[I wrote a short biographical bit on sociologist Jules Monnerot (1909-1995) introducing another article; I will therefore not repeat myself here1. The first piece of this post, which gave it its title, is not the most detailed or scholarly study. However, since very few readers, even in France, know about Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), who yet had a tremendous influence not only on French intellectual life and society but also abroad, this kind of introduction is a great way to spark curiosity about him — on top of that, it is quite very short. Another thing, this article was published in a foundational magazine: Europe-Action. Animated by Dominique Venner and published between 1963 and 1967, it layed the theoretical and human foundations for the future French New Right. Many figures from this movement, coming from collaborationism and the SS, the Algerian War and the OAS, or simply young promising authors like Alain de Benoist, gathered in 1968 to create the official think-tank of the Nouvelle Droite, the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (fr. GRECE). Such surroundings, at the peak of their radicality2, make this article all the more interesting. It will be completed with fragments from Monnerot’s Sociologie du Communisme (1949) and Sociologie de la Révolution (1969) mentioning Saint-Simon, giving tought-provoking intellectual genealogies, and then a critique of its shortcomings, in view of marxism. A biographical outline, taken from the Europe-Action issue for its first part, augmented by an evocation of saint-simonian posterity, will precede Monnerot’s texts, and a short bibliography of works by or about the Comte de Saint-Simon in English language — not to mention the notes —, will give curious readers some more things to get their teeth into.]

Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). As a young nobleman from a wealthy family, he went overseas between 1779 and 1783 and took part in the American Revolution alongside with the Marquis de Lafayette. He was under the command of George Washington during the siege of Yorktown3. Back in France at the time of another Revolution, a Republican, he is successively imprisoned, enriched, and ruined; a learned man, he gets a passion for the nascent industry and founds a school where he unites politics and economics in an original and indissoluble way. There, he advocates for the rule of producers, without rallying to democracy.

Several important figures were his disciples, such as historian Augustin Thierry (1795-1856), his secretary between 1814 and 1817, who gave the concept of Race a central role in History after Boulainvilliers4, and Auguste Comte (1798-1857), founder of positivism5, who was Saint-Simon’s secretary between 1817 and 1824, not to mention important French socialist figures.

Saint-Simon died almost unknown, but his influence on intellectuals, on engineer corps and on industrial entrepreneurs was both formidable and lasting6: the edification of networks of all kinds and some titanic projects in the second half of the 19th Century, in both France and its area of influence (railways especially; but also the Suez Canal — and an aborted project for a dam on the Nile in the 1830s), were operated by saint-simonians. French colonialists found in his works a great fuel7. Sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his 1895-1896 lectures, said that Saint-Simon was, more than Comte, the true founder of sociological science.

N.B.: Karl Marx, one of the sole reasons why people ever hear about Saint-Simon, labeled him — for obviously polemical reasons — a “utopian socialist”, which does not do justice to him in the public mind. That saint-simonians sometimes fell into utopianism and even eccentricity does not suppress the founder’s realism and his deep sense of History; but Monnerot talks about this.

Saint-Simon, more actual than Marx (Europe-Action °41, May 1966).

Socialism… The tremendous success of such a term is akin to inflation. The relationship between the word and its meaning is that of depreciated currency: the sign gets multiplied at an breathtaking rate, at the expense of the signified thing.

Spirit however preceded the letter just as it survives it: it is only in retrospect that Saint-Simon was labeled a socialist. At the time Napoléon was conquering Europe, Saint-Simon conceives the upcoming raise of standard of living among White peoples. The socialist idea then is the best possible distribution; the most favorable to men taken statistically; the elevation of human status within a given frame. Therefore we see the accent being put on community, at the time when in this same Europe, romanticism rather stresses the difference. The tension between these two poles — individualism, socialism — radiates a specific kind of energy. In the 19th, even more so in the 20th Century, who will be the bearer of this energy will rule the world.

For the first time since the Second Empire [1852-1870], Saint-Simon is getting reprinted. In 1966, saint-simonianism is farsighted, when marxism rather looks towards the past.

Saint-Simon indicated, at the time of Napoléon’s reign, that progresses in production will trigger all the other ones. He is the first known theorician of economic growth.

Saint-Simon, foreboding the mutation of Europe, saw that the mutants were these men who tomorrow would be inventors, engineers, captains of industry, bankers, and that the old political executives were only inert profiteers. The different revolutions that went on since then did not render such views as anachronistic as we could think.

Saint-Simon, in his visionary clear-sightedness, sensing the formidable increase of our material powers, advocated for the reorganization of European society, and for the restoration of Spiritual Power. Since the explosion of the first atomic bomb, we can no longer pretend not to understand what he meant to tell us.

But let us pass on his intuitions in detail, and on his mistakes. It will be enough to indicate the reasons why despite the terrific marxist entropy, and maybe because of it, the thought of the great French socialists of the first half of the 19th Century shines with an unmatched radiance.

I. — This kind of socialism is not opposed to capitalism: if, the socialist ends being presented, the necessary primacy of production causes a need for setting up the most efficient production method, let us ask our experience for an answer on this issue. Our experience gives the following answer: the socialist realizations were realized under the capitalist regime.

II. — This kind of socialism is not opposed to nationalism: there can be socialism only where there is a society. A society can only be defined by its limits. Society is the French society, the European society, the Western society.

Indeed, giving prominence to abstractions instead of putting reality first is escapism, plain and simple. Giving prominence to the remote before the neighbour is pathological behaviour. The Sartres who prefer Stalin, Mao Zedong or Lumumba because they cannot bear the sight of their own reflection represent the death-wish of a historical society. Either we want the development of the society we are part of, or we condemn ourselves to swing between treason and delusion. When socialism and nationalism are not pretexts or pretences but mobiles for action, they demand the welfare of the same people.

Oriental marxism, pretending to make Europeans swallow back the waste of their own culture, the anachronistic phrasing of the General de Gaulle, advocating for the hexagonal, metropolitan involution of France, could only exist on the historical scene if the European, Western man squandered his virtues. I do not believe that to be the case.

Jules Monnerot.

Sociologie du Communisme (1949), excerpts.

[Notes are Jules Monnerot’s.]

What 19th Century “revolutionary” thought — and more specifically, Marx’s — owes to Hegel, it owes it, through him, to counter-revolutionary thought. In fact, hegelianism is only the lively and fruitful organisation of preexisting vital elements. Those who were called “revolutionaries” and those who were called reactionary; the thought that was claimed “at the right” and the thought that was claimed “at the left” drew from the same, common nourishing elements, which are the common ground of Western thought. Besides and aside from Hegel, without having to always pass through his mediation, “revolutionaries” and “socialists” borrowed from the “reactionary” thought, and changed the meaning of what they borrowed. Both “reactionaries” and “socialists” (and here we can see how mobile such meanings are and how they are easily subject to being transformed into their opposite), grounded on Burke’s protest, but also on the concept of life on which many had speculated, from Paracelsus and Van Helmont to the Montpellier medical school, many “physiological philosophers” made the determination of what is organic the core of both their thought and their researches. Such is the case of Saint-Simon and of Comte, but also that of Bonald: a creative great Lord, a son of the French Revolution, and an émigré. They draw the same elements from their surroundings and from the air they breathe: on top of that, their own philosophies fecundate one another. They would oppose organic eras to critical eras, they would consider European Christendom, the Christian Europe, as the symbol of the organic era, and after the critical era that the 18th Century ending with the French Revolution was, they aspire to a new organic era; the concepts of organized life, of organism, of the “whole immanent to its parts”, of the “omnipresence of unity in the multiplicity of the parts8”, which characterize life for romantic thinkers, get a regulating role. Real institutions, religion, “positive” law are presented as natural phenomenons (and romantics would subvert the meaning of the word “natural”), just as are individual living organisms.9 […]

One cannot overstate the importance of Hegel in transmitting living elements from counter-revolutionary thought to Marx, in a form digestible for a revolutionary mind. We see with this the kind of crossovers, exchanges, participations, implications, silent references from a thought deemed to be “counter-revolutionary” to one deemed “revolutionary”. Such enemies come one from another: Comte from Saint-Simon, and from Comte comes Maurras. Saint-Simon takes his organicist theory from the Counter Revolution, and there is no doubt that he was thinking against the Revolution too, wanting to put the critical era to an end. The “organic era” he advocated for would be an industrial era.10

Sociologie de la Révolution (1969).

Saint-Simon is not inferior to Marx when it comes to raw prevision, quite the contrary in fact. But he ties the diffusion, the expansion, the generalisation of his ideas and hopes to statistically rare and historically poor psychological traits: the sense of the common interest of the species, or at least of a vast community. Such characters are insufficiently motivating, except in elite individuals who benefit from an advanced intelligence, thanks to a convergence of supporting factors. Such men are true culture-changers, who on the one hand were well-placed to receive a powerful tradition, and on the other hand had a genetic heritage enabling them to put it to work; a psychological structure that let them find their most fundamental delight and self-accomplishment in such tasks.

Considering Western society after the great revolutionary crisis that gave birth to the intellectual 19th Century, the “utopians”, each in their own language, diagnose a critical era, marked by schisms and fractures: the remedy has to be found in a vast elevation of the spirits, that would bind people together, that answers to words saint-simonians hold very dearly: “order”, “religion”, “devotion”, “association”, which, in our sentimental and moral idiom, means everything that comes from love rather than hate. In a vacuum, the diagnosis is not even debatable. But the element lacks. Still in a vacuum, the remedy suggested by Saint-Simon and Comte flows from an undeniable intelligence of History: the Restoration of a spiritual power as wide as needed considering the day’s evils, which means one even stronger than that within the Christian organisation of the Middle Ages. In order to shape such a spiritual power, the general course of events, as Cournot used to say, seems to offer new social categories, savants, and people who apply science to human enterprise. First and foremost, industrialists and bankers, engineers, backers and doctors. But the disarmed prophets fall down a slope, that a correct use of intelligence would rather invite them to climb back when they fail to distinguish between what is desirable and what is probable, and they tend to incline one towards the other until they meet and merge. The saint-simonians seem to postulate that abilities and a will to use them as instruments for the public good are to be necessarily found within the same men. But as Pareto would say, these two ends are heterogeneous, and only an affective disposition from within can invite us to have them meet and unite. Such is what Pareto calls the “need to unite the residues” [bisogno di unire i residui], according to which we want the truth to also be beautiful and good. But there is a heterogeneity between reality and our desire. These two processes do not intermingle, or rather they can: only when we make our ends operational, by submitting to laws governing the apparition of particular events, which are not the same that govern the apparition of ideas. In fact, exhilarated that they are at the sight of new perspectives opened by science, industry and finance, the saint-simonians fail to recognize the presence of an obstacle, which is the central, permanent obstacle in political theory: how can we make it, in fact, so that the good of the most crucial part of a given society (the good of the ruling class) is also the good of the whole society? In other words, what can ensure to Saint-Simon and Comte that these bankers, these industrials, these engineers will share their own devotion to the public good and their selflessness? Utopians do seem to solve the issues they write about through projecting, in its psychoanalytical sense, in these savants, these industrials and backers, by giving these men, who differ so much from them by their status, their very own way of thinking. There was a contamination, within these great utopians’ spirits, between the order of events and that of preferences, between the subjective and the objective; and when the saint-simonians imagined that these bankers, industrials and savants could feel the same feelings for the collective, that they could envision themselves having the same duties as King Saint Louis towards his subjects, or as Francis of Assisi towards his neighbour, they mistook their own preferences with events that were only potential, that would happen outside from them. They did not submit to Bacon’s method: one commands nature by obeying it. And here, this intellectual defect gets out of control with the overestimation of the power of good counsel. In fact, the new ruling classes, whose advent was saluted by the saint-simonians and Auguste Comte, rather were attached to their own, particular interests, just as their predecessors; such interests were partly common, and when they saw in this detail the general interest, as (said) classical political economy gives a testimony of, it was due to them giving in to wishful thinking, just like the saint-simonians. The weakness of utopians, their historical inferiority in regard to marxists, does not come from the content of their conceptions. They are no less scientific, and according to the norms of Western civilisation, they are far more moral than Marx’s. But utopians did not attach their — more balanced, fairer, less unilateral than Marx’s — ideas to real forces, to social forces, to existing energy that could apply themselves to realise them historically. The case of the said “utopian” socialists enables one to make the following observation, yet another time: if we take them just like that, with no ruse, frankly, without any operational technique, good intentions [les bons sentiments] are political legless cripples — economical ones too. In truth, “utopians” only asked for the following thing: industrialists, bankers and savants had to be both saints, geniuses and heroes. But why would have they been more than human? They did not possess a moral superiority from their position, unlike the ancient sacerdotal class. Their function did not require such a moral superiority; their history did not necessarily give it to them. “Utopian” philosophers only thought that the image of the world would be more satisfying had the savants, the industrialists and the bankers possessed these virtues. Which was indeed not enough to entrust them with these.

We can now understand why this distinction between utopian and scientific socialism, although formulated in a fallacious wording, covers a reality (of a whole other order, though). Marx’s method could only give way to viable political movements, because he was not mistaken about the optimal modalities for the application of human energy. In other words, marxism is a strategic, fighting doctrine, while “utopian” socialisms were only reflected by declarations of intentions, of “good intentions”, even. Among them, the ends eat the means, while among the marxists, the means devour the ends.

As a matter of fact, utopians such as the saint-simonians stressed most of our great issues: the correlation between production and progress (the raising of standards of living is a consequence of it, class struggle aside), a first idea of economic growth; they had a sharp sense of the importance of abilites and of a “meritocracy” that wouldn’t be obsessed with a “class mysticism”, the sense of a necessity for “reorganising European society”, for the recreation of a spiritual Power destined to balance, in the very interests of the species, man’s unprecedented — and before that, unconceivable — conquests over physical means. We can even go as far as saying that the utopian partisans of a spiritual power are more right after a hundred and fifty years than they were during their lifetime. And I am only talking about the great issues here.

In the end, the cardinal difference between Marx and the precursors he labels as “utopians” is that they failed, even geniuses like Saint-Simon, to put at the center of their doctrine the determination of an assault class. It would be far less inexact to speak of a distinction between a disarmed and an armed socialism (if we care about the word “socialism”, which to me has no other value than that of usage). Saint-Simon announced the extinction of bellicism while Marx theorised chronic war, both internal and generalised. Good intentions are not very profitable, politically speaking. They did not enable finding an assault class.11

To read Saint-Simon dans le texte, one can have a look at Henri de Saint Simon, 1760–1825: Selected writings on science, industry and social organization, Taylor (ed.), 2016 [1975], a thorough selection of his works, The political thought of Saint-Simon, Ionescu (ed.), 1976, or at the shorter and earlier selection called Social organization, the science of man, and other writings, Markham (ed.), 1964. Sadly, these anthologies often lack insightful bits, short introductions, notes, developments and other parts, which can only be known through checking the original, complete editions.

On his life, one can read Mathurin Dondo’s 1955 The French Faust: Henri de Saint-Simon, or the earlier Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism; a chapter in the history of socialism in France (Booth, 1871). Émile Durkheim’s Socialism and Saint-Simon (2011, 1958 [1928]) is simply essential. On more particular aspects of his doctrine, short studies by IR researcher Jan Eijking on Saint-Simon’s Technocratic Internationalism (2021) and A ‘priesthood of knowledge’: the international thought of Henri de Saint-Simon (2021) are of great interest, just as Pierre Musso’s Violence in the Philosophy of Saint-Simon12, in Chandra (ed.) Violence and Non-Violence across Time History, Religion and Culture, 2020, and also Brick’s 2011 thesis on Saint-Simonianism and the public sphere in 19th century France.

The French reader can access the recent scholarly edition of Saint-Simon’s Œuvres complètes in 4 volumes at the Presses Universitaires de France (2019), and an important anthology of his letters, Correspondance (1782-1825), Musso (ed.), 2025.
Scholar Pierre Musso, author of penetrating works on the philosophy of networks and on the monastic archeology of industrialism, has published many things on Saint-Simon, as his finest expert: an introductory (in the famous Que sais-je? series) Saint-Simon et le saint-simonisme, 1999 (reed. 2020, Manucius editions); Le vocabulaire de Saint-Simon, 2005; La religion du monde industriel, analyse de la pensée de Saint-Simon, 2006; Saint-Simon, l'industrialisme contre l'État, 2010. The English reader with an interest for these things could benefit from taking a peak at the volume dedicated to Pierre Musso and the Network Society: From Saint-Simonianism to the Internet, Garcia (ed.), 2017. As for the French, they can also read his ample 2017 masterwork on The industrial Religion: Monastery, manufacture, factory. A genealogy of business [entreprise]13.

For a more thorough (although limited by its dates), multilingual bibliography, see the Bibliographie du saint-simonisme de 1965 à 1984, and its (suite) : de 1984 à 2001.