Comte believed that today we live in a time of crisis.
Well, we contemporary readers in the 21st century recognize that thought.
But don't forget that Comte worked in the city of Paris at the beginning of
the 19th century, and was really in a very, very unstable situation.
On the one hand, you had those who believed that
the project of the French Revolution had not yet been finished, and
that there still was a lot of work to do in bringing about more freedom,
more equality and also more democracy.
On the other hand there were conservatives who had been appalled by much
of what had happened during and also in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
And who were not at all convinced that human intervention in the vulnerable
fabric of French society had produced anything positive.
They dreamed about return to the time tested institutional arrangements
of the past, the norms and values of good old France, the [FOREIGN] regime.
Those two political camps opposed each other, not only in Parliament or
in the newspapers but from time to time also in the streets of Paris.
Where barricades were erected and where the kind of repetitions of
the French Revolution took place on a somewhat smaller scale.
But resulting in an ever changing balance of power between
the inheritors of the spirit of the French Revolution and
their conservative or even reactionary opponents.
That is really a deep structural crisis and Comte to witnessed it,
and according to him, it was ultimately the result
of a crisis in the intellectual realm, Comte thought that a well ordered society
must be integrated by a unifying set of ideas.
Kind of intriguetive consensus.
Medieval France, he thought, had been well integrated because the Catholic church
gave each and every member of that society a set of ideas about the world.
Moral codes, ethical goals worth striving for.
Ideas that united everybody into an organic structure.