This chapter, on the vicissitudes of positivism in nineteenth-century Brazil, locates the power-bases of Comteanism in the intellectual and military elites of the empire and follows its protagonists into the republican era. Weaving together the history of belle époque Brazilian society, political life, science, and literature, Palti reconstructs how positivists scrapped the rose-colored and socially conservative accounts of Brazil's harmoniously pluralist cultural heritage provided by the earlier generation of Romantic literati. Instead, the positivist scientific image of post-monarchical and post-slavery Brazil threw into sharp relief the insurmountable rifts within its society. Discussing Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertões of 1902, Palti shows how the peculiarity of Brazilian natural and social environments provided the positivists with a key for understanding the irregularities of their country's historical development.