ABSTRACT
The story of the variety of economists’ religions in matters of taxation is quite amusing. Of the three main social doctrines: communism, which considers only society and regards the individual as being only an element of the State; individualism, which knows only man and that believes the State is only a gathering of individuals; synthesism, which believes that experience teaches us the fact of man in society, the individual in the State, the second of these is the economists’ doctrine, just as it is the doctrine of the bourgeoisie. Inasmuch as I have cited elsewhere Plato and Aristotle as the champions of communism and individualism, respectively, I feel a need to remark here that these two great geniuses are not, however, unconditionally confined exclusively to one point of view. After Plato, in his Republic, divided the citizens into different races: the golden race, which is that of the magistrates, the silver race, which is that of the warriors, and the iron and brass races, which are those of the workers and artisans, he adds that if the children of magistrates have some mixture of iron or brass they should be relegated to the state of workers or artisans, and if the children of workers or artisans manifest silver or gold, they should be elevated to the status of warriors or the dignity of magistrates, ‘for an oracle says that the republic will perish when it becomes governed by iron or brass’ [Book III]; and so he formulates, in the splendid wording that is so characteristic of him, the principle of inequality of positions. And when [446] Aristotle repeats many times in his Politics that the State (πόλις) is a community (χοινωνία) of equals and fellow-men (ίσων και όμοόων [Book VII, §viii]), he virtually asserts in a rigorous way the principle of the equality of conditions. In the nineteenth century, this broad and comprehensive view is shared only by some rare minds, like Pierre Leroux, [Charles Brook] Dupont-White, and Mr. Vacherot. Most of the socialists have been communists, so much so that the
word socialism, created by Lerouxii to designate its synthetic conception, eventually became for many people identical with the word communism. As far as the economists are concerned, they are excessively individualistic, and, on that terrain, they follow along behind Mr. Thiers, the philosopher of bourgeois sociology. As I explained in the sixth lesson of my Théorie générale de la société,iii when exclusive individualism is applied to the theory of the distribution of social wealth among the people in society, the two questions of property and taxation are separated, and the first is solved by attributing all types of social wealth to the individual alone: personal faculties, capital, and land; then, having done this, the resources of the State are obtained by means of a payment extracted from the various incomes of the diverse types of capital relegated to individual ownership and enjoyment: wages, interest, and rent. Then, having posited the problem of taxation, it is solved by the twofold principle that the amount of taxation should be agreed upon voluntarily and distributed proportionally. That is how Mr. Thiers proceeds. Property and taxation being only the two halves of one and the same theory, they are dealt with [in Thiers’s book] in one and the same volume,2 except that the former is treated in Parts I and II and the latter in Part IV; this means that a question is tackled after it has already been solved. What is the State? It is an institution by means of which individuals are protected in the processes of obtaining and enjoying their incomes.
