SOURCE: "The Apocalypse of Man: Comte," in From Enlightenment to Revolution, edited by John H. Hallowell, Duke University Press, 1975, pp. 136-59.

In the following essay, Voegelin contends that Comte's political philosophy is an apocalyptic vision that establishes Comte as an authoritarian figure.

After a century of misunderstanding we are approaching today, on the basis of more recent experiences, a more adequate understanding of Comte both in his quality as an astute philosopher of history and in his more sinister quality as a spiritual dictator of mankind. The history of the misunderstanding of Comte and of the gradual dissolution of these misunderstandings is, at the same time, the history of our growing insight into the Western crisis. Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was well aware of the fact that Western civilization faced a crisis and while he misjudged the duration of the crisis he neither misjudged its scale nor its nature...