Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Gregory Claeys

philanthropy, a universal good-will, which can only be developed when the

entire human race shall be rich, free, and just’ (Fourier 1901,p.61). At its

simplest level, then, Fourier’s theory postulated that happiness required the

satisfaction of desires for social interaction as well as those for individual

self-expression. By maximising freedom, thus, these could be reconciled,

and order could also be attained.

The most important application of this account of the passions was to

labour, which was repulsive only because falsely organised, but which would

be made attractive by recognising that here three passions needed to be ful-

ﬁlled and harnessed: the papillonne, or need of change and variety; the cabal-

iste, or love of intrigue, rivalry and emulation; and the composite, a com-

pound pleasure affecting both mind and the body. Fourier’s communitarian

ideal, called by him the ‘Phalanx’ from about 1800, was to involve about

1,800 persons, or 400 f amilies, organised on a square mile of land, and living

in one enormous central building some six storeys high, with two wings,

called the phalanst

ere. Here unproductive labour would be minimised, by

pooling resources communally and abolishing idleness. Economies of scale

in community would reduce the cost of living immensely, and avoid the

need for any class of servants. The system of ‘attractive association’ based

on the ‘law of passionate attraction’ was to be applied to work in order

to release individual creative potential. Monotony was to be avoided by a

scheme of rotation between up to eight tasks daily which linked groups

possessing similar aptitudes and tastes, encouraged the free choice of work,

and avoided excessive labour. Industrial labour would be no more than

one-quarter of the total: the phalanx, deﬁned in 1808 as an ‘agricultural

association’ (Fourier 1996–8,p.10), would essentially be a market garden on

an immense scale. Organisation of the community was broken down into

groups of seven to nine people, twenty-four to thirty-two groups forming

a ‘series’. The continuing existence of capital would help to ensure the

preservation of individual freedom in face of the possible tyranny of the

phalanx. Here liberty and fraternity are given greater priority over equality

than in the other early socialist systems; Fourier indeed described equality

as ‘a political poison in association’, adding that

the English are ignorant of that fact, and constitute their communities of families of

about equal fortune. The associative r

egime is as incompatible with equality of fortune

as with uniformity of character; it desires a progressive scale in every direction, the

greatest variety in employments, and, above all, the union of extreme contrasts, such as

that of the man of opulence with one of no means, a ﬁery character with an apathetic

one, youth with age, etc. (Fourier 1901,p.128)

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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914

The phalange or phalanx was thus not to be communistic, nor was self-

interest to be abolished; hence Fourier’s principle of distribution is often

understood as more ‘realistic’ than that of the communist writers. (Accom-

modation and dining facilities of different grades were to be available too,

though ‘the food sent to the ordinary people’s kitchens’ would ‘be ﬁner

than the food we reserve for kings’, Fourier 1996–8,p.164.) The economic

product was to be divided into three parts: capital receiving four-twelfths,

labour ﬁve-twelfths and talent three-twelfths (but individuals might belong

to each group). Freedom of inheritance would also secure existing fortunes.

But despite social classes, a spirit of unity would pervade the association: for

some it is thus ‘Fourier’s concept of community as individual self-realisation

through the creation of social institutions permitting human encounters

that deﬁnes him as a socialist’ (Poster, in Fourier 1971a, p. 20). The wealthy

would beneﬁt by being no longer despised by the poor, and would assist in

some work purely for the sake of association. Hard labour would also be

better paid than pleasant work, with a generous minimum wage, each ‘Har-

monian’ being advanced clothing, food and housing each year, to be repaid

by labour (Fourier 1901,p.191). The government of the phalanx was to

be republican, with all ofﬁcers elected, and coercion minimised. But details

of phalangist ‘politics’ are sparse; the assumption again is once the great

‘stumbling-block’ of politics, poverty, had been abolished (Fourier 1851,

i,p.339), fundamental divisions of opinion would not create entrenched

partisanship; that satisﬁed beings, content with, perhaps exhausted by, the

exercise of rich individuality, would be less prone to disagreement, and that

the passion for power over others, or the cabalist spirit of intrigue, would

have been sublimated by being channelled into the passional intrigues of

some thirty series.

By this means the rich, in particular, would be less prone

to desire domination over the poor in the phalange (Fourier 1971a, p. 299,

1851, i,pp.325–45,andii,pp.13–27, on cabalism). Eventually all phalanges

would federate and elect a single leader, resident at Constantinople. But this

would not be a paternalistic world-government, for Fourier was utterly dis-

missive of ‘the most ridiculous prejudice, the conviction that the good can

be established by government action’, claiming that every form of ‘civilised’

administration also preferred its own good (Fourier 1971a, p. 162).

3 ‘ . . . love, a passion of which the analysis appears ver y frivolous to us, and which, far from being a

spring foreign to the politics of harmony, will with ambition be then the most potent spring of the

industrial combinations, for in harmony love is quite as powerful a vehicle as ambition to attract men

to agricultural and manufacturing labor’ (Fourier 1851,vol.i,p.248). Fourier here calls love ‘a lever

of social politics’ (i,p.248).

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Gregory Claeys

Fourier also recognised that other forms of human vice besides greedy

self-interest could corrupt and destroy communities. But such passions,

again, were not to be repressed, but channelled in positive ways. Gluttony

and the love of luxury could be accommodated, for instance, by increasing

the standard of living and taste culture in food and accommodation (‘the

generalisation of epicurism’, in other words; Fourier 1901,p.63); while a

love of disorder and dirt in children could be fulﬁlled by their occupations.

Lust was to be sated by ensuring a ‘sexual minimum’ of gratiﬁcation, and the

vast extension of every form of sexual relationship that would occur when

the ‘incoherent household’ of bourgeois society had been superseded. But

Fourier’s radical theories on sexuality and marriage or ‘enslaved monogamy’,

which he proposed to abolish, and his urging of the necessity for universal

sexual gratiﬁcation, with a ‘Court of Love’ supervising sexual relations, were

regarded as overly controversial by his disciples, and suppressed (his treatise

Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux was not published in full until 1967;English

extracts are in Fourier 1971a; and a German translation, Fourier 1977).

Fourier contended, however, that only such an ‘amorous corporation’ could

ensure the fullest freedom for women, and insisted indeed that ‘the extension

of privileges to women is the general principle of all social progress’ (Fourier

1901,p.77).

The Fourierist ideal of daily varied labour, ﬁve sumptuous meals,

free religious worship, diverse cultural expression and copious sexual

intercourse, not unsurprisingly soon found votaries. The movement

spawned a number of mostly short-lived communities in France (notably

Jean Godin’s Familist

ere at Guise, founded in 1859) and Britain, and rather

more in the United States, notably at Brook Farm, during the 1840s

(Guarneri 1991). Fourier’s chief disciple in France in this period was Victor

Consid

erant (1808–93), who gave preference to the state over the phalange

as the agency of social refor m (Beecher 2001). In the United States Albert

Brisbane (1809–90), whose Social Destiny of Man appeared in 1840,proved

an indefatigable interpreter. Fourier’s inﬂuence was also powerful on the

nascent Russian socialist movement. And for a brief moment, at least (in

1845–6), and perhaps only fancifully, Marx and Engels acknowledged the

attractions of being able to ‘hunt in the morning, ﬁsh in the afternoon,

rear cattle in the evening, engage in criticism after dinner, just as I please’

(Marx and Engels 1976, v,p.47). But this was not to be the image

of communist society with which they would thereafter choose to be

afﬁliated.

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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914

5 Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism

The most inﬂuential form of early socialism, as far as mainstream social

and political thought is concerned, was Saint-Simonism. Its founder was

Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), a French nobleman who fought in

the American War of Independence and renounced his title at the French

Revolution. Thereafter he became involved in canal construction and land

development, but was ruined ﬁnancially in 1804. His main writings, pub-

lished between 1803–17, are neither communitarian nor, by most deﬁni-

tions, socialist (though see Durkheim 1959); it was his chief followers who

extended his ideas in this direction, or, like Auguste Comte, built upon

his analysis of industrial society. Saint-Simon himself was initially chieﬂy

concerned, in the tradition of Condorcet, to describe human progress in

terms of the perfectibility of scientiﬁc methodology (Letters from an Inhab-

itant of Geneva, 1802). He then turned to offer a solution for European

national struggles by proposing a European (initially Anglo-French) con-

federation on liberal, parliamentary principles based on ‘European patrio-

tism’ or ‘Europeanism’, which would aim at perpetual peace, with a central

body arbitrating over national disputes (Reorganisation of European Society,

1814). National Houses of Commons were, however, to be composed only

of economic and administrative elites, elected by their professional bodies.

Deputies were to possess a landed income of not less than 25,000 francs

per annum, but twenty members of a chamber of 240 members would

be granted this property every ten years on the basis of merit. The ini-

tial Parliament was also to be two-thirds British and one-third French.

Saint-Simon became best known, thereafter, for his description of the new

form of industrial society, and for describing a means, chieﬂy religious, of

ameliorating the lot of the poor created by its development. (His works

are Saint-Simon 1865–78. Selections in English include Saint-Simon 1964,

1975, 1976. Studies include Booth 1871; Carlisle 1987; M anuel 1956;Picon

2002. On Saint-Simonism see Booth 1871;Butler1926;Charl

ety 1896;

Iggers 1958; Janet 1878; Jullien 1926;Reybaud1864; Walch 1967;Weill

1896.)

The industrial epoch, in Saint-Simon’s view, demanded an entirely new,

commensurate, form of polity. Distinguishing between organic historical

periods, when a social order was developed, and critical periods, when it

came under attack, Saint-Simon took the chief crisis of the age to be one

of authority; the old order was disintegrating rapidly, a new leading group

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Gregory Claeys

needed to take its place. His endeavour to provide a new form of spiri-

tual authority, utilising a ‘new religion’, called ‘Physicism’ (or sometimes,

‘Positive Philosophy’), assumed a scientiﬁc explanation of the homogeneity

of matter and mind would supersede theology. Comte would develop this

into the system called ‘Positivism’, echoing Saint-Simon’s view that the

reinforcement of spiritual power was crucial to the transitional age, partic-

ularly during an intermediary stage when theology was still widely upheld.

(Prior to its public acceptance, however, rejecting effor ts by Bonald, Maistre

and others to restore Catholicism, Saint-Simon counselled deism as a pop-

ular religion, which still presumed governance by a divine will rather than

natural laws.) This emphasis on the need for a new ruling spiritual power

to replace that lost by the decline of medieval Catholicism is often taken to

be a leading feature of Saint-Simon’s system, and can be linked to similar

themes in Carlyle and Mill, among others (see Cofer 1931; Pankhurst 1957;

Shine 1941).

Saint-Simon’s chief contribution to socialism was thus his account of the

transition of modern society from a military stage to ‘industrialism’ (a term

he coined) and its implications for the reshaping of the modern world,

notably in L’Industrie (1816–18). Society was here categorised in terms of

three main classes: scientists, writers and artists; proprietors; and toilers.

Spiritual power was to reside with the former; temporal power, or con-

trol of the state, with the property owner s; and the right of election with

all workers. All useful workers, not merely the bourgeoisie, whom Saint-

Simon regarded as having made the French Revolution and conducted it in

their own interest, were ‘industrialists’, since work was the basis of all virtue,

and all incomes not based on work (including that of lawyers, who were to

be abolished and replaced by unpaid courts of arbitration) were essentially

robbery. The failure of the French Revolution lay in the assumption of

power by the most ignorant, and the concentration of effort on perfecting

the mechanism of government, when its chief aim should have been the

subordination of government to administration as the main activity. The

new spiritual power would guarantee universal peace through European

government, abolish parasitism and idleness, and establish universal associa-

tion and the right to labour, with reward based on merit. But governments

as such would have less power and fewer ﬁnancial resources than previously,

and national governments would also be weakened by their subordination

to European institutions, which would curb alike ‘the ambitions of peoples

and kings’ (Saint-Simon 1976,p.96).

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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914

Here we see that the analysis of politics, indeed the proposal of a new

science thereof, in which the ‘politics of power’ is supplanted by the ‘politics

of abilities’, was vastly more important to Saint-Simon than to Owen or

Fourier, or for that matter most other nineteenth-century socialists. For

Saint-Simon the present transitional age witnessed the natural progress

of society from a governmental, or a feudal, military or predatory regime

of ‘idlers’, nobles and lawyers, to an administrative or industrial regime of

‘producers’. Soon governments would ‘no longer order men about; their

functions will be limited to ensuring that useful work will not be hindered’

(Saint-Simon 1964,p.71). Thus, as encapsulated in the famous phrase,

‘politics is the science of production’ (Saint-Simon 1976,p.108),

the class

of industrialists would promote the greatest production of useful things.

This was, for Saint-Simon, a meritocratic ideal hostile to feudal privilege

and economic interference; as such it is close in some particulars to the

liberal economics of ‘the immortal’ Adam Smith (e.g. Saint-Simon 1976,

p. 107). Saint-Simon also believed that taxes would be much reduced in

the juster industrial system. Saint-Simon’s Le Politique (1819) also advocated

the abolition of standing armies, the costs of which hindered the relief

of the proletariat (Saint-Simon 1976,p.239). Much more important than

political participation, thus, was economic participation, by which power

was more diffused. Saint-Simon anticipated a growing interdependence

in the productive process, which would promote a greater harmony of

interests between the various types of industrialists, with decision-making

being based less on command and obedience t han persuasion and argument

amongst the different organisations of producers, be they trade unions,

corporations, communes, etc. National parliaments would formulate an

economic ‘plan’, but this respected public works only; as a whole the

economy itself was to remain independent of political control in order to

maximise efﬁciency and minimise parasitism and interference. Yet if, as

Durkheim supposed, the point of this scheme was ‘to bind economic life

to a central organ that regulates it’, this could also be termed ‘the very

deﬁnition of socialism’ (Durkheim 1959,p.137).

In L’Organisateur (1819) Saint-Simon offered a plan for an industrial

parliament composed of three chambers of Invention, Examination and

4 In the original: ‘La politique est donc, pour me r

esumer en deux mots, la science de la production,c’est-

a-dire la science qui a pour objet l’ordre de choses le plus favorable

a tous les genres de productions’

(quoted in Booth 1871,p.48).

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Gregory Claeys

Execution, the ﬁrst to plan public works; the second, also consisting of

engineers and other educated people exercising ‘spiritual power’, to scru-

tinise such plans; and the third being great capitalists and bankers, who

would retain executive power and control over taxation and expenditure,

though they were supposed to be guided by the other chambers. This

scheme, later criticised as dictatorial by Mill (1968,p.168), was taken up in

Auguste Comte’s System of Positive Polity (Comte 1875–7, ii,pp.276–345,

iv,pp.315–454). In the Syst

eme Industriel (1821), however, Saint-Simon

withdrew the power he had assigned men of letters, worrying that they

would be prone to despotic clericalism, and offered it instead to positive

philosophers guided and invested with power by the King. (Comte would

agree that a dictator might introduce his scheme, which was however to be

republican.) Saint-Simon’s Cat

echisme des Industriels (1823) emphasised the

dangers of revolutionary change, and proposed government by the lead-

ing priests, savants and industrials, more or less spontaneously given power

by the masses. There is nothing particularly socialistic about this scheme,

unless the centrality of the ‘Plan’ as such deﬁnes socialism. For politically,

Saint-Simon always presumed that rule by an educated elite was natural

and inevitable. He did assume a degree of harmony and common interest

between the capitalist and proletarian, which can be seen as the outcome

of his general principle of the subordination of politics to ethics, later also

a Positivist ideal. But he also had come to reject any assumption that the

pursuit of individual interest spontaneously generated any common good.

Saint-Simon did become increasingly aware of the condition of the working

class. But he did not solve the social question as such, apparently viewing as

over-optimistic his earlier classiﬁcation of workers and employers together

as harmonious ‘industrials’, without recognising antagonisms inherent in

the capitalist system. Only in his later works, notably the Syst

eme Industriel

(1821), did Saint-Simon move towards what would be later more com-

monly understood as socialism, mainly by proposing that the government

guarantee the right of work; he also argued for temporal power to be exer-

cised by cultivators and the proprietors of manufactories. By 1825 he was

urging that priority should be given in state expenditure ‘to ensuring work

for all ﬁt men, to secure their physical existence’, as well as providing them

education and the means of recreation (Saint-Simon 1964,p.77). This was

the ﬁrst main form of statist socialism described in this period. In his ﬁnal

and most inﬂuential work, the Nouveau Christianisme, 1825,itisareformed

religion which cements these ties, with the aim of religion being the ame-

lioration of the condition of the working class and the promotion of the

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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914

single divine principle that ‘Men should treat each other as brothers.’ This

became the basis of the Saint-Simonian religion and was again echoed in

Comte’s Positive religion. The social problem thus had in part a religious

answer.

The most prominent of Saint-Simon’s followers were the ‘Supreme

Fathers’ of the sect, Saint-Amand Bazard, who did most to develop Saint-

Simon’s conception of organic and critical historical periods, Barth

elemy-

Prosper Enfantin and Pierre Leroux. They adopted a distinctive blue cos-

tume, and extended the master’s ideas in a markedly socialist, authoritarian

and feminist direction in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Their chief inter-

pretation of his writings, The Doctrine of Saint-Simon (1828–9), also argued

for greater equality for women, the increased facility of divorce, an expan-

sion in national education, and both greater freedom of trade and closer

integration of the state and the system of production, especially through

a remodelling of the banking system (Iggers 1972). Taking the view that

the exploitation of labour had followed three successive forms of slavery,

serfdom and wage-labour, the Saint-Simonians insisted that the moral end

of historical progress was ‘universal association’, which required the aboli-

tion of economic exploitation. Capital as such belonged to the community

rather than the individual. Since the competitive system was increasingly

prone to engender industrial crisis, it was necessary for the government,

rather than, as for Saint-Simon, private enterprise, to balance supply and

demand by centralising economic knowledge. The abolition of inheritance

was to be introduced, followed by a principle of distribution based on the

famous principle ‘From each according to his capacity; to each according

to his works.’ Here reward according to merit was stressed, and commu-

nity of goods ﬁrmly rejected as destroying the principle of emulation by

giving the idle the same share as the industrious (Iggers 1972,p.89). The

state thus became the owner of land and capital, and the organiser of the

entire labour force on military principles. Administration would be cen-

tralised through the banking system, with a ‘central bank representing the

government in the material order’, extending credit to and monitoring the

activities of lesser banks, thus becoming the chief economic unit (Iggers

1972,pp.103–7). A new intellectual elite and industrial hierarchy would

emerge based upon talent rather than birth, and aiming at maximising eco-

nomic efﬁciency; in short, ‘industry is organised, everything is interlinked,

and all is planned’ (Iggers 1972,p.98). An expanded form of Christianity,

again, in which labour and science were sanctiﬁed, was to provide an ethical

bond for the new society. This scheme was later derided by some historians

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Gregory Claeys

as an extreme form of ‘scientism’ (Hayek 1952,p.135), and by others as a

‘totalitarian fantasy’ (Iggers 1972, p. vii), which foreshadowed a later d

acle

(by unifying an ideology of order, a regimented popular movement, a party

based upon a monolithic secular religion, and an absolutist leader emerg-

ing spontaneously from the masses and acknowledged for his greatness).

(A critique of this view by Gita Ionescu (Saint-Simon 1976,pp.21–2)

denies that the functional aspects of a dirigiste or collectivist society have any

intrinsic relation to the deprivation of rights and freedom associated with

fascist and communist totalitarianism.) Nonetheless by 1831 it was claimed

that the ‘new religion’ had some 40,000 adherents throughout Europe.

The movement began to split, however, in part over the issue of whether

a female Messiah was needed to reveal the next stage of doctrine, upon

which Enfantin insisted. By the 1840s its inﬂuence had dwindled, though

its philosophy of history and account of industrial society were developed

by various thinkers, including Marx. Many Saint-Simonians also became

prominent in France as engineers, businessmen and economists.

6 Paternalistic or feudal socialism: Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin

The Saint-Simonian ideal was taken up in Britain by one critic of industri-

alism in particular, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). As early as Sartor Resartus

(1831) Carlyle achieved a measure of renown as an opponent of Benthamism

and classical political economy, which he accused of promoting a culture of

money- or ‘Mammon’ worship. By the early 1840s he had come to reject

the market system based on competition entirely. In Book 4 of Past and

Present (1843), Carlyle proposed an ‘organisation of labour’ into industrial

armies, led by an ‘aristocracy of talent’, chieﬂy captains of industry, who

would be charged with instilling a new sense of chivalry and just subordi-

nation. Workers would be offered a permanent labour contract, subject to

performance, and might share in the management of industrial enterprises,

though Carlyle dismissed demands for democracy as merely promising fur-

ther anarchy. Labourers might, moreover, also be compelled t o work if they

were found to be idle or shirking. Legislation would ensure greater safety

and comfort in the workplace t hrough the regulation of factories and mines

and sanitary regulations. Public parks, education and assisted emigration

werealsotobeintroduced.

John Ruskin (1819–1900) is usually taken to be a disciple of Carlyle,

though his ‘socialism’ is equally difﬁcult to classify. It falls broadly, however,

into two parts. The economic programme presented in Unto This Last

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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914

(1862) pleads for an equal exchange of labour for labour, rooted in Owenite

and Christian Socialist argument, and is linked to a scheme for permanent

working-class employment (see Anthony 1983;Cockram2007; Henderson

2000). Second, Ruskin mounted brieﬂy a communitarian experiment called

the Guild of St George in the 1870s(Scott1931).

Other early socialists

Amongst the other inﬂuential forms of non-Marxian socialism during the

nineteenth century, mention should be made of the proposals of the com-

munist lawyer

Etienne Cabet (1788–1853), author of the Voyage en Icarie

(1840), who founded a series of colonies in the United States beginning

in 1848 and lasting until the early 1880s (see C. Johnson, 1974; Sutton,

1994). Cabet proposed a highly rationalist, and somewhat authoritarian,

system of social organisation (which became democratic after his death).

Its proposals for non-violent, gradual change towards egalitarian socialism

attracted several hundred thousand adherents in France during the 1840s.

Like Babeuf, who had proposed similarities of dress (distinguishing only

for age and sex), food and education, there is an enforced uniformity in

Cabet’s egalitarianism, though elegance and beauty were supposed to be

encouraged.

The principal early German socialist was the tailor Wilhelm Weitling

(1808–71), whose ﬁrst tract, Mankind As It Is and As It Ought to Be (1838),

was composed under the inﬂuence of a secret revolutionary society based in

Paris, the League of the Just (Wittke 1950). This projected a future system

of organisation based upon units of 10,000 families, sub-divided into units

of 1,000 families which were in turn sub-divided. Each unit would choose

delegates to administer its own affairs, who would in turn elect admin-

istrators to the next higher level. Industry was to be similarly organised

on the basis of an ascending series of elected bodies representing major

occupational groups, organised around the small workshop rather than the

factory. Weitling’s main work, Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1842),

described the loss of a golden age or state of nature prior to the creation

of private property and examined the emergence of the modern industrial

proletariat. Weitling’s proposals for a communist society detailed those needs

(principally for acquisition, pleasure and knowledge) that would be satisﬁed,

including the assurance of intellectual development, and the extension of

freedom to all. Basic subsistence for all, including housing, clothing and

food, was to be assured; any luxuries desired could be earned by additional

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