The hope for radical equality
Joseph Rey, the man most responsible for bringing the work of Robert Owen to France, pointed out that, faced with liberal abdication of responsibility and betrayal, two just and benevolent models to organise future society had emerged amongst socialists.
About the first model, that of the Saint-Simonians and followers of Fourier (in Fourierist phalanstery, distribution was carried out in proportion to the contributions in work, talent and capital of each member[235]) he commented:Some thought it would suffice to find a combination so that there was an association of productive work, but maintaining the inequality of sharing the products according to certain rules that seemed to them more in line with equity than those of the current situation.
(Joseph Rey Archives, Memoires Politiques, vol. 3, Bibliotheque Municipale de Grenoble)
Equity as well as equality
Rey was a proponent of another option that Owen had developed in Britain, but which, in France, he also connected to the tradition supporting a radically egalitarian conception of the Republic: notably the one supposedly from Gracchus Babeuf (1760-1797) that Philippe Buonarotti (1761-1837) brought back to public attention by publishing a far-reaching Histoire de la conspiration pour l'egalite, dite de Babeuf. This tradition was restored to its former glory at the dawn of the 1840s when Cabet published his Voyage en Icarie and communism was expressed in the works of Dezamy (Code la communaute), De la loi sociale (1841) by Richard Lahautiere (1813-1882) and especially numerous newspapers: L'Humanitaire, L'Egalitaire, and la Fraternite. Cabet and these early Communists were not alone in their goal of radical equality, and the idea could also be found in the work of other authors such as Pierre Leroux and his circle. For these men from fairly diverse schools of thought, equity could not fulfil socialist ambitions for justice: a more ambitious conception of social equality needed to be devised.
The second socialist tradition was based on a very different point of view. It slated liberal political economy, “a transcendent theory of strength and chance”, as Franςois Vidal put it (1846): the market selects by chance and validates the strength of the winner. According to this second tradition, Saint-Simonian socialism, although it had the merit of abolishing chance, enshrined to an even greater extent than the savage market principle the guiding value of strength in the organisation of the emerging industrial world. For this second socialism, the socialist equality of opportunities announced by Saint-Simonianism should be considered a floor rather than a ceiling. Socialism’s mission begins at this level. The emerging world - a world of the division and evolution of labour, and therefore of required human qualities that were neither comparable nor classifiable, a world in which political and social civic rights now needed to be asserted - rather than finding the path of objective inequalities, should instead study new fundamental bonds. The bonds of fraternity and solidarity traced the outlines of a far more radical egalitarianism than mere equality of opportunity and encouraged experimentation with other, more evolved forms of cooperation encapsulated in the still vague notions, sometimes interchangeable and sometimes exclusive, of association and community. It was a socialism that set itself the task of inventing rather than uncovering the future and that sometimes progressed in its investigation alongside a republicanism that, during those same years, developed, in some cases, the ideas of participation and deliberation at least as much as classic ideas of representation and national sovereignty.
This radical egalitarianism was expressed in different ways. There is a fairly precise formulation of it in the related studies of Louis Blanc, Constantin Pecqueur and Franςois Vidal. It should be kept in mind that one of the early movements of this original socialism was to reject the Malthusian refrains about the inevitability of misfortune, suffering, scarcity and toil.
As early as 1834, the Fourierist Clarisse Vigoureux superbly attacked the faint-hearted, fatalistic and dolorous “science of old men” (principally economics), challenging them: “Have they never realised, have they never dared suggest THAT HAPPINESS WAS A RIGHT?” (Vigoureux 1834). For socialists, a society is fair when it leads to happiness - a goal now imaginable in a society of scientific, technological, political and social progress - a notion that Vidal summarised as follows:happiness, for the individual and for the species, is the total satisfaction of all needs that are natural, and consequently legitimate, moral and physical; in addition, it is the gradual and harmonious development of all the faculties, all the elements, that constitute human nature.
(Vidal 1846, 22)
Happiness was, then, firstly the negation of the unhappiness announced by all doctrines on resignation: it contained the idea of properly organised human beings’ extensive power over the natural and social environment. It was time to go back to the drawing board with the task first defined by Saint-Simon in 1825 in Le Nouveau Christianisme, which Pecqueur explained by noting that “true social progress in history is synonymous with a great improvement in the fate of the largest and poorest class” (Pecqueur 1840, 64-5).
Liberty, equality and fraternity
There were two conditions for society to be fair and happy: firstly, the values of liberty, equality and fraternity,[236] established and enshrined with many variants and sometimes additions since 1789, should be correctly redefined and all respected; and secondly, these three values must be simultaneously present and properly connected.
Liberty. Pecqueur, Blanc and Vidal all accused the 1789 Revolution of being inconsequential with regard to liberty. Individual, bourgeois liberty, recognised as a right in 1789, was, in reality, nothing but the substitution of a new tyranny - by proprietors - for an old tyranny - the tyranny of kings and aristocrats.
Pecqueur, denouncing economists’ unrestrained use of this notion of freedom-as-a-right, observed that “unlimited freedom is chaos; it is savagery, it is anthropophagy” (Pecqueur 1850b). The notion of a right conferred to the individual should be replaced by the notion of power guaranteed by society; “with the word ‘right’ ”, wrote Blanc, “liberty is nothing but a vague theory, while power tends to make it something real” (Blanc 1849a, 4). He therefore suggested the following definition of liberty: “liberty consists not in the right but in the power given to each person to develop his faculties” (Blanc 1849a, 77), which Pecqueur explained by emphasising that “being free is the power to do what one wants”. True liberty, “intelligent liberty” (Pecqueur), could be defined using Pierre Leroux’s terms as the “power to act”,[237] and therefore consisted in a set of moral and physical conditions that a society’s institutions would guarantee equally to every individual. Socialists therefore altered the prevailing discourse on the idea of individuals’ natural ability found in various forms in 1830-1840s’ France, from the elitist liberalism of Franςois Guizot[238] to the orthodox Saint-Simonians’ project for a hierarchised industrial society. For Vidal, Pecqueur and Blanc, it was not so much necessary to get an elite to emerge, capable of rationally and hierarchically configuring society, as to make, through social guarantees in terms of labour or education, all individuals capable of functioning and participating, each according to his or her abilities, in society’s development. It was thus that, insisting on the need for equal access to the conditions for development, Pierre Leroux exclaimed “If I believe in liberty, it is because I believe in equality!” (P. Leroux 1843b, 609-70).Equality. In his study on distributive justice, Vidal began by critically reviewing the theories of economists from Physiocrats to the disciples of Say, and then reviewed the positions of the different schools of socialism.
In their logic of ability (“each according to his ability and to each ability according to its works”), the Saint-Simonians preferred a strict proportionality between contribution and remuneration while the Fourierists suggested remuneration in proportion to labour, capital and talent. Reasoning in terms of “absolute justice”, Vidal preferred the socialists of the “egalitarian” school, especially Blanc and Pecqueur who had chosen as distribution principles “the goodwill and the needs of the individual” (Vidal 1846, 452). In the closing lines of his Organisation du Travail, Louis Blanc pointed out that even during the reform and reorganisation of society by the associations and the State, individuals’ states of mind and levels of education would allow a certain level of inequality to persist for a long time. Nevertheless, he added that the pure principles of distributive justice should, in a future organised society, cause these discrepancies to disappear and lead to equality in the distribution of wages and advantages. He wrote:the day will come when it is acknowledged that he who has received more strength or intelligence from God owes more to his fellow men. It will then be up to the genius, and this is worthy of him, to establish his legitimate empire not by the size of the tribute he will levy on society, but by the magnitude of the services he will render. For it is not to inequality of rights that inequality of abilities must lead, but to inequality of duties.
(Blanc 1841, 92-3)
Responding a little later to Michel Chevalier’s criticism, he insisted that “although hierarchy by ability is necessary and fruitful, this is not the case for remuneration by ability” (Blanc 1847, 141). Pecqueur also explained that in a perfectly organised society, “with each person appropriately fulfilling the duties of his function, each, without exception, has the right to the equality of remuneration or share in the product and social advantages”; indeed, “equality consists in each individual obtaining the equivalent satisfaction of his basic needs in relation to everyone.
This equivalence is always possible, for the basic needs of life are more or less the same for every individual” (Pecqueur 1842, 667-8). The distribution rule for these socialists was, then, “From each according to his strengths and abilities; to each according to his needs” (Pecqueur 1849a, 4) or “From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs” (Blanc 1849b, 224). Again, their position led, in the idea of a pure theory of distributive justice, to overturning the prevailing discourses about the relation between ability and remuneration. A just society should understand that it was the weakest people who had the greatest needs and most needed social guarantees for their development: the highest income should go to the least capable individuals. But equality as a condition of extensive freedom as the power to act could not work without the support of a sentiment of fraternity, which was then imposed as a rule of action.Fraternity. The definition of fraternity seemed to introduce a difference of opinions, and disagreement, especially between Blanc and Pecqueur. While Blanc explained metaphorically that fraternity meant “equality enshrined, poeticised, sanctified and maintained by love”, Pecqueur adopted a more advanced position:
Fraternity alone is the generating social principle par excellence. Equality and liberty define and clarify fraternity; they are, in a way, its weight and measure. Upon equality and liberty one can only build egoism, rights and federalism; on to fraternity one can graft dedication, duty and unity.
(Pecqueur 1842, 3)
What can explain this ostensible difference that made Blanc sanction equality while Pecqueur sanctioned fraternity? It could be suggested that, on this level, the two men had a difference of perspective, with one of them, Pecqueur, seeking more clearly the foundations of his ideas on social and ethical justice in theology, a theology that had been rethought and republicanised after the evolutions of Felicite de Lamennais (1782-1854) and his momentous Paroles d'un croyant (1834), and the other, Blanc, in philosophical anthropology. This did not, however, prevent either of them from dipping into the neighbouring register, socialism being for Blanc “gospel in action” (Blanc 1849b, 3), for example. This was a constant for this generation of reformist thinkers who intertwined the religious and the political in a thousand ways. Nonetheless, one difference remained. For Pecqueur, fraternity was a guiding principle because duty was “the obligation to carry out the will of God”, and right was “all that man has the liberty to do or not to do without thwarting the will of God, or rather fulfilling his duty” (Pecqueur 1842, 21). For Blanc, while fraternity is only “a poetic exhibition of solidarity” (Blanc 1880, 145), this was because it was principally the institutional conditions achieving liberty and equality that shaped behaviours and made it possible to achieve fraternity. The institutions of an organised society gradually reveal the nature of human behaviour. Consideration is an important ingredient, but to a far lesser extent than dedication. As its dominant activity, organisation leads to government, and implies the participation of everyone, at all levels of society in the Republic, in government functions. And, as Blanc stated several times, “governing is dedication” (Blanc 1849a, 20). In an organised, functional society, every person governs to some extent, and dedication will thus inevitably flourish everywhere. On this last point, Blanc again showed himself to be in debt to the doctrines of his times, with this idea of dedication stemming from, on one hand, a classic Republican source sympathetic to the virtues of the citizen, and on the other, a religious source and the Christian dedication praised by authors such as Buchez and Lamennais.
Blanc’s position perhaps appears more modern than Pecqueur’s, weighed down as it was with theological arguments. But it could also be said that Pecqueur’s position proves more radical with regard to justice. By placing fraternity above equality and liberty, he claimed he would never reintroduce into the pure equation of justice any catalyst for legitimised inequalities: neither in terms of ability, as preached by the Saint-Simonians, nor in terms of talent, sometimes used by Fourierism, nor even in terms of virtue or will - and this is what could happen, in Pecqueur’s opinion, with Blanc’s position (as well as that of a certain Republicanism). From Blanc’s perspective, if institutional guarantees in terms of liberty and equality were fully respected, then only the more or less dedicated, virtuous behaviour of individuals would come into play: and a hierarchy could be reconstituted, the hierarchy of virtues. However, reminding us that fraternity lies beyond liberty and equality, Pecqueur averted this risk, pointing out that socialism relies heavily on the unavoidable demands of equality and liberty but can only be accomplished by achieving fraternity, in other words, “the sentiment of solidarity, the relatedness and unity of humankind” (Pecqueur 1849b, 12).
There are, then, two significant things that emerge from these discussions about the three cardinal values: the radical reformulation of the values of liberty and equality, and discussion on how the three values of liberty, equality and fraternity link together. However, these theories produced by social science then needed to be made real in practical propositions and social reforms.
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