As befits one of the foundations of collectivist thought, the Exposition is the product of no single man. Although Bazard, as the most skillful speaker, delivered the majority of the lectures, their content was the result of discussion among the group. The published texts were actually written by H. Carnot from notes taken by him and others during the lectures, and it is presumably to him that the Exposition owes its elegance and power. An important supplement to it are the five lectures on the Saint-Simonian religion which Abel Transon delivered about the same time to the students of the Ecole polytechnique14.20 and which are appended to some of the editions of the Exposition.
It is difficult without tiresome repetition to give an adequate idea of this most comprehensive expression of Saint-Simonian thought, since much of it is of course a more or less faithful reproduction of views we have at ready met. It is, however, not merely, as it claims to be, the sole publication in which the whole of the contribution of Saint-Simon (and, we should add, the young Comte) has been brought into a comprehensive system; but it also develops it further, and it is these developments by Enfantin and his friends which we must mainly consider.
A large part of the more important first volume of the Exposition is given to a broad philosophic survey of history and of the ``law of development of humanity revealed to the genius of Saint-Simon,''14.21 which, based on the study of mankind as a ``collective being,''14.22 shows us with certainty what its future will be.14.23 This law asserts in the first instance the alternation of organic and critical states, in the former of which ``all aspects of human activity are ordered, foreseen and coordinated by a general theory,'' while in the critical states society is an agglomeration of isolated individuals struggling against each other.14.24 The final destiny toward which we are tending is a state where all antagonism between men will have entirely disappeared and the exploitation of men by men is replaced by their joint and harmonic action upon nature.14.25 But this definite state, where the ``systematization of effort,''14.26 the ``organization of labor''14.27 for a common purpose14.28 is perfected, is reached only in stages. The basic fact of the ever decreasing antagonism between men, which will lead in the end to the ``universal association, ''14.29 implies a ``steady diminution of the exploitation of men by men''--a phrase which forms the leitmotif of the whole Exposition.14.30 While the positive advance toward the universal association is marked by the stages of the family, town, nation, and the federation of nations having a common creed and church,14.31 the decrease of exploitation is shown by the changing relations between the classes. From the stage when cannibalism was practiced on the captive, through slavery and serfdom to the present relations between proletarians and proprietors, there has been a constant decrease of the degree of exploitation.14.32 But men are still divided into two classes, the exploiters and the exploited.14.33 There is still a class of disinherited proletarians. 14.34 As the eloquent Abel Transon put it to the young polytechnicians in a passage of his lectures which better than anything in the Exposition sums up the main argument:
The peasant or craftsman is no longer attached to the man or to the soil, he is not subjected to the whip like the slave; he owns a greater part of his labor than the serf, but still, the law is cruel at his expense. All the fruit of his labor does not belong to him. He has to share it with other people who are not useful to him either by their knowledge or by their power. In short, there are no masters for him nor lords, but there are bourgeois, and so that's what a bourgeois is.
As the owner of land and capital the bourgeois disposes of these at his will and does not place them in the hands of the workers except on condition that he receive a premium from the price of their work, a premium that will support him and his family. Whether a direct heir of the man of conquest or else an emancipated son of the peasant class, this difference of origin merges into the common character which I have just described; only in the first case is the title of his possession based on a fact which is now condemned, on the action of the sword; in the second case the origin is more honorable, it is the work of industry. But in the eyes of the future this title is in either case illegitimate and without value because it hands over to the mercy of a privileged class all those whose fathers have not left them any instruments of production.14.35
The cause of this still existing state of affairs is the ``constitution of property, the transmission of wealth by inheritance within the family.''14.36 But the institution of ``property is a social fact, subject, as all other social facts, to the law of progress.''14.37 According to the Exposition, the new order will be created by
the transfer to the state, which will become an association of workers, of the right of inheritance which today is confined to the members of the family. The privileges of birth which have already received such heavy blows in so many respects must entirely disappear.14.38
If, as we proclaim, humanity moves toward a state where all the individuals will be classed according to their capacities and remunerated according to their work, it is evident that the right of property, as it exists, must be abolished, because, by giving to a certain class of men the possibility to live on the work of others and in complete idleness, it preserves the exploitation of one part of the population, the most useful one, that which works and produces, in favor of those who only destroy.14.39
They explain that to them land and labor are merely ``instruments of work; and the proprietors and capitalists ...are the depositaries of these instruments; their function 14.40is to distribute them among the workers.''14.41 But they perform this function very inefficiently. The Saint-Simonians had studied Sismondi's Nouveaux principes d'économie politique which in 1826 had appeared in a new edition, in which the author for the first time describes how the ravages of economic crises were caused by ``chaotic competition.'' But while Sismondi had no real remedy to propose and later seems even to have deplored the effects of his teaching,14.42 the Saint-Simonians had one. Their description of the defects of competition is almost entirely taken from Sismondi:
In the present state of affairs, where the distribution [of the instruments of production] is effected by the capitalists and proprietors, none of these functions is performed except after much groping, experimenting, and many unfortunate experiences; and even so the result obtained is always imperfect, always temporary. Each person is left to act on his own individual knowledge; no general conspectus guides production; it takes place without judgment, without foresight; it is deficient at one point and excessive at another.14.43
The economic crises are thus due to the fact that the distribution of the instruments of production is effected by isolated individuals, ignorant of the requirements and needs of industry and of the people, and of the means that can satisfy them.14.44 The solution which the Saint-Simonians propose was at the time completely new and original. In the new world which they invite us to contemplate
there will be no longer any proprietors, no isolated capitalists, who by their habits are strangers to industrial activity, yet who decide the character of the work and the fate of the workers. A social institution is charged with these functions which today are so badly performed; it is the depository of all the instruments of production; it presides over the exploitation of all the material resources; from its point of vantage it has a comprehensive view of the whole which enables it to perceive at one and the same time all the parts of the industrial workshop; through its ramifications it is in touch with all the different places, with all kinds of industries, and with all the workers; it can thus take account of all the general and individual wants, bring men and instruments to where the need for them makes itself felt; in a word, it can direct the production and put it in harmony with consumption and entrust the tools to the most deserving industrialists, because it incessantly endeavors to discover their capacity and is in the best position to develop them ...In this new world ...the disturbances which follow from the lack of general accord and from the blind distribution of the agents and instruments of production would disappear and with them also the misfortunes, the reverses and failures of firms against which today no peaceful worker is protected. In a word, industrial activity is organized, everything is connected, everything foreseen; the division of labor is perfected and the combination of efforts becomes every day more powerful.14.45
The ``social institution'' which is to perform all these functions is not left vague and undetermined as it was by most later socialists. It is the banking system, properly reconstructed and centralized and crowned by a single banque unitaire, directrice, which is to serve as the planning body:
The social institution of the future will direct all industries in the interest of the whole society and specially of the peaceful workers. We call this institution provisionally the general system of banks, making all reservations against the too narrow interpretations which one might give to this term.
The system will comprise in the first instance a central bank which constitutes the government in the material sphere; this bank will become the depository of all wealth, of the whole productive fund, of all the instruments of production, in short of everything that today makes up the whole mass of private property.14.46
We need not follow the Exposition further into the detail of the proposed organization.14.47 The main points given will suffice to show that in their description of the organization of a planned society they went much further than later socialists until quite recent times, and also how heavily later socialists have drawn on their ideas. Till the mordern discussion of the problem of calculation in a socialist community this description of its working has not been further advanced. There was very little justification for dubbing this very realistic picture of a planned society ``utopian.'' Marx, characteristically, added to it the one part of classical English economics which was out of tune with its general analysis of competition, the ``objective'' or labor theory of value. The general results of the fusion of Saint-Simonian and Hegelian ideas, of which Marx is of course the best-known exponent, will occupy us later. 14.48
But insofar as that general socialism which today is common property is concerned, little had to be added to Saint-Simonian thought. As a further indication of how profoundly the Saint-Simonians have influenced modern thought, it need only be mentioned to what a great extent all European languages have drawn from their vocabulary. ``Individualism,''14.49 ``industrialist,''14.50 ``positivism,''14.51and the ``organization of labor''14.52 all occur first in the Exposition. The concept of the class struggle and the contrast between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the special technical sense of the terms are Saint-Simonian creations. The word socialism itself, although it does not yet appear in the Exposition (which uses ``association'' in very much the same sense), appears in its modern meaning for the first time14.53 a little later in the Saint-Simonian Globe.14.54