That Auguste Comte (1798-1857), was the father of sociology is fairly well known, but lesser known is, that he started as the secretary of Saint Simon, the ur-guru of  technocratic solutions to social problems in short, central socialist planning. Beyond that, he was the ancestor of those who seek global governance, world parliaments and world peace, the contemporary manifestation of the utopian legacy. Revolution and disdained their talk of liberty and rights, at least he can't be blamed for international courts of justice. While millionaire bankers posthumously published his collected works and paid to maintain his grave in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, the Soviets erected an obelisk to his memory in Moscow. If the former liked his idea of `an aristocracy of talent', the latter were keener on his division of humanity into productive worker bees and eliminable parasitic drones. Saint-Simon's `socialism' rejected equality and welcomed profit. His doctrines left their mark (for he said that ideas were like the lingering smell of musk) on such projects as the Credit Mobilier, the European railway networks and the Suez Canal of de Lesseps. Saint-Simon's local influence was most evident in the regime of Napoleon III.

Just as Saint-Simon was not fussy about which autocrat might imple­ment his schemes, so his thinking was eclectic and open to surprising ideological influences, in the manner of twentieth-century postmodernists, who are at least theoretically open to the ideas of right as well as left, although they too have the herd-like mentality of academics everywhere. Saint-Simon took much from the ultra-reactionaries, putting it at the service of the liberal bourgeoisie who detested the outmoded rule of aristocrats and clergy that these two had lauded. Admirers say that Saint-Simon was a philanthropic aristocrat struggling to adapt to what he correctly saw as the coming age of science and industry - an extraordinarily prescient vision, as it turned out, for he wrote at a time when most of Europe's population were still subsistence farmers. Undeterred by the fact that what science he knew came from his practice of lavishly entertaining down-at-heel professors when he was in funds himself, Saint-Simon had boundless confidence in the future of science.

Scientists were the first group to whom he promised the earth, on the ground that their political advancement would benefit humanity as a whole, a proposition that is quite different from the fact that most of us prefer scientific medicine to magic or witchcraft when we are ill. From 1814 onwards he added bureaucrats, magistrates and merchants to the new elite, before transferring the leading role in transforming the world to the `industrials', a term whose meaning shifted but which was always coterminous with `productive elements' ranging from bankers to humble workers. An advocate of free trade, which he thought would inaugurate an age of peace, Saint-Simon wanted industrialists to take over administration of the state, which would be cut back to a few police functions since there would be no economic regulation. The state had developed partly to defend people against the Church; without the Church the state could wither away. Later he refined his focus to advocacy of rule by bankers alone, which probably explains his popularity with Messrs Lafitte and Pereire, the financial princes of their day. The world would become one giant multinational enterprise, linked together by the flows of international capital.

 In its final elaborations, Saint-Simonian utopianism consisted of semi-corporatist `Chambers'. Central planning of huge infrastructural projects was the responsibility of a Chamber of Invention, dominated by engineers, the new class, who fused the skills of businessmen and scientists, and whose future importance Saint-Simon was among the first to notice. He was obsessed with canals and roads, which would be punctuated with vast gardens, with museums displaying the natural and industrial products of any given locality. Culture would no longer be a luxury for the few, but something used to refine the mass of humanity, for Saint-Simon was the first `engineer of human souls' to set to work on the creative arts. Other aspects of his thought also have the cabbage whiff of the east European people's palace circa 1950. Public festivities would exhort people to more work, and remind them of the perdition they had transcended. A Chamber of Review, consisting of hundreds of pure scientists, would `review' the schemes of the Chamber of Inventions, and organise further festivals, celebrating men and women, boys and girls, mothers, fathers, children, managers and workers. A Chamber of Deputies, consisting entirely of industrialists, would be the executive, raise taxes and implement massive public projects. Striking a protoCommunist or proto-Fascist note, Saint-Simon warned: `The role of the talkers is approaching its end, that of the doers will not be long delayed in making its appearance’.

The Enlightenment had rejected the medieval and absolutist past, although it was fond of a dimly known republican antiquity. By contrast, Saint-Simon claimed that progress resulted from the dialectical interaction of `organic' and `critical' periods in history. Organic periods included classical Hellenic and medieval Christian civilisations when all ideas were in harmony and in the service of the common good; but critical periods - such as Saint-Simon's own - were equally necessary, for they dissolved the former while simultaneously giving birth to higher organic periods. He found virtue in surprising places, including the medieval Church which had held Europe together, civilising and pacify- mg wherever it could. One cannot imagine any Enlightenment thinker writing that up to the fifteenth century:

the men of the Church were superior to the laity in their talents and virtues. It was the clergy that cleared land for cultivation, and drained unhealthy marshes; it was they who deciphered ancient manuscripts. They taught reading and writing to the lay population ... the clergy founded the first hospitals, and the first modern institutions of learning; they united the European nations in their resistance to the Saracens.

Living in what he regarded as a time of critical dissolution, Saint-Simon could not resist the challenge of elevating social science into a new religion that would guarantee order together with progress. Like everyone who had lived through the Revolution, and many of those who hadn't, he had a fear of the guillotine and of being rabbled. This was where the downgraded savants came in. They were to be organised into an Academy of Reasoning and an Academy of Sentiment. The former would draft laws and regulations; the latter, consisting of artists, moral­ists, poets, painters and theologians, would paint images of the bright future. So far, this vision lacked any religion. Isaiah Berlin was wrong to claim that Saint-Simon was `the first originator of what might be called secular religions', for the Jacobins had already passed that way.

But from 1821 onwards Saint-Simon began to elaborate what he called `New Christianity', for, as he put it, `The throne of the absolute could not remain untenanted.' There was also a social agenda, for he also wrote: `Religion is the collection of applications of general science by means of which enlightened men rule the ignorant ... I believe in the necessity of a religion for the maintenance of the social order.' That was the beginning of the Orwellian double morality whereby the enlightened elite espoused one code of values while force-feeding the donkeys with another." Arguing that one God must translate into one sublime com­mandment, Saint-Simon claimed that it was that men should behave as brothers. Both rich and poor would be morally improved if they acknowledged that it was incumbent on everyone to work on behalf of the poor. The heretical papacy had perverted this doctrine through its corrupt proximity to earthly powers. The Church had become a secular rather than a spiritual force. If the Catholic Church was 'Anti- Christian', the Reformation had hardly been an improvement, since Luther too had done little by way of `public works' to benefit the poor. He had also replaced an institution that over time exhibited adaptability and flexibility with the rigidity of what was written in one book. If the new religion was capitalistic philanthropy, its priesthood consisted of artists and scientists - or priests retrained as such - while the messiah was none other than the prophet through whom God spoke: Saint-Simon himself. (There is a good discussion of Saint-Simon in Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress. History and Society , London, 1968,  pp. 104-14.)

After his death, Saint-Simon's disciples Amand Bazard and Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin developed the master's doctrines in different ways in a series of evening lectures. Bazard wished to abolish private inheritance of property. Inheritances would go to a central bank which would rein­vest in new productive enterprises, a project dimly perceived behind the realities of government investment in railways and the Credit Mobilier. Enfantin was more interested in founding a Saint-Simonian religious sect. This took. the form of a commune at Menilmontant on the outskirts of Paris, where the disciples lived according to a pseudo-monastic rule based on the injunction 'All men must work' and espoused brotherly love as the basic tenet. They wore a special uniform, whose vest could only be fastened from the back, a symbolic daily reminder of human interdependence. Raymond Bonheur painted the composer Felicien David wearing this outfit. Rumour had it that their constant talk of love was not confined to the sublimated variety, which guaranteed that the idly prurient flocked to witness the suburban cult in action. Otherwise different from Vladimir Soloviev’s "Free Theocracy" or "Universal Church”, Saint- Simonianism did  also include a belief in, the Eternal Feminine as the Wisdom of God. Where another disciple of Saint- Simon, Eliphas Levi father of a new religion called "Occultism" married Marie-Noemi Cadiot, on whom he projected this idea of a Devine Feminine, Compte somehow seems to have carried over a similar idea in his own life.

In 1844, by which time his academic career and marriage had disintegrated, Comte fell in love with a young woman called Clothilde de Vaux whose husband had abandoned her. Her refusal to satisfy his sexual importunities, perhaps complicated by the fact that Comte was impotent, until the death from tuberculosis of his `incomparable angel' resolved things. Some claim that this was literally an epiphany, leading neatly to Comte's `religion of humanity', in which worship of Clothilde (and the plush red chair she had sat on) figures prominently, but his definitive biographer disagrees. (See, Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte. An Intellectual Biography ,Cambridge, 1993, 1, pp. 362ff.)

At any rate, thereafter each morning Comte spent forty minutes in 'Commemorating' Clothilde, followed by twenty minutes of `Effusions', kneeling before her dead flowers. Midday prayers involved reading the whole of her last letter to him, together with long passages of Virgil, Dante and Petrarch. Evening prayers were offered, `in bed seated' and then `lying down'.

These rituals were accompanied by Herculean labours on books that few read then and which fewer read now. Even limiting each sentence to five lines, and each paragraph to seven sentences, did not promote clarity

Comte sought to establish the philosophical basis for the sciences and for the scientific ordering and reform of society, a formula calculated to appeal to the right as well as the left. In his six-volume Course on Positivist Philosophy, Comte showed how each of the sciences, maths, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology, had become `positive', that is based on empirically verifiable laws. Between 1851 and 1854 he published a four-volume work of sociology, which laid the basis for his Religion of Humanity. Positivism was supposed to be a third way between the outmoded theologically grounded world of the ancien regime and an abstract, critical rationalism that had become anarchic and incapable of creating anything.

Comte's most famous idea was the law of three stages, whereby every area of thought passes through a theological (fictional), a metaphysical (abstract) and a scientific phase, this last being called `positive'. This was true too of  historical epochs, which in his view were governed by regnant ideas, with an early military and theological stage (from antiquity to the fourteenth century) giving way to an era of decay and renewal (from the fourteenth century to the French Revolution) and finally the industrial and scientific era that succeeded it in which mankind was menaced by rampant individualism just at the time the old beliefs had faded away.

Essentially Comte sought a new unifying social doctrine to replace theology and the Church.Even highly astute commentators have found this beguiling, for since Comte there have been much grimmer examples of 'sociolatry', that is the worship of human society.

British sceptics called Comte's Religion of Humanity `Catholicism minus Christianity'. The Comtean religion fused elements from the civic cults of the French Revolution with transpositions from Roman Catholicism. While Comte rejected Chrisitianity on the grounds that it regarded women as the source of evil, labour as a `divine curse' and benevolence as alien to our flawed natures, he also admired the separ- ation of spiritual and temporal powers, the cult of the Blessed Virgin and the aesthetic achievements of medieval Catholicism. The detail was maniacal, the role of numerical permutations obsessive. The worship of 'le Grand Etre' (echoes of the supreme being) had its dogmas and ceremonies, saints and sacraments, designed to merge public and private life. There were public saints, like Archimedes, Aristotle, Dante, Descartes, Frederick the Great and Gutenberg, after whom the lunar months were named in a calendar beginning in 1789; and private saints - or `angels' cum `domestic goddesses' -consisting of mothers, sisters, wives, servants and inevitably `beloved women' dead or alive, for whom Clothilde de Vaux was the prototype.

Comte became interested in future female parthenogenesis, that is reproduction without congress between the sexes, hoping that this would be an ennoblement of marriage equivalent to the epochal progression from polygamy to monogamy. The year was also punctuated by festivals celebrating fundamental social relations, whether of parent and child or master and servant; festivals which recognised earlier stages of religion, fetishism, polytheism, monotheism; and festivals which celebrated the social functions of capitalists, workers and women. There were nine sacraments: presentation of the infant, initiation at fourteen, admission at twenty-one, destination at twenty-eight, marriage before thirty-five (twenty-one for women), maturity at forty-two, retirement at sixty-two and, after death, the sacrament of transformation, whereby after a decent seven-year interval the subjective residue of a personality was consigned to immortality in the sacred grove next to the temple of humanity. The immortal's memory would become part of the Great Being. As Comte wrote: `To live in others is, in the truest sense of the word, life ... To prolong our life indefinitely in the Past and Future, so as to make it more perfect in the Present, is abundant compensation for the illusions of our youth which have now passed away for ever.' By contrast, the condemned and suicides passed into oblivion while `unworthy spouses' went to the Positivist's hell.

Comte's thought was cosmic, as well as comic, in ambition. He wished to replace the earth's elliptical path with a circular orbit to harmonise extremes of climate. In addition to wishing to convert first Europe and Russia, then the Middle East, India and Africa to Positivism, Comte had prescriptions for the government of human society. Existing states should be divided into small republics the size of Sardinia or Tuscany, so that France would become seventeen such units. Existing nations, such as England, France or Spain, were merely `factitious aggregates without solid justification'.' The entire western world would be divided into five hundred such units, each with between one and three million inhabitants. An admirer of medieval theocracy and of the Jacobin Club, Comte wanted his 'sociocracy' to be based on the temporal rule of bankers and industrialists, with spiritual power in the hands (or rather minds) of the scientific contemplatives who had been winnowed out of the over-specialised 'pedantocracy'. This new priesthood would consist of people who had mastered every form of art and science, and who were responsible for the cure of souls and bodies. Comte believed that the pope would be the moral arbiter between nations. The middle class would disappear, leaving 120 million proletarians ruled by two thousand patrician bankers. Comte rejected democracy of any kind, and his Positivistic religion was not open to critical discussion. Duties rather than a riot of rights were paramount. By transferring to man rights derived from God, Comte left individuals bereft of any autonomy regarding the new God of abstract humanity. Man was enclosed from cradle to beyond the grave in society with no external moorings other than himself.

While few people went in for the sectarian version of Positivism, its underlying beliefs were attractive to many middle-class people, including such worthies as professors of history or mathematics at University College London and the Webbs, cofounders of the London School of Economics, with Sidney worshipping the ghastly Beatrice as well as the beastly Soviet Union.