Positivism
Auguste Comte (1798-1857) saw one universal law at work in all sciences: the ‘law of three phases’ which says that society has gone through three phases: Theological, Metaphysical, and Scientific. He also gave the name ‘Positive’ to the last of these.
- The Theological phase was seen as preceding the 18th-century Enlightenment, in which man’s place in society and society’s restrictions upon man were controlled by God.
- The Metaphysical phase involved the justification of universal rights as being on a higher plane than the authority of any human ruler.
- The Scientific phase, which came into being after the failure of the French Revolution and of Napoleon, was one in which people could find solutions to social problems and put them into practice.
Comte developed a systematic and hierarchical classification of all sciences, including inorganic physics (astronomy, earth science and chemistry) and organic physics (biology and, for the first time, ‘social physics’ for which he later invented the term ‘sociology’). Comte saw sociology as the last and greatest of all sciences, one that would include all other sciences, and would integrate their findings into a cohesive whole. His emphasis on the interconnectedness of different social elements foresaw modern functionalism. (In the philosophy of mind, Functionalism says that what makes something a particular type of a mental state does not depend on its internal constitution, but on the way it functions in the system of which it is a part).
Comte’s explanation of the Positive philosophy introduced the relationship between theory, practice and human understanding of the world. He said: “If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some theory. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them”.
He also coined the word ‘altruism’ to refer to what he believed to be a moral obligation of individuals to serve others and place their interests above one’s own. He opposed the idea of individual rights, maintaining that they were not consistent with this supposed ethical obligation
During his lifetime, Comte’s work was sometimes viewed sceptically because he elevated Positivism to a religion and named himself the Pope of Positivism. There are still one or two Positivist temples in Brazil. He also re-worked the calendar, naming months after distinguished thinkers such as Homer and Aristotle.
His emphasis on a quantitative, mathematical basis for decision-making remains with us today. It is a foundation of the modern notion of Positivism, modern quantitative statistical analysis, and business decision-making. His description of the continuing cyclical relationship between theory and practice is seen in modern business systems of Total Quality Management and Continuous Quality Improvement where advocates describe a continuous cycle of theory and practice through the four-part cycle of ‘plan, do, check, and act’. The theories of Management by Objectives, fashionable in the 1960s, are clearly coherent with Positivism and were adopted by the leaders of the 1964 military coup in Brazil.
Positivism in Brazil
Positivism is the key to much of the social and political as well as intellectual history of Latin America in the second half of the 19th century. It was more popular there than anywhere else, even France. The Roman Catholic form of society remained, but among many intellectuals it was discredited, waiting for something to take its place. Positivism satisfied the needs of Latin American thinkers who had rejected Spanish and Portuguese culture and were trying to prove their independence by adopting French ideas. Catholicism, they maintained, was a tool of Iberian imperialism, and it had kept Latin America in a state of amoral, chaotic backwardness.
The Positivism of Auguste Comte promised progress, discipline, and morality, together with freedom from the tyranny of theology. Positivism influenced every country in Latin America, but none as much as Brazil. In Brazil the Positivist ‘Church and Apostolate’ became a reality unique in the world. Several Brazilians were students of Comte, but Machado Dias, who had studied in Paris under Comte in 1837-38, was a prophet in that he wanted a republic based on Positivist ideals to replace the Empire of Pedro II - something which did not happen until 1889.
Interestingly, one of the founders of the Brazilian Positivist movement was a woman, Nísia Floresta. Having won fame as the founder and director of a school in Rio de Janeiro, she and her daughter moved to Paris, where they became close friends of Auguste Comte, who in his Twelfth Annual Confession refers to “the noble Brazilian widow” as a “precious pupil.”
While there were Positivist groups in all the states of Brazil, the most important and the most influential one was that in the capital, Rio de Janeiro. The imperial court of Pedro II attracted the social and intellectual elite of the country, and Rio de Janeiro was the principal entry for European culture. The influence of France was preponderant in all matters except politics, a domain in which the Empire cultivated English ideals. However, French Positivism was destined to undermine the Empire politically. About 1870 four Positivist magazines began to appear, followed in 1876 by A Revista do Rio de Janeiro, an important Positivist organ. The Positivists made no secret of the fact that the Empire was incompatible with Positivist Republicanism and told Pedro II so. He, with characteristic broadmindedness, made no attempt to repress the Positivist movement. As elsewhere in Brazil, Positivism had first developed around 1860 in medical research, especially in the field of cerebral physiology, but it soon affected every phase of thought, including political theory.
The leader of Positivist Republicanism in Rio de Janeiro was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhāes. The Escola Politécnica was a focal point of Positivism and at least ten professors there, including Benjamin Constant, were Positivist leaders. The students they imbued with Positivist ideas became teachers in many of the leading schools of Brazil.
Whereas earlier Positivism had had its most marked impact on medicine, now the instrument of Positivism was mathematics. The Positivists were the brains of the Republican movement which brought about the fall of the Empire in 1889, and Benjamin Constant was its leading intellectual figure. The peaceful transition from Empire to Republic was facilitated by a mutual respect unique in Latin American history. Despite Benjamin Constant’s declared Republicanism, the imperial court not only kept him as a royal preceptor, but also offered him a title, which he refused. To Benjamin Constant’s dismay, for he openly preached the subordination of the military to civilian authority, the republic was dominated by the Army. The Republic came into being because the Army refused to continue capturing fugitive slaves. Slavery thereby broke down, and in 1888, in the absence of Pedro II, the government abolished slavery. The Empire thus lost the support of the landed aristocracy, and it collapsed in 1889.
The Republican movement had won the decisive support of the Army when Benjamin Constant persuaded Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca to join its ranks. Deodoro da Fonseca accepted the Presidency of the Republic, although he had expected Benjamin Constant to take the post. Benjamin Constant, acclaimed as the founder of the Republic, was named Minister of War in the provisional government, but when the Republic created the Ministry of Education, Postal Service and Telegraphs as one bureau, he moved over to it. He died in 1891 so his role as an active Republican leader was cut short.
The division between the ‘apostolate’ of Miguel Lemos and Teixeira Mendes and the orthodox Positivism of Pierre Laffitte, which Benjamin Constant followed, continued to divide the Republicans. The latter group was more democratic, but even it talked about the need for a ‘dictatorship,’ by which it meant a strong executive. There were many young officers in the constituent assembly, all declared Positivists, and all in favour of an authoritarian regime. The result was that the assembly adopted a presidential form of government, whereas the Empire had been parliamentarian. The Church was separated from the State, and religious freedom proclaimed. Traditional militarism was discouraged, and the Army became essentially an organ for civic betterment, thus anticipating the ‘civic action’ roles of Latin American armies in the twentieth century.
The Brazilian Republic adopted as its flag a representation of the firmament showing the position of the stars, especially of the Southern Cross, at the moment the Republic was proclaimed. Over it appears the Positivist motto ‘Order and Progress’ against a representation of the Southen Cross and the attendant stars that were showing above Rio de Janeiro on the day of the proclamation of the Republic. For decades the Positivist church in Rio de Janeiro was a gathering place for national leaders. It continued to function long after Positivist churches had closed in France and elsewhere. In the latter part of the 20th century, it leads a precarious existence, non-Catholic religious activity having been diverted to evangelical Christianity, spiritualism and neo-African cults, all of which are booming.
An example of Positivism in action at this time concerns slavery, which was not abolished in Brazil until 1888 and was a burning issue, especially in the Northeast. Pereira Barreto was opposed to immediate and complete abolition. In line with Comte’s thesis of social dynamics, he preferred a gradual approach. This was the attitude of most Brazilian Positivists, but it was sufficient to anger the landowners. One Positivist, Celso Magalhães, was a district attorney; his career was ruined because he prosecuted, unsuccessfully, the wife of a slaveowner who had stabbed a slave baby to death because it was white and because she suspected her husband was the father. The anger of the Positivists against universities and the Roman Catholic Church can be understood in the light of the experience of Domingos Guedes Cabral, whose Positivist-inspired thesis on The Functions of the Brain (1876) could not be presented at the University of Bahia because of the opposition of the Church.
The southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, became the most important stronghold of Positivism in Brazil. It was probably because of the proximity of Buenos Aires and Montevideo and because of the virtual absence of slavery that Republicanism was much stronger in Rio Grande do Sul than in the rest of Brazil. The two tendencies met and gave rise to the simple equation: Positivism equals Republicanism.
When Getúlio Vargas a politician from Rio Grande do Sul, who had a Positivist background, seized the national government, he established a dictatorship which, while it reflected fascist developments in Europe, was a culmination of the dictatorial trend within the political philosophy of Brazilian Positivism. The main feature of the Rio Grande do Sul Constitution, derived from Positivist principles, was the division of powers and the attempt to achieve a balance between authority and freedom. In fact it was authoritarian, and Positivist Republicanism in the New World was usually dictatorial. At the same time it is claimed that the constitution of the state of Rio Grande do Sul was the first in the New World to embody articles defending the rights of workers.
Modern Brazil: Military Rule and Redemocratization
From 1961 to 1964, Brazilian President João Goulart had been initiating economic and social reforms; policies which annoyed Brazil’s elites and threatened U.S. and Western interests in the country. In 1964, Goulart was overthrown by a military coup backed by the CIA, and a military regime lasted from 1964 to 1985. During this time, there was intense economic growth at the cost of a soaring national debt, and thousands of Brazilians were deported, imprisoned, or tortured. Politically motivated deaths are numbered in the hundreds, mostly related to the anti-guerrilla warfare between 1968-1973; official censorship, though not stringent, also led many writers and artists into exile.
During this period we see the elements of Positivism that had founded the Republic - rationalism and authoritarianism - being used by the military authorities to respectively justify and impose their developmentalist policies. These policies effectively involved turning Brazil into a source of cheap labour for US and European industry. The Positivist motto inscribed on the Brazilian flag: “Order and Progress”, was transformed by the dictatorship into its philosophy of “Security and Development”. Opposition to the government’s policies was denounced as a danger to national security and the country adopted its own version of US anti-Communist paranoia.
The focal point of the military dictatorship’s adaptation of Positivism to modern conditions was that the Higher War College in Rio de Janeiro, and many officers who trained there also went on training missions to the United States. On these missions and they learned about the adaptation of Management by Objectives from the business world to the military context. When they seized power in Brazil they tried to adapt the same theory to running the country. From a purely theoretical point of view, they had a point: the country was lagging behind in developmental terms, it was not making the most of its immense natural and geographical resources and its politicians and civil servants enjoyed high levels of corruption.
What better then than rule by the military, who were traditionally not particularly interested in personal profit, were not landowners and, in the absence of any international wars to fight, could turn their sense of patriotic duty towards improving the lot of their fellow countrymen? Obviously, there would be inconvenient opposition to these altruistic moves coming from those wishing to preserve their own personal privileges but as the modern army interpreted Comte, altruism must sometimes be enforced by means of authoritarianism.
Trades unions were neutralised, newspapers were censored, universities (which some of the 19th-century Positivists had wished to abolish) had senior military officers installed on the campuses in order to keep an eye on ‘subversive’ lecturers. In comparison with Chile and Argentina, the numbers of those tortured and killed were negligible, nevertheless most people in Brazil know someone who fell foul of the regime in one way or another.
And the result? Initially there was an economic boom but after 21 years, the officers of the dictatorship themselves were ready to return to barracks, with the country’s foreign debt immense and out of control and (partly due to the Falklands War) the mood of the developed world having changed in relation to military dictatorships. Brazil’s economic development was then and is now characterised as a cheap manufacturing centre for the developed world, from the vast Carajás iron ore mine to cheap agricultural products such as soya. The division between rich and poor - one of the most extreme in the world - was then and remains now largely unchanged. From 1994-2002 a centre-right government ran the country reasonably well but since 2003 Brazil’s version of Britain’s New Labour has shown itself to be extremely corrupt, politically incompetent though at the same time economically competent, mainly because the restrictions imposed on it by the international financial community do not permit financial irresponsibility.
Conclusion
The conclusion we may draw from this is that while the inheritance of Comtean Positivism, the lesser known rival to Marxism, has not caused as much human misery as the latter, in the case of what we might call the ‘Northern’ societies, it has had a certain amount of success. When applied to what we might call ‘Mediterranean’ societies however, the rationalism that Comte advocates cannot overcome personal loyalties that place duty to the individual and family above altruism in favour of the general good. The Brazilian officers who seized power in 1964 enjoyed 21 years of laboratory conditions in which to apply their neo-Comtean Positivism and at the end shuffled away from power with very little measurable progress to show for it.
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