Capitalism's Contradictions

Studies of Economic Thought Before and After Marx

Henryk Grossman, Rick Kuhn

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781608467808
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Teoría económica

Collected and translated by Deutscher Prize-Winning Grossman biographer Rick Kuhn, assembles several of Henryk Grossman's most important essays, and serves as an introduction to his project of recovering Marx. Grossman highlights distinctive features of Marx's economic theory by contrasting it with the views of his forerunners, from Adam Smith to Sismondi.

Simonde de Sismondi and His Economic Theories

(A New Interpretation of His Thought)134

Translated from the French by Ian Birchall

This year we have the opportunity to commemorate several great economists, for it is the centenary of the death of [David] Ricardo, the fortieth anniversary of Karl Marx’s death, the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith and the hundred and fiftieth of that of Simonde de Sismondi. Today I propose to draw your attention to the last of these. Compared with the numerous studies devoted to the physiocrats and the classical English economists,135 those dealing with Sismondi are relatively few in number. And although a host of excellent authors in more or less recent times, such as Adolphe Blanqui, [Julius] Kautz, [Hugo] Eisenhart, Charles Périn, [John Kells] Ingram, Ludwig Elster, Luigi Cossa, [Alfred Victor] Espinas, [Heinrich] Herkner, [Albert] Aftalion, [Joseph] Rambaud, Hector Denis and Charles Rist, have attempted to expound Sismondi’s ideas, those studies we do possess have not succeeded, in my view, in giving sufficient attention to his theoretical thinking.136 In fact, while they pay ample homage to this honorary professor of the University of Wilno137 and draw out his importance as the creator of new social policy, he is relegated to secondary status as a theoretician. It is precisely on this last point that I differ from generally accepted opinions. To set them right I will try to characterize in turn Sismondi’s method, his theory and his social policy.

1. Sismondi’s Method

As far as method was concerned, it previously seemed that Sismondi’s viewpoint had been clearly established. It was generally claimed that Sismondi was an opponent of the abstract and deductive method and that his merit consisted solely in the fact that he had spoken out critically against the abstract and deductive method of the classical school and in particular of Ricardo, juxtaposing it to the method of historical and descriptive induction. According to Denis, “Sismondi’s basic criticism of the [classical] school is for its abstract and deductive method.”138 Charles Rist in turn makes a very similar judgment. “Sismondi’s disagreement was not upon the theoretical principles of political economy. So far as these were concerned, he declared himself a disciple of Adam Smith. He merely disagreed with the method, the object and hence the practical conclusions of the classical school.” “Ricardo . . . is accused of having introduced the abstract method into the science … his spirit shrank from admitting those abstractions which Ricardo and his disciples demanded from him. Political economy, he thought, . . . was to be based on experience, upon history and observation. Human conditions were to be studied in detail.” According to Rist, Sismondi’s critique is directed against generalization. “It also prepared the way for that conception of political economy upon the discovery of which the German historical school so prided itself at a later date.”139

Admittedly one can find in Sismondi many more passages similar to those noted by Rist. But we can see that the latter has stuck to a literal reading of Sismondi and has not grasped the spirit, that he has not seized the very essence of his method. Having asserted that Sismondi is an opponent of the abstract method, a few lines later he criticizes him for a certain inconsistency, because “Sismondi himself was forced to have recourse to it. It is true that he used it with considerable awkwardness and his failure to construct or to discuss abstract theories perhaps explains his preference for the other method.”140

If there is an inconsistency, I venture to say that it is not in Sismondi but rather in Rist’s standpoint and his rather scholastic logic. According to Rist, Sismondi’s methodological merit entails the critique of the abstract method and the application of the historical and descriptive method. But then Rist goes on to say that Sismondi “was forced to have recourse” to the abstract method.

Is it true that in Sismondi we are faced with contradictions and that these are a sign that he “creates . . . confusion” and has a “hesitating mind”—as Rist assures us?141 To concede this would make our job a lot easier, all the more so since Sismondi is a powerful individual whose enormous influence on the development of economic thought, as well as on several great thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon, Karl Marx, Émile Laveley and so on, becomes more obvious with every passing day, as Hector Denis has quite rightly noted.142

If it were solely a matter of showing the need for an inductive, historical descriptive method, Sismondi’s achievement in this respect would be quite dubious. In Germany [Johann Gottlieb] Fichte, it is true, applied an abstract constructive method to his “rational state,” that is, the state as it ought to be. But where it was a question of economic relations, “real states existing at present,” he demanded an explanation of “how everything that is came to be as it is,” and it was for history to respond to this question, “since indeed all historical research of deep penetration neither can nor should be anything else than a genetic answer to the causal question: how has the present state of things arisen and what are the reasons that the world formed itself into what we find before us?”143 In France it is Charles Ganilh who should take the credit, albeit problematic, for having opposed the abstract method. This economist, four years before the appearance of Sismondi’s book, published a program for a statistical and descriptive method. In his work he criticizes Adam Smith and the physiocrats for using an “ambitious method” that, as a result of “their predilection for rational and speculative theories” and “by means of hypotheses, conjectures and analogies,” aims to construct “general laws” by a means that “is independent of facts and experience.” Political economy is “a practical science.” Now “Adam Smith’s system of unlimited freedom” is “a speculative theory.” “When one looks carefully at Smith’s admirable work, one finds there only assertions which do not fit the facts, conjectures with no basis in reality and unfounded hypotheses.” To this method Ganilh contrasts the descriptive method and sees the solution in the progress of statistics.144 It seems that he was inspired by the famous statistical treatise of Patrick Colquhoun (1814), which showed the distribution of wealth among the various classes in the population of England.145 “Thus it seems to me that from the table of the present wealth of a people . . . one can progress not only to knowledge of the causes of this people’s wealth but even to the establishment of the principles that create modern wealth and to the true theory of political economy.”146 He defines the relationship between statistics and economics as follows: “The former accumulates the materials and the latter builds the edifice of the science.” If the speculative theories that he criticizes “reasoned before having observed the facts . . . asserted instead of calculating,” the method advocated by Ganilh leads in short to a rigorous theory, “to mathematical certainty.” He briefly indicates the path to be followed. “We observe facts that can be subjected to observation and calculation and that, as a result, give economic science the right to lay claim to the same precision as the physical and mathematical sciences.”

Thus it was not Sismondi who was the first to juxtapose a scientific ideal based on the statistical-descriptive method to the abstract and deductive method of the classical economists. However, I will not spend time discussing once more the banal question as to whether political economy should use in...