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V

All this changed suddenly with Saint-Simon's next work, the Réorganisation de la société européenne 12.47 published in 1814. From that date onward there issued under his name a stream of books and pamphlets in which ideas were systematically expounded and which sometimes were even well written. It is true that after a new period of abject misery, during which he underwent a cure in what looks suspiciously like a mental home, he was enabled to make a new start. But the man of fifty five was hardly likely to have suddenly acquired the gift of lucid exposition. It is difficult to resist the belief that the change had something to do with the fact that from that date onward he was able to secure the help of young collaborators and that the influence of these young men went beyond matters of mere exposition.

The first of these young helpers, who even appeared on the title page of the Réorganisation as his coauthor and pupil, was the future historian Augustin Thierry, then nineteen years of age--the same Thierry who was later to become the leader of the new schools of historians that developed history as a history of the masses and of a struggle of class interests and, in this, profoundly influenced Karl Marx.12.48

The pamphlet on which he first collaborated with Saint-Simon is not of great interest to us, although it has achieved a certain celebrity for its advocacy of an Anglo-French federation, which, after the adherence of Germany, was to develop into a sort of European federation with a common parliament. The fall of the French empire and the negotiations going on at Vienna made Saint-Simon then apply his dominant idea of a reorganization of society to the whole of Europe; but in the execution of the idea there was little of the old Saint-Simon, except for occasional flights of fancy of which the phrase ``the golden age that is not behind us but in front of us and that will be realized by the perfection of the social order'' has by its later use as a motto by the Saint-Simonians become widely known.12.49

The collaboration of Saint-Simon and Thierry lasted about two years. During the hundred days, they wrote first against Napoleon and then against the Allies. The great Carnot, always one of Saint-Simon's admirers and then temporarily returned to power, procured for Saint-Simon a sublibrarianship at the Arsenal, equally temporary.12.50 After Waterloo he fell for a brief period back into poverty. But he had now young friends among the new generation of bankers and industrialists whose fortunes were rising, and it was to them that he attached himself. The enthusiasm for industry was henceforth to replace the enthusiasm for science; or, at least, as the old love was not quite forgotten, he found a new force worthy to exercise the temporal power at the side of science which was to wield the spiritual power. And he found that the praise of industry was better rewarded than the appeals to the scientists or the adulation of the emperor. Lafitte, governor of the Banque de France, was the first to help. He procured for Saint-Simon the considerable sum of 10,000 francs per month, to start a new journal to be called L'Industrie littéraire et scientifique ligué avec l'industrie commerciale et manufacturière.

Around the new editor a number of young men collected, and he began his career as the head of a school. At first the group consisted largely of artists, bankers, and industrialists--among them some very distinguished and influential men. There was even an economist among the contributors to the first volume of L'Industrie, St. Aubin, although one whom I. B. Say unkindly described as the ``clown of political economy.'' He and Thierry appeared as the authors of the discussions of finance and politics which filled the first volume of L'Industrie. To the second volume, which appeared in 1817 under a slightly changed title,12.51 Saint-Simon himself contributed some considerations on the relations between France and America.

This essay is on the whole in the spirit of the liberal group for whom Saint-Simon was then writing.12.52 ``The sole purpose toward which all our thoughts and all our efforts ought to be directed, the organization of society most favorable to industry in the widest sense of the term,'' is still best achieved by a political power which does nothing except to see that ``the workers are not disturbed'' and which arranges everything in such a way that all workers, whose combined force forms the true society, are able to exchange directly, and in complete freedom, the products of their various labors.12.53 But his attempt to base all politics on economic considerations as he understands them, that is, in fact, on technological considerations, began soon to lead him outside the views of his liberal friends. We need only quote two of the ``most general and most important truths'' to which his considerations lead: ``First, the production of useful things is the only reasonable and positive end which politics can set itself and the principle respect for production and the producers is infinitely more fruitful than the principle respect for property and the proprietors,'' and ``Seventh, as the whole of mankind has a common purpose and common interests each man ought to regard himself in his social relations as engaged in a company of workers.'' ``Politics, therefore, to sum up in two words, is the science of production, that is, the science which has for its object the order of things most favorable to all sorts of production.''12.54 We are back at the ideas of the Habitant de Genève--and at the same time at the end of what can be regarded as the independent development of Saint-Simon's thought.

The beginning defection of liberalism soon cost Saint-Simon his first assistant. ``I cannot conceive of association without government of someone'' are reported to have been Saint-Simon's words in the final quarrel, to which Thierry replied that he ``could not conceive of association without liberty.''12.55 Soon this desertion by his assistant was to be followed by a mass flight of his liberal friends. But this came only after a new assistant of great intellectual force began to push Saint-Simon further along the road which he had only indicated but had not had the power to follow. In the summer of 1817 the young polytechnician Auguste Comte, the first and greatest of the host of engineers who were to recognize Saint-Simon as their master, joined him as secretary. Henceforth, to the death of Saint-Simon eight years later, the intellectual history of the two men is indissolubly fused. As we shall see in the next chapter, much of what is commonly regarded as Saint-Simonian doctrine, and what through the Saint-Simonians exercised a profound influence before Comte's public career as a philosopher began, traces to Auguste Comte.


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Next: Social Physics: Saint-Simon and Up: The ``Accoucheur d'Idées'': Henri Previous: IV   Contents