A History of Economic Doctrines from the time of the physiocrats to the present day. Charles Gide

its march, and he treats us to a full résumé of its many heresies. In the bitter struggle which ensued the heretics won the day, their nostrums taking the place of the Classical doctrines in the public favour. But it seems hardly possible that Sismondi’s work should have determined the course of these newer tendencies. His immediate influence was extremely limited. It scarcely told at all except upon the socialists. His book was soon forgotten, and not until our own day was its importance fully realised. It would be truer to say that in the course of the nineteenth century there was a spontaneous revival of interest in the ideas promulgated by Sismondi. None the less he was the first writer to raise his voice against certain principles which were rapidly crystallising into dogmas. He was the earliest economist who dared resist the conclusions of the dominant school, and to point to the existence of facts which refused to tally with the large and simple generalisations of his predecessors. If not the founder of the new schools that were about to appear, he was their precursor. They are inspired by the same feelings and welcome the same ideas. His method is an anticipation of that of the Historical school. His definition of political economy as a philosophy of history[430] works wonders in the hands of Roscher, Knies, and Hildebrand. His plea for a closer observation of facts, his criticism of the deductive process and its hasty generalisations, will find an echo in the writings of Le Play in France, of Schmoller in Germany, and of Cliffe Leslie and Toynbee in England. The founders of the German Historical school, in their ignorance of foreign writers, regarded him as a socialist,[431] but the younger representatives of that school have done full justice to his memory, and recognise him as one of their earliest representatives.

      By his appeal to sentiment and his sympathy for the working classes, by his criticism of the industrial régime of machines and competition, by his refusal to recognise personal interest as the only economic motive, he foreshadows the violent reaction of humanitarianism against the stern implacability of economic orthodoxy. We can almost hear the eloquence of Ruskin and Carlyle, and the pleading of the Christian Socialists, who in the name of Christian charity and human solidarity protest against the social consequences of production on a large scale. Like Sismondi, social Christianity will direct its attack, not against the science itself, but against the easy bourgeois complacency of its advocates. A charge of selfishness will be brought, not against economic science as such, but against its representatives and the particular form of society which it upholds.

      

      Finally, by his plea for State intervention Sismondi inaugurated a reaction against Liberal absolutism, a reaction that deepened in intensity and covered a wider area as the century wore on, and which found its final expression in State socialism, or “the socialism of the chair.” He was the first to advocate the adoption of factory legislation in France and to seek to give the Government a place in directing economic affairs. The impossibility of complete abdication on the part of the State would, he thought, become clearer every day. But it was little more than an aspiration with him; it never reached the stage of a practical suggestion.

      Thus in three different ways Sismondi’s proposals were destined to give rise to three powerful currents of thought, and it is not surprising that interest in his work should have grown with the development of the new tendencies which he had anticipated.

      His immediate influence upon contemporary economists was very slight. Some of them allowed themselves to be influenced by his warmheartedness, his tenderness for the weak, and his pity for the workers, but they never found this a sufficient reason for breaking off their connections with the Classical school. Blanqui[432] in particular was a convert to the extent that he admitted some exceptions to the principle of laissez-faire. Theodore Fix and Droz[433] seemed won over for a moment, and Sismondi might rightly have expected that the Revue mensuelle d’Économie politique, started by Fix in 1833, would uphold his views. But the days of the Revue were exceedingly few, and before finally disappearing it had become fully orthodox. Only one author, Buret, in his work on the sufferings of the working classes in England and France,[434] has the courage to declare himself a whole-hearted disciple of Sismondi. The name of Villeneuve-Bargemont, author of Économie politique chrétienne, must be added to these. His work, which was published in three volumes in 1834, bears frequent traces of Sismondi’s influence.

      Sismondi, though not himself a socialist, has been much read and carefully studied by socialists. It is among them that his influence is most marked. This is not very surprising, for all the critical portion of his work is really a vigorous appeal against competition and the inequalities of fortune. Louis Blanc read him and borrowed from him more than one argument against competition. The two German socialists Rodbertus and Marx are still more deeply indebted to him. Rodbertus borrowed from him his theory of crises, and owes him the suggestion that social progress benefits only the wealthier classes. Rodbertus quotes him without any mention of his name, but Marx in his Manifesto has rendered him full justice, pointing out all that he owed to his penetrative analysis. The most fertile idea borrowed by Marx was that which deals with the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few powerful capitalists, which results in the increasing dependence of the working classes. This conception is the pivot of the Manifesto, and forms a part of the very foundation of Marxian collectivism. The other idea of exploitation does not seem to have been borrowed from Sismondi, although he might have discovered a trace of the surplus value theory in his writings. Marx endeavours to explain profit by drawing a distinction between a worker selling his labour and parting with some of his labour force. Sismondi employs terms that are almost identical, and says that the worker when selling his labour force is giving his life. Elsewhere he speaks of a demand for “labour force.” Sismondi never drew any precise conclusion from these ideas, but they may have suggested to Marx the thesis he took such pains to establish.

      Many a present-day socialist, without acknowledging the fact, perhaps without knowing it, loves to repeat the arguments which Sismondi was the first to employ, to stir up his indifferent contemporaries.

CHAPTER II: SAINT-SIMON, THE SAINT-SIMONIANS, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF COLLECTIVISM

       Table of Contents

      Sismondi, by supplementing the study of political economy by a study of social economics, had already much enlarged the area traced for the science by its founders. But while giving distribution the position of honour in his discussion, he never dared carry his criticism as far as an examination of that fundamental institution of modern society—private property. Property, at least, he thought legitimate and necessary. Every English and French economist had always treated it as a thing apart—a fact so indisputable and inevitable that it formed the very basis of all their speculations.

      Suddenly, however, we come upon a number of writers who, while definitely rejecting all complicity with the earlier communists and admitting neither equality of needs nor of faculties, but tending to an agreement with the economists in claiming the maximum of production as the one aim of economic organisation, dare lay their hands upon the sacred ark and attack the institution of property with whole-hearted vigour. Venturing upon what had hitherto been holy ground, they displayed so much skill and courage that every idea and every formula which became a commonplace of the socialistic literature of the later nineteenth century already finds a place in their system. Having definite ideas as to the end which they had in view, they challenged the institution of private property because of its effects upon the distribution and production of wealth. They cast doubt upon the theories concerning its historical evolution, and concluded that its abolition would help the perfection of the scientific and industrial organisation of modern society. The problem of private property was at last faced, and a recurrence of the discussion was henceforth to become a feature of economic science.[435]

      

      Not that it had hitherto been neglected. Utopian communists from Plato and More up to Mably, Morelly, Godwin, and Babeuf, the eighteenth-century equalitarians, all rest their case upon a criticism of property. But hitherto the question had been treated from the point of view of ethics rather than of economics.[436] The originality of the Saint-Simonian treatment is that it is the direct outcome of the economic and political revolution which shook France and the whole of Europe