Born in 1760 (arguably also the birth year of the Revolution), Henri de Saint-Simon was a French theorist best known for, early on, identifying the industrial class as the group that must be protected to bring about a properly functioning economy and society. This was a philosophy that sought to learn from the Enlightenment era but applied to the industrial age amid the rise of productivity, individualism, and other forces spurred by capitalist production. This idealized vision of “the industrial society” not only condemned idleness of any kind, but also lacked any materialist basis, and so while Saint-Simon’s ideas influenced Karl Marx and others, this version of utopian socialism was one that ignored class struggle in favor of an industrialized vision of meritocracy.
Saint-Simon also learned from the French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, a key Enlightenment figure who, alongside championing the power of ideas and not people to lead the charge of the future, solidified for Saint-Simon the value of a rationalist determinism about human progress. He predicted that only this form of meritocratic industrialism would provide Western society with a viable future and that a proper hierarchy would be required to make it happen, with the decision-making industrial class at the top. As Walter M. Simon’s translation of Oeuvres de Saint-Simon & D’Enfantin (1865) shows, this belief in a deterministic causality lent his predictions their power.
“[T]he future consists of the last terms of a series whose first terms constitute the past,” Saint-Simon wrote. “When one has carefully studied the first terms of a series, it is easy to supply the following ones; thus one may easily deduce the future from a proper observation of the past.”
Saint-Simon had an authoritarian streak, too, believing so fully in his proposals for a better society that he felt they ought to be enacted by force: the attitude of a true philosopher-king that’s not unlike the style of tech evangelists in the twenty-first century, who likewise attach a sense of pure inevitability to their predictive abilities.