Charles Dunoyer was born on 20 May 1786 in the department of Lot. He studied in Paris, first at the Academie de Jurisprudence and then at the Ecole de Droit.
Hostile to Napoleon, he supported the Provisional Government in 1814 after the first fall of the imperial regime. He was however dissatisfied with Louis XVIII’s “Charte octroyee” and, with Charles Comte - J.-B.
Say’s son-in-law - he founded a periodical, Le Censeur, to defend liberal ideas. The publication, first made on a weekly basis and then in thick volumes in order to avoid a censorship, which was limited to publications of less than 320 pages, came to an end for a while. It resumed under the name of Censeur europeen, but, in June 1817, Comte and Dunoyer were prosecuted. Comte left the country but Dunoyer was arrested and sentenced to one year of imprisonment. After the Revolution of July 1830, he returned to politics, supported the new regime of Louis-Philippe and was appointed as a Prefet and became a member of the Conseil d’Etat. Elected to the Academie des sciences morales et politiques, he was a co-founder of the Societe d’economie politique, of which he became the president. He opposed Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s putsch of 2 December 1851 and resigned from all official positions. He died in Paris on 4 July 1862.For Dunoyer (1827a: 368), the eighteenth-century philosophes, and especially Montesquieu and Rousseau, analysed the organization of society abstracting from the laws of its progress and without inquiring into the proper aim of social activity. Politics only consisted in a discussion of the nature and forms of governments. The economists, on the other hand, thought that politics had no influence on wealth and prosperity and that “wealth was basically independent of public organization” (Say [1803] 2006: 3). Dunoyer instead wanted to understand the links between politics and the economy, starting from the idea Benjamin Constant (1814: 8) had put forward that “today the unique aim of human nations is quietness, and wealth with quietness, with industry as the source of wealth”.
When in 1815 the editors of Le Censeur were obliged to suspend its publication, they were wondering whether the liberal opposition had a proper object: and they admitted that “in general one did not know, and did not even ask, where society had to go, and in view of what general object it had to be established” (Dunoyer 1827a: 374). Dunoyer tried to give an answer.It is first necessary to know what liberty is. Dunoyer discards the traditional definition that it is the possibility to do what one wants to do. He also rejects the idea of liberty as a natural right as stated in the Declaration of Human Rights. For him, liberty is a situation in which a person can use his or her faculties without any impediment (1825: 29; 1845, I: 24). Liberty is not a right. It is a power that can be obtained.
What organization in political power does comply with a market economy? Do men therein live in harmony or conflict? Montesquieu (1748, II: 2) wrote that “the natural effect of commerce is to bring peace. Two nations that trade together render themselves mutually dependent if one has an interest in buying and the other in selling”. Louis de Bonald (1796, II: 449) stated instead that “even the most honest trade necessarily puts men in a constant state of war” and, as a consequence, he proposed a specific organization of the political system:
Civilized countries... could not have existed... without the formation, from the very nature of man and society, of a barrier... which placed in the lower part of the society the wish and the duty to get rich through work and industry, and in the upper part, where fortune has already been made, the duty and even the ambition of public careers. (Bonald 1822: 32)
One must be wealthy in order to be allowed to participate in political power.
Dunoyer rejects this view. Industry alone, defined as all the useful activities, is capable of giving society prosperity, morality and peace. Political and social organization must favour this development.
What must be removed is the opposition between a dominated class, doomed to work, and a politically ruling and leisure class. What must and will be instituted is a society in which “the working classes have taken precedence..., in which the passion for work prevails instead over the passion for power... and labour is the sole avowed means to get rich” (Dunoyer 1825: 323).Like Dunoyer, Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1823) defended “industrialisme”, but he disagreed with him on the role of the government. Dunoyer (1827a: 381) criticized him for considering political power as the authority in charge of “directing all the industrial activities towards a common aim”, and put forth instead the idea that the government’s activity is an industry like any other, as it can be seen from the nature of public expenses. Say had rejected Adam Smith’s opposition between productive and unproductive labour, but nevertheless had maintained a distinction between unproductive consumption, which meets the immediate satisfaction of a need, and reproductive consumption, which produces a deferred satisfaction (Say 1803 [2006]: 863). Public expenses mainly concern “immaterial products” and are thus unproductive (ibid.: 937), a destruction of values, a diminution of wealth. Against Say, Dunoyer (1827b) maintains that, if they are suitably done, public expenses are productive even if they take the form of services. With an industrious people:
government itself has the character of an industrial undertaking, with the sole difference that, instead of being done for particular persons or associations,... it acts on behalf of the general society, which entrusts it to people of its choice, at a price and conditions it judges to be the most advantageous. (Dunoyer 1825: 323-4)
In an industrial society, the government plays the part that society assigns to it and by which it is not ruled.
Alain Beraud
See also:
French classical political economy (II); Gustave de Molinari (I); Jean-Baptiste Say (I); Adam Smith (I).