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Auguste Comte (1798-1857) built a unified vision of human history leading to an end state considered definitive. To do this, he mobilizes several registers, some of which may seem mutually contradictory: scientific engineering applied to social science, the secular transposition of the Christian theme of the coming Kingdom, the utopian genre and even anticipatory literature. The superposition of these strategies for legitimation compensates for the limits of science for social reorganization. Since the twentieth century we have returned to the myth of progress and its eschatological dimension, but at the cost of disillusion and a loss of collective meaning, and even of catastrophism which resuscitates ancient apocalyptic terrors.