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Emma Rothschild
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“It is above all in their writings that one can best study the true nature” of the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in L’ancien régime et la Révolution, of the Économistes or Physiocrats of the mid-eighteenth century, of Quesnay and Letrosne and Morelly and Mercier de la Rivière. The “Economists have had less brilliance in history than the philosophers,” he wrote; they nonetheless express, even more than the philosophers, the “single notion” in which “the political philosophy of the eighteenth century consists.” This is the idea that it is appropriate “to substitute simple and elementary rules, derived from reason and from natural law, for the complicated and traditional customs” of particular societies at particular times. The past, for the Économistes, was “the object of a limitless scorn.” They argued for the abstract and the general; for administrative simplicity, for “public utility” without “private rights,” for “laisser faire” or “the free exchange of commodities” without “political freedoms.”
― Economic Sentiments
― Economic Sentiments
“The disposition of universal discussion—the unending, discursive process of public altercation which was so admired, and so execrated, for much of the eighteenth century—was concerned, often, with economic policy. “From the scholastic disputes of theologians to matters of trade,” d’Alembert wrote, “everything has been discussed and analyzed, or at least mentioned.”55 For Edmund Burke, “it has been the misfortune (not as these gentlemen think it, the glory) of this age, that everything is to be discussed”; the age was one of “oeconomists, and calculators.”56 Taxes and regulations, guilds and excise inspections, were a principal preoccupation, together with religion, of enlightened opinion. Adam Smith’s most serious offense, for his Edinburgh contemporary the Reverend Alexander Carlyle, consisted in “introducing that unrestrained and universal commerce, which propagates opinions as well as commodities.”57 The commerce in opinions was itself, in large part, a commerce in opinions about commerce, or about commercial policy. The “focal point of enlightenment,” Kant says in What is Enlightenment?—the subject to be disputed, in the imperative to “argue as much as you like and about whatever you like”—consists in matters of religion. But economic matters are also a subject of enlightened discussion in Kant’s description; the tax official says, “‘Don’t argue, pay!’” and the cosmopolitan citizen “publicly voices his thoughts on the impropriety or even injustice of such fiscal measures.”58”
― Economic Sentiments
― Economic Sentiments
“The idyll of individual independence was for the opponents of economic reform the most fearsome of prospects. For Turgot’s principal adversary in the Lit de Justice, the advocate-general Antoine-Louis Séguier, to abolish regulations would be to “abandon the certainty of the present for an uncertain future.” It would be to threaten both commerce and the way people think about themselves: “Every manufacturer, every artisan, every worker will regard himself as an isolated being, dependent on himself alone, and free to wander in all the discrepancies of an often disordered imagination; all subordination will be destroyed.” “This sort of freedom is nothing other than a true independence,” Séguier said, and “independence is a vice in the political constitution”; “this freedom would soon transform itself into license . . . this principle of wealth would become a principle of destruction, a source of disorder.”79 As J.-E.-M. Portalis, Napoleon’s minister of religion, wrote in a eulogy to Séguier, the period of Turgot’s reforms was an epoch in which traders had “a great idea of their independence and their strength,” and in which “industry was great, but disquiet was greater still.” “The spirit of discussion and criticism” had “incredible effects,” and “there was nothing constant except the perpetual change in everything.”80 In the Lit de Justice, the last poignant words were the king’s: “My intention is in no way to confound the conditions of men; I wish to reign only by justice and laws.”81”
― Economic Sentiments
― Economic Sentiments
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