Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

condemned to utopia from the outset; the more they were worked out in their details, the more they had to vanish into pure fantasy.

Once this is established, we shall not dwell a moment longer on this side of the matter, which now belongs entirely to the past. We can leave it to literary pedants to solemnly quibble over these fantasies, which are today only amusing, and to assert the superiority of their own sober way of thinking over such "madness." We prefer to rejoice in the ingenious germs of thought and the ideas that break through everywhere under the fantastic shell, and to which those philistines are blind.

Saint-Simon was a son of the Great French Revolution; at the time of its outbreak, he was not yet thirty years old. The revolution was the victory of the Third Estate—that is, the great mass of the nation active in production and trade—over the hitherto privileged, idle estates: the nobility and the clergy. But the victory of the Third Estate had soon revealed itself as the exclusive victory of a small part of this estate, as the conquest of political power by the socially privileged layer of it, the propertied bourgeoisie. And indeed, this bourgeoisie had developed rapidly even during the revolution, through speculation in the confiscated and subsequently sold landed property of the nobility and the church, as well as through fraud against the nation by army contractors. It was precisely the rule of these swindlers that, under the Directory, brought France and the revolution to the brink of ruin, and thus provided Napoleon with the pretext for his coup d'état. Thus, in Saint-Simon's mind, the antagonism between the Third Estate and the privileged estates took the form of an antagonism between "workers" and "idlers." The idlers were not only the old privileged classes, but also all who lived on dividends without participating in production and trade. And the "workers" were not only wage-laborers, but also the factory owners, the merchants, and the bankers. That the idlers had lost the capacity for intellectual leadership and political rule was certain and had been definitively defeated by the revolution. That the propertyless did not possess this capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proven by the experiences of the Reign of Terror. But who was to lead and rule? According to Saint-Simon, science and industry, both held together by a new religious bond, destined to restore the unity of religious views which had been shattered since the Reformation—a necessarily mystical and strictly hierarchical "New Christianity." But science, that meant the scholars, and