DAN STONE SISMONDI, JEAN-CHARLES-LÉONARD SIMONDE DE (1773–1842)

Jean-Charles-Léonard was a Genevan political economist and historian. In political economy Sismondi came to prominence as the leading liberal critic of laissez-faire in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a historian, he was a dedicated student of Gibbon, and sought to chart the uneven development of modern forms of liberty as independence in Italy and in France.

Sismondi’s first work of political economy, completed at the end of the eighteenth century, analysed the economic situation of two newly annexed branches of France’s Empire; first Geneva, in the Statistique du département du Léman (Analysis of the Leman department), and second Tuscany, in the Tableau de l’agriculture toscane (Outline of Tuscan Agriculture). In 1803 he published a more general work of political economy that received favourable attention: De la richesse commerciale, ou principes d’économie politique, appliqué à la législation et du commerce (Of Commercial Wealth, or the Principles of Political Economy, Applied to Law and to Trade). Sismondi here claimed to

be to applying Adam Smith’s ‘science of the statesman or legislator’ to the post- revolutionary world. Like SAY’S Treatise on Political Economy, which appeared in the same year, Sismondi sought to restrict the involvement of the state in the production of wealth. At the same time he aimed to foster forms of commerce compatible with an austere code of morality, and accordingly attacked luxury, ostentation and prodigality.

During the Restoration he became more pessimistic about the prospects for commercial reform, having seen at first hand the squalor and misery that accompanied mechanization and the growth of the factory. Sismondi continued to blame the dominant

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mercantile system that governed public policy in the major states of Europe. But he ceased to have faith in solutions founded on the liberty of trade, and rejected the optimistic assessments for future growth and long-term stability epitomized, he believed, by the work of Say and RICARDO. His attack on their ideas, rejecting the free market as

a means of guaranteeing stability in commercial society, was published in the article ‘Political Economy’, written for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia in 1816, and in book form in 1819 as New Principles of Political Economy (Nouveaux principes d’économie politique) . The latter work identified large farms and factories, the extension of the division of labour and the increased use of machinery in place of labour as signs of contemporary economic malaise. Their root cause, Sismondi claimed, was a disjunction between the production of wealth and its consumption. He argued that the Say-Ricardo doctrine of expanding demand without regard to the capacity of the market to supply goods risked the creation of a ‘general glut’: when goods were sold at less than their cost of production, with dire consequences for employment. His great fear was that governments would ‘excite production’ during periods of distress, leading to a short-term rise in wages, a consequent rise in population and the ultimate unemployment of this population when returns on capital fell. Such problems could only be addressed indirectly. In the short term he advocated guaranteed wages to sever the link between income level and population growth. He also supported Poor Law Relief and restrictions on the right to marry unless adequate prospects could be proven. In the longer term it was essential that governments encouraged laws to protect the worker from abuse by aristocrats and capitalists.

In his day Sismondi was best known outside Britain as a historian. Between 1807 and 1818 he published his celebrated History of the Italian Republics (Histoire des républiques italiennes) in sixteen volumes. This was followed in 1813 by De la littérature du midi de l’Europe (Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe) and Julia Sévéra, a description of the manners and customs of the Gauls under Clovis. Between 1818 and the end of his life he laboured on what he considered his greatest work, the Histoire des Français (History of the French), which, although voluminous, was never completed. MICHELET claimed that in these works he could discern the prejudices of Genevan and Italian republicanism. At the same time he called Sismondi the founder of the historical discipline in France, and his work monuments to the nations whose history they described.

Although he was born and died in Geneva, Sismondi’s life was one of continuous exile and adventure. From a prosperous bourgeois family, Sismondi was educated in Philosophy and in Law at the Geneva Academy. His family abandoned Geneva in 1794 when the French Terror was beginning to infect the city, resulting in the shortterm imprisonment of Sismondi and his father. Initially they wanted to return to Peasmarsh in Sussex, where they had spent time in 1793, but lack of funds caused them to move to Pescia in Tuscany, where they remained until 1800. On returning to Geneva, Sismondi became involved with the circle of friends, headed by the Pictet brothers, who wrote for the journal Bibliothèque Britannique. This led to wider intellectual friendships, particularly with CONSTANT. Both men were then working at resolving the problem of establishing free constitutions in large republics. Constant caused Sismondi to become a member of GERMAINE DE STAËL’s Coppet Circle. With respect to politics Sismondi shared the Circle’s Anglophilia. Democracy, he stated, was among the worst forms of

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Government. He admired the British constitution because, in his eyes, it guaranteed limited Government through a balance between monarch, aristocracy and people. Sismondi was well known to correspondents and readers of his books across the globe as the most cosmopolitan of men, and an arch-opponent of slavery, empire and ‘pointless wars’. The irony is that he has been largely neglected by historians in the Anglophone world.

DAN STONE SISMONDI, JEAN-CHARLES-LÉONARD SIMONDE DE (1773–1842)