Religion and political economy in Saint-Simon

Abstract

The project of Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825) was to complete the French Revolution by a social change in order to eliminate the so-called “feudal-military” system and to bring about a new society which he named “the industrial system”. Everything had to be changed, including religion and its relation to political economy. In this paper, I examine: (i) the recurring problem of religion, raised by Saint-Simon as early as his first text; (ii) the emergence of the economic problem of identifying production with politics; (iii) and finally, the metamorphosis of the Christian religion into a moral and industrial religion.