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intellectual development in society. These ideas were carried over into the Positivist calendar as organizing principles. Each month of the Positivist year is named for an individual, who represents an era in the development of human history. The earliest months are associated with the earliest eras. In the Positivist scheme, calendrics recapitulates history. |
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In particular, Comte's mania for including every aspect of human history in the Positivist synthesis was expressed in the calendar in a peculiar way. Comte named not only the months of his calendar, but also the days. Not only were days named, but the names of days were different (in some cases) when the year was a leap year. The impulse to dedicate the days of the month to Positivist saints is not unlike that reflected in the Zoroastrian calendar. |
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9.12.4.2.2
Historical Background |
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Isidore Auguste Marie Francois Xavier Comte, known generally as Auguste Comte, was a French philosopher, born in A.D. 1798. Comte essentially gave the name sociology to the fledgling study and established it in a systematic way. |
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Comte drew most of his ideas from writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries, such as Kant, Hume, and Gall. From them, he derived a concept of positivism. From several Catholic writers, he obtained a notion for ordering social structures along the lines of religious organizations. The French Revolution impressed him with the idea that religion should have a secular orientation. To all of his work, Comte brought an obsessive need to organize history and ideas into a single, comprehensive framework. |
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Comte's concept of the ideal positivist society was revealed in his System of Positive Polity, the first volume of which was published in 1851, and the fourth in 1854. In that work, Comte describes the Catholic Church, stripped of supernaturalism, as the ideal structural model for his new positivist society. Comte replaced the Catholic God with his Great Being, which was humanity, and called the new positivist faith his religion of humanity. Comte proved to be a meticulous social planner and described a priesthood of secular sociologists lodged in Paris, who were to implement the new social order. The entire thesis was quite a shock to his rationalistic admirers, like Mill, who were unprepared for Comte's closet Catholicism. |
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Comte's calendar was first described in his Calendrier positiviste (Positivist Calendar) in 1849. It again appeared in volume IV of the System of Positive Polity, which is the version described here. |
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See the SCDTL text on the CD for the discussion of the code. |
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9.12.5
Goddess Lunar Calendar |
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Historically, lunar calendars have not done well. The complexity of lunar motion tends to complicate a calendar that attempts to account for it. Societies whose economic base is agricultural find that their natural calendric cycle is annual by the sun, not monthly |
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