Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi

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Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi bigraphy, stories - Swiss economist

Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi : biography

19 May 1773 – 25 June 1842

Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi (19 May 1773 – 25 June 1842), whose real name was Simonde, was a writer born at Geneva. He is best known for his works on French and Italian history, and his economic ideas.

Historiographical position and political stance

He was a historian whose economic ideas passed through different phases. The acceptance of free trade principles in De la richesse commerciale was abandoned in favour of a critical posture towards free trade and industrialisation.

Nouveaux principes d’économie politique attacked wealth accumulation both as an end in itself, and for its detrimental effect on the poor. His critique was noticed by Malthus, David Ricardo and J. S. Mill. He indicated contradictions of capitalism. He can be said to have criticized capitalism in a sentimental way, from the viewpoint of the petty bourgeois. Despite his favorable attitude towards the poor, he was himself attacked by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and other socialists for lacking positive aims. Marx, for example, said he "dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production" but that his recommendations were reactionary, only wanting to restore the old means of production.

French history

In 1813, he visited Paris for the first time, lived there for some time, and mixed with many in literary society. Although a Liberal and in his earlier days almost an Anglomaniac, he did not welcome the fall of the empire. During the Hundred Days, he defended Napoleon Bonaparte’s constitutional schemes or promises, and had an audience with the emperor himself, which is one of the main events of a not very eventful life. After the Restoration he left Paris.

On completing (1817) his great book about the Italian republics, he undertook (1818) a still greater work, Histoire des Français, which he planned on a long period, and of which during the remaining twenty-three years of his life he published twenty-nine volumes. His untiring industry enabled him to compile many other books, but it is on these two that his fame mainly rests. The former displays his qualities in the most favourable light, and has been least injuriously affected by subsequent writings and investigations. But the latter, as a careful and accurate sketch on a grand scale, has now been superseded. Sainte-Beuve has, with benevolent sarcasm, surnamed the author "the Rollin of French History," and the praise and the blame implied in the comparison are both perfectly well deserved.

Main economic thoughts

Title page of Nouveaux principes d’économie politique As an economist, Sismondi represented a humanitarian protest against the dominant orthodoxy of his time. In his first book, he followed Adam Smith; but in his principal subsequent economic work, Nouveaux principes d’économie politique (1819), he insisted on the fact that economic science studied the means of increasing wealth too much, and the use of wealth for producing happiness, too little. For the science of economics, his most important contribution was probably his discovery of economic cycles. In refutation of other thinkers at the time (notably J. B. Say and David Ricardo), Sismondi challenged the idea that economic equilibrium leading to full employment would be immediately and spontaneously achieved. He wrote, "Let us beware of this dangerous theory of equilibrium which is supposed to be automatically established. A certain kind of equilibrium, it is true, is reestablished in the long run, but it is after a frightful amount of suffering."Simonde de Sismondi, New Principles of Political Economy, vol. 1 (1819), 20–21. He was not a socialist; but, in protesting against laissez faire and invoking the state "to regulate the progress of wealth," he was an interesting precursor of the German Historical school of economics.

His theory may more precisely be classed as one of periodic crises, rather than cycles per se. His theory was adapted by Charles Dunoyer, who introduces the notion of cycling between two phases, thus giving a modern form of economic cycle., Rabah Benkemoune, History of Political Economy 2009 41(2):271-295;