Bastiat and Carey
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,[3] 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, Gülich 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.[3] 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 contradictory 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 feudalism 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 regulation. 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 themselves, 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 (PUBLIC 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 emancipation 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,[3] 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 developed 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.
[III-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.
Endnotes
[3] According to Bastiat, "the workers' pension fund" was to be made up of contributions by the workers themselves, for thus alone the necessary degree of "stability" could be ensured (Fr. Bastiat, Harmonies économiques, 2nd edition, Paris, 1851, p. 395).—11