From the People to the Industrialists: Saint-Simon and the Eclipse of Sovereignty

If French political culture during the Empire and the Restoration was marked by a general weakening of the people’s revolutionary centrality, it is to the critical reflections of Claude Henri de Saint-Simon in particular that we need to turn for substantial doctrinal clues as to the climate of those years. His “philosophical contemplation of the past” where society dominates as the “positive” historical subject helps, in fact, to fill in a theoretical framework in which the conceptual universe linked to the people appears to grow dim or even to run dry. More especially, an important contribution to understanding the layers of meaning assumed by the concept of the people in those years may be supplied by interpolating the levels of analysis used by the author. Saint Simon thus deconstructs the concepts of the people and of the sovereignty emerged by the revolutionary discourse in favor of a sociological category such as Industrial.