Indeed the positivist overtones of the Polytechnique herald the transition from platocracy to technocracy, for the technical intelligentsia trained its German, Russian and American counterparts have effected a quasi-religious synthesis of physics and politics. In this 'planning' was the central theme. The social history of such planning (with the concomitant views on the social organisation of science) is the subject of the book Pressurising it is the conviction that we can identify a particular thing only by pointing to the various things it successively was before it became that particular thing that it will presently cease to be, and the story, which begins four hundred years ago and ends in 1964.