Introduction

Politics and society are two central modern categories, in the sense that the reflection on the meaning of these terms, as well as the exploration of the phenomena for which they are taken to stand, are recurrent features of modern philosophy and social science. Politics and society are also central “categories of practice” (Brubaker 1994), since they are used by historical actors to make sense of their own world. By contrast, “the political” and “the social” will be used in this chapter as “categories of analysis” (Brubaker 1994), that is, more abstract and more encompassing concepts that scholars define in the process of constructing their own objects of inquiry. In what follows, I will understand “the political” as anything that pertains to collective rule- setting and rule- enforcement (Wagner 2001: chap. 10), and “the social” as any kind of practice involving an interaction between human beings (cf. Terrier 2015). In this understanding, political phenomena are a subset of social phenomena, so that “the social” is clearly the super- ordinate concept. In the history of social and political thinking, however, this subordination of politics to society is far from having been adopted by all. Many have tended to separate these two dimensions of collective life, some even declaring politics to be something distinct from and opposed to society. This chapter seeks to establish that Comte's thought can be understood as a long struggle against this “independentist” conception of the political as the truly sovereign element. Yet his understanding of the social and the political was not the same as the one I have just delineated. His categories were narrower: as a first approximation, we can say that he understood society as human interrelationships ordered in a way that is conducive to the convergence of opinions, beliefs and feelings; and politics as the art of steering the action of others by way of physical coercion, material incentives and moral inspiration. In the present chapter, broad “categories of analysis” are chosen in order to avoid being trapped in an analysis of Comte's own terminology. The goal is to locate him within a more general history of social and political thought.