Breaking with the Past 223Two features of Comte’s positive philosophy are of par tic u lar note. One is
of a negative character, and the other a positive. On the negative side was a
principled antirationalist stance. From this part of its heritage, positivism
has always had more than a whiff of anti- intellectualism about it. On the
positive side, the new philosophy sounded a powerful tone of optimism. It was
a doctrine of liberation from the chains of the past and the inauguration of a
great future. It had a reformist, progressive outlook that was much in charac-
ter with the ethos of the nineteenth century generally. As such, it became a
quasi- religious creed for reformers, progressives, and modernists everywhere.
In Latin America, its hold was especially strong— most of all in Brazil, where
positivist adherents in the Brazilian military were instrumental in the over-
throw of the monarchy in 1889. Th ey promptly placed the positivist motto
“Order and Progress” onto the Brazilian fl ag, where it remains today.
At the same time, it should not be thought that Comte was in favor of vio-
lent revolution. Far from it. His temperament was actually staunchly au-
thoritarian. He had little use for democracy, let alone for revolution, and the
positivist utopia that he foresaw for the future was a decidedly regimented
society. It is no accident that the fi rst major academic stronghold of positiv-
ism was the Polytechnic in France (the elite military academy).
Th e positive philosophy even penetrated the very heartland of the arch-
metaphysicians, the lawyers. Th e term “positive law” was long familiar, hav-
ing apparently been fi rst employed in the thirteenth century by canon law-
yers. It simply meant man- made law in contrast to natural law. Its foremost
medieval exponent was Marsilius of Padua in the fourteenth century. He
was, fi ttingly, a contemporary of William of Ockham and even a fellow refu-
gee of William’s at the court of Louis of Bavaria.
Positivism, as a legal philosophy, entailed taking the decisive step of deny-
ing legal status altogether to natural law as a matter of principle, and insist-
ing on positive law as the only kind of law. A doctrinaire positivism of this
k ind had a ver y long (though distant) pedigree in the lega list school of thought
of ancient China. In the Western tradition, however, it was a nineteenth-
century novelty. Its seminal fi gure was the British lawyer John Austin, a profes-
sor of jurisprudence at the newly founded University of London in the period
1826 – 32. Austin was inspired not by Comte’s “positive philosophy” (which
had not been formulated at the time) but rather by its British counterpart, the
utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham.