Schmitt and Foucault on Political Theology

I have been struck in recent months by some similarities between Schmitt and Foucault. This post sketches one such similarity: The parallel stories they tell of the connection between theological and political developments from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Schmitt’s Method

The third chapter of Schmitt’s Political Theology argues that changing ideas of political sovereignty in Western Europe are connecting to changing theological commitments. Following Max Weber, he sees an elective affinity connecting religious and political sensibilities—the claim is not necessarily that one of these is prior to the other, but that they both derive from certain master conceptual characteristics of particular epochs. He summarizes this methodological “sociology of legal concepts,” as follows:

It aims to discover the basic, radically systematic structure and to compare this conceptual structure with the conceptually represented social structure of a certain epoch. There is no question here of whether the idealities produced by radical conceptualizations are a reflex of sociological reality, or whether social reality is conceived of as the result of a particular kind of thinking and therefore also of acting. Rather this sociology of concepts is concerned with establishing proof of two spiritual but at the same time substantial identities. It is thus not a sociology of the concept of sovereignty when, for example, the monarchy of the seventeenth century is characterized as the real that is “mirrored” in the Cartesian concept of God. But it is a sociology of the concept of sovereignty when the historical-political status of the monarchy of that epoch is shown to correspond to the general state of consciousness that was characteristic of western Europeans at that time, and when the juristic construction of the historical-political reality can find a concept whose structure is in accord with the structure of metaphysical concepts. Monarchy thus becomes as self-evident in the consciousness of that period as democracy does in a later epoch (Political Theology 45-6).

I am sympathetic to this broad approach because of its blobbish character. We need not determine the precise causal connections between material facts, economic attitudes, theological convictions, and political theories. There are more subtle if imprecise unifying themes that run through them all. But regardless, my point is not to think through the method here, just to lay it out. Schmitt goes on to outline the theologico-political similarities in distinct periods of modern European history.

Schmitt on Early Modernity

The theology and political theory of the seventeenth century feature a sovereign authority who stands at the head of a rational order. The rationalism of a Descartes, for example, insists on the perfect rational structure of the universe produced by the perfect work of an omnipotent creator. Schmitt summarizes the Cartesian position (quoting from the Discourse on Method) as follows:

the works created by several masters are not as perfect as those created by one. “One sole architect” must construct a house and a town; the best constitutions are those that are the work of a sole wise legislator, they are “devised by only one”; and finally, a sole God governs the world. As Descrates once wrote to Mersenne, “It is God who established these laws in nature just as a king establishes laws in his kingdom (PT 47).

Cartesian rationalism thus points to a single, omnipotent divine creator and likewise a single, omnipotent political sovereign. Crucially, however, both God and the Prince remain palpably present. The theological and political sovereign remain personal authorities, capable of intervening in the world. Hobbes, Schmitt argues, further develops the Cartesian picture, emphasizing the centrality of the personal sovereignty of the Leviathan.

Schmitt on the Eighteenth Century

Despite his rationalism, Descartes still understood God to intervene in the world through miracles. That possibility of special providence disappears in the eighteenth century. Descartes’ divine architect becomes the deists’ watchmaker God, a perfect engineer whose personal presence disappears from his creation. This theological revolution is tied to the new political commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of law not man:

The idea of the modern constitutional state triumphed together with deism, a theology and metaphysics that banished the miracle from the world. This theology and metaphysics rejected not only the transgression of the laws of nature through an exception brought about by direct intervention, as is found in the idea of a miracle, but also the sovereign’s direct intervention in a valid legal order” (PT 36).

The disappearance of the miracle goes with the disappearance of the exception, what Schmitt takes to be the essence of political sovereignty. The Enlightenment takes the order of early-modern theology/politics, but evacuates it of personal authority. The universe and the state are machines that operate without subsequent intervention. Deism forgets the deity just as constitutionalism forgets the founder:

The sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside. The machine now runs by itself … The decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty was thus lost (PT 48).

Some further features of the Enlightenment should be noted. The first is the intensification of a scientific ethic that insists on regularity. Theologically, that ethic explains the rejection of miracles and God’s special providence. Politically, it explains the hostility to any form of personal discretion or authority. As Schmitt puts it, quoting a book by Hugo Krabbe:

The modern idea of the state, according to Krabbe, replaces personal force (of the king, of the authorities) with spiritual power. “We no longer live under the authority of persons, be they natural or artificial (legal) persons, but under the rule of laws, (spiritual) forces. This is the essence of the modern idea of the state (PT 22).

We are left with law and legal form, but we have abandoned the authoritative, personal sources of that law. This, Schmitt suggests, is the crucial difference between Hobbes and Locke. The Hobbesian personal sovereign gives way to Lockean constitutionalism.

A second important theme is the connection between the rationalism of the eighteenth century and the new emphasis on education. Both the constitutional separation of powers and omnipotent, tutelary despotism are products of the deist-rationalist ethic:

For the rationalism of the Enlightenment, man was by nature ignorant and rough, but educable. It was thus on pedagogic grounds that the ideal of a “legal despotism” was justified: Uneducated humanity is educated by a legislator (who, according to Rousseau’s Social Contract, was able “to change the nature of man”); or unruly nature could be conquered by Fichte’s “tyrant,” and the state became, as Fichte said with naïve brutality, an “educational factory” (PT 56).

(For what it’s worth, the alleged connection here between Rousseau’s legislator and Quesnay’s legal despotism strikes me as implausible given Rousseau’s contempt for the physiocrats. But that’s a separate point).

Schmitt says more on this theme in his Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. He argues there that the principles of eighteenth-century rationalism are just as connected to Publius’ program of constitutional balance as they are to Condorcet’s demand for rational despotism (maintained through education):

Condorcet’s absolute rationalism negates the division of powers and destroys both its inherent negotiation and moderation of state powers and the independence of the parties. To his radicalism, the complicated balancing of the American constitution appeared subtle and difficult, a concession to the peculiarities of that land, one of those systems “where one must enforce the laws an in consequence truth, reason and justice,” and where one must sacrifice “rational legislation” to the prejudices and stupidity of individual people. Such rationalism led to the elimination of balance and to a rational dictatorship. Both the American constitution and Condorcet identify law with truth; but the relative rationalism of the balance theory was limited to the legislative and logically limited again within parliament to a merely relative truth” (Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy 46).

There’s something a slippery here, as Condorcet’s rationalist dictatorship sounds a bit more like the Cartesian sovereign. The contrast with Hobbes is more clear, though likewise the connection between Descartes and Hobbes weakens. For Hobbes the personal authority is prior to the “truth” or rationality of the laws, whereas Condorcet’s dictator is a servant of truth. But more should be said about that.

Schmitt on the Nineteenth Century

This relatively clean taxonomy gets a good deal more complicated when we come to the nineteenth century. We see, for example, an abortive attempt of certain democratic peoples to invoke a new standard of democratic authority not unlike that of the old seventeenth picture of sovereignty. Schmitt quotes Tocqueville, for example, to observe that early America invoked a standard of democratic legitimacy in some ways reminiscent of Hobbesian personal sovereignty:

for some time the aftereffects of the [absolutist] idea of God remained recognizable. In America this manifested itself in the reasonable and pragmatic belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God—a belief that is at the foundation of Jefferson’s victory of 1801. Tocqueville in his account of American democracy observed that in democratic thought the people hover above the entire political life of the state, just as God does above the world, as the cause and the end of all things, as the point from which everything emanates and to which everything returns (PT 48).

Reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries similarly attempt to reconstruct a vision of political absolutism tied to an account of divine voluntarism. De Maistre, on Schmitt’s view, cares less about what the government does than he does about whether an absolute authority exists. Donoso Cortes goes so far as to adopt a Calvinist vision of human depravity and an existentialist contempt for human reason: “What Donoso Cortes had to say about the natural depravity and vileness of man was indeed more horrible than anything that had ever been alleged by an absolutist philosophy of the state in justifying authoritarian rule” (PT 58).

More prominently, Schmitt notes the continued persistence of deist constitutionalism in the legal theories of Kelsen and the like. Such thinkers continue the eighteenth century’s assault on sovereignty and authority by identifying the legal order itself with the state. This neo-Kantian constitutionalism features a redoubled commitment to scientific order, rejecting the category of personal command as precisely the kind of arbitrariness a system of laws cannot tolerate: “at the foundation of this identification of state and legal order rests a metaphysics that identifies the lawfulness of nature and normative lawfulness” (PT 41). And again: “Democracy is the expression of a political relativism and a scientific orientation that are liberated from miracles and dogmas and based on human understanding and critical doubt” (PT 42).

Schmitt also sees the rise of immanent theology and politics as the other major development of the nineteenth century. Where the sovereign God of the seventeenth century and the deist God of the eighteenth were both transcendent divinities, standing above or outside the created order, the God of the nineteenth century is found in the world itself, perhaps even made identical with it:

Conceptions of transcendence will no longer be credible to most educated people, who will settle for either a more or less clear immanence-pantheism or a positivist indifference toward any metaphysics. Insofar as it retains the concept of God, the immanence philosophy, which found its greatest systematic architect in Hegel, draws God into the world and permits law and the state to emanate from the immanence of the objective (PT 50).

The radical left-Hegelians and their offspring are the clearest representatives of this immanentizing tendency. Schmitt sees in their demand that man become God and kill any remnants of transcendent theology a ruthless yet serious challenge to the prevailing liberal order. Indeed, in some stirring (if somewhat confusing) passages toward the end of the book, Schmitt casts the conflict between these radicals and the reactionaries to be the key antithesis of modern times. Liberal constitutionalism with its endless discussion and parliamentarism is outmatched by these two extremes.

Schmitt’s own positive view at the end of PT is not entirely clear. His master polemic against liberal constitutionalism remains powerful, and he clearly wishes to restore sovereignty and politics. Consider this famous passage, which connects well with his essay on “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations:”

Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant (PT 65).

But the form of this restored sense of the political should take is not obvious. He sympathizes with the counterrevolutionaries and their demand for a restoration of sovereignty. And he sympathizes too with their observation that the age of monarchy is over and that the only choices left are democracy or dictatorship. But he concludes on a slightly critical note concerning the illegitimate character of brute, decisionist dictatorship. Does that suggest a tepid defense of democracy—or a commissarial dictatorship within democracy? I think so, but I’m not sure.

Foucault’s Method

Enough of Schmitt. Let’s turn to Foucault. The text I’m interested in here is Security, Territory, Population, which because of its lecture-format is remarkably clear and easy to follow. There is a lot going on in these lectures, including a very interesting distinction between law, discipline, and security as distinct techniques of power. The connection and disjunction between security and discipline is of particular interest, and I’m not sure I follow it entirely. There is also a wonderful account of how "counter-conduct" practices rebuke of settled forms of governmentality and regimented control before being themselves coopted and routinized. But again, my focus will be more narrow—Foucault’s political theology. It is difficult to draw out a clean set of categories even here. As a friend of mine put it, the trouble with interpreting Foucault is that nothing is ever stable, the categories are always moving under your feet. But I’ll do my best to artificially make them stand still.

First on method. Foucault’s method in these lectures—which I will not attempt to say anything about—is an extension of his more general project of institutional and disciplinary analysis. This method begins as follows:

This kind of method entails going behind the institution and trying to discover in a wider and more overall perspective what we can broadly call a technology of power. In the same way, this analysis allows us to replace a genetic analysis through filiation with a genealogical analysis—genealogy should not be confused with genesis and filiation—which reconstructs a whole network of alliances, communications, and points of support. So, the first methodological principle is to move outside the institution and replace it with the overall point of view of the technology of power (STP 117).

Applied more specifically to the state, he summarizes his project in these lectures as follows:

Is it possible to place the modern state in a general technology of power that assured its mutations, development, and functioning? Can we talk of something like a “governmentality” that would be to the state what techniques of segregation were to psychiatry, what techniques of discipline were to the penal system, and what biopolitics was to medical institutions? (STP 120).

I don’t aim to comment on this methodological program, for I’m not sure I understand it. But in the interest of symmetry I’ve included it.

Foucault on Christian Pastoral Political-Theology

Unlike Schmitt, Foucault begins his political theology with Christianity and the political-theological image of the pastor. He argues that the image of the ruler as a shepherd is properly a contribution of Christianity, and spends more than a few pages explaining why the apparent invocation of the shepherd in Plato’s Statesman does not represent Plato’s real image of political rule. For Plato—and for the Greeks more generally, Foucault suggests—“the politician is a weaver,” a metaphor that emphasizes the political vocation’s focus on knitting together society:

What then is political action in the strict sense, the essence of the political, the politician, or rather the politician’s action? It will be to join together, as the weaver joins the warp and the weft. The politician will bind the elements together, the good elements formed by education; he will bind together the virtues in their different forms, which are distinct from and sometimes opposed to each other; he will weave and bind together different contrasting temperaments, such as, for example, spirited and moderate men; and he will weave them together thanks to the shuttle of a shared common opinion. So the royal art is not at all that of the shepherd, but the art of the weaver, which is an art that consists in bringing together these lives “in a community that rests on concord and friendship” (STP 146, quoting Statesman 311b).

The Christian image of the pastorate is radically different, for it emphasizes not primarily the communitarian good of the whole, but each individual soul: “pastoral power is an individualizing power. That is to say, it is true that the shepherd directs the whole flock, but he can only really direct it insofar as not a single sheep escapes him” (STP 128).

The shepherd image, Foucault provocatively argues, is the origin of what he calls “governmentality,” which when rationalized becomes the foundation of the modern state (STP 165). He discusses here patristic sources and monastic rules, which together point to the Christian celebration of obedience as a means of acquiring apatheia and self mastery. As he puts it: “The perfection of obedience consists in obeying an order, not because it is reasonable or because it entrusts you with an important task, but because it is absurd” (STP 176). Proceeding through a discussion of spiritual direction, he concludes that the pastorate is an “absolutely new form of power” that relies on a comprehensive network of mutual servitude and individuation, the combination that he takes to yield the technique of the modern state (STP 183-4).

St. Thomas Aquinas’ De Regno is offered here as representative of the medieval Christian attitude toward political rule and sovereignty. Though importantly different from the animating spirit of the modern state, Thomas articulates an kind of political governmentality. As Foucault puts it, the crucial point here is that Thomas rejects any hard line between sovereignty and government. In outlining the governmental character of political rule, Thomas offers a series of analogies. The first is that the king must imitate God, for just as God governs nature, the king must govern the state. The second is an analogy to nature: the king must be the “vital force,” the animating principle of the political community. The third is our familiar pastoral and paternal image; the king must “procure the common good of the multitude in accordance with a method that can obtain for it heavenly blessedness” (STP 232-3). These three analogies point to the sweeping role of political rule in organizing a huge array of social institutions and relationships.

Foucault on the “De-Governmentalization of the Cosmos” (STP 236)

In imitating God, the vital force, and the pastor, Thomas’ monarch governs with a conscious eye to the salvation of each. The pastoral prince is not bound by abstract rules or principles, he must deal with the particular demands of each individual. For Foucault (in a clearly Schmittian line of reasoning), the Thomistic model of politics requires signs and decisions that can be analogized to God’s miracles. As he puts it: “A pastoral government of nature was therefore a nature peopled by prodigies, marvels, and signs” (STP 235).

This political-theological vision is brought to an end with the scientific revolution. In an analysis that closely follows Schmitt’s, Foucault argues that the scientific revolution proved:

that ultimately God only rules the world through general, immutable, and universal laws, through simple and intelligible laws … What does it mean to say that God only rules through general, immutable, universal, simple, and intelligible laws? It means that God does not “govern” the world; he does not govern it in the pastoral sense. He reigns over the world in a sovereign manner through principles (STP 235).

Like Schmitt, the new vision of the ruler-God is not a sovereign who intervenes (through miracles/decision) to touch individual lives, but who reigns over his creation through the immutable regularities he builds into it. The pastoral God of “prodigies, miracles, and signs” disappears “precisely between 1580 and 1650” (STP 236).

With the fall of the old pastoral vision, we get the new pure theory of government. Machiavelli and the new tradition of reason of state insist on a merely political mode of rule, one that has been severed from the analogy to nature or the divine. Foucault goes so far as to term the new vision of politics “statolatry,” the good of the state becomes the sole criterion for proper rule (STP 242). For that reason, the state becomes an object of “reflected practice,” a preeminent form of governmentality (STP 247-8).

From Reason-of-State back to Nature

Foucault goes on at great length about the consequences of the new purely political understanding of the state. He says much of interest here—including an aside on how the demystification of nature requires the dramatization of politics (STP 266-7) and a discussion of the origins of balance-of-power thinking (STP 296ff). But most important for our purposes is the discovery of the economy as the essential site of governmentality and regulation as the essential mechanism. The modern state brings with it an obsession with statistics, a need to know about the whole of society: population, economic facts, public health, etc. The fundamental aim of the new category of “police,” Foucault explains, is as follows:

what police thus embraces is basically an immense domain that we could say goes from living to more than just living. I mean by this that police must ensure that men live, and live in large numbers; it must ensure that they have the wherewithal to live and so do not die in excessive numbers. But at the same time it must also ensure that everything in their activity that may go beyond this pure and simple subsistence will in fact be produced, distributed, divided up, and put in circulation in such a way that the state really can draw its strength from it (STP 326).

Something odd is happening. The modern state rejected the pastoral model and gave up on the commitment to tend to the salvation of each soul. Yet it has produced an intensified mode of governmentality that demands totalizing knowledge of every feature of social life. In a sense, Foucault suggests, we see some continuity with the medieval Christian ethos. The point gets even stranger when it comes to nature. The original reason-of-state turn rejected the analogy to nature and the natural order. But the eighteenth century sees the rise of the physiocrats, who rely on a new fetishization of nature and naturalness.

The “politiques,” the champions of reason of state, had rejected natural balance. The physiocrats restore that vision with a vengeance, and thereby inaugurate modern economics. Nevertheless, Foucault continues, there is a crucial difference between physiocratic and medieval understandings of nature:

naturalness re-appears with the economistes, but it is a different naturalness. It is the naturalness of those mechanisms that ensure that, when prices rise, if one allows this to happen, then they will stop rising by themselves. It is the naturalness that ensures that the population is attracted by high wages, until a certain point at which wages stabilize and as a result the population no longer increases. As you can see, this is not at all the same type of naturalness as that of the cosmos that framed and supported governmental reason of the Middle Ages or of the sixteenth century. It is a naturalness that is opposed precisely to the artificiality of politics, of raison d'état and police. It is opposed to it, but in quite specific and particular ways. It is not the naturalness of processes of nature itself, as the nature of the world, but processes of naturalness specific to relations between men, to what happens spontaneously when they cohabit, come together, exchange, work, and produce (STP 349).

If I understand this correctly, Foucault is arguing that the naturalness of the physiocrats is limited to a vision of the “naturalness” of the economic sphere and civil society, of the realm of human “spontaneous” exchange. The role of the state is merely to manage these social interactions so that the natural mechanisms of balance can take root. But the state can in no way understand itself as “natural” in the old medieval sense, which touched a far more comprehensive vision of human life. There is none of the old Thomistic analogy between the king and the “vital principle” of the state.

Instead, we are left, as with Schmitt’s vision of liberal constitutionalism, with a state that aims at perfect self-regulation and equilibrium:

the new governmentality, which in the seventeenth century thought it could be entirely invested in an exhaustive and unitary project of police [cf. Schmitt’s Cartesian sovereign] now finds itself in a situation in which it has to refer to the economy as a domain of naturalness: it has to manage populations; it also has to organize a legal system of respect for freedoms; and finally it has to provide itself with an instrument of direct, but negative intervention, which is the police (STP 354).

So, in short, we have gone from the natural pastoral monarchy of the medievals to the artificial, anti-natural reason-of-state of Machiavelli to the naturalist balance of the market/civil society constrained by the artificial state. The new “natural” economic governmentality limits nature to the commerce of social life, which though self-correcting still requires artificial government support. While initially disavowing the pastoral demand to touch all aspects of social life, the modern state has reconstructed an equally if  not more totalizing omnipotence over every significant feature of the modern world—population, health, and the economy. All this is maintained through a regime of regulation with an eye to balance.

Sismondi and Third-Way Economics

I recently read some Simonde de Sismondi, previously known to me only from Marx’s vitriolic attacks. The “Communist Manifesto,” for example, praises Sismondi for his dissection of “the contradictions in the conditions of modern production,” but denounces Sismondi for representing a “petty-bourgeois socialism” that is unable and unwilling to go beyond demands for a rejuvenated form of patriarchal agriculture and guild manufacturing.

What is particularly striking about Sismondi (whose main economic work was published in 1819) is the degree to which he articulates what has become the default “third-way” position of contemporary economics. In part vindicating, perhaps, Marx’s critique, Sismondi attempts to moralize capitalism, remaining tethered to its fundamental categories, while insisting on reforms to mitigate the more brutal effects of market competition. Third way economics—which has some crude affinity with neoliberalism, Clintonite liberalism, and Blairite New Labor—remains the standard economic position for most Western liberals and conservatives. In what follows I sketchily outline the similarities between Sismondi and the third way, while noting interesting points of difference. There’s nothing systematic here, it’s more a meandering through some interesting passages.

Similarities with Third Way Economics

I see four chief areas of agreement between Sismondi and the prevailing consensus: (1) His commitment to a broadly Smithian approach to private property, the division of labor, and market competition; (2) His moralist critique of what we now call classical economics, centered on a demand to consider questions of distribution, not merely aggregate growth; (3) His defense of widespread private ownership and economic stability; and (4) His wariness of a welfare state and what has been called a culture of “dependency.”

A fine summary of Sismondi’s economic philosophy is found in a biographical essay attached to an 1847 translation of some of his writings. The translator describes Sismondi’s objection to the doctrine of laissez faire as follows:

He affirms that the object of the political economist should be, to ascertain how the happiness and well-being of the whole community are affected by the creation and distribution of wealth, not abstractedly how wealth may be created and preserved; that the principles of political economy should be extended to embrace all subjects which relate to the social welfare of man, and that this ought to be considered as the end, to which the increase and security of wealth is but a means; that the purely economical mode of considering the means apart from the end, the calculating theories in which men are too often reckoned as figures, and considered as means of production, have led to a disregard of their value of men: also that the theories of political economy and the legislation founded on them tend to make the rich, richer, and the poor, poorer. Thus the amount of a nation’s wealth being taken as the test of its prosperity without regard to its distribution … M. de Sismondi contends that one of the main objects of political economy should be to regulate this very unequal distribution of wealth, which is not only frequently a source of injustice and a cause of misery to the lower classes, but which causes national insecurity … by continually adding to that dangerous though despised class who, at any time of difficulty or trouble, are ready to revenge their own sufferings by attacking property and institutions which have afforded to them neither advantage nor protection (Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government 67-8).

In a more recent translation of Sismondi’s New Principles of Political Economy, an introductory essay by Richard Hyse confirms the similarity between this approach and the today’s prevailing economic common sense:

[His proposals] have become, 150 years later, the accepted institutions of democratic capitalism: wide distribution of share ownership in large corporations, unions and industry-wide bargaining, unemployment insurance, pensions and social security, and equalization of incomes by government-decreed minimum wages and the progressive income tax (New Principles of Political Economy xxxviii-xxxix).

Let’s consider some more specific affinities:

1.1 Smith and private property

The first chapter New Principles is an elaboration of an essay published in the (Smithian) Edinburgh Review on the history of economics. He concludes that essay and this chapter with a celebration of Smith’s genius and achievement. In particular, the labor theory of value remains the central discovery of modern political economy. Yet Sismondi continues:

After this profession of our deep admiration of this creative genius, of our keen gratitude for the enlightenment we owe to him alone, one will no doubt be astonished to learn that the practical results of the doctrine we take from him, appeared to us often diametrically opposed to those he drew from it, and that, by combining his very principles with the experience of a half century during which his theory was more or less put into practice, we believe we can show that it was necessary, in more than one instance, to draw from it quite different conclusions (New Principles 52-3).

Methodologically, Sismondi remains loyal to Smith’s historical (yet scientific) economics against the overly abstract theorizing of Ricardo et al. He writes, plausibly enough:

One would believe at first sight that in freeing the theory from all surrounding circumstances, one would make it clearer and easier to comprehend; the opposite has happened; the new English economists are extremely obscure and can only be understood with much effort, while our mind is loath to accept the abstractions they require of us (New Principles 55).

That indictment applies well, it seems to me, to fields beyond economics. But more importantly, he insists on defending the core Smithian insights concerning the role that private ownership of capital and the division of labor play in driving economic production. The early chapters of Book two on the “formation and progress of wealth” offer restrained praise for the role specialization and private capital ownership play in driving prosperity. Reversing Rousseau, he moreover celebrates the institution of private property rights for making possible unprecedented plenty:

“He who, after having enclosed a field, uttered the first This is mine, has summoned him who possesses no field, and who could not live if the fields of the first would not bring forth a surplus product. This is a fortunate usurpation, and society, for the benefit of all, does well to guarantee it” (New Principles 138).

Private property rights, however, should not be understood as any kind of natural right. They are regulated by a principle of “public utility” not justice.

Today we find an explosion of so-called “left Smithians” who want to reclaim the man from libertarian and doctrinaire free marketeers. Sismondi is helpful and harmful to that project. He, like them, finds something about the Smithian project that is capable of producing a more egalitarian capitalism. Yet unlike them, he sees Smith squarely as part of the laissez faire tradition.

1.2 Moralism and distribution

This leads to our second point—Sismondi’s familiar, moralist critique of the market. While preserving the fundamentals of a market economy, Sismondi points us to the condition of those we would now call “left behind.” The preface to the second edition of New Principles details the shocking contradiction of modern England, which has managed to combine unprecedented economic wealth with unprecedented mass, proletarian misery. We must consider distribution, not merely production. He writes that the “double goal of the science of government” consists in (1) seeking “the means of securing to [men] the highest degree of felicity compatible with their nature,” while (2) “allowing the greatest possible number of individuals to partake in that felicity” (New Principles 21). Radical egalitarians abandon the first demand, rejecting any form of inequality or distinction, caring only about the equal distribution of wealth and privilege. Classical liberals, on the other hand, call the market society “liberty, even though it is founded on the slavery of the lower classes” (New Principles 22).

Again, familiarly enough, Sismondi wants to temper competition-induced wealth with concerns for just distribution. He accepts neither the liberal nor the egalitarian extremes, both the size of the pie and the size of the slices, so to speak, are morally important. Here the gap with Marx—famously contemptuous of this kind of economic moralism—is obvious.

Yet there are few critics of the market today who would go beyond Sismondi in this regard. Third-way consensus economics accepts growth and equality to be a permanent balancing act. All economic debate in modern Western societies becomes a form of haggling within Sismondian bounds.

1.3. Property owning democracy and job stability

Another familiar refrain of third-way economics is that wealth inequality is not just morally objectionable, it is politically destabilizing. Sismondi repeats two consistent themes on this point. The first is that property ownership must be widely distributed so as to ensure the full moral development of the poor and to prevent political revolution. In an analysis that will be echoed by Tocqueville and others, he writes:

The strongest safeguard of an established order may lie in the existence of a numerous class of proprietors. However advantageous it may be for a society to safeguard property, it is an abstract idea difficult to grasp by those to whom it seems only to guarantee privation. When land ownership is taken from the cultivator, and the ownership of factories from workers, all those who create wealth, and who see it passing through their hands without end, are strangers to all its benefits. They form by far the most numerous part of the nation; they see themselves as the most useful part, and they feel disinherited. Constant envy stirs them up against the rich; one can hardly dare to discuss civil rights before them, because one must always be afraid they will go from this discussion to that of property rights, and that they will demand the distribution of possessions and land.

A revolution in such a country is frightful; the whole order of society is subverted; power passes into the hands of the multitude which commands physical power, and this crowd, having suffered much, kept in ignorance by need, is hostile to all types of law, all degrees of distinction, all kinds of property. France experienced such a revolution at a time when the vast majority of the population was a stranger to ownership, and as a consequence to the blessings of civilization (New Principles 146).

Large consolidated farms, for example, pay their workers next to nothing. Efficiency coincides with less employment and terrible compensation. Favoring Swiss and American homesteading models, he demands breaking up large farms and distributing the wealth to smaller producers:

in England the excessive consolidation of farms is often caused by the owner against the interest of the nation. England has increased its prosperity so much … that at first glance the drawbacks of its large estates are not obvious. After having admired the well-tended fields, one has to take account of the population which works them; it is less than half of what it would be in France on the same amount of land. In the eyes of some economists this is a gain, in mine it is a loss. But the smaller population is at the same time much poorer. The cottager is below the peasant of almost all the other countries of Europe in happiness, hope, and security; from which I conclude that the goal of wealth creation has been missed (New Principles 188).

The logic of efficiency favors economic consolidation, but consequently produces “an abyss between extreme opulence and extreme poverty.” It destroys “that happy independence, that happy mediocrity, which was long the object of the wishes of the wise” (Political Economy 146).

Similarly, Sismondi is wary of the precarious nature of employment under conditions of modern market competition. He writes with a twinge of feudal nostalgia, noting that modern industrial laborers are abandoned when they cease to be productive, where feudal dependents were cared for in sickness and old age:

In the entirely barbaric and inhumane society of feudal countries, of slaveholding countries, this basic principle of justice has not been ignored. Never has a lord dreamt to make his vassals, his serfs, his slaves a burden of the province in their misfortunes, their old age, and their sicknesses; he has strongly felt that it was up to him alone to provide for the needs of those who experienced them only for his own benefit (New Principles 579).

The same logic applies to manufacturing. He insists in the final chapter of the book that large firms provide more substantial guarantees to their employees. Pensions and health coverage come to mind. He goes further, suggesting that large firms are less capable or willing to provide that kind of longterm support. Favoring more radical measures (like worker co-determination) he looks for means of aligning the interests of labor and capital. In a sense, such a program restores part of the holistic reciprocity the medieval guilds provided—thus giving some credence to Marx’s charge of Sismondi’s de facto reactionary economics. He doesn’t offer a specific plan here, but he summarizes the basic vision as follows:

I wish that the industry of the towns, as those of the land, be divided among a large number of independent businesses, and not brought together under a great single head who commands hundreds or thousands of workers; I wish that the ownership in manufactures be divided among a large number of average capitalists, and not concentrated in a single man, master over many millions; I wish that the industrious worker have before him the opportunity, almost the certainty, to be a partner to his master, in order that he will marry only when he will have a share in the business, instead of growing old, as he does today, without hope of advancement (New Principles 585).

The point there about marriage and childrearing is important, and points to our next similarity

1.4. Welfare and dependency

While concerned with the moral costs of economic brutalization, Sismondi is rather wary of public charity as the solution. He fears what today is often called the “culture of dependency” that accompanies direct, state support. The poor laws have not resolved the problem of pauperization, they have exacerbated it. The key target here is irresponsible childrearing. Like with conservative emphases on the “welfare queen” trope in the 90s, Sismondi is centrally concerned that the recipients of public charity will not be driven into productive work, but will instead have too many children. Those children are fated themselves to grow up in conditions of pauperization: “public charity can be considered as an encouragement society gives to a population it cannot sustain” (New Principles 549).

Where welfare reform advocates demand work requirements, however, Sismondi again favors a more harmonious alignment of the interests of labor and capital. The solution is to abolish proletarian wage labor, and to turn the poor into part of a broader middle class of “property owners” (New Principles 550). Indeed, work requirements of the sort conservatives celebrate will only exacerbate the trend of pauperization: “the condition of men who must live by their labour, who can only work when capitalists employ them, and who, when they are idle, must become a burden on the community” (Political Economy 149). Public charity and proletarian labor are two sides of the same coin. He concludes:

there will be no happiness for the working classes, there will be no real and lasting progress towards prosperity until a means will have been found to create a community of interest instead of opposition between the entrepreneur and all those he puts to work; until the workers in the fields will have been called to share in the harvests, and the factory workers in their output (New Principles 551).

Some Notable Differences with Third-Wayism

So those are the quick similarities I find between Sismondi’s ethic and the consensus position of third-way economics. While there are quibbles within the consensus, most democratic capitalists today favor broad deference to the market, wish to constrain that market with an eye toward equitable distribution, want to promote broad property ownership, and are somewhat skeptical of welfare state measures that beget greater indigence.

But there are some points of difference, at least in emphasis, as well.

2.1 Sismondi’s Radicalism

The first is that Sismondi theorizes the contradictions of capitalism in far more radical terms than do most contemporary moralizing critics of the market. Indeed, as the helpful footnotes in New Principles are quick to point out, many of Marx’s most famous arguments come straight from Sismondi. Consider this passage, for example:

Let whatever is called progress in the arts, in manufactures, in agriculture, be examined, and it will be found that every discovery, every improvement, may be reduced to doing as much with less labour, or more with the same labour; all progress tends also to reduce the value and reward of labour, or the ease of those who live only to labour.

The fundamental change which has taken place in society, amidst the universal struggle created by competition, is the introduction of the proletary among human conditions, the name of whom, borrowed from the Romans, is ancient, but whose existence is quite new. (Political Economy 144).

We see here clearly the account of wages falling to subsistence levels and the emergence of a new proletariat class that will become the industrial reserve army.

We see a discussion of the kind of mystification arising from the new M-C-M dynamics of the monetized market:

the circulating medium simplified all commercial transactions and complicated all the philosophical observations which have these transactions as their object. As much as this invention showed everyone clearly the goal to be pursued in every transaction, by that much it made the totality of these transactions intricate and unclear, and the general direction of commerce difficult to grasp (New Politics 113).

We see also a sophisticated account of what today we call business cycles, a theory of the intrinsic proclivity of the market to produce crises of overconsumption and mass unemployment. (The topic of New Politics Book II chapter 6).

Most significantly, Sismondi clearly develops the idea of “surplus labor,” which Marx picks up and ties to exploitation. Surplus labor consists in the gap between the wealth produced by the laborer and the wage he is paid (which covers only his subsistence). Consider the following passages:

The advantage of an employer of labor is often nothing more than the plunder of the worker he hired; he does not profit because his enterprise produced much more than its cost, but because he does not pay all the costs, because he does not grant to the worker sufficient compensation for his work (New Principles 83)

the labor that the worker will perform during the year, will always be worth more than the labor during the preceding year, with which he will maintain himself. Industry provides a constant increase in wealth as a consequence of this surplus value (New Principles 92).

All of the annual product is consumed, partly by workers who, in exchanging it for their work, convert it into capital and reproduce it; and partly by capitalists who destroy it by giving their income in return. Moreover, one should never forget that labor power is incommensurable with wealth. Wages do not represent an absolute quantity of labor, but only a quantity of goods which ahs sufficed to maintain the workers of the previous year (New Principles 93).

(The translator notes that Marx cited Sismondi more than anyone else in Capital, but curiously did not cite him on these points).

So in all these respects, Sismondi goes beyond mere moralism about the plight of those left behind. He offers a far more sweeping and radical indictment of the contradictions built into capitalism than modern third-wayers are inclined to offer. Marx could learn something from Sismondi’s treatment of the market. I don’t think he could have learned much from Tony Blair’s.

2.2 Wariness of Innovation

Another break with the third-way consensus is Sismondi’s producerist wariness of technological innovation and entrepreneurial progress. Everyone in the world today favors innovation. Perhaps the fruit of that innovation should be more widely spread, perhaps (with pharmaceuticals, for example) there should be constraints on prices that might tamp down a degree of innovation, and perhaps we were somewhat too cavalier in embracing automization. But on the whole, the strong presumption is in favor of disruptive creative destruction.

Sismondi flips that presumption. Labor saving technology and more general forms of entrepreneurial innovation are expected to harm workers.

Each improvement introduced into industry, if it has not been the result of a new demand, and if it has not been followed by a greater consumption, has almost always produced the same effects—it has killed, far away, old producers no one saw, and which have disappeared unsung; it has enriched, besides the inventor, new producers who, because they did not know their victim, have regarded each new invention as a benefit to mankind (New Principles 265).

We speak today of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency to justify the costs of dislocation. Of course, that's a rather brutal standard. A cash transfer is not the same thing as gainful employment, nor is mandated retraining particularly attractive. Regardless, those transfers and retraining investments never happen. But the modern third-wayist still presumptively favors disruptive innovation. For Sismondi, that stems from a bias in favor of consumption and an incapacity to properly value producers’ welfare and moral interests. He offers the following charming story in a footnote:

It is said that the Emperor Alexander, astonished to see, in England, that the entire population that surrounded him was wearing stockings, shoes and dress tolerably similar to that of a proper burgher, exclaimed in surprise: ‘Where are the poor? Are there no poor people in this country?’ However, more than one-half of these individuals, whom custom forced to spend a good deal for their clothing, had no other property than the wages they would receive that Saturday for the entire week; and more than a tenth of them were helped by their parish. There would be more independence and more happiness for the poor, to walk barefoot, or in wooden shoes, and owning a cottage, some fields, a garden and two cows, like the majority of the peasants on the Continent (New Principles 560).

Sismondi is presumptively hostile to all advances in labor-saving technology:

if the manufacturer, without an increase in demand, and without an increase in capitals, merely converts a part of his circulating capital into machines and lays off a number of his workers proportional to the work he has done by his blind servants, and without extending his sales, only increases his profit becasue he produces what he sells at a lower price, the social loss will be certain whatever the advantage he finds there for his own account (New Principles 300).

He develops this point too with an interesting aside on what will happen to the household with the development of new domestic labor-saving technology:

Why, it says, should the housewife spin, weave, and prepare all the linen of the family? All this work would be done infinitely cheaper at the manufactory … Why should she knead the bread? … Why should she make the pot boil? (Political Economy 148)

The future promises that “omnibus kitchens” will emerge to supply all the household’s food needs. Uber Eats! Sismondi warns that the abolition of these domestic duties will harm women, destroying the grounds of their independence and authority within the home. We should therefore oppose these changes because:

reciprocal cares and duties form and strengthen domestic ties; because the wife endears herself to the family of the poor man by the solicitude with which she provides for its first necessities ; because love is often in a labouring man only a brutal and transient passion ; but his affection for her who every day prepares for him the only enjoyment which he can obtain in the day, thus increases also every day. It is the wife who foresees, and who remembers, in the midst of that life passed so rapidly in labour, and physical wants; it is she who knows how to combine economy, neatness, and order, with abundance. It is in the happiness she gives that she finds strength to resist, if it is necessary, the imperious demands of drunkenness and gluttony. When the wife has nothing to do in the house but to produce children, can it be supposed that the sacred bond of marriage is not more broken, than by the lessons and the example of the most reprehensible immorality? (Political Economy 148-9).

You definitely won’t hear that argument today.

As Sismondi puts it in a rebuke of Ricardo and today’s prevailing consumptivist ethic: “Wealth is everywhere, men are absolutely nothing? What? … In truth, then there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England” (New Principles 563).

Hopefully we are recovering a bit of this producerist instinct today, but it remains absent for the most part, it seems to me.

2.3 Population control

Our final example is a break in emphasis with today’s third-wayism. I mentioned above the affinity with contemporary critics of the welfare state who warn of dependency and reckless procreation. Sismondi offered a somewhat more extreme discussion on that theme. He like many is terrified by the growth of an indigent population, and initially proposed laws to bar the poor from marrying. He dropped that argument in the second edition, but continued to insist that steps be taken to discourage the poor from marrying young and having many children. He doesn’t share Malthus’ pessimism on the matter, and claims that the right set of economic incentives will encourage the working class to delay marriage. Indeed, he argues that one of the chief failures of a mystifying market economy is that workers no longer can reasonably predict their future economic condition. That uncertainty is partly responsible for the growth in what he sees as a parasitic excess population:

the more property is taken from the poor, the more he will be in danger of miscalculating his income, and contributing to a population increase which will not in any way match the demand for labor, and will not find any subsistence (New Principles 520).

Greater ownership within factory life, for example, will give the worker a clearer sense of his lifetime earnings schedule, inclining him to delay marriage until he has attained the necessary advancement in the firm (New Principles 573).

Again, we don’t talk in this way today. Though the third-wayist enthusiasm for long-acting reversible contraception is perhaps not so different.