The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth

by J. B. Bury

"The imagination of poets has placed the golden age in the cradle of the human race. It was the age of iron they should have banished there. The golden age is not behind us, but in front of us. It is the perfection of social order. Our fathers have not seen it; our children will arrive there one day, and it is for us to clear the way for them."

The Comte de Saint-Simon, who wrote these words in 1814, was one of the liberal nobles who had imbibed the ideas of the Voltairian age and sympathised with the spirit of the Revolution. In his literary career from 1803 to his death in 1825 he passed through several phases of thought, [Footnote: They are traced in G. Weill's valuable monograph, Saint-Simon et son oeuvre, 1894.] but his chief masters were always Condorcet and the physiologists, from whom he derived his two guiding ideas that ethics and politics depend ultimately on physics and that history is progress.

Condorcet had interpreted history by the progressive movement of knowledge. That, Saint-Simon said, is the true principle, but Condorcet applied it narrowly, and committed two errors. He did not understand the social import of religion, and he represented the Middle Ages as a useless interruption of the forward movement. Here Saint-Simon learned from the religious reaction. He saw that religion has a natural and legitimate social role and cannot be eliminated as a mere perversity. He expounded the doctrine that all social phenomena cohere. A religious system, he said, always corresponds to the stage of science which the society wherein it appears has reached; in fact, religion is merely science clothed in a form suitable to the emotional needs which it satisfies. And as a religious system is based on the contemporary phase of scientific development, so the political system of an epoch corresponds to the religious system. They all hang together. Medieval Europe does not represent a temporary triumph of obscurantism, useless and deplorable, but a valuable and necessary stage in human progress. It was a period in which an important principle of social organisation was realised, the right relation of the spiritual and temporal powers.

It is evident that these views transformed the theory of Condorcet into a more acceptable shape. So long as the medieval tract of time appeared to be an awkward episode, contributing nothing to the forward movement but rather thwarting and retarding it, Progress was exposed to the criticism that it was an arbitrary synthesis, only partly borne out by historical facts and supplying no guarantees for the future. And so long as rationalists of the Encyclopaedic school regarded religion as a tiresome product of ignorance and deceit, the social philosophy which lay behind the theory of Progress was condemned as unscientific; because, in defiance of the close cohesion of social phenomena, it refused to admit that religion, as one of the chief of those phenomena, must itself participate and co-operate in Progress.

Condorcet had suggested that the value of history lies in affording data for foreseeing the future. Saint-Simon raised this suggestion to a dogma. But prevision was impossible on Condorcet's unscientific method. In order to foretell, the law of the movement must be discovered, and Condorcet had not found or even sought a law. The eighteenth century thinkers had left Progress a mere hypothesis based on a very insufficient induction; their successors sought to lift it to the rank of a scientific hypothesis, by discovering a social law as valid as the physical law of gravitation. This was the object both of Saint-Simon and of Comte.

The "law" which Saint-Simon educed from history was that epochs of organisation or construction, and epochs of criticism or revolution, succeed each other alternately. The medieval period was a time of organisation, and was followed by a critical, revolutionary period, which has now come to an end and must be succeeded by another epoch of organisation. Having discovered the clew to the process, Saint-Simon is able to predict. As our knowledge of the universe has reached or is reaching a stage which is no longer conjectural but POSITIVE in all departments, society will be transformed accordingly; a new PHYSICIST religion will supersede Christianity and Deism; men of science will play the role of organisers which the clergy played in the Middle Ages.

As the goal of the development is social happiness, and as the working classes form the majority, the first step towards the goal will be the amelioration of the lot of the working classes. This will be the principal problem of government in reorganising society, and Saint-Simon's solution of the problem was socialism. He rejected the watchwords of liberalism—democracy, liberty, and equality—with as much disdain as De Maistre and the reactionaries.

The announcement of a future age of gold, which I quoted above, is taken from a pamphlet which he issued, in conjunction with his secretary, Augustin Thierry the historian, after the fall of Napoleon. [Footnote: De la reorganisation de la societe europeenne, p. 111 (1814).] In it he revived the idea of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre for the abolition of war, and proposed a new organisation of Europe more ambitious and Utopian than the Abbe's league of states. At this moment he saw in parliamentary government, which the restored Bourbons were establishing in France, a sovran remedy for political disorder, and he imagined that if this political system were introduced in all the states of Europe a long step would have been taken to the perpetuation of peace. If the old enemies France and England formed a close alliance there would be little difficulty in creating ultimately a European state like the American Commonwealth, with a parliamentary government supreme over the state governments. Here is the germ of the idea of a "parliament of man."

3.

Saint-Simon, however, did not construct a definite system for the attainment of social perfection. He left it to disciples to develop the doctrine which he sketched. In the year of his death (1825) Olinde Rodrigues and Enfantin founded a journal, the Producteur, to present to humanity the one thing which humanity, in the opinion of their master, then most needed, a new general doctrine. [Footnote: The best study of the Saint-Simonian school is that of G. Weill, L'Ecole saint-simonienne, son histoire, son influence jusqu'a nos jours (1896), to which I am much indebted.]