All his life, Saint-Simon was possessed with the idea that he was the great new Messiah who had at last come to save earth*, and he lived at a time when a great many people** were under that peculiar impression.
[Saint-Simon] is also the father of what I should like to call the technological interpretation of history. This is not quite the same as the materialistic interpretation of history which we associate with the name of Marx, but it does lie at its root, and in certain respects is a much more original and tenable view. Saint-Simon is the first person to define classes in the modern sense, an economic social entities, dependent in a direct way upon the progress of technology—the progress of machinery, the progress of the ways in which people obtain and distribute and consume products. In short, he is the first person to draw serious attention to the economic factors in history. Moreover, whenever there is talk about a planned society, about a planned economy, about technocracy, about the necessity for what the French call dirigisme, anti-laissez-faire; whenever there is a New Deal; whenever there is propaganda in favor of some kind of rational organization of industry and of commerce, in favor of applying science for the benefit of society, and, in general, in favor of everything which we have now come to associate with a planned rather than a laissez-faire State—whenever there is talk of this sort, the ideas which are bandied saw the light originally in the half-published manuscripts of Saint-Simon.
Again, Saint-Simon more than anyone else invented the notion of the gov’t of society by elites, using a double morality. Saint-Simon is almost the first thinker who comes out and says that it is important for society to be governed not democratically, but by elites of persons who understand the technological needs and the technological possibilities of their time; and that, since the majority of human beings are stupid, and since they mostly obey their emotions, what the enlightened elite must do is to practice one morality themselves and feed their flock of human subjects with another.
He is one of the most trenchant attackers of such eighteenth-century shibboleths as civil liberty, human rights, natural rights, democracy, laissez-faire, individualism, nationalism. He attacks them because he is the first person to see—as the thinkers of the 18th century never did quite clearly see—the incompatibility between the view that wise men ought to direct society and the view that people ought to govern themselves; the incompatibility,in short, between a society which is directed by a group of wise men who alone know towards what goal to move and how to get humanity to move towards it, and the notion that it is better to govern oneself, even than to be governed well. He chooses, of course, in favor of good gov’t.
Finally, Saint-Simon is the first originator of what might be called secular religious—that is to say, the first person to see that one cannot live by technological wisdom alone; that something must be done to stimulate the feelings, the emotions, the religious instincts of mankind.
He developed the notion that history must be understood as a kind of evolution of mankind in the satisfaction of its various needs, and for that reason where the needs are different the satisfaction will be different.
The four criteria of a progressive society:
1) The progressive society is that which provides the maximum means of satisfying the greatest number of needs of the human beings who compose it.
2) Anything that is progressive will give the opportunity to the best to reach the top. The best, for him, are the most gifted, the most imaginative, the cleverest, the most profound, the most energetic, the most active, those who want the full flavor of life.
3) The maximum unity and strength for the purpose of a rebellion or an invasion.
4) Conduciveness to invention and discovery and civilization.
What are the purposes of society? Well, says Saint-Simon, we are told it is the common good, but that is very vague. The purpose of society is self-development, the purpose of society is ‘the best application, in order to satisfy human needs, of knowledge acquired by the sciences, in the arts and crafts, the dissemination of such knowledge, and the development and maximum accumulation of its fruits, that is, in the most useful combination of all separate activities, in the sphere of the sciences, the arts and crafts’.
As for rights, ‘right’ is an empty sound: there are only interests. Interests are which humanity happens to want at any given moment. It is the business of producers to give it to them. Humanity divides into two vast classes, the indolent and the workers. By ‘workers’ he does not seem to mean manual workers or the proletariat; he means anybody who works, including managers, captains of industry, bankers, industrialists.
Above all, we must have professionals and not amateurs. Poverty is always due to incompetence, and we must replace the appalling waste of competition by concerted planning; what we want is a centralized industrial plan for society.
Source: Freedom and Its Betrayal. Six Enemies of Human Liberty (2002) by Isaiah Berlin.
The beliefs of Saint-Simon I think are for the most part believed by the Left today. He could be one of their “founding fathers.” He did influence Karl Marx who called him a Utopian socialist.
Who are the other betrayers you might ask? Claude-Adrien Helvetius, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Joseph De Maistre.
*Sounds like the current U. S. president.
**This of course is the lame-stream-press, most musicians and actors, college professors, etc.
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