Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Cheryl B. Welch
The method of enquiry underlying Id
´
eologue versions of social science
was thought to be analyse, i.e. the decomposition of all ideas into basic ele-
ments of sense perception and the lucid recomposition of these elements into
complex ideas. Inherited from the philosophes and especially from Condillac,
analyse was initially invoked as the universal method for achieving progress
in the physical and social sciences. The most influential articulations of
this passion for analysis were the lectures in the second class of the Institut
National (Moral and Political Sciences) delivered concurrently by Pierre
Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy. Cabanis lectured on the physiological aspects
of ‘ideology’ (subsequently published as Rapports du Physique et du Moral de
l’Homme in 1802) and Tracy examined the rational aspects in lectures later
revised and published as the four-volume
´
El
´
emens d’Id
´
eologie.
Cabanis was a doctor whose research into human physiology ultimately
proved particularly subversive of the egalitarian ideal of the bon citoyen that he
himself continued to cherish. Presenting himself as a methodical collector
of physiological facts for a history of human nature, his Rapports was meant
to begin the task of cataloguing influences (including temperament, age,
sex, disease, climate and diet) upon individual sensibility: a necessary tilling
of the intellectual fields in preparation for creating (through education) a
generation of more equal individuals (1956, i,p.121). Cabanis, however,
left those fields sown with the seeds of an entirely new crop of social and
political ideas: biology as the indispensable context of social theorising,
innate physiological differences among humans as the basis of functional
differentiation, and a profoundly gendered view of the social passions and
of political life. His contemporary Xavier Bichat went even further, insist-
ing that all organisms, including humans, obey their own ‘vital’ laws, and
that the interactions between such laws and the environment cause the
emergence of three stable classes of human beings: sensory men, brain men
and motor men (Bichat 1809,pp.107–9). These organic metaphors would
eventually be exploited by a new generation of social thinkers, including
Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, who integrated them in different ways
into ‘social science’.
2 Political economy: queen of the social sciences or dismal science?
Like the physiological id
´
eologie of Cabanis, the so-called ‘rational’ id
´
eologie
of Destutt de Tracy had the paradoxical result of providing the basis for an
attack on his own political ideals, and of reor ienting the thrust of social
science in France away from an individualist methodology. Tracy’s works,
174
Social science from the Revolution to positivism
however, were subject to a different set of tensions and contradictions.
Though he made a real attempt to assimilate Cabanis’ ideas, he was pri-
marily concerned with a philosophical analysis of the general development
of ideas and language out of sense impressions. This focus on the sensa-
tionalist theory of mind, despite important departures from earlier versions,
inevitably led away from Cabanis’ new appreciation of human variety to
a reaffirmation of the universal elements in human nature. He proposed a
universal ‘logic of the will’ that attempted to enthrone political economy –
the science of the will and its effects – as the queen of the social
sciences.
Tracy’s theoretical difficulties arose from an inability to show convinc-
ingly either that this ‘logic of the will’ clarified existing social and economic
practice or that it fulfilled liberal hopes for a new foundation for poli-
tics. Indeed, contemporary reactions to Tracy’s claims for Id
´
eologue social
science serve as useful barometers of the changing climate of discussions
about social science in France. If the Saint-Simonians and Comte were to
draw directly on Cabanis and Bichat, they would use Tracy indirectly as
foil. Arguing against his elaborate treatment of method precipitated their
distinctions between ‘critical’ and ‘synthetic’ reasoning, and between the
‘metaphysical’ and ‘positive’ historical eras. Moreover, Tracy’s own applica-
tion of his method helped to spark a debate over the intellectual pretensions
of political economy in France. A recognition of what was at stake in this
debate provides us with one perspective on why political economy f ailed to
achieve a privileged status in French intellectual life, even among ‘liberal’
elites.
In the first three volumes of his
´
El
´
emens d’Id
´
eologie, Tracy reworked the
by now familiar outlines of sensationalist philosophy: the basis of all knowl-
edge in sense impressions; the central place of pleasure and pain in the
development of complex ideas; the attempt to clarify and purify ideas by
reconstructing the chain from simple perception to complex thought; and
finally, the conviction that philosophy is really only a well-made language.
Tracy, nevertheless, decisively cut the link between a presumed equality in
sensibility to pleasure and pain and equality in social and political rights.
Acutely aware that there was a campaign to discredit his philosophical point
of view by linking it with destructive revolutionary excesses, Tracy explicitly
avoided hyperbole, illusion and metaphor, and cultivated a dry emotionless
voice as an antidote to revolutionary flamboyance. Like Bentham, he por-
trayed the rights of man as a discredited ‘means of deception’ (Destutt de
Tra cy 1817, ii,pp.390–1).
175
Cheryl B. Welch
Tracy in fact premised his entire intellectual project on a belief, analo-
gous to that of Bentham, that his method could yield certainty about the
real meaning of language and ideas. In the pursuit of this goal, however,
he continually encountered unsettling doubts that led him to an unusually
candid appraisal of the difficulties of such a project. Because of his rejec-
tion of the analogy to mathematics – an analogy used to great effect by
thinkers as diverse as Hobbes, Condillac, Condorcet, Bentham and James
Mill – his account of the association of ideas was deprived of the borrowed
prestige of mathematical certainty. And because of his merciless exposure
of the deficiencies of language and human memory, his own claims to have
uncovered a solid chain of ideas appeared increasingly threadbare. Tracy’s
social thought in fact oscillated between a projection into the future of
a purified natural pattern of social interactions and troubled attempts to
confront inevitable human weakness and irrationality in the present. His
particular appropriation of political economy exemplified these tensions,
leaving his readers with the sense of a troubling gap between a science
of happiness and satisfaction and an application of this science that led to
misery and want.
In the final volume of the
´
El
´
emens, entitled the Tr ait
´
e sur la Volont
´
eetde
ses Effets, Tracy placed the underlying principles of political economy at the
heart of social science, defined explicitly as a system of principles indicating
the way to promote the greatest amount of happiness in society (Destutt de
Tra cy 1817, iii,pp.380–1). This notion of invariable laws of human pro-
duction (and thus of happiness), so central to the Physiocrats and to Adam
Smith, was powerfully attractive to French thinkers who now distrusted
revolutionary political rhetoric for its associations with the reign of terror.
They wished both to return to the lessons of concrete experience and to
condemn as unnatural the activist (and they thought tyrannical) govern-
ments of the Revolution and Empire. This attraction is obvious in the work
of the most influential of the French political economists, Jean-Baptiste Say.
3
Tracy, not himself an original economic thinker, reworked Say’s theory with
an eye to elaborating its connections to a larger philosophical enquiry.
3 J. B. Say had published his Trait
´
ed’
´
Economie Politique in 1803. It was to go through a major revision in
1814, and thenceforth to become the seminal text of the classical school on the continent. Though
deeply influenced by Adam Smith, Say in some ways resisted the newer English tendencies to construe
political economy within narrow limits. Rather he favoured a more expansive view of its links with
‘republican’ morality and manner s characteristic of the Id
´
eologues. On Say’s larger political and
intellectual theory see Richard Whatmore 2000, although Whatmore is not an altogether reliable
guide on the complexities of Say’s relationship to ‘Id
´
eologue political economy’.
176
Social science from the Revolution to positivism
Tracy prefaced his discussion of political economy with a series of ‘ideo-
logical’ definitions of personality, property, wealth and value that emphasised
the potential of economic interaction to lead to a utopian society of self-
interested exchange. From the point of view of production, the most serious
impediments to the ideal operation of a benevolent invisible hand were mis-
guided aristocratic ‘idlers’, who stubbornly stood aloof from commerce and
republican mores, and hence distorted a process of production that would
otherwise result in gains for all. Tracy’s logic of the will and its effects, then,
exalted scientific laws of production and largely equated these laws with the
laws of social happiness. Yet Tracy had read Malthus. Indeed, his adoption of
a pessimistic Malthusian perspective on the population problem did much
to popularise these ideas in France. From the point of view of the actual
distribution of the social product, Tracy noted, optimism was unjustified:
one had to ‘recognise everywhere the superiority of needs over means, the
weakness of the individual, and his inevitable suffering’ (Destutt de Tracy
1817, iv,pp.287–8). Just as radical defects in memory and language severely
circumscribed the more general claims of Tracy’s philosophic method, so his
recognition of inevitable human limitations told against the historical emer-
gence of an ideal model of social commerce in which everyone would gain.
He painted a bleak picture of an unequally distributed social product that
caused misery and suffering among the wage-earning class, even as he reit-
erated that justice required an equal weighting of every individual’s pleasure
and pain. Moreover, despite the starkness of this contrast between ideal the-
ory and inevitable facts, his proposed applications of social science did not
go beyond the traditional pleas for education, complete liberty of trade and
freedom to emigrate. In this despairing contrast between utopian claims for
political economy and its inherent limitations, one begins to see why polit-
ical economy failed to gain any lasting purchase on the French imagination.
It may be useful here to contrast briefly the emergence of political econ-
omy in England during the early nineteenth century. By the 1830spolit-
ical economy in England had achieved a cer tain intellectual cach
´
easa
self-contained science, the product of an active and self-conscious intellec-
tual community in regular contact with both natural scientists and policy-
making elites. Indeed between 1815 and 1820, it has been said, ‘everyone in
England who thought at all was forced to form definite opinions on a series
of very difficult economic problems’ (Graham Wallas quoted in Milgate and
Stimson 1991,p.8). Although political economy was often nominally sub-
sumed under a broader notion of the scientific study of society as a whole, it
was nevertheless celebrated as the most highly developed and useful branch
177
Cheryl B. Welch
of this study: the first successful ‘entrepreneur of the social sciences’ (Deane
1989,p.96). Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century political economy
was seen as integral to informed ‘scientific’ political discourse: ‘its tropes
and figures constantly recurred in the speeches, writings and conversation
of all social classes’ (Kadish and Tribe, 1993,p.3).
The introduction to the 1836 edition of Nassau Senior’s An Outline of
the Science of Political Economy states this view of the reach of the science
of political economy quite clearly. Senior contrasts most writers of the
‘English school’ to continental writers and a few misguided English fol-
lowers. Political economy, according to Senior, studies not the science of
welfare, but the science of the production of wealth. Narrow but power-
fully compelling, its findings must be heeded by statesmen practising the
art of government because the larger goals of statecraft naturally require the
maximisation of resources. Political economy belongs, then, to the class of
‘subservient Sciences’ (Senior 1965,p.3). As developed in conjunction with
the utilitarian philosophies of Bentham, the Mills and Sidgwick, the view
that political economy had a central but subsidiary place in public deliber-
ations led to the practice of weighing the scientific conclusions of political
economy against a larger criterion of (utilitarian) social justice. Economics
itself was not expected to integrate moral norms into its science; rather,
the science of economics would inform the larger tasks of political elites.
A half-century later both Alfred Marshall and Henry Sidgwick articulated
variations on this theme. According to Marshall in his inaugural address at
Cambridge, the economic ‘organon’ – i.e. a scientific analysis of human
motives, their grouping and interrelationships – would clarify important
aspects of social life, but was only a ‘machine’ or ‘tool’ to inform the com-
mon sense that should underlie political judgement on matters of morals
and politics (Sidgwick 1904,pp.163–5). Sidgwick expressed the relationship
of economics to social science in similar terms: economic science was not
the whole of social science, but it, at least, had made solid progress and had
something to show for itself. Political economists – unlike sociologists –
were not ‘always wrangling, and never establishing anything’ (Sidgwick
1904,p.189).
Political economy in England, then, rejected the task of directing a new
political order through its allegedly scientific character and rejected the
label of a science of human happiness. In France the claims for political
economy were at once grander, more amorphous, and more evanescent.
They provoked conceptions of social science that defined themselves against
political economy rather than in conjunction with it.
178
Social science from the Revolution to positivism
3 The emergence of a scientific logic of the ‘social’
I want now to suggest schematically the responses made to early French
claims for political economy among three groups in post-revolutionary
France: the Doctrinaire liberals of the Restoration and July Monarchy;
Catholic reformers particularly concerned with the costs of industrialisation
and with issues such as welfare and prison reform; and, finally, young radicals
of the re-emerging left opposition. For different reasons, none of these
milieux provided a congenial welcome for political economy. Indeed, their
negative reactions conspired to inhibit the pursuit of any social science
that privileged an individualist logic, and to encourage the search for an
encompassing science of the ‘social’.
Liberalism during the French Restoration can be defined roughly as the
willingness to contest legitimist claims by demanding the rule of law and
representative government. Yet these demands had to be made on grounds
that were impeccably anti-revolutionary. Any set of ideas tainted by atheism
or materialism or egoism – all notions linked inexorably to revolutionary
excesses in the slippery slope of Restoration debate – had to be denounced.
The Id
´
eologues and their followers, however, proudly linked the method-
ology of French political economy to eighteenth-century sensationalism.
Political economy, then, would enter the lists of Restoration debate at a
disadvantage.
4
Indeed, what was most characteristic of post-revolutionary
French liberalism, in George Kelly’s phrase, was a ‘respiritualisation of its
philosophical base – a movement away from the “Id
´
eologie” of Destutt de
Tracy toward a more idealised and voluntaristic version of human freedom’
(Kelly 1992,p.2). Inspired by German philosophy, the most influential
liberals, in the academy and in politics, shared the eclectic philosophical
sensibilities of Victor Cousin.
By no means opposed to the legal bases of a liberal order, or to economic
rights, these liberals were nevertheless hostile to the methodological tem-
per of political economy and were repelled by the notion of focusing on
self-interest as the basis of law-like regularities in social life. Their charac-
teristic defences of property and the pursuit of wealth were shaped instead
by an almost obsessive preoccupation with reconstructing the virtues of
4 Writers such as D’Hauterive, Storch, Charles Comte, and Charles Dunoyer – often thought of as
Say’s school – did continue to celebrate the benefits of economic exchange and laisser-faire,butthey
were increasingly marginalised as a ‘sect’. Increasingly the proponents of laisser-faire in France tended
towards a dogmatic style that exaggerated the utopian elements in classical economics. Perhaps the
best example of this tendency is Frederic Bastiat’s Economic Harmonies (1850).
179
Cheryl B. Welch
personal responsibility and public duty. They embraced an exclusive notion
of property rights, for example, as necessary for the flowering of duties
surrounding husband, wife and children. Individual effort and the pur-
suit of self-interest were natural because they were necessary to establish the
security and independence of the family.
5
Doctrinaire liberals, then, recoiled
from the celebration of economic ‘egoism’ and reaffirmed notions of moral
duty. They also launched an important critique of the methods of political
economy as ahistorical and one-sided. Franc¸ois Guizot, for example, devel-
oped a view of history in which political and moral progress was limited by
the possibilities inherent in the social state of a people: its class and property
relations, economic interactions, customs and mores. The task of political
thinkers was to analyse the democratic social state emerging in France and
to organise an appropriate political expression of the pouvoir social. When
considered in isolation from a more complete view of the
´
etat social, politi-
cal economy was a sterile science. Even as the Doctrinaires’ elaboration of
the ‘social’ realm of human life reinforced its currency in post-revolution
debates, however, their focus on institutional change in historical perspec-
tive led them away from any transhistorical or transcultural consideration
of social laws, and indeed away from any systematic scientific approach to
either society or economy.
Except for a small free-trade sect indebted to Say and the Id
´
eologues,
then, French liberals initially looked to Eclectic moral theory or to the
Doctrinaires’ narrative of progressive civilisation, rather than to scientific
elaborations of society or economy, to bolster claims for political reforms.
6
Indeed, it was among Catholic social reformers, sometimes with impeccable
legitimist ties, that the scientific claims of political economy were more
often debated. It was also among this group that an explicit alternative to
political economy’s focus on the individual began to emerge: a conception
of the ‘social’ as the source of a distinctive scientific understanding of human
interdependence.
5 These sentiments can also be found in the works of the influential second generation of eclectics:
Adolphe Franck (1809–93), Jules Simon (1814–96), Paul Janet (1823–99) and Elme Caro (1826–87).
For a good discussion see Logue 1983,pp.17–49. As J. S. Mill noted, Eclecticism, which had taken
such firm hold of the ‘speculative minds of a generation formed by Royer-Collard, Cousin, Jouffroy,
and their compeers’ had no exact parallel in England (1865,p.2).
6 This is not to argue that there was a sharp divide between Eclecticism and all versions of social science.
Indeed, Brooks 1998 has persuasively argued that later French innovators in the social sciences –
including Th
´
eodule Ribot (1839–1916), Alfred Espinas (1844–1922), Pierre Janet (1859–1947), and
´
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) – were decisively marked by their spiritualist education in developing
allegedly ‘positivist’ versions of psychology and sociology. See Brooks 1998.
180
Social science from the Revolution to positivism
Conservative French reformers interested in public charity, prisons and
public health were made particularly anxious by claims that the laws of
social science inevitably produced industrial poverty because, in the French
context, the notion of a permanently impoverished class conjured up terri-
fying images of the revolutionary peuple. Many of these reformers became
both obsessed and repelled by the English example as a harbinger of the evil
consequences of unrestricted development (Reddy, 1984). They traced the
new industrial plague of pauperisme to the transformative effects of develop-
ment itself and shifted their focus from the mendicancy of the rural labourer
(a frequent concern of eighteenth-century thinkers) to the dangerous con-
dition of the industrial urban worker. Most important, they concluded that
any ‘science’ of political economy that viewed such results as natural was
in need of fundamental revision. Sismondi, for example, expertly exploited
the menacing contradictions inherent in a science of pleasure that produced
pain. He painted a portrait of an urban population predestined by eco-
nomic laws (rather than by failure of character) to fall into the condition
of a threatening modern proletariat (Sismondi 1975,pp.158, 198). In his
‘M
´
emoire sur la Conciliation de l’
´
Economie Politique et de l’
´
Economie
Charitable ou d’Assistance’, P. A. Dufau likened the task of specifying a
method for political economy to being lost in a maze. It was contradictory
and therefore unscientific, he claimed, to hold at once that modern poverty
was caused by the inevitable working out of economic laws, but that the
science of political economy could not and need not specify ways to combat
pover ty. The urgent task of social science was to find a way out of this con-
fusion (d
´
edale)(Dufaul860,p.106). Many middle-class reformers found the
theoretical thread that would lead them out of this alleged labyrinth in a dif-
ferent scientific understanding, often termed
´
economie sociale. In Sismondi’s
use, the term took on the meaning of a science that both transcended and
reoriented political economy.
7
One can discern certain common themes about the objective needs of
society in the writings of the so-called French social economists of the 1830s,
1840sand1850s. Some historians, in fact, have seen in their writings a recog-
nisably new discourse of social intervention (Ewald 1986; Procacci 1993).
A series of reports and analyses, including those by Villeneuve-Bargement
(1834), DeG
´
erando (1839), Fr
´
egier (1840), Buret (1840), Villerm
´
e(1840)
7 See Welch 1984,p.220. Destutt de Tracy first used the expression
´
economie sociale in order to indicate
that social science should be distinct from the traditional concerns of politics (Destutt de Tracy 1817,
iv,pp.289–90). It was adopted by J. B. Say in the later editions of his works for this reason.
181
Cheryl B. Welch
and Cherbuliez (1853), promoted the view that the science of social econ-
omy should focus on the well-being of the entire population, including
adequate food, clothing, shelter and welfare for the pauperised classes.
Moreover, they developed more fully the idea that pauperism was a specif-
ically modern social threat, caused neither by individual sinfulness nor by
governmental corruption or neglect, but by the laws of economic develop-
ment tout court. Yet they also employed and even heightened a rhetoric –
very familiar in the French context – that castigated paupers as sexually
dissolute, imprudent, lazy, ignorant, insubordinate and rebellious. On this
account, the newly pauperised classes formed a debased population bereft
of intellect and social sympathies, but imbued with a new sentiment of hon-
our and confidence that was the unfortunate legacy of popular politicisation
during the Revolution. Like earlier images of roving beggars and brigands,
the French view of the lower classes in the early nineteenth century was
one in which the lines between the working classes and pauperised classes
were blurred into an image of dangerous hordes who ‘made one tremble
for the whole order of society’ (Sismondi 1975,p.157).
In England, too, paupers were often thought of as a degraded popula-
tion. Armed with a new scientific enthusiasm for social surveys that would
generate the statistics to determine what was needed and to ‘rouse the com-
munity and legislature’ to action, humanitarian social reformers sought to
bring the plight of these new poor before the public (Abrams 1968,p.35).
Yet the general hope seemed to be that the community contained social
sympathies of sufficient strength to be roused. It has often been argued that
in England, the challenge of the social question was eventually met by an
expanded – though very imperfect – notion of legal inclusion, politically
created and reflecting a transformed sense that civil rights included a ‘social’
dimension (T. H. Marshall 1977). In France, where the Revolution was
blamed for destroying old patterns of moral and social sympathies without
creating new ones, the rhetoric surrounding social evils was more politi-
cally charged. Paupers were perceived not only as degraded, but as politically
dangerous (Chevalier 1973; Himmelfarb 1984,pp.392–400).
The French social economists, then, feared and despised the pauperised
classes, but were more likely than English reformers to absolve them of
responsibility for their own condition. The evils of public misery ‘origi-
nate in the milieu in which individuals are placed and it is not up to them
to change it’ (Dufau 1860,p.93). The eradication of social evils was a
social obligation, rather than a matter of individual character reformation.
182
Social science from the Revolution to positivism
This obligation, however, was a duty that engendered no corresponding
political right, and hence no valid legal claim. Indeed, these writers impli-
cated the legal individualism of the Revolution, with its talk of natural
right, in the very roots of pauperism: the abstract notion of the rights
of economic man was fundamental to the new economic order that was
generating a pauper class. To attempt to eliminate the evil of pauperism
by recognising individual rights to work or to welfare would in fact only
deepen the problem by intensifying individualism, destroying all interme-
diary associations and leaving a void between state and citizen (Cherbuliez
1853,p.4). But how and by whom was this obligation of social reforma-
tion to be met? The social economists began to invoke both the needs
and potential action of ‘society’, which was conceived as having its own
logic and regulating force, superior to and different from economic laws.
As socially conservative Catholics, many of these thinkers adopted a notion
of social obligation that had clear affinities to a religious conception of the
reciprocal duties that bound Christians together within a Catholic com-
munity. The idea of the ‘social’, however, was itself unencumbered and
fluid; it had no specific theology or priesthood to give it determinate
shape.
8
In England, reformers often forged alliances with political economists
in order to combat scientifically the new ills associated with industrial
poverty (Abrams 1968,pp.8–52). In France, however, debates over the
social question and social reform took shape largely outside and even against
the categories and claims of liberal political economy. Rather they emerged
within a new discourse calling for social integration based on a larger
encompassing ‘science’. Indeed, to call an issue such as prison reform, child
labour or poor relief ‘social’ in the elite political culture of the Restoration
and the July Monarchy was to signal that positions on the issue would not be
discussed in economic or political terms, but rather would be determined
by an impartial analysis of social facts as manifested in elite expert opinion
(Drescher 1968,p.99). It was hoped that a consensus on social policy could
be achieved by developing an ameliorative apolitical social science, rather
than by ritualistic debates that would exacerbate fissures in the political
system.
8 The various policy measures recommended by the social economists displayed a continuing tension
between state control (such as supervision and regulation in t he home) and encouragement of
spontaneous co-operation and self-help among workers. See Welch 1989,pp.179–83.
183