Saint-Simon (1760–1825) (review)

Until recently, the most comprehensive introduction to the thought of Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon was Pierre Musso's Saint-Simon et le saint-simonisme (Paris: PUF, 1999). Unlike Musso's book, this slim volume eschews biographical detail and dwells neither on Saint-Simon's legacy nor on the dissemination of his thought by the Saint-Simonians. Grange's presentation avoids any description of Saint Simon's thought in terms of a series of scientific, political or religious phases. The aim of this book is to identify an abstract problematic common to Saint-Simon's epistemology, his political writings and his call for a New Christianity. This aim is ambitious, given Saint-Simon's own preference for a haphazard mode of exposition, characterized elsewhere by Christophe Prochasson as 'poussées intempestives d'idées mal présentées' (Christophe Prochasson, Saint-Simon ou l'anti-Marx: figures du saintsimonisme français : XIXe - XXe siècles (Paris: Perrin, 2005), p.85.). However, as Grange's introduction makes clear, Saint-Simon's apparent carelessness is born of his suspicion of the metaphysical tradition and the arid precision of the savant. Grange shows how this concern moulds his particular conception of philosophy, the aim of which is to establish a 'general method' or synthetic model of human knowledge based on paradigms common to the physical and life sciences. The first chapter provides a succinct account of Saint-Simon's attempts to lay down an epistemological basis for his 'science de l'homme' and to discover a unifying general principle capable of surmounting scientific conflicts. The section on physiology is particularly effective within this chapter. For Saint-Simon, the paradigms of functional complexity from the methodologies of the life sciences present a transformational reference for the study of man. Grange provides a convincing account of how Saint-Simon's development of the concept of organization allows him to estalish a unified basis for the understanding of the internal complexity of the human body and the evolution of individuals within social structures. The organizational model also informs Saint-Simon's understanding of politics, dealt with in Chapter 2. Saint Simon criticized Enlightenment political philosophy for its neglect of the social and historical dimensions of human experience. In his view, the degree of advancement of human industry is indicative of the interplay of the social organization and its natural milieu. Since industry provides the motor of history, Saint-Simon argues that less rigid versions of concepts such as nature, property and the State are required, with the aim of providing a more holistic basis for the productive development of the social organization. The book's final section describes how the search for a new basis for the social bond sparked Saint-Simon's interest in the affective and social mechanisms of religion. His projected social organization was to be achieved via persuasion and rational argument rather than by violence or via constitutional and legal means; thus belief and morality could be brought into the service of social cohesion. A selection of commented texts by Saint-Simon on these themes complements this fine short introduction to his thought.