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Purpose and benefits

Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) was a social reformer and a seminal figure in the history both of socialism as a political movement and sociology as an academic discipline. In this work, a collection of essays and open letters which first appeared in 1821, Saint-Simon describes and justifies the claims of ‘les industriels’ to play the decisive role in any society, an industriel being, in Saint-Simon’s terms, anyone who is in the broadest sense a productively active: a farmer or labourer, a craftsperson or manufacturer, a merchant or banker, a scholar or an artist.