Claude Henri Rouvroy

Background

Henri de Saint-Simon was born on October 17, 1760 in Paris as a French aristocrat. His grandfather's cousin had been the Duke de Saint-Simon.

Education

After an irregular education by private tutors, he entered military service at 17. He was in the regiments sent by France to aid the American colonies in their war of independence against England and served as a captain of artillery at Yorktown in 1781.

Career

First commissioned into the army at 17, he served 4 years, during which he fought with some distinction in the American Revolution.

During the French Revolution he remained in France, where he bought up newly nationalized land with funds advanced by a friend. He was imprisoned in the Palais de Luxembourg during the Reign of Terror, barely escaped execution, and emerged to find himself enormously rich because of the depreciation of the Revolutionary currency. He proceeded to live a life of splendour and license, entertaining prominent people from all walks of life at his glittering salons. Within several years he had brought himself close to bankruptcy. He turned to the study of science, attending courses at the École Polytechnique and entertaining distinguished scientists.

In numerous essays and brochures written during the chaotic years of Napoleon's rule and the Bourbon restoration that followed, he developed a broad-ranging program for the reorganization of Europe.

But each in turn also is destined to become obsolete as further cultural progress occurs.

In this he was one of the first ameliorators to argue for reform as an evolutionary necessity.

In his first published work, Lettres d’un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains (1803; “Letters of an Inhabitant of Geneva to His Contemporaries”), Saint-Simon proposed that scientists take the place of priests in the social order. He argued that the property owners who held political power could hope to maintain themselves against the propertyless only by subsidizing the advance of knowledge.

By 1808 Saint-Simon was impoverished, and the last 17 years of his life were lived mainly on the generosity of friends. Among his many later publications were De la réorganisation de la société européenne and L’industrie. In 1823, in a fit of despondency, Saint-Simon attempted to kill himself with a pistol but succeeded only in putting out one eye.

Throughout his life Saint-Simon devoted himself to a long series of projects and publications through which he sought to win support for his social ideas. As a thinker, Saint-Simon was deficient in system, clearness, and coherence, but his influence on modern thought, especially in the social sciences, is undeniable. Apart from the details of his socialist teachings, his main ideas are simple and represented a reaction against the bloodletting of the French Revolution and the militarism of Napoleon. Saint-Simon correctly foresaw the industrialization of the world, and he believed that science and technology would solve most of humanity’s problems. Accordingly, in opposition to feudalism and militarism, he advocated an arrangement whereby businessmen and other industrial leaders would control society. The spiritual direction of society would be in the hands of scientists and engineers, who would thus take the place occupied by the Roman Catholic church in the European Middle Ages. What Saint-Simon desired, in other words, was an industrialized state directed by modern science, and one in which society would be organized for productive labour by the most capable men. The aim of society would be to produce things useful to life. Saint-Simon also proposed that the states of Europe form an association to suppress war. These ideas had a profound influence on the philosopher Auguste Comte, who worked with Saint-Simon until the two men quarreled.

Although the contrast between the labouring and the propertied classes in society is not emphasized by Saint-Simon, the cause of the poor is discussed, and in his best-known work, Nouveau Christianisme (1825; “The New Christianity”), it takes the form of a religion. It was this development of Saint-Simon’s teaching that occasioned his final rupture with Comte. Before the publication of Nouveau Christianisme, Saint-Simon had not concerned himself with theology, but in this work, beginning with a belief in God, he tries to resolve Christianity into its essential elements, and he finally propounds this precept: that religion “should guide the community toward the great aim of improving as quickly as possible the conditions of the poorest class. ” This became the watchword of the entire school of Saint-Simon.

Saint-Simon died in 1825, and, in the subsequent years, his disciples carried his message to the world and made him famous. By 1826 a movement supporting his ideas had begun to grow, and by the end of 1828 the Saint-Simonians were holding meetings in Paris and in many provincial towns. In July 1830 revolution brought new opportunities to the Saint-Simonians in France. They issued a proclamation demanding the ownership of goods in common, the abolition of the right of inheritance, and the enfranchisement of women. The sect included some of the ablest and most promising young men of France. In the following years, however, the leaders of the movement quarreled among themselves, and as a result the movement fragmented and broke up, its leaders turning to practical affairs.

Despite this, the ideas of the Saint-Simonians had a pervasive influence on the intellectual life of 19th-century Europe. Thomas Carlyle in England was among those influenced by the ideas of Saint-Simon or his followers. Friedrich Engels found in Saint-Simon “the breadth of view of a genius, ” containing in embryo most of the ideas of the later socialists. Saint-Simon’s proposals of social and economic planning were indeed ahead of his time, and succeeding Marxists, socialists, and capitalist reformers alike were indebted to his ideas in one way or another. Felix Markham has said that Saint-Simon’s ideas have a peculiar relevance to the 20th century, when socialist ideologies took the place of traditional religion in many countries.

Achievements

• He created a political and economic ideology known as industrialism that claimed that the needs of an industrial class, which he also referred to as the working class, needed to be recognized and fulfilled to have an effective society and an efficient economy. Unlike later conceptions by others of a working class being manual labourers alone, Saint-Simon's conception of this class included all people engaged in productive work that contributed to society, that included businesspeople, managers, scientists, bankers, along with manual labourers amongst others.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles (French Edition)

    (Extrait : "Tout le monde parle de la philosophie, chacun ...)

  • Mémoire sur la science de l'homme (French Edition)

    (Extrait : "Le pas le plus utile dans les sciences est tou...)

  • Du système industriel. T. 2 (French Edition)

    (Ce livre est une oeuvre du domaine public éditée au forma...)

  • Nouveau christianisme (French Edition)

    (Ce livre est une oeuvre du domaine public éditée au forma...)

  • De l'organisation sociale (French Edition)

    (Ce livre est une oeuvre du domaine public éditée au forma...)

  • Du système industriel. T. 1 (French Edition)

    (Ce livre est une oeuvre du domaine public éditée au forma...)

Religion

Prior to the publication of the Nouveau Christianisme, Saint-Simon had not concerned himself with theology. In this work he starts from a belief in God, and his object in the treatise is to reduce Christianity to its simple and essential elements. He does this by clearing it of the dogmas and other excrescences and defects that he says gathered round the Catholic and Protestant forms of it. He propounds as the comprehensive formula of the new Christianity this precept: "The whole of society ought to strive towards the amelioration of the moral and physical existence of the poorest class; society ought to organize itself in the way best adapted for attaining this end. " This principle became the watchword of the entire Saint-Simon school of thought.

Views

Although many of its ideas were commonplace, his program is distinctive for its blending of Enlightenment ideals, the more practical materialism of the rising bourgeoisie, and the emphasis on spiritual unity of restorationists.

These contain his main socialist writings, but his doctrines often are closer to venture capitalism and technocracy than to Marxism or primitive communalism.

Saint-Simon stressed the need for recognition of the merit of the individual and the need for hierarchy of merit in society and in the economy, such as society having hierarchical merit-based organizations of managers and scientists to be the decision-makers in government.

He strongly criticized any expansion of government intervention into the economy beyond ensuring no hindrances to productive work and reducing idleness in society, regarding intervention beyond these as too intrusive.

Quotations: "Today, for the first time since the existence of societies it is a question of organizing a totally new system; of replacing the celestial with the terrestrial, the vague by the positive, and the poetic by the real. "

"The philosopher places himself at the summit of thought; from there he views what the world has been and what it must become. He is not just an observer, he is an actor; he is an actor of the highest kind in a moral world because it is his opinion of what the world must become that regulates society. "

Connections

In 1801 he married Alexandrine-Sophie Goury de Champgrand. After a year's duration the marriage was dissolved by mutual consent.

Grandfather's cousin:

Duke de Saint-Simon

Wife:

Alexandrine-Sophie Goury de Champgrand

References

• Le comte de Saint-Simon (French Edition)
• The Prophets of Paris: Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Comte
• Prophets of Progress: Saint Simon, Comte & Spencer: Pioneers of Sociology