Henri de Saint-Simon

Dzieła

• 1823Katechizm przemysłowców

  Pytania i odpowiedzi o społeczeństwie, w którym władzę sprawują producenci, a nie szlachta i urzędnicy – trzecią część napisał Comte.

• 1825Nowe chrześcijaństwo

  Religia sprowadzona do jednej zasady: społeczeństwo musi pracować nad jak najszybszą poprawą losu najuboższej klasy.

Stanowisko

Saint-Simon saw the Revolution as an unfinished transition. The old order of priests and feudal lords had been destroyed, but no new order had replaced it. That order, he argued, had to be industrial: in modern society the “industriels” – all who produce, from farmers and workers to engineers, merchants and bankers – should govern, together with scientists who know the laws of social life, while the “idlers” of nobility, army and bureaucracy should lose their power. Politics would become administration: “the government of men” would give way to “the administration of things”, as Engels later summarised him. Saint-Simon called for a science of society on the model of physiology and expected it to be as exact as the natural sciences. In his last work, New Christianity (1825), he reduced religion to one rule: society must work for the fastest possible improvement of the poorest class. After his death Prosper Enfantin and Saint-Amand Bazard turned his ideas into a movement that was partly a church, partly a school of engineers and bankers who later built railways and promoted the Suez Canal. Marx and Engels counted him among the “utopian socialists”; Durkheim, in lectures of 1895–96, called him the true originator of positivism and sociology, and Comte’s dependence on him has been debated ever since. Critics have pointed to the technocratic and authoritarian side of a society run by experts, and like many contemporaries he took Europe’s civilising mission for granted.

Życie i kontekst

Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, was born in Paris in 1760 into a family of the high nobility. As a young officer he fought on the American side in the War of Independence and was captured by the British in 1782. During the Revolution he renounced his title, made a fortune speculating in confiscated church and noble property, and was imprisoned during the Terror until the fall of Robespierre in 1794. He spent the money on a salon for scientists and was soon poor. From 1814 to 1817 the historian Augustin Thierry worked as his secretary, from 1817 to 1824 the young Auguste Comte. His “parable” of 1819, which held that France would lose nothing if its princes and officials died but would be ruined if it lost its best scientists, artisans and bankers, brought him a trial and an acquittal. In 1823, in debt and isolated, he shot himself and lost an eye. He died in Paris in 1825.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva (Lettres d’un habitant de Genève, 1803)
• On the Reorganisation of European Society (with Augustin Thierry, 1814)
• L’Organisateur (1819–20)
• On the Industrial System (Du système industriel, 1821–22)
• Catechism of the Industrialists (Catéchisme des industriels, 1823–24)
• New Christianity (Nouveau christianisme, 1825)

Pojawia się w

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