Henri de Saint-Simon

Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (17 October 1760 – 19 May 1825) was a French utopian socialist and political theorist. He defined the French Revolution as a class war between the nobility, bourgeoisie, and propertyless classes. He also defined a distinction between idlers and workers (industriels), which included proletarians, bankers, manufacturers, and merchants, effectively merging the proletariat and bourgeoisie under one umbrella. As capitalism was only beginning to develop at this time, Saint-Simon predicted that the bourgeoisie would only hold limited power as public officials or social trustees, and he genuinely wanted to end the exploitation of the proletariat.

During the French Revolution, Saint-Simon initially sided with the Jacobins and adopted a bourgeois liberal point of view. But when he was dissatisfied with the bourgeois revolution's results, he developed a scientific, mechanistic analysis of societal progress known as "social physiology." But his material analysis was limited by his idealist worldview, which led him wanting to overcome class conflict through religious morality. In 1814, he called for the "superior" European race to colonise the rest of the world. In 1815, at the time of Napoleon's defeat, Saint-Simon called for an alliance of France, Germany, and England to guarantee the prosperous development of Europe.