 The early writings remain the required starting point for everyone who wishes to understand the goal that Comte incessantly pursued. It is not without reason that on the first page of the System Comte applied to himself Alfred de Vigny’s words: ‘What is a great life? A thought of youth, executed by mature age.’ His formative years were dominated by his relationship with Saint-Simon. When meeting him in 1817, Comte, like his fellow students at the École Polytechnique, had just been dismissed by Louis XVIII and was therefore looking for a job. He even thought of emigrating to the United States to teach at a school that Jefferson was planning to open and which was to be modeled on the École Polytechnique. The École Polytechnique, whose faculty included the likes of Arago, Laplace, Cauchy, and Poisson, had been for Comte what the Evangelisches Stift in Tübingen had been for Hegel. There, he got an education in science that was second to none in all of Europe; it left a permanent imprint on him. But he was equally a typical representative of the generation of Tocqueville and Guizot that saw itself confronted with the question of how to stop the Revolution after the collapse of the Empire. ‘How,’ as Comte would put it in 1848, ‘does one reorganize human life, irrespectively of God and king’? (1851, v. 1, 127; E., v. 1, 100) It is from this perspective that his profound hostility towards classical political philosophy —philosophy that we continue to respect today— has to be understood. With its insistence on freedom of conscience and on the sovereignty of the people (souveraineté populaire), the revolutionary doctrine had no other function than to destroy the Ancien Régime (founded on papal authority and monarchy by divine right). But in that task it had now succeeded. The moment had come for reconstruction, and it was hard to see how these weapons could be of use in such work.