In this work, Josefina Di Filippo analyzes the attempts to recreate a vision of the world through mentalities, that slow but progressive theoretical and rational clarification of the image of the collective world achieved through the institutionalization of the scientific treatment of social issues, of the degree of dominance that the culture of the XIX century reached over this network of relationships. Starting from the study of the scientific systematizations of the 18th century, and its approaches to a science of society influenced by the natural ones, this book rescues both the way utopian socialism perceives the social impact of the incipient phenomenon of industrialism, such as the transit of the philosophy of history to historical sociology. Positivist, materialist and biologicist approaches are approached as key cultural categories of the 19th century, to which is added conservative thinking, adverse to the enthusiasm for progress derived from the great Revolution. In the progressive institutionalization of the scientific treatment of social questions, the notion of movement and change, applied to the heterogeneity of social structures - inequality itself as a result of natural selection - coexists, in its explanatory attempt, with the incipient space that images begin to have as members of the collective imagination.