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

• Published date: 01 October 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231157468
• Author: William R. Cameron
• Date: 01 October 2023

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231157468

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(5) 741 –766

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917231157468

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Article

Cosmology and Vigilance:

Political Vanguardism in

Saint-Simon and Blanqui

William R. Cameron1

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

1Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

William R. Cameron, Cornell University, White Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.

Email: wrc66@cornell.edu

1157468PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231157468Political TheoryCameron

research-article2023

742Political Theory 51(5)

draws attention to the importance of cosmological rhetoric in the history

of modern republican and socialist political thought.

Keywords

socialism, vanguard, cosmology, democratic theory, popular sovereignty,

progress

Introduction

It is a truism that political thought has long sought to ground itself in cosmo-

logical visions. Finding analogies between the origin and development of

cosmos, city, and man was a central theme of Plato’s Republic that, on

Sheldon Wolin’s telling, bequeathed to the tradition of political theory an

“architectonic impulse” aimed at “bound[ing] the community to the rhythm

of the cosmos itself.” This tradition, Wolin (2004) continues, culminates “in

the Leninist theory of the Party,” with its “faint echoes of the divine ruler of

Hellenistic thought who labors to infuse into men a logos of which they are

only dimly conscious” (pp. 47, 51). The connection between Plato’s philoso-

pher-king and Lenin’s vanguard party—both guardians of a natural order

only knowable to the initiated—remains a powerful negative image for dem-

ocratic theorists of all stripes. Marxist-Leninists claim to represent the “van-

guard of history,” wielding the epistemic authority of “scientific socialist”

ideology to facilitate the unfolding of “objective” developmental laws, dep-

recating the capacity for popular self-organization upon which democracy

depends. As Marx’s rival Mikhail Bakunin put it in 1872, vanguardism is “the

reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and

elitist of all regimes” (Bakunin 1972, 321).

This article challenges this familiar account by attending to the historical

emergence of the “vanguard” metaphor in nineteenth-century France. It

argues that, far from serving as a mere negative example for contemporary

political theorists, the discourse of vanguardism and the scientifically vigi-

lant attitude it attempts to foment, can shed light on dilemmas of democratic

representation that remain central to political theory. These theoretical

insights only become apparent, however, when we challenge prevalent his-

toriographies of nineteenth-century French political culture. Given its deri-

vation from a military lexicon—where it denoted an advanced guard of a

main force—the emergence of the term “vanguard” in political speech is

easily associated with the various conspiracies to violently restore Jacobin-

style democratic dictatorship that plagued successive French regimes after