Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

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Industry, these were primarily the active bourgeois members of the middle class, manufacturers, merchants, and bankers. These bourgeois were indeed to be transformed into a kind of public official, or social trustee, but were nonetheless to retain a commanding and economically privileged position over the workers. In particular, the bankers were to be called upon to regulate the entire social production through the control of credit. This conception corresponded entirely to a time when, in France, large-scale industry and with it the opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat working class were just in their infancy. But what Saint-Simon emphasizes in particular is this: he was always and everywhere concerned first with the fate of "the most numerous and the poorest class" (la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre).

In his Genevan Letters Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva to His Contemporaries, Saint-Simon already posits the principle that "all men ought to work." In the same writing, he already knows that the Reign of Terror the most violent phase of the French Revolution was the rule of the propertyless masses. "Look," he cries out to them, "at what happened in France at the time when your comrades held power there; they brought about famine." To perceive the French Revolution as a class struggle, and indeed not only between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, but between the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the propertyless, was in 1802 a most ingenious discovery. In 1816, he declares politics to be the science of production, and predicts the complete absorption of politics into economics. If the realization that the economic situation is the basis of political institutions only appears here in its germ, the transition of political government over men into an administration of things and a management of production processes—the "abolition of the state" which has lately been bandied about with so much noise—is already clearly expressed here. With equal superiority over his contemporaries, he proclaimed in 1814, immediately after the entry of the Allies into Paris, and again in 1815, during the "Hundred Days" war, the alliance of France with England, and secondarily of both countries with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe. To preach an alliance with the victors of Waterloo to the French of 1815, that indeed required as much courage as historical foresight.

If we discover in Saint-Simon a brilliant breadth of vision, by virtue of which almost all the non-strictly economic thoughts of later socialists are contained within him in embryo, we find in Fourier an authentically French, witty, but no less deeply penetrating critique of existing social conditions. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, its enthusiastic prophets from before the revolution, and its interested sycophants from after the revolution, at their word.