It has been long and well known that Auguste Comte owed a debt to the Counterrevolution. Comte's notion of society as a positive datum (Milbank 1995, 51), his insistence that a common belief must organize human relations, his idea of spiritual and temporal powers, his interest in the social primacy of education, and his critique of psychology all have origins in the thought of Louis de Bonald (Macherey 1987 and Milbank 1995, 51– 74) and Joseph de Maistre, the two major Francophone theorists of the early conservative group that he dubbed the “retrograde school.” The character and extent of Comte's debt, however, remains the subject of a controversy that has polarized scholarly opinion for three quarters of a century as Comte scholars have claimed him for either Enlightenment or Counterrevolution.

The debate began in 1941, when Henri Gouhier noticed that Comte first read Maistre around 1825, soon after breaking with Claude- Henri de Saint- Simon, with whom he had worked for seven years as disciple and secretary. Given the thematic and conceptual similarities between Maistre and Saint- Simon's thought, Gouhier believed that Maistre might have served Comte as an intellectual corrective for his former mentor's influence (Gouhier 1933, 41, III [1941]: 405). This thesis appears plausible in light of Comte's later insistence that he owed a great deal to Maistre (Comte 1968, 71, VII [1969]: 64) and nothing to Saint- Simon, and when remembering that Comte broke with Saint- Simon to gain intellectual independence and be able to publish under his own name.

Pierre Macherey has pursued Gouhier's line of argument further to maintain that Comte actually borrowed no ideas from Maistre, that he conceived of “retrograde” thought as “negative” and devoid of content and that he used Maistre's work solely to confirm a theory he had originally derived from Saint- Simon, namely the separation between spiritual and temporal powers (Macherey 1991, 41– 7). A radical contribution to an interpretive tradition tending to disengage Comte from conservatism, Macherey's opinion is notably approximated in the English- speaking world by the work of Anthony Giddens, for whom the continuity Robert Nisbet first observed between conservative and sociological thought is more formal than substantial (Giddens 2014 [1977], 208– 34 and Nisbet 1993 [1966]). Nisbet's views, however, have had their own descent.