Definitions

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  • adjective Alternative form of Comtian.

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Examples

  • He became convinced of the Comtean view that social change proceeds through “critical periods,” in which old institutions are overthrown, followed “organic periods,” in which new forms of social cohesion emerge and are consolidated.

    John Stuart Mill Wilson, Fred 2007

  • If this union is torn apart — for example by silently condoning the rape of Czechoslovakia, and the Stalinist indictment of strikes and workers 'councils as "anti-socialist" (Brezhnev dixit) — then there is nothing left of Marxism but a positivist sociology of the Comtean type, and this is in fact what Althusser and his followers have made of it.

    Klugscheisser Huaco, George A. 1969

  • Jordan (op. cit., pp. 125ff.) suggests that the Comtean notion of social physics has its counterpart in the Marxian approach, and that for Marx — as for Comte — “society is the true reality, and the individual the abstraction” (p. 132).

    Dictionary of the History of Ideas GEORGE LICHTHEIM 1968

  • More specific to mid-nineteenth - century France was the Comtean (positivist) doctrine that conservation of a sexual substance would strengthen body and mind.

    LONGEVITY GERALD J. GRUMAN 1968

  • It was favored by Comtean thought to the extent that the latter insisted, as against introspective or speculative approaches, on the value of a positivistic method in psychology which, in the historically given circumstances, could only lead to the primacy of the physiological factor.

    Dictionary of the History of Ideas ARAM VARTANIAN 1968

  • It was, however, only in the eighteenth century that, especially in France, this new prestige made itself felt throughout educated society, and this is the first and most general respect in which Comtean positivism, as one expression of the scientism of the nineteenth cen - tury, owes a debt to the Enlightenment.

    Dictionary of the History of Ideas WALTER SIMON 1968

  • All that is known of his childhood is that his parents, Comtean intellectuals and reformers who came to America from England, brought him up in the Positivist faith, in a household which appears to have been emotionally a little austere.

    Herbert Croly's America Lasch, Christopher 1965

  • Such is the famous _Law of the three States_, which has always been treated by friend and foe as the key to the Comtean philosophy.

    Morality as a Religion An exposition of some first principles W. R. Washington Sullivan

  • May not much of the comparative sterility of post-Comtean (or at any rate post-Spencerian) sociology, which is so commonly reproached to us, and to which the difficult formation and slow growth of sociological societies and schools is largely due, be thus explained?

    Civics: as Applied Sociology Patrick Geddes 1893

  • But Mr. Spencer has so thoroughly and completely demonstrated the absence of any correspondence between the historical development of the sciences, and their position in the Comtean hierarchy, in his essay on the "Genesis of Science," that I shall not waste time in repeating his refutation.

    Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews Thomas Henry Huxley 1860

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