This article examines the evolution of nineteenth-century French economist Michel Chevalier’s reputation and self-understanding as a Saint-Simonian. Despite only having served two years as chief editor of the famous Saint-Simonian Globe, Chevalier’s attempt to re-integrate himself into liberal intellectual circles following his split from the Saint-Simonian movement was consistently hindered by his perceived adherence to its illiberal principles. This article mobilizes Chevalier’s reputation as a means to explore the porous boundary between Saint-Simonianism and French liberalism (...) at a time when the contours between the two traditions were still not clearly defined. I also argue that the economist’s continued prioritization of economic development over political liberty grounded a variety of liberalism that many political liberals found intolerable, notably in its willingness to endure Bonapartist authoritarianism for the sake of economic growth. Mobilizing new archival material from the Second Empire, this article illuminates how Chevalier and others understood his relation to Saint-Simonianism and liberalism in the moment when he was at the apogee of his power and influence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Robert Owen’s ideas and achievements largely shaped French republicanism in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly through the action of former Saint-Simonian socialists. This article explores this process, focusing on two of its major actors: the philosophers Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud, who joined the Republican Party in 1833. The two friends formulated an ambitious and influential republican doctrine in their Encyclopédie Nouvelle, in which Owen’s philosophy was largely mobilised, most particularly when Leroux theorised his religion de la fraternité (...) on the model of the ‘Religion of Charity’. Furthermore, Reynaud implemented key elements of Owen’s educational principles in the Second Republic’s policies when he became a leading figure of Hippolyte Carnot’s Ministère de l’instruction publique et des cultes in 1848. Finally, as the two men had a great influence on George Sand, sometimes described as Leroux’s ‘prophetess’, they introduced her to Owen’s ideas, which she presented and discussed in her novels. Thus, even if they sometimes remained ambivalent towards the British reformer, Leroux and Reynaud introduced parts of his thought and ideals into French republicanism, be it in terms of ideology, policies, or literary mythologies. (shrink)

This essay contests the notion that there was a necessary and fundamental opposition between republicanism and liberalism during the post-Revolutionary period in France. Constant's writings of the Restoration years show his abiding interest in both the construction of viable political institutions and the promotion of a vibrant political life. Worried about what he saw as growing authoritarian trends within the liberal camp, Constant wrote about the need to keep political liberty alive in commercial republics. His refutations of Auguste Comte and (...) the Saint-Simonians, and his writings on religion, should be seen as offering pointed lessons to fellow liberals about the crucial importance of both politics and the moral values promoted by religious freedom. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to add an important new dimension to the historical scholarship on early socialism by analysing the Saint-Simonian encounter with Owenism during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The article shows how the Saint-Simonian interpretation of Owenism was shaped by the manner by which the Saint-Simonians disseminated their doctrine. It draws on a number of neglected texts to show what the Saint-Simonians drew from Owen’s work and how they set out to distinguish (...) themselves from Owen and his French followers. The article focuses on key Saint-Simonian publications, including Le Globe and those edited by women members of the movement, Jeanne-Désirée Veret and Marie-Reine Guindorf’s La Tribune des femmes, and its early iterations. The article shows in detail the extent to which the Saint-Simonians saw Owen’s work as threatening to their cause, and how they formulated a thoroughgoing critique of it. (shrink)

This book is devoted to discussion of the views of Pierre Musso and starts with a central chapter written by Musso, entitled Network Ideology: from Saint-Simonianism to the Internet. Pierre Musso is a French philosopher and is one of the most original thinkers in the history of the network society. His thought develops a critique of information and communication technologies through their imaginary and social representations and of the information society, based on the network metaphor. The main question (...) on which Musso has focused his attention is how the network metaphor is one of the most powerful ways of understanding the complex societies in which we live. Showing characteristic attention to detail, and drawing on the history of ideas, political philosophy and sociology, Musso traces the genealogy of the network imaginary, and points out that it did not emerge with the Internet. He shows how its modern roots can be found in Henri de Saint-Simon and his disciples, engineers and entrepreneurs such as Michel de Chevalier, and Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, who developed channel networks, railroads, and the telegraphic network in France in the nineteenth century. In addition to the central piece written by Musso, the book includes a general introduction and six commentaries from experts on information technologies and networks. It displays a wide range of perspectives from a diverse set of authors in terms of nationalities and universities, as well as disciplinary backgrounds. (shrink)

Upon the death of Saint-Simon in 1825, his disciples endeavoured to develop and diffuse his ideas. They denounced an economic and social order in which workers were exploited by an idler minority in possession of the instruments of labour. The Saint-Simonians championed a project aiming to favour the public interest rather than that of a small number of owners profiting from an economy which catered to their needs. The quest for this public interest involved an improvement of the (...) lot of workers and required a novel approach to political economy, in turn, leading to a new industrial organisation. (shrink)

À la mort de Saint-Simon en 1825, ses disciples s’efforcent de développer et de diffuser ses idées. Ils dénoncent un ordre économique et social dans lequel les travailleurs sont exploités par une minorité d’oisifs qui détiennent les instruments du travail. Les saint-simoniens défendent un projet visant à privilégier l’intérêt général plutôt que celui d’un petit nombre de propriétaires dans une économie qui fonctionne à leur profit. La recherche de cet intérêt général passe par une amélioration du sort des (...) travailleurs qui doit se fonder sur une nouvelle approche de l’économie politique conduisant à une nouvelle organisation industrielle. (shrink)

Chez Saint-Simon, la substitution d'une réorganisation sociale et d'un autre rapport à la nature à l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme, de l'administration des choses au gouvernement des hommes, entre autres, ont pris corps théoriquement en partant de l'expérience plutôt que de 'raisonnements a priori' (Le Producteur, oct. 1825 - oct. 1826). De la lecture de ses Œuvres éditées pour la première fois en 2012 en Œuvres complètes émergent des liens entre action et pensée, corps et esprit. Le saint-simonisme (...) (1825-1835) apparaît, au lendemain de la Révolution de Juillet, comme un 'espace-temps' élargi aux prolétaires et aux femmes attirés par cette 'nouvelle et puissante doctrine', prêts à s'impliquer dans la pratique de ces liens et les discussions dramatiques entre les deux 'Pères', Bazard et Enfantin (sur la 'question de la femme', les rapports internes et externes - silence sur les émeutes des canuts lyonnais). Saint-Simon et le saint-simonisme ont été /sont des 'passe-frontières' entre les sexes, les cultures, les états (réciprocité des échanges avec la Toscane pré-unitaire et l'Allemagne des intellectuels post-hégeliens). À la promesse 'd'être sincères en tout', véritable leitmotiv du saint-simonisme, les 'prolétaires saint-simoniennes' ont répondu en créant un mouvement autonome où vivre leur désir de ne pas séparer cœur, corps et esprit, 'dans la foi religieuse qui nous donne la force de vaincre' (La femme libre, 1832) ; par la création de cette forme sociale-politique et l'audace de leur pensée, elles ont précédé les hommes ; leurs écrits et ceux de leurs proches (Cl. Démar, S. Voilquin) nous bouleversent encore. Des formes de créativité étonnamment populaires sont nées en Provence sur les décombres de la société d'ordre, telles les chansons provençales de V. Gelu à Marseille (1837-1855) et ses 'Notes biographiques' écrites en français (rééditées en partie à la fin XXe siècle), tel Le marquis des Saffras, roman du saint-simonien J. de la Madelène (1849) réédité plusieurs fois. Femmes et hommes se réfèrant au 'vrai', chez lesquels la totalité de l'être est engagée dans le sillage de Saint-Simon, n'inventent-ils pas le politique moderne à l'encontre des codes et des chartes fustigés par Cl. Démar (1833)? Le saint-simonisme n'a-t-il pas été la matrice de la sociologie avec la découverte du rapport à l'autre, dégagée du moralisme étouffant du 'Me siècle (S. Zweig), peut-être articulée à la naissance du féminisme? N'a-t-il pas généré une nouvelle manière de penser que la Ille République aurait tenté d'annihiler (imposition du positivisme comme philosophie centrale) et les prémices de la découverte freudienne?"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The relationship between the religious political group of the Saint-Simonians and the German movement for political reform around 1830 has already been amply investigated. Significantly less explored is the Jewish aspect of this connection. The article focuses on the significance of the participation of the Jewish members of the Saint-Simonian movement and the cultural transfer initiated by them with German Jewish intellectuals and political activists such as Gabriel Riesser.

SummaryBorn to a noble family in the Italian Trentino, Prati studied philosophy in Austria and Germany. Returning to Italy, he joined the carbonari, a network of revolutionary secret societies. Forced into exile in Switzerland, he worked as an educator alongside Pestalozzi. Following his expulsion from Switzerland, Prati sought refuge in Britain, becoming acquainted with Coleridge, the Benthamite utilitarians, and the Owenites. Following the July Revolution, Prati went to Paris, where he became a Saint-Simonian. Returning to Britain, he sought to (...) convert the British to Saint-Simonism, before undertaking a series of other literary projects. He eventually returned to Italy, where he entered into correspondence with the Roman Catholic philosopher Antonio Rosmini. Prati left behind him a trail of letters, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books, written in four different European languages. These have been hitherto neglected by scholars, and constitute the basis of the current article. (shrink)

This article deals with a blind spot in Hirschman’s analysis in The Passions an the Interests: according to him, the topos of the doux commerce would have been erased from the collective consciousness during the 19th century, due to the social consequences of the industrial revolution. However, in the debates that animate the industrialist thinkers under the French Restoration (1814-1830), the association between civil peace and economic development takes on new topical and argumentative forms with the conceptual shift from the (...) “trading nation” to the “industrial society”. This shift is not indifferent: it has reconfigured the topography of the doux commerce. On the one hand, the theme of peaceful industry superimposed the workshop model (regarded as cooperative, productive and hierarchical) on that of commercial exchange (regarded as more egalitarian). On the other hand, it opened the prospect not only of a simple softening, but of a radical substitution of interest for passions and of a total elimination of conflict thanks to the peaceful exploitation of nature. However, the emergence of the social question sowed discord among industrialists: without rejecting the commonplace entirely, the Saint-Simonians separated from the liberals by detaching the theme of peaceful industry from the dogma of free competition. (shrink)

Il sansimonismo, sistema culturale della civiltà tecnologica, di A. Cattabiani.--Nota dell'Editore.--Introduzione.--Beniamino Constant.--I San-Simoniani.--Appendice: L'utopismo di Carlo Fourier.

Frammenti di una storia della empietà.--Esame delle opinioni di Melchiorre Gioja in favor della moda.--Saggio sulla dottrina religiosa di G. D. Romagnosi.--Lettere.

This is the first major study of Marx and the Young Hegelians in twenty years. The book offers a new interpretation of Marx's early development, the political dimension of Young Hegelianism, and that movement's relationship to political and intellectual currents in early nineteenth-century Germany. Warren Breckman challenges the orthodox distinction drawn between the exclusively religious concerns of Hegelians in the 1830s and the sociopolitical preoccupations of the 1840s. He shows that there are inextricable connections between the theological, political and social (...) discourses of the Hegelians in the 1830s. The book draws together an account of major figures such as Feuerbach and Marx, with discussions of lesser-known but significant figures such as Eduard Gans, August Cieszkowski, Moses Hess, F. W. J. Schelling as well as such movements as French Saint-Simonianism and 'positive philosophy'. Wide-ranging in scope and synthetic in approach, this is an important book for historians of philosophy, theology, political theory and nineteenth-century ideas. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the history of the notion that to believe in religion is to believe in society by tracing instances in which, in the discourse of this current within nineteenth-century French republicanism, the term religion entered into the same semantic field as the notions of society and association. I analyze several groups and individuals who sought to define religion by invoking "association" and "society": the Saint-Simonians, P.-J.-B. Buchez, Pierre Leroux, Jean-Marie Guyau, and Emile Durkheim. I conclude (...) by suggesting that this way of thinking about religion not only illuminates the intellectual context in which Durkheim's religious sociology emerged, but also highlights a distinctly French social imaginary. (shrink)

Mill wrote in the 1849 edition of Principles of Political Economy that Fourierism presented “in every respect the least open to objection, of the forms of Socialism”. Why did he think this? If we look at Mill's earlier engagements with the Saint-Simonians and Comte side by side a striking pattern of agreements and disagreements emerges: Comte and Mill were anti-utopians, but the Saint-Simonians were not; Mill and the Saint-Simonians were feminists, but Comte was not; and the (...) class='Hi'>Saint-Simonians and Comte sought government by industrialists, but Mill did not. To understand this pattern is to highlight just how much common ground Mill did indeed share with the Fourierists and makes his verdict that they were less “open to objection” than any of the other socialists not so much surprising but practically over-determined. (shrink)

This book constitutes the first volume of a projected two-volume intellectual biography of Auguste Comte, the founder of modern sociology and a philosophical movement called positivism. Volume One offers a reinterpretation of Comte's "first career," (1798-1842) when he completed the scientific foundation of his philosophy. It describes the interplay between Comte's ideas and the historical context of postrevolutionary France, his struggles with poverty and mental illness, and his volatile relationships with friends, family, and colleagues, including such famous contemporaries as (...) class='Hi'>Saint-Simon, the Saint-Simonians, Guizot, and John Stuart Mill. Pickering shows that the man who called for a new social philosophy based on the sciences was not only ill at ease in the most basic human relationships, but also profoundly questioned the ability of the purely scientific spirit to regenerate the political and social world. (shrink)

There are three slogans in the history of Socialism that are very close in wording, viz. the famous Cabet-Blanc-Marx slogan: "From each according to his ability; To each according to his needs"; the earlier Saint-Simon-Pecqueur slogan: "To each according to his ability; To each according to his works"; and the later slogan in Stalin’s Soviet Constitution: "From each according to his ability; To each according to his work." We will consider the following questions regarding these slogans: a) What are (...) the earliest occurrences of each of these slogans? b) Where does the inspiration for each half of each slogan come from? c) What do the Saint-Simonians mean by “To each according to his ability”? d) What do they mean by “To each according to his works”? e) What motivates the shift from “To each according to his ability” to “From each according to his ability”? f) How should we envisage the progression toward “To each according to his needs”? g) What is the distinction between from “To each according to his works” and “To each according to his work”? (shrink)

In his analysis of the logic of history and social sciences Mill was much influenced by French writers of the Saint Simonian school and especially Auguste Comte. This school divided history into 'organic' and 'transitional' periods. In organic periods human personalities and institutions are coherently organized in a stable system, the workings of each part complementing and reinforcing the workings of the others. But this cannot last forever, stability is never absolute: the system starts to come apart, there follows (...) a period of more or less disorder and confusion, in which the parts of society pull against or collide with one another, personalities and institutions do not suit one another, people are dissatisfied and disappointed and change becomes rapid - until out of the struggle another stable organization develops, another 'organic' period. So on this view it is possible to draw non-arbitrary lines across history, to recognise distinct 'periods', though some of these will be periods of transition or revolutionary periods without any high degree of coherence. (shrink)

In the nineteenth century, the French utopian socialists, Saint-Simonians and Fourierists, developed different concepts of the colonisation of Africa. These concepts collided in Algeria. The Saint-Simonians were impressed by the Arab system of the tribal ownership of land. They wanted to preserve it and ultimately bring the two peoples, the Arabs and the French, together in the spirit of a commune. On the other hand, the Fourierists wanted to expropriate Arabs from their land and hand it over to (...) the French colonists so that they could build new economic communities of a phalanstery type. This article presents the theoretical disputes between the two schools and also describes the actual practical consequences of these disputes for the French colonial politics. (shrink)

This article seeks to demystify the influence that Merton continues to have over the sociology of science, including The Geography of Scientific Collaborations. It draws attention to the subbtle shift in Merton's own thinking from a 'communist' to a more stratified approach to scientific collaboration, the latter exemplified by what he called the 'Mathew effect', which he seemed to endorse. This has led the science system to move in seemlingly opposing directions as once: on the one hand, a more freelancing (...) approach by indiidual scientists ('Ricardian'), and on the other, a more teamwork approach by a scientific community ('Saint-Simonian'). It results in the 'dependency culture', especially in academia, as reflecting in th H-index of scientific citations. From the standpoint of the dynamics of capitalism, such a result is not surprising. Against this backdrop, DARPA offers an alternative model of cooperation. This US Cold-War inspired agency makes open calls for researchers to participate in projects whose futuristic orientation reduces the prior relative advantage of the applicants. In that respect, it points to a more egalitarian approach to collaboration that might also serve to deconstuct the academic disciplines that currently sustain the hierarchical approach. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:172 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY us," Saint-Simon wrote in 1814. Matching the development of mind of their eighteenthcentury rationalist compatriots with the development of love and action, the Saint-Simonians, Fourier and Comte saw hardly any stop to the inevitability and infinitude of progress and perfectibility. The prospect of the twentieth century, however, shows an "uneasy consensus." Manuel is not concerned to swell the flood of philosophical history but (...) to bear witness to it, and it is as a witness that he reports that man's "urge to place himself in a total time sequence" is undiminished, if anything it continues to grow and magnify. The search for a total meaning of historical existence is an apparently irrepressible drive. In this concluding chapter Manuel shows how the threads of the previously expressed ideas, particularly from French and German sources, are tied and knotted in the more familiar figures, Spengler, Sorokin, Toynbee, and a group of Christian writers and philosophers of history (de Chardin, Niebuhr, Dawson, Tillich, Pope Plus XII, and Pope John XXIII) illustrating and instantiating the vitality and longevity of the archetypal conceptions he began with. The great divide between theorists persists pretty much in the present as it did in older times. There are the progressists among whom are distinguished those still loyal to the French concept of perfectibility, a new school of philosophical life scientists writing cosmic history, and contemporary Marxists. Manuel classes the Christian theologians of history in a special category, which, although progressist in a sense, like Augustine denigrate earthly progress and restrict themselves to spiritual advance. Then there are the non- or anti-progressists, circular theorists, among whom Spengler, Sorokin, and "Toynbee I" are to be found. Having done duty for the Greeks and Romans, the Italians, French and Germans (surprisingly omitting the figure of Schopenhauer in his account) it would be a further service to have Professor Manuel's reading of English and Scottish involvement in philosophies of history of the sort he defines as "pictures of the total meaning of historical existence... (which have) included predictions of things to come as well as a reduction of the whole of the past to an order," for despite their professed empiricism it will not be denied that in figures like Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, as in some of the lesser figures of the English and Scottish Enlightenment (he mentions the "imitative works" of Price, Priestly, Spencer and Buckle), philosophies of history of the sort defined are implicit where they are not explicit and outspoken. Perhaps one day Professor Manuel will turn his illuminating searchlight to this area. While conceding Manuel's point that philosophies of history of the more distinctly speculative type have grown and even multiplied over the recent past, it should be added (what is common knowledge) that many equally responsible philosophers have tried both to discourage this growth and at the same time to make a contribution to the discipline through a more analytic approach. So far has this movement gone, indeed, that it would appear that the tide of speculative philosophies of history has ebbed greatly, and that "theories" of history are now pretty much restricted to poets, novelists, dramatists and their brethren in some of the social sciences, particularly psychology and sociology, especially in the Englishspeaking world. Whether the "analysts" are making a substantial contribution to our knowledge of historical processes (as distinguished from the language and logic of historical discourse) is still somewhat moot, but there is little doubt that the analysts are rapidly displacing the synthesists in philosophy of history. STANLEYM. DAUGERT Western Washington State College Universals: A New Look at an Old Problem. By Farhang Zabeeh. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Pp. vi -t- 68. $3.15.) In this short analysis of a perennial philosophical problem, Professor Zabeeh has taken upon himself the rather ambitious task of attempting to trace the development of the various attempts to explain the function, meaning, and ontological status of universals from Socrates BOOK REVIEWS 173 (or Plato) to Wittgenstein and Austin. In doing so, he has neglected (pace a few random references) the most fertile field for the analysis of universals, the medieval writers. To some extent, Professor Zabeeh does... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 697-716 [Access article in PDF] "La Mère Humanité":Femininity in the Romantic Socialism of Pierre Leroux and the Abbé A.-L. Constant Naomi J. Andrews Humanity, my mother, since you have led me, by so many paths, to conceive this design, support me, inspire me, affirm me. —Pierre Leroux, "Invocation to my Muse." 1It was during the July Monarchy in France, in the (...) era immediately preceding the Revolution of 1848, that the ideology we call socialism became more than an abstraction held by isolated intellectuals and conspirators. 2 A series of individuals, loose-knit associations, and more formal écoles were active during the 1830s and 1840s, developing a varied agenda of social reform, economic cooperation, or association, mystical Christianity, and women's liberation. Roughly lumped under the pejorative rubric of utopian socialism, and perhaps more accurately called romantic socialism, this movement was ultimately unsuccessful in achieving its diverse goals, but contributed significantly to the political discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 3Socialism at this stage of its development overlapped in many ways with republicanism, both being, to quote one historian of the latter, "an amalgam of responses to the Enlightenment, the 1789 Revoluation and above all economic [End Page 697] change." 4 Many early socialists were also republicans, and socialist ideas influenced the ideology articulated by republicans such as Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Auguste Blanqui. Louis Blanc, perhaps the best-known socialist of the decade surrounding the 1848 revolution, was and is known as a Jacobin socialist. 5From a certain perspective republicanism and socialism shared common origins and assumptions during the July Monarchy. Most socialists had come out of the political milieu of republicanism, whether through the carbonarist movement, opposition political clubs such as Droits de l'Homme and Les Amis du Peuple, or through the influential journalism trade of the Bourbon Restoration and early July Monarchy. Pierre Leroux, for one, had been a co-founder of the widely read journal le Globe, a bastion of liberalism, which he later turned over to the Saint-Simonians upon his conversion to their "church." 6 Although diverse in many ways, the left of this era did share certain core tenets, chief among them opposition to the Orleanist monarchy and, to varying degrees the belief in more democratic rule of the French nation.To say this, however, might erroneously imply a unity that was certainly not a feature of socialism during this period. In fact socialism, despite its near mystical devotion to ideas of unity, was anything but singular during its pre-Marxian phase. The spectrum of socialist thinkers and groups ranged widely. Standing closest to the republicans in their beliefs about politics and the revolutionary tradition were Jacobin socialists, most usually associated with Louis Blanc. Blanc and others articulated a social philosophy that sought "to unite two distinct ideologies: Jacobin democracy and co-operative socialism." 7 Thus Jacobin socialism combined republican political priorities and commitment to national political processes in general and to a centralized state in particular with attention to economic change, to reforming the distribution process along more equitable lines and to putting the situation of working people at the center of political change. In this goal Jacobin socialism reflected, as did other strains of socialism, the economic instability of the era and the emergence of an organized working class movement which followed the aborted revolution of 1830. 8At the other end of the spectrum one might put the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierist École Sociétaire. 9 Vehemently anti-republican, these groups shared [End Page 698] very little with the Jacobin socialists, other than a certain concern with the emerging working class, one of the few consistent features of early socialism. Unlike Jacobin socialists, these groups focused their theories of community at a very low level, having a strongly utopian component to their thinking. As a result, they tended to see national politics as irrelevant to the situation of ordinary people and even as a... (shrink)

Following the February Revolution in 1848, working-class women as well as men attempted to hold the government to its promise of the right to work, through street demonstrations, individual and collective demands for work, and participation in the national workshops that had been established in an attempt to address the problem of unemployment in the capital. In the process, these activists articulated what scholars have labelled as a democratic socialist vision of republicanism. In June of 1848, women participated in the (...) insurrection that sought to defend the vision of a social republic. While the republicanism of working-class men and bourgeois women such as George Sand has been examined, studies of working-class women in the first half of the nineteenth century have to this point focused on the romantic socialist influences that shaped their activities, in particular the Saint-Simonian movement. Drawing primarily on individual letters, police interrogations and newspaper reports, a vision of republicanism emerges that includes the ability for women to sustain their families through waged as well as household labour. This concept of republican virtue based itself not in suffrage but in women's capacity to act as both producers and consumers under just and equitable conditions. (shrink)

For Augustin Thierry, rewriting the story of the past was, until 1830, explicitly a way of making the future, and after 1830, implicitly a way of justifying the present. In subverting traditional historiography perceived as a legitimation of royal authority Thierry did not follow the Enlightenment strategy of opposing history and reason. Writing after 1789, he discovered reason in history. Constant and the Saint-Simonians had already distinguished two ages of history an age of conquest or violence, and an age, (...) just beginning, of commerce and reason but these appeared as discontinuous. Thierry's aim, especially after 1830, was to reveal history as a continuous, providential unfolding of reason, culminating in the bourgeois nation state. The violence of history was thus to be subsumed by reason. Historiographically, narrative and commentary were not to be discontinuous, as in Enlightenment historiography; meaning was to emerge instead from the narrative itself. Correspondingly, the historian's role was to be construed as a mediating, not a constructive one. The historian is the mouthpiece of history, as the bourgeois, the true hero of history, uniting in himself conquered and conqueror, re-presents what in history was divided the nation. In neither case is control to be viewed as a mark of division or violence; historian and hero are alike agents or representatives of totality . Violence reasserts itself thematically, however, in the stark, unresolved opposition of conquered and conqueror, subject and lord, female and male, victim and executioner, which structures Thierry's most successful historical narratives. (shrink)

During the past century and a half historians and sociologists have often shown signs of considerable simplicity of mind when assessing the motivating forces behind the men whose deeds they are studying, and those attaining the most flattering notoriety in the intellectual world have been among the simplest. From the early nineteenth century, beginning with the fall of Napoleon, there is a tendency to present the historical disciplines as sciences: the re-creative anecdote is greeted with increasing disdain, and sociology undergoes (...) its act of baptism. The Revolution of 1789 and the epic of imperial France are events of such dimension that it is difficult to associate them with the conscious designs of a few individuals. No longer a muse, Clio becomes a goddess. In War and Peace Tolstoi ironically treats historians of the old school who pretend to offer the key to the Revolution “in exposing the deeds and gestures of a few dozen men in one building in the city of Paris.” The French emperor's gallop into Russia and the stubborn but apparently passive resistance offered by Kutuzov—these are facts in which Tolstoi sees the manifestation of forces far surpassing the play of a few human wills. Tolstoi's manner in extolling Kutuzov is typical: Kutuzov is not a visionary; he shows no signs of genius, but with humble and patient fervor he turns aside all obstacles which might stifle the voice of popular instinct. Thirty years before Tolstoi, in a letter to his fiancée, Georg Büchner stated the case in another good example of this type of thinking: “I have studied the history of the Revolution. … I find in human nature a frightening equality, in the condition of man an ineluctable power conferred at once upon all and upon no one. The individual is but a fleck of foam upon the wave, greatness merely the result of chance, the power of genius a puppet show, a ridiculous struggle against a law of iron.” Men are interesting insofar as they are representative. Saint-Simon, mentor of Auguste Comte and father of sociology, declares that the great men of the world merely play the role assigned to them in historical evolution. According to Saint-Simon, the sixteenth century, an age of theology, gave birth to theologian-kings: Charles V and Henry VIII. Because he is a theologian, Henry VIII easily prevails over gallant and witty Francis I. The eighteenth century, a siècle of philosophy, “counts but two great names among its sovereigns: Catherine and Frederick the Great, friends of philosophers and patrons of philosophy.” Seen in this light, the features of the individual become blurred and shadowy. History is admired instead— history which, often with material of mediocre quality, builds solid edifices. But, faced with the astonishing drama played out by Napoleon himself, Tolstoi merely shrugs his shoulders, while following step by step simple men like Tostopchin or Kutuzov, who are obviously the mere instruments of history. Heine, who went through a Saint-Simonian phase, is amazed that Luther, that rough, gross monk whose brain was clouded by anxiety and superstition, so easily wielded the battering ram that shattered the old medieval world. In the 1830’s Auguste Comte foresees a “history without proper names,” a definition which is of prime importance in the analysis we are undertaking here. But, a hundred years later, Maxime Leroy, nourished on both Comte and Sainte-Beuve, draws more subtly shaded definitions: history becomes a “sociology containing proper names.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the Fourierist reception of Owenism. In challenging the established historiography on Owen’s reception in France, the article draws on a wide range of Fourierist material – letters, unpublished draft manuscripts, and neglected articles in Fourierist and non-Fourierist periodicals – that previously not accessible to twentieth-century historians in order to reassess the Fourierist response to Owen and Owenism. The article pays special attention to the work of Fourier’s leading disciple, Victor Considerant. It contrasts Fourier’s highly critical evaluation (...) of Owen’s work, with Considerant’s more considered reading of Owen and conciliatory approach in dealing with other socialists, such as the Saint-Simonians and Owen’s French disciples. The article also examines the work of some of Fourier’s other followers, including Jules Lechevalier, Adrien Berbrugger, Alexandre Baudet-Dulary, and Amédée Paget and their evaluations of Owen and Owenism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews,Shapes oS Philosophical History. By Frank E. Manuel. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965.Pp. 166.$1.95.) Based upon his seven Camp Lectures of 1962 at Stanford, Professor Manuel has issued this taut and recondite volume describing the forms philosophical history has taken in the West. He has performed a difficult task well, giving much scholarly substance to his theme that two archetypal shapes of speculative history-writing have dominated Western thought, (...) one an Augustinian teleological.unitary-procursus view, the other a Polybian, cyclical, Ixionlike, Stoic model. The first is broadly defined as "movement either to a fixed end, or to an indefinite end that defines itself in the course of the progression, history as novelty-creating and always variant"; the second as "circularity, eternal recurrence, return to the beginning of things, sheer reiteration or similar recapitulation." Comte and modem progressists are at the end of the first line, Nietzsehe and Spengler and other cylicists at the end of the second. However, broadly again, amalgamations of the two types are possible, syncretistic variants have often taken shape, and, Protean-hke, both lend themselves to almost infinite interpretive patterns. These typologies are psychological more than logical polarities, both emotional and intellectual alternatives, so they often stand for and serve contradictory purposes. Yet historians tend to betray their preference for one of these opposed conceptions, according to Manuel, as they "select an identity for historic man." Deliberately refraining from taking sides on the issue (thus implicitly casting some doubt on his contention that historians and others "inevitably betray their preference for one of these opposing conceptions"), Manuel addresses himself to the task of illuminating the polarity, exhibiting the multiplicity of its forms through time and focusing upon crucial moments of the debate in the West. Of these exhibits--early Christians vs. pagans, Augustine vs. Joachim, the virtual triumph of cyclicism in the Renaissance (albeit with a split developed between negative and positive, pessimist and optimist cyclicists), the ambivalence of the eighteenth-century Germans on the issue (particularly Kant and Herder), the triumphant optimism of the French perfectibilists, the vacillation of the German academists--Manuel's examination of the French and German writers stands out, although the range of his knowledge and first-hand inspection of archival sources from Augustine's time to Toynbee's demonstrates an admirable scholarship. Of the eighteenth-century Germans, Manuel well illustrates their ambivalent and paradoxical side. Herder, for example, nominally an opponent, debating against "abderite" cyclical theory and apparently concluding in favor of it; Goethe wondering whether the world "will become one great hospital in which we behave toward one another like benign male nurses" if Herder's more optimistic notions triumph; old Kant in his special language rejecting all then current models of world history (moral terrorism, abderitism and eudaemonism ) and opting for what Manuel calls a "mechanism... akin to the cunning of reason" to institute a just civil constitution and estabhsh perpetual peace, yet not really persuaded that his sanguine view of moral progress would prevail. As for the later Germans in and out of the Academy (particularly Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, HSlderlin and Hamann) while youthful enthusiasts of progress (everyone knows the story of the young Hegel and his friends planting the tree of liberty saluting the French revolution), their conceptions of history became more and more Platonic, more and more nostalgic and parochial. On the other hand Manuel's account of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century French relates their boundless energy and dedication to progressist conceptions, a development he holds as quite isolated and isolable from the German movement. Without doubt the French had the most imagination and the most confidence in developing philosophical history to an almost dizzying optimistic pitch. Manuel demonstrates a line from Voltaire through Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier and the Saint-Simonians to Auguste Comte, each building on the others in time, each theorizing "man's steady conquest of the external world, beginning in a period when he was still the member of a feeble and isolated band, and culminating in his present high estate." "The Golden Age of the human species is not behind us, it is before [171] 172 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY us," Saint-Simon... (shrink)

When, under the tutelage of the “Fathers” Enfantin and Saint-Amand Bazard, the disciples of Saint-Simon were initiated into the exemplary “proletarian” life, they were re-enacting the ways of the first Christians. Styling themselves as “apostles,” by way of justifying their doctrines, they invoked the authority of myth. The “City of God” referred to in their vows was no Utopian invention, but the “New Jerusalem,” the recreation of the original city; the New Book summarizing the ideology of a radical (...) renovatio, was the sacred text of a New Christianity. To the avowed Saint-Simonians, the Golden Age was not the source of some irrepressible nostalgia, but rather the promise of a social perfection that must be realized upon Earth in the more or less immediate future. The pilgrims of Ménilmontant were not unfamiliar with the myth of the Three Ages : did not one of them translate into French Lessing's “incendiary” essay on The Education of the Human Race? (Even while that new interpretation of millennial prophecy by the Calabrian abbot was, through Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, infiltrating into libertarian socialism and Marxism.). (shrink)

This article treats the intellectual problem of revolution, agency, and the advent of liberal democracy from the standpoint of mid-nineteenth century France in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. After a discussion of the theoretical and historiographical problem—in particular the relevance for this period in history of science studies—the article discusses the views of former Saint-Simonian and political economist, Michel Chevalier, eventually turning to the debate over the free market of goods and labor between the early French socialist Louis (...) Blanc and Chevalier in Chevalier’s new role of liberal free trade activist who trumpeted the ideology of the mass marketplace. Chevalier’s engagement of the social question turned on a distinctively moral, ideological, and, ultimately, technocratic defense of the free market—this free market utopianism became both starker and more ideologically refined as a result of Chevalier’s engagement with Blanc, especially in regard to worker-education. Both referred to the new mass marketplace of cheap, retail goods created by the rapid advance of mass transport, modern logistics, as le bon marché. French political economists went so far as to invoke a new way of life: la vie a bon marché (literally, “life on the cheap”). This notion of work and life was opposed by Blanc on the grounds of fraternal social solidarity. Finally, and potently, the moral virtues of the free market were conceived by Chevalier as a direct answer to social revolution, a means for affording social stability. (shrink)

The article focuses on the social-lexical history of the terms fraternité and solidarité in France during the first half of the 19th century. In particular, the author highlights how, in 1848, fratenité is both used in the motto of the Republic and associated with the defeated socialist republicanism. Then, the author focuses on its synonymous, solidarité, and he reconstructs the different contexts of use of this term , in order to show that its use in the social context accompanies the (...) formation of the first sociological approach with a republican-saint-simonian matrix. (shrink)

After his mental crisis in 1826 J. S. Mill set out to revise Benthamite Utilitarianism. The nature of that revision and its relation to Mill's mature philosophy is central to Mill scholarship. This study suggests that in order to understand the development of Mill's thought it is necessary to understand the central role he assigned to sympathy. ;Benthamism, to Mill, was based upon the assumptions that mankind was predominately motivated by self-interest, and that the greatest happiness of the greatest number (...) would be achieved by an artificial identity of interests. During his crisis Mill discovered that enlightened self-interest and an education based upon associationist psychology could not provide an abiding link between an individual's happiness and the happiness of others. The possibility of establishing such a bond, Mill came to believe, lay in each individual's capacity to sympathize with others. Mill's recovery from his crisis was sparked by the discovery of his ability to identify sympathetically with others and by his recognition of the possibility of nurturing the capacity for sympathy. This dissertation argues that these experiences became the foundation for Mill's revision of Benthamism and the core of his moral and social philosophy. Analysis of Mill's early essays , newspaper articles and letters establishes the extent of Mill's belief in the necessity of developing sympathy, and his insistence that sympathy be incorporated into Utilitarianism. ;Mill's appeal to sympathy is best understood in its intellectual context. This work interprets Mill's emphasis on sympathy within the context of the discourse on the relation of sympathy and self-interest to social morality articulated in the moral philosophies of Adam Smith and David Hume, the Romantic poetics of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, the moral philosophies of the critics of Benthamism and the social criticism of the Saint-Simonians. ;The role of sympathy in Mill's thought has yet to be fully examined. While this dissertation focusses on Mill's revision of Benthamism, sympathy is also a major theme in his mature moral and social philosophy. This study further suggests the need for re-examining Victorian liberalism in the light of the central role of sympathy. (shrink)

A proper understanding of some of John Stuart Mill's most distinctive ideas cannot eschew the consideration of his relations to France: besides his affective attachment to France and the French, Mill was indeed driven by an intense intellectual curiosity towards French society, its political, social, philosophical, moral and artistic life. This continued engagement with French thought must be viewed as a key element in his emancipation from the narrow‐minded utilitarianism inherited from his father and Bentham, and a crucial step in (...) the shaping of a philosophy of his own, and most notably an original social and historical philosophy of liberty. (shrink)

For several centuries prior to the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875, individual 'theosophers' in Britain and Europe were quietly in touch with one another all seekers of the inward way. Theosophic Correspondence (1792 1797) is a series of inspiring letters, personal and philosophic, exchanged during the climactic days of the French Revolution between Kirchberger, member of the Sovereign Council at Berne, Switzerland, and Saint-Martin, whom Kirchberger regarded as 'the most eminent writer . . . and most profound (...) of his age'. (shrink)

A puzzle for identity statements using massnouns, central to the expression of chemicaltypes, arises if one accepts that both `Wateris H2O' and `Ice is H2O' are identitystatements, since they jointly entail that`Water is ice'. The puzzle is resolved if itcan be shown that the `is' of such statementsis not the `is' of identity.