God is a Capitalist

by Roger McKinney

  Mises summarized the dramatic change in the perspective on human nature in his book Theory and History this way:

  Christian theology discerns three stages in human history: the bliss of the age preceding the fall of man, the age of secular depravity, and finally the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. If left alone, man would not be able to expiate the original sin and to attain salvation. But God in his mercy leads him to eternal life. In spite of all the frustrations and adversities of man's temporal pilgrimage, there is hope for a blessed future.

  The Enlightenment altered this scheme in order to make it agree with its scientific outlook. God endowed man with reason that leads him on the road toward perfection. In the dark past superstition and sinister machinations of tyrants and priests restrained the exercise of this most precious gift bestowed upon man. But at last reason has burst its chains and a new age has been inaugurated. Henceforth every generation will surpass its predecessors in wisdom, virtue, and success in improving earthly conditions. Progress toward perfection will continue forever. Reason, now emancipated and put in its right place, will never again be relegated to the unseemly position the dark ages assigned to it. All "reactionary" ventures of obscurantists are doomed to failure. The trend toward progress is irresistible.

  Saint-Simon – father of modern socialism

  Hayek started part two of his book The Counter-Revolution in Science with this depiction of the spirit of the age:

  Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success. And never can pride in the achievements of the natural sciences and confidence in the omnipotence of their methods have been more justified than at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and nowhere more so than at Paris where almost all the great scientists of the age congregated. If it is true, therefore, that the new attitude of man towards social affairs in the nineteenth century is due to the new mental habits acquired in the intellectual and material conquest of nature, we should expect it to appear where modern science celebrated its greatest triumphs. In this we shall not be disappointed. Both the two great intellectual forces which in the course of the nineteenth century transformed social thought - modern socialism and that species of modern positivism, which we prefer to call scientism, spring directly from this body of professional scientists and engineers which grew up in Paris, and more particularly from the new institution which embodied the new spirit as no other, the Ecole polytechnique.

  Hayek wrote that the French Enlightenment embodied an unprecedented enthusiasm for the natural sciences, and rightly so. The great scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made enormous advances in their fields. However, scientists began to err when they applied the methods of the natural sciences to the study of man and society. Condorcet, Hayek wrote, “repeatedly exhorts the scholars ‘to introduce into the moral sciences the philosophy and the method of the natural sciences.’” Hayek quoted from Condorcet’s Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind:

  The only foundation for the knowledge of the natural sciences is the idea that the general laws, known or unknown, which regulate the phenomena of the Universe, are necessary and constant; and why should that principle be less true for the intellectual and moral faculties of man than for the other actions of nature?

  Hayek wrote that Condorcet had laid the foundation for the collectivist view of history and scientism that remain with us today. The French Revolution took Condorcet’s life while taking his philosophy as its guide. The violent destruction of the revolution scraped the ground clean of the ancient institutions and left a barren plain on which the revolutionaries built new ones using the best scientific knowledge of the time. Hayek wrote,

  As one of the new scientific journals which sprang up at the end of the Terror expressed it: “The Revolution has razed everything to the ground. Government, morals, habits, everything has to be rebuilt. What a magnificent site for the architects! What a grand opportunity of making use of all the fine and excellent ideas that had remained speculative, of employing so many materials that could not be used before, of rejecting so many others that had been obstructions for centuries and which one had been forced to use.”

  And so they did. Like engineers building a bridge, or another tower of Babel, they would construct a new mankind. To aid them, they built a new school, the Ecole Polytechnique, with an innovative curriculum. In 1812, the year the French burned Moscow and the British torched Washington, Henri de Saint-Simon wrote about a small flame that a century later would consume the world in its own fire. Hayek quoted him:

  Such is the difference in this respect between the state of...even thirty years ago and that of today that while in those not distant days, if one wanted to know whether a person had received a distinguished education, one asked: “Does he know his Greek and Latin authors well?,” today one asks: “Is he good at mathematics? Is he familiar with the achievements of physics, of chemistry, of natural history, in short, of the positive sciences and those of observation?

  The graduates of the new French system “prided themselves on having more precise and more satisfactory solutions than anyone else for all political, religious and social questions,” and “ventured to create a religion as one learns at the Ecole to build a bridge or a road,” according to Hayek.

  Henri de Saint-Simon did not attend the Ecole Polytechnique. Raised in an aristocratic family, like Karl Marx, he spent his early manhood as a soldier fighting with Lafayette in the U.S. war for independence. After the French Revolution he abandoned his aristocratic title and began speculating with borrowed money on real estate, focusing on the sales of confiscated Church land. He spent some time in prison during the “terror.” Out of prison, he worked on a variety of business ideas using borrowed money, such as organizing a stage coach service, selling wine, manufacturing textiles and playing cards, and banking. His entrepreneurial phase ended when his silent partner discovered that Saint-Simon had spent most of the funds on a lavish lifestyle instead of paying the bills of the business.

  Saint-Simon still had a modest inheritance to live on and used it to write philosophy. In 1803 he wrote the Lettres d'un habitant de Geneve a ses contemporains in which he proposed that a Supreme Council of Newton be formed consisting of three scholars each from seven fields, mathematics, physics, chemistry, physiology, literature, painting and music. The people should elect the members and the mathematician who received the most votes would preside over it. As Hayek wrote, the council would,

  become in their collective capacity the representatives of God on earth, who would deprive the Pope, the cardinals, bishops and the priests of their office because they do not understand the divine science which God has entrusted to them and which some day will again turn earth into paradise...It is necessary that the physiologists chase from their company the philosophers, moralists and metaphysicians just as the astronomers have chased out the astrologers and the chemists have chased out the alchemists.

  In other words, the people would elect their dictators and submit to them, while the dictators would use science to restructure society. Saint-Simon even included a religion in which people would worship science in temples of Newton. One of the main jobs of the council was to reconcile property owners with the majority of people who did not own property in order to prevent the struggle that naturally happens between the two classes. Hayek quoted him:

  All men will work; they will regard themselves as laborers attached to one workshop whose efforts will be directed to guide human intelligence according to my divine foresight. The supreme Council of Newton will direct their works...Anybody who does not obey the orders will be treated by the others as a quadruped.

  At the pamphlet’s publication, Saint-Simon’s inheritance ran out and that made him homeless. He became weak and ill until a former valet took him in and supported him for four years. Then the former servant died, tossing Saint-Simon back onto the street. Through the intermediation of an admirer, Sa
int-Simon obtained a small annual pension in exchange for giving up any claims to an inheritance. With that income, he began again writing about his plan for society.

  Before long Saint-Simon attracted a small following of young, gullible men who absorbed and refined his philosophy. Augustin Thierry, then nineteen years old, developed the theory of class conflict that later kidnapped Marx’s imagination. Saint-Simon attracted a circle of young bankers and industrialists and, finding praise of industry more profitable than science in attracting donations he became an enthusiast of manufacturing and banking. A governor of the Banque de France gave him 1,000 francs per month to start a new journal on science and industry. The journal raised Saint-Simon’s appeal among young artists, bankers and industrialists who formed a larger group of admirers around him.

  But his love of planning, and control soon alienated most of those. Among the many things that offended readers, Hayek wrote, were his statements such as, “the principle respect for production and the producers is infinitely more fruitful than the principle respect for property and the proprietors...” and “Politics, therefore, to sum up in two words, is the science of production, that is, the science which has for its object the order of things most favorable to all sorts of production.”

  Eventually, Saint-Simon lost most of his pupils who advocated liberty and he would likely have died in obscurity had he not attracted his most intelligent follower, a young engineer named Auguste Comte. The Ecole Polytechnique had kicked out Comte just before his final exam for being the ring leader in an insubordination. Afterward, he tutored students in math and translated from English a textbook on geometry. Comte worked as Saint-Simon’s secretary for three months, during which he absorbed, distilled and advanced his boss’ ideas. He summed up his development of moral philosophy, according to Hayek, with this: “There is nothing good and nothing bad absolutely speaking; everything is relative, this is the only absolute statement.”

  He insisted that property “is the real basis of the social edifice,” more so than parliamentary government and suggested changing that edifice by rewriting property laws. With that turn against liberty and property, Saint-Simon and Comte lost all of their support from bankers and industrialists and were forced to shut down the journal. Over the next few years Comte collaborated with Saint-Simon on several publications with untarnished enthusiasm for his old boss, referring to him as the most excellent man he knew and pledging eternal friendship to him.

  Most of the complaints about the publications came from those attached to individual liberty and property, which caused Saint-Simon to turn more antagonistic toward the two institutions. He wrote, “The vague and metaphysical idea of liberty...impedes the action of the masses on the individual” and is “contrary to the development of civilization and to the organization of a well-ordered system.” Of course, the chief proponents of individual liberty and property were the political economists, or what modern economics calls the classical economists such as David Ricardo and J. B. Say, which shows that the antipathy between socialism and economics arose long before Marx.

  Following Descartes’ insistence that design by an elite group trumps design by the many, Saint-Simon and Comte insisted that a society consciously designed and enforced by the most intelligent people would prove far superior to the existing system that Christianity had created. Saint-Simon and Comte gave artists the role of suggesting ideas that engineers would implement in the latest iteration of his plan, but an elite group of scientists would guide the process from above. The elite could establish Saint-Simon’s perfectly designed social order only if they could in all cases “assign to every individual or nation that precise kind of activity for which they are respectively fitted,” according to Hayek. That order presupposed a moral order, but not the existing one which had grown up undirected with Christianity. Comte could endorse only a morality designed by an elite group he called a Government of Opinion which would determine “the entire system of ideas and habits necessary for initiating individuals into the social order under which they must live.”

  Another financial crisis hit Saint-Simon in 1823 and left him destitute again. He tried to blow his brains out with a gun, but succeeded only in destroying one eye. The incident again attracted sympathy and a financial benefactor, this time until his death at age sixty-five in 1825. He left behind a small group of devoted disciples who would spread his ideas worldwide. The disciples held a series of lectures in 1828 and 1829 on Saint-Simons’ ideas as refined by them. Those reached printed form as Doctrine de Saint-Simon, Exposition which Hayek called the most important document produced by Saint-Simon or his students:

  If it is not the Bible of Socialism, as it has been called by a French scholar, it deserves at least to be regarded as its Old Testament. And in some respects it did indeed carry socialist thought further than was done for nearly a hundred years after its publication.

  The Exposition constructed a comprehensive system of Saint-Simon and Comte’s original ideas, but his disciples advanced important concepts of their own. Among those were the laws of history that deluded them into thinking they could predict a future state of mankind in which all antagonism between men caused by the exploitation of one group by another will end in a state of harmony. In the past, exploitation took the form of cannibalism, slavery, and serfdom. But in the minds of Saint-Simon’s disciples, exploitation existed in the form of work for wages because the business owners, the bourgeoisie, took the products of the wage earners and disposed of them as they wished. Marx would later call this divorce of the laborer from his production “alienation.” The scientifically designed society would end this exploitation by terminating private property and transferring it to the state.

  The disciples found inheritance particularly irritating. The new order would make the workers the inheritors and thereby destroy the privileges of birth. Hayek wrote of the Exposition,

  The main points given will suffice to show that in their description of the organization of a planned society they went much further than later socialists until quite recent times, and also how heavily later socialists have drawn on their ideas. Till the modern discussion of the problem of calculation in a socialist community this description of its working has not been further advanced. There was very little justification for dubbing this very realistic picture of a planned society “Utopian.” Marx, characteristically, added to it...the “objective” or labor theory of value.

  But in so far as that general socialism which today is common property is concerned, little had to be added to Saint-Simonian thought. As a further indication of how profoundly the Saint-Simonians have influenced modern thought, it need only be mentioned to what a great extent all European languages have drawn from their vocabulary. “Individualism,” “industrialist,” “positivism,” and the “organization of labor” all occur first in the Exposition. [Hayek was mistaken about individualism. See chapter 2] The concept of the “class struggle” and the contrast between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat” in the special technical sense of the terms are Saint-Simonian creations. The word “socialism” itself, although it does not yet appear in the Exposition (which uses “association” in very much the same sense), appears in its modern meaning for the first time a little later in the Saint-Simonian Globe.

  Saint-Simon’s disciples retreated to a commune outside Paris where they practiced and taught their philosophies. They disbanded after charges of outraging public morality were brought against the leaders, resulting in them spending a year in jail. But their influence spread far and wide through literature. Saint-Simonians had preached that art should be contentious and show life in all its ugliness in order to prepare the people for the coming revolution. Many artists took the challenge seriously. Some writers were followers of Saint-Simon while others, such as H. de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Eugene Sue absorbed and help spread the ideas. Others applied the concepts to music. Thomas Carlyle, who minted the term “dismal science” to disparage economics because he support
ed slavery when the classical economists opposed it, spread Saint-Simon’s ideas in England where the movement bagged its grandest trophy in the capture of J. S. Mill. Hayek quoted Mill who wrote that Comte’s System of Positive Policy,

  harmonized well with my existing notions to which it seemed to give a scientific shape. I already regarded the methods of physical science as the proper models for political. But the chief benefit which I derived at this time from the trains of thought suggested by the Saint-Simonians and by Comte, was, that I obtained a clearer conception than ever before of the peculiarities of an era of transition in opinion, and ceased to mistake the moral and intellectual characteristics of such an era, for the normal attributes of humanity.

  ...[my] eyes were opened to the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy, which assumes private property and inheritance as indefeasible facts and freedom of production and exchange as the dernier mot of social improvement.”

  Mill embraced Saint-Simon and Comte’s ideas for 20 years, but they finally so revolted him that he called them “the completest system of spiritual and temporal despotism which ever yet emanated from a human brain, unless possibly that of Ignatius Loyola,” as Hayek quoted him.

  Saint-Simonians failed to gain the political power they desired, but undeterred, they set about transforming the structure of economies across Europe by creating large companies and promoting public works, especially railroads and canals. Hayek wrote, “One might almost say that after the Saint-Simonians had failed to bring about the reforms they desired through a political movement, or after they had grown older and more worldly, they undertook to transform the capitalist system from within and thus to apply as much of their doctrines as they could by individual effort.” They created the European pattern of industrial organization in which large banks financed and owned stock in corporations that built railways, canals, and utilities. They originated the concept of town planning, which evolved into zoning laws in the U.S. “Enfantin, looking back late in life at the works of the Saint-Simonians, was well entitled to say that they had ‘covered the earth with a net-work of railways, gold, silver, and electricity,’" Hayek wrote. Finally, they provided the arguments for cartels and the form of socialism that would be known as fascism.