Cosmology and Vigilance: Political Vanguardism in Saint-Simon and Blanqui

Abstract

This paper re-examines the idea of political vanguardism—long consigned to the dustbin of defunct scientific socialist ideology—to shed light on the theory of democratic representation. The discussion connects the use of the term “vanguard” by two prominent early socialist thinkers to what it terms the “cosmological” dimension of their writings. It shows how each author figured vanguard agency as fomenting different visions of the intellectual progress required for representative government, and that these visions were sustained by analogies to the origin and development of astronomical objects. The “utopian” socialist Henri Saint-Simon (1770–1825) first invoked the vanguard metaphor to describe a way of thinking about scientific progress that would naturalize a new governing elite. The revolutionary communist Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) then appropriated the vanguard idea to reimagine scientific authority in a way that would preserve and expand citizens’ capacities to hold their representatives accountable. The article pursues three goals. First, it provides a revisionist history of well-known scientistic attempts to stabilize mass democracy in the nineteenth century, revealing how claims to scientific authority were contested from within a socialist republican tradition usually seen as complicit in such agency-inhibiting ideologies. Second, the concept of vanguardism it reconstructs from this history, as a response to the “usurpation” of a vigilant attitude between citizens and office holders, offers new resources for theorizing democratic representation. Finally, it draws attention to the importance of cosmological rhetoric in the history of modern republican and socialist political thought.