Background
The sociological thinking of Cournot, like all his work moreover, is rooted for the most part in his own personal experience, even if it cannot be reduced to that.1 Thus, without a minimum understanding of the events of his life, without taking into serious account the many intellectual encounters he had, his work may seem abstract without any real continuity. We must recall here Bottinelli’s remark to the effect that Cournot’s psychology “helps us to understand his sociological doctrines.”2 We are relatively familiar with the main stages of his life. His Souvenirs certainly provide useful information, but they come to an end in 1859, a crucial moment in his intellectual development, when his sociological views were becoming more clearly articulated. We shall not go into detail here on the course of his personal life, nor shall we dwell on particular anecdotes: Instead, we shall simply cite those aspects that frame or perhaps suggest the genesis of his thinking and his ideas.
Antoine Augustin Cournot was born on August 28, 1801, at Gray in the Franche-Comté. It was in this little town, home at that time to some 5000 inhabitants, that he began the studies that would take him later to Besançon, “a city more theologically oriented than many others.”3
Early on, as his Souvenirs suggest, Cournot was captivated by philosophy. He writes that at the age “where other children had the natural wisdom to occupy themselves in playing with hoops and jacks, I was already possessed of the demon of philosophical curiosity, taking great pleasure in observations, revelations, avidly gathering the stories that were addressed to me, or that I overheard, and engraving them in my memory in order to comment on them in my own way. And although what followed responded only weakly to that quality—or that affliction—of the precocious child, the disappointment was not so great but that I was able to make my own way in the world, leaving behind the modest bourgeoisie of a small town buried in a remote province (at a time when there were still remote provinces) to come to Paris to meet with famous scholars and writers, to consort in a familiar way with men who had commanded armies and who had held ministerial portfolios, and then later to fill high posts in the Administration of Public Education. Thus, in my maturity, I found the means to pursue the observations and reflections of the reasoning child. Yet with all that, my role remained too small for me to have the pretension of leaving behind memoirs, and still less of writing confessions and of telling the public about woes that were mine alone.”4
Cournot’s childhood and youth were essentially spent in reading and thinking. His youthful readings, both in their level of difficulty and in their extreme diversity, are not only impressive but they had an indelible influence on his thinking.5 “Among the books that I read as a child or adolescent, and that had a decisive influence on all my subsequent ideas and studies, I shall cite, in the order read, the Mondes of Fontenelle, his Éloges des Académiciens, the Exposition du système du monde of Laplace , the Logique of Port Royal, and the two little volumes in which Desmazeaux collected the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke , along with other minor philosophical works. Fontenelle and Laplace instilled in me a burning desire to have a scientific instrument with which I could fully grasp these imposing truths, and the profound insights of the great German philosopher filled me with admiration.”6 As for Leibniz, Cournot would later say of the German philosopher that he was “the greatest genius by whom the sciences and philosophy are honored.”7
In 1821, Cournot was accepted into the École Normale. However, the following year the school was closed for political reasons and he was obliged to continue his studies elsewhere. He thus found himself once again in Paris, where he pursued his university training at the Sorbonne. He then became a disciple of eminent mathematicians of the time, such as Lagrange and Poisson , and was introduced to the work of Laplace . Having earned degrees in mathematical sciences (1823) and in law (1827), Cournot finally obtained his doctorate in mathematics in 1829 on the basis of a principal thesis, Mémoire sur le mouvement d’un corps rigide soutenu par un plan fixe and a supplementary thesis, La figure des corps célestes (on celestial bodies). In 1823, he was hired as a private tutor by le Maréchal Gouvion-Saint-Cyr and helped him to draft his Mémoires, which were published in 1830. In 1834–1835, he launched his academic career, teaching the theory of infinitesimal functions at the newly established faculty of sciences at Lyon. He went on to serve as director of the Academy of Grenoble (1835–1838), Inspector General of Public Education (1836–1848), a member of the Commission on Advanced Studies (1848–1849), and director of the Academy of Dijon, where he remained until his retirement in 1862.
During the course of these years, Cournot was also beginning to build a rich and varied body of work. His first writings dealt primarily with the area of economic science and mathematics, although from the beginning of his intellectual career he was also concerned with philosophical questions.8 In 1838, he published his Recherches sur les principes mathématiques de la théorie des richesses, a work that enjoyed only meager success. Then, in 1841 and 1843, he returned with two other mathematical works: Traité élémentaire de la théorie des fonctions et du calcul infinitésimal and Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilités. As of mid-century, he devoted himself almost exclusively to philosophy, while still maintaining his interest in mathematics. In 1851, he inaugurated his philosophical writings by publishing an essay on the foundations of knowledge and the nature of philosophical criticism (Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances et sur les caractères de la critique philosophique), a seminal work that was followed in 1861 by a treatise on the sequence of fundamental ideas in the sciences and in history (Traité de l’enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l’histoire), in 1872 by a work on the progress of ideas and events in modern times (Considérations sur la marche des idées et des événements dans les temps modernes) and finally, in 1875, by Matérialisme, vitalisme, rationalisme. Cournot died on March 30, 1877, in Paris, having just completed his revision of the proofs for his last book, the Revue sommaire des doctrines économiques.
The decade running from 1841 to 1851 was for Cournot a period of great intellectual ferment. During this decade alone, he published five works, including his first great book of philosophy which, we may say, marks the beginning of a new direction in his thinking. But the shift from mathematics to philosophy can be explained in large part by reasons of a personal nature. It was during this time that Cournot gradually lost his eyesight. “Very early on I had a passion for reading,” he recounts in his Souvenirs, “as if I had an instinctive premonition that I would be condemned one day soon to be almost unable to read at all.”9
As of the mid-1840s, Cournot was no longer able to pursue mathematics. He confesses this to Walras in a letter dating from 1873: “I must tell you that for the last 30 years I have been obliged to rely on a reader for my daily browsing. Needless to say, I have not been able to find a boy capable of reading mathematics to me, nor can I read mathematics with my ears, and that has forced me to renounce mathematics for 30 years now.”10
Although Cournot had to abandon mathematics prematurely, the fact remains that his philosophical writings and his works on the history of science reveal clearly the solid grounding in mathematics that he had acquired in his youth. There is no doubt, indeed, that the idea of developing a philosophy of probability and chance events would never have come to him if he had not first studied mathematics. In the Traité, Cournot justifies the importance that he had until then accorded mathematics: “we have found the secret to the preeminence of the role of mathematical sciences. Mathematics is the science par excellence, the most perfect example of scientific form and construction […]. Pure mathematics is an absolutely and eminently rational science, because the principles from which it proceeds are truths of intuition, axioms of reason, which the mind feels no need to account for, as they are clear in themselves and they impose themselves of necessity.”11
From this perspective, mathematics is the foundation of philosophical thinking. “The use of mathematical signs comes naturally whenever we set out to discuss the relationships between magnitudes, and even when they are not strictly necessary, if they can facilitate exposition, make it more concise, place it on the road to more extensive developments, and avoid the pitfalls of vague argumentation, it would be very un-philosophical to dismiss them.”12
And so, at a time marked by instability and disorder, Cournot, like many philosophers, was led almost by the force of circumstances to interest himself in history, not to make of it a “more or less cloudy metaphysics,” to use Henri Sée’s13 exp...