There are certain figures in the history of ideas who have exercised wild influence over the course of human affairs. We know some of their names (Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, Marx, Darwin, Einstein, Keynes) but other mighty figures are less well understood in our times, such as G.F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, and many others.
One in particular stands out as something of a hidden architect of the ethos and aspiration alive in the West since his life and works. This is because of his strangely enduring legacy, which might have only recently faced a genuine reckoning.
The man is Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Just about the only thing people know about him these days is that he was a proto-socialist before Marx. The trouble is that this is not true: he never used those words and never advocated for collective ownership of the means of production. He was instead the high priest of technocracy, a cause he pushed with missionary zeal all in the name of lifting up the poor and working class.
Saint-Simon’s biography is peculiar enough. Born of aristocratic French lineage, he often claimed without evidence to be a descendent of Charlemagne (of course!). He was witness to the great event that defined his early and formative years, the French Revolution and the fall of the status of the monarchy.
We cannot imagine in our times the implications of this event for European intellectuals. All government and academia since the late Middle Ages had been formed out of the presumption that hereditary monarchs were the best custodians of civic life. From that came the strong belief that culture, religion, and the best ideas flowed through and from the aristocracy. Seeing the fall of that great idea shattered everything that many generations had believed about the world around them.
For Saint-Simon, there was an earlier chapter of his life that set the stage for his ideas. At age 17, he joined the French army (1777). France was allied with the American colonies against the British crown. The French organized an expeditionary force under the command of Comte de Rochambeau. Saint-Simon was a junior officer. Incredibly, he participated in the Battle of Yorktown, Virginia, where Washington and Rochambeau combined forces against British General Cornwallis. The British forces surrendered.
He took from this wild experience in the New World the notion that monarchies were likely doomed with the ascendance of superior technical prowess backed by democratic forms of government, provided they were led by elites—such as himself. When that experience mutated into the French Revolution, he was ready to write and evangelize for his new theory of society, government, and history. He gathered followers who long outlasted him.
Saint-Simon, inspired by the discrediting of aristocracy and impressed by the advance of technology, had a different view. Science is not a process of discovery by research but a codified end state known and understood only by an elite. This elite would impose its view on everyone else. Hayek called this “the abuse of reason” because genuine reason defers to uncertainty and discovery while scientism as an ideology is arrogant and imagines it knows what is unknown.
Simply put, Saint-Simon was an elitist but not in the conservative way we associate with lineage and heritage. He dreamed of a world without privilege of birth or inherited wealth. The aristocracy can be damned. He imagined a world of what he called merit but it was not merit by means of hard work and enterprise as such. It was a world run by geniuses or savants who have unusual intellectual gifts. They would comprise the managerial and ruling elite of society.
His preferred system of government would consist of 21 men: “three mathematicians, three physicians, three chemists, three physiologists, three men of letters, three painters, three musicians.” It was the council of 21! He imagined that they would get along well, not be corrupt in the slightest, and would rule with overwhelming benevolence.
We would find out who these people are by having votes placed at the grave of Isaac Newton (Saint-Simon’s god of choice) and eventually the consensus concerning the elite council would be chosen. They would not be a government as such, at least not as traditionally understood, but elite planners who would use intelligence to shape the whole society the same way that scientists understand and shape the natural world.
You see, to his way of thinking, this is far more rational than having an hereditary aristocracy in charge. And these men would in turn deploy their rationality in service of society, which would be enormously inspired by it. Saint-Simon wrote:
“Men of genius will then enjoy a reward worthy of them and of you; this reward will place them in the only position which can provide them with the means of giving you all the services they’re capable of; this will become the ambition of the most energetic souls; it will redirect them from things harmful to your tranquility. By this measure, finally, you will give leaders to those who work for the progress of your enlightenment, you will invest these leaders with immense consideration, and you will place a great pecuniary power at their disposition.”
So there you go: the elite get unlimited power and unlimited money and everyone will aspire to act like these people and this aspiration will improve the whole of society. It reminds me of the pre-modern system in China in which only the best students could enter into the class of the Mandarins, which were the 9 levels of high-ranking officials in Imperial China’s government.
Indeed, Saint-Simon invited his followers to “consider yourselves as the governors of the operation of the human mind.” He imagined “spiritual power in the hands of the savants; temporal power in the hands of the possessors; the power to nominate those called to fulfill the functions of the great heads of humanity, in the hands of everyone.”
Saint-Simon lived a life that oscillated between wealth and poverty, and regretted that condition would befall any man of his genius. So he cobbled together a political theory that would protect him and his ilk from the vicissitudes of the market. He wanted a permanent class of bureaucrats that would be completely insulated from the liberal world that had been celebrated only a quarter-century earlier by the likes of Adam Smith.
His writings inspired Auguste Comte and Charles Fourier, who agreed that science should assume the mantle of leadership in the social order. Here was the core of what Hayek called the “counterrevolution of science.” It was not science but scientism in which freedom for everyone is a hell, geniuses seizing control was the transition, and permanent rule by savants to shape the human mind was heaven on earth.
“Scientism” as an ideology is the reverse of science as traditionally understood. It is not supposed to be the codification and entrenchment of an elite class of social managers but rather a humble exploration of all the fascinating realities that make the world around us work. It is not about imposition but curiosity, and not about norms and force but facts and an invitation to look more deeply.
Saint-Simon celebrated science but became the anti-Voltaire. Instead of freeing the human mind, he and his followers imagined themselves to be governors of it.
Why do I say that his hegemonic influence is at an end? Because it is clear to many and even most people that science massively abused its power and privilege, foisting on the world a series of products and schemes that ended up achieving the opposite of their stated purpose, while enriching themselves in the process. The Saint-Simonians did indeed take over the world, with full triumph in the 21st century, with the apotheosis of their temporal power embodied in the pandemic response that now stands fully discredited.
It could be a full generation before we see the paradigm fully shift away from this technocratic outlook, but if my reading of the waves of history is correct, they have already been knocked off the mantles of prestige and power. Perhaps we can, after a long struggle out of this thicket, rediscover more credible uses of science and more humane ways to govern the world.
