Auguste Comte
An Intellectual Biography

"...Mary Pickering provides a superb account of Auguste Comte....The book is richly documented and exceptionally well written. It represents the first truly comprehensive intellectual biography of Comte." Canadian Journal of Sociology

"Pickering's treatment of Comte's prickly relations with the power brokers of the French scientific and academic world is detailed and cogent. She acheives a balance between sympathy for Comte, whose quest for official recognition was doomed by his arrogance and social ineptitude, and for those who were unswayed by his claims to intellectual superiority." ISIS

"...should become the standard work in the field for the forseeable future...a biography both complete and eminently readable." Library Journal

"...an all inclusive, encyclopedic study in the context of romanticism, social, utopian and other movements...Pickering's documentation if remarkable...Here is a work of thoroughness, a study of extraordinary importance and a valuable commentary. This study is an essential reference that will long be treasured. We are impatiently waiting for the second volume!" Nineteenth-Century French Studies

"Although Auguste Comte was one of the primary intellectual figures of the nineteenth century, founder of the school of thought known as positivism, there is no comprehensive work on his life, thought, and influence. We are, accordingly, all the more grateful to Mary Pickering for having produced a readable and authoritative study of Comte's life and his philosophical and social ideas, set against the background of early 19th-century French history. A notable feature of her magnificent book is the illuminating way in which Mary Pickering relates the life-struggles of Comte with the development of his ideas." I. Bernard Cohen, Harvard University

"...extremely detailed....Not since the labours of Harriet Martineau--the original translator of Comte's Positive Philosophy, 150 years ago--has Comte received such devoted attention." Anthony Giddens, Times Literary Supplement

"...an exhaustive account of Comte's life and work and is fully documented... For those with qa special interest in the history of ideas, this is an important book... the standard work on Comte's early life." Nature

"In this admirably thorough first volume of Pickering's biography of Auguste Comte, she has succeeded in returning Comte to his rightful principal place in the history of sociology....Pickering provides not only an excellent biography, but also a balanced and readable cultural history of the era." Choice

"...a large and impressive work. ...a work that elucidates many areas of nineteenth-century intellectual history. This is a solid and impressive work of scholarship...." Harvey Chisick, International Studies in Philosophy