Charles Gide, Charles Rist
A History of Economic Doctrines from the time of the physiocrats to the present day
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664605085
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I: SISMONDI AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CRITICAL SCHOOL
CHAPTER II: SAINT-SIMON, THE SAINT-SIMONIANS, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF COLLECTIVISM
CHAPTER III: THE ASSOCIATIVE SOCIALISTS
CHAPTER IV: FRIEDRICH LIST AND THE NATIONAL SYSTEM OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
CHAPTER V: PROUDHON AND THE SOCIALISM OF 1848
CHAPTER II: THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL. JOHN STUART MILL
CHAPTER I: THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL AND THE CONFLICT OF METHODS
CHAPTER IV: DOCTRINES THAT OWE THEIR INSPIRATION TO CHRISTIANITY
CHAPTER II: THE THEORY OF RENT AND ITS APPLICATIONS
BOOK I: THE FOUNDERS
CHAPTER I: THE PHYSIOCRATS
Political Economy as the name of a special science is the invention of one Antoine de Montchrétien, who first employed the term about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Not until the middle of the eighteenth century, however, does the connotation of the word in any way approach to modern usage. A perusal of the article on Political Economy which appeared in the Grande Encyclopédie of 1755 will help us to appreciate the difference. That article was contributed by no less a person than Jean Jacques Rousseau, but its medley of politics and economics seems utterly strange to us. Nowadays it is customary to regard the adjective “political” as unnecessary, and an attempt is made to dispense with it by employing the terms “economic science” or “social economics,” but this article clearly proves that it was not always devoid of significance. It also reveals the interesting fact that the science has always been chiefly concerned with the business side of the State, especially with the material welfare of the citizens—“with the fowl in the pot,” as Henry IV put it. Even Smith never succeeded in getting quite beyond this point of view, for he declares that “the object of the political economy of every nation is to increase the riches and the power of that country.”[5]
But the counsels given and the recipes offered for attaining the desired end were as diverse as they were uncertain. One school, known as the Mercantilist, believed that a State, like an individual, must secure the maximum of silver and gold before it could become wealthy. Happy indeed was a country like Spain that had discovered a Peru, or Holland, which, in default of mines, could procure gold from the foreigner in exchange for its spices. Foreign trade really seemed a quite inexhaustible mine. Other writers, who were socialists in fact though not in name—for that term is of later invention—thought that happiness could only be found in a more equal distribution of wealth, in the abolition or limitation of the rights of private property, or in the creation of a new society on the basis of a new social contract—in short, in the foundation of the Utopian commonwealth.
It was at this juncture that Quesnay appeared. Quesnay was a doctor by profession, who now, when on the verge of old age, had turned his attention to the study of “rural economy”—the problem of the land and the means of subsistence.[6] Boldly declaring that the solution of the problem had always lain ready to hand, needing neither inventing nor discovering, he further maintained that all social relations into which men enter, far from being haphazard, are, on the contrary, admirably regulated and controlled. To those who took the trouble to think, the laws governing human associations seemed almost self-evident, and the difficulties they involved no greater than the difficulties presented by the laws of geometry. So admirable were these laws in every respect that once they were thoroughly known they were certain to command allegiance. Dupont de Nemours cannot be said to have exaggerated when, in referring to this doctrine, he spoke of it as “very novel indeed.”[7]
It is not too much to say that this marks the beginning of a new science—the science of Political Economy. The age of forerunners is past. Quesnay and his disciples must be considered the real founders of the science. It is true that their direct descendants, the French economists, very inconsiderately allowed the title to pass to Adam Smith, but foreign economists have again restored it to