Attempts at diffusion of Saint-Simon's ideas and their application in the greek territory between 1825-1837

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to bring to light that specific persons occupied to tranfer into
the Greek era the ideas of Saint-Simon, after his death in 1825. Saint-Simon's name and doctrines
were known to the Greek scholars of the Diaspora and especially to Corais' circle. One of
the most active Corais' disciples, Fr. Pylarinos (1802-1882) adopted the doctrines of the
Saint-Simonists and propagated and presented them in the above newspaper "Helios". In 1833,
when King Otho came to Greece, a group of Saint-Simonists fugitives ahead by Gustave
Eichthal took shelter in Nafplion. Eichthal proposed the establishment of the "Bureau of Public
Finance", inspired by Saint-Simon's idea of a foundation of a "chambre d'industrie", which
would play an advisory role in the Ministry of Commerce, as Saint-Simon described in his "De
systeme industriel" (1821). The Saint-Simonists, as members of a sort of planning board were to
constitute a managerial elite and assume the direction of the economy, transforming the anarchy
of production into an organization of production. They believed that they found in the new established
Greece the ideal field for the application of Saint-Simon's ideas. Despite the fact that
the "Bureau of Public Finance" had an ambitious beginning, it was not as fruitful as expected.
The main reasons for this could have been the insufficiency in personnel, but mainly, the political status of the country, which did not permit the intervention in a social-economic structure
which was already difficult.