Saint-Simon Comte de, title of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy (1760–1825), French social reformer. An aristocrat by birth, he initially joined the ranks of the enlightened and liberal bourgeoisie. His Newtonian Letters to an Inhabitant of Geneva (1803) and Introduction to Scientific Works of the Nineteenth Century (1808) championed Condorcet’s vision of scientific and technological progress. With Auguste Comte, he shared a positivistic philosophy of history: the triumph of science over metaphysics. Written in wartime, The Reorganization of European Society (1814) urged the creation of a European parliamentary system to secure peace and unity. Having moved from scientism to pacifism, Saint-Simon moved further to industrialism.
In 1817, under the influence of two theocratic thinkers, de Maistre and Bonald, Saint-Simon turned away from classical economic liberalism and repudiated laissez-faire capitalism. The Industrial System (1820) drafts the program for a hierarchical state, a technocratic society, and a planned economy. The industrial society of the future is based on the principles of productivity and cooperation and led by a rational and efficient class, the industrialists (artists, scientists, and technicians). He argued that the association of positivism with unselfishness, of techniques of rational production with social solidarity and interdependency, would remedy the plight of the poor. Industrialism prefigures socialism, and socialism paves the way for the rule of the law of love, the eschatological age of The New Christianity (1825). This utopian treatise, which reveals Saint-Simon’s alternative to reactionary Catholicism and Protestant individualism, became the Bible of the Saint-Simonians, a sectarian school of utopian socialists. J.-L.S.