FRANCE
All the later European schools presuppose-in part adopting, in part criticising--the work of the English economists from Smith(62) to Ricardo and the Epigoni. The German school has had in a greater degree than any other a movement of its own-following, at least in its more recent period, an original method, and tending to special and characteristic conclusions. The French school, on the other hand,-if we omit the Socialists, who do not here come under consideration, -has in the main reproduced the doctrines of the leading English thinkers,--stopping short, however, in general of the extremes of Ricardo and his disciples. In the field of exposition the French are unrivalled; and in political economy they have produced a series of more or less remarkable systematic treatises, text-books, and compendiums, at the head of which stands the celebrated work of J. B. Say. But the number of seminal minds which have appeared in French economic literature of writers who have contributed important truths, introduced improvements of method, or presented the phenomena under new light--has not been large. Sismondi, Dunoyer, and Bastiat will deserve our attention, as being the most important of those who occupy independent positions (whether permanently tenable or not), if we pass over for the present the great philosophical renovation of Auguste Comte, which comprehended actually or potentially all the branches of sociological inquiry. Before estimating the labours of Bastiat. we shall find it desirable to examine the views of Carey, the most renowned of American economists, with which the latest teachings of the ingenious and eloquent Frenchman are, up to a certain point, in remarkable agreement. Cournot, too, must find a place among the French writers of this period, as the chief representative of the conception of a mathematical method in political economy.
Of Jean Baptiste Say (1767-1832) Ricardo says "He was the first, or among the first, of Continental writers who justly appreciated and applied the principles of Smith, and has done more than all other Continental writers taken together to recommend that enlightened and beneficial system to the nations of Europe." The Wealth of Nations in the original language was placed in Say's hands by Clavière, afterwards minister, then director of the assurance society of which Say was a clerk; and the book made a powerful impression on him. Long afterwards, when Dupont de Nemours complained of his injustice to the physiocrats, and claimed him as, through Smith, a spiritual grandson of Quesnay and nephew of Turgot, he replied that he had learned to read in the writings of the mercantile school, had learned to think in those of Quesnay and his followers, but that it was in Smith that he had learned to seek the causes and the effects of social phenomena in the nature of things, and to arrive at this last by a scrupulous analysis. His Traits d'Économie Politique (1803) was essentially founded on Smith's work, but he aimed at arranging the materials in a more logical and instructive order.(63) He has the French art of easy and lucid exposition, though his facility sometimes degenerates into superficiality; and hence his book became popular, both directly and through translations obtained a wide circulation, and diffused rapidly through the civilized world the doctrines of the master. Say's knowledge of common life, says Roscher, was equal to Smith's; but he falls far below him in living insight into larger political phenomena, and he carefully eschews historical and philosophical explanations. He is sometimes strangely shallow, as when he says that "the best tax is that smallest in amount." He appears not to have much claim to the position of an original thinker in political economy. Ricardo, indeed, speaks of him as having "enriched the science, by several discussions, original, accurate, and profound." What he had specially in view in using these words was what is, perhaps rather pretentiously, called Say's théorie des débouchés, with his connected disproof of the possibility of a universal glut. The theory amounts simply to this, that buying is also selling, and that it is by producing that we are enabled to purchase the products of others. Several distinguished economists, especially Malthus and Sismondi, in consequence chiefly of a misinterpretation of the phenomena of commercial crises, maintained that there might be general over-supply or excess of all commodities above the demand. This Say rightly denied. A particular branch of production may, it must indeed be admitted, exceed the existing capabilities of the market ; but, if we remember that supply is demand, that commodities are purchasing power, we cannot accept the doctrine of the possibility of a universal glut without holding that we can have too much of everythingthat "all men can be so fully provided with the precise articles they desire as to afford no market for each other's superfluities." Whatever services, however, Say may have rendered by original ideas on those or other subjects, his great merit is certainly that of a propagandist and populariser.
The imperial police would not permit a second edition of his work to be issued without the introduction of changes which, with noble independence, he refused to make; and that edition did not therefore appear till 1814. Three other editions were published during the life of the authorin 1817, 1819, and 1826. In 1828 Say published a second treatise, Cours complet d'éonomie Politique pratique, which contained the substance of his lectures at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and at the Collége de France. `Whilst in his earlier treatise he had kept within the narrow limits of strict economics, in his later work he enlarged the sphere of discussion, introducing in particular many considerations respecting the economic influence of social institutions.
Jean Charles L. Simonde de Sismondi (17731842), author of the Histoire des Républiques Italienises dis moyen âge, represents in the economic field a protest, founded mainly on humanitarian sentiment, against the dominant doctrines He wrote first a treatise De la Richesse Commerciale (1803), in which he followed strictly the principles of Adam Smith. But he afterwards came to regard these principles as insufficient and requiring modification. He contributed an article on political economy to the Edinburgh Encyclopeadia, in which his new views were partially indicated. They were fully developed in his principal econcmic work, Nouveaux Principes d'Économie Politique, ou de la Richesse dans ses rapports avec la Population (1819; 2d ed., 1827). This work, as he tells us, was not received with favour by economists, a fact which he explains by the consideration that he had "attacked an orthodoxyan enterprise dangerous in philosophy as in religion." According to his view, the science, as commonly understood, was too much of a mere chrematistic: it studied too exclusively the means of increasing wealth, and not sufficiently the use of this wealth for producing general happiness. The practical system founded on it tended, as he believed, not only to make the rich richer, but to make the poor poorer and more dependent; and he desired to fix attention on the question of distribution as by far the most important, especially in the social circum- stances of recent times.
The personal union in Sismondi of three nationalities, the Italian, the French, and the Swiss, and his comprehensive historical studies, gave him a special largeness of view; and he was filled with a noble sympathy for the suffering members of society. He stands nearer to socialism than any other French economist proper, but it is only in sentiment, not in opinion, that he approximates to it; he does not recommend any socialistic scheme. On the contrary, he declares in a memorable passage that, whilst he sees where justice lies, he must confess himself unable to suggest the means of realising it in practice; the division of the fruits of industry between those who are united in their production appears to him vicious; but it is, in his judgment, almost beyond human power to conceive any system of property absolutely different from that which is known to us by experience. He goes no further than protesting, in view of the great evils which he saw around him, against the doctrine of laisser faire, and invoking, somewhat vaguely, the intervention of Governments to regulate the progress of wealth and to protect the weaker members of the community.
His frank confession of impotence, far wiser and more honourable than the suggestion of precipitate and dangerous remedies, or of a recurrence to outworn mediaeval institutions, has not affected the reputation of the work. A prejudice was indeed early created against it in consequence of its partial harmony of tone, though, as we have seen, not of policy, with socialism, which was then beginning to show its strength, as well as by the rude way in which his descriptions of the modern industrial system, especially as it existed in England, disturbed the complacent optimism of some members of the so-called orthodox school. These treated the book with ill-disguised contempt, and Bastiat spoke of it as preaching an économie politique à rebours. But it has held its place in the literature of the science, and is now even more interesting than when it first appeared, because in our time there is a more general disposition, instead of denying or glossing over the serious evils of industrial society, to face and remove or at least mitigate them. The laisser faire doctrine, too, has been discredited in theory and abandoned in practice; and we are ready to admit Sismondi's view of the State as a power not mere intrusted with the maintenance of peace, but charged also with the mission of extending the benefits of the social union and of modern progress as widely as possible through all classes of the community. Yet the impression which his treatise leaves behind it is a discouraging one; and this because he regards as essentially evil many things which seem to be the necessary results of the development of industry. The growth of a wealthy capitalist class and of manufacture on the great scale, the rise of a vast body of workers who live by their labour alone, the extended application of machines, large landed properties cultivated with the aid of the most advanced appliancesall these he dislikes and deprecates; but they appear to be inevitable. The problem is, how to regulate and moralise the system they imply; but we must surely accept it in principle, unless we aim at a thorough social revolution. Sismondi may be regarded as the precursor of the German economists known under the inexact designation of Socialists of the Chair; but their writings are much more hopeful and inspiring.
To the subject of population he devotes special care, as of great importance for the welfare of the working classes. So far as agriculturists are concerned, he thinks the system of what he calls patriarchal exploitation, where the cultivator is also proprietor, and is aided by his family in tilling the land a law of equal division among the natural heirs being apparently presupposedthe one which is most efficacious in preventing an undue increase of the population. The father is, in such a case, able distinctly to estimate the resources available for his children, and to determine the stage of sub-division which would necessitate the descent of the family from the material and social position it had previously occupied. When children beyond this limit are born, they do not marry, or they choose amongst their number one to continue the race. This is the view which, adopted by J. S. Mill, makes so great a figure in the too favourable presentation by that writer of the system of peasant proprietors.
In no French economic writer is greater force or general solidity of thought to be found than in Charles Dunoyer (17861862), author of La Liberté du Travail (1845; the substance of the first volume had appeared under a different title in 1825), honourably known for his integrity and independence under the régime of the Restoration. What makes him of special importance in the history of the science is his view of its philosophical constitution and method. With respect to method, he strikes the keynote at the very outset in the words "rechercher expérimentalement," and in professing to build on "les données de l'observation et de l'expérience." He shows a marked tendency to widen economics into a general science of society, expressly describing political economy as having for its province the whole order of things which results from the exercise and development of the social forces. This larger study is indeed better named Sociology; and economic studies are better regarded as forming one department of it. But the essential circumstance is that, in Dunoyer's treatment of his great subject, the widest intellectual, moral, and political considerations are inseparably combined with purely economic ideas. It must not be supposed that by liberty, in the title of his work, is meant merely freedom from legal restraint or administrative interference; he uses it to express whatever tends to give increased efficiency to labour. He is thus led to discuss all the causes of human progress, and to exhibit them in their historical working.
Treating, in the first part, of the influence of external conditions, of race, and of culture on liberty in this wider sense, he proceeds to divide all productive effort into two great classes, according as the action is exercised on things or on men, and censures the economists for having restricted their attention to the former. He studies in his second and third parts respectively the conditions of the efficiency of these two forms of human exertion. In treating of economic life, strictly so called, he introduces his fourfold division of material industry, in part adopted by J. S. Mill, as "(1) extractive, (2) voiturière, (3) manufacturièure, (4) agricole," a division which is useful for physical economics, but will always, when the larger social aspect of things is considered, be inferior to the more commonly accepted one into agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial industry, banking being supposed as common president and regulator. Dunoyer, having in view only action on material objects, relegates banking, as well as commerce proper, to the separate head of exchange, which, along with association and gratuitous transmission (whether inter vivos or mortis causa), he classes apart as being, not industries, in the same sense with the occupations named, but yet functions essential to the social economy. The industries which act on man he divides according as they occupy themselves with (1) the amelioration of our physical nature, (2) the culture of our imagination and sentiments, (3) the education of our intelligence, and (4) the improvement of our moral habits; and he proceeds accordingly to study the social offices of the physician, the artist, the educator, and the priest. We meet in Dunoyer the ideas afterwards emphasised by Bastiat that the real subjects of human exchange are services; that all value is due to human activity; that the powers of nature always render a gratuitous assistance to the labour of man and that the rent of land is really a form of interest on invested capital. Though he had disclaimed the task of a practical adviser in the often-quoted sentence"Je n'impose rien; je ne propose même rien; j'exposé," he finds himself, like all economists, unable to abstain from offering counsel. And his policy is opposed to any state interference with industry. Indeed he preaches in its extreme rigour the laisser faire doctrine, which he maintains principally on the ground that the spontaneous efforts of the individual for the improvement of his condition, by developing foresight, energy, and perseverance, are the most efficient means of social culture. But he certainly goes too far when he represents the action of Governments as normally always repressive and never directive. He was doubtless led into this exaggeration by his opposition to the artificial organizations of labour proposed by so many of his contemporaries, against which he had to vindicate the principle of competition; but his criticism of these schemes took, as Comte remarks, too absolute a character, tending to the perpetual interdiction of a true systematisation of industry.(64)
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