Sismondi’s republican creed[203]
In Recherches sur les constitutions des peuples libres, Sismondi indicates as the main and essential goal of any political constitution the realisation of freedom. Freedom as a whole revolves around civil liberty, democratic freedom, and finally political freedom.
Civil liberty is made up of all the rights, faculties and interests that citizens retain when they enter society. This civil liberty is exercised in particular through productive capacities: it requires that each individual be recognised with their own rights to exercise creative capacities, as well as the right to access markets in order to be able to produce his own wealth (through a valorisation process which is realised in the exchange). Democratic freedom is defined through the relationship between the nation and the government, and is achieved through everyone’s participation in the life of the city. The constitution must reflect the plurality of interests by guaranteeing each of the parties in society a fair share in sovereignty.In full agreement with Geneva Republican tradition which had found in Rousseau an illustrious representative, Sismondi sees in the active participation of the citizens the source, continually to be renewed, of virtue. It is only through the constant presence of civic virtue that a nation can aspire to become ever more united in its diversity and independent of arbitrary powers. Political unity results not from the hegemony of a particular class, but rather from the expression of a plurality of wills and interests which must be recognised first in an attempt to overcome them later. This central argument of power as a negotiated representation of wills and interests cuts across all of Sismondi’s thinking until his Etudes sur les constitutions despeuples libres (1836), first volume of his Etudes sur les sciences sociales.
From Richesse commerciale, the purpose of the theoretical elaboration of political economy for Sismondi is to illuminate the way in which man can pursue and achieve the highest degree of wealth, the greatest individual freedom and the greatest happiness.
The Nouveauxprincipes d’economie politique (New Principles of Political Economy) mark a new stage in the attempt to synthesise these three areas that Sismondi has been exploring tirelessly for nearly twenty- five years. The first edition of Nouveaux principes dates from 1819, the second from 1827. To these two versions of the same book one should add the article “Political economy”, written from Autumn 1816 to Summer 1817 for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia. In fact, this book-length article[204] contains the essentials of the logical structure and the argumentation of the Nouveaux principes; and can be considered as a first version of this work dating back to the years immediately following Waterloo.Written in parallel with Nouveaux principes, Histoire des republiques italiennes au moyen age (The History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages) and Histoire des Franςais (History of the French) illustrate past manifestations of freedom to enlighten contemporaries through experience in their march towards this much- desired modern freedom. Political philosophy and its study of political institutions examines the “constitutions of free peoples” with the idea of improving the political structures guaranteeing this individual freedom. Likewise, the third component of this systematic interweaving of the human sciences, political economy is a study of the progress of civilisation in relation to the progress of wealth. But this increase in production and wealth cannot be the goal of political economy; rather a simple means to contribute to the happiness of all. In opposition especially with British economists, for Sismondi, the progress of society is both moral progress through the exercise of individual freedom and a progress of civilisation in which the economic variable plays an essential role.
The political economy of commercial wealth also borrows from Republicanism its central theme: it is indeed to the market and to the price mechanism that the resolution of the opposition plurality/synthesis of economic interests is entrusted, not by suppression and exclusion of differences, but by their fusion, that is to say by the composition and the balancing of antagonisms and pluralities. By switching to political economy, Sismondi thus retains his contractualist approach. From this perspective, we grasp the capital importance of the price system: prices must in principle sanction the plurality and independence of the divisions of society. They must allow the free expression of capacities and the deepening of the division of labour, being itself the expression of the tensions and dynamics of civil society.
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