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The Realism of Saint-Simon's Spiritual Program1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

W. Stark
W. Stark
Affiliation:
Cambridge, England
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Extract

In constructing his social theory Saint-Simon made use of the inductive method: by the study of historical facts he endeavored to win knowledge of the laws of the character and movements of society. In shaping his spiritual program he followed a different path, the path of deduction: his goal was to find a great principle in accordance with which the institutions of the future social order could be consciously molded. “Socrates,” he said, putting his ideas into the mouth of the great Greek, “clearly understood that we must criticize a posteriori and organize a priori.” For “any social regime is an application of a philosophical system, and, consequently, it is impossible to institute a new regime without having before established the new philosophical system to which it should correspond.”

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , May 1945 , pp. 24 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1945

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References

2 Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d'Enfantin …. publiées par les membres du Conseil institué par Enfantin pour l'exécution de ses dernières volontés (Paris, 1865–1878) (47 vols.), XI, 149. The volume numbers used are not those of the whole forty-seven-volume publication but those appearing on the separate title pages of the Oeuvres de Saint-Simon (cited hereafter as Oeuvres).Google Scholar

3 Oeuvres, III, 23.

4 “The future is composed of the last terms of a series of which the first terms constitute the past. Hence the study of the march which the human spirit has followed will unveil to us the march which will ensue.”—Ibid., XI, 172.

5 Ibid., XI, 171.

6 Ibid., XI, 271–72.

7 Ibid., I, 238.

8 Ibid., II, 129.

9 Ibid., III, 69–70. In the essay “Sur Dunoyer” we read: “What the science of man teaches is that the different classes of men which compose society can invent and will even only conceive things which appear to them conducive to their interests, and that they can only work for what appears to them to be advantageous.” Cf. also the interesting passage, Ibid., X, 75.

10 Ibid., III, 38. To prevent misunderstandings it may be emphasized that Saint-Simon indeed regarded egotism as the basis of future society, but expected its realization from altruism. Cf. VI, 120. In this, however, there is no contradiction. Of the fourth of August 1789 Saint-Simon thought: The few are expected to sacrifice so that the many may gain; the past is to overcome itself so that the future may unfold freely. In the system of industrialism, however, the homogeneous interests will create a spontaneous order.

11 “All the little worlds resemble each other under the most important aspects,” he teaches. “Hence in studying myself I study at the same time all men, and in exposing my observations on the actions which I have found conducive and those which I have found prejudicial to my interests I tend to bring all men into harmony; and that is the principal object which philosophy should set itself.”—Ibid., XI, 256.

12 Ibid., I, 99–100.

13 Ibid., IV, 187.

14 And the imperative of ethics: “The duty is imposed on every man to give to his personal forces always a direction useful to mankind.”—Ibid., I, 57. Cf. my article, “Liberty and Equality, or Jeremy Bentham as an Economist,” The Economic Journal, LI (1941), 56–79.Google Scholar

15 Oeuvres, II, 13.

16 Ibid., XI, 7; Oeuvres de Saint-Simon … publiés par Olinde Rodrigues (Paris, 1832, hereafter cited as Rodrigues), II, 325Google Scholar. In order to be useful in this sense, to correspond to the stage of development which society has reached after its entrance into the epoch of industrialism, even the sciences will have to take one step forward: they will have to become positive, that is, purely factual, disciplines. Only thus will they reach their historical end: “The sciences have begun by being conjectural, because at the origin of scientific investigations only a few observations had been made, because the small number of those that had been made had for lack of time not yet been examined, discussed, and verified by long experience, and because they were only presumed facts, conjectures. They had to become positive, they have to become positive, because the experience daily acquired by the human spirit makes them acquire the knowledge of new facts and rectify the formerly acquired knowledge of certain facts which had been observed before but at an epoch when man was not yet in a position to analyze them.”—Oeuvres, XI, 26. It is as a new prophet of empiricism that Saint-Simon wished to occupy his place among the great in the realm of philosophy: “Plato has given himself to reasoning; Aristotle has kept to facts; … Plato, Descartes, and Kant presented vague speculations which have not been of great use; Aristotle and Bacon have cultivated a positive philosophy …. Aristotle lived at the same epoch as Plato; Descartes wrote at the same time as Bacon; who will be the contemporary of Kant who will place a new milestone in the direction indicated by Aristotle and Bacon?”—Ibid., I, 90–1. It cannot be doubted of whom he was thinking: the new Encyclopaedia which he intended to write was to be built on the idea “that the science, in its whole as well as in its parts, should be based on observation.”—Ibid., I,149. And in another place he says, proving his realism still more strikingly: “The aim of our work is to put facts into the place of the reasonings of the metaphysicians.”—Rodrigues, II, 39–40. It is the great leitmotiv of the nineteenth century that is sounded in these words.

17 Even in this respect Saint-Simon is reminiscent of Bentham, but still with this difference that Bentham first believed in the natural harmony of social life and only later demanded its artificial harmonization; Saint-Simon regarded the co-ordination of contravening interests as necessary in the present, while he expected of the future a spontaneous equality of interests. Here the difference of phase in the development of England and France is manifest: in Bentham's time England passed to the class order of capitalism so that her thinkers were forced to abandon step by step their ideal of harmony; in Saint-Simon's time France outgrew the estate order of feudalism so that her philosophers were tempted to think their ideal of harmony on the way to realization.

18 Oeuvres, I, 185–87.

19 Ibid., IV, 45 ff.

20 In his serial publications, L'Industrie and Le Potitique, the growth of his thought can be observed. The Organisateur of 1820 gives it clear exposition. L'Organisateur, says the prospectus of this paper, “will have for its object … to state the principles which should serve as the base of the new political system.”—Ibid., IV, 8.

21 .Ibid., III, 35.

22 Ibid., III, 47.

23 Ibid., II, 188.

24 Ibid., IV, 39.

25 Ibid., III, 70.

26 See my article, “Saint-Simon as a Realist,” The Journal of Economic History, III (1943), 50–51.Google Scholar

27 “Under the old system the common people were under the domination of their chiefs; under the new they are combined with them. From the military chiefs there was commandment; from the industrial chiefs there is nothing but guidance. In the first case the people were subjected, in the second they are in the position of a partner. Such is in fact the admirable character of industrial combinations that all those who take part in them are in reality all collaborators, all partners, from the simplest manual worker to the most opulent manufacturer …. In a co-operative system where all contribute a capacity and a share there is in truth association, and no other inequalities exist than those of capacities and shares which are both necessary, that is to say inevitable, and which it would be absurd, ridiculous, and fatal to attempt to make disappear. Everybody will obtain a degree of consideration and benefit in proportion to his capacity and share; this constitutes the highest degree of equality which is possible and desirable. Such is the fundamental character of industrial societies.”—Oeuvres, IV, 150 ff. It is the spirit of early liberalism, the spirit of Say and Charles Comte, which appears in Saint-Simon's solution of the social problem.

28 Ibid., lV, 194–95.

29 “In a society which is organized for the positive aim of working for its prosperity by means of the sciences, the arts, and industry, the most important political act, that which consists in fixing the direction in which society should march, no longer belongs to the men invested with the public functions—it is exercised by the body social itself; …. The act of governing is then nil or almost nil as far as it concerns commanding.”—Ibid., IV, 197–98. “Men consequently will under this order of things enjoy the highest degree of liberty which is compatible with the social state.”—Ibid., IV, 202.

30 Ibid., IV, 206–7.

31 Ibid., III, 62–63.

32 Saint-Simon goes so far as to make even the king a simple citizen: “It is in the nature of things that the king should assume the title of the first Frenchman of the first class of Frenchmen; thus His Majesty ought to have called himself first gentleman, first soldier of his kingdom, so long as the tendency of the nation was principally military; and today when the nation is mainly active in the direction of industry, today when it is essentially by peaceful work that they endeavor to increase their prosperity, the only title which might be proper for the king is that of the first industrialist of his kingdom.”—Rodrigues, II, 74–75. The bourgeois king and the bourgeois emperor, Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon, are announced in these words.

33 Saint-Simon anticipated the experience of the European democracies, that a second body of legislation if it is not, as in England and the United States, totally different in its composition, must be useless, because, in spite of the usually higher age of election in active and passive respects, it almost always arrives at the same resolutions as the first chamber.

34 Cf. Oeuvres, VI, 79.

35 Ibid., III, 68. “This division is necessary for the separation of the work of the observer from that of the actor, that is to say for … the distinction of what the passive man who is less subject to error has undertaken to prove, from what the active man who is much more subject to it has tried to establish.”—Ibid., XI, 44. Cf. also Ibid., VI, 56 ff.

36 Ibid., IV. 58.

37 Ibid., IV, 51–52.

38 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Cannan, (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), II, 214.Google Scholar

39 “Yes, Sir, according to my mind, the exclusive aim toward which should tend all thoughts and all efforts is the organization most favorable to industry, … that is to say a government where the political power has no activity and competence but what is necessary to prevent interference with the useful pursuits, a government where everything is so ordered that the workers whose union forms the true society may exchange the products of their different labors among themselves directly and with perfect liberty; finally, such a government that society, which alone can know what suits it, what it wishes, and what it prefers, is the only judge of the use and utility of [public] actions ….”—Oeuvres, II, 165–66. Even the Organisateur is a piece of liberal, not a piece of socialist, literature.

40 Ibid., lV,61.

41 “The spiritual power can well judge of the matters which are of common utility to all nations, but its interference becomes uncertain and even harmful if the regulation of the particular interests of each of them is concerned. The temporal powers, on the other hand, are efficient in regulating the particular interests of each of the nations they govern, but they can never reach good results in the general interests. Now it is a fact that from the ninth to the fifteenth century the actions of the spiritual and temporal powers were balanced against each other. It is a fact that in these five hundred years Europe completely enjoyed the general advantages which can result from a good social organization; she enjoyed them as no important interior war troubled her tranquillity.”—Ibid., XI, 248–49.

42 Ibid., I, 196.

43 Ibid., I, 206. This plan of a solid legal and political alliance of the leading cultural nations was re-awakened in the melancholy year of 1940 and was the basis of the historic offer of the British Cabinet to the French on the sixteenth of June.

44 Ibid., IV, 38–39.

45 Ibid., XI, 141. The Romans offer the opposite example: “If the Romans had had as the object of their first religious veneration a temple common to them and their neighbors, Sabines, Volsci, Veii, etc., these different peoples would have found themselves forming a confederation … but their attachment … for their household gods enflamed their patriotism and extinguished in them all sentiment of common interest with their neighbors.”—Ibid., XI, 157–58.

46 Ibid., XI, 313.

47 The Globe, December 30,1831.Google Scholar

48 Rodrigues, I, 93.

49 Ibid., I, 94.

50 Ibid., I,161–62.

51 Ibid., I, 160.

52 “In the infancy of religion, at the epoch when the peoples were still submerged in ignorance … all nations were divided into two great classes, that of masters and that of slaves …. At that epoch morality could only be the least developed part of religion because there existed no reciprocity of general obligations between the two great classes which divided society; cult and dogma were naturally vested with much more importance than morality …. In a word, the materialist part of religion played a much more considerable role the nearer this institution was to its foundation, and the spiritual part has always gained in importance in the same measure as the intelligence of man has developed.”—Ibid., I, 157–59.

53 Ibid., I, 114–15.

54 Ibid., I, 123–24.

55 “Luther was a very energetic man and very capable as regards criticism …. But the part of his work concerning the reorganization of Christianity was far inferior to what it ought to have been: instead of taking the measures necessary for increasing the social importance of the Christian religion, he forced this religion to go back to its starting point …. In this way he restricted the Christian morals to the narrow limits which the state of civilization had imposed on the first Christians.” With this spiritual retrogression was connected a political one: Luther “recognized that the power of Caesar was the one from which all the others emanated; he reserved to his clergy only the right of humble supplication to the temporal power; and by these tendencies he condemned the pacific characters to remain eternally in dependence on men with violent passions and military character.”—Ibid., I, 149–50.

56 Ibid., I, 155.

57 Saint-Simon in the end gave preference to this formula after having still, in the fourth issue of the Catéchisme, described the sentence “Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you” as the “fundamental principle of divine morals.”—Oeuvres, X, 19–20.

58 Rodrigues, I, 95.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 “The doctrine of morals will be considered by the New Christians as the most important; cult and dogma will be envisaged by them only as accessories having for their main object the fixing of the attention of the faithful of all classes on morality.”—Ibid., I, 104. See also Ibid., I, 4.

62 Oeuvres, XI, 31.

63 Ibid., XI, 135. “They can only be useful, they can only have power to the extent to which they are composed of the most learned men and to which the principles known to them are still unknown to the common people.”—Ibid., XI, 31.

64 Rodrigues, I, 105.

65 Ibid., I, 102–3. “The first chiefs of the church were elected by all the faithful and the only motive which decided their nomination was that they were regarded as the most capable in discovering the means for bettering the moral and physical existence of the most numerous class ….“—Ibid., I, 126. “The clergy appears to me today of all organized bodies the one which commits the greatest errors, the errors most hurtful to society.”—Ibid., I, 98.

66 Ibid., I, 160. “Dogma should be conceived only as a collection of commentaries having for their object the general application of these considerations and sentiments to the great political events which might arise, or to facilitate to the faithful the application of morals in the daily relations that exist between them.”—Ibid.

67 Ibid., I, 154.

68 Ibid., I, 110–11.

69 Ibid., I, 170.

70 Ibid., I, 138.

71 Ibid., I, 139. The world beyond is degraded to an annex of this world: “So far the clergy have given to the faithful for the guidance of their lives only a metaphysical aim, the heavenly paradise …. This conduct of the clergy could be followed, and had to be followed, at the epoch of the infancy of religion; but today when our ideas in this respect have become enlightened and more exact, the prolongation of similar mystifications would be humiliating …. Certainly all Christians aspire to the eternal life, but the only means of obtaining it consists in working in this life for the increase of the well-being of the human race.”—Ibid., I, 144–46.

72 Barry, William, Newman (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904), p. 171.Google Scholar

73 Bondil, L. J., Vie de M gr. de Miollis (1845), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

74 Ibid., p. 17. “Godliness is profitable unto all things,” De Miollis taught with the Apostle, but still only in the Christian sense, “having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.”—I Tim. 4:8. And good works are justifiable even by the felicific calculus; they are not only a command of the love of the neighbor but also of the love to oneself: “Let us not be weary in well-doing: for in due season we shall reap ….”—Gal. 6:9. “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”—II Cor. 4:17.

75 “What a difference between the truly believing and the man who does not believe! He who does not believe sets his hopes in his work, his industry, luck, in his friends, ‘in his protectors …. Even if he succeeds according to his wishes, what does he leave if he quits this world ? Some goods ? but oh! henceforth these goods will be useless to him …. He, on the contrary, who believes, knows that God is faithful to his promises and for all time to come he is assured of finding in Him what interests him more than anything: first, help and support; then, compensation and reward …. He knows that all his sufferings, all his deeds will be counted; that nothing will be left without recompense …. This is what animates him, this is what inspires him with an untiring ardor in the practice of well-doing; this is also what animated the Bishop of Digne.”—Bondil, p. 19.

76 Lettres sur la réligion el la politique (Paris, 1832), p. 139. Here appears once more the realistic sobriety of Saint-Simon which is contrasted with the mystical sentimentality of his followers. In strict opposition to Rodrigues, Saint-Simon had stated: “The philanthropic sentiment … is the true base of Christianity.”—Rodrigues, I, 138.Google Scholar

77 Oeuvres, XI, 42–43.

78 Ibid., XI, 286.

79 Ibid., XI, 276.

80 In this he reminds us of the utilitarians of antiquity, the Epicureans such as Lucretius Carus who indeed assumed the existence of gods but regarded as their seat the space between the worlds and declared all interference with human affairs as beyond their sphere, connecting with this view the doctrine that true devotion consists in upholding the right way of thinking.