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Journal of the History of Ideas.
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BY WALTERM. SIMON
ity) there is general agreement; see, e.g., Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und
seine Probleme (Tiibingen, 1922), p. 390. Even the Marxist writer, interested in
Saint-Simon of course principally from the point of view of socialism, declares that
311
the yardstick and test case for all the inferior civilizations, even with-
out explicit comparisons; 8 while chronologically, history did not be-
come " really interesting and instructive " until the time of Socrates.9
The simple series of observations; the inducing of general laws;
the instructiveness of history-these are some of the expressions of
the positivism (or if with Professor Gouhier one prefers it, pre-
positivism) in Saint-Simon which must form the first topic in any
examination of his historical thinking. With Saint-Simon as with its
later, greater, and more systematic exponents, what was of the essence
in positivism was both an aim and a method, reflecting perhaps a
dual meaning of the word positive. The aim, which was by no means
new, was to secure a comprehensive, reliable, coherent picture of the
universe and of the laws governing it. The method, of somewhat less
hallowed vintage, was simply to apply the method of the natural
sciences to other areas of knowledge, where it would yield equally
spectacular and unassailable results. Generally speaking, the method
of the natural sciences was understood by positivists to mean em-
piricism, but there were both conscious reservations to this principle
and unconscious departures from it of which we shall have to take
note in the case of Saint-Simon. To permit the extension of scien-
tific method to new fields, two initial assumptions were made which
were methodological in their intent but metaphysical in their im-
plications. One was the celebrated Law of the Three States (or
Stages) which originated with Turgot and was adopted by Saint-
Simon, who passed it on to Comte.10 According to this law, as formu-
lated by Comte, "From the nature of the human intellect each
branch of knowledge in its development is necessarily obliged to pass
through three different theoretical states: the Theological or fictitious
state; the Metaphysical or abstract state; lastly, the Scientific or
positive state." 1 Closely connected with this law was the other
assumption, that the various branches of knowledge, or sciences, were
arranged in a hierarchy. Since all knowledge about the universe was
part of one vast and coherent system, all the branches of knowledge
were mutually linked and interdependent. The hierarchy of the
sciences specified the various relations of dependence and established
the areas in which knowledge could not be expected to emerge until
knowledge in certain other areas had supplied tools and data. This
hierarchy of increasing difficulty therefore provided a chronological
guide to the order in which the various sciences would pass through
8 O. c., I, 173, 188; II, 105; III, 374. 9 0. c., I, 188.
10 Cf. John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth
Century (Edinburgh and London, 1907-14), IV, 483, n. 1.
11 Quoted ibid., IV, 484.
to other fields, see the recent book of F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolutionof Sci-
ence (Glencoe,Ill., 1952). Essentiallya polemicagainstsocial planningwhich over-
states its case, it is neverthelessa challengingwork.
13E.g., Oeuvres,XV, 90.
Sometimes,curiously,Saint-Simonsaid that the " sci-
ence of man" had already reachedthe stage of positivism: Oeuvres,XV, 108-109;
XXI, 137-138. 14 Oeuvres,XVIII, 216-220; XX, 6; 0. c., II, 237.
15 0. c., II, 195-196. 16 Oeuvres,
XV, 91, 147-149.
fully studied the first terms of a series, it is easy to supply the fol-
lowing ones; thus one may easily deduce the future from a proper
observation of the past." 37 From here it is only one more step to
the further statement that a " study of the course taken by the hu-
man mind up to this point will reveal to us what useful steps remain
to be taken by it...." 38
III
If historical analysis could provide watertight predictions, and
therefore prescriptions, for the future because the future could, as it
were, be extrapolated on the graph representing the past, then clearly
the course of human events was subject, in Saint-Simon's system, to
a rigid determinism. A certain line of development, once started,
could continue in one direction and one direction only. The plotter
of the graph had merely to analyze accurately and completely the
data available to him, and only one possible configuration would
present itself. Saint-Simon never used the word determinism, but
freely acknowledged the substance without worrying much about its
philosophical justification, or about the nature of the determining
agency which he was wont to describe as "the order of things." A
social system, he said, could not be created; all that one could do was
to "perceive the new complex of ideas and interests that has come
into being, and to demonstrate it. ... A social system is a fact, or
else it is nothing." 39 The inculcation of correct political attitudes,
then, in which Saint-Simon was engaged, consisted not in developing
people's political judgment and teaching them to use it, but rather in
making people aware of what, as a group, they were going to do
anyway:
. . we wish merely to light the way for the necessarycourseof things, and
to remove obstacles. We want men henceforthto do consciously,by direct
effort and with more fruitful results, what they have hitherto been doing as
it were unintentionally,slowly, indecisively, and with little success.40
Political success or failure depended, and was to be judged, not on
moral considerations or even on ordinary grounds of expediency, but
on whether the action undertaken was conformable to the pattern
being traced by history. Martin Luther, for example, had succeeded
in an apparently utopian project, that of overthrowing the papal
power, because, having " observed the course of the human mind, he
recognized that that which everyone else thought impossible was in
36 Oeuvres, XV, 111. 37 Oeuvres, XV, 122. 38 0. c., II, 12-13.
39 Oeuvres, XX, 179-180. 40 lb., XVIII, 166.
The triumph of the industrial cause is the necessary result of the progress
of civilization to this date, not only in France, but throughoutwestern Eu-
rope; no human power can hope to prevent it.46
The god of history, evidently, could overcome legislatures. In the
same vein, Saint-Simon undertook to give some good advice to Louis
XVIII:
. . .the revolution is far from being at an end, and it will not be until it
has completelyattained the goal assignedto it by the courseof events, that
is to say, until the new political system is established. It is not in the
power of any human agency to turn the clock back on this natural move-
ment, or even to obey it only halfway: the best thing that royalty can do
is to place itself at the head of the movement.47
In fact, not only the industrialists and the existing government,
but everybody, ought to " work with a common purpose to introduce
that political system whose immediate establishment is irresistibly
dictated by the present state of civilization .. ." 48
It is not difficult to point out the weaknesses of Saint-Simon's
positivist and determinist attempt to make past history yield infalli-
ble rules for present conduct. Perhaps the most obvious weakness is
that history, like statistics, can be made to prove almost anything by
working backward from what is to be proved. In any history class-
room one may hear expounded daily the reasons why the Bourbon
monarchy was riding for the fall which came in 1789, or why the
overseas discoveries were bound to shift the balance of power in Eu-
rope. To explain why whatever has happened happened is, after all,
the business of the historian. But Saint-Simon evidently changed
the rules of the game by postulating what was going to happen be-
cause he wanted it to happen, and then used history to show why it
was going to happen; but in this process he lost the hindsight which
is the saving grace of the ordinary historian. Saint-Simon would
have claimed, for instance, not only to be able to explain why Louis
XVI lost his head, but also to have been able to keep his own head
if he had been in Louis' place; but this is just the sort of claim that
a modest historian would not make. Saint-Simon himself betrayed
the weakness of the claim in an interesting passage which fits the
above example. What someone should have said to Louis XVI in
1789, according to Saint-Simon, was this:
A great revolution is in the air and will soon break out. This revolution
will necessarilyend in the establishmentof a new social system which will
be essentially in the interests of the governed, and only secondarily useful
to the governors. This revolution cannot be averted, it cannot even be ap-
46
Oeuvres, XXII, 63. 47 Ib., XXI, 28. 48 Ib., XXII, 141.
It was not true, as Montesquieu claimed, that " each nation requires
a form of government peculiar to itself, since there can be only a
single good form of government, simply because there is only one
90
good method of arriving at one .... "
Saint-Simon also attacked relativism from another direction. It
might be true (disregarding the contrary sentiments just noted) that
institutions were to be judged on relative rather than absolute stand-
ards, depending on the society to which they belonged; but there
ought, according to Saint-Simon, to be no disagreement about the
merits of an institution within this framework:
The philosophers of the eighteenth century succeeded in obtaining general
assent to the proposition that everyone should be free to hold and to teach
to their children whichever religion they preferred. The philosophers of the
nineteenth century will inculcate the necessity of subjecting all children to
the study of the same code of secular morality, since a community of posi-
tive moral ideas is the only link that can unite men in society, and since,
after all, the perfecting of society means nothing but the perfecting of the
positive system of morality.91
This totalitarian edict of the positivist philosopher-king, extinguish-
ing any right to dissent on the part of the people of the positivist
state, was, of course, always logically implied in Saint-Simon's postu-
lation of necessary correspondence between a society and its institu-
tions. Saint-Simon found nothing terrifying in this prospect of a
unanimous population; that the truth would make men free was a
proposition taken for granted by rationalists from Voltaire to Marx,
and the corollary, that if necessary men had to be forced to be free
by being made to accept the truth, had been established by Rous-
seau. Saint-Simon, who ratified the past, even though it was super-
stitious and barbarous, because it had a part in his cosmic scheme,
was certainly not reluctant to ratify the future, which was the ulti-
mate destination of the cosmic scheme. For Saint-Simon like most
determinists-Spengler is an exception-constructed his cosmic
scheme with a happy ending; 92
or, perhaps, it would be more ac-
90Ibid., p. 39. It is possible that the anti-relativisticstrain particularlynota-
ble in this work is due partly to Saint-Simon'scollaborator,the historianAugustin
Thierry (cf. Gouhier,La jeunessed'AugusteComte,III, 84-85, 88), but Saint-Simon
cannot have raised any objectionsto it, in any event.
91Oeuvres,XVIII, 218, n. 1; cf. however,Oeuvres,XXI, 15, n. 1, where Saint-
Simon declaredthat the industrial (i.e., the positive) system would automatically
provide the highest possible degree of social freedom. The difficulty may lie in
definingthe word freedom.
92Symptomatically,Saint-Simon,unlike Spengler, sometimes applied the bio-
logical analogyto society without paying attention to the stage of declineand death
(cf. above). At other times, however, he speculated pessimistically about the