Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
outlined in Saint-Simon's
Introduction aux travaux scientifiques du xix
e
siècle
(
Introduction to the Scientific Studies of the Nineteenth Century
) (1807-1808),
Mémoire sur la science de l'homme
(
Memoire on the Science of Man
)
(1813), and his
millenarian
Nouveau Christianisme
(
New Christianity
) (1825) would find their
more influential expression in Comte's
Cours de philosophie positive
(
Course of
Positive Philosophy
) (1830-1842) and
Systéme de politique positive
(
System of Posi-
tive Polity
) (1875), Saint-Simon's words were spoken into the hurricane winds
of crisis that still raged as the revolution gave way to the Napoleonic period
and Bourbon restoration. For this reason they give us a clearer picture of
the rhetorical pressures that were then working to condense the loose specu-
lations of Enlightenment philosophers into a harder scientific substance.
Saint-Simon's writings may be only the disorganized outpourings, as Frank
Manuel describes them, “of a man who suffered from intermittent fits of
mental disorder,” yet “for all their exasperating confusion they constitute
the first version of a socio-philosophical system which gained broad accep-
tance on the European continent.”
6
Indeed, Saint-Simon's creative genius
would cause Durkheim to give him greater primacy than even Marx in the
development of those positivist notions of society that were beginning to
give rise to socialism.
7
Like other heirs of the Enlightenment, Saint-Simon found himself
enthralled with the visionary implications of Condorcet's
Esquisse
, and this
gives us good reason for supposing that he absorbed into his own histori-
cal worldview the displaced narrative already at work in this outline. There
were, no doubt, some personal reasons for this attraction. Like Condorcet,
Saint-Simon was a liberal aristocrat and had nearly become a victim of the
Terror himself. He responded to the disillusionments he shared with the
elder
philosophe
by pressing harder to justify the intellectual currents that had
given rise to the revolution. By the time this former soldier and veteran of
the American War of Independence had begun his second career as a social
theorist and pamphleteer at the turn of the nineteenth century, Condorcet's
Esquisse
had been enshrined by a new generation of liberal thinkers as its
manifesto of progress. For these writers and political activists, it was no lon-
ger merely an apology for the Enlightenment project but rather a roadmap
capable of righting the course of the ongoing movement it celebrated. Those
of Saint-Simon's generation were not inclined to doubt Condorcet's ratio-
nalization for the Terror as the inevitable counteraction of tyranny and “its
faithful companion superstition” seeking to take hold of the gains made by
reason. Nor did they challenge his optimistic expectation that progress was
assured by reason's immanence within nature and only slowed by certain
