SAY, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1767–1832)

Jean-Baptiste Say was a French political economist. Having been active in revolutionary politics for a decade, Say’s first work of political economy was published in 1800, entitled Olbie, ou essai sur les moyens d’améliorer les mceurs d’une nation (Olbie, or Essay on the Means of Improving the Morals of a Nation). After this work was heavily criticized, Say embarked on the writing of the Treatise on Political Economy (Traité d’économie politique), published in Paris in 1803. Say’s writing was censored on refusing to rewrite the book as a justification of Bonaparte’s Empire. He was forced to wait until 1814 to publish a second edition; this received far more attention than the first, and three further editions followed. A third edition followed in 1817 and two further editions appeared before Say’s death. Fame as a political economist was established across Europe by the time of Say’s appointment to the Chair of ‘Économie industrielle’ at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in 1819. It continued to grow throughout the 1820s, as the revolutionaries of 1830 acknowledged in granting him a Chair in ‘Économie politique’ at the Collège de France. Say published what he believed to be his most important work in 1828–9, the Cours complet d’économie politique pratique (Complete Course of Practical Political Economy). The subtitle of the work indicated Say’s main aim: to make political economy ‘everybody’s business’. Say believed that it was vital to combat the mercantile systems that had perverted the commerce of Britain, France and the wider world. In their place it was possible to create a society that was both more just towards the poor and more productive.

Throughout his life Say remained a revolutionary in his hatred of aristocracy and luxurybased commerce. Politically he always described himself as a republican, embracing fully the austere moral code this entailed. Although he described his own work as continuing that of Smith in separating political economy from morals and politics, he was in fact Smith’s disciple only in the general sense that he borrowed many of the arguments of the Wealth of Nations. Marx called Say ‘insipid’ in Capital (see MARX AND MARXISM). Rather than being seen as the weakest of the classical economists, Say’s ideas are best understood in the context of the failure of republican

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constitutionalism in France, and the ongoing search for a state that was popular, stable, egalitarian in social structure, and commercially advanced.

Of Genevan and Calvinist merchant stock, both branches of Say’s family were prominent in commerce at Lyon. At the age of 9 he attended a Catholic boarding school, the philosophe-orientated curriculum of which caused the school to be persecuted by the Bishop of Lyon. Looking back in his Memoirs, Say identified this as the source of an opposition to religion that continued until the end of his life. During the Restoration he planned to write a book showing the damage done to humanity by religious belief. The business problems of Say’s father Jean-Étienne put an end to Say’s education. In 1787 Etienne Clavière employed him in his Paris-based life assurance company. At some point before the revolution Say became Clavière’s secretary. He remained in this position until

he volunteered for the revolutionary army in August 1792. Serving Clavière was the defining moment in Say’s early intellectual life. Before the age of 25 Say enjoyed access to one of the most radical intellectual coteries in Paris. Numerous figures who rose to prominence in the 1790s were well known to Clavière, including Mirabeau, Brissot, SIEYÈS and Condorcet. Say found himself in a circle of men who were committed to justifying large-state republicanism against the accusation, shared by such luminaries as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Smith, that such forms of Government were only possible in small states. Clavière’s group was also intent on justifying a form of republicanism that was modern, in that it was fully compatible with the commercialization of French society, against which Rousseau had so vehemently argued. Through working on Mirabeau’s letters to his Aix constituents, entitled Le Courrier de Provence, Say became converted to these points of view. After the Terror, Say was a founder member of the journal La Décade philosophique, which sought to promote modern republicanism in France.

The ethics of a stable republican life that Say drew from such sources entailed an absolute probity in public and private life, and the value of industry, economy, propriety and moderation. A willingness to sacrifice self for the good of the republic was essential. In order to establish this morality only the productive groups of society were to be citizens. A greater equality of wealth had to be sought, the ideal of which Say described as a ‘comfortable medium’. In the Treatise Say aimed to show that moderate wealth could be established in modern societies without political or social upheaval. Once laws such as primogeniture had been abolished, Say believed that industrious activity would generate enough wealth to ensure that the lowly labourer could enjoy the benefits of modern productivity. Government involvement in the economy had to be limited because of the temptation to corruption that no political officer could resist in the existing moral climate. But this did not mean that markets could be relied upon to be a force for morality by their independent action alone. Say had no faith in the ‘hidden hand’. People from all of the productive groups of society had to be taught that self-interest corresponded with a life lived according to the precepts of virtue.

The role of political economy was to provide the education that would direct individuals in the economic realm. The French had to be taught to avoid the British example of inequality and social hierarchy favoured by CONSTANT. Say developed friendships with those whose view of politics and morals he believed he shared, and described those of BENTHAM as being superior to any other writer of the post- revolutionary era. The ‘Law’ associated with his name, that supply creates its own

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demand, was intended to prove the stability of an industrious and frugal culture, the foundation of a commercial society characterized by equality and independence.

SAY, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1767–1832)