had by their heroic vision transcended the
"liberal" epoch which in their horizon had its culminating point at the
epoch of the French revolution. The former in his interpretation of
history substituted social physics for economic law and politics, and in
spite of many idealistic and positivistic uncertainties, he almost
discovered the genesis of the third estate. The other, ignorant of
details which were still unknown or neglected, in the exuberance of his
undisciplined spirit imagined a great chain of historic epochs vaguely
distinguished by certain indications of the directing principle of the
forms of production and distribution. He thereupon proposed to himself
to construct a society in which the existing antitheses should
disappear. From all these antitheses he discovered by a flash of genius
and he, more than any other, developed "the vicious circle of
production"; he there unconsciously reached the position of Sismondi,
who at the same epoch, but with other intentions and along different
roads, studying crises and denouncing the disadvantages of the large
scale industry and of unbridled competition, announced the collapse of
the newly established economic science. From the summit of his serene
meditation on the future world of the harmonians he looked down with a
serene contempt upon the misery of civilization and unmoved wrote the
satire of history. Ignorant both, because idealists, of the bitter
struggle which the proletariat is called upon to maintain before putting
an end to the epoch of exploitation and of antitheses, they arrived
through a subjective necessity at their conclusions, in the one case
scheme-making, in the other utopianism. But as by divination they
foresaw some of the direct principles of a society without antitheses.
The former reached a clear conception of the technical government of
society in which should disappear the domination of man over man, and
the other divined, foresaw and prophesied along with the extravagances
of his luxuriant imagination a great number of the important traits of
the psychology and pedagogy of that future society in which according
to the expression of the Manifesto, "the free development of each is the
condition of the free development of all."

Saint-Simonism had already disappeared when the Manifesto appeared.
Fourierism, on the contrary, was flourishing in France and in
consequence of its nature not as a party but as a school.

When the school attempted to