THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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to authoritarian ideas. Thus on the other hand he thought he discovered precisely in the pre­capitalist system (and the Catholicism connected with it) considerably more
tenable elements than mere hostility to the people and oppression. The prophet of industry never shows any mercy to feudalism, but the prophet of the centralized
collective sees in the Middle Ages, restricted as it is, the better Europe. Saint­Simon coincides at many points here with the Restoration thinkers of his age, with the
haters of revolution and ‘traditionalists’ like de Bonald and de Maistre, with the reactionary anti­capitalists and preachers. Compare this with de Maistre's hope: ‘Tout
annonce que nous marchons vers une grande unité’* or the other one, from his ‘A Study of Sovereignty’, full of the Holy Alliance: ‘Le gouvernemerit est une vraie
religion, il a ses dogmes, ses mystères, ses prêtres.’† Thisis a mystified pathos of order, firmly in the style of Campanella, and now Saint­Simon also describes an arc
towards it, in the midst of industry, an industry to be organized. Namely by overthrowing the feudal lords, liberalism only did half the work even where it did not take
over their positions, for its product is negative or the mere destruction of what has been. Economic and other ‘subjectivism’ (contained in the Manchesterist principle, in
laissez faire, laissez aller) dissolved and atomized society; in the midst of the unleashed upturn in industry reign chaos and anarchy. Saint­Simon's intention was to
eliminate them and to put in charge of the unleashed forces of production that ‘capacité administrative’ which has nothing in common precisely with Jacobin ideas.
Which creates order instead, an overall view from the heights of a central institution, a new hierarchy in fact. This is in Saint­Simonism a highly momentous, highly
paradoxical encounter between reaction and socialism, united in their hatred of individual economic freedom. Not only is the caricature ‘feudal socialism’ encountered
here, which the ‘Communist Manifesto’ derides in the French and English ‘legitimists’, but the nasty reverse of the paradox continued its influence right up to Lassalle's
flirtation with Bismarck, right up to the various alloys of ‘Prussianness and socialism’, of state capital and socialism. But the centralist Saint­Simon took up illiberal
Romanticism while completely ignoring its reactionary application and naturally without a reactionary brief. He wanted to change the function of illiberalism in order to
reach right through it to the light and the humane value of bondedness Like Fourier, Saint­Simon was also convinced that no earlier epoch could
* ‘Everything suggests we are marching towards a great unity’.
† ‘The government is a true religion, it has its dogmas, its mysteries, its priests.’