What was called political economy yesterday is well and truly dead.

Attempts to resuscitate it will be as impotent as anything else that is attempted to bring a corpse back to life: false science, moreover, that which lets things happen; which begins by abdicating, by putting itself in the wake of the facts, instead of dominating them and imposing its law on them; which makes itself a solvent, instead of being organic; which tells instead of prophesying; which limits itself to the analysis and the inventory of what is; while true science will be the synthesis of what must be.

(Pecqueur 1842, iii)

Along with the developments of the various trends of nineteenth-century liberal economic theory, the first appropriate formalisations and the progressive institu­tionalisation of the field as an academic discipline, a great number of critiques were levelled against political economy. As seen in the preceding volume (Chap­ters 7 and 9), some criticisms had already been aimed at the free-trade approach. But widespread hostility developed after the French Revolution and the rise of markets and industrial activities. The following chapters present the most relevant developments, which sought to present alternative economic ideas. They are first those expressed by Jean-Charles-Leonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842) and Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and his followers, the so-called Saint- Simonians who developed some of his ideas in a radical way. Then a series of authors are dealt with, who belonged to the various emerging “associationist” or socialist schools of thought during the first half of the century - namely, Louis Blanc (1811-1882), Victor Considerant (1808-1893), Pierre (1797-1871) and Jules (1805-1883) Leroux, Constantin Pecqueur (1801-1887), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) and Franςois Vidal (1812-1872), among others. Finally, one chap­ter deals with three authors who provide a good illustration of different trends in the socialist discussions at the end of our period: Benoit Malon (1841-1893), Georges Sorel (1847-1922) and Adolphe Landry (1874-1956). This part devoted to the critiques of (liberal) political economy concludes with an analysis of some criticisms expressed by another new discipline: sociology - the main authors con­sidered being Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Frederic Le Play (1806-1882), Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and a member of the Durkheim school, Franςois Simiand (1873-1935).

1.