Bruce Caldwell

“If Saint-Simon had been a megalomaniacal verkannte Genie (196), at least he had enough personal charm to attract a following. In comparison Hayek’s second protagonist, Auguste Comte, a founder both of socialism (through his collaboration with Saint-Simon) and, in his own writings, of positivism, was a “singularly unattractive” individual. Grandiose, pompous, ever confident of his own brilliance (early in life he decided he had read enough, and thereafter practiced a “cerebral hygiene,” refusing to read anything new), he felt he had discovered laws governing the development of the human race that were “as definite as those determining the fall of a stone” (258, 269). He was prolix: his first work, the Cours de philosophie positive, took over a dozen years to complete and ran to six volumes, while his second, the Système de politique positive, took up four. Only his death prevented the world from receiving a planned third set of volumes. His work, perhaps unsurprisingly, was almost completely ignored in his own country during his lifetime.”
― Bruce Caldwell, Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950