Saint-Simon, Henry

The representative of a noble noble family, a relative of the Duke of Saint-Simon . D'Alembert took part in his upbringing ^[4] .

Thirteen years old, he had the courage to tell his deeply believing father Balthazar Henri de Rouvroix de Saint-Simon Marquis Sandricourt (1721-1783) that he did not want to speak and take communion, for which he locked him up in Saint-Lazare prison. Very early on, the idea of ​​fame as the most worthy motivation for human action entered his worldview.

Henri Saint-Simon adjoins the detachment sent by the French government to help the North American colonies that rebelled against England; five years involved in the struggle and, finally, captured by the British. Released at the end of the war, he travels to Mexico and proposes to the Spanish government a project for connecting the Atlantic and Great Oceans through a canal. Accepted coldly, he returns to his homeland, where he receives the position of commandant of the fortress in Metz and, under the leadership of G. Monge, studies mathematical sciences.

Soon he resigns, goes to Holland and tries to convince the government to form a French-Dutch colonial alliance against England, but, having not succeeded in this, he goes to Spain with the project of the canal, which was supposed to connect Madrid with the sea. The revolution that broke out in France forced him to return to his homeland, but, in his own words, he did not want to actively intervene in the revolutionary movement, because he was deeply convinced of the fragility of the old order.

In 1790, he was not long mayor in the district where his estate was located. In the same year, he advocated the destruction of noble titles and privileges (in the era of the Restoration, he continued, however, to bear the title of Count). At the same time, Saint-Simon was engaged in the purchase of national property and acquired a considerable amount in this way. He subsequently explained his speculations with the desire “to promote the progress of enlightenment and improve the fate of humanity” by “founding a scientific school of improvement and organization of a large industrial institution”. During the terror, Saint-Simon was imprisoned, from where he was released only after 9 Thermidors .

In 1797, Saint-Simon intended to "pave a new physical and mathematical path to human understanding, forcing science to take a common step forward and giving the French school the initiative in this matter." To this end, at the age of forty, he takes up the study of the natural sciences, wanting to "state their current state and find out the historical sequence in which scientific discoveries occurred"; gets acquainted with professors of the polytechnic, then medical school, to determine "the effect produced by scientific studies on those who indulge in them"; He is trying to turn his house into a center of scientific and artistic life, for which he marries (in 1801) the daughter of a deceased friend.

The following year, he divorced her and looked for the hands of Madame de Stael , who seemed to him the only woman capable of contributing to his scientific plan. He went for this to the estate of Madame de Stael on the shores of Lake Geneva , but was not successful. Having traveled to Germany and England (1802) and having spent his last means on this, Saint-Simon returned to France and was forced to take the place of a scribe in a pawnshop, giving him 1000 francs a year for a nine-hour daily work, while one of his acquaintances, Diard, I didn’t offer him to live on his means in order to be able to continue his scientific studies.

In 1810, Diard died, and Saint-Simon again became terribly poor, asking for help from wealthy people. Not always having the means to print his works, he personally copied them in several dozen copies and sent them to various scientists or dignitaries ( Mémoire sur la science de l'homme , Mémoire sur la gravitation universelle ). Nevertheless, he publishes a lot of brochures, speaks with articles in the press.

In 1820, after the assassination of the Duke of Berry, Charles-Ferdinand , Saint-Simon was brought to trial as a moral accomplice in the crime. The jury acquitted him, and he soon wrote a pamphlet On the Bourbons and the Stuarts, where, drawing a parallel between the two dynasties, he predicted the fate of the Stuarts to the Bourbons.

Gradually, Saint-Simon more and more begins to come to the conclusion that the rights of industrialists impose on them well-known responsibilities towards the proletariat. His rich patrons did not like the new direction, and, having lost their support, he soon again found himself in dire need, forcing him to encroach on his life ( 1823 ). The wound was not fatal: Saint-Simon lost only one eye. A subscription was opened in his favor, and the collected amounts allowed him to continue his writing activities.

May 19, 1825, Saint-Simon died in Paris in the arms of Rodrigue - one of his most zealous students ^[5] . Before his death, the count said: “They think that any religious system should disappear, because the decrepitude of Catholicism has been proved. This is a profound error; religion cannot leave the world, it only changes its appearance ... My whole life is summarized in one thought: to provide people with the free development of their abilities ... The fate of the workers will be arranged; the future belongs to us. ”

On May 19, 1825, Saint-Simon was buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery . There were no relatives at the funeral, only the students and friends of the count were present : Olind Rodrigue , Auguste Comte , Augustin Thierry , Barthelemy Prosper Anfanten , Etienne-Marie Bailly , Leon Halevi and others .

The Early Views of Saint-Simon

During his stay in Geneva, Saint-Simon published his first essay: "Letters of a Geneva inhabitant to his contemporaries" (1802). It requires unlimited domination of art and science, which are designed to organize society. The belligerent type of mankind should disappear and be replaced by the scientific: “away, Alexandra, give way to the disciples of Archimedes.”

Labor is the categorical imperative of the new society. Everyone will have to exert their strength in a way that is useful to mankind: the poor will nourish the rich, who will work with his head, and if he is incapable of this, he must work with his hands. The spiritual power in the new society should belong to scientists, secular to owners, and the right to choose the bearers of both authorities to the whole people. In essence, the content of secular power has not been clarified: there is nothing left for it, since the entire organization of society, the entire direction of work, is in the hands of spiritual authority.

In general, the ideas expressed by Saint-Simon are vague and sometimes even contradictory. Influenced by similar attempts made at the end of the 18th century, he offers a new religion, open to him, in his words, in a vision by God himself. A distinctive feature of this religion is “Newtonism”: Newton was entrusted by God with “the guidance of the light and the inhabitants of all the planets”; the place of the temples will be taken by the "Newton's Mausoleums", etc.

Saint-Simon on the role of science

In 1808, he published "Introduction to the scientific works of the XIX century . " Science, in his opinion, until that time was engaged only in experiments, studied only facts; it was very fruitful, but it was time to come to a common point of view. All private sciences are only elements of some general science, which is precisely positive philosophy. And in its whole, and in its parts, science should have only a “relative and positive character”; human knowledge has already reached a state in which it is necessary to generalize and build a finished building out of them.

This idea is complemented by another - the systematic organization of further scientific research. Saint-Simon also speaks of the “benefits of the new scientific system”, the classification of sciences and its connection with the history of human development in his following brochures: “Lettres au bureau des Longitudes” and “Nouvelle Encyclopédie” . In the “Note on the science of man” he demands the creation of a special positive “science of man”, which would study humanity from a purely scientific point of view, as exact sciences study the inorganic world. Humanity is developing as naturally as everything organic, and this development leads to the highest perfection.

An individual cannot be considered from any one side — either from the political or economic side; you need to take the entirety of the phenomena, all their diversity and trace their interdependence and interaction (the thought realized by one of Saint-Simon's students, Auguste Comte , in creating sociology). Finally, in his Note on Universal Gravitation, he seeks to find an explanation of all phenomena in the law of universal gravitation.

Political Opinions

Events of 1814-1815 distracted Saint-Simon from purely scientific issues and directed his thought to political issues, and later social ones, which resulted in several political brochures.

In Reorganization of European Society, written in collaboration with Augustin Thierry , he insists on the need for an alliance between France and England, which would allow these two countries to introduce constitutional order into all other European states; then all of them together would form a pan-European parliament, which would be the supreme resolver of disagreements between individual states, would create a code of morality and would set its main task to organize public works, conduct channels, organize resettlement of excess population to other countries.

Saint-Simon also expressed the same idea in his subsequent Opinions sur les mesures à prendre contre la coalition de 1815 . Saint-Simon was able to publish these pamphlets because his family agreed to pay him a pension for refusing his inheritance. In the ensuing struggle between industrial and clerical-feudal interests, between “people of industry with people of parchment,” he took the side of the former, with whose help he began to publish the collection “L'industrie” (1817-1818) with the epigraph: “everything through industry everything for her. " Understanding by “industrialism” a new industrial direction, in contrast to the previous aristocracy, and not yet noticing among the “industrialists” themselves the contradictions of the interests of capital and labor, he argues that only labor gives the right to exist and that modern society should consist of workers mentally and physically.

Saint-Simon considered the “Industrialists” as a single class, including all those who work in industry and agriculture — both as manual workers and as entrepreneurs. At the same time, intellectual groups adjoin the class of industrialists. The line of basic division in society runs, according to Saint-Simon, between the industrialists and the parasites-rentiers ^[6] .

The rentier - these social parasites - are the essence of cancer that modern states suffer from. It is the industrial class that brings the greatest benefit to the state and has the greatest ability to manage the affairs of the state. From this point of view, it is necessary to redo the composition of the chamber in order to remove from it the “military,” the “consumers who produce nothing,” whom he directly calls the anti-national party.

The same defense of “industrialists against courtesans and nobles, that is, bees against drones,” Saint-Simon leads in Politique (1819), L'Organisateur (1819-1820), Système industriel (1821-1822), Catéchisme des industriels ” (1822-1823). The place of a military-theocratic state that has survived itself should be taken by an industrial-scientific state; conscription must give way to a common duty of labor; like the XVIII century. was primarily critical, destroying the barriers to the formation of a new social order, since the XIX century. must be creative, must create an industrial state based on the results of science.

The famous Parabola is placed in Organisateur , in which he makes the assumption that France will suddenly lose three thousand of its first physicists, chemists, physiologists and other scientists, artists, as well as the most capable technicians, bankers, merchants, factory owners, rural owners, artisans, etc. What will be the consequences? Since these people "make up the color of French society, ... then a nation will become a body without a soul ... And it will need at least a whole generation to reward its losses." But suppose the sudden death of three thousand people of a different kind - members of the royal house, dignitaries, state advisers, ministers, bishops, cardinals, ober-stalmeisters, ober-ceremonies of masters, prefects and sub-prefects, etc. and, in addition, ten thousand owners, the most the rich, of those who live in a lordly way ”- and so what? Good-natured Frenchmen will be very upset by the kindness of their hearts, but "from this accident there will be no political evil for the state," since there will soon be thousands of people who are ready and able to take the place of the dead. Modern society, from the point of view of Saint-Simon, is “truly light inside out, since those who represent a positive utility are placed in a subordinate position” in relation to people incapable, ignorant and immoral.

The Catechism of the Industries ( Catéchisme politique des industriels ), one of the editions of which was written by Auguste Comte, was followed by Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles (1825), where his new attitude to the working class was finally determined. Here he points to the fundamental contradiction between capital and labor, from the interaction of which the liberal bourgeoisie arose. The mission of the revolution of the last century, he says, was political freedom, and the goal of our century should be humanity and brotherhood. The middle estate deprived the landowners of power, but itself took their place; his guiding star was naked egoism. To combat it, to place brotherhood in the place of egoism, Saint-Simon demands an alliance of royal power with workers, on whose banner the achievement of the greatest possible economic equality would be written.

“The industrial principle is based on the principle of complete equality.” Political freedom is a necessary consequence of progressive development; but once it is achieved, it ceases to be the ultimate goal. Individualism has too developed an already strong egoism in man; Now we need to try to organize production on the principles of association, which will soon lead to the development of natural feelings of solidarity and mutual fraternal devotion. The slogan of individualism is the struggle of people against each other; the slogan of the principle of association is the struggle of people in alliance with each other against nature. The main task of state people in an industrial state is to take care of labor. Closer to the principle of the right to work, Saint-Simon foresaw that the proletariat would soon be organized and would demand the right to participate in power; the best policy, therefore, is to unite power holders with real workers against non-working capital.

Saint-Simon on Religion

Saint-Simon's swan song was “New Christianity” . Recognizing Christianity as a Divine origin, he thinks, however, that God in revelation applies to the degree of understanding of people, as a result of which even the disciples of Christ did not have the Divine truth in its entirety. That is why the main commandment of Christ, “love your neighbor as yourself,” can now and should be expressed differently: “every society should take care of the quickest possible improvement of the moral and physical condition of the poorest class; it should be organized in a way that would be most conducive to achieving this goal. ” The new Christianity should be a transformation of the old: it has not yet come - it is ahead and will lead to universal happiness. “The golden age that blind tradition has placed so far in the past is actually ahead of us.” New Christians will also have a cult, there will be dogmas; "But moral teaching will be the most important among them, and cult and dogma will only be a kind of appendage." Pointing to the successes of mathematics and science, Saint-Simon expressed regret that the most important science, "which forms the foundation of society and serves as its foundation - moral science" - is neglected.

Dreaming of great deeds and glory from the earliest years, convinced that “only the fugitives who escaped from the house of madmen usually get fame” and that “it is necessary to be inspired to accomplish great things”, who was really carried away with his plans and ideas to self-forgetfulness, sometimes to the prophetic ecstasy, Saint-Simon often changed one idea for another and became a reformer in the field of science, then in the field of politics, social structure and even morality and religion. An “inventor of ideas” and a master in the art of captivating people and directing them to scientific research, he had many students ( Auguste Comte and Augustin Thierry are the most famous; both separated from him: the second - when Saint-Simon became indifferent to political issues and concentrated all his attention was on social issues, the first was when Saint-Simon began to introduce a religious-mystical element into his teaching) and gave them important guiding ideas, for the proof of which he always needed, however, the studies of his students. He did not express his teachings in a systematic way; his very thought was often obscure. The so-called sensimonism system was not created by him, but by his students. In all areas, he only outlined new directions.

The concept of historical progress

Not content with the concepts of “personality” and “state”, which operated the 18th century and liberalism of the 19th century, Saint-Simon gives them a place and even the prevailing meaning of “society”, in which the personality is an organic particle, the state in relation to the personality is something derivative . Society at any given moment is determined by the well-known organization of material forces and the well-known worldview corresponding to this organization. The course of historical events depends on the change - very slow - in the ratio of material particles. The laws that govern social change are subject to scientific study, after which it will be possible to establish precise rules for the management of society. Hence, the indifference of Saint-Simon to politics and the emphasis on the social side of the life of peoples are clear; hence the condemnation of the former historical science, which, in his words, was a simple biography of power.

The idea of ​​the need to transform history is closely connected with the views of Saint-Simon on the economic evolution of Europe, which he even gave a general formula: the history of Europe was for him the transformation of military society into industrial society, and the evolution of labor seemed to him as a sequence of slavery, serfdom and free mercenaryism, for which, in turn, must be followed by the stage of community service ( travail sociétaire ).

Saint-Simon saw the great French revolution as an incomplete revolution. Основной её недостаток он видел в том, что она не передала власть в руки «индустриалов» и учёных, а поставила во главе государства два промежуточных слоя: метафизиков и законников («легистов»). Эти промежуточные слои сыграли в своё время положительную роль в смягчении норм феодально-богословского строя, но оказались неспособными обеспечить переход к новой системе ^[7] .

Вообще, всем своим учением об обществе Сен-Симон связал своё имя с первой стадией эволюции позитивизма , а взгляды, высказанные им в последние годы относительно рабочего класса, сделали его родоначальником социализма .

Сен-Симон и коммунистическая идеология

В статье « Три источника и три составных части марксизма » В. И. Ленин назвал идеи Сен-Симона, Фурье и Оуэна одним из трёх источников марксизма . Лозунг « От каждого по его способностям, каждому — по его труду » (так называемый «принцип социализма»), провозглашённый в Конституции СССР 1936 года (ст. 12), восходит к тезису, выдвинутому в книге С.-А. Базара «Изложение учения Сен-Симона» (1829) (во введении к этой книге, резюмируя содержание восьмой лекции по основам сенсимонизма, прочитанной 25 марта 1829 года, Базар формулирует данный тезис в следующей форме: «Каждому по его способности, каждой способности по её делам» ^{[8] [9]} ). Позднее указанный лозунг стал широко известен благодаря французскому публицисту П. Ж. Прудону , широко использовавшему его в своих сочинениях, а в СССР он применялся для характеристики положения личности в социалистическом обществе ^[10] .

• Сен-Симон А. Собрание сочинений. М. , Л. , 1923.
• Сен-Симон А. Избранные сочинения. Т. 1-2 М., Л., 1948.

• Аникин А. В. Глава восемнадцатая. Прекрасный мир утопистов: Сен-Симон и Фурье // Юность науки: Жизнь и идеи мыслителей-экономистов до Маркса. - 2nd ed. — М. : Политиздат , 1975. — С. 341-350. - 384 p. - 50,000 copies.
• Блауг М. Сен-Симон, Клод Анри де Рувруа // 100 великих экономистов до Кейнса = Great Economists before Keynes: An introduction to the lives & works of one hundred great economists of the past. - SPb. : Экономикус, 2008. — С. 269-271. - 352 p. — (Библиотека «Экономической школы», вып. 42). - 1,500 copies. - ISBN 978-5-903816-01-9 .
• Васильевский М. Г. Сен-Симон, Анри Клод // Энциклопедический словарь Брокгауза и Ефрона : в 86 т. (82 т. и 4 доп.). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
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• Волгин В. П. Французский утопический коммунизм . — М. : Изд-во АН СССР, 1960. — 184 с.
• Вольский Ст. Сен-Симон — 1935 год. — 312 с. ( Жизнь замечательных людей ).
• Гладышев А. В . «Артисты», «легисты» и «буржуа» (К. А. Сен-Симон о творцах Французской революции) // Французский ежегодник 2001: Annuaire d'etudes françaises. Чудинов А. В. (Ред.) 2001. — С. 266—279.
• Гладышев А. В. Сен-Симон и партийное строительство в эпоху Реставрации // Французский ежегодник 2009. М., 2009. — С. 139—173.
• Застенкер Н. Е. Анри де Сен-Симон // История социалистических учений. — М. : Изд-во АН СССР , 1962. — С. 208-227. — 472 с.
• Изложение учения Сен-Симона / Со вступит. статьей и комментариями В. П. Волгина . — М. : Изд-во АН СССР, 1961. — 608 с. — (Предшественники научного социализма).
• Кучеренко Г. С. Сенсимонизм в общественной мысли XIX века . — М. : Наука, 1975. — 358 с.
• Сен-Симон Клод Анри де Рувруа / Застенкер Н. Е. // Сафлор — Соан. — М. : Советская энциклопедия, 1976. — ( Большая советская энциклопедия : [в 30 т.] / гл. ред. А. М. Прохоров ; 1969—1978, т. 23).
• Туган-Барановский М. И. Сен-Симон и сен-симонисты // Очерки из новейшей истории политической экономии: (Смит, Мальтус, Рикардо, Сисмонди, историческая школа, катедер-социалисты, австрийская школа, Оуэн, Сен-Симон, Фурье, Прудон, Родбертус, Маркс) . - SPb. : Publ. журнала «Мир божий», 1903. — С. 110-133. — X, 434 с.
• Щеглов, «История социальных систем» (т. I, стр. 369—372).
• Altmann SL, Ortiz EL (eds.) Mathematics and social utopias in France: Olinde Rodrigues and his times . — Providence (Rhode Island): American Mathematical Society, 2005. — ISBN 0-8218-3860-1 .
• Hubbard. S.-Simon, sa vie et ses travaux (1857).
• Osama W. Abi-Mershed Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria. — Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010. — xii + 328 p. — ISBN 0-804-76909-5 .
• P. Weisengrün . Die Social wissensch. Ideen St.-Simons.

• Сен-Симон — статья в Новой философской энциклопедии