Talk:Henri de Saint-Simon

nor did he adhere to the narrower definition of the working class as manual labourers as defined by Marxists

 * This is flatly wrong. Marxists don't think the working class is constituted only by manual laborers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.107.28.189 (talk) 05:31, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeah, there's a quote from Marx in the first volume of Capital: "Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. . . a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation." Even snubbing Marx's definition as "narrower" (as the text seemed to be doing) is rather silly given how very broad Saint-Simon's definition of industriels was, and given that few, if any historians, economists, etc. seem to adhere to (or be remotely influenced) by Saint-Simon's conception as compared to Marx's vastly more influential analysis. --Ismail (talk) 06:31, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Requested move

 * I am suggesting moving this page (back) to Claude Henri de Rouvroy because Naming conventions instructs that the simpler, moe common form of names is preferred unless disambiguation is required. Feel free to comment below. -- Dystopos 21:23, 14 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Strong oppose. Since he is usually referred to as "Saint-Simon", moving him to Claude Henri de Rouvroy would not be appropriate. Current title is fine. Check out all the titles of articles on British peers. Uppland 22:10, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
 * What is he usually referred to as, again? What about "Henri de Saint-Simon"? The guideline on Naming conventions (names and titles) instructs: "use the most common form of the name used in English..." - Sorry if I stirred up a subject that's been gone over before, but since there was no discussion here, I assumed the possibility that a shorter name would be better. --Dystopos 22:24, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Well, Henri de Saint-Simon is obviously a much better alternative, and I added it as an alternative name in the beginning of the article. But we still have to consider the fact that there are Wikipedia naming conventions for articles on people with noble titles. I am not familiar enough with these guidelines and their rationales to support any move at this point. As long as redirects exist, I don't see a big problem here. Let's wait for some more input. Uppland 09:53, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Strong Oppose According to the Wikipedia naming conventions nobility titles are used. Where is this proposal coming from all of a sudden? Gryffindor  10:54, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
 * From my ignorance. I knew that in general, the simplest, most common name was preferred for article titles. I didn't realize that with eminences like Henri, that there is no alternative to the full title. Sorry for the intrusion. Go back to your business. Dystopos 02:01, 18 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Strong Oppose

In France, he is known invariably as the comte de Saint-Simon, to distinguish him from his much more famous relative, the duc de Saint-Simon, who is known simply as "Saint-Simon".

NO ONE would know either from their family name, de Rouvroy.

208.87.248.162 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 15:51, 1 November 2009 (UTC).

(proposal retracted, template removed, listing scuttled) --Dystopos 02:02, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Vote: getting rid of the redirect for Saint Simonism
I think Saint Simonism clearly deserves its own article separate from this one; it was a movement much broader than Claude Henri de R. himself through much of the 19th century. Saint Simonism was very influential in the military academies for example. I'm willing to write the article myself (since I am doing a bit of research on the topic).jackbrown 22:29, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

>>Obviously, the article has a more than adequate (ie I think excellent) discussion of the ideas of Saint Simonism. I think what's missing is a survey of the movement's relevance among the French intelligensia in the 19th century, in institutions like the army and how it inflenced colonial policy for example. And that's obviously not something which belongs in the article on the Count...Thoughts?jackbrown 22:35, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Do you mean Saint Simonianism? There is a separate article for that... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zubinmukerjee (talk • contribs) 20:52, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

In addition to proofing, I expanded the lead.
I copied and pasted various sections in the article up into the lead and then ruthlessly cut them down. Hopefully it's a better lead than it started out as. Bettymnz4 (talk) 01:02, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Lacking neutrality
I accuse the article of lacking neutrality. I claim he wasnt influenced by Marxism. The claim that early socialists where "created by-" or "influenced by marxism" is solely based on the idea that Karl Marx predate socialism but socialism predate Marx. The books the early socialist are know to have read should be listed by name and author, not refered by ideology,

By klas Wullt. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.210.245.217 (talk) 20:05, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

—Thanks for the tip. Given that Karl Marx was 7 years old when Saint-Simon died, your assertion that Saint-Simon wasn't influenced by Marxism is almost certainly correct.-- Whoosit (stalk) 14:55, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Anyone claiming that Saint-Simon was "influenced by Marxism" is... factually wrong. No author, whether Marxist or not, claims that. So I wouldn't consider that a case of the article "lacking neutrality," I'd consider it more "whoever wrote this knows nothing of Saint-Simon or Marx." --Ismail (talk) 06:31, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Neutrality and Enfantin
The following seems to be extremely moralizing: "Bazard, a man of stolid temperament, could no longer work in harmony with Enfantin, who desired to establish an arrogant and fantastic sacerdotalism with lax notions as to marriage and the relations between the sexes. In the name of progress, Enfantin announced that the gulf between the sexes was too wide and this social inequality would impede rapid growth of society." It sounds like we're quoting this from somewhere, but in any event, we don't do this sort of thing. It's not up to us to try to judge whether Enfantin's ideas were or were not "arrogant" and "fantastic" or had "lax" notions. Metamagician3000 (talk) 09:39, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
 * From a search on Google Books, that sentence was taken almost verbatim from The New Encyclopedia Britannica copyrighted in 1974. So yes, besides violating Wikipedia's NPOV policy, it's also plagiarized. --Ismail (talk) 10:22, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Possible Copy-paste?
Much of this article, in particular the Theory section reads like a 19th century philosophy textbook. I can't track a source down--so I can't be sure. This section seems to have stood in various forms since 2007. It's been extensively copied around the web, making it tricky to pinpoint an original source online. Someone with better search skills than me might give it a crack...

If it's not a copy-paste then it sure looks like OR.

-- Whoosit (stalk) 15:40, 14 January 2013 (UTC)


 * It is not a copyright violation as the text is out of copyright. It is copied from EB1911 see here. I have now included the EB1911 template in place of cite EB1911 which includes the correct attribution. I have also moved the template up into a References section so that the attribution partially meets the requirements of the plagiarism guideline. It meet the guideline fully inline citations to the EB1911 article are required. -- PBS (talk) 18:45, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Maybe needs some more tags
POV, rewrite, etc. Really bad anti-socialist POV pushing is quite evident/blantant. 76.180.168.166 (talk) 16:46, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Recent changes by 70.53.113.91
The editor noted above just made a series of extensive edits to this article, but included no references to support those changes. I reverted those changes, and left a note on the editor's 70.53.113.91|talk page JoeSperrazza (talk) 16:41, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

The article title should be "Henri de Saint-Simon" per WP:COMMON NAME
The first sentence in this article says that he was commonly referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon, and as far as I am aware there is no other major historical figure by that name, so by WP:COMMON NAME the article should be named "Henri de Saint-Simon".--70.55.10.162 (talk) 17:49, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree. Moving &mdash; cnzx  07:15, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I agree with the 'dubious - discuss' comment on Mary Shelley anticipated Saint-Simon's ideas by a generation. Mary Wollstonecraft, born in 1759, was a near exact contemporary of Saint-Simon, so they were the same generation. The writer of the comment, Flora Tristan, was not born until 1803, six years after Mary Shelley's death, so it is tempting to delete this as erroneous on the part of Tristan. What Tristan appears to mean is that Shelley was actively writing in the 1790s in the decade immediately before Saint-Simon began writing. As Shelley was living and writing in revolutionary France, Saint-Simon would have had access to French publications of her work even if he may not have met her.Cloptonson (talk) 06:40, 20 June 2021 (UTC)


 * What you have said doesn’t back up why Flora Tristan’s statement is ‘dubious’.
 * Flora Tristan her statement:
 * “Mary Shelley anticipated Saint-Simon's ideas by a generation.”
 * still stands.
 * Flora Tristan was a lifelong friend of Eliphas Levi’s for godsake. She sure would know who’s who and what’s what in the ‘Satanic front world’ which indeed Saint-Simonism (like Marxism, Capitalism and likes of Victor Hugo) without shadow is. Many a contemporary of Saint-Simon say he was an utter wretch of a ‘human’. 2A00:23C7:2B13:9001:88C4:9128:5025:3923 (talk) 13:17, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't see how Tristan being a friend of Lévi or Saint-Simon being considered "an utter wretch" resolves the issue at hand. If Tristan thought Shelley had anticipated Saint-Simon's ideas, that's one thing, but I'm not aware of any historians or other authorities on the lives of Saint-Simon or Shelley making this claim, so it seems rather odd to include it in an encyclopedia article if it really is the solitary opinion of one historical figure. --Ismail (talk) 12:26, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Did he envisage a market economy or not?
The whole article seems to focus on how he wasn't anything like Marx, and in the end it remains unclear in what way his ideas were different from actually existing American capitalism.--79.100.149.219 (talk) 06:27, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * He did envision a market economy, but he thought the market could be made "rational" through intervention by a state comprised of capitalists, scientists, engineers and the like. He believed such a society could have full employment, no "idle" classes (e.g. landowners would be required to use their land "productively"), a degree of upward mobility unknown to any actual market economy, and so on. His influence on socialist thought isn't so much due to his aforementioned system (though it contained "socialistic" elements including a degree of planning), but his conception of historical progress and the arguments he used to justify political and economic changes (e.g. he argued the main goal ought to be to "ameliorate promptly the moral and physical condition of the most numerous class" and that his system aligned with society's present requirements and was therefore "the only one that would contribute directly and efficiently" to this process), which could easily lead to socialist conclusions in the hands of others. --Ismail (talk) 16:07, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Grad school diction
Saint Simon's conceptual recognition of broad socio-economic contribution, and his Enlightenment valorization of scientific knowledge, soon inspired and influenced utopian socialism, liberal political theorist John Stuart Mill, anarchism through its founder Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was inspired by Saint-Simon's thought and Marxism with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identifying Saint-Simon as an inspiration to their ideas and classifying him among the utopian socialists.

Garden path:

... Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was inspired by Saint-Simon's thought and Marxism ...

In grad school you get to untangle this mess, because the professor who wrote the crappy manuscript is too busy for words.

Here, we can do better. &mdash; MaxEnt 02:13, 11 September 2022 (UTC)