Henri de Saint-Simon

Henri de Saint-Simon was a French political, economic and socialist theorist whose thought influenced politics, economics, sociology and the philosophy of science. He fought alongside the Marquis de Lafayette in the American Revolution and was imprisoned during the Terror until 1794. His ideology, Saint-Simonianism, held that the needs of an industrial class of all productive workers, from bankers and scientists to manual labourers, must be met against an idling class, and that merit-based hierarchies of managers and scientists should lead. Marx and Engels counted him among the utopian socialists; his last work, Le Nouveau Christianisme, appeared in 1825, shortly before his death.