ABSTRACT
The second part of this volume is devoted to the various critiques addressed to (liberal) political economy. The present chapter forms an introduction and an analytical complement to these critiques, illustrating the intellectual context in which they were formulated. Critiques of the free trade approach started early in the nineteenth century and came from very different corners: from the Counter Revolution, with Louis de Bonald for example who did not accept the new political and social organisation generated by the 1789 Revolution, but also from liberal political philosophers like Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant. Criticisms addressed to liberal political economy were later extensively developed by two opposed lines of thought. Catholic authors – conservative or liberal – tried to develop an alternative approach, a Christian political economy, with authors like J.-P.A. de Villeneuve-Bargemont, Charles de Coux, Louis Rousseau or Charles Périn. At the same time, social reformers and socialists – J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, C.-H. de Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonians, the different trends of the socialist thought or authors writing from the perspective of a new discipline: sociology – proposed new ways of organising an efficient and just society. A common feature of most developments is the stress on the necessity of morality and religion to maintain society and ensure the efficiency of the economic system.
