Heterodox economics movement

Preface

The Heterodox Traditions in Economics began when Jean-Jacques Rousseau , a Swiss political philosopher of the Enlightenment and purported father of the French Revolution, wrote his book Discourse on Political Economy (Economie Politique) (1755) which became the entry on the subject in Diderot's Encyclopedie.

Utopians and Socialists

Rousseauvian Socialism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1788

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote Discourse on Political Economy (1755), an article which contains no obvious economic theory and is merely a pre-taste of the political philosophy he was to lay out in his Social Contract (1762). His earlier polemical Discourse on Inequality (1754) - which argued that civilization had destroyed man's "natural goodness" and thus was the source on inequality - is prescient of the Marxian doctrine of "alienation".

Rousseau's work had a little direct impact on economics, but exerted a substantial indirect influence. He shared with his fellow Enlightenment philosophers the faith in the existence of a "natural state" of society - which one could thereby extend to social equilibrium and "natural value" concepts - which were very much ingrained in the thinking of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. His appeal to this state via his "natural man", the "noble savage", is reminiscent of the analogies formed in modern economics.

A thorough pessimist about existing human society, Rousseau recognized that this "natural state" was perverted by "civilization" and that the appetites and motivations of civilized man had been consequently corrupted and constructed by his interaction with society - "Man is born free and is everywhere in chains" as he wrote in his famous opening to the Social Contract

The "natural state", Rousseau claimed, could only be achieved via wholesale social reform which envisioned a collective state with extra-personal dedication to a "General Will"''. Only in such a state, Rousseau asserted, could the true "natural man" exist and be truly free. It is these last observations that make Rousseau the father of Socialism (utopian and otherwise) - and earned him much emnity from later anti-Socialists such as Hayek.

His publications got him arrested and his books were burned throughout France. He ran off to England, being hosted and supported by David Hume where he wrote his polemical Letters from the Mountain Soon he returned to France, where he wandered in poverty until his death in 1778.

Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, 1773-1842

Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi was a French historian, an early socialist and great rival of Jean-Baptiste Say and the [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/frenchlib.htm French Liberal School. Sismondi was against the capitalist industrial system, which he viewed as being detrimental to the interests of the poor and particularly prone to crisis brought by an insufficient general demand for goods.

His underconsumption thesis was shared by Robert Malthus, and sparked off the General Glut Controversy of the 1820s where their theories were pitted against those of Say, Ricardo and the Classicals.

Sismondi wrote, among other books, Nouveaux principes d'économie politique ou De la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population, Political Economy (1815), Examen de la Constitution françoise (1815)

Utopian Socialism

St. Thomas More 1477-78? - 1535

St. Thomas More, saint, knight, Lord Chancellor of England, author and martyr, was born in London, 7 February, 1477-78; executed at Tower Hill, 6 July, 1535.

Of his writings the most famous is the Utopia

The volume recounts the fictitious travels of one Raphael Hythlodaye, a mythical character, who, in the course of a voyage to America, was left behind near Cape Frio and thence wandered on till he chanced upon the Island of Utopia ("nowhere") in which he found an ideal constitution in operation.

The whole work is really an exercise of the imagination with much brilliant satire upon the world of More's own day. Real persons, such as Peter Giles, Cardinal Morton, and More himself, take part in the dialogue with Hythlodaye, so that an air of reality pervades the whole which leaves the reader sadly puzzled to detect where truth ends and fiction begins, and has led not a few to take the book seriously. But this is precisely what More intended, and there can be no doubt that he would have been delighted at entrapping William Morris, who discovered in it a complete gospel of Socialism; or Cardinal Zigliara, who denounced it as "no less foolish than impious"; as he must have been with his own contemporaries who proposed to hire a ship and send out missionaries to his non-existent island. The book ran through a number of editions in the original Latin version and, within a few years, was translated into German, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, and English.

A collected edition of More's English works was published by William Rastell, his nephew, at London in 1557; it has never been reprinted and is now rare and costly. The first collected edition of the Latin Works appeared at Basle in 1563; a more complete collection was published at Louvain in 1565 and again in 1566. In 1689 the most complete edition of all appeared at Frankfort-on-Main, and Leipzig. Lakowski compiled a full bybliography of More's writtings, see: LAKOWSKI, Romuald Ian. A Bibliography of Thomas More's Utopia; Early Modern Literary Studies 1.2 (1995): 6.1-10