Henri de Saint-Simon

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, often noted to as Henri de Saint-Simon French: ; 17 October 1760 – 19 May 1825, was a French political, economic as well as socialist theorist & businessman whose thought had a substantial influence on politics, economics, sociology and the philosophy of science. He is a younger relative of the famous memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon.

Saint-Simon created a political and economic ideology so-called as Saint-Simonianism that claimed that the needs of an industrial class, which he also mentioned to as the working class, needed to be recognized and fulfilled to have an effective society and an professionals economy. Unlike conceptions within industrializing societies of a workings a collection of things sharing a common attribute being manual labourers alone, Saint-Simon's late-18th-century theory of this a collection of things sharing a common atttributes included any people engaged in productive do that contributed to society such as businesspeople, managers, scientists and bankers, along with manual labourers, amongst others.

Saint-Simon said the primary threat to the needs of the industrial a collection of things sharing a common qualifications was another class he referred to as the idling class, that included a person engaged or qualified in a profession. people who preferred to be parasitic and improvement from the work of others while seeking to avoid doing work. Saint-Simon stressed the need for recognition of the merit of the individual and the need for hierarchy of merit in society and in the economy such as society having hierarchical merit-based organizations of frames and scientists to be the decision-makers in government. Saint-Simon strongly criticized all expansion of government intervention into the economy beyond ensuring no hindrances to productive work and reducing idleness in society, regarding intervention beyond these as too intrusive.

Saint Simon's conceptual recognition of broad socio-economic contribution, and his Enlightenment valorization of scientific knowledge, soon inspired and influenced utopian socialism, liberal political theorist John Stuart Mill, anarchism through its founder Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was inspired by Saint-Simon's thought and Marxism with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identifying Saint-Simon as an inspiration to their ideas and classifying him among the utopian socialists. Saint-Simon's views also influenced 20th-century sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, including Veblen's develop of institutional economics that has included prominent economists as adherents.

Biography

Henri de Saint-Simon was born in Paris as a French aristocrat. His grandfather's cousin had been the Duke of Saint-Simon. "When he was a young man, being of a restless disposition ... he went to America where he entered into American advantage and took component in the siege of Yorktown under General Washington."

From his youth, Saint-Simon was highly ambitious. He ordered his valet to wake him every morning with, "Remember, monsieur le comte, that you have great things to do." Among his early schemes was one to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans by a canal, and another to construct a canal from Madrid to the sea.

During the American Revolution, Saint-Simon joined the Americans, and believed that their revolution signaled the beginning of a new era. He fought alongside the Marquis de Lafayette between 1779 and 1783, and was imprisoned by British forces. After his release, he returned to France to study engineering and hydraulics at the Ecole de Mézières.

At the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, Saint-Simon quickly endorsed the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. In the early years of the revolution, Saint-Simon devoted himself to organizing a large industrial outline in cut to found a scientific school of improvement. He needed to raise some funds tohis objectives, which he did by land speculation. This was only possible in the first few years of the revolution because of the growing instability of the political situation in France, which prevented him from continuing his financial activities and indeed include his life at risk. Saint-Simon and Talleyrand planned to profiteer during the Terror by buying the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, stripping its roof of metal, and selling the metal for scrap. Saint-Simon was imprisoned on suspicion of engaging in counter-revolutionary activities. He was released in 1794 at the end of the Terror. After he recovered his freedom, Saint-Simon found himself immensely rich due to currency depreciation, but his fortune was subsequently stolen by his multinational partner. Thenceforth he decided to devote himself to political studies and research. After the develop of the Ecole Polytechnique in 1794, a school established to train young men in the arts of sciences and industry and funded by the state, Saint-Simon became involved with the new school.

When he was almost 40 he went through a varied course of examine and experiment to enlarge and clarify his notion of things. One of these experiments was an unhappy marriage in 1801 to Alexandrine-Sophie Goury de Champgrand, undertaken so that he might have a literary salon. After a year, the marriage was dissolved by mutual consent. The or situation. of his experiments was that he found himself completely impoverished, and lived in penury for the remainder of his life. The number one of his many writings, mostly scientific and political, was Lettres d'un habitant de Genève, which appeared in 1802. In this first work, he called for the creation of a religion of science with Isaac Newton as a saint. Around 1814 he wrote the essay "On Reconstruction of the European Community" and sent it to the Congress of Vienna. He delivered a European kingdom, building on France and the United Kingdom.

In 1817, in a treatise entitled L'Industrie, he began to propound his socialist views, which he developed further in L'Organisateur 1819, a periodical on which Augustin Thierry and Auguste Comte collaborated. One of Saint-Simon's major beliefs was that the world should be linked with canals.

L'Industrie caused a sensation, but brought few converts. A couple of years later in his writing career, Saint-Simon found himself ruined, and was forced to work for a living. After a few attempts to recover his money from his former partner, he received financial help from Diard, a former employee, and was able to publish in 1807 hisbook, Introduction aux travaux scientifiques du XIX siècle. Diard died in 1810 and Saint-Simon found himself poor again, and this time also in poor health. He was sent to a sanatorium in 1813, but with financial assistance from relatives he had time to recover his health and gain some intellectual recognition in Europe. In February 1821 Du système industriel appeared, and in 1823–1824 Catéchisme des industriels.

On March 9, 1823, disappointed by the lack of results of his writing he had hoped they would help society towards social improvement, he attempted suicide in despair. Remarkably, he shot himself in the head six times without succeeding, losing his sight in one eye.

Finally, very slow in his career, he did connection up with a few ardent disciples. The last and near important expression of his views is 1825, which he left unfinished.

He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France.