Concluding remarks
The intellectual legacy of sensationist political economy is essential on many points: the determination of value and prices, the conception of money and the theory of the rate of interest, capitalist competition and the distribution of income, public economics and the ethics of the public good.
Sensationist economists do not necessarily agree with each other,[112] but the different paths they took are coherent - the main gap between them being, retrospectively, on the theory of value and the origin of the net product. However, with the exception of the theory of the exclusive productivity of agriculture and the related conception of the incidence of taxation, it is not clear that sensationist authors felt that the differences between them were material. Turgot, for example, appreciated Graslin’s Essai analytique, and some of its “ingenious views”: “this book is far from being devoid of any merit nor even of depth”, he wrote to Dupont (Turgot 1913-23, II, 665), happy to shake the physiocrats’ dogmatism (see also Goutte and Klotz 2015). In interpreting this “early” literature, scholars must thus be very cautious and avoid retrospective views.[113] None of these authors can be included in the subsequent British and French classical schools. However, it is certain that we find in them many important theoretical elements that were later used by classical authors as building blocks in their theoretical constructions. As a conclusion, let us briefly focus on two additional but not minor points.Firstly, an important subject was how to organise the transition from a regulated economy to a free market one. It was heavily discussed among the reformers of the time, and Turgot and Condorcet, in particular, engaged in a polemical discussion with Ferdinando Galiani and Jacques Necker. In a nutshell, the main question was how to implement economic reforms to establish free trade, and to what extent was “abstract” economic theory a useful guide for action in those circumstances (Faccarello 1998).
Secondly, the theme of the division of labour and the benefits it generates was well known in France. It was dealt with, as a rather obvious topic, in many writings. We find it, for example, in Turgot (especially in the Reflexions) and in Graslin:
All men being obliged... to work personally in order to obtain the objects of their needs; and each of them seeking to obtain more with less labour; they soon understood... that, if each of them devoted himself to the production of one object, he would acquire more aptitude and ability, to the advantage of all. Hence the division of productive labour............................................... This order directly
derives from natural and primitive law, because each only labours - and more profitably - for his own well-being.
(Graslin 1767, 97)
This theme is also linked to the theory of the evolution of societies in a certain number of stages - starting from a society of hunters and arriving at the commercial society, with intermediary steps like the shepherding and agricultural stages. Turgot outlined such a theory very early, in 1751, in “Plan d’un ouvrage sur la geographic politique” (1751a) and “Plan de deux discours sur l'histoire univer- selle” (1751b) - a scheme also later developed in France and in Scotland.
But another author is worth mentioning: Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, a political philosopher, who collaborated with Condorcet, and the author of the celebrated pre-revolutionary pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? In the 1770s, especially in his Lettres aux economistes sur leur systeme de politique et de morale. Premiere lettre. Sur les richesses (1775), he developed some interesting economic and political ideas. Insisting on the essential role of labour in the economy, he saw it as the basis of society, “the social order being nothing other than the best possible order of works”. This order is thus linked to the division of labour.
Every man first acquires alone almost all the objects of his needs.
Their number increases with the means [of production], and, as these means become more complicated, a division of tasks arises; the mutual benefit requires it because the workers, less disturbed by actions of the same nature than by tasks of different kinds, always tend to make the greatest efforts with least means. Divisions in labour always increase by virtue of this law...: to improve the effects, and to reduce the costs.(Sieyes 1775, 32-3)
But Sieyes is also laying here the foundations of his theory of representative democracy and propelling the economic theme of the division of labour into political philosophy - just as, in a totally different context, Plato did in Republic. Just as the division of labour has beneficial effects on productivity and wealth, Sieyes emphasised, the different political functions in a State are all the more efficiently performed when they are executed by men who specialise in these functions, even if they are exercised on a temporary basis. With these assertions, Sieyes was refuting the arguments of the partisans of direct democracy and pleading in favour of representative democracy (see, for example, Sieyes 1789).