History is almost always written by the victors and the history of ideas is no exception.
Despite the central part played by Jean-Charles-Leonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842) in the general glut controversy (one of the fiercest and most inconclusive debate in the history of economic theory), his relegation to the fringe of Classical economics first by David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say and John Ramsay McCulloch and then by most economists down to recent historians of economic thought, rests essentially on selective readings of a massive oeuvre reaching fields far beyond narrow economics (Faccarello et al.
2014). A brief re-consideration of the logical framework of such a colossal output should help understand the reasons why, armed with an intellectual construction pre-dating Ricardo’s Principles (and despite frantic analytical efforts), Sismondi failed to convince the then nascent economic profession about the relevance of his approach. The origin of the under-consumptionist theory he tried to frame in the language of political economy in order to refute Ricardo and Say is not to be found within the narrow confines of political economy as such but also in his political philosophy based on his much earlier Republican creed. Hence, his failure to invalidate the theoretical foundations of Ricardian economics is not to be uncovered only in his supposed analytical weakness but mainly in his political philosophy heavily influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. In other words, Sismondi’s ultimate1 Except for the Nouveaux principes d’economie politique, for which references to both the 2015 French variorum edition and the 1991 American Richard Hyse translation are given, other references are from Sismondi’s six-volume &uvres economiques completes (see References) and translated by the present author.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429202407-11 failure to invalidate Say’s law results simply from the fact that his central critical argument is not to be found in his political economy alone.
Inventing with his Principles the mode of thinking economists still use today, Ricardo heralded the declaration of independence of economics from political philosophy.
As a matter of fact, the advent of the so-called “Ricardian vice” (to use Schumpeter’s quip) marks the much-bemoaned divorce between what Sen calls economics as ethics and engineering economics (1987). For Smith, market never stood alone while the Ricardian approach gave nearly exclusive pride of place to market in the pursuit of wealth and happiness. This chapter on Sismondi’s economics is an attempt to illustrate the modernity of his central argument according to which[this] error... which confuses the increase in production with that of wealth, this error on which the whole system of modern chrematistics is based [consists in] erecting one’s fortune on the destruction of one’s fellow men.
(1836-38, 686)
This chapter falls into five sections. Section 1 examines Sismondi’s crucial Genevan intellectual formative years as a post-Smithian economist before Ricardo. Section 2 describes some elements of his crucial Republican creed. Using Sismondi’s shifting appreciation of the concept of market and his price theory (following clearly the Continental tradition), Section 3 illustrates his critical approach to “the chrematistics of the English School”. In the light of this re-assessment of Sismondi’s over whole intellectual construction, Section 4 offers an outline of Sismondi’s position within the general glut controversy. The concluding remarks suggest a few comments on Sismondi’s alleged heterodoxy.
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