Abstract
In 1828 Tocqueville read Jean-Baptiste Say’s Cours complet d’économie politique. By now a junior magistrate, Tocqueville had successfully completed three years of legal studies two years before, in 1826. Had Royer-Collard’s 1820 reforms to the law curriculum survived the conservative government of the Comte de Villèle, Tocqueville would have formally studied political economy as part of his legal training. But the ultras scrapped Royer-Collard’s reforms and political economy was dropped from the curriculum, and did not appear as an obligatory course of study until 1871.1 Despite the absence of a formal academic study of political economy Tocqueville did, however, acquire a good knowledge of its axioms from conversations with his father, a former prefect, and his brother Édouard, who was very knowledgeable in the subject. He also developed an understanding of new economic theories and innovations in the discipline from reading the liberal paper the Globe.
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Notes
On the introduction of political economy into the academic curriculum see, Lucette Le Van-Lemesle, ‘La promotion de l’economie politique en France au XIXe siecle jusqu’a son introduction dans les facultés (1815–1881) Revue d’histoire rnoderne et contemporaine, XXVII (1980), pp. 270–94 and Alain Alcouffe, ‘The Institutionalization of Political Economy in French Universities: 1819–1896’, History of Political Economy, XXI, (1989) pp. 313–44.
For more on the Globe see Jean-Jacques Goblot, La Jeune France liberale: Le Globe et son groupe litteraire, 1824–1830 (Paris: Plon, 1995).
Alan B. Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) pp. 98–9.
Goblot, ibid., pp. 311–12. On Physiocracy see, G. Weulersse, Le mouvement physiocratique en France (de 1756 a 1770) (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1910); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); Catherine Larrere, L’invention de 1’economie au XVIIIe siecle: du droit naturel a la physiocratie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992). On the antecedents to physioc racy see Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: the political and social origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). See too Michael Sonenscher’s excellent, ‘The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: The French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789’, Parts 1 and 2, History of Political Thought, XVIII, 1 and 2 (1997) pp. 64–103 and pp. 267–325 and his ‘Physiocracy as a Theodicy’ History of Political Thought, XXIII, 2 (2002) pp. 326–39.
Cited in Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 353.
On the differences between Say and Smith on this point, see Philippe Steiner, ‘The Structure of Say’s Economic Writings’, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 1998 5, 2 (1998) p. 232.
Jean-Baptiste Say, Cours complet d’économie politique pratique, VI, (Paris: Rapilly Libraire, 1829), p. 386.
Tocqueville to Nassau Senior, 11 January 1837, OC, VI, ii, p. 79 and Tocqueville to Edouard, 6 December 1843, OC, XIV, p. 235. Despite his contention that he was never a political economist, others, including the members of the general departmental council of the Manche, believed him to have an expert knowledge of economic issues. See OC, X, p. 23 and Eric Keslassy, Le libéralisme de Tocqueville d l’epreuve du paupérisme, p. 243.
Nassau Senior, Four Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (London, 1852), p. 54, cited in Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) pp. 68–9.
See in the following chapter the section entitled ‘Liberty and Commerce’ and Harvey Mitchell, ‘Tocqueville’s Mirage or Reality? Political Freedom from Old Regime to Revolution’, Journal of Modern History, LX (1988) p. 53.
On the depth of that crisis see Jardin, Tocqueville, pp. 61–3. See too Tocqueville to abbe Lesueur, [1821–1822?], OC, XIV, p. 44 and Tocqueville to Charles Stoffels, 22 October 1831, OCBT, VII, pp. 80–4. A letter from Louis de Kergorlay to Tocqueville is particularly revealing about the kinds of doubts Tocqueville had and how Kergorlay believed they might be overcome. See Louis de Kergorlay to Tocqueville, 16 May 1823, OC, XIII, i, pp. 60–3.
For more on Jansenism see Rene Taveneaux, Jansenisme et politique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965), Rene Taveneaux, La vie quotidienne des jansénistes aux XVIIe et XVIII siecles (Paris: Hachette, 1985), Jean-Pierre Chantin, Le Jansenisme (Paris: Cerf, 1996); Monique Cottret, Jansenisme et Lumieres: Pour un autre XVIIIe siecle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998); and Henry Phillips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
For more on this issue see Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 28.
See Edouard de Tocqueville, Du credit agricole et de ses effets (Compiegne: E. Leradde, 1838); Des questions agricoles soumises a la legislature de 1843, bestiaux, vins, laines (Paris: Librairie agricole de la maison rustique, 1844); De l’intervention de l’esprit chrétien dans 1’enseignement professionnel de l’agriculture (Paris: Amyot, 1853); l’agriculture en France en 1866 (Paris: Douniol, 1866).
OC, V, ii, pp. 42–3, p. 32 and Malthus’s remarks on promiscuous intercourse in An Essay on the Principle of Population, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) book I, chapter 2, p. 23.
Thomas Robert Malthus, Essai sur le principe de population, ou Expose des effets passes et presents de l’action de cette cause sur le bonheur du genre humain (Traduit de l’anglais par Pierre Prevost) (Paris: J.J. Paschoud, 1823).
On this issue Say departed from Smith and Malthus. Jean-Baptiste Say, Letters to Thomas Robert Malthus on Political Economy and Stagnation of Commerce (London: George Harding, 1936).
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© 2003 Michael Drolet
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Drolet, M. (2003). Embracing Liberal Political Economy and then Rejecting it: Tocqueville’s Reading of Say and Malthus. In: Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230509641_3
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