Classical theorists:
August Comte:
He was born on the 19th of January 1798, in Paris France. He was born in the shadow of the French revolution and as modern science and technology gave birth to the industrial revolution. During this time, European society experienced violent conflict and feelings of alienation. Comte spent most of his life developing a philosophy for a new social order amidst all the chaos and uncertainty. He rejected religion and royalty, focusing instead on the study of society which he named “sociology”. He broke the subject into two categories: i. Forces holding the society together(social statics) ii. Those driving social change(social dynamics)
Comte wrote so many books which contains the outline of his thought such as: i. Positive philosophy(1830 -42) ii. System of positive policy(1851 -54) iii. Religion of humanity (1958)
Comte gave birth not only to a specific methodology of studying knowledge and also analyzed the evolution of human thinking and its various stages. He developed a unilinear theory of evolution. According to Comte, individual mind and human society pass through successive stages of historical evolution leading to some final stage of perfection. The principle developed by Comte in the study of human thinking presumes gradual evolution and development in human thinking and it is known as the law of three stages of thinking. Comte’s law of three stages represents that there are three intellectual stages through which the world has gone through this process but groups, societies, individual science and even minds go through three stages. As there has been an evolution in the human thinking so that each succeeding stage is superior to and more evolved than the preceding stages. Moreover, these three stages namely: i. Theological or Fictious Stage ii. Metaphysical or Abstract Stage iii.