The Classical School by Callum Williams

The Classical School by Callum Williams

Author:Callum Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-05-18T16:00:00+00:00


What led to Sismondi’s radicalisation? His training as a historian may have something to do with it. As a young man, Sismondi had annotated a copy of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a landmark history book published in 1776.

He gradually applied his historical insights to the study of the economy. He had a thought at the back of his mind the whole time: “Things have not always been like this, and things will not be like this forever.” To us, that may sound pretty banal. It would not have sounded so at the time. Most of the political economists had a rather simplistic view of history (or at least the ones who hadn’t read Hegel, whose views are sometimes suggestive of Sismondi’s). Basically, they viewed different societies as having been more or less capitalist. “When we compare the state of a nation at two different periods,” says Adam Smith, “we may be assured that its capital must have increased during the interval between the two periods.” Ricardo is the worst offender. “In different stages of society… the accumulation of capital… is more or less rapid.”3

Sismondi, by contrast, says that societies of the past might have been fundamentally different from what they are today. The conception of the self might have been different; people may have been less self-interested; material wealth might have been less of a symbol of social status. What of honour, self-sacrifice, loyalty? Adam Smith believes that it is human nature to “truck and barter”; Sismondi holds up his hands and says that he has absolutely no idea what human nature really is.

An important lesson flows from that insight. If societies were different in the past, they might be different in the future. Humans were not destined to live in poverty and misery, as many did at the time. Capitalism, Sismondi says, may not even last for all that long. This notion, unsurprisingly, was a source of great inspiration for Karl Marx.

Sismondi, in sum, found that the lesson of history was that no social system endured for all that long. Once he had established that notion to his own satisfaction, he wondered what he would like to change about capitalism. He found plenty of things, which can be grouped into two. The first concerns what he called “chrematistics”–something that he would like to get rid of. The second concerns what he saw as capitalism’s self-destructing tendencies, which he would like to treat.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.