Henri de Saint-Simon
Henri de Saint-Simon (actually Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon ; born October 17, 1760 in Paris , † May 19, 1825 in Paris) was an important French sociological and philosophical author at the time of the Restoration .
The early socialist Saint-Simonism appealed to him .
Live and act
Saint-Simon (as he is simply called in historiography) came from a noble family and was a distant younger relative of the well-known memoir author Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon . At 17 he joined the volunteer troop with which the Marquis de Lafayette went to America to fight in the War of Independence against England on the side of the insurgents, who were also secretly supported materially by France.
In 1789, like many liberal aristocrats, he initially sympathized with the revolution and adopted the real name of Claude Bonhomme. But in 1794, during the reign of terror , he barely escaped the guillotine . Since he was impoverished by the expropriation of his goods, he switched to business activities after the moderate Directory came to power (1795) and quickly regained prosperity. In order to document this and in the hope that she would lead him a spiritually and socially authoritative salon, he married Sophie de Grandchamp in 1801 . However, the marriage quickly fell apart and with it prosperity.
After that he lived as an independent intellectual on the remains of his fortune and on donations from a former servant who had become rich. He moved around the school of thought of the so-called ideologues around Destutt de Tracy , pursued scientific and philosophical studies, and began to write social and political theory, which initially remained mostly unprinted. These include B. the Lettres d'un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains (1803, German: "Letters from a resident of Geneva to his contemporaries"), in which modern science is stylized as a kind of religion; or the Essai sur l'organization sociale (1804, German: "Essay on the organization of society"), the Introduction aux travaux scientifiques du XIXe siècle (1807, German: "Introduction to the scientific work of the 19th century"), the Histoire de l'homme (1810, German: "History of man"), the Mémoire sur la science de l'homme (1814, German: "Memorandum on the science of man"). Saint-Simon did not see his task as researching individual questions, rather he tried to unite the research results of his time and to use these elements to determine a new social science and a new social order.
At the time of the Restoration after Napoleon's fall in 1815, Saint-Simon gradually became known, initially as a publicist with numerous articles, but also short-lived magazines, e.g. B. L'Industrie (1816–1818), which he wrote or edited in collaboration with his secretary Augustin Thierry , who later became a well-known historian. He finally became a quasi-prophet through the books Du système industriel (1820–1822, German: “From the industrial system”), Catéchisme des industriels (1823/24, German: “Catechism of the industrialists”) and De l'organization sociale ( 1824, German: "From the social organization"), in whose development his new secretary Auguste Comte , who later founded the school of thought of positivism and sociology, was involved .
Saint-Simon tapped the potential of industrial society for utopian thinking. With the increase in social wealth he expected that the conflicting interests between the owners and non-owners of the means of production would become meaningless. In his writings, Saint-Simon took the revolutionary view that only "industrialists" ( industriels ), i.e. H. that through “ work ” (the word also meant “inventiveness / industriousness”) services and, above all, goods-producing individuals, are useful members of society, and that the share of the individual in jointly generated prosperity is to be measured according to his or her contribution parasitic classes such as the nobility , the rentiers , but also middlemen of all kinds missed out, while both the employers and the workers received their appropriate wages. In his posthumously printed book Le Nouveau Christianisme (1825, German: “Das neue Christianentum”), Saint-Simon declared it was also the task of Christians to give the lower strata of the population fair consideration in the distribution of the national product .
meaning
Saint-Simon not only founded the economic and social science school of thought of the Saint-Simoniens , which became very important in the 1830s and 1840s, but he also had a strong impact on the socio-political ideas of many authors of the Romantic period and, above all, many political actors of the time.
He was one of the representatives of the early socialism that aroused the opposition of Karl Marx and thus influenced his thinking. With Le nouveau christianisme he became one of the fathers of Catholic social teaching , which flourished around and after 1900 and saw itself as a Christian alternative to atheistic socialism à la Marx.
His belief in science and in the recognizability of the rules of human coexistence shaped his pupil Auguste Comte and his influential philosophy of positivism.
Today Saint-Simon is regarded as the forefather of scientific sociology and at the same time of utopian socialism .
Works
- Lettres d'un habitant de Genève (1802)
- Reorganization de la société européenne (1814)
- L'Organisateur (1820)
- Le Système Industriel (1821)
- Le Catéchisme des industriels (1824)
- Le Nouveau Christianisme (1825)
Translations
- Selected writings . Ed. Lola Zahn , translator Lola Zahn. Berlin 1977 (Economic Study Texts, Vol. 6 Table of Contents )
- New Christianity. Translated from French and provided with an introductory treatise "The Origins of Christian Social Ideas" by Friedrich Muckle . Major works of socialism and social policy , new series, 1st issue (of the entire series XI. Issue). Leipzig, Hirschfeld, 1911
literature
- Paul Janet : Saint-Simon et le Saint-Simonisme . Paris: Germer Baillière, 1878.
- Georges Weill: Saint Simon et son Œuvre. Un Precurseur du Socialisme . Paris: Perrin, 1894.
- Georges Weill: L'École Saint-Simonienne. Son histoire, son influence jusqu'à nos jours . Paris: F. Alcan, 1896.
- Maxime Leroy: La vie véritable du Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) . Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1925.
- Sébastien Charléty: Histoire du Saint-simonisme, 1825-1864 . Paris: P. Hartmann, 1931.
- Mathurin Marius Dondo: The French Faust. Henri de Saint-Simon . New York: Philosophical Library, 1955.
- Frank Edward Manuel: The New World of Henri Saint-Simon . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956.
- Dietrich - E. Franz: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen - social utopias of the 19th century. Leipzig, 1987. ISBN 3-332-00082-9
- H.-C. Schmidt am Busch et al. (Ed.): Hegelianism and Saint-Simonism . Paderborn: Mentis, 2007. 232 pp. ISBN 3-89785-538-0 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Henri de Saint-Simon in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Henri de Saint-Simon in the German Digital Library
- Article in name, title and dates of the French literature
- france expert
Individual evidence
- ^ Rolf-Peter Fehlbaum: Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonists. From laissez faire to economic planning. Kyklos / JCB Mohr, Basel / Tübingen 1970, p. 2 .
- ↑ Petra Schaper-Rinkel: "Other futures: Politics of Utopias. In: PROKLA. 2005. (PROKLA)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Saint-Simon, Henri de |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy Comte de; Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, Henri de |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Aristocrat, American Revolutionary War officer, ideologist, and publicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 17, 1760 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 19, 1825 |
| Place of death | Paris |