"In contrast with Babeuf, the French theorist the Comte de Saint-Simon was no believer in equality, but he has some claim to be regarded as the ‘founder of modern theoretical socialism, conceived not merely as an ideal but as the outcome of a historical process’. Saint-Simon believed that free economic competition produced poverty and crises and that society was moving inexorably to a stage when its affairs would be planned in accordance with social needs. He was resolutely opposed to violence and held that the most educated section of society would become convinced of the necessity of the development of more rational administration, based upon the application of science, and that other social groups would be won over to an appreciation of such a development. Although Saint-Simon’s was the first form of socialism to which the young Karl Marx was introduced – by his future father-in-law, Ludwig von Westphalen – Marx was later to pour scorn on Saint-Simon’s followers on account of their utopianism, commitment to peaceful change and trust in the possibility of class cooperation rather than the inevitability of class struggle."