ABSTRACT
Condorcet, Helvétius and others. These ideas coalesced into a particular form under the intellectual leadership of the sensationalist philosopher Destutt de Tracy and the physiologist Cabanis, a form most congenially represented by the metaphor of the social body. The idéologues, like many other eighteenth-century intellectuals, imagined
society as a body made up of individuals, in which the will of each separate person must be in accord with the social will if society is to flourish. Individual interests, if they are truly understood, cannot be at odds with the social will because no member of society can be indifferent to the health of the social body. In the minds of the idéologues, this metaphor took a particular form. Cabanis, the physiologist, argued that the human body, to remain healthy, required the intervention of physicians whose duty was to re-establish order among the separate functional systems of the physical body. Similarly, the ideological psychologist Pinel argued that the role of the psychologist was to be physician to the human soul by re-establishing order among the separate functions of the mind and, in particular, between the will and reason. And the philosopher Tracy and the economist Say conceived of the social scientist as physician to the social body. Where physicians restored order to physical bodies, and psychologists to mental states, social scientists were charged with restoring order to the body politic. This they did by means of a pervasive pedagogical programme designed to teach people their true interests, and by establishing institutions consistent with social order. It is, I think, clear that Say’s economic analysis is consistent with the
preconceptions and priorities of idéologie. What is not at all clear is that idéologie is necessary to our understanding of Say’s economics. In particular, we have surveyed Say’s theory of value, his distribution theory and his law of markets. Although the ideological preoccupation with stabilising institutions and education is present in each case, it is certainly true that these aspects of Say’s economic analysis stand alone in the sense that we can understand them quite adequately without the baggage of idéologie. And because it would be difficult to argue that idéologie is necessary to an understanding of the details of Say’s economics, would not Occam’s razor suggest that, as economists, we ignore the idéologie as, at best, unnecessary? If I wanted to be facetious, I could argue that we can understand Say’s
economics quite adequately, not only without idéologie but without Say. And, in fact, two hundred years of the development of Say’s law of markets has done precisely that. Sowell has no more need of Say than he does of idéologie, or any other branch of metaphysics. The history of economic thought has always stood in an odd relationship to its masters. We argue that what is essential to a working economist is the history of economic analysis—that toolbox of ideas and theorems and principles that are totally separable from individual writers and historical context. If all that matters is analysis, it is entirely ir relevant that Keynes misrepresented Say’s law, or that most commentators are ignorant of the variations that the law took over the course of Say’s many publications. And if we accept the notion that only economic
analysis matters, then the kind of history of economic thought we ought to undertake is precisely that of Sowell. Authors, ‘great masters’, personalities, errors and quirks of individual contributors are irrelevant. And this kind of history is particularly pleasing because it is concrete and we can hope to have complete knowledge about that subset of questions for which evidence exists. Only the text matters and that, barring variant editions, is at least tangible.1 A second type of historical analysis focuses on individuals, but abstracts
from everything that makes these individuals human beings. We begin with a mannequin, or a statue in Condillac’s honour, and systematically strip away as unnecessary all but the economic analysis. Then, we clean up the analysis and paste it back on the statue. And we end up not with a study of Say’s economic analysis nor with a study of the historical figure Jean-Baptiste Say. We have a ‘man-machine’ —a statue with a set of highly abstract economic ideas in a form that no human being of that time could ever have created. This man-machine, this statue, is undoubtedly more consistent than any real human being has ever been and undoubtedly more relevant to contemporary economic questions, but it is, nonetheless, an artificial creation and almost cer ta in ly a creature who would have been unrecognisable to his contemporaries. If our goal is modern relevance, we ought to focus on the ideas alone. If, by contrast, we are intrigued by how it is that ideas are created and how they change over time in response to multiple influences, then we have to undertake the far more difficult task of actually attempting to reconstruct those forces acting on a particular person at a particular time. Here, the questions are quite different, as is the nature of the evidence
and the certainty with which we can draw conclusions. This is a study of human creativity. How did political economy gel at a particular time and place? Which of the multiple and largely undefinable influences ought we to examine? What is persuasive evidence? And how can we know, with certainty, anything at all about a time and a place that requires us to set aside our unacknowledged cultural preconceptions and to try to understand the preoccupations of people living in circumstances we can never experience directly and can only document and reconstruct to the limits of the very incomplete evidence available to us? We must acknowledge that we always leave ourselves open to the charge of having ignored some influences and emphasised others out of all proportion to their actual impact. Such is life in the realm of the history of ideas, in which almost everything is overdetermined.
