La Fundación Saint-Simon y el debate sobre la modernización en Francia: Las pautas de una vocación homogeneizadora

Abstract

The Saint-Simon Foundation, an association halfway between the Anglo-Saxon Think tank and the French clubs of co-optation, tried to construct bridges between right-wing politicians and moderate left, industrialists, intellectuals, academic and political ideologists during its eighteen years of existence. Its objective was to be an intellectual project of reform of the society brought by elites that tried to incarnate the common good, in the manner the raised by Pierre Rosanvallon, one of its maximum representatives, in the sense that, the most urgent thing was to produce ideas, to elaborate projects, to formulate diagnoses. The main objective of this article is to offer a general vision of an association —most especially of its aims, working mode and influence that tried to remain a space of initiatives to formulate oriented projects towards a better intelligibility of our contemporary societies be always gathering together intellectuals, high civil employees and industrialists. The idea was to create a space of elaboration of new ways to perceive the social world. And this is what happened: shared visions of society would eventually model a high amount of topics, with conclusions that will become unquestionable evidence in the context of a society in the search of complete homogeneity which will never be scientifically verified nor put into practice.