When Hans Jonas wrote his Das Prinzip Verantwortung (1979), no theoretical tradition seemed to be available to face the risks humanity was experiencing in light of its own technological progress. However, Auguste Comte – considered the founding father of scientific positivism – paved the way for a new form of knowledge, sociology, conceived to provide a unitary theoretical framework accounting for the relationship between human being and the surround-ing world. He reoriented all the scientific specializations within the limits imposed by such a foundational relationship. In the first part of the article, I try to isolate, among the reasons leading Comte to found sociology, the most interesting ones for the “imperative of responsibility” as professed by Jonas. In the second part, instead, I try to identify the cultural obstacles that prevented Jonas from finding in Comte, and in the sociological tradition tout court, any useful ideas in order to conceive “an ethics for technological civilization”.
