Concluding remarks
“Among the new principles of political economy I have thought to establish..., there is one that offends more than the others conventional wisdom” wrote Sismondi about his critique of Say’s law.
Does this opposition to conventional wisdom represented here by Say and the economists of the British school make Sismondi necessarily a heterodox economist? The early period during which he structured his way of thinking should press the reader to accept Sismondi’s opinion (mentioned above as an epigram) that he was, in fact, following another route than that subsequently taken by Ricardo, the British Classical school and the French Liberal School. To make a long story short, the main building blocks of Sismondi’s analytical framework were conceived and put down in writing before the publication of Ricardo’s Principles. As a matter of fact, the book-length article for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia should be considered not as an answer to Ricardo but as a pre-print of Sismondi’s 1819 New principles. And the word “new” in the title does not refer to Ricardo’s 1817 volume but to a reconsideration of or even an improvement on the Smithian corpus. Hence, between Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Sismondi stands at a crucial crossroad; and the fact that he chose to follow another route does not make him necessarily a heterodox economist but rather a balancing alternative to what was soon to become for the best parts of two centuries the dominant wisdom in economic theory.[212]The fact that Ricardo completely eclipsed Sismondi in the field of economic theory should not blind the modern reader to the permanent importance of various Sismondian themes until today. The modernity of the three elements discussed in this chapter should help consider Sismondi and Ricardo as complementary thinkers rather than in opposition.
First, the much-lamented divorce between economics as ethics and engineering economics was certainly not initiated by Sismondi. For him, markets never stood alone in the pursuit of wealth and happiness: economic theory and political philosophy are, and should remain, two closely connected branches of a broader social science.
The acquisition of material wealth is not a substitute for moral behaviour; and natural liberty, which may allow the greatest accumulation of material wellbeing, could hardly be seen as the correct and exclusive form of social organisation (Bridel 2020).Second, anticipating the fatal critiques brought about during the second half of the twentieth century on the stability of a general competitive equilibrium and the incompleteness of markets, Sismondi already denounced with increasing severity the intolerable brutality and the inefficiency of a market system characterised by unlimited competition based on a wage system and a price mechanism unable to bring some sense of order (in particular intertemporal) to a largely anarchic and oppressive production system.
Third, the pride of place Sismondi gave (for better or worse) to distributional effects, in particular during the general glut controversy, has never stopped being an underlying and much-neglected argument in economic theory. The very recent renaissance of such a topic at the junction between history, economic theory and political philosophy demonstrates once again that questions related to growth and income distribution are still as unsolved today as they were during Sismondi’s lifetime.
Travelling along “another route” than that followed by the disciples of the “conventional wisdom”, Sismondi never grew tired of hoping and working for a convergence of these two complementary ways of understanding economic systems. And for standing at this crucial junction, hopelessly waving at other economists in an intellectual hurry, he might just, but only just be considered as a heterodox economist.