Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
interests of power that tempted some to turn reason against itself. Taking
their inspiration from this hope even as they criticized the merely reaction-
ary posture taken by many of its elder prophets, they aspired now to make
straight the course of progress by codifying it as science.
It was, no doubt, the fact that Condorcet's
Esquisse
already hinted at a
science of history that inspired Saint-Simon to declare it “one of the most
beautiful productions of the human mind.”
8
But he also wished to over-
come its fatalistic tendency to foresee a perennial warfare between reason
and superstition, and he did this by instead interpreting this apparent polar-
ity in dialectical terms. The mechanism of historical progress he theorized
in his 1813
Mémoire sur la science de l'homme
had advanced through two
alternating modes of scientific rationality, a synthetic or
a priori
mode now
fully understood in the scientific philosophy of Descartes, and an analytical
or
a posteriori
one associated with Locke and Newton.
9
The Enlightenment
had been unable to achieve the liberation it promised because it was preoc-
cupied too exclusively with science's analytical side, and now it was time for
a balancing response. Earlier setbacks only indicated that the “critical and
revolutionary” stage of the
philosophes
was passed, that it had given way to a
new period of “inventive and organizing” work that would bring new order
to civilization.
10
The revolution had remained incomplete only because the
attack on the
ancien régime
had not been complemented by this offsetting
synthesis. This work of construction would arise when the “system” of scien-
tific principles that governed social nature was discovered, thereby enabling
philosophers to predict and regulate history's course.
11
Saint-Simon's unwavering belief that these scientific laws were soon to
be found explains the often rash urgency of his political appeals. Although
he remained unknown and unread until the last fifteen years of his life,
this did not deter him from soliciting the attention of kings, emperors, or
anyone else who might listen, always with the confident expectation that
the world should instantly recognize the scientific character of his visions.
The manifesto that he wrote with Augustin Thierry to the delegates of the
1814-1815 Congress of Vienna,
De la réorganisation de la société Européenne
(
The Reorganization of European Society
)
reflects this certainty. With neither
any hint of diffidence nor scholarly sobriety, the unknown philosopher
asserted that Europe's only hope of political stability in the aftermath of
the Napoleonic wars was to be found in the implementation of his own
theories.
12
Speaking
ex cathedra
as an oracle of natural law, Saint-Simon pre-
sented himself as the prophet of a new epoch. The “philosophy of revolu-
tion” had run its course in the previous century and was now giving way to
