Alfred Espinas

Alfred Espinas (1844 to 1922) was a French thinker and an early sociologist, noted for having been an influence on Nietzsche. He was a student of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, and although he began as an adherent of positivism he later became a committed realist. His best known work is Des societes animales of 1877, a study of animal societies that treated social life as a natural phenomenon, and he followed it with Les origines de la technologie in 1897 and La philosophie sociale du XVIIIe siecle et la Revolution in 1898. A posthumous volume of 1925 returned to Descartes and the morality of action. He died in Saint-Florentin in the Yonne, and the philosopher Jean Ostrowski later presented him as a forerunner of praxeology.