Henri de Saint-Simon 1760 – 1825

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, was a French political philosopher, theorist of industrial society, and one of the founders of socialist thought. Born to one of the oldest families of the French nobility, he served as a young officer in the American Revolution and survived a brief imprisonment during the Reign of Terror. His writings, including the Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva and the New Christianity, argued that industrial society must be reorganized under the leadership of producers, scientists, and engineers in the service of the poorest class. He shaped the work of Comte and the early French socialists.

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, was born in 1760 in Paris, a younger son of an old Picard noble family that claimed descent from Charlemagne. He served as a French officer in the American War of Independence and was present at the siege of Yorktown. After speculating in confiscated property during the Revolution and a brief period of imprisonment he set himself the task of refounding European civilization on scientific and industrial principles.

His later years were spent in restless writing, in poverty, and in patronage of the young secretaries — among them Augustin Thierry and Auguste Comte — who carried his ideas forward. His major works include Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva (1803), Introduction to the Scientific Works of the Nineteenth Century (1808), Memoir on the Science of Man, On the Reorganization of European Society (with Thierry, 1814), L'Industrie, the Catechism of the Industrialists (1823-1824), and the deathbed New Christianity (1825).

Saint-Simon argued that the 'industrial' class of producers — bankers, manufacturers, scientists, and skilled workers — should organize society to maximize production and minimize idle parasitism, that politics should be reduced to administration, and that a new rational Christianity of fraternity should replace the old. The Saint-Simonian movement that gathered around his disciples after his death at Paris in 1825 made him one of the principal sources of nineteenth-century socialism, technocracy, and positivism.