Prophet of Science

Mary Pickering is Professor of Modern European History at San Jose State University. She is the author of the three-volume Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography.

Auguste Comte is one of the most influential, least appreciated and strangest modern philosophers. He invented sociology, decisively shaped philosophy of science and fired up nineteenth-century activists around the world. In this rich and engaging biography, the eminent expert Mary Pickering does justice to Comte’s fascinating life and work – and his attempts, both disastrous and surprisingly successful, to weave religion, emotion, fetishism and the sciences together for a global industrial society. - John Tresch, The Warburg Institute, London, author of The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after NapoleonProphet of Science distills Mary Pickering’s lifelong engagement with Auguste Comte, one of the nineteenth century’s most daring and unsettling minds. At once incisive and deeply humane, it traces a life marked by revolutionary fervor, immense intellectual ambition, mental crisis, authoritarian dreams, and the creation of a secular “Religion of Humanity.” Comte emerges here as a passionate, conflicted figure rather than a dry system‑builder, and his ideas—formative across a wide range of emerging disciplines—appear richer and more complex than the doctrinaire schemes advanced by the many thinkers and writers who later sought to claim his legacy. - Warren Breckman, University of PennsylvaniaNo one is better qualified than Mary Pickering to write a study of the life and ideas of Auguste Comte. Eschewing her subject’s own disregard for clarity, she has authored not only a lucid picture of Comte’s complex and troubled personality but also a compelling account of the science and dogma of positivism he struggled to construct. The intellectual and political environment in which this was done is brought vividly to life as is the massive influence Comte had in his own lifetime and subsequently. For all Comte’s many contradictions and paradoxes, Pickering shows that in our “post-truth” age a closer look at this neglected thinker is merited. - Jeremy Jennings, King's College London