Tarde, Durkheim and the Durkheimian school

From the later nineteenth century to World War I sociological work began to develop in France (Mosbah-Natanson 2017). The process of institutionalisation began with the appointment of Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) to the College de France, followed by Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) at the Sorbonne.

Beyond these major sociologists there were many other authors who consid­ered the relations between sociology and political economy without the critical tone adopted by Tarde and Durkheim. For example, in his ethnographical approach to sociology Charles Letourneau (1831-1902) limited himself to some comments about property rights in different parts of the world, and concluded his evolutionary approach by explaining that the present European form was unique, and subject to change in the future since property is a social fact (Letourneau 1880, 415). After a short review of contemporary economic thinkers, he concluded by favouring John Stuart Mill’s proposal to limit bequests (Letourneau 1880, 419). One year later, Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) also took an evolutionary approach. Considering the social unrest spreading among the working classes, he vehemently rejected social­ism and communism, and dismissed the working classes as morally inferior, some­thing that some economists had already done - he quoted Gustave de Molinari at length (Le Bon 1881, II, 405). He concluded by outlining a scheme that would turn members of the working class into petty capitalists by creating low-value shares (of between 5 and 10 francs). The need to save in order to purchase these shares would insulate them from the socialist gospel and its errors. The organicist sociol­ogy introduced by Rene Worms (1869-1926) was likewise not opposed to political economy, being a science that dealt in terms of the nutrition of the social body (Worms 1896, Chapter 9). This is confirmed by the significant number of econo­mists who became member of his Institut international de sociologie (International Sociological Association), notably Lujo Brentano, Charles Gide, Robert Giffen, Alfred Marshall, Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller.

These three examples demonstrate that sociologists could endorse a variety of opinions regarding the relationship between sociology and political economy. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, the two principal French sociologists had a more critical view of political economy.

Gabriel Tarde and psychological approach to economic phenomena

Gabriel Tarde was academically successful in his lifetime; he was widely read and honoured with a professorship in the College de France. But he was an isolated scholar, and his legacy in sociology and in economic sociology remains weak, even if he published a lengthy book on economic psychology (Tarde 1902)^[264] two years before he passed away.

Tarde was at the time famous for his views on imitation, a social process that he considered as a foundation stone of social life. Opposition and invention were two further processes added to his sociological framework, then used to reconsider the achievements and shortcomings of political economy.

In his Psychologie economique he organised the economic dimension of his sociology into three parts - repetition, opposition and adaptation - cover­ing the three processes constitutive of his social thinking. He was dissatisfied with the classic tripartite division of political economy into production, distribu­tion and consumption. Economic repetition dealt with the reproduction of labour and desires, and the circulation of money; economic opposition was about the confrontation between utility and needs, but also competition, strikes and com­mercial wars; finally, economic adaptation was mainly about invention and the critique of previous inventions. His wish to bring political economy into the big tent of sociology was linked to his ideas about the status of political economy as a separate science.

Was political economy a universal science? No, said Tarde (1902, 67). Politi­cal economy was directly connected to all the other social sciences, and if the latter should learn from political economy, then the reverse was also true.

Like Comte, Le Play and Durkheim, Tarde rejected the homo wconomicus, the central character of political economy. The economists’ focus on a psychology of pain and pleasure, and of material wealth, rehabilitated greed. This was owed to the fact that economic man has no heart and lacks any form of social connection (Tarde 1902, 101-2). Instead, Tarde developed the idea that leisure should be a very important component of political economy. First, the social distribution of leisure is important for the well-being of the population, and even for the economic performance of workers; second, leisure is a necessary condition for invention, including the economic inventions of entrepreneurs; third, our understanding of society would be incomplete without taking account of leisure, when men are seek­ing to create mutual pleasure, complementing their working relationships through the division of labour.

Contemporary economists did not pay much attention to Tarde’s ideas, even if he had some influence on Joseph Schumpeter’s view of the entrepreneur.

Durkheim’s critique of political economy

At the beginning of his intellectual career, Durkheim took economic issues very seriously. His dissertation was devoted to the division of labour (Durkheim 1893), and then the last chapter of his study of suicide (Durkheim 1897) was devoted to professional groups, a specific form of trade union. However, his critique of politi­cal economy was mainly theoretical.

In line with Comte’s views, Durkheim was critical of the reductive perspec­tive of political economy. The critique was directed to one particular feature: political economy, mistakenly, sought to achieve the status of an independent science by separating itself off from moral and social perspectives. This faulty approach was related to the education and training of French economists who, as lawyers, businessmen or public officials, were unfamiliar with biological and psychological knowledge and so lacked the kind of scientific training required to develop economics in the mould of the other natural sciences. Accordingly, Durkheim placed emphasis upon the “great economic error” (Durkheim 1886, 208) of “reducing society to no more than the simple juxtaposition of individu­als”, so that “man and society as conceived by economists are pure imaginary entities without any correspondence to the real world” (Durkheim 1886, 212). This conception prevented economists from properly defining their object and led them to overlook the role, importance and conditions of existence of social solidarity. Hence the problem presented by the status of abstraction in the social sciences and in political economy.

To avoid dealing with facts that were too complex, economists isolated eco­nomic facts from other facts; they isolated the economic activity of a “logical man” from the entirety of actions performed by a “real man” immersed in society (Durkheim 1887, 279).

Whether one likes it or not, whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, socie­ties exist. Economic activity takes place within constituted societies. Logic is powerless if confronted with a fact that complicates a problem, but which cannot be excluded by abstraction.

(Durkheim 1886, 208)

As a consequence of this process of faulty abstraction, economists denatured their contribution to the creation of the social sciences - by recasting the conception of an economic law:

Economic laws, and more generally, social laws, are not therefore very gen­eral facts that the scientist derives inductively from observation of societies, but instead logical consequences that he deduces from the definition of an individual. The economist does not say: things happen in the way established by experience; but instead: they have to happen like this because it would be absurd if it happened in any other way. The word natural has therefore to be replaced by the word rational.

(Durkheim 1888, 84)

The second chapter of Les regles de la methode sociologique made a strong distinc­tion between science and common-sense notions that arise in social life through the need for action. This distinction had to be made because science had to take the social fact itself as the object of study. However, ideological analysis disrupted two particular branches of the social sciences: ethics and political economy. Instead of an experimental science, he argues, the economist simply engages in introspection, coupled with a few facts selected for illustrative purposes.

All that could be done... has been to demonstrate by dialectical argument that individuals should act in this way if they perceive what is in their best interest; any other course of action would be harmful to them, and if they followed it, it would indeed constitute an error of logic.... But this entirely logical necessity in no way resembles the one that the true laws of nature reveal. These express the relationships whereby facts are linked together in reality, and not the way in which it would be good for them to be linked.

(Durkheim 1895, 26)

Durkheim thus envisaged the economic fact in the same terms as the social fact, in that it could be invested with an institutional form, the crystallisation of opinion, and assume a moral character: the two ideas being closely related. He defined eco­nomic sociology in terms of economic institutions:

Finally, there are the economic institutions: institutions relating to the pro­duction of wealth (serfdom, tenant farming, corporate organisation, pro­duction in factories, in mills, at home, and so on), institutions relating to exchange (commercial organisation, markets, stock exchanges, and so on), institutions relating to distribution (rent, interest, salaries, and so on). They form the subject matter of economic sociology.

(Durkheim 1909, 150)

Durkheim himself did not develop this economic sociology, since the sociology of religion became his main interest in the last two decades of his life. Durkheimian economic sociology became the domain of one of his followers: Franςois Simiand and, later on, Maurice Halbwachs.

Simiand and the development of the Durkheimian economic sociology

Franςois Simiand (1873-1935) edited the “economic sociology” section of L’Annee sociologique, Durkheim’s sociological periodical, from the beginning to the end of the first series (1897-1913). His task was to develop a sociologi­cal approach to economic activity, and he therefore read widely in European and American economic literature before gaining his doctorate in political economy. After World War I, he was appointed professor of political economy in the Con­servatoire national des arts et metiers and became a member of the editorial com­mittee of the Revue d’economie politique. He ended his career at the College de France (1931-35), lecturing on the economic crisis and on money (Gillard and Rosier 1996; Frobert 2000).

In L’Annee sociologique he wrote several critical reviews of the German His­torical School, which was for him too descriptive, together with vigorous criti­cism of “traditional” or “orthodox” economics. “Traditional” economics meant for Simiand French liberal economics (exemplified for instance by Clement Colson), the Austrian school associated with Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, Joseph Schumpeter, and the new mathematically-based economics of Vilfredo Pareto, Irving Fisher, Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall. The main thrust of his critique is methodolog­ical. He followed the route taken by Durkheim, but he possessed an understanding of the material that Durkheim never had.

Simiand argued that economists had eliminated the social and historical dimen­sion from economic reality: this is one of the principal criticisms that Durkheim had already directed at economists. Then Simiand showed that economists made two strong and implicit hypotheses. Whether involving the hypothetical case of Robinson Crusoe on his island, or the laws of supply and demand, Simiand opened up for examination everything that economists assumed about social life, the knowledge of objects and their qualities, expressed in the classroom examples of which they were so fond: “He [the ideological theoretician] is compelled to assume an island for Robinson Crusoe, and then on this island trees, coconuts, a river for the canoe made from a tree trunk, etc.” (Simiand 1912, 69). These assumptions took a more institutional turn with exchange:

This theory assumes: prior appropriation, alienable property, alienable accord­ing to the wishes of proprietors, the institution of contract to mediate between such wishes, and especially of the contract for exchange and for sales.

(Simiand 1912, 92; see also 200-203)

Simiand added to these remarks a series of others concerning the knowledge of the world that the behaviour attributed to the homo wconomicus demands. This cogni­tive socialisation, one might say, concerns the capacity attributed to individuals enabling them to assess without problem the quality of the objects with which they are surrounded, and also the future. Taking an example from daily life, Simiand raises the problem of the appreciation of the quality of a product: “What precisely will be, for the consumer, the best quality? Of the many elements which go to make up the quality of a good, many are such that the ordinary buyer is entirely incompe­tent to appreciate them” (Simiand 1912, 16). It is the same when homo wconomicus seeks to look into the future:

But why not include in the hypothesis the man who does not know whether his needs will decrease or whether his resources will increase.... So it is said that the case is unreal? On the contrary, it is something that can be observed on a daily basis; but that is of no concern to this method. Is it said that nothing new will appear? That is to be seen. That nothing in this case can be fore­seen? But is not this lack of determinacy exactly what the theory of interest should deal with?

(Simiand 1912, 64-5)

These are telling criticisms, since economic theory was to be significantly modified in the course of the twentieth century by the introduction of uncertainty in respect of the qualities of a good on the one hand, and in respect of the future on the other.

Simiand went on to criticise the way in which abstractions are generated within economic theory. The economist makes assumptions so that the models with which he works might function, but why does the ideological theorist stop short with a particular model when an infinity of alternative models exists? Simiand suggests that this happens because the economist arbitrarily reintroduces social and histori­cal reality when selecting possible hypotheses, choosing those which, in his view, coincide most closely with the stylised reality which he wishes to explain. From that, he infers the pseudo-scientificity of economic theory: confounded by the pros­pect of an infinity of all possible hypothetical cases, he implicitly makes a definite but arbitrary selection which is not susceptible to any assessment of its relation to empirical reality.

This explains Simiand’s choice of a different method of abstraction, respecting an experimental imperative that takes account systematically of empirical givens:

All scientific knowledge proceeds on the basis of abstraction... and experi­mental method is itself, in this sense, abstract whenever it opens out a relation. The nature of the method is not therefore determined by the use of abstrac­tion, but rather by the type of abstraction employed. Instead of abstractions, instead of experimental method... constantly submitting themselves to the control of correspondence with facts,... the abstractions in this case [in orthodox theory] are ideas.

(Simiand 1912, 57-8)

The theory of action to which economists adhere is too limited to take account of observed behaviours. Self-interested behaviour finds itself confronted with many possible options. Which will prevail? The economist has no way deducing this from his premises without making use, once more, of uncontrolled allusions that do not satisfy the criteria of experimental science (1912, 21-2). “This method should not therefore be called ‘abstract’, but ‘conceptual’ or ideological” (Simiand 1912, 59).

Simiand, however, was too familiar with contemporary theory to overlook the fact that economists did in fact seek to confront their formal results with empirical facts, but he thought that this confrontation was inadequate. For example, when Irving Fisher endeavoured to verify the quantity theory of money developed in The Purchasing Power of Money with statistical and historical studies, Simiand objected that the statistical framework was too narrow (just thirteen years), and that Fisher was indiscriminate in his use of historical material (L’Annee sociologique, vol. 11, 532-3). But Simiand took no comfort from Henry L. Moore’s proposal to establish a statistical economics in which pure mathematical theory would draw upon factual elements. He was certainly in favour of the use of statistics, but he intended to give statistics a role other than a subsidiary one, whose task was to verify the abstract theories of political economy developed in isolation from it. It was for this reason that he found Moore’s proposed “statistical political economy” or “substantive mathematics” unconvincing.

Having arrived at this point, Simiand left to one side ideological and normative economics and presented the elements of a positive economics which takes on the experimental exigencies of modern science. Two salient elements of it could be mentioned. Firstly, Simiand built his own classification of economic events, distinguishing production and distribution on the one hand, regimes, forms of institutions and economic representations (related to value, prices and money) on the other (Steiner 2010, 63-9). Secondly, focussing on historical data about French workers’ wages, he tried to make sense of these data in terms of a theory of action where bosses and workers were in conflict over the amount of efforts provided and the nominal revenue they received (Simiand 1907). In his final years, through a painstaking elaboration of statistical data and their minute examination, Simiand studied the evolution of modern capitalism. He developed a specific theory of price cycles (Simiand 1932) according to which economic progress results from the alternation of rising and then declining prices (Steiner 2010, chapter 4). As a consequence, he endorsed the view that the government should not interfere with the decline in prices and the economic depression that results, because that would nullify the possibility in the long run of achieving a progressive economy.

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