Conclusion
The economic theories of fin-de-siecle French socialists like Malon, Sorel and Landry were perhaps doomed from the start not to become easily integrated within the social imaginaries of militants since they openly embraced the complexity of reality in order to envisage social transformation.
They were not suitable for political sloganeering, which can be useful in the heat of action but must be seen for what it is: brandishing the sorts of “social myths” useful for mobilising contestation which Sorel wrote about (Sorel 1902; [1908] 1990). To this extent, topics like workers’ rights to the integral product of their labour, the labour theory of value, class struggle and state control over the means of production were all motivational slogans, the harshest criticism of which could often be found in serious socialist writings at the time. Thus, the economic thought of fin-de-siecle socialists - such as Benoit Malon, who translated Die Quintessenz des Sozialismus (Schaffle [1874] 1880) - was much broader in its scope than that found in the idiom of militants.Ideas always reflect complex material and epistemic approaches, and it is difficult - if not pointless - to try and mechanically link a discipline or analytical method (e.g. marginalism) to a political ideology. This is as true for socialism (which one spontaneously tends to link to sociology) as it is for economics (which seems naturally linked to liberalism) (Karsenti and Lemieux 2017). Thus, for the socialist approaches described above, the concern was not with understanding how a single law operated in reality, but rather with how to grapple with constantly changing economic realities producing the very laws one first needed to understand were these realities ever to be sufficiently explained such that they might be changed. From the former farmworker like Malon to the philosophy student turned economist and, later in the 1930s, Labour Minister like Landry via the idiosyncratic and iconoclastic hydraulic engineer who was Sorel, this chapter has limited itself to examining the economic thought of three French socialist figures, even if, admittedly, the period’s intellectual variety cannot be reduced to these necessarily limited examples.
While Malon, Sorel and Landry certainly had very different views of what political economy was and should be, they all shared an attachment to some variant of socialism, which in France had both a Saint-Simonian, industrialist background and also a liberal branch (Tribe 2015). Unlike the liberal branch, however, Malon, Sorel and Landry sought, each in their own way, to define an emancipated production for which the focus on labour would once again become the driving force for improved social organisation. They all wanted to replace profitability with productivity and profiteers with workers. The emancipated production they wanted was as far from unbridled industrialism as, in their eyes, productivity was from profitability. Although they shared a Saint-Simonian vision of exploiting the planet, they recognised its limitations, without, however, offering all the answers (especially ecological answers) that contemporaries of our own day and age might wish for. Yet their theories focused on the general environment in which the creative act of production takes place, and in doing so, they outlined an economic world very different from the one designed by their liberal rivals. For this reason, their theories deserve to be rescued from the oblivion to which they have been relegated by existing histories of both economic and socialist thought.