Socialist Saint

It ’s a pity that the forty-seven volumes of Saint-Simon’s collected works are seldom taken from the shelves these days, for our Liberal friends would find it interesting and profitable to open the oyster from which came so many of the pearls of wisdom that they now wear with pride.

Everyone knows, of course, that Saint-Simon invented plebiscites and the Wilsonian doctrine of the “self-determination of peoples.” . He denounced colonialism, and thought that prosperous nations should provide the technological and financial assistance necessary to industrialize the whole world. He was a vociferous apostle of a United Nations that would infallibly prevent war and insure “world cooperation.” It was he who discovered how easy it is to abolish poverty everywhere by applying science to the twin problems of raising everyone’s standard of living and of organizing mankind. He was, furthermore, sentimental about “the workers,” and he devised the now popular “New Christianity” in which religion is replaced by a blind faith in the miracles to be wrought by Progress.

RO

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Revilo Oliver

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It ’s a pity that the forty-seven volumes of Saint-Simon’s collected works are seldom taken from the shelves these days, for our Liberal friends would find it interesting and profitable to open the oyster from which came so many of the pearls of wisdom that they now wear with pride.

Everyone knows, of course, that Saint-Simon invented plebiscites and the Wilsonian doctrine of the “self-determination of peoples.” . He denounced colonialism, and thought that prosperous nations should provide the technological and financial assistance necessary to industrialize the whole world. He was a vociferous apostle of a United Nations that would infallibly prevent war and insure “world cooperation.” It was he who discovered how easy it is to abolish poverty everywhere by applying science to the twin problems of raising everyone’s standard of living and of organizing mankind. He was, furthermore, sentimental about “the workers,” and he devised the now popular “New Christianity” in which religion is replaced by a blind faith in the miracles to be wrought by Progress.