The positivist calendar was a calendar reform proposal by Auguste Comte in 1849. Revising the earlier work of Marco Mastrofini, or an even earlier proposal by "Hirossa Ap-Iccim" (Hugh Jones), Comte developed a solar calendar with 13 months of 28 days, and an additional festival day commemorating the dead, totalling 365 days.
This extra day added to the last month was outside the days of the week cycle, and so the first of a month was always a Monday. On leap years, an additional festival day (also outside the week cycle), to celebrate holy women, would join the memorial day of the dead. The scheme followed the Gregorian calendar rules for determining which years are leap years, and started on January 1. Year 1 "of the Great Crisis" (i.e. the French Revolution) was equivalent to 1789 in the standard Gregorian system.
Much like Comte's other schemas, the positivist calendar never enjoyed widespread use.
Months
The months were named, in chronological historical order, for great figures in Western European history in the fields of science, religion, philosophy, industry and literature. Each day of the year was named after neither Catholic Saints as in the Georgian calendar nor after Île-de-France agriculture as in the French Republican calendar but after figures in history in various fields. Weeks and days were also dedicated to great figures in history as a secular version of the concept of saint's days. In all, the Positivist Calendar "contains the names of 558 great men of all periods, classified according to their field of activity."[1] Villains of history were also commemorated in order to be held up for "perpetual execration".[2]Napoleon, according to Comte, was especially deserving of this fate.[2]
In 1849, Comte wrote that he called his calendar a "breach of continuity" with the old way of thinking, and his Humanistic calendar was part of that breach. He called it, "a provisional institution, destined for the present exceptional century to serve as an introduction to the abstract worship of Humanity."[3]
Aside from the religious references the calendar carried, Duncan Steel, author of Marking Time, believes the novelty of the calendar's month names alone helped prevent the wide acceptance of this proposal.
The main reason that his suggestion [for calendar reform] failed to find favor with many people seems to have been that he insisted on naming the months for various notable persons from historical to modern times, ... One must admit that it would seem strange to give the date as the third day of Homer, and with a month named for the bard a reference to "Shakespeare's Twelfth Night" would be ambiguous.[4]
Author Tricia Lootens writes that the idea of naming days after literary figures, as if they were Catholic Saint days, didn't catch on outside the Positivist movement.
Outside of positivist circles, canonization of literary secular saints was nearly always slightly tinged with irony or nostalgia, and positivist circles were never large.[5]
The several advantages of the Positivist calendar are mainly related to its organization. The subdivision of the year is very regular and systematic:
Every year has exactly 52 weeks divided in 13 months.
Each month has exactly 28 days divided in 4 weeks.
Every day of the month falls on the same weekday in each month (i.e. the 17th always falls on a Wednesday).
The calendar is the same every year (perennial), unlike the annual Gregorian calendar, which differs from year to year. Hence, scheduling is easier for institutions and industries with extended production cycles. Movable holidays celebrated on the nth certain weekday of a month, such as U.S. Thanksgiving day, would be able to have a fixed date while keeping their traditional weekday.
Statistical comparisons by months are more accurate, since all months contain exactly the same number of business days and weekends, likewise for comparisons by 13-week quarters. Supporters of the Positivist calendar have argued that thirteen equal divisions of the year are superior to twelve unequal divisions in terms of monthly cash flow in the economy.
While each quarter would be equal in length (13 weeks), thirteen is a prime number, placing all activities currently done on a quarterly basis out of alignment with the months.
Christian, Islamic and Jewish leaders are historically opposed to the calendar, as their tradition of worshiping every seventh day would result in either the day of the week of worship changing from year to year, or eight days passing when "The Festival of All the Dead” or “The Festival of Holy Women" occurs.[6]
Birthdays, significant anniversaries, and other holidays would need to be recalculated as a result of a calendar reform, and would always be on the same day of the week. This could be problematic for Public holidays that would fall under non-working days under the new system; eg. If a public holiday is celebrated on January 8, under the Positivist calendar that holiday would always fall on a Sunday, Moses 8, which is already a non-working day, and compensatory leave would have to be given each year on Moses 9, thus essentially changing the date of the holiday to Moses 9. A vast amount of administrative data, and the software that manages that, would have to be corrected/adjusted for the new system, potentially having to support both the IFC and the standard local time keeping systems for a period of time.
Calendrier positiviste, Catéchisme positiviste, ou Sommaire Exposition de la religion universelle en treize entretiens systématiques entre une femme et un prêtre de l'humanité, Auguste Comte, Apostolat positiviste (Paris), 1891. From Gallica - Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
A calendar is a system of organizing days. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years. A date is the designation of a single and specific day within such a system. A calendar is also a physical record of such a system. A calendar can also mean a list of planned events, such as a court calendar, or a partly or fully chronological list of documents, such as a calendar of wills.
The French Republican calendar, also commonly called the French Revolutionary calendar, was a calendar created and implemented during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805, and for 18 days by the Paris Commune in 1871, and meant to replace the Gregorian calendar.
A holiday is a day or other period of time set aside for festivals or recreation. Public holidays are set by public authorities and vary by state or region. Religious holidays are set by religious organisations for their members and are often also observed as public holidays in religious majority countries. Some religious holidays, such as Christmas, have become secularised by part or all of those who observe them. In addition to secularisation, many holidays have become commercialised due to the growth of industry.
The International Fixed Calendar was a proposed reform of the Gregorian calendar designed by Moses B. Cotsworth, first presented in 1902. The International Fixed Calendar divides the year into 13 months of 28 days each. A type of perennial calendar, every date is fixed to the same weekday every year. Though it was never officially adopted at the country level, the entrepreneur George Eastman instituted its use at the Eastman Kodak Company in 1928, where it was used until 1989. While it is sometimes described as the 13-month calendar or the equal-month calendar, various alternative calendar designs share these features.
The World Calendar is a proposed reform of the Gregorian calendar created by Elisabeth Achelis of Brooklyn, New York in 1930.
The Soviet calendar was a modified Gregorian calendar that was used in Soviet Russia between 1918 and 1940. Several variations were used during that time.
Calendar reform or calendrical reform is any significant revision of a calendar system. The term sometimes is used instead for a proposal to switch to a different calendar design.
A leap week calendar is a calendar system with a whole number of weeks in a year, and with every year starting on the same weekday. Most leap week calendars are proposed reforms to the civil calendar, in order to achieve a perennial calendar. Some, however, such as the ISO week date calendar, are simply conveniences for specific purposes.
The Tabular Islamic calendar is a rule-based variation of the Islamic calendar. It has the same numbering of years and months, but the months are determined by arithmetical rules rather than by observation or astronomical calculations. It was developed by early Muslim astronomers of the second hijra century to provide a predictable time base for calculating the positions of the moon, sun, and planets. It is now used by historians to convert an Islamic date into a Western calendar when no other information is available. Its calendar era is the Hijri year. An example is the Fatimid or Misri calendar.
The Symmetry454 calendar (Sym454) is a proposal for calendar reform created by Irv Bromberg of the University of Toronto, Canada. It is a perennial solar calendar that conserves the traditional month pattern and 7-day week, has symmetrical equal quarters in 82% of the years in its 293-year cycle, and starts every month on Monday.
Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive – meaning a posteriori facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience. Other ways of knowing, such as intuition, introspection, or religious faith, are rejected or considered meaningless.
In Thailand, two main calendar systems are used alongside each other: the Thai solar calendar, based on the Gregorian calendar and used for official and most day-to-day purposes, and the Thai lunar calendar, used for traditional events and Buddhist religious practices.
The ISO week date system is effectively a leap week calendar system that is part of the ISO 8601 date and time standard issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) since 1988 and, before that, it was defined in ISO (R) 2015 since 1971. It is used (mainly) in government and business for fiscal years, as well as in timekeeping. This was previously known as "Industrial date coding". The system specifies a week year atop the Gregorian calendar by defining a notation for ordinal weeks of the year.
Religion of Humanity is a secular religion created by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the founder of positivist philosophy. Adherents of this religion have built chapels of Humanity in France and Brazil.
The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most parts of the world. It went into effect in October 1582 following the papal bull Inter gravissimas issued by Pope Gregory XIII, which introduced it as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. The principal change was to space leap years differently so as to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, more closely approximating the 365.2422-day 'tropical' or 'solar' year that is determined by the Earth's revolution around the Sun.
Marco Mastrofini (1763–1845) was an Italian priest, philosopher and mathematician.
Clotilde de Vaux, born Clotilde Marie, was a French intellectual known to have inspired the French philosopher Auguste Comte's Religion of Humanity.
The Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar (HHPC) is a proposal for calendar reform. It is one of many examples of leap week calendars, calendars that maintain synchronization with the solar year by intercalating entire weeks rather than single days. It is a modification of a previous proposal, Common-Civil-Calendar-and-Time (CCC&T). With the Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar, every calendar date always falls on the same day of the week. A major feature of the calendar system is the abolition of time zones.
A perennial calendar is a calendar that applies to any year, keeping the same dates, weekdays and other features.
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