Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation

by Henri de Saint-Simon, Keith Taylor (Translator)

Keith Taylor has undertaken a thorough study of the full range of writings by the brilliant French thinker Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825), including his unpublished manuscripts, and the result is the first comprehensive and truly representative selection in English from the works of this founding father of social science and socialism, whose ideas exerted a formative influence on such major and diverse intellectual figures as Comte, Proudhon, Marx and Engels, Herzen, Carlyle and Durkheim. When Saint-Simon's writings first appeared, they aroused little more than amusement and curiosity. The ideas they contained - ideas concerning the application of scientific method to the study of man and society, the coming of the new 'scientific-industrial' age in which the State would assume responsibility for promoting social welfare, the prospects for international cooperation and integration in Europe, man's need for a secular religion - were widely dismissed. But the boldness and originality of Saint-Simon's work had a lasting impact on subsequent thinkers and played a major role in the development of European social thought throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.







Keith Taylor's introductory essay places Saint-Simon's writings in their proper historical context, offers a penetrating reassessment of their significance as a contribution to social theory, and considers the extent of their influence on modern thought. It indicates the inadequacies of many previous interpretations of Saint-Simon's thinking, and highlights, in particular, the tendency of most recent commentators to disregard some crucial features of his political philosophy. This selection is an essential insight into a modern understanding of Saint-Simon from a young English scholar. Nowhere else in English may be found so wide-ranging a selection from Saint-Simon's writings presenting such a balanced view of his thought.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, often referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon (17 October 1760 – 19 May 1825) was a French early socialist theorist whose thought influenced the foundations of various 19th century philosophies; perhaps most notably Marxism, positivism and the discipline of sociology. He was born an aristocrat.

In opposition to the feudal and military system, he advocated a form of state[dubious – discuss]-technocratic socialism, an arrangement where industrialists would lead society and found a national community based on cooperation and technological progress, which would be capable of eliminating poverty of the lower classes. In place of the church, he felt the direction of society should fall to the men of science. Men who are fitted to organize society for productive labour are entitled to rule it.

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for the editor's selection of texts, useful introduction & bibliography, and for the clarity with which Saint-Simon explains his awful, awful ideas.

Saint-Simon was monomaniacally focused on installing scientists as a new clergy to stabilize society in the wake of the French Revolution, thus completing and ending the revolutionary process. At first he thought of this in terms of ending the French-English war via a new "spiritual power", a council of scientists and mathematicians, replacing Catholicism and the Holy Roman Empire as the stabilizing force of European Society, eventually to lead to a European Union. After Napoleon's fall, he changes course slightly to become a literal apostle of industrialism, preaching that the industrial capitalists need to be given complete temporal power of society in order to eliminate the military-feudal-rentier classes and complete the revolution.

He's often classified as a "utopian socialist" by the Marxist tradition. He's certainly utopian, but to my eyes he was in no way socialist. The only appeal he makes to the working class is that they should beg the king to let capitalists run society. I expect his followers, who seem to have formed a cult after Saint-Simon's death to preach his (incredibly cynical) doctrine of New Christianity, must have changed course, but this book doesn't cover them.

It seems to me that Saint-Simon, rather than Auguste Comte, should be considered the real founder of Positivism in philosophy, although Comte take Saint-Simon's aspiration to create a master science of politics/society more seriously, so that Comte probably can still be called the founder of Sociology. (I do think the claim that Sociology is distinctly more scientific than pre-Comtean philosophizing about society is dubious, but Comte expands on *pretension* to scientificity that Saint-Simon merely thinks is a possibility.) In Saint-Simon's early phase, he would talk constantly about Bacon & Descartes & Newton, how observation replaces belief, about scientific revolution, about positive science. Comte's three stages of the development of science, theological/metaphysical/positive, come directly from Saint-Simon's description of the French Revolution, viewed as a transition from theology to positive science mediated by lawyers prattling about natural right (metaphysics!) who need to be eliminated in order for industry to reign supreme.

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

merit-based society lowkey goes hard