Henri de Saint-Simon

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon was born 17 October 1760, a younger relative of the famous memoirist Duc de Saint-Simon. He developed a political and economic ideology that redrew the map of class: his "industrial class" wasn't just manual labor but everyone doing productive work - businesspeople, managers, scientists, bankers - and his enemy was the "idling class," able-bodied persons living what he saw as parasitic lives. He wanted hierarchies run by merit, with top managers and scientists making government decisions, and he opposed state meddling in the economy beyond ensuring work happened and idleness didn't. His methods could be blunt; he said opponents of his reforms should be "treated like cattle." He died 19 May 1825, but the ideology he called Saint-Simonianism seeded utopian socialism, influenced John Stuart Mill, anarchism through Proudhon, and Marxism - Marx and Engels named him an inspiration - and later shaped Thorstein Veblen's institutional economics.