Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 359-374, September 2022.

SummaryThis article deals with laissez faire arguments as distinguishable in Europe between the final decades of the nineteenth century and 1914. The focus is on Herbert Spencer and the British ‘Individualists’, the Italian Vilfredo Pareto, and the Frenchman Paul Leroy-Beaulieu. Analysis concentrates on the relationship between laissez faire formulations and democracy, the latter amounting to the impact of the extension of the franchise on representative government. All the mentioned authors blamed the mechanisms of democratic government for the contemporary growth in (...) state functions. While Spencer focused on the threat of a new class legislation after the demise of aristocratic power, Pareto and Leroy-Beaulieu viewed the pressure of lobbies and parties as the chief cause of the extension of state interventions. This article also aims to detect similarities and differences with more recent formulations. It is argued that Friedrich Hayek's achievement was to reconcile, against earlier perspectives, laissez faire with democracy. The reconciliation rested on a conceptualisation of democracy as a valuable method or procedure, onto which no values should be grafted. (shrink)

Corrado Gini was a key intellectual in the Fascist establishment. His scientific programme included statistics, demography, eugenics, economics, and sociology, as well as occasional forays into political thought and anthropology. Historians have focused on his statistics and eugenics, in connection with his spell as head of the Italian bureau of statistics. This article, integrating economics with the other threads of Gini’s programme, takes economic anthropology as a standpoint to reassess the inspiration behind his whole oeuvre. That anthropology consisted of two (...) parts: the criticism of economists’ ‘economic man’ and the attempt to replace it with an instinctual economic agent, inspired by the nationalist rhetoric of ‘young peoples’ bound to conquer the world. Once the perspective is enlarged, the usual definition of Gini as a technocrat proves insufficient, for his science incorporated essential pieces of Fascism’s political ideology and cultural legitimacy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article deals with the most important points of contact between feeling and cognition in the thought of Félicité de Lamennais. The following arguments are focused on: i. the central role of love; ii. the advocacy of self-denial, taking the shape of a denunciation of earthly pleasures and passions, especially pride; iii. a failure to endorse moral pluralism; iv. the necessity for people to fulfil their ‘duties’; v. a view of the post-revolutionary phase as fateful; and vi. a tendency (...) to criticise and antagonise. It emerges that Lamennais the pious believer, extolling the authority of the Church (i.–iii.), always coexisted with Lamennais the revolutionary, preaching religious and political subversion (iv.–vi.). He spread the same affective tropes, although in different doses, over the various phases of his career. (shrink)

In a work of unusual ambition and rigorous comparison, Roberto Romani considers the concept of 'national character' in the intellectual histories of Britain and France. Perceptions of collective mentalities influenced a variety of political and economic debates, ranging from anti-absolutist polemic in eighteenth-century France to appraisals of socialism in Edwardian Britain. Romani argues that the eighteenth-century notion of 'national character', with its stress on climate and government, evolved into a concern with the virtues of 'public spirit' irrespective of national traits, (...) in parallel with the establishment of representative institutions on the Continent. His discussion of contemporary thinkers includes Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Millar, Burke, Constant, de Staël and Tocqueville. After the mid-nineteenth century, the advent of social scientific approaches, including those of Spencer, Hobson and Durkheim, shifted the focus from the qualities required by political liberty to those needed to operate complex social systems, and to bear its psychological pressures. (shrink)

This paper reassesses Sismondi's Nouveaux principes d?économie politique (1819) by locating the origins of his unorthodox political economy in the republican tradition of thought. Deeply influenced by both Smith and Rousseau, Sismondi first expounded his republican creed in a political treatise, Recherches sur les constitutions des peuples libres (1797?1801). He was in favour of a balanced constitution combined with public virtue. Sismondi's major historical work, the Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen Age (1807?1818), amounts to a tribute to the liberty (...) and patriotism brought about by republican governments. After a brief examination of De la richesse commerciale (1803), the third section of the paper is devoted to a close analysis of the Nouveaux principes. The foci of interest are Sismondi's views on property, commercial wealth, work and leisure, division of labour, consumption and luxury, paper money and public credit, and citizenship. The paper concludes by suggesting that Sismondi managed to transform Genevan republicanism into a set of ideas which has nourished economic radicalism up to the present. (shrink)