Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the “constructive” course he promised to chart.
13
To realize its promise, the
Congress needed only to abandon its old-fashioned diplomatic approach of
negotiation and compromise and instead adopt principles of social organiza-
tion laid out in accordance with discoverable laws.
14
All that was needed was
a scientific architect capable of producing the appropriate theorems, and
this duty Saint-Simon now offered to perform.
Believing that the European destiny he plotted had this scientific
basis, the variant political ideologies of the patrons Saint-Simon sought for
his plans did not matter. Natural truths were universal truths that tran-
scended such differences, and so he was just as happy to pitch his schemes
to Bonaparte as to Louis XVIII.
15
He had also hoped that the
industriels
, the
emerging class of scientists, artists, and technicians, would rise spontane-
ously to his prophetic directives and seize the reins of government. They
were nature's constituency and ought to instantly recognize the voice of its
prophet. But as he waited in vain for this group to rally behind his genius,
whatever other powers seemed to be in ascent would have to do.
16
Even as
he was making his appeal to the Vienna Congress as it worked to undo
Bonaparte's destruction, simultaneous overtures were also going out during
the “Hundred-Days” to Napoleon through his minister of the interior.
17
The
future he envisioned for the Vienna Congress was to be a loose confedera-
tion.
18
The same “general reorganization” of Europe that he proposed to
this democratic body as the instrument that would establish peace among
autonomous nations by “adjusting the claims of each and conciliating the
interests of all,” simply took on a more decidedly Francocentric and imperi-
alistic flavor in the letter he sent to Napoleon.
Saint-Simon was not the only French intellectual on this quest. His
search for a science of history that would guide the reconstitution of Euro-
pean society by “certain, absolute, universal principles, independent of time
and place,” took much of its inspiration from the social theorizing of the
ideologues.
19
This collection of philosophers, publicists, physicians, and sci-
entists had been influential during the revolution and continued to carry
forward its aims in the early part of the nineteenth century before falling
out of Napoleon's favor.
Idéologie
was their word for the generalized science
of society, a precursor to what the positivists under Comte's influence would
first call “social physics” and later “sociology.” Destutt de Tracy defined it as
a “science of ideas,” and Saint-Simon's friend Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis as
“the science of methods.”
20
But despite these aspirations to technicality, the general science of every-
thing envisioned by the ideologues was also meant to fill France's widening
