Positive Liberty

What can be said about Saint-Simon? He is little read today and even less appreciated, that much is true. And on reading the “Letter from an Inhabitant of Geneva to His Contemporaries,” one is tempted to ask: Is this what they call socialism?

It is, it is.

Before Marx, many notions that passed for socialism amounted ultimately to claims that this or that method of production would be more agreeable or more efficient. In retrospect, the more successful of them don’t really look all that much different from capitalism at all, while the less successful look like failed experiments in the same. Marx changed all that, by calling for reforms not just in the methods of production or the distribution of wealth, but also in society and conscience, and in positing that these reforms could only be achieved by a radical, probably violent break with the past.

Even Fourier did not go that far. Yes, he envisioned a society radically transformed, but it would be through common sense and voluntary cooperation. And it would be — a key distinction — achieved solely through reforms to the methods of production, undertaken without any violence at all.

Fourier grumbled loud and long about the inefficiency of individual family kitchens, individual storage attics, and even individual houses. Why does everyone cook a nightly meal in a separate fire? Why not have all cook together, and eat together, which will be more efficient and improve camaraderie besides? Why separate dwellings, when a single large building is more efficient to heat? Why so many storage attics, when a single warehouse could be maintained more efficiently? The ideal for him could be found in the small farmers who each contributed a share of milk to a communal cheese, one that could never have been made, or else only made very badly, if each had attempted it alone. This was the way toward socialism.

Usually considered the founder of French socialism, Saint-Simon offers a variant on this sort of voluntary communal project in his “Letter,” one that would have many later echoes and even keeps some of its intuitive appeal today. Like Fourier’s, Saint-Simon’s project would ideally be undertaken voluntarily.

The scheme is simple enough:

Open a subscription in honour of Newton’s memory: allow everyone, no matter who he may be, to subscribe as much as he wishes.

Let each subscriber nominate three mathematicians, three physicists, three chemists, three physiologists, three authors, three painters and three musicians.

The subscriptions and nominations should be renewed annually, although everyone should be completely free to renominate the same people indefinitely.

Divide the amount of the subscriptions between the three mathematicians, the three physicists, etc., who have obtained the most votes.

Invite the President of the Royal Society in London to receive the subscriptions for the first year. In subsequent years, entrust this honourable duty to whomsoever has given the highest subscription.

Make it a proviso that those who have been nominated should accept no posts, honours or money from any special group, but leave each man absolutely free to use his gifts as he wills.

And why should the landed rich and the old aristocracy want to do this? Because it is in their own interests that the best people should rule. Except that they aren’t them anymore:

Gentlemen, do not take issue with them, for you will be beaten in every battle in which you allow them to embroil you. You will suffer more than they during hostilities and the peace will not be to your advantage. Give yourselves the credit of doing something with good grace which, sooner or later, the scientists, artists and men of liberal ideas, joined with the propertyless, will make you do by force: subscribe to a man - it is the only way open to you to avert the evils which threaten you.

This might just be the founding text of technocratic government, and the above paragraph is virtually the exact theme of, for example, the film Things to Come, which we will be watching and discussing in a few weeks. Scientists are to be the new spiritual elite, Saint-Simon declares, and this is both a good idea and what everyone ought to want, if only they were rational enough.

It’s worth asking, however, whether the Saint-Simonian project is altogether voluntary, coming as it does with a threat attached. (Resistance is futile?) Saint-Simon himself seems to equivocate a bit: “Think of yourselves as the regulators of the progress of the human mind; you can play this part; for if, through the subscription, you give prestige and comfort to men of genius,” he tells the propertied classes. And it is unclear whether the ultimate authority will be the scientists, or those who fund them.

From here, the fight is on: What will control the future? Force? Money? The men of intellect? Isaac Asimov’s Foundation — next up on our reading list — is an important commentary on these themes, as are many of the subsequent texts. And of course, some of our authors will maintain that no one in particular should “control” the future, that the question itself is badly posed, and that it leads to nothing but trouble. There is a lot to be said for this view as well.

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