is introduction that these teenage years represented his political and social formative years. Comte wrote that for the rest of his life the spirit of the revolution preoccupied his thinking and he would spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing the revolution's accomplishments and failures (Pickering, 1993, 8).
One of the chief themes laced throughout Comte's body of work is the need to build consensus within a society concerning how to be governed. His concern for studying the means of creating and bonding a society grew out of the failed policies of the First Directory during the revolution and the civil war which raged within his own town over religious rights as well as the bloody struggle for control of political power between royalists and Jacobins. These experiences strongly influenced his later works when Comte turned his attention to the reorganization of religion and the moral character of man.
Comte balanced the revolution's deep seated distrust of the Church and its institutionalized power against his family's deeply hel
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