Clauzade, Laurent
Grégoire Wyrouboff on Russia. An essay on applied positive sociology?
- 2016.
92
Grégoire Wyrouboff (1843-1913), born in Russia, directed the first positivist journal— La Philosophie positive—along with Émile Littré. The articles he wrote for the periodical are the main part of a work that can be called philosophical in the Comtean meaning of the word. The way Wyrouboff understands positive philosophy as a whole follows the theses of Littré on positivism: he assumes a kind of republican and antireligious scientism that is specific to the beginnings of the French Third Republic. Wyrouboff shows much more originality in his articles on Russia. In order to describe Russian social and political phenomena and to defend an occidentalist position, he uses methodological tools, which indeed do not belong to classical Comtean sociology.