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Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte

Born	19 January 1798 Montpellier, France
Died	September 5, 1857(1857-09-05) (aged 59) Paris, France
Notable ideas	Positivism, Sociology, Law of three stages, Encyclopedic law
Influenced by Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, William Robertson, David Hume, Marquis de Condorcet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri de Saintrt Spencer, Émile Durkheim, Charles Maurras[1]

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857), better known as Auguste Comte [oɡyst kɔ̃t], was a French philosopher. He was a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.

Strongly influenced by the Utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th century thought, impacting the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot.^[2] His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism, though now outdated, set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into Modern academic sociology presented by Émile Durkheim as practical and objective social research.

Comte's social theories culminated in the "religion of humanity", which was influential to the development of religious humanist and Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century. Comte likewise coined the word "altruism".^[3]

Life[link]

Comte's grave at Père Lachaise cemetery

Comte was born in Montpellier, Hérault, in southern France on January 19, 1798. After attending the Lycée Joffre^[4] and then the University of Montpellier, Comte was admitted to the École Polytechnique in Paris. The École Polytechnique was notable for its adherence to the French ideals of republicanism and progress. The École closed in 1816 for reorganization, however, causing Comte to leave and continue his studies at the medical school at Montpellier. When the École Polytechnique reopened, he did not request readmission.

Following his return to Montpellier, Comte soon came to see unbridgeable differences with his Catholic and Monarchist family and set off again for Paris, earning money by small jobs. In August 1817 he became a student and secretary to Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, who brought Comte into contact with intellectual society and greatly influenced his thought thereon. It is during that time that Auguste Comte published his first essays in the various publications headed by Saint-Simon, L'Industrie, Le Politique, and L'Organisateur (Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte's Le Censeur Européen), although he would not publish under his own name until 1819's "La séparation générale entre les opinions et les désirs" ("The general separation of opinions and desires"). In 1824, Comte left Saint-Simon, again because of unbridgeable differences. Comte published a Plan de travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société (1822) (Plan of scientific studies necessary for the reorganization of society). But he failed to get an academic post. His day-to-day life depended on sponsors and financial help from friends. Debates rage as to how much Comte appropriated from the work of Saint-Simon.^[5]

Comte married Caroline Massin, but divorced in 1842. In 1826 he was taken to a mental health hospital, but left without being cured – only stabilized by French alienist Esquirol – so that he could work again on his plan (he would later attempt suicide in 1827 by jumping off the Pont des Arts). In the time between this and their divorce, he published the six volumes of his Cours.

Comte developed a close friendship with John Stuart Mill. From 1844, Comte was involved with Clotilde de Vaux, a relationship that remained platonic. After her death in 1846 this love became quasi-religious, and Comte, working closely with Mill (who was refining his own such system) developed a new "religion of humanity". John Kells Ingram, an adherent of Comte, visited him 1855 in Paris.

He published four volumes of Système de politique positive (1851–1854). His final work, the first volume of "La Synthèse Subjective" ("The Subjective Synthesis"), was published in 1856.

Comte died in Paris on 5 September 1857 from stomach cancer and was buried in the famous Cimetière du Père Lachaise, surrounded by cenotaphs in memory of his mother, Rosalie Boyer, and of Caroline de Vaux. His apartment from 1841-1857 is now conserved as the Maison d'Auguste Comte and is located 10 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, in Paris' 6th arrondissement.

Thought[link]

Comte's positivism[link]

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Comte first described the epistemological perspective of positivism in The Course in Positive Philosophy, a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. These texts were followed by the 1848 work, A General View of Positivism (published in English in 1865). The first three volumes of the Course dealt chiefly with the physical sciences already in existence (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), whereas the latter two emphasised the inevitable coming of social science. Observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and classifying the sciences in this way, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.^[6] Comte was also the first to distinguish natural philosophy from science explicitly. For him, the physical sciences had necessarily to arrive first, before humanity could adequately channel its efforts into the most challenging and complex "Queen science" of human society itself. His View of Positivism would therefore set out to define, in more detail, the empirical goals of sociological method.^{[citation needed]}

Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'. The idea bears some similarity to Marx's view that human society would progress toward a communist peak.^{[citation needed]} This is perhaps unsurprising as both were profoundly influenced by the early Utopian socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon, who was at one time Comte's teacher and mentor. Both Comte and Marx intended to develop, scientifically, a new secular ideology in the wake of European secularisation.^{[citation needed]}

Comte's stages were (1) the theological, (2) the metaphysical, and (3) the positive.^[7] The Theological phase was seen from the perspective of 19th century France as preceding the Enlightenment, in which man's place in society and society's restrictions upon man were referenced to God. Man blindly believed in whatever he was taught by his ancestors. He believed in a supernatural power. Fetishism played a significant role during this time. By the "Metaphysical" phase, he referred not to the Metaphysics of Aristotle or other ancient Greek philosophers. Rather, the idea was rooted in the problems of French society subsequent to the revolution of 1789. This Metaphysical phase involved the justification of universal rights as being on a vauntedly higher plane than the authority of any human ruler to countermand, although said rights were not referenced to the sacred beyond mere metaphor. This stage is known as the stage of investigation, because people started reasoning and questioning although no solid evidence was laid. The stage of investigation was the beginning of a world that questioned authority and religion. In the Scientific phase, which came into being after the failure of the revolution and of Napoleon, people could find solutions to social problems and bring them into force despite the proclamations of human rights or prophecy of the will of God. Science started to answer questions in full stretch. In this regard he was similar to Karl Marx and Jeremy Bentham. For its time, this idea of a Scientific phase was considered up-to-date, although from a later standpoint it is too derivative of classical physics and academic history. Comte's law of three stages was one of the first theories of social evolutionism.

The other universal law he called the "encyclopedic law." By combining these laws, 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, physique sociale, later renamed sociologie). Independently from Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès's introduction of the term in 1780, Comte re-invented "sociologie," and introduced the term as a neologism, in 1838. Comte had earlier used the term "social physics," but that term had been appropriated by others, notably Adolphe Quetelet.

"The most important thing to determine was the natural order in which the sciences stand — not how they can be made to stand, but how they must stand, irrespective of the wishes of any one....This Comte accomplished by taking as the criterion of the position of each the degree of what he called "positivity," which is simply the degree to which the phenomena can be exactly determined. This, as may be readily seen, is also a measure of their relative complexity, since the exactness of a science is in inverse proportion to its complexity. The degree of exactness or positivity is, moreover, that to which it can be subjected to mathematical demonstration, and therefore mathematics, which is not itself a concrete science, is the general gauge by which the position of every science is to be determined. Generalizing thus, Comte found that there were five great groups of phenomena of equal classificatory value but of successively decreasing positivity. To these he gave the names astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology."

— Lester F. Ward, The Outlines of Sociology (1898), ^[8]

This idea of a special science—not the humanities, not metaphysics—for the social was prominent in the 19th century and not unique to Comte. It has recently been discovered that the term "sociology" - a term considered coined by Comte - had already been introduced in 1780, albeit with a different meaning, by the French essayist Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès(1748–1836).^[9] The ambitious—many would say grandiose—way that Comte conceived of this special science of the social, however, was unique. Comte saw this new science, sociology, as the last and greatest of all sciences, one which would include all other sciences and integrate and relate their findings into a cohesive whole. It has to be pointed out, however, that there was a seventh science, one even greater than sociology. Namely, Comte considered "Anthropology, or true science of Man [to be] the last gradation in the Grand Hierarchy of Abstract Science."^[10]

The motto Ordem e Progresso ("Order and Progress") in the flag of Brazil is inspired by Auguste Comte's motto of positivism: L'amour pour principe et l'ordre pour base; le progrès pour but ("Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal"). Several of those involved in the military coup d'état that deposed the monarchy and proclaimed Brazil a republic were followers of the ideas of Comte.^[11]

Comte’s explanation of the Positive philosophy introduced the important relationship between theory, practice and human understanding of the world. On page 27 of the 1855 printing of Harriet Martineau’s translation of The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, we see his observation that, “If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts can not be observed without the guidance of some theories. 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."^[12]

Comte is generally regarded as the first Western sociologist (Ibn Khaldun having preceded him in North Africa by nearly four centuries). Comte's emphasis on the interconnectedness of social elements was a forerunner of modern functionalism. Nevertheless, as with many others of Comte's time, certain elements of his work are now viewed as eccentric and unscientific, and his grand vision of sociology as the centerpiece of all the sciences has not come to fruition.

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. Despite his advocacy of quantitative analysis, Comte saw a limit in its ability to help explain social phenomena.

The early sociology of Herbert Spencer came about broadly as a reaction to Comte; writing after various developments in evolutionary biology, Spencer attempted (in vain) to reformulate the discipline in what we might now describe as socially Darwinistic terms. (Spencer was in actual fact a proponent of Lamarckism rather than Darwinism).

Comte's fame today owes in part to Emile Littré, who founded The Positivist Review in 1867. Debates continue to rage, however, as to how much Comte appropriated from the work of his mentor, Henri de Saint-Simon.

The religion of humanity[link]

Positivist temple in Porto Alegre

In later a 'religion of humanity' for positivist societies in order to fulfil the cohesive function once held by traditional worship. In 1849, he proposed a calendar reform called the 'positivist calendar'. For close associate John Stuart Mill, it was possible to distinguish between a "good Comte" (the author of the Course in Positive Philosophy) and a "bad Comte" (the author of the secular-religious system).^[6] The system was unsuccessful but met with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species to influence the proliferation of various Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century, especially through the work of secularists such as George Holyoake and Richard Congreve. Although Comte's English followers, including George Eliot and Harriet Martineau, for the most part rejected the full gloomy panoply of his system, they liked the idea of a religion of humanity and his injunction to "vivre pour autrui" ("live for others"), from which comes the word "altruism").^[13]

Three Stages[link]

"The law is this: -that each of our leading conceptions, -each branch of our knowledge, -passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive." -Comte^[14]

1. Theological Stage
   1. Fetishism
   2. Polytheism
   3. Monotheism
2. Metaphysical or Abstract Stage
3. Positive Stage

The development that recognised as a three stage is considered as a result of development of thinking and accumulation of philosophical achievements, by M. I. Sanduk.^[15] The enormous accumulations of achievements of Theoretical Physics during the first three decades of the last century were behind Gaston Bachelard's declaration of his new scientific spirit ^[16] or a new a philosophy of science (or a fourth stage). That regarding of a new philosophy of science was owing to the accumulation of new proposals of Quantum mechanics. Accordingly, for Sanduk, the new development in science applications led to philosophy of technology; so philosophy of technology may be the fourth stage of philosophy.

Bibliography[link]

Works[link]

• Comte, A.; A general view of positivism [Discours sur l'Esprit positif 1844] London, 1856 Google books
• Comte, A.; Bridges, J.H. (tr.); A General View of Positivism; Trubner and Co., 1865 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 978-1-108-00064-2)
• Comte, A.; Congrev, R. (tr.); The Catechism of Positive Religion; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1891 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 978-1-108-00087-1)
• Comte, A; Martineau, H. (tr.); The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte; 2 volumes; Chapman, 1853 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 978-1-108-00118-2)
• Comte, A.; Jones, H.S. (ed.); Comte: Early Political Writings; Cambridge University Press, 1998; ISBN 978-0-521-46923-4

Secondary[link]

• Henri Gouhier, La vie d'Auguste Comte, Gallimard, 1931 ;
• Jean Delvolvé, Réflexions sur la pensée comtienne, Félix Alcan, 1932 ;
• John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism,^[17] Trübner, 1865 ;
• Laurent Fedi, Comte, Les Belles Lettres, 2000, réédition 2005 ;
• Laurent Fedi, L’organicisme de Comte, in Auguste Comte aujourd’hui, M. Bourdeau, J.-F. Braunstein, A. Petit (dir), Kimé, 2003, pp. 111–132 ;
• Laurent Fedi, Auguste Comte, la disjonction de l’idéologie et de l’Etat, Cahiers philosophiques, n°94, 2003, pp. 99–110 ;
• Laurent Fedi, Le monde clos contre l’univers infini : Auguste Comte et les enjeux humains de l’astronomie, La Mazarine, n°13, juin 2000, pp. 12–15 ;
• Laurent Fedi, La contestation du miracle grec chez Auguste Comte, in L’Antiquité grecque au XIXè siècle : un exemplum contesté ?, C. Avlami (dir.), L’Harmattan, 2000, pp. 157–192 ;
• Laurent Fedi, Auguste Comte et la technique, Revue d’histoire des sciences 53/2, 1999, pp. 265–293 ;
• Henri Gouhier, La jeunesse d'Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, tome 1 : sous le signe de la liberté, Vrin, 1932 ;
• Henri Gouhier, La jeunesse d'Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, tome 2 : Saint-Simon jusqu'à la restauration, Vrin;
• Henri Gouhier, La jeunesse d'Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, tome 3 : Auguste Comte et Saint-Simon, Vrin, 1941 ;
• Henri Gouhier, Oeuvres choisies avec introduction et notes, Aubier, 1941 ;
• Georges Canguilhem, « Histoire des religions et histoire des sciences dans la théorie du fétichisme chez Auguste Comte », Études d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Vrin, 1968 ;
• H.S. Jones, ed., Comte: Early Political Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1998;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Auguste Comte et la théorie sociale du positivisme, Seghers, 1972 ;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Auguste Comte, la science sociale, Gallimard, 1972 ;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Le projet anthropologique d'Auguste Comte, SEDES, 1980, réédition L'Harmattan, 1999 ;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, L'anthropologie positiviste d'Auguste Comte, Lib. Honoré Champion, 1980 ;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Entre le signe et l'histoire. L'anthropologie positiviste d'Auguste Comte, Klincksieck, 1982, réédition L'Harmattan,1999 ;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Le positivisme, Coll."Que sais-je?", PUF, 1982 ;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Le concept de science positive. Ses tenants et ses aboutissants dans les structures anthropologiques du positivisme, Méridiens Klincksieck, 1983 ;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Le positivisme d'Auguste Comte, L'Harmattan, 2006 ;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Auguste Comte et la science politique, in Auguste Comte, Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiserla société, L'Harmattan, 2001;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Auguste Comte et l'histoire générale, in Auguste Comte, Sommaire appréciation de l'ensemble du passé moderne, L'Harmattan, 2006 ;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Auguste Comte et la science politique, L'Harmattan, 2007;
• Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Le kaléidoscope épistémologique d'Auguste Comte. Sentiments Images Signes, L'Harmattan, 2007;
• Realino Marra, La proprietà in Auguste Comte. Dall’ordine fisico alla circolazione morale della ricchezza, in «Sociologia del diritto», XII-2, 1985, pp. 21–53;
• Pierre Macherey, Comte. La philosophie et les sciences, PUF, 1989 ;
• Jacques Muglioni, Auguste Comte: un philosophe pour notre temps, Kimé, Paris, 1995
• Gertrud Lenzer, Auguste Comte: Essential Writings (1975), New York Harper, Paperback, 1997 ;
• Raquel Capurro, Le positivisme est un culte des morts: Auguste Comte, Epel, 1999 (traduit en français en 2001) : l'étude la plus récente sur la vie d'Auguste Comte, la vision sans complaisance d'une psychanalyste de l'école de Lacan ;
• Auguste Comte, Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Part I (1855), translated by Harriet Martineau, Kessinger Publishing, Paperback, 2003 ; Also available from the McMaster Archive for the History of Economic Thought, Volume One Volume Two Volume Three
• Pierre Laffitte (1823-1903): Autour d'un centenaire, in Revue des Sciences et des Techniques en perspective, 2ème série, vol. 8, n°2, 2004, Brepols Publishers, 2005 ;
• Zeïneb Ben Saïd Cherni, Auguste Comte, postérité épistémologique et ralliement des nations, L'Harmattan, 2005 ;
• Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press (1993), Paperback, 2006 ;
• Wolf Lepenies, Auguste Comte: die Macht der Zeichen, Carl Hanser, München, 2010;
• Oséias Faustino Valentim, O Brasil e o Positivismo, Publit, Rio de Janeiro, 2010. ISBN 978-85-7773-331-6.

Notes[link]

The following footnotes may refer to reference works.

External links[link]

• Works by Auguste Comte at Project Gutenberg

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Auguste Comte

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Auguste Comte

• Auguste Comte: Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
• Review materials for studying Auguste Comte
• Auguste Comte quotes
• Auguste Comte at Find a Grave
• Positivist Church of Brazil
• Auguste Comte and Positivism
• The Three Cs and the Notion of Progress: Copernicus, Condorcet, Comte by Caspar J M Hewett
• The positive philosophy, Auguste Comte / freely translated and selected by Harriet Martineau Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. {Reprinted by} Cornell University Library Digital Collections or downloadable version here
• Some selections from first lecture of Course of Positive Philosophy
• Auguste Comte – High Priest of Positivism by Caspar Hewett

G. K. Chesterton
Born	Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-05-29)29 May 1874 Kensington, London, England
Died	14 June 1936(1936-06-14) (aged 62) Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England
Occupation	Journalist, Novelist, Essayist
Genres	Fantasy, Christian apologetics, Catholic apologetics, Mystery, Poetry
Influences Christianity, Catholicism, St. Thomas Aquinas, George MacDonald, William Blake, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hilaire Belloc
Influenced C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Franz Kafka, G. B. Shaw, Marshall McLuhan, Dorothy L. Sayers, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, David Dark, Gabriel García Márquez, Karel Čapek, Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, Ronald Knox, Anthony Burgess, E. F. Schumacher, Orson Welles, Dorothy Day, Brian McLaren, R. A. Lafferty, Philip Yancey, Rich Mullins, Terry Pratchett, J. K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Alan Watts, Don Miller, Garry Wills, Susanna Clarke, Carl Amery, Hannah Arendt, Slavoj Žižek, Aka Morchiladze

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, KC*SG (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer.^[1] He published works on philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction. Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox".^[2] Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out."^[3] For example, Chesterton wrote "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."^[4]

Chesterton is well known for his reasoned apologetics and even some of those who disagree with him have recognized the universal appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.^[3][5] Chesterton, as a political thinker, cast aspersions on both progressivism and conservatism, saying, "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."^[6] Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox" Christian, and came to identify such a position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, Chesterton's "friendly enemy" according to Time, said of him, "He was a man of colossal genius".^[3] Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and John Ruskin.^[7]

Life[link]

Chesterton at the time of his engagement, 1898

Born in Campden Hill in Kensington, London, Chesterton was educated at St Paul's School. He attended the Slade School of Art in order to become an illustrator and also took literature classes at University College London but did not complete a degree at either. In 1896 Chesterton began working for the London publisher Redway, and T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period he also undertook his first journalistic work as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. In 1902 he was given a weekly opinion column in the Daily News, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he would continue to write for the next thirty years.

According to Chesterton, as a young man he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards.^[8] However, as he grew older, he became an increasingly orthodox Christian, culminating in his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922.^[9]

Chesterton early showed a great interest and talent in art. He had planned to become an artist and his writing shows a vision that clothed abstract ideas in concrete and memorable images. Even his fiction seemed to be carefully concealed parables. Father Brown is perpetually correcting the incorrect vision of the bewildered folks at the scene of the crime and wandering off at the end with the criminal to exercise his priestly role of recognition and repentance. For example, in the story "The Flying Stars", Father Brown entreats the character Flambeau to give up his life of crime: "There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don't fancy they will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I've known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime."^[10]

Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around 21 stone (130 kg; 290 lb). His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote. During World War I a lady in London asked why he was not 'out at the Front'; he replied, 'If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.'^[11] On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw: "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England". Shaw retorted, "To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it".^[12] P. G. Wodehouse once described a very loud crash as "a sound like Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin."^[13]

Chesterton usually wore a cape and a crumpled hat, with a swordstick in hand, and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. Chesterton had a tendency to forget where he was supposed to be going and miss the train that was supposed to take him there. It is reported that on several occasions he sent a telegram to his wife Frances from some distant (and incorrect) location, writing such things as "Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" to which she would reply, "Home."^[14] As a result of these memory problems and of Chesterton being extremely clumsy as a child, there has been speculation that Chesterton had undiagnosed developmental dyspraxia.^{[15][citation needed]}

Chesterton loved to debate, often engaging in friendly public disputes with such men as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow. According to his autobiography, he and Shaw played cowboys in a silent movie that was never released.

Death[link]

Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on the morning of 14 June 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. His last known words were a greeting spoken to his wife. The homily at Chesterton's Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, London, was delivered by Ronald Knox on June 27, 1936. Knox said, "All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton's influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton."^[16] He is buried in Beaconsfield in the Catholic Cemetery. Chesterton's estate was probated at £28,389, approximately equivalent to £1.3 million in 2005.

Near the end of his life he was invested by Pope Pius XI as Knight Commander with Star of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great (KC*SG).^[17] The Chesterton Society has proposed that he be beatified.^[18]

Writing[link]

Chesterton in 1905 by photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn

Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, the Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour in the 14th edition (1929). His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel. He was a convinced Christian long before he was received into the Catholic Church, and Christian themes and symbolism appear in much of his writing. In the United States, his writings on distributism were popularized through The American Review, published by Seward Collins in New York.

Of his nonfiction, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906) has received some of the broadest-based praise. According to Ian Ker (The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961, 2003), "In Chesterton's eyes Dickens belongs to Merry, not Puritan, England" ; Ker treats Chesterton's thought in Chapter 4 of that book as largely growing out of his true appreciation of Dickens, a somewhat shop-soiled property in the view of other literary opinions of the time.

Chesterton's writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humour. He employed paradox, while making serious comments on the world, government, politics, economics, philosophy, theology and many other topics.

Views and contemporaries[link]

Self-portrait of Chesterton based on the distributist slogan "Three acres and a cow"

Chesterton's writing has been seen by some analysts as combining two earlier strands in English literature. Dickens' approach is one of these. Another is represented by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, whom Chesterton knew well: satirists and social commentators following in the tradition of Samuel Butler, vigorously wielding paradox as a weapon against complacent acceptance of the conventional view of things.

Chesterton's style and thinking were all his own, however, and his conclusions were often opposed to those of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. In his book Heretics, Chesterton has this to say of Wilde: "The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw."^[19] More briefly, and with a closer approximation of Wilde's own style, he writes in Orthodoxy concerning the necessity of making symbolic sacrifices for the gift of creation: "Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde."

Chesterton and Shaw were famous friends and enjoyed their arguments and discussions. Although rarely in agreement, they both maintained good-will toward and respect for each other. However, in his writing, Chesterton expressed himself very plainly on where they differed and why. In Heretics he writes of Shaw:

After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.^[20]

Shaw represented the new school of thought, modernism, which was rising at the time. Chesterton's views, on the other hand, became increasingly more focused towards the Church. In Orthodoxy he writes: "The worship of will is the negation of will... If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, 'Will something', that is tantamount to saying, 'I do not mind what you will', and that is tantamount to saying, 'I have no will in the matter.' You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular."^[21]

This style of argumentation is what Chesterton refers to as using 'Uncommon Sense' — that is, that the thinkers and popular philosophers of the day, though very clever, were saying things that were nonsensical. This is illustrated again in Orthodoxy: "Thus when Mr. H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different", he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."^[22] Or, again from Orthodoxy:

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless — one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is — well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.^[22]

"All healthy men, ancient and modern, Western and Eastern, hold that there is in sex a fury that we cannot afford to inflame; and that a certain mystery must attach to the instinct if it is to continue delicate and sane."^[23] In the middle of his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse he famously states: <poem> For the great Gaels of Ireland Are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, And all their songs are sad.^[24] </poem>

Another contemporary and friend from schooldays was Edmund Bentley, inventor of the clerihew. Chesterton himself wrote clerihews and illustrated his friend's first published collection of poetry, Biography for Beginners (1905), which popularized the clerihew form. Chesterton was also godfather to Bentley's son, Nicolas, and opened his novel The Man Who Was Thursday with a poem written to Bentley.

Chesterton faced accusations of anti-Semitism during his lifetime, as well as posthumously.^[25] In a work of 1917, titled “A Short History of England,” Chesterton considers the year of 1290, when by royal decree, Edward I expelled Jews from England, an edict not rescinded until 1655. In writing of the official expulsion and banishment of 1290, Chesterton writes that Edward I was “just and conscientious” a monarch never more truly representative of his people than when he expelled the Jews, “as powerful as they are unpopular.” Chesterton writes Jews were “capitalists of their age” so that when Edward “flung the alien financiers out of the land,” he acted as “knight errant,” and “tender father of his people.”^[26] In The New Jerusalem, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that there was a "Jewish Problem" in Europe, in the sense that he believed that Jewish culture (not Jewish ethnicity) separated itself from the nationalities of Europe.^[27] He suggested the formation of a Jewish homeland as a solution, and was later invited to Palestine by Jewish Zionists who saw him as an ally in their cause.

The Wiener Library (London's archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: "he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on."^[28] Chesterton, like Belloc, openly expressed his abhorrence of Hitler's rule almost as soon as it started.^[29]

[edit] The Chesterbelloc

See Also G. K.'s Weekly.

Chesterton is often associated with his close friend, the poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc. George Bernard Shaw coined the name Chesterbelloc for their partnership, and this stuck. Though they were very different men, they shared many beliefs; Chesterton eventually joined Belloc in his natal Catholicism, and both voiced criticisms towards capitalism and socialism. They instead espoused a third way: distributism. G. K.'s Weekly, which occupied much of Chesterton's energy in the last 15 years of his life, was the successor to Belloc's New Witness, taken over from Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert's brother who died in World War I.

Literary legacy[link]

• Chesterton's The Everlasting Man contributed to C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. In a letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950)^[30] Lewis calls the book "the best popular apologetic I know", and to Rhonda Bodle he wrote (31 December 1947)^[31] "the [very] best popular defence of the full Christian position I know is G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man." The book was also cited in a list of 10 books that "most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life."^[32]
• Chesterton's 1906 biography of Charles Dickens was largely responsible for creating a popular revival for Dickens's work as well as a serious reconsideration of Dickens by scholars.^[33]
• Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursday inspired the Irish Republican leader Michael Collins with the idea: "if you didn't seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out."^[34]
• Etienne Gilson praised Chesterton's Aquinas volume as follows: "I consider it as being, without possible comparison, the best book ever written on Saint Thomas...the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame."^[35]

• Chesterton's column in the Illustrated London News on September 18, 1909 had a profound effect on Mahatma Gandhi. P. N. Furbank asserts that Gandhi was "thunderstruck" when he read it,^[36] while Martin Green notes that "Gandhi was so delighted with this that he told Indian Opinion to reprint it."^[37]

• Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, author of seventy books, identified Chesterton as the stylist who had the greatest impact on his own writing, stating in his autobiography Treasure in Clay "The greatest influence in writing was G.K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite."^[38]

• Canadian Media Guru Marshall McLuhan was heavily influenced by Chesterton; McLuhan said the book What's Wrong with the World changed his life in terms of ideas and religion.^[39]
• The author Neil Gaiman has stated that The Napoleon of Notting Hill was an important influence on his own book Neverwhere, and used a quote from it as an epigraph to that novel. Gaiman also based the character Gilbert, from the comic book The Sandman, on Chesterton.^[40]
• Argentine author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges cited Chesterton as a major influence on his own fiction. In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late 1960s, Borges said, "Chesterton knew how to make the most of a detective story."^[41]

List of major works[link]

• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) text CSE.dmu.ac.uk
• Heretics (1905) ISBN 978-0-7661-7476-4 (Available from Project Gutenberg)
• Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906)
• The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) Manybooks.net
• Orthodoxy (1908) Doubleday, 1991. ISBN 978-0-385-01536-3 (Available from Project Gutenberg)
• The Ballad Of The White Horse (1911)
• Manalive (1912)
• Father Brown short stories (detective fiction)
• Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)
• Saint Francis of Assisi (1923), Doubleday, 1987. ISBN 978-0-385-02900-1
• The Everlasting Man (1925)
• Saint Thomas Aquinas (1933), Doubleday, 1974. ISBN 978-0-385-09002-5

	Poetry portal
	Saints portal

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Ahlquist, Dale. G. K. Chesterton: Apostle of Common Sense (2003)
• Braybrooke, Patrick, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1922.
• Cooney, A., G.K. Chesterton, One Sword at Least, Third Way Publications, London, 1999. ISBN 0-9535077-1-8
• Coren, M., Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton, Paragon House, New York, 1990.
• ffinch, M., G. K. Chesterton, 1986
• Kenner, H., Paradox in Chesterton, 1947.
• Ker, Ian (2011), G. K. Chesterton: A Biography, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-960128-3
• Ker, Ian. G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford University Press; 2011)
• Lauer, Quentin, G.K. Chesterton: Philosopher Without Portfolio, Fordham University Press, New York City, New York, 1991 ISBN 0-8232-1199-1
• McLuhan, Marshall "G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic" (Dalhousie Review 15 (4), 1936)
• McNichol, J., The Young Chesterton Chronicles, Book One: The Tripods Attack!", Sophia institute Press, Manchester, NH, 2008. ISBN 978-1-933184-26-5
• Paine, R., The Universe and Mr. Chesterton, Sherwood Sugden, 1999. ISBN 0-89385-511-1
• Pearce, J, Wisdom and Innocence – A Life of G.K.Chesterton, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996. ISBN 0-340-67132-7
• Sullivan, John, "G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal", Paul Elek, London, 1974. ISBN 0-236-17628-5
• Ward, M., Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Sheed & Ward, 1944.
• Williams, Donald T. Mere Humanity: G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition (2006)

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: G. K. Chesterton

Wikisource has original works written by or about: G. K. Chesterton

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: G. K. Chesterton

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Chesterton, Gilbert Keith.

• Portraits of G. K. Chesterton in the National Portrait Gallery (London). Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Archival material relating to G. K. Chesterton listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• The American Chesterton Society. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Gilbert Magazine, a Chesterton journal. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Parish Church in Beaconsfield where Chesterton is buried. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Iain Benson (ed), "The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton"
• G. K. Chesterton website, including etexts
• Works by G. K. Chesterton at Project Gutenberg
• Works in audio format from LibriVox. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Works at Internet Archive. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Works by or about G. K. Chesterton in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by G. K. Chesterton at Wikilivres. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Works at the Online Books Page. Retrieved 2010-10-28