and

Carey
]

Bastiat. Harmonies Économiques.
2 édit.

Paris. 1851.

Avantpropos

The history of modern political economy ends with Ricardo and Sismondi, antitheses, of whom the one speaks English, the other French – just as at the end of the 17th century it begins with Petty and Boisguillebert. The later political-economic literature either dissipates into eclectic, syncretistic compendia, such as, e.g., the work of J. St. Mill, or into deeper elaboration of individual branches, such as, e.g., Tooke's "History of Prices" and, in general, the more recent English writings on circulation – the only branch in which really new discoveries have been made, since the writings on colonisation, landed property (in its various forms), population, etc., are distinguished from the older ones really only by a greater wealth of material – or reproduction of old economic controversies for a wider public and the practical solution of questions of the day, like the writings on free trade
and protection
– or, finally, into tendentious intensifications of the classical trends, a relationship in which, e.g., Chalmers stands to Malthus, and Gülich
to Sismondi, and, in a certain respect, MacCulloch and Senior in their earlier writings to Ricardo. It is throughout an epigonic literature, reproduction, greater elaboration of form, broader appropriation of the material, pointing up, popularisation, summarising, elaboration of details, absence of seminal and decisive phases of development, taking of inventory on the one hand, increment in particulars on the other.

The only apparent exceptions are the writings of Carey, the Yankee, and Bastiat, the Frenchman, of whom the latter confesses that he relies upon the former. Both grasp that the antithesis to political economy – socialism and communism – finds its theoretical presupposition in the works of classical economy itself, specifically in Ricardo, who must be considered its most consummate and ultimate expression. Both therefore find it necessary to attack the theoretical expression which bourgeois society has historically attained in modern economy, as a misunderstanding, and to prove the harmony of the relations of production precisely where the classical economists naively depicted their antagonism. The utterly different, indeed contradictory national environment from which both write nonetheless drives them to the same endeavours.

Carey is the only original economist of the North Americans. Belonging to a country where bourgeois society developed not on the foundation of the feudal system, but began from itself; where it appears not as the surviving result of a centuries-long movement, but as the point of departure of a new movement; where the state, in contrast to all earlier national formations, was from the outset subordinate to bourgeois society and its production, and could never lay claim to being an end in itself; where, finally, bourgeois society itself, combining the productive forces of an old world with the enormous natural terrain of a new one, develops in hitherto unknown dimensions and with hitherto unknown freedom of movement, has far outstripped all previous labour in the conquest of natural forces, and where, finally, the antitheses of bourgeois society themselves appear only as vanishing moments. That the relations of production in which this enormous new world has developed so rapidly, so surprisingly, and so felicitously, are regarded by Carey as the eternal normal relations of social production and intercourse, which in Europe, specifically England, which for him is actually Europe, are only hampered and impaired by the inherited barriers of the feudal period – that in his view these relations are only distortedly and falsifyingly perceived, reproduced, or generalised by the English economists, in that they mistook accidental perversions of them for their immanent character – what more natural? American conditions against English ones: To this his critique of the English theory of landed property, wages, population, class antagonisms, etc., reduces itself. Bourgeois society does not exist in England in a pure form, not in accordance with its concept, not adequate to itself. How could the concepts of bourgeois society held by the English economists be the true, unclouded expression of a reality they did not know? For Carey, the disturbing effect of traditional influences, not themselves grown out of the womb of bourgeois society, upon its natural relations reduces itself in the last instance to the influence of the state upon bourgeois society, in its encroachments and interventions. Wages, e.g., grow naturally with the productivity of labour. If we find reality not in conformity with this law, we have only, be it in Hindostan or England, to abstract from the influences of government, taxes, monopolies, etc. Bourgeois relations, considered in themselves, i.e., after deduction of state influences, will in fact always confirm the harmonious laws of bourgeois economy. To what extent these state influences, public debt,
taxes
etc., themselves grow out of bourgeois relations, and therefore in England, e.g., appear by no means as results of feudalism, but rather of its dissolution and conquest, and in North America itself the power of the central government grows with the centralisation of capital – this Carey naturally does not investigate. While Carey thus asserts, in opposition to the English economists, the higher potency of bourgeois society in North America, Bastiat
asserts, in opposition to the French socialists, the lower potency of bourgeois society in France. You believe you are revolting against the laws of bourgeois society in a country where these laws were never allowed to realise themselves! You know them only in the stunted French form, and you regard as their immanent form what is only their national French distortion. Look across at England. In that country, the task is to free bourgeois society from the fetters the state imposes on it. You want to multiply these fetters. First work out the bourgeois relations in their pure form, and then we shall speak again. (Bastiat is right insofar as, in France, owing to its peculiar social formation, many a thing passes for socialism which in England is political economy.)

Carey, however, whose point of departure is the American emancipation of bourgeois society from the state, ends with the postulate of state intervention, so that the pure development of bourgeois relations may not, as has in fact happened in America, be disturbed by influence from without. He is a protectionist, while Bastiat is a free trader. The harmony of the economic laws appears in the whole world as disharmony, and the beginnings of this disharmony strike Carey even in the United States. Whence this strange phenomenon? Carey explains it from the destructive effect of England with its striving for industrial monopoly on the world market. Originally, English conditions were deranged internally by the false theories of its economists. Now, outwardly, as the commanding power of the world market, England deranges the harmony of the economic relations in all countries of the world. This disharmony is a real one, not one grounded merely in the subjective apprehension of the economists. What Russia is politically for Urquhart, England is economically for Carey. The harmony of the economic relations, according to Carey, is based on the harmonious cooperation of town and country, industry and agriculture. This fundamental harmony, which England has dissolved within its own interior, it destroys everywhere on the world market through its competition, and is thus the destructive element of the general harmony. Protection against this can be formed only by protective tariffs – the forcible, national barricading against the destructive force of English large-scale industry. The ultimate refuge of the "harmonies économiques" is therefore the state, which was originally branded as the sole disturber of these harmonies. On the one hand, Carey here again voices the specific national development of the United States, its antagonism to and its competition with England. This happens in the naïve form that he proposes to the United States to destroy the industrialism propagated by England by developing it more rapidly within their own borders through protective tariffs. Apart from this naïveté, with Carey the harmony of the bourgeois relations of production ends with the most consummate disharmony of these relations, where they appear on the grandest terrain, the world market, in their grandest development, as the relations of producing nations. All those relations which appear harmonious to him within specific national boundaries, or even in the abstract form of general relations of bourgeois society – concentration of capital, division of labour, wage-labour, etc. – appear to him as disharmonious where they appear in their most developed form – in their world-market form – as the internal relations which produce English domination on the world market and which are, as destructive effects, the consequence of this domination. It is harmonious when within a country patriarchal production makes way for industrial production, and the process of dissolution that accompanies this development is apprehended only from its positive side. But it becomes disharmonious when English large-scale industry dissolves the patriarchal or petty-bourgeois or other forms of foreign national production that find themselves on lower stages. The concentration of capital within a country and the dissolving effect of this concentration offer him only their positive side. But the monopoly of concentrated English capital and its dissolving effects upon the smaller national capitals of other peoples is disharmonious. What Carey has not grasped is that these world-market disharmonies are only the ultimate adequate expressions of the disharmonies that are fixed in the economic categories as abstract relations, or possess a local existence on the smallest scale. No wonder that he, on the other hand, forgets the positive content of these processes of dissolution – the only side that he perceives in the economic categories in their abstract form, or in the real relations within specific countries from which they are abstracted – in their full world-market appearance. Where the economic relations confront him in their truth, i.e., in their universal reality, he therefore switches from his principled optimism into a denunciatory and irascible pessimism. This contradiction constitutes the originality of his writings and gives them their significance. He is just as much an American in his assertion of harmony within bourgeois society as in his assertion of the disharmony of the same relations in their world-market shape. With Bastiat, nothing of all this. The harmony of these relations is a "beyond," which begins precisely where the French frontiers end, which in

England and America exist. For him it is merely the imaginary, ideal form of non-French English-American conditions, not the real one as it confronts him on his own native soil. While, therefore, in his case harmony by no means proceeds from the fullness of living perception, but is rather the strained product of a thin and tense, contradictory reflection, the sole moment of reality in him is the demand that the French state abandon its economic boundaries. Carey sees the contradictions of economic relations as soon as they appear as English relations on the world market. Bastiat, who merely imagines harmony, begins to see its realisation only where France ceases and all nationally separated components of bourgeois society, freed from the supreme supervision of the state, compete with one another. This ultimate harmony of his – and the presupposition of all his earlier, imaginary ones – is, however, itself once again a mere postulate, which is to be realised through free-trade legislation.

If, therefore, Carey, quite apart from the scientific value of his researches, at least possesses the merit of expressing the great American conditions in abstract form, and, indeed, in contrast to the old world, the sole real background in Bastiat would be the smallness of French conditions, which everywhere stick their long ears out of his harmonies. This merit is, however, superfluous, because the conditions of so old a country are sufficiently well known and have the least need of being made known by such a negative detour. Carey is therefore rich in, so to speak, bona fide researches in economic science, such as on credit, rent, etc. Bastiat is merely occupied with satsifying paraphrases of researches ending in contrasts; l’hypocrisie du contentement [8]. Carey’s generality is Yankee universality. France and China are equally near to him. Always the man who dwells on the Pacific and on the Atlantic. Bastiat’s generality is a looking away from all countries. As a genuine Yankee, Carey absorbs from all sides the massive material which the old world offers him, not in order to recognise the immanent soul of this material and so to grant it its right to a life of its own, but in order to work it up for his purposes, as dead proofs, as indifferent material for the propositions abstracted from his Yankee standpoint. Hence his rambling about in all countries, massive and uncritical statistics, catalogue-like erudition. Bastiat, by contrast, provides fantastic history, his abstractions once in the form of ratiocination and another time in the form of supposed events which, however, never and nowhere occurred, just as the theologian treats sin once as the law of the human essence, another time as the story of the Fall. Both are therefore equally unhistorical and anti-historical. But the unhistorical moment in Carey is the present historical principle of North America, while the unhistorical element in Bastiat is merely a reminiscence of the French manner of generalisation of the 18th century. Carey is therefore formless and diffuse, Bastiat affected and formally logical. The highest he can manage are commonplaces, paradoxically expressed, cut into facets [9]. In Carey, a few general theses, prefaced in the manner of doctrinal propositions. Following them, a shapeless material, a compilation as proof – the substance of his theses in no way worked up. In Bastiat, the sole material – abstracting from a few local examples or fantastically trimmed English normal phenomena – consists only in the general theses of the economists. Carey’s chief antithesis is Ricardo, in short the modern English economists; Bastiat’s is the French socialists. [2]

[1] Foreword
[2] Free trade
[3] Protective tariff
[4] in the manuscript: Jülich
[5] National debt
[6] Taxes
[7] in the manuscript: makes them. Bastiat
[8] hypocrisy of contentment
[9] cut like the facets of jewels