Competing economic and political ideals
At the end of a letter to Mirabeau written on 26 July 1767, Rousseau made this definitive statement:
Your economic system is admirable. Nothing is more profound, more true, more perceptive, more useful.
It is full of great and sublime truths which transport one.... [B]ut I am afraid that it will lead to countries quite different from those toward which you claim to go.(Rousseau 1767, 271)
Mably, too, adhered unambiguously to many physiocratic developments in agriculture, taxation and commerce (Mably 1768, 1-2; 256). Addressing abbe Baudeau, one of the greatest promoters of Quesnay’s school, he did not even hesitate to call himself “the disciple of the celebrated philosophes [Quesnay and Mirabeau] whom you call your masters” (1768, 1). But at the end of his book, he concludes, “I agree with you that, in order to create a happy State, agriculture must flourish; but I believe that rural prosperity is due to principles other than those of the Economists [physiocrats]” (1768, 256-7). Linguet was less ambiguous: if he claimed to “respect” the physiocrats and if he believed in their “honesty” (Linguet 1771, III, 230), against them he used - compared to Rousseau and Mably - harsh and terrible language. Very little or none of their ideas found favour in his view. And in fact, for these three men, the flaw of the whole physiocratic project was crystal clear: they rejected a policy oriented exclusively towards the extension of the net product, generated by large-scale agriculture to the benefit of entrepreneurial farmers and landowners. And Rousseau and Mably went beyond this: they refused the idea that governments must increase the wealth of nations.
If we are to believe Linguet, there is no worse policy than focusing on the rich. Now the physiocrats are “down on their knees before the wealthy”. If Lemercier wanted to multiply “wealth” and “delights” [jouissances], it was for “those who enjoy”, and any increase of well-being for farmers and landowners only “resulted from the gathering of many little parts removed to everyone else...
the secret of increasing the wealth of a people, is that of raising the number of unfortunate” (Linguet 1771, III, 224-6). Against the grande culture of large farms promoted by the physiocrats, Linguet defended sharecropping [metayage] and small-scale agriculture: employees of prominent farms are usually badly paid, large estates employ less of a workforce than small ones (1771, III, 211-12). Moreover, what is important is to have many smallholders, cheap grain, a cheap workforce, few inequalities and no dependency on foreign countries (1771, III, 179-200). Mably and Rousseau shared this ideal of a flourishing countryside, free of luxury and inequalities. They imagined little Republics in which money and trade were not banned but limited. In his Considerations on the Government of Poland, Rousseau proposed:Encourage agriculture and the useful arts, not by enriching farmers, which would only incite them to give up farming, but by making it honourable and pleasant for them. Establish manufactures of the primary necessities; constantly multiply your wheat and your men without worrying about the rest. The surplus produce of your soil, which will be in short supply in the rest of Europe because of growing monopolies, will necessarily bring you more money than you will need.
(Rousseau 1782, 229)
Mably’s ideal was that of Sparta after the legendary Lycurgus, with its so-called equal citizens, its laws preventing citizens from being too poor or too rich, its noble men with the plough in hands, its absence of luxury, banks, public debts and other paper currencies (Mably 1764, 528-33). But Mably knew that there was a gulf between an (Ancient) ideal and the realpolitik of Western Europe in the second half of eighteenth century. He did not believe in economic principles that were valid at all times and all places, and dealing with what would be desirable for his time, he spoke out against the destruction of private property and in favour of certain commercial activities (Ferrand and Orain 2017).
In Du gouvernement et des lois de Pologne (1770), he said to his interlocutor, who may have been surprised by Mably’s encouragement to improve commerce in Poland: “you are accustomed to hear me blaming commerce”, but “I will praise it when free of pomp and luxury it serves simple needs and is not irritating for our passions” (Mably 1770, 234). According to Rousseau and Mably, the policies could not consist in raising the net product of land. Human beings gather in society in order to be legislators, to improve their manners and virtue. “We must probably need good harvests”, said Mably, “but one has to start to have excellent citizens. A flourishing agriculture is ordinarily the result of good government, but it does not make it” (Mably 1768, 29) (see Rousseau 1755b).The physiocratic notions of “self-evidence” and of “legal despotism” were even more under attack. Fire came from physiocratic objective allies such as Turgot and Condorcet as well as from their adversaries, even when they claimed to be Quesnay’s admirers, such as Mably. This rocket barrage drew interesting and unexpected alliances among these theoreticians. Turgot had scant interest in “selfevidence”, but praising Rousseau’s Contrat social as a text which has “resolved” the idea of inalienability of the sovereignty of the people under every government, he made no secret of his distaste for the concept of “legal despotism”. For Turgot, the latter, which implies a total submission to the will of a monarch, “tarnishes” the writing of the physiocrats (Faccarello 2006, 5-6). For his part, Condorcet could not accept the concept of “self-evidence”. His epistemology was probabilistic, and proofs could only be established by the recurrence of observations. Trying to clarify Rousseau’s concept of “general will” through is social mathematics, Condorcet, favourable to an elected representative assembly, rejected also the physiocratic “legal despotism” (Menudo and Rieucau 2014, 661-2; Faccarello 2016, 88-90).
If they did not refer to a probabilistic theory of knowledge, Rousseau, Mably and Linguet assimilated “self-evidence” to a vague and poorly defined geometric abstraction.
Now they claimed that in policymaking everything depends on the circumstances. For these critics, passions and public opinion were other mistresses much more capricious and powerful than all the so-called mathematical truths of the physiocrats. “In any particular government, which is a composite of so many diverse elements, this self-evidence necessarily disappears. For the science of government is nothing but a science of combinations, applications and exceptions, according to times, places, circumstances” (Rousseau 1767, 269). According to Mably, self-evidence is “an empty word”, a “magic talisman”, “which is to serve as the undoing of all the truths that others will hold up against yours” (Mably1768, 45-6). The passions oppose all their strength to self-evidence: far from expecting that our reason has been able to come to certainty about things, they push us to act in a disordered manner. They always defy self-evidence. Distinguishing clearly what belongs to the physical or the moral sciences, Mably criticised the assimilation made by the physiocrats of the laws of geometry to the laws of politics. No political law can be considered an incontestable truth as can a mathematical law. Linguet qualifies the chapters of Lemercier’s Ordre naturel et essentiel regarding the notion of self-evidence as examples of delirium.“The book takes into consideration neither passions (which influence, so forcibly, the manner of envisaging and appreciating things) nor interests (which do not any less alter and overpower judgement or the aptitude to understand the truth)” (Linguet 1771, III, 24-5).
Gentlemen, allow me to say it to you; you attribute too much force to your calculations, and not enough to the inclinations of the human heart and the play of the passions. Your system is very good for the people of Utopia, it is worthless for the children of Adam.
(Rousseau 1782, 270)
Rousseau added, “I have never been able to understand just what the self-evidence is on which legal despotism is supposed to be based” (1782, 268-9).
Nothing is less evident than being governed by a despot, even “legally”, and it is unlikely that a despot would rule his kingdom through “self-evidence”. A despot, recalls Rousseau, governs according to his passion, not along his own true interests. The sacred rights of property will be destroyed in a minute when decided by a despot, who cannot be restricted by any law. To Mirabeau, Rousseau concluded, “Sir, do not ever again speak to me about your legal despotism. I could not appreciate or even understand it; and I see in it nothing but two contradictory words, which together signify nothing to me” (Rousseau 1767, 271). Mably addressed the usual criticisms to the same term of “despotism”, the “colours” of which “make humanity quake”. It carries with it all the horrors of indolence, debauchery and blood (Mably 1768, 106-7). The adjective that is put with it, legal, is laughable, nothing stands up to the will and passions of an all-powerful prince, and certainly not woolly self-evidence:
Do you not see evidently yourself that I am surrounded by four hundred thousand men whom I pay to find evident that everything I like is just; and that the rest, after looking over the situation closely, judge that it is reasonable to suffer my fantasies, because they evidently risk being impaled if they contradict me.
(1768, 160-61)
The heredity they claim is just a throw of the dice, for nothing guarantees that sovereign philosophers will be born who possess knowledge of natural laws (1768, 176).
It is not the place here to discuss the profound and complex political theories of Rousseau and Mably. Suffice it to recall that according to the first, the “General will” was the product of a nation, the sovereign, gathered in one assembly in order to make fundamental laws. Bearing in his hands the legislative power, the sovereign delegated to a government the capacity to enforce its decisions (puissance executive). The latter could take varied forms from country to country (depending on the size of the population, number of cities, climate, etc.), but it was clear to Rousseau that hereditary monarchies or aristocracies were the worst of all possible governments.
When the best citizens were designated to govern by the sovereign, when they were not able to pass legislation and may be revoked by the nation at any time, and if population of a country increased, Rousseau thought that we approached the best government (Rousseau 1762, Book III). This ideal was quite far from the physiocratic legal despotism. If Rousseau was against representatives within small nations (deputies with imperative mandate could be considered in larger States, see Crignon 2007), Mably championed a “mixed government”, that is a clear-cut separation between the legislative authority, different elected bodies able to make laws, and the executive power, several magistrates who only have to enforce these laws (Mably 1768, 242). Contrary to Lemercier and in agreement with Rousseau, he was to make of the separation of powers the key to every good government: the executive power must only see that the laws are obeyed and the legislative authority must alone have the ability to make laws (1768, 140-41). But he was not favourable to direct democracy, consequently, the responsibility of making the law must be entrusted to representatives. Mably was profoundly convinced that only a mixed government was the best, but he did not propose the institution of a republican one, but that of a moderate monarchy. His ideal was not so much to protect one social class against another as to compensate for - irreversible - inequalities of fortune and condition by a permanent search for better respect of the natural law of self-preservation.4.