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Fourier and the Saint-Simonians on the Shape of History Jonathan Beecher One of the main intellectual consequences of the French Revolution was to leave many Europeans with the sense that the optimistic, rationalistic and egalitarian ideology of the Enlightenment had exhausted itself and been discredited with the failure of the radical phase of the revolution. There was a sense on many sides that the Enlightenment had been “on trial” during the French Revolution and that the understanding of human nature and history offered by the Enlightenment had proved inadequate. The period that followed the French Revolution was therefore marked by an intellectual reaction leading in two directions. First, to the belief that future thinking about society and politics would have to take a much greater account of the affective needs of individuals and of the role that long-established beliefs and customs must play in the maintenance of any social and political order. Second, history had to be understood in a way that the eighteenth century had failed to understand it. Not simply as “philosophy teaching by example”— a storehouse of moral lessons useful at any time—but rather as a force or power greater than the will of any individual. In this essay, I discuss two of the most interesting French efforts to make historical sense of the post-revolutionary period: efforts made in the late 1820s by a group of young social thinkers called the Saint-Simonians and efforts made, started a generation earlier, by the utopian thinker Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Both Fourier and the Saint-Simonians were inspired by the desire to understand and overcome what they saw as the disorder of post-revolutionary society and culture. While neither was sympathetic to the Catholic and royalist reaction, both were strong critics of the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the narrowness of its conceptions of human nature and progress. Both believed that understanding begins by putting the present in historical perspective. Miller 2 :Whats minta 1 9/3/08 4:42 PM Page 47 48 Jonathan Beecher The Saint-Simonians, whose thinking was loosely inspired by the social philosopher Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825), were brilliant, but troubled young men and women who saw themselves living in a society in which traditional social bonds had collapsed. They were eager for a faith that would give them direction and purpose, and they regarded Saint-Simon as the prophet of a new world in which science and love might collaborate to bring about the material and moral regeneration of humanity. In 1829, they organized what amounted to a lecture series in Paris in which they attempted to spell out the main elements of their doctrine. The following year, having constituted themselves formally as a “church,” they began to devote themselves to missionary activity, sending groups of “preachers” out into the provinces to expound their social gospel. It was in their 1829 lectures that they presented the fullest account of their reflections on history. In these lectures on history the Saint-Simonians took issue with the tendency of earlier historians to focus on “great men” and their accomplishments. The true subject of history, they argued, was humanity as a whole—the human species considered as “a single body developing progressively according to invariable laws.”1 The first of these laws stated that history was marked by an alternation between two stages or epochs—the organic and the critical. The organic stage was one in which the goal of all social activity was clearly defined and widely understood. All efforts were focused on the accomplishment of this goal, and the different social roles that different individuals had to play were recognized and accepted. “Truly superior individuals ,” they wrote, “are naturally found in positions of power; there is legitimacy, sovereignty, authority in the true meaning of these words. Harmony reigns in social relations.”2 In organic periods, strong and weak were joined by common beliefs and by shared answers to life’s largest questions. Such periods were periods of religious unity, the Saint-Simonians asserted. They were periods in which shared belief culminated naturally and spontaneously in shared reverence and shared worship. Looking over the history of the West, the Saint-Simonians saw two great organic periods, each marked by the flourishing of a religion: the first was the period of early Greek and Roman polytheism and the second was the period of medieval Christianity. Critical epochs were epochs in which the old shared beliefs and relations came under attack and...

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