Auguste Comte was a French philosopher who founded positivism, sociology, and the Religion of Man. He was the secretary of French utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, but became estranged when he felt that Saint-Simon was taking credit for his own ideas.
Much of what has transpired over the past two hundred years in philosophy and the social sciences can be traced to Comte. In neuromythography we refer to the Comtean world-view.
Comte can be contrasted with the later anti-positivists, who embraced subjectivity in sociology and led to critical theory, and with Adolphe Quetelet, who represents the empiricism that commandeered probability to yield modern scientific statistic and eugenics.
Interestingly, Comte originally called his new positivist study of society by the name of ‘social physics’, only to discover that Quetelet had started using this term to reveal social truths through biometrics and quantitative analysis. Comte disagreed with Quetelet’s notion that a theory of society could be derived from a collection of statistics, and coined the word ‘sociology’ to differentiate his own approach.