The history of modern political economy ends with Ricardo and 
Sismondi: antithetical figures, of whom the one speaks English, 
the other French—just as it begins at the end of the 17th 
century with Petty and Boisguillebert. The later literature of 
political economy ends up either in eclectic, syncretic compendia, 
like e.g. the work of J. St. Mill,* or in rather detailed elaboration 
of particular branches, like 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. For the 
writings on colonisation, landed property (in its different forms), 
population, etc., really go beyond the older writings only in 
respect of their greater abundance of material. There are some 
reproductions of old economic controversies for a larger public 
and some practical solutions for day-to-day problems, like the 
Writings ON FREE TRADE and protection. Finally, there are tendentious 
exaggerations of the classical theories, e.g. Chalmers exaggerates 
Malthus, Gulich exaggerates Sismondi, and, in their earlier 
writings, MacCulloch and Senior in some ways exaggerate Ricardo. 
This literature is altogether derivative, reproduction characterised 
by a greater refinement of form, a more extensive appropriation 
of the material, a greater emphasis, popularisation, synopsis and 
elaboration of detail. It lacks salient and decisive phases of 
development, confining itself on the one hand to stock-taking and 
on the other to adding detail on individual moments. 

The only apparent exceptions are the writings of Carey, the 
Yankee, and Bastiat, the Frenchman, the latter acknowledging that 
he bases himself on the former.* Both understand that the 
opposition to political economy— socialism and communism — finds 
its theoretical assumptions in the works of classical political economy 
itself, especially in Ricardo, who must be considered as its most 
complete and final expression. Both therefore find it necessary to 
criticise the theoretical expression which bourgeois society has 
historically achieved in modern political economy as a misunder- 
standing and to demonstrate the harmony of the relations of 
production at the point where the classical economists naively 
analysed their antagonism. The entirely different, even contradic- 
tory national context from which their writings derive, nevertheless 
impels them in the same direction. 

Carey is the only original economist among the North Ameri- 
cans. He belongs to a country in which bourgeois society is not 
developing on the basis of feudaiism but in which it has originated 
from itself; in which it does not appear as the surviving product of 
the development of centuries but as the point of departure for a 
new development; in which the State, in contrast to all previous 
national forms, was from the start subordinated to bourgeois 
society, to its production, and could never claim to be an end in 
itself; in which bourgeois society itself, combining the productive 
forces of an old world with the immense natural terrain of a new 
one, is developing on an unprecedented scale and in unpre- 
cedented [conditions of] freedom of movement and far surpassing 
all previous achievements in [III-2] mastery of the forces of 
nature, and in which, finally, the contradictions of bourgeois 
society itself appear only as transient moments. 

What could be more natural than that Carey should consider 
the relations of production in which this immense New World has 
grown so quickly, so astonishingly and so fortunately, as the 
eternal normal relations of social production and intercourse; that 
they should seem to him merely impeded and restricted in Europe 
and especially in England, which he really identifies with Europe, 
by the fetters inherited from the feudal period; that they should 
seem to him merely to have been regarded, depicted or 
generalised in a distorted, falsified way by the English economists 
in that they mistook accidental perversions of them for their 
immanent character? 

American relations as opposed to English: that is what his 
critique of the English theory of landed property, wages, 
population, class antagonisms, etc., boils down to. Bourgeois 
society does not exist in England in its pure form, corresponding 
to its concept, adequate to itself. How, then, could the English 
economists’ ideas of bourgeois society be the true, unsullied 
expression of a reality which they did not know? 

Carey ultimately identifies the disturbing effect of traditional 
influences not emerging from the womb of bourgeois society itself 
upon that society’s natural relations with the influence of the State 
on bourgeois society, with State interference and State regula- 
tion. E. g. wages [according to Carey] rise naturally with the 
productivity of labour. If we find that reality does not 
correspond to this law, we have only to abstract from the 
influence of government, taxes, [State] monopolies, etc., whether in 
Hindustan or in England. Bourgeois relations considered in them- 
selves, i.e. after taking away the influence of the State, will in fact 
always confirm the harmonious laws of bourgeois political economy. 
To what extent these State influences (pusiic debt, TAXES, etc.) 
themselves arise from bourgeois relations—and thus appear in e.g. 
England by no means as the results of feudalism but rather 
of its dissolution and suppression, and to what extent even in 
North America the power of the central government grows with 
the centralisation of capital—this, naturally, Carey does not 
investigate. 

While Carey thus seeks to confront the English economists with 
the higher potency of bourgeois society in North America, Bastiat 
seeks to confront the French socialists with the lower potency of 
bourgeois society in France. You think [he says to the French 
socialists] that you are revolting against the laws of bourgeois 
society in a country in which these laws have never been allowed 
their full realisation! You only know these laws in their stunted 
French form, and take as their immanent form what is only their 
national French distortion. Look at England. Here in France the 
task is to free bourgeois society from the fetters which the State 
lays upon it. You wish to multiply these fetters. First develop 
bourgeois relations in their pure form, then we shall discuss the 
matter again. (Bastiat is right to this extent, that in France, because of 
its peculiar social structure, much is taken for socialism which in 
England is political economy.) 

Carey, however, whose starting point is the American emancipa- 
tion of bourgeois society from the State, ends with the demand for 
State interference, lest the pure development of bourgeois 

relations be disturbed by external influences in the way in which 
this has actually happened in America. He is a protectionist, while 
Bastiat is a FREE TRADER. 

The harmony of economic laws appears in the whole world as 
disharmony, and the beginnings of this disharmony strike Carey 
even in the United States. How does one explain this strange 
phenomenon? Carey ascribes it to the destructive effect of 
England’s striving for industrial monopoly on the world market. 
Originally, [economic] relations were distorted inside England 
by the false theories of its economists. Now, [III-3] as the 
dominating power on the world market, England distorts the 
harmony of economic relations in all countries of the world. This 
disharmony is real, not based merely on the subjective perception 
of economists. 

What Russia is for Urquhart politically," England is for Carey 
economically. The harmony of economic relations is_ based, 
according to Carey, on the harmonious cooperation of town and 
country, of industry and agriculture. England, having destroyed 
this basic harmony within itself, destroys it everywhere on the 
world market through its competition, and is thus the destructive 
element of universal harmony. The only defence against this are 
protective tariffs—the forcible isolation of the nation from the 
destructive power of English large-scale industry. Therefore the 
State, branded at the outset as the only disturber of the “harmonies 
économiques”, becomes their last refuge. 

On the one hand, Carey here once more articulates the specific 
national development of the United States, its opposition to and its 
competition with England. He does it in the naive form of 
proposing that the United States destroy the industrialism 
propagated by England by developing its own more quickly 
through protective tariffs. Apart from this naivety, the harmony of 
bourgeois relations of production ends with Carey in the total 
disharmony of these relations just where they appear upon the 
most magnificent scene, the world market, and in their most 
magnificent development, as the relations of producing nations. 
All the relations which appear to him harmonious within 
particular national boundaries, or also in the abstract form of 
general relations of bourgeois society—the concentration of 
capital, division of labour, wage labour, etc.—appear to him as 
disharmonious where they show themselves in their most de- 
veloped form—in their world market form—as the internal 

relations which produce England’s domination in the world 
market and which, as destructive influences, are the result of this 
domination. 

It is harmonious, if, within a country, patriarchal production 
gives way to industrial production, and the process of dissolution 
accompanying this development is conceived only in its positive 
aspect. But it becomes disharmonious, if England’s large-scale 
industry dissolves the patriarchal or petty-bourgeois or other 
primitive forms of another country’s national production. The 
concentration of capital within a country and the dissolving effect 
of this concentration present themselves to him only in their 
positive aspect. But the monopoly enjoyed by concentrated English 
capital and its dissolving effects on the smaller national capitals of 
other countries, are disharmonious. Carey has not grasped that these 
world market disharmonies are only the ultimate adequate 
expression of the disharmonies which have become fixed in the 
economic categories as abstract relations or have a local existence on 
the smallest scale. 

No wonder, then, that on the other side he forgets the positive 
content of these processes of dissolution—the only aspect which 
he recognises of the economic categories in their abstract form or 
of the real relations within particular countries from which they 
are abstracted—in their complete world market form. Hence, 
where he is confronted by economic relations in _ their 
truth, i.e. in their universal reality, he collapses from his systematic 
optimism into a denunciatory and irritated pessimism. This 
contradiction constitutes the originality of his writings and 
gives them their significance. He is American as much in his 
assertion of the harmony within bourgeois society as in his 
assertion of the disharmony of the same relations in their world 
market form. 

In Bastiat nothing of all this. With him, the harmony of these 
relations belongs to another world which lies beyond the borders 
of France, in England and America. It is merely the imagined, 
ideal form of the un-French Anglo-American relations, not the 
real form which actually confronts him on his own territory. 
Hence, while in Bastiat harmony does not in any way arise from a 
wealth of living observation, but is rather the stilted product of a 
thin and strained, contradictory reflection, the only aspect of 
reality is his demand that the French state should renounce its 
economic limits. 

Carey sees the contradictions inherent in [bourgeois] economic 
relations as soon as they appear as English relations on the world 

market. Bastiat, who merely imagines the harmony, begins to see 
its realisation only where France ends and where all the nationally 
separated component parts of bourgeois society compete with each 
other freed from State supervision. This ultimate harmony of 
his—and the premiss of all his earlier imagined ones—is, 
however, itself a mere postulate which is supposed to be realised 
by free trade legislation. 

[111-4] Thus, if Carey, quite apart from the scientific value of his 
researches, has at least the merit of articulating in abstract form 
the magnitude of American relations and of doing so in 
contradistinction to those of the Old World, the only real 
background to Bastiat is the pettiness of French relations, whose long 
ears stick out of his harmonies everywhere. But this is a superfluous 
merit, because the relations of so old a country are sufficiently 
known and least of all require to be made known by such a negative 
circuitous route. Carey is therefore rich in so to speak bona fide 
researches into such areas of political economy as credit, rent, etc. 
Bastiat is only occupied with paraphrases glossing over the 
contradictory result of his researches; l’hypocrisie du contentement. 

Carey’s generality is Yankee universality. For him France and 
China are equally near. He is at all times the man who lives 
both on the Atlantic and the Pacific coast. Bastiat’s generality is a 
turning away from all countries. Carey, as a true Yankee, absorbs 
from all directions the abundant material which the Old World 
offers him, not indeed to cognise the immanent soul of this 
material and thus to concede to it its right to its own proper life, 
but to work it up as lifeless pieces of evidence, as indifferent 
matter, for his own purposes, i.e. for the propositions derived 
from his Yankee point of view. Hence his traversing of all 
countries, his mountains of uncritical statistics, his encyclopaedic 
reading. Bastiat on the other hand produces fantastic history: his 
abstraction takes the form now of logical reasoning, now of 
notional events which never actually occurred anywhere. Just as 
the theologian discusses sin now as a law of human nature, now as 
the history of man’s fall. 

Bastiat and Carey are therefore equally unhistorical and 
anti-historical. But the unhistorical element in Carey is the 
contemporary historical principle of North America, while the 
unhistorical element in Bastiat is only a reminiscence of the 
18th-century French mode of generalisation. Carey is there- 
fore formless and diffuse, Bastiat affected and formally lo- 
gical. The utmost that Bastiat achieves are commonplaces 
paradoxically expressed, polished en facettes. Carey’s work is 

prefaced by a few general theses in axiomatic form. These are 
followed by his unshaped material—compilation serving as verifi- 
cation—which is not in any way worked up to sustain his theses. 
In Bastiat, the only material—apart from a few local examples or 
some ordinary English phenomena fantastically distorted— 
amounts to no more than the general theses of the economists. 

The chief counterpart to Carey is Ricardo, in short the modern 
English economists; to Bastiat, the French socialists.