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From the intellectual effervescence of the nineteenth century, the social philosophies of Comte, Spencer, and Cournot all in common propose a classification on the model of the sciences of nature. These three works, with their encyclopaedic spirit, have marked the founding act of the social sciences, while at the same time they have provided a general framework enabling them both to go beyond the limits of current sociology and to think globally about the future of social sciences. The rejection of the philosophies of history in the twentieth century made us lose sight of what these syntheses – and the classifications through them – permitted when they coordinated several processes in order to make history intelligible. The emergence of this “philosophy of universal history” certainly did not correspond to a universal history in the manner of the old chronicles, nor to the image of the present “world history” but insofar as it provided schemes of thought, we shall try to show that it allows the social fact to be organized within its historical matrix.