Early Experiments in the Sociological Operation III. The Socialist Sociologisms of Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonists

In this chapter, I turn to the group of the Saint-Simonists and their engagement with the notion of belief as a lever to imagine sociological interventions. As I will argue throughout the chapter, this engagement represented less of a clear-cut program of preserving society’s ability to believe, as it was for Bonald, than as an instrument to discover what it meant to think socially and cultivate a truly sociological mode of existence. The category of belief represented, for the Saint-Simonists, a narrative instrument of conversion and transformation towards becoming a person who could fully embrace the paradoxical and multifaceted nature of social life. Again, the semiotic flexibility and historicity of ‘belief’ played a crucial role in this regard. For the Saint-Simonists, while their approach of the category first started out as a typical enlightened understanding of ‘beliefs’, they eventually added other meanings to this category, as they came to experience the intellectual complexity of social groups and their different cultural layers. It was the elasticity of belief as a concept which allowed the Saint-Simonists to inhabit this space between a highly theoretical philosophy of historical progress and a lived experience of eclectic proletarian practices of meaning and spirituality.