Antoine-Augustin Cournot as a Sociologist by Robert Leroux

Author:Robert Leroux
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030046873
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Future of Politics

Although in his Souvenirs Cournot makes constant reference to the main political events of his century, in his theoretical and philosophical writings he accords little place to political life as such. The reason is simple: Cournot considered that political life would give way to a new regime dominated by the administrative dimension—a new regime, final and definitive, governed by instrumental rationality, by logic and statistics. The era of great revolutions would then be over.

Such is the march of progress, as the conclusion of the Souvenirs makes clear: “Progress can consist only of reducing the frequency and intensity of political commotions, of ensuring that a political revolution can take place without noticeably interrupting the course of social life and the workings of the administrative machinery, as when the image on the coinage changes without affecting its weight or its value.”27

Yet while he observed politics from on high, in a dispassionate way, Cournot developed a number of ideas that serve to align him with the liberal tradition of political philosophy running from Montesquieu to Alexis de Tocqueville .

For Cournot, in fact, the political idea pursues a path similar to that of religion, language, or law. It is marked by an irreversible course of history that runs from the vital to the rational. “Political ideas and passions are inherent in the very nature of man, in his crude instincts for aggression and pillage, as well as his poetic instincts for glory, freedom and greatness. Reason will assert itself later to moderate or combat these instincts, sometimes even to mock them for what is noble and generous about them. From this viewpoint the State, instead of being a living personality, is nothing but an abstraction. The public fortune is merely a kind of algebraic sum of individual fortunes. People accept a government for what it is worth, weighing its costs and benefits. The citizens no longer live for the State: the State exists solely to ensure law and order in society and, by protecting all the individual strengths of society, to ensure their effect.”28

Following the general fashion, then, the political apparatus is doomed to be reduced to its simplest expression29: “Through so many transformations and various phases it has already acquired a noteworthy generality, and that is the constant tendency to explain everything by the mistakes of government: it is a bit like arguing that all sick people die for want of a doctor, or that all men kill themselves by straying from their diet. There can hardly be a government, whether republican or monarchist, whether resulting from inheritance or from election, that could not last indefinitely, to the satisfaction of honest people, if governments and the governed listened only to the voice of wisdom and reason. But then it would be even easier to be content with having administrators, magistrates, judges and policemen, and to do away with government.”30 In the same vein, Cournot was severe in his judgment of statism and he cast a critical eye, full of cynicism,

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