During the nineteenth century, utopian socialism was most often interpreted as an essentially political phenomenon. Few commentators took seriously its ambition to create a new science of man and society. Yet the invention of such a science was one of the fundamental claims of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and their disciples who saw a scientific understanding of society as a prerequisite for its reconstruction.

At the turn of the century, Émile Durkheim was among the first to stress the role of utopian socialism in the emergence of the social sciences. He considered Saint-Simon, the mentor of Auguste Comte, to be the true founder of sociology. Since the time of Durkheim, the importance of utopian socialism in the birth of the social sciences has been widely recognized. This role is, however, difficult to assess accurately. Utopian socialism was, after all, the inheritor of eighteenth-century reflections regarding man and society. These reflections were in turn indebted to a long tradition of utopian writings dealing with social organization, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516. To what extent did Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen break with the Enlightenment and its utopian component to mark a new era in social thought?

Another justification for a more thorough inquiry lies in the definition of the social sciences given by the utopian socialists. Although meant to be a departure from the philosophical tradition, their idea of science was still imbued with philosophical and even metaphysical conceptions. Extending far beyond the limits of our contemporary social sciences, Saint-Simon’s, Fourier’s, and Owen’s doctrines appear in retrospect as a disconcerting combination of brilliant intuition and oversimplification, of original thought and prejudice.