POLITICAL ECONOMY AS PRESERVATIONAL REGIME OF TRUTH
By 1848, political economy formed a coherent ideology founded on the veri- diction of the market process as an external check on the sovereignty of the State. Supported by legions of savants, the Journal des economistes, and an active press, political economists provided a consistent source of opposition to state intervention in the economy that found specific expression against the National Workshops and industrial regulation (Bouchet 2006). In doing so, they invoked a particular regime of truth founded on the outcome of market processes to promote their laissez-faire policies.
The aims of the early political economists were neither more nor less moral than those embracing a traditional moral economy of exchange (E. P. Thompson 1991, 265-93). Indeed, political economists arguing in 1848 against right-to-work laws emphasized that their animating desire was precisely to improve the condition of the working class.20 For the chair of political economy at the College de France, Michel Chevalier, “Political economy thus presupposes the simultaneous existence of competition and of Christian sentiment.”21 For Frederic Bastiat, paragon of liberal economic thought, what distinguished political economy was not the morality of the ends it sought, but the temporality it used in considering the “ulterior and final effects” rather than “the immediate consequences.”22 What had changed with the emergence of political economy was the mediation of moral ends through the functioning of a market process that aggregated the self-interests of rational individual actors, and that operated in accordance with discoverable natural law, the scientific understanding of which would reveal the harmonious consequences of unimpeded human action (Staum 1998).
Within the political economic regime of truth, the economy existed as a natural and immutable system. According to Jean-Baptiste Say, acolyte of Adam Smith and perhaps the most influential French political economist of the nineteenth century, “Wealth is independent of the nature of government. The exact forms of public administration only indirectly, accidentally, influence the formation of wealth, which is almost entirely the work of indi- viduals.”23 Say believed that political economy was a science, a method that “has always come to place itself between man and truth.”24 For subsequent practitioners such as Bastiat, the economy represented an eternal truth anterior, exterior, and superior to the State that manifested itself in such “divine institutions” as property rights.25 The task of the political economist was to scientifically reveal these “general laws” of nature in order to bring the laws of the State into accordance with them and thus harmonize society.26 For leading economist Joseph Garnier, political economy provided the only source of guidance capable of ensuring that the State was operating “in accordance with the nature of things.”27 Thus, political economy depended on the ideation of a natural order outside the realm of the State before the State could be brought into accordance with its laws: “political economy regulates interests, the same [way] that politics regulates the state of persons: this one governs, that one administers.”28
In order for market processes to reveal a spontaneous natural law, however, they had to operate through individual human actors pursuing limited interests. Acknowledging that people acting in the real world responded to a wide range of motivations, Chevalier maintained that individual self-interest played a central and necessary role in motivating human action by making the individual act socially.29 Bastiat echoed this point in insisting that people acted primarily out of “personal interest,” but that in doing so the “individual becomes social.”30 Thus, the role of the State in reference to the natural law of the market was to protect the profits of individuals so that their pursuit would catalyze economic growth.31
Rather than the unrestrained self-interest of individual actors leading to chaos in the marketplace, political economists argued that the self-interest of individual actors would balance each other and generate the greater good for all of society. In fact, political economy founded its implicit claim to morality on the outcome of an invisible hand: “Economists believe in the natural harmony, or rather the necessary and progressive harmonization of interests.”32 For example, the attempt of manufacturers to maximize profits would create a harmonizing balance between the returns to capital and labor while lowering prices, thereby raising the standard of living for all.33 The natural laws underpinning the political economic understanding of the world thus emerged from the decisions of individuals taken in response to their environments and led to the benefit of society as a whole by harnessing individual interests towards the social good (Hirschman 1977).
At this point, however, political economists reached a Panglossian conundrum. Their acceptance of the invisible hand as the aggregating foundation of the market order entailed the negation of political economy’s capacity to evaluate the order resulting from the market process. If the self-interested actions of individuals culminating in observable trends and following natural laws were taken to lead to the harmonization of social exchange, then the artificial interference of the State into market processes could only destabilize the market order.34 Although political economy in mid-nineteenth-century France entailed a broad range of subtle and nuanced opinions, when confronted with the radical socialist threat in the spring of 1848, the leading advocates of this science fell back on a reductive and dogmatic opposition to any and all state intervention in the economy. According to the political economists of 1848, the truths revealed by the science of political economy could “all be summarized in these words alone: laissez faire, laissezpasser; simple words, sublime words.”35 When confronted with widespread poverty and unemployment resulting from market fluctuations, as was the case in 1848, such an argument amounted to the claim that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. By defending the market order against the intrusions of the State in 1848, political economists became champions of the status quo as it existed and thus, given the predominance of a capitalist system, promoters of an essentially preservational ideology.36
To support their interdiction of state intervention, these political economists warned against the threat of a slippery slope. They believed that “the division of property, in whatever way it happens, is the present ruin of soci- ety.”37 For Bastiat, even public discussion of state intervention in the market would undermine the confidence of capital owners in their property rights, “and that is enough for uncertainty, the greatest scourge of labor.”38 Any violation of property rights by the State would be tantamount to full communism: “a drop of water is as much water as the entire Ocean.”39 Political economy in 1848 represented at once an internally coherent, consistent, and totalizing ideology and a regime of truth that could be invoked in policy debates to justify noninterventionist policies and state inaction in the face of persistent unemployment. Thus, political economy supplied a direct counter to the moral economy invoked by socialists (Walton 1988).
