Henri de Saint-Simon

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (; French: [klod ɑ̃ʁi də ʁuvʁwa kɔ̃t də sɛ̃ simɔ̃]; 17 October 1760 – 19 May 1825), better known as Henri de Saint-Simon (French: [ɑ̃ʁi də sɛ̃ simɔ̃]), was a French political, economic and socialist theorist and businessman whose thought had a substantial influence on politics, economics, sociology and the philosophy of science. He was a younger relative of the famous memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon.

Saint-Simon created a political and economic ideology known as Saint-Simonianism that claimed that the needs of an industrial class, which he also referred to as the working class, needed to be recognised and fulfilled to have an effective society and an efficient economy. Unlike conceptions within industrialising societies of a working class being manual laborers alone, Saint-Simon's late-18th-century conception of this class included all people engaged in what he saw as productive work that contributed to society, such as businesspeople, managers, scientists, bankers, and manual labourers, amongst others.

Saint-Simon believed the primary threat to the needs of the industrial class was what he defined as the idling class: a tier of society that included able-bodied persons who, instead of using their labour to benefit the social and economic orders, preferred what he perceived as a parasitic life avoiding work. Saint-Simon stressed a three-pronged recognition of the merits of the individual, social hierarchy, and the wider economy, such as hierarchical, merit-based organisations of managers and scientists; those at the top of the hierarchies would be decision-makers in government. Saint-Simon condemned any intrusion of government into the economy beyond ensuring productive working conditions and reducing idleness in society. Saint-Simon endorsed what critics have described as authoritarian or totalitarian means to achieve his goals, saying that opponents of his proposed reforms should be "treated like cattle".

Saint-Simon's conceptual recognition of the merits of broad socioeconomic contribution and Enlightenment-era valorization of scientific knowledge inspired and influenced utopian socialism, utilitarian political theorist John Stuart Mill, anarchism (through its founder, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon), and Marxism—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified Saint-Simon as an inspiration for their ideas and classified him among the utopian socialists. Saint-Simon's views also influenced 20th-century sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, including Veblen's influential school of institutional economics.