Assuming that France has become a huge factory, the most important task that awaits the nation is to inaugurate the new manufacturing _régime_ and to seek to combine the interests of the _entrepreneurs_ with those of the workers on the one hand and of the consumers on the other. There is thus just enough room for government—of a kind. What is required is the organising of forces rather than the governing of men.[453] Politics need not disappear altogether, but “must be transformed into a positive science of productive organisation.”[454] “Under the old system the tendency was to increase the power of government by establishing the ascendancy of the higher classes over the lower. Under the new system the aim must be to combine all the forces of society in such a fashion as to secure the successful execution of all those works which tend to improve the lot of its members either morally or physically.”[455] Such will be the task of the new government, where capacity will replace power and direction will take the place of command.[456] Applying itself to the execution of those tasks upon which there is complete unanimity, most of them requiring some degree of deliberation and yet promptness of action, it will gradually transform the character of politics by concentrating attention upon matters affecting life or well-being—the only things it need ever concern itself with.[457] In order to make his meaning clearer, Saint-Simon proposes to confine the executive power to a Chamber of Deputies recruited from the representatives of commerce, industry, manufacture, and agriculture. These would be charged with the final acceptance or refusal of the legislative proposals submitted to them by the other two Chambers, composed exclusively of savants, artists, and engineers. The sole concern of all legislation would, of course, be the development of the country’s material wealth.[458] An economic rather than a political form of government, administering things instead of governing men, with a society modelled on the workshop and a nation transformed into a productive association having as its one object “the increase of positive utility by means of peaceful industry”[459]—such are the ruling conceptions which distinguish Saint-Simon from the Liberals and serve to bring him into the ranks of the socialists. His central idea will be enthusiastically welcomed by the Marxian collectivists, and Engels speaks of it as the most important doctrine which its author ever propounded.[460] Proudhon accepts it, and as a practical ideal proposes the absorption of government and its total extinction in economic organisation. The same idea occurs in Menger’s _Neue Staatslehre_,[461] and in Sorel’s writings, where he speaks of “reorganising society on the model of a factory.”[462] It is this novel conception of government that most clearly distinguishes Saint-Simon’s industrialism from economic Liberalism.[463]