EXCERPT: "THE SIMULACRUM OF UTOPIAN DECAY" (A.GLASS 2020)

(Henri Saint-Simon's "Du Systeme Industriel" 1821.  His Utopian blueprint to have Western Europe connected by a network of canals)

 "...And this early manifestation of the French Utopian template can be seen one hundred
years after Thomas More’s satirical concept of a Utopian Island, via the French
philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon born October the 17th 1790 in Paris, France. A son to a
wealthy aristocratic family, at an early age he was an idealist, who had written various
articles in French publications outlining the beginning of a groundswell movement within
France, known as “Saint-Simonianism”. But it was his 1819 thesis written for the French
political magazine L’Organisateur that Saint-Simon and his Simonianism philosophy of a
Utopian concept began to solidify into his vision of Utopian socialism. Over two hundred
years later to our present time, after two World Wars and the collapse of Communism
throughout Europe, Saint-Simonianism may have assisted in creating one of the most
audacious and controversial concepts in modern political history.
What we now know as the “The European Union”.

There was a belief as determined as it could be at time in Europe during the 1800s, where
for the first in its history, technology and science had taken center stage. Ensuring that a
process of both the industrial and philosophical would begin to implement a new beginning
that did not require faith or religion. This was the start of a secular humanist society, that
was both capitalism and socialist idealism in its process of how a civilization should
become. Setting forth from these Utopian beliefs, was the philosopher Henri de Saint-
Simon and his Saint-Simonianism notion that an industrially proficient and technologically
embracing world would set a society free of its past feudalism. What needs to be
understood in regard to the early Utopians, was their ardent belief that a socialist and
capitalist society, should be of the tangible, the real, it was not by any measure a
conceptual philosophy. Saint-Simonianism promoted the use of engineering and science;
of what could be created, devised and maintained as a structural Utopian presence. Not
confined to the rhetoric of an idealist..."

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Excerpt from:  "The Simulacrum of Utopian Decay" (A.Glass 2020)