Saint Simon
Saint Simon
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, often referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon (17 October 1760–19 May 1825) was a French utopian socialist thinker.
Saint-Simon was born in Paris. He belonged to a younger branch of the family of the duc de Saint-Simon. He claimed his education was directed by Jean le Rond d'Alembert, though no proof of this exists; it is likely that Saint-Simon himself invented this false intellectual pedigree. At the age of sixteen he was in America helping the Thirteen Colonies in the American Revolution against Britain. From his youth, Saint-Simon was highly ambitious. He ordered his valet to wake him every morning with, "Remember, monsieur le comte, that you have great things to do."] Among his early schemes was one to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific by a canal, and another to construct a canal from Madrid to the sea He was imprisoned in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris during the Terror. He took no part of any importance in the Revolution, although he profited from it by amassing a sizable fortune through land speculation; he said that this was motivated not by self-interest but by the desire to facilitate his future projects.
Early career
When he was nearly 40 he went through a varied course of study and experiment to enlarge and clarify his view of things. One of these experiments was an unhappy marriage — undertaken so that he might have a salon. After a year's duration the marriage was dissolved by mutual consent. The result of his experiments was that he found himself completely impoverished, and lived in penury for the remainder of his life. The first of his numerous writings, Lettres d'un habitant de Genève, appeared in 1802; but his early writings were mostly scientific and political. In 1817 he began in a treatise entitled L'Industrie to propound his socialistic views, which he further developed in L'Organisateur (1819), a periodical on which Augustin Thierry and Auguste Comte collaborated.
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Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, often referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon (17 October 1760–19 May 1825) was a French utopian socialist thinker.
Saint-Simon was born in Paris. He belonged to a younger branch of the family of the duc de Saint-Simon. He claimed his education was directed by Jean le Rond d'Alembert, though no proof of this exists; it is likely that Saint-Simon himself invented this false intellectual pedigree. At the age of sixteen he was in America helping the Thirteen Colonies in the American Revolution against Britain. From his youth, Saint-Simon was highly ambitious. He ordered his valet to wake him every morning with, "Remember, monsieur le comte, that you have great things to do."] Among his early schemes was one to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific by a canal, and another to construct a canal from Madrid to the sea He was imprisoned in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris during the Terror. He took no part of any importance in the Revolution, although he profited from it by amassing a sizable fortune through land speculation; he said that this was motivated not by self-interest but by the desire to facilitate his future projects.
Early career
When he was nearly 40 he went through a varied course of study and experiment to enlarge and clarify his view of things. One of these experiments was an unhappy marriage — undertaken so that he might have a salon. After a year's duration the marriage was dissolved by mutual consent. The result of his experiments was that he found himself completely impoverished, and lived in penury for the remainder of his life. The first of his numerous writings, Lettres d'un habitant de Genève, appeared in 1802; but his early writings were mostly scientific and political. In 1817 he began in a treatise entitled L'Industrie to propound his socialistic views, which he further developed in L'Organisateur (1819), a periodical on which Augustin Thierry and Auguste Comte collaborated.
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