Economy and society: a coherent theoretical approach

Against “ideological economics”

Although in France around 1800 the term “ideology” was championed by a liberal generation heir to the eighteenth century (the “Ideologues”), the real fortunes of the word - although in a very different sense - came with Karl Marx to denounce liberal political economy: the discrepancy between the reality and the discourse around it did not stem from a somewhat scientistic illusion but a political desire for dissimulation.

Economists presented the market as a neutral mechanism freely expressing indi­viduals’ choices and ensuring nations’ wealth. Socialists denounced it as a system to ensure the reproduction of inequalities and domination, generalising confrontation and war where, in a better organised institutional context, cooperation, agreement and mutual assistance would naturally emerge. Considerant wrote that economics is “their science of the wealth of nations that are starving to death” (Considerant 1833, 26) and, in Organisation du Travail, assessing the commercial and indus­trial chaos, Louis Blanc wrote that the competitive regime constituted a “system of extermination” for the people, a “cause of ruin for the Bourgeoisie” and a catalyst for “war to the death” among European nations.

Considering the recurring commercial crises and the paradox of the parallel growth of industry and poverty, according to the original socialists, the competitive regime was causing the twofold problem of efficiency and equity.

Competition proved to be an inefficient process: the balance between supply and demand could not be achieved in an unregulated system, and competition therefore produced periodic crises. Furthermore, the system was instable since it placed antagonism at the heart of economic and social transactions.

Competition also went hand-in-hand with injustice. Far from being a phenome­non independent of other social phenomena, competitive trade occurred in an insti­tutional environment dominated by private and inherited property. In this context, the antagonism that competition placed at the heart of social relations involved individuals and groups unequally endowed with wealth and power, property own­ers and non-owners. It was an intolerable situation. Firstly, the origin of endow­ments (and their later accumulation) was not justified. Then, in an unregulated context, inequalities could only be exacerbated, affecting, for example, increasing numbers of categories (with the bourgeoisie and middle classes soon facing ruin because of “industrial oligarchs”). Lastly, this unbalanced situation was leading to extreme social and moral consequences (“the extermination” of the poor and the generalisation of “exploitation of man by man” that we hear from the Saint- Simonians and Blanc) that any civilised society could only reject: poverty, impov­erishment, prostitution, corruption and crime.

This criticism of competition was closely linked to criticism of private and inherited property. But what socialists more distinctly reproached of partisans of the competitive regime was their capitulation of the project to govern society and improve its development. Economists were criticised because their doctrine led them to capitulate to the facts and to defend, as Pecqueur highlighted “the mon­strous idea that everything that is, is good”, and to trust in the “God of Chance”. This capitulation was possible for these authors because of their lack of faith.

In what sense were the French socialists “Utopians”?

These early socialists were soon accused of being Utopians. From both sides of the ideological divide, they were stigmatised for their inability to uncover the “true” laws of social organisation, evolution and history. In his Harmonies Econom- iques, Frederic Bastiat made a distinction between “natural social organisations” expressing the true laws of the mechanism of a complex, modern social world - natural laws based on the motive of interest and total freedom for the agents - and “artificial social organisations”. Although at the time, Adam Smith remained the uncontested father of a political economy whose mission it was to uncover and study these natural arrangements (above all the market), Jean-Jacques Rousseau can be said to be at the root of the opposite tradition of which the different social­ist and communist schools were the most recent expression at the time Bastiat was writing (1850, 39). For their part, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a text contemporary with the Harmonies Economiques, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels pointed out that these Utopians could not, in the social movement of their time, uncover what was radically changing the history of humankind: the growing class struggle, exacerbated antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoi­sie, workers and capitalists, and the historical mission of the proletariat.

From the 1840s, qualified ironically or viciously as Utopians, our socialists were at first destabilised by the accusation before reappropriating the adjective, assum­ing it and laying claim to it. In 1840, Etienne Cabet published his Voyage et aven- ture de Lord William Carisdall en Icarie anonymously in England (which, under the author’s name, became Voyage en Icarie in 1842). Echoing Saint-Simon’s opin­ion that “the golden age that blind tradition has hitherto placed in the past is ahead of us” (Saint-Simon 1825, epigraph), Pecqueur wrote “living with ideals, in a Uto­pia, is to live in the future”.^[233] Blanc echoed this: “Utopias? But Utopia is a militant idea; it is often tomorrow’s truth, and consequently the revolutionary truth” (Blanc 1873, 129-30). And George Sand, writing to the mason and poet Louis-Charles Poncy, magnificently told him:

This is how Utopias are achieved. It is always different and better.... Some­body conceives an idea; we laugh about it and forgive him, saying: that’s beautiful, but too beautiful. Then time goes by, the facts come to pass, and the ideal is outmoded.

(Sand 1970, 187)

This is only partly true; these Utopians, some of them heirs to the eighteenth cen­tury and the idea of natural laws, developed their ideas alongside positivism in its earliest version by Auguste Comte, Saint-Simon’s former secretary. They therefore sometimes claimed to uncover laws or imperative codes of history that differed from those later uncovered by Marxism or liberalism. Nevertheless, many modern inter­pretations of these Utopians, from Ernst Bloch to Paul Ricoeur, Miguel Abensour and Pierre Macherey, for example, chose to examine precisely what was often reproached of them: their capacity for invention. But far from associating the term invention with confabulation, they linked it to creativity and positive imagination.

From this perspective, the socialism of 1848 was part of a doctrine claiming to uncover the new social, economic and political truth, but also, in part, a doctrine claiming to imagine and trying to create it. Creation and imagination encouraged all kinds of audacity because, with the scientific and technical promises available and offered to all political, social and moral hopes, the impossible became possible in a few measures to experiment with. Charles Fourier explained that to gain access to the paths of the impossible, Cartesian “passive doubt” should be overcome: it was “necessary to adopt doute actif [active doubt], and operate by means of ⅛cart absolu [absolute deviation]” - and for it to champion contradiction everywhere and to imagine a “mechanism [thas is, a society in Fourier’s sense] in contrast to our own” (Fourier 1835, 51-2). The path to this new world to be uncovered should, then, use happiness as a compass: “Happiness”, continued Fourier, “consists in having many passions and many means to satisfy them”.

Developing “social science”: two visions of a just society

It could be said that, for these socialists, this creation primarily required - thanks to the new “social science” synonymous with socialism - a wide-ranging discus­sion about justice. This discussion constantly bridged two levels: first of all, giv­ing a rigorous and as succinct as possible response to the question “what is a just society?” And then, demonstrating that this ideal model of a just society made it possible, in the present chaos, to experiment with practical solutions to try and achieve the desired improvements. The question of “transition” was crucial, and Fourier’s followers summed this up perfectly when they professed in La Reforme Industrielle, based on their leader’s theory of society, to have in industrial asso­ciation, a “means of engaging with what is, order or disorder” (Considerant and Lechevalier 1832, 2).

“For society to be possible, a principle to regulate human relations, something akin to what we call Justice, is necessary” wrote Proudhon in De la justice dans la Revolution et dans l’Eglise. Auguste Blanqui was saying the same thing at the same time (Blanqui 1885, 58-9). During the early nineteenth century that gravitated around the years of revolution (1830-1848), socialists were contemplating crite­ria for justice. Their ideas were varied and at times antagonistic but one element united them: their opposition to the model they all perceived in liberal political economy. A model, or rather a counter-model, in that it emerged by chance from the endowments of capital, labour and talent, without questioning the legitimacy of its origins through morality or politics, and ultimately promoted strength as a value by sanctioning - to the point of charity - inequalities and social hierarchies. In the age of industry and socialism, of progress and perfectibility, this attitude was seen by socialists as, at best, capitulation and at worst, a betrayal, given the very obvious ills of the time.

Why, in material terms, is there this inequality of wealth among men? Why are those who work so poor? Why is there this struggle between machines and workers? Why are our hearts moved by the sight of such things?

(Leroux 1833, 532-3)

Against these issues, the socialists set a voluntarist and constructivist perspective. Objectives for justice needed to be defined for this new world and introduced into institutions. Broadly speaking, two models for justice that included different con­ceptions of politics, economics and socialism emerged, blended and sometimes contradicted each other. One placed almost all the emphasis on the criterion of equity, and the other covered this equity criterion but explained that it should be surpassed by a radical criterion of equality.

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