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what differentiates positivism from its more prosperous successor. This dif-
ference has chiefly to do with the role of scientism in efforts to establish
scientific patronage. Positivism is no less scientistic than evolutionism, but
when it becomes part of the public ideology of a society it does not necessar-
ily produce the kind of ideological framework that translates into material
support for the natural sciences. Evolutionism I believe does.
For the moment, my aim is to discuss three features of positivism that
anticipate but which also provide helpful contrasts to evolutionism. The
first, which I have already mentioned, is the positivists' explicit claim that
they had reduced history to science even as they continued to advance his-
torical ideas that were derived from the Christian tradition. Once enfolded
into science, the speculative and mythologized features of this history
became less subject to critical inspection and could more effectively sus-
tain the emerging ethos of scientism. The second feature is positivism's ten-
dency to merge decisively these enduring religious themes into the notion
of evolution. This pattern stands out even more sharply in classical posi-
tivism than it does in evolutionism proper, simply because of this earlier
movement's explicit efforts to establish itself as a scientific alternative to
Europe's religious traditions. As the architects of a movement concerned
with social science, the positivists theorized that religion was a necessary
mechanism of social stability and prosperity. Consequently, they actively
and self-consciously articulated what evolutionism continues to advance in
more indirect ways: an evolutionary scheme in which science is presented
as religion's natural descendent. The third feature of positivism, which I
will consider at the conclusion of this chapter, is its potential as a rhetorical
resource for scientific patronage. By insisting that science was destined to
inherit the offices of religion, the positivists were also making it the tran-
scendent authority destined to oversee the revitalization of European civi-
lization, and the rhetorical outcome of this was the construction of a new
secular constituency for science. Any view of history is also a picture of the
society that is its product, and the social world envisioned in the positivist
historical narrative was one created in the image of science.
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Although a discussion of these developments might just as easily begin with
Auguste Comte, who is the figure most closely associated with classical posi-
tivism, I want to begin by looking at some of the scattered ideas of his early
mentor and collaborator, Henri de Saint-Simon. Although the main ideas
