The European Union Project of Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon: between Utopian Imagination and Technocratic Reality

This article discusses the relation between politics, religion, and science, as understood by the nineteenth-century French socialist Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon and described in his project of European Union. We find in his works, and in this project in particular, ideas that are surprisingly actual, the most important of which is the idea of replacing the “governing of people”, or people’s interest in res publica, with the „administration of things”, the best rule being then that of technocrats attempting, on the grounds of science, to administer a predictable world. Starting from the philosophical reflections of Étienne de La Boétie and of Simone Weil, this article raises the question of what explains the fact that a majority can be easily subordinated to the administrative control of a small technocratic group.