Marx, Nietzsche and Saint-Simon founded the three ruling modernities theories

Evidence

Marx, Nietzsche, and Saint-Simon may plausibly be regarded as the founders of the three most influential ways of thinking about modernity. All three take the Enlightenment as their starting-point, all three have a distinctive conception of the modern epoch inaugurated by the dual industrial and political revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. Saint-Simon inherited Condorcet’s conception of history as the ‘progress of the human mind’. He saw this progress taking concrete shape in industrial society, where scientific knowledge would become the basis of social power and class antagonisms disappear. Marx and Nietzsche are also both recognizable children of the Enlightenment. Both Marxian Ideologiekritik and Nietzschean genealogy continued the philosophes9 attempts to trace the social roots of ideologies. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 261

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes Saint-Simon’s Enlightenment progressivism from Marx’s and Nietzsche’s respective anti-progress genealogies.