Life and background

Say’s life was as fascinating as his work. He was successively bank clerk, sol­dier, publicist, managing editor, government official, factory owner, and ultimately became one of the first professors of political economy in France.

Say was born in Lyon on 5 January 1767, in a Huguenot family deeply rooted in business.^[10] His father, Jean Etienne Say, was a Swiss-born silk merchant in Lyon, and later a bank and currency trader in Paris. At the age of 15, Say started an apprenticeship in a trading house in Paris, then went to England and, in 1787, Etienne Claviere, a Swiss banker and businessman, took him on his insurance company. Say took an active part in the French Revolution. He briefly served as a soldier, and then he focused on literary activities. He worked at a newspa­per, the Courrier de Provence, published by Gabriel-Honore de Mirabeau, and was close to the Girondins, to whom Claviere, who was for a time Minister of Finance in 1792, had introduced him. In 1794, Say became the managing editor of the periodical La Decade philosophique, litteraire et politique. The incapacity of the Directoire to stabilise the Revolution led him and his friends, the Ideo­logues, to support Napoleon Bonaparte’s Coup d’Etat on 18 Brumaire of Year VIII (9 November 1799). He became secretary of the Legislative Committee of the Conseil des Cinq-Cents and then, after the new Constitution of Year VIII, a member of the Tribunat, a legislative body. The first edition of Traite d’economie politique (henceforth Traite) was published in 1803. The book was a success and caught Bonaparte’s attention. He asked Say to release another edition of his text that would be more supportive of his economic policy. Say refused, and as a result, he was removed from the Tribunat following the partial renewal of its members in March 1804 (Jacoud 2020-21). He was and remained a Republican (Whatmore 2000, 12): for him “the representative government...

wealth is independent of the nature of government, a State can thrive if it is well administrated The forms of public administration have only an

indirect and accidental influence on the formation of wealth, which is almost entirely the work of individuals.

(Say 1803, 2)5

A heavily revised second edition of Traite was prepared quickly, but, in response to government censorship, it would not be released until 1814 and the fall of Napoleon. Stripped of all official appointments, Say instead turned to entrepreneur­ship, owning and directing a cotton-spinning manufacture in Auchy in northern France from 1805 to 1812. Bothered by technical problems and by the restrictions on the import of cotton caused by the Continental blockade, he eventually sold his shares and returned to Paris near the end of 1812. He focused on writing and teach­ing and became famous and widely read. After the fall of the Empire in 1814, Say travelled again to England, where he met James Mill, David Ricardo and Jeremy Bentham. He lectured at the Athenee, a private institution in Paris, which was a sort of political club for the liberal opposition to the policy of the Restoration. In 1819, a chair was created for him at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers: his lec­tures were published as Cours complet d’economie politique pratique (henceforth Cours) in 1828-29. It is only after the 1830 Revolution and the July Monarchy that the government considered political economy an academic discipline, something that Napoleon and the Bourbons monarchy had previously opposed. A chair of political economy was created at the College de France; Say was the first to hold this chair until his death in Paris on 14 November 1832.

Say authored three major texts. Traite, his magnum opus, was published in six editions (1803-41).

Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) came from a Scottish family who settled in France in the early fifteenth century. Appointed depute representing the nobility at the Etats Generaux in 1789, he supported abolishing feudal privileges, embraced the declaration of human rights and the civil constitution of the clergy. He was a member of the Societe de 1789 whose main leaders were M-J-A-N. Caritat de Condorcet and Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes, and a member of the Club des Feuil- lants which coalesced proponents of a constitutional monarchy. Elected depute of the Assemblee Constituante in 1791, Destutt de Tracy sat alongside Duke Fran- ςois Alexandre de la Rochefoucault and Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette,

5 Translations of Say and Destutt de Tracy’s writings are ours, unless noted otherwise. who was a close friend. However, after the failure of the constitutional monarchy, he refused to follow them in exile. While retired at Auteuil, he spent time with Condorcet, Pierre Cabanis and Catherine Helvetius, among others. It was during that time that he studied Locke and Condillac and became familiar with the sensa- tionist philosophy from which he designed his theory of “ideologie”, defined as the science of the formation of ideas. Arrested on 2 November 1793, during the Reign of Terror and scheduled to be tried on 29 July 1794, the downfall of Robespierre on July 27 spared his life.

With the aid of Cabanis, Destutt joined the newly created Institut National des Sciences et des Arts (National Institute for Sciences and the Arts). On 21 April 1796, he read an essay on the ability to think in which he introduced the concept of ideology.

He was appointed senator for life by Napoleon in November 1799. Their rela­tionship quickly deteriorated and, in 1814, he voted in favour of overthrowing the Emperor. Louis XVIII expressed his gratitude by naming him to the Chambre des pairs where he condemned the excesses of the Restoration and voted against all the laws opposing the spirit and progress inspired by the Revolution.

From 1801 to 1815, he published his Elements d’ideologie. The first volume (1801) deals with ideology per se, the second (1803) is concerned with grammar, the third (1805) addresses logic, while the fourth and fifth (1815) are titled Traite de la volonte et de ses effets. The fourth volume was reprinted as Traite d’economie politique in 1823.^[11] In 1811, Destutt’s Commentaires sur l’esprit des lois de Mon­tesquieu were published in the United States by Jefferson without mentioning the name of the author of the book. The French version of the book appeared in 1819. Although the content of Commentaires was primarily political in nature, the book contains famous passages about the economy, particularly those that were wrongly interpreted as indicative of Destutt’s espousing the labour theory of value in the sense of Ricardo.

2.