Conclusion

During a significant part of the nineteenth century, many French sociologists were critical of political economy. From Comte to Durkheim and Simiand the meth­odology was a significant medium for these critiques; from a different perspec­tive, based on an empirical approach or on a psychological interpretation of social life, both Le Play and Tarde pursued the same end.

Each of them puts forward some form of economic sociology, a way to address with their sociology important economic issues related to the growth of industri­alism and of market exchanges: an altruistic society for Comte, a typology and a patriarchal view of the family and the workshop with Le Play, an institutional approach to economic affairs with Durkheim and the Durkheimians, the imitation­innovation structure with Tarde. Their efforts were important, and their achieve­ments in sociology were enduring; however, their economic sociology was less successful, with the partial exception of the Durkheimian school.

Nevertheless, considered historically, all of them had a significant impact on social science and political economy. As mentioned in this chapter, their books and ideas were discussed by economists, and some of their ideas were consid­ered valuable even if others were straightforwardly rejected. Mill was influenced by the views developed by Comte in his Cours de philosophie positive. Some close disciples of Le Play were themselves professors of political economy, and the study of workers’ budgets become a normal approach in statistical research; Tarde published his basic ideas in the Revue d’economie politique, and some of his ideas were taken into account by leading economists, such as Joseph Schum­peter. Finally, Simiand’s critiques were noticed by American institutionalists, since they were so close to the Veblenian critique (Gislain and Steiner 1999); while the Durkheimian approach became absorbed into French political economy of the 1930s, with Simiand’s “economie positive”.

In a word, due to the lack of differentiation between disciplines within the social sciences, the work of sociologists was not ignored by economists, especially in the two decades before World War I, when economic sociology had its own momen­tum, with Worms’ institutional activity and the positive views that major econo­mists of that time - Jevons, Pareto, Veblen and Weber among others - endorsed because of their uneasiness with the contemporary state of political economy.