Alasdair MacIntyre has said, with insight, that every discipline is an open debate about its own history. This is nowhere more so than in the case of sociology. Auguste Comte (1798-1857) is generally, but by no means universally, acknowledged as a kind of founding father of this discipline (in the eyes of some the main alternative candidate would be Émile Durkheim – even though he himself explicitly attributes this role to Comte). During his lifetime Comte came to be considered something of a maverick or even a madman by some of his former disciples. A consideration of Comte’s project and the reactions it produced from the beginning is one way of broaching the daunting task of defining the sociological paradigm alongside the other paradigms we have examined so far in this series. The place to begin is with history, in particular with that of the French Revolution, of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the restoration of the monarchy in 19th century France. To this we must add the, partially parallel, history of the second industrial revolution with its obvious dependence on the history of advances in science and technology. Without at least a general awareness of these circumstances, Comte’s project cannot…