This is an enlarged version of a paper presented at a meeting of the British Society for the History of Science in Cambridge in March 1976. The title of the meeting was ‘New perspectives in the life sciences, 1750–1850’, and this paper took its title from one section of the meeting, in which it served to focus discussion.

¹ Greene, J. C., ‘Biology and social theory in the nineteenth century: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer’, in Clagett, Marshall (ed.), Critical problems in the history of science, Madison, Wis., 1959, pp. 419, 422.Google Scholar

² Comte, Auguste, Cours de philosophie positive, Paris, 1908, iii.Google Scholar

³ By now an enormous literature deals with the development of evolutionist ideas, but the most satisfactory representative study in the French field is by Roger, Jacques, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée du dix-huitième siècle, Paris, 1963.Google Scholar

⁴ The extent of Saint-Simon's debt to science is still not generally appreciated outside the field of the history of science. Understandably, critics trained in humanities, political science and social studies look more readily for influences in the general philosophical attitudes of his age; this is not the place to present sufficient evidence to persuade them to broaden their field of vision. I am currently preparing a fuller exposition of the scientific infrastructure of Saint-Simon's thought, and this paper will simply suggest some of the ways in which science shaped the detail of his thought.

⁵ It is not a particularly helpful distinction, since it generates the problem of the ‘simultaneous emergence’ of evolutionary theories in two supposedly discrete disciplines, which this paper will suggest were still one.

⁶ Saint-Simon's mediating position between these two societies, whose rivalry was symptomatic of an increasing division between physics and the life sciences, was noted by Crosland, M. P., The Society of Arcueil: a view of French science at the time of Napoleon I, London, 1967, pp. 90–1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ Quoted by Kervella, E. J., La vie et l'oeuvre de Bichat, Paris, 1931, pp. 42–3.Google Scholar

⁸ Gusdorf, G., Les sciences humaines et la pensée occidentale, vGoogle Scholar: Dieu, la nature, l'homme au siècle des lumières, Paris, 1972, 527.Google Scholar

⁹ I use the term ‘encyclopaedic’ because it was a key word in Saint-Simon's vocabulary, which he defined in his Esquisse d'une nouvelle Encyclopédie, ou introduction à la philosophie du XIXe siècle (1810)Google Scholar in the following terms, and with a footnote indicating the Greek derivation: ‘ENCYCLOPEDIE, ce mot dont les racines sont grecques, signifie enchaînement des connaissances; il ne devrait pas servir de titre aux Dictionnaires généraux. Un dictionnaire général est un magasin de matériaux propres à construire une Encyclopédie. Rendre un compte systématique des connaissances acquises … [c'est l'obligation] à remplir par les auteurs qui décorent leurs travaux du titre d'Encyclopédie’. Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d'Enfantin, Réimpression photomécanique de l'édition 1865–78, Aalen, , 1964, xv. 91.Google Scholar (This edition is hereafter cited simply as Oeuvres.) Elsewhere Saint-Simon used synthétique as virtually synonymous with encyclopédique, and increasingly substituted organique for both. See below for further discussion.

¹⁰ See Comte's definition of sociologie, op. cit. (2), iv.Google Scholar 47e leçon, 200: ‘étude scientifique des faits sociaux humains considérés comme appartenant à un ordre particulier, et étudiés dans leur ensemble’ (my italics).

¹¹ Mandelbaum, M., History, man and reason: a study in nineteenth-century thought, Baltimore, 1971, p. 22.Google Scholar

¹² René, Descartes, Discours de la méthode, in Adam, and Tannery, (eds.), Oeuvres de Descartes, Paris, 1902, vi. 62.Google Scholar

¹³ Gusdorf, G., op. cit. (8), viGoogle Scholar: L'avènement des sciences humaines au siècle des lumières, Paris, 1973, 542.Google Scholar Even Helvétius's materialism was moving towards organicism: see especially De l'esprit, Londres, 1784Google Scholar, Discours I, chapter IV.

¹⁴ The question of influence is notoriously controversial, but in this case there is no doubt. Sentences and whole sections from Bichat's and Cabanis's works are quoted verbatim by Saint-Simon, and manuscript notes in Bibliothèque Nationale, MSS. Nouvelles acquisitions françaises 24605–7 show evidence of his reading of their major publications.

¹⁵ The current edition of Robert's Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française defines rapport in its broadest sense as ‘lien, relation qui existe entre plusieurs objets distincts, et que l'esprit peut constater’. Relation in turn is defined as ‘lien de dépendance ou d'influence réciproque’, so that at its simplest, rapport refers to a situation in which objects perceived to be distinct are nonetheless in a relationship of mutual dependence—which begs the very question we are discussing, the whole problem of the one and the many, or the relationship of unity and plurality. It is worth noting, however, that quite apart from its other technical meanings in mathematics and chemistry (made particularly topical by developments in both fields at the end of the eighteenth century), rapport could also mean ‘relation de cause à effet’.

¹⁶ Ch. Lemonnier, (ed.), Oeuvres choisies de C. H. de Saint-Simon, Bruxelles, 1859, i. 64ff.Google Scholar

¹⁷ de Condillac, E. Bonnot, Oeuvres complètes, Paris, 1798, xxiii. 7.Google Scholar

¹⁸ That Saint-Simon might have influenced Comte is taken for granted, whereas commentators tend to forget how impressionable the older man was—particularly since he was conscious of the deficiencies of his early education. Arrogant and superficially self-confident though he may appear in his published writings, there is abundant evidence of the influence which younger men had on his work—from Burdin and Blainville to Thierry and Comte. For this reason, an analysis of his earlier works (written in relative isolation) and manuscript fragments must supplement the well-known works of the post-1814 period, during which a whole series of collaborators and acquaintances modified the presentation and, increasingly, the substance of his thought.

¹⁹ Oeuvres, choisies …, Op. cit. (16), i. 175.Google Scholar

²⁰ Oeuvres, xv. 40.Google Scholar

²¹ Ibid., xl. 21.

²² To be precise, it was the whole of the Mémoire which made this point. Within this work Saint-Simon used physiologie interchangeably with anatomie, indicating almost as an afterthought here that ‘en employant … l'expression d'anatomie, j'ai présenté la partie pour le tout, et … ce mot signifie dans cette occasion l'ensemble de la science des corps organisés’ (Oeuvres, xl. 86Google Scholar). Elsewhere (e.g. p. 17) he used physiologie in the same sense, and this is a good example of the impatience and lack of attention to detail which have won him a reputation for inconsistency, and which make any definitive statement about his work very hazardous. Compare, for example, the supposed quotation from Vicq d'Azyr (actually a paraphrase) in the 1813 Mémoire (Oeuvres, xl. 73–4Google Scholar), where he wrote that ‘nulle science ne touche l'homme d'aussi près que l'anatomie’ with the same one in Oeuvres, xv. 125–6Google Scholar (written one year earlier), where he wrote that ‘nulle science ne touche l'homme de si près que la physiologie’ (My italics in both cases).

²³ Mandelbaum, , loc. cit. (11).Google Scholar

²⁴ Saint-Simon repeatedly insisted that he was totally unconcerned with style and presentation, and intended his work (before 1814) only for a small circle of fellow-thinkers and scientists. See for example his remarks in the preface to the Mémoire sur la science de l'homme (Oeuvres, xl. 10–11Google Scholar). He even insisted that recipients of this work should not communicate it to a wider public without his written consent (ibid., p. 24).

²⁵ The term ‘analogy of the body politic’ is taken from the article under that heading by Hale, D. G. in the Dictionary of the history of ideas, New York, 1968, 1973Google Scholar, an article which is representative of the mistrust to which I refer.

²⁶ Most contemporary definitions insist on the broad meaning of organe as a derivative of δργανον and this interpretation is upheld, for example, by Klein, (A comprehensive etymological dictionary of the English language, Amsterdam, 1969, ii.)Google Scholar and Onions (Oxford dictionary of English etymology, 1966Google Scholar). Aristotle used the word in De anima in the sense of ‘that with which one works’. See for example Book II, chapter 1, where within a few lines organon is used for ‘an instrument, for example an axe’, for a part of a plant, and (in the form soma organikon) for the body distinguished from the soul. Organon was certainly long standard in the sense of ‘instrument’, only acquiring the sense ‘bodily part’ in the time of Plato and Aristotle, and although the Latin derivatives organum and organicum are obviously post-Classical, the evidence suggests that they retained the standard fifth-century BC etymological sense.

²⁷ Nouveau dictionnaire français et allemand contenant les expressions de nouvelle création du Peuple Français, compiled by Snetlage, L., Gottingue, , 1795Google Scholar. This dictionary is cited because it contains an explicit reference to the extended use of organiser and its cognate forms which the revolutionary circumstances of France seem to have encouraged. Certainly, slightly earlier definitions do not draw attention to this family of words. The Encyclopédie defined organiser very narrowly in terms of the musical instrument, and the Dictionnaire critique de la langue française compiled by the Abbé Féraud and published in three volumes in 1788 simply adds that organisé currently enjoyed a fashionable use as a complimentary adjective for a systematic mind. It is clear that a critical change in usage occurred in the revolutionary period, generating for example the adjective organisateur, significantly first recorded in the work of Condorcet.

²⁸ Wolin, S. S., Politics and vision; continuity and innovation in western political thought, Boston, 1960Google Scholar. Interestingly, Wolin nonetheless sees ‘the problems of community and of organization’ as mutually difficult to reconcile, and names Rousseau as the ‘theorist of community’ alongside Saint-Simon as the ‘theorist of organization’ (pp. 363ff.). For Saint-Simon, however, organization and community were far from mutually irreconcilable; rather they were mutually sustaining, as the following discussion will suggest.

²⁹ The verb coordonner itself was used in a novel way. Having been previously confined to geometry, it now meant, according to the Göttingen dictionary of 1795, ‘mettre deux ou plusieurs choses à l'unisson, de façon qu'elles ne font qu'une seule ou un ensemble inséparable’. Again, the verb had been given particularly rich associations by its use in the new chemistry.

³⁰ Oeuvres, xv. 55.Google Scholar

³¹ Social physiology was the preferred title for Saint-Simon's science of society, though he also used terms in general usage, like ‘physique sociale’, and he was attracted by Bentham's idea of a ‘felicific calculus’.

³² Bohr, Niels, ‘Quantum physics and biology’, in Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, 1960, 14: Models and analogues in biology, 5.Google Scholar

³³ Bertalanffy, L. von's article ‘Modern concepts on biological adaptation’, in Brooks, and Cranefield, (eds.), History of physiological thought, New York, 1959Google Scholar, is interesting in this respect.

³⁴ ‘Structuralism’ is a term so widely used and abused that one hesitates to use it. I should therefore make it plain that it is used here in its restricted sense, as used by Cassirer and Piaget, as an interdisciplinary approach opposed to atomistic reductionism, and concerned with ideas of wholeness, tranformation and self-regulation. See Piaget, G., Le structuralisme, Paris, 1968Google Scholar. I do not refer to the narrower interpretation most commonly associated with Lévi-Strauss.

³⁵ See for example manuscript notes dating from the early Empire, in Bibliothèque Nationale, MSS. Nouvelles acquisitions françaises 24605.

³⁶ The comparison with Marx's millenarian vision is equally enlightening.

³⁷ Limited space prevents the examination of Gall's contribution to Saint-Simon's thought, or indeed the contributions of Cabanis, Burdin and other life scientists. Bichat is selected because his contribution was possibly the greatest, and the least touched by eighteenth-century attitudes.

³⁸ See especially Bichat, M. F. X., Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, Paris, 1800.Google Scholar

³⁹ Ibid. p. 1.

⁴⁰ Bertalanffy, L. vonProblems of life, an evaluation of modern biological thought, London, 1952Google Scholar, is the source of this particular term, though his writings date, of course, from the 1930s. Cannon, W. B., ‘Organization for physiological homeostasis’, in the Physiological review, 1929, 9Google Scholar. A textbook by Langley, L. L., called simply Homeostasis, New York, 1965; London, 1966, traced the idea, if not the term, back to Claude Bernard. Bernard's self-acknowledged debt to Bichat suggests that the idea could usefully be traced to a much earlier date, and Bichat's work on metabolism.Google Scholar

⁴¹ The terms ‘Organic’ and ‘critical’ were formalized by the Saint-Simonians: see the Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Première année, 1829 (new edition by Bouglé and Halévy), Paris, 1924Google Scholar. However, they were widely used by Saint-Simon in his Empire writings.

⁴² Bichat, M. F. X., Traité des membranes, Paris, 1800Google Scholar, and Anatomie générale appliquée à la physiologie et à la medecine, Paris, 1801.Google Scholar

⁴³ This omission is strange, for the terms tissu cellulaire and tissu muqueux are used elsewhere in articles and cross references, and Théophile Bordeu, the famous protagonist in Diderot's Rêve de d'Alembert and a contributor to the Encyclopédie, pioneered experimental work on the tissues which Bichat continued.

⁴⁴ See for example Lukes, Steven's recent study, Individualism, Oxford, 1973.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ It is often argued that Saint-Simon used the terms industrie and industriel in the sense of large-scale manufacturing industry, and in opposition to agriculture and commerce. Certainly, this distinction was being made in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and, it is plausibly argued, Saint-Simon could well have picked up this usage from J. B. Say. But the notorious Parabole of 1819 (Oeuvres, xx. 19–20Google Scholar) makes it plain that he regarded farmers, weavers, bankers, managers and industrial investors alike as industriels, by which he meant useful members of a society whose lifeblood is organized production. Industriel in his vocabulary meant industrious, usefully-employed; it had a clear, moral sense which the Göttingen dictionary of 1795, already cited, also emphasized by giving as the German equivalent Betriebsam. Saint-Simon's commonplace metaphor of the abeilles and the frelons reinforces this interpretation, and it is clear that he subscribed to the wide definition of industrie (the same, incidentally, which is attributed to Quesnay in the Encyclopédie in the sub-section ‘Droit politique et commerce’ of the article ‘Industrie’) as embracing agriculture, manufacturing and service industries without distinction.

⁴⁶ Unfortunately, Saint-Simon again kept his reservations private, so that his public self-confidence has been taken at face value. Manuscript fragments suggest, however, that he had a realistic appreciation of the limitations of the social sciences which Bernal and Popper have so clearly identified. See for example Bibliothèque Nationale, MSS. Nouvelles acquisitions françaises 24605.

⁴⁷ Gusdorf, , op. cit. (8), v. 459.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ This is an opinion Saint-Simon could have learned from Bichat, but one which was reinforced by his personal acquaintance with Gall, and familiarity with his works. Gall's influence has had to be neglected in this paper.

⁴⁹ The several influences of less well known acquaintances of Saint-Simon like Burdin, Bailly, Bourgon, as well as those of mathematicians and physical scientists like Arago, Poisson, and Biot, are often overlooked. In their very diversity they help to explain the contradictions of Saint-Simon's thought, which reflected rival interpretations of contemporary science.

⁵⁰ Perroux, François, Industrie et création collective—Saint-simonisme du vingtième siècle, Paris, 1964, p. 9.Google Scholar