System in its turn. And with it, individual property had also to go. Private ownership and Authority were not immutable institutions. Property had already undergone several modifications in the course of history, and new changes, having become necessary, would have to be made.
The abolition of private property—they wrote—could be done gradually, by a series of measures (of which the Great Revolution had already begun to take the initiative), enabling the State to appropriate, in the shape of inheritance duties, a steadily growing proportion of the estates transmitted by inheritance. Individual inheritance being thus more and more reduced, so as to be eventually abolished, and the rich people themselves seeing their own advantage in abandoning privileges which belong to a dying stage of civilisation, "the State would finally become the sole owner of all the lands and industrial concerns, as also the supreme regulator of all labour, the head and the absolute regulator of the three main functions of social life—Art, Science, and Industry."[1]
Every one, being a worker in one of these branches, would thus be a functionary of the State. As to the Government, it would be composed of a hierarchy of the "best men"—the best men of science, the best artists, the best industrialists.
The distribution of the commodities produced would be made, under this system, in virtue of the principle: To each one according to his capacity, to each capacity according to its works.[2]
The Saint-Simonist school, and still more so the Positivist philosophy to which it gave birth, produced a number of quite remarkable historical works, in which the origins of authority, of property, and of the State divided into classes were discussed in a really scientific way, and which up till now have retained their value. The Saint-Simonists severely criticised at the same time the so-called classical political economy of Adam Smith and Ricardo (which was known later on as the Manchester school of "non-intervention of the State"). But while combatting the principle of commercial and industrial individualism and competition, advocated by these economists, the Saint-Simonists fell into the error which they themselves had combatted at the outset, when they severely criticised the military State and the
- ↑ V. Considérant, "Le Socialisme devant le Vieux Monde," 1848, p. 36. I use here the very words of Considérant, to show how Saint-Simonism was understood by the Socialists in 1848, and how many of its ideas are still retained in the teachings of the Social Democrats.
- ↑ I translate verbally the Saint-Simonist formula.
