“Saint-Simon first taught us to consider the history of labor and property as an essential element of human development, and consequently to investigate the history of society.
“He first discerned clearly the separation of the two great classes of industrial society, and implanted bitter hatred in the consciousness of the lower classes. Saint-Simon’s word that the party of the laborers would be formed, has been fulfilled. Saint-Simonism is the first expression of the proletariat.
“He first represented social reform as the only true function of government.
“Finally, he first brought forward the question of inheritance, the question upon which the entire future of the social form of Europe will rest during the next two generations.
“Thus through Saint-Simon is society, in its power, its elements, and its contradictions, for the first time half understood, half vaguely conjectured. He is the boundary of a new era in France. He left the beaten track and laid down his life in discovering and opening for society a new path. In it we have as yet taken only a few steps, and no human eye is able to discern the goal whither we are tending.”[63]
CHAPTER V.
FOURIER.
In his “Social Movements in France”[64] Lorenz von Stein uses these words, in comparing Saint-Simon and Fourier: “While Saint-Simon was sacrificing his life in Paris in his efforts to attain an unknown and only vaguely conjectured goal, and while his school was struggling against foes from within and without, there lived in another part of France a man who, without knowing Saint-Simon, was taking an essentially different route towards the same goal. This man was Charles Fourier.... Never has any land at the same time produced two men of such importance in the history of society.”[65]
These two men together constitute one whole. Each was required as a complement of the other. The one started in his career as a man of wealth and social eminence, the other as a man of the people. The one observed society, studied its history, its development, and sought to find therein a clew to guide him in his work of regenerating the world, morally and economically; the other, regarding the past as such a series of blunders as to afford no proper basis for future formations, searched the depths of his own consciousness, and discovered a law which furnished premises, enabling him to construct deductively an ideal and perfect society, and to explain with mathematical accuracy the past, present, and future of the entire universe.