“II mondo va da se”
Say liked to repeat the motto attributed to Vittorio Fossembroni: “Il mondo va da se” (“The world turns by itself”; see Faccarello 2010: 734). People “need not been governed... The State exists without receiving an impulse, without the need of a system of administration, a thought of government” (Say 2003: 324, original emphases).
Several times, during the Revolution, “all the springs of authority were broken... there was no government... All was functioning as usual” (Say 1819 [2003]: 101). When a public institution fails, people know how to replace it for the best. Governments wrongly try to influence production, to stimulate the production of goods, the consumption of which they judge preferable, or to dictate the way in which they have to be produced. Worse, they sometimes want to create manufactures. Far from being an alleged source of wealth, these establishments were instead a cause of loss. The state is a bad producer because “it only acts through... the intermediary of persons, who have a particular interest different from its own - a particular interest which they prefer” (Say 1803 [2006]: 382).While a government is not an essential part of social organization, this does not mean that it is useless, but that the principle of utility alone can justify its intervention. Some consumptions “can only be made in common, with persons to which one is tied by the political organization” (Say 1803 [2006]: 920). They are characterized by two elements: (1) they concern needs that an individual can only satisfy in society, and they require the intervention of an institution with a coercive power; and (2) they also deal with the production and diffusion of knowledge, because scientists obtain from their works a smaller benefit than that enjoyed by society. It is thus necessary, for example, to support “a small number of outstanding schools, where the stock of knowledge is not only preserved...
but the field of science always extended” (ibid.: 955). It is also necessary to give all the citizens the knowledge they need to know where their enlightened interest lies and where that of society is. “A nation is not civilized... when some do not know how to read, write and count” (ibid.: 957).Say maintains that the government must erect and maintain works like the means of communication, which, while being in the public interest, cannot be the outcome of private interest. He rejects the idea that they must be wholly financed by those who use them. Tolls ration the use of utilities by many persons, who cannot afford them. They deprive society from a part of the potential benefits these works could bring. The principle that a means of communication should not be made if its exploitation does not cover its costs is also ill-founded because it neglects the fact that such a means would stimulate production in the provinces it serves.
Say, like Ricardo, Mill and Malthus, developed his analyses from his reading of the Wealth of Nations. They all are Smith’s heirs, and they could, for this reason, be described as classical. However, the idea of a school - of the existence, as Hollander wrote (2005), of a “Classical canon in economics” - can be a source of mistakes if it leads to the neglect of the divergences that, despite long and friendly discussions, divide these authors. On some central questions - the theory of prices and of distribution in particular - Say developed his own views, different from Ricardo’s, because he did not conceive in the same way the role of demand in the determination of the prices of goods and productive services.
Alain Beraud
See also:
Jeremy Bentham (I); French classical political economy (II); Thomas Robert Malthus (I); John Stuart Mill (I); David Ricardo (I); Barthelemy-Charles Dunoyer de Segonzac (I); Jean-Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi (I); Adam Smith (I).