Note 436 — Chapter II · : SAINT-SIMON, THE SAINT-SIMONIANS, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF COLLECTIVISM

Not to speak of celebrated Utopians like Plato, More, and Campanella, a number of writers who have been minutely studied by Lichtenberger undertook to supply such criticism in the eighteenth century. Morelly, Mably, Brissot, and Meslier the curé in France, and Godwin in England, attacked the institution of property with becoming vigour. Babeuf, who in 1797 suffered death for his attempt to establish a community of equals, has left us a summary of their theories. But the Saint-Simonians owe them nothing in the way of inspiration. Eighteenth-century socialism was essentially equalitarian. What aroused the anger of the eighteenth-century writers most of all was the inequality of pleasure and of well-being, for which they held the institution of private property responsible. “If men have the same needs and the same faculties they ought to be given the same material and the same intellectual opportunities,” says the Manifeste des Égaux. But the Saint-Simonians recognise neither equality of needs nor of faculties, and they are particularly anxious not to be classed along with the Babeuvistes—the champions of the agrarian law. Their socialism, which is founded upon the right to the whole produce of labour and would apportion wages according to capacity, aims neither at equality nor uniformity.

The Saint-Simonians seem to have remained in ignorance of the socialist theories of their contemporaries, the French Fourier and the English Thompson and Owen. Fourier’s work only became known to Enfantin after his own economic doctrine had been formulated. Saint-Simon and Bazard appear never to have read him. It is probable that Enfantin only became aware of Fourier’s writings after 1829, and when he did he interested himself merely in those that dealt with free love and the theory of passions. As Bourgin put it: “If Fourier did anything at all, he has rather hastened the decomposition of Saint-Simonism.” (Henry Bourgin, Fourier, p. 419; Paris, 1905.)

The English socialists are never as much as mentioned. The Ricardian doctrine of labour-value, which is the basis of Thompson’s theory and of Owen’s, and later still of that of Marx, seems never to have become known to them. “Questions of value, price, and production, which demand no fundamental knowledge either of the composition or the organisation of society,” are treated as so many details (Le Producteur, vol. iv, p. 388). Their doctrine is primarily social, containing only occasional allusions to political economy. Enfantin is careful to distinguish between Quesnay and his school and Smith or Say. The Physiocrats gave a social character to their doctrine, which the economists wrongfully neglected to develop. Aug. Comte, in the fourth volume of the Cours de Philosophie, has criticised political economy in almost identical terms, which affords an additional proof of his indebtedness to Saint-Simonism.