In nineteenth-century France those thinkers who contributed to the development of sociology and took an interest in political economy had a background in philosophy (Emile Durkheim, Franςois Simiand), (Gabriel Tarde) or engineering (Auguste Comte, Frederic Le Play). law
They were thus significantly distinct from the European founders of sociology: Vilfredo Pareto, a mathematician by training, was a renowned economist before becoming a sociologist, and Max Weber taught commercial law in Berlin before being appointed to posts in political economy in Freiburg and Heidelberg.
Sociological argument in France in part developed through a critique of political economy. There were of course exceptions, as was the case with Charles Letourneau and Gustave Le Bon, who recognised the existence of different social sciences, or even tried to associate them within the Association internationale de sociologie (International Sociological Association), as Rene Worms would do. We must also take into account the fact that Herbert Spencer, who was very influential until the end of the century, developed a sociology whose utilitarian influences made it acceptable to many political economists.
The French peculiarity can be explained in two ways. In the early nineteenth century political economy and sociology identified the notion of society and tried to understand its laws of operation. Since political economy was a broad church for much of the century - as with the French Academie des sciences morales et politiques (moral and political sciences academy), or Adam Smith’s triptych: jurisprudence, moral philosophy and political economy - these two fields of knowledge clashed because their respective fields of enquiry overlapped. In France, sociology became a major opponent to political economy; in Germany (Bruno Hildebrand, Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies, then Gustav Schmoller) and in Great Britain (Thomas Cliffe-Leslie), the historical approach played this role; whereas in the United States, at the end of the century, it was the institutionalism of Thorstein Veblen that would become dominant. Ultimately, sociologists emphasised the historical dimension of economic activity and stressed the role played by behaviour that was based on tradition, norms and values, in contrast to economists, for whom self-interested behaviour remained the key principle of action.
For these reasons, this chapter argues that the sociological critique of political economy in France has direct affinities with the critique of political economy that was emerging with the Historical School in Germany and England, and with American institutionalism. Of course, there are also specificities on which this chapter focuses, notably the movement towards an economic sociology which, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, assumed an international dimension, with contributions from leading sociologists and economists (Gislain and Steiner 1995, Swedberg 1998, Steiner 1995, 2010) and an attempt at institutionalisation around the Institut international de sociologie and the Revue internationale de sociologie established by Rene Worms in 1893.
This chapter begins with the critique of classical political economy deployed in the first half of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte, following Claude- Henri de Saint-Simon. It then gives an account of the way in which Frederic Le Play’s empirical and conservative sociology rejected the industrial world, seen as a danger to the stability of society, while developing an approach based on precise empirical surveys. The last part focuses on the critique of political economy developed by Gabriel Tarde on the one hand, and by Emile Durkheim on the other. Their followers, especially Franςois Simiand, continued their work and created an economic sociology under the name of “economie positive” (positive economics) in the 1920s and 1930s.
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