Henri de Saint-Simon
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, better known as Henri de Saint-Simon, was a French political, economic and socialist theorist and businessman whose thought had a substantial influence on politics, economics, sociology and the philosophy of science. He was a younger relative of the famous memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon.
Saint-Simon created a political and economic ideology known as Saint-Simonianism 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 conceptions within industrializing societies of a working class being manual laborers alone, Saint-Simon's late-18th-century conception of this class included all people engaged in what he saw as productive work that contributed to society, such as businesspeople, managers, scientists, bankers, and manual labourers, amongst others.
Saint-Simon believed the primary threat to the needs of the industrial class was what he defined as the idling class: a tier of society that included able-bodied persons who, instead of using their labor to benefit the social and economic orders, preferred what he perceived as a parasitic life avoiding work. Saint-Simon stressed a three-pronged recognition of the merits of the individual, social hierarchy, and the wider economy, such as hierarchical, merit-based organizations of managers and scientists; those at the top of the hierarchies would be decision-makers in government. Saint-Simon condemned any intrusion of government into the economy beyond ensuring productive working conditions and reducing idleness in society. Saint-Simon endorsed what critics have described as authoritarian or totalitarian means to achieve his goals, saying that opponents of his proposed reforms should be "treated like cattle".
Saint-Simon's conceptual recognition of the merits of broad socioeconomic contribution and Enlightenment-era valorization of scientific knowledge inspired and influenced utopian socialism, utilitarian political theorist John Stuart Mill, anarchism, and Marxism—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified Saint-Simon as an inspiration for their ideas and classified him among the utopian socialists. Saint-Simon's views also influenced 20th-century sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, including Veblen's influential school of institutional economics.
Biography
Early years
Henri de Saint-Simon was born in Paris as a French aristocrat, the son of Balthazar Henri de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, Marquis de Sandricourt and his wife and cousin, Blanche Isabelle de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, lady-in-waiting of Marie Joséphine of Savoy, Countess of Provence. His grandfather's cousin had been the Duke of Saint-Simon. His younger sister Marie Louise de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon was mother-in-law of Princess Maria Christina of Saxony, Dowager Princess of Carignano.From his youth, Saint-Simon was highly ambitious. He ordered his valet to wake him every morning with, "Remember, monsieur le comte, that you have great things to do." Among his early schemes was one to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans by a canal, and another to construct a canal from Madrid to the sea.
During the American Revolution, Saint-Simon joined the Americans, believing that their revolution signaled the beginning of a new era. He fought alongside the Marquis de Lafayette between 1779 and 1783, and took part in the siege of Yorktown under the command of General George Washington. Saint-Simon was captured and imprisoned by British forces during the end of his service, and upon his release, returned to France to study engineering and hydraulics at the Ecole de Mézières.
At the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, Saint-Simon quickly endorsed the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. In the early years of the revolution, Saint-Simon devoted himself to organizing a large industrial structure in order to found a scientific school of improvement. He needed to raise some funds to achieve his objectives, which he did by land speculation. This was only possible in the first few years of the revolution because of the growing instability of the political situation in France, which prevented him from continuing his financial activities and indeed put his life at risk. Saint-Simon and Talleyrand planned to profiteer during the Terror by buying the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, stripping its roof of metal, and selling the metal for scrap. Saint-Simon was imprisoned on suspicion of engaging in counter-revolutionary activities. He was released in 1794 at the end of the Terror. After he recovered his freedom, Saint-Simon found himself immensely rich due to currency depreciation, but his fortune was subsequently stolen by his business partner. Thenceforth he decided to devote himself to political studies and research. After the establishment of the Ecole Polytechnique in 1794, a school established to train young men in the arts of sciences and industry and funded by the state, Saint-Simon became involved with the new school.
Life as a working adult
When he was nearly 40 he went through a varied course of study and experiment to enlarge and clarify his view of things. One of these experiments was an unhappy marriage in 1801 to Alexandrine-Sophie Goury de Champgrand, undertaken so that he might have a literary salon. After a year, the marriage was dissolved by mutual consent. The result of his experiments was that he found himself completely impoverished, and lived in penury for the remainder of his life. The first of his numerous writings, mostly scientific and political, was Lettres d'un habitant de Genève, which appeared in 1802. In this first work, he called for the creation of a religion of science with Isaac Newton as a saint.Saint-Simon's earliest publications, such as his Introduction aux travaux scientifiques du XIXe siècle and his Mémoire sur la science de l'homme ,, demonstrate his faith in science as a means to regenerate society.
A few years into his writing career, Saint-Simon found himself ruined and was forced to work for a living. After a few attempts to recover his money from his former partner, he received financial support from Diard, a former employee, and was able to publish in 1807 his second book, Introduction aux travaux scientifiques du XIX siècle. Diard died in 1810 and Saint-Simon found himself poor again, and this time also in poor health. He was sent to a sanatorium in 1813, but with financial help from relatives, he had time to recover his health and gain some intellectual recognition in Europe. In February 1821 Du système industriel appeared, and in 1823–1824 Catéchisme des industriels.
Around 1814 he wrote the essay "On Reconstruction of the European Community" and sent it to the Congress of Vienna. He proposed a European kingdom, building on France and the United Kingdom.
For his last decade, Saint-Simon concentrated on themes of political economy. Together with Auguste Comte,, Saint-Simon projected a society bypassing the changes of the French Revolution, in which science and industry would take the moral and temporal power of medieval theocracy. In his last work however, Le Nouveau Christianisme '', Saint-Simon reverted to more traditional ideas of renewing society through Christian brotherly love. He died shortly after its publication.
Suicide attempt
On March 9, 1823, disappointed by the lack of results of his writing, he attempted suicide in despair. Remarkably, he shot himself in the head six times without succeeding, losing his sight in one eye.Death
He died on 19 May 1825 and was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France.Ideas
Industrialism
In 1817 Saint-Simon published a manifesto called the "Declaration of Principles" in his work titled L'Industrie. The declaration was about the principles of an ideology called industrialism that called for the creation of an industrial society led by people within what he defined as the industrial class. The industrial class, also referred to as the working class, was defined as including all people engaged in productive work that contributed to society, emphasizing scientists and industrialists, but including engineers, businesspeople, managers, bankers, manual workers, and others.Saint-Simon said the primary threat to the needs of the industrial class was another class he referred to as the idling class, which included able people who preferred to be parasitic and benefit from the work of others while seeking to avoid doing work. He saw the origins of this parasitic activity by idlers in what he regarded as the natural laziness of humanity. He believed the principal economic roles of government were to ensure that productive activity in the economy is unhindered and to reduce idleness in society.
In the Declaration, Saint-Simon strongly criticized any expansion of government intervention into the economy beyond these two principal economic roles, saying that when the government goes beyond these roles, it becomes a "tyrannical enemy of industry" and that the industrial economy will decline as a consequence of such excessive government intervention. 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. His views were radical for his time. He built on Enlightenment ideas which challenged church doctrine and the older regime with the idea of progress from industry and science
Heavily influenced by the absence of social privilege he saw in the early United States, Saint-Simon renounced his aristocratic title and came to favor a form of meritocracy, becoming convinced that science was the key to progress and that it would be possible to develop a society based on objective scientific principles. He claimed that feudal society in France and elsewhere needed to be dissolved and transformed into an industrial society. As such, he invented the conception of the industrial society.
Saint-Simon's economic views and ideas were influenced by Adam Smith whom Saint-Simon deeply admired, and referred to him in praise as "the immortal Adam Smith". He shared with Smith the belief that taxes needed to be much reduced from what they were then in order to have a more just industrial system. Saint-Simon desired the minimization of government intervention into the economy to prevent disruption of productive work. He emphasized more emphatically than Smith that state administration of the economy was generally parasitic and hostile to the needs of production. Like Adam Smith, Saint-Simon's model of society emulated the scientific methods of astronomy, and said "The astronomers only accepted those facts which were verified by observation; they chose the system which linked them best, and since that time, they have never led science astray.".
Saint-Simon reviewed the French Revolution and regarded it as an upheaval driven by economic change and class conflict. In his analysis, he believed that the solution to the problems that led to the French Revolution would be the creation of an industrial society, where a hierarchy of merit and respect for productive work would be the basis of society, while ranks of hereditary and military hierarchy would lessen in importance in society because they were not capable to lead a productive society.