ABSTRACT
Human bodies achieve and maintain order because physicians can re-establish appropriate hierarchies in the physical and mental system: the brain is in charge of the nervous system and, within the brain, reason has dominion over the will and the passions. If this natural hierarchy was disturbed, as it is inclined to be often enough, then Cabanis and Pinel could ply their trades and, through their expertise, re-establish order. Similarly, social bodies achieve and maintain order because social theorists and wise lawgivers can establish appropriate relations between members of a society and, most importantly, instruct individuals with respect to their true interests that are harmonious. The human body is naturally ordered but is liable to disruption, which must be cured by physicians. The social body is naturally ordered because true individual interests are harmonious but disruptions can occur when individuals are ignorant or delusional, and the re-establishment of social order requires the equivalent of physicians in the social realm. This chapter examines the responsibilities of legislators, administrators and
educators in the amelioration of poverty. Say acknowledged that the vicious inclinations of the people are due to the environment and, in particular, to the extremes of wealth and poverty that afflict many. His solution, therefore, was to make the social body harmonious by eliminating great disparity in living conditions. This he achieves through institutional reform and through education. First, I demonstrate that economic reform designed to mitigate extremes of wealth and poverty is essential to the establishment of social order and public morality in Olbie. Then, I claim that popular instruction is fundamental to the alleviation of poverty, and must simultaneously teach the skills that are required for basic citizenship, provide an opportunity for social mobility and teach the
fundamental harmony of the true interests of all members of a society. That is, literacy and the rudiments of political economy were at least as essential an aspect of instruction, according to Say’s Olbie, as were publicly displayed maxims an aspect of mass moral education. Finally, I suggest that the fundamental solution to poverty, according to Olbie, was industrialisation, which requires the active intervention of administrators and legislators as well as teachers. Individuals would come to value the ‘comfort’ that industrialisation brings, but industrialisation would only occur when hard work and frugality had become endemic. The encouragement of these values required not only that individuals be exposed to appropriate maxims as they went about their daily affairs, but that institutions such as savings banks be established and that other institutions that have the effect of encouraging a belief in ‘fate’ or ‘luck’ eliminated. Economic reform, popular instruction and the creation of institutions consistent with industrialisation require the active participation of educators, administrators and legislators, who play the same role of establishing order in the social body that physicians play in healing the physical body.
