A Treatise on Political Economy. Antoine Louis Claude Destutt De Tracy

economic, and political sciences. But views critical of the Imperial government were subject to rigorous censorship. In 1806 – 7, therefore, Destutt de Tracy interrupted the completion of the Elements and wrote an extended critique of Montesquieu intended to serve as the basis for his projected discussion of economics and politics. With no hope of its publication in France, Destutt de Tracy sent the manuscript to Thomas Jefferson, with whom he was already in correspondence. The latter, despite minor reservations over the nature of executive power, was sufficiently impressed with the text to secure its translation and anonymous publication in 1811 under the title A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws. ”⁴ In general terms, Destutt de Tracy recommended a system of what he termed “national government,” resting upon free but indirect elections, civil liberty (including freedom of the press and from arbitrary arrest), legal but not economic equality, and a society in which every citizen would benefit from the liberalization of commerce and industry. Crucially, liberty was defined not (following Montesquieu) as doing what one ought to want but as the ability to do as one pleases. Moreover, he argued that the American constitution far better exemplified the principle of the division of powers than did its English counterpart admired by his illustrious predecessor. It is not difficult to understand why Jefferson was impressed by Destutt de Tracy’s manuscript, since it harmonized quite remarkably with his own political philosophy and gave external confirmation of the soundness of the famed principles of Jeffersonian democracy. In a letter to Destutt de Tracy dated January 26, 1811, Jefferson wrote that he considered it “the most precious gift the present age has received” (Chinard, 74).

      Encouraged by Jefferson’s lavish praise, Destutt de Tracy resumed work on the proposed fourth part of the Elements, under the title A Treatise on Political Economy. In doing so he reproduced (at times verbatim) the arguments relating to luxury, taxation, public debt, and money to be found in the later sections of the Commentary. Again the text was sent to Jefferson with a view to securing its translation in the United States, and again it met with the enthusiastic approval of the American. To the publisher of the Commentary, W. Duane, Jefferson wrote on January 22, 1813: “The present volume is a work of great ability; it may be considered as a review of the principles of the Economists, of Smith, and of Say.... As Smith has corrected some principles of the economists and Say some of Smith’s; so Tracy has done as to the whole. He has in my view corrected fundamental errors in all of them” (Chinard, 105). Nevertheless, publication in America was seriously delayed. The volume finally appeared in 1817, some two years after the French version was brought out under the title Élémens d’Idéologie, IV partie: Traitéde la Volonté. The interminable delay in securing publication had many causes, but when, finally, Jefferson received the manuscript in English translation he found it, as his correspondence reveals, to be “wretched,” “abominable,” and “mutilated” (Chinard, 138, 141, and 140). To Lafayette, he remarked that it “had been done by a person who understood neither French nor English” (Chinard, 150). By his own account, therefore, Jefferson was obliged to revise it as best he could. Working up to five hours a day for two months or more during the spring of 1816, he eventually produced a translation that, if “unexceptional,” was at least “faithful” to Destutt de Tracy’s original version (Chinard, 138 and 141). It was, however, Jefferson who decided to depart from the pagination adopted by the author in order, as he told John Adams, “to prepare the reader for the dry, and to most of them, uninteresting character of the preliminary tracts” (Chinard, 145). Nonetheless, Jefferson did not begrudge his arduous labors on Destutt de Tracy’s behalf. To the Frenchman he confided that “this, I believe, is the country which will profit most from your lessons” (Chinard, 170). For his part, Destutt de Tracy returned the compliment, indicating that, as an inhabitant of a Europe where the spirit of liberty had been oppressed and broken, all his hopes and affections lay with the United States (Chinard, 179).

      What, then, were the distinguishing features of Destutt de Tracy’s outline of political economy? Most obviously he disputed the theory of production associated with the physiocratic orthodoxy of the eighteenth century. This entailed, first, a rejection of the physiocratic notion that agriculture was the primary source of wealth and, second, a repudiation of the attachment of the physiocrats to a centralized state as a vehicle of economic progress. At issue was a fundamental disagreement about the nature of productive activity, for Destutt de Tracy wished to argue that to produce was to give to things a utility they did not previously possess and, therefore, that all labor from which utility arose was productive. This meant, in contradiction to physiocratic doctrine, that agriculture could be reduced to a branch of manufacturing industry possessing no distinctive characteristics. A farm was “a real manufactory” and a field was “a real tool” (TPE, 106). All those who labored and who belonged to “the laborious class” (107), be they manufacturers or merchants, were producers of utility and, therefore, of riches or wealth. This had a further radical implication: whereas the physiocrats had been prepared to argue that the “sterile” class was largely composed of those not engaged in agriculture, Destutt de Tracy overturned this idea, countering that “the truly sterile class is that of the idle, who do nothing but live, nobly as it is termed, on the products of labours executed before their time, whether these products are realized in landed estates which they lease... or that they consist in money or effects which they lend for a premium” (107).

      Viewed thus, society could be described as “nothing but a succession of exchanges” (95) from which all the contracting parties can be said to benefit. “It is,” Destutt de Tracy clarified, “this innumerable crowd of small particular advantages, unceasingly arising, which composes the general good, and which produces at length the wonders of perfected society, and the immense difference we see between it and a society imperfect or almost null, such as exists amongst savages” (97). This multiplicity of exchanges rested upon three causes of prosperity: the concurrence or uniting of men to labor in a common endeavor, the increase and preservation of knowledge, and the division of labor. Accordingly, the richest society was one where those who worked were “the most laborious and the most skillful” and who produced the greatest utility (109).

      Following Jean-Baptiste Say, Destutt de Tracy believed that all productive activity could be divided into three operations: “theory, application and execution” (113). Seldom in advanced societies were these three activities now performed by the same person, and, consequently, it was possible to identify three species of laborer: the savant or man of science concerned with invention, the entrepreneur who directed and financed the enterprise, and the workman who executed the physical labor required to complete the process of fabrication. All three were entitled to financial reward, but the savant and the workman would always be in the pay of the entrepreneur. Such, Destutt de Tracy declared, “decrees the nature of things” (116), and it was, therefore, only just that the entrepreneur should be rewarded for “the quantity of utility which he will have produced” (116). Next, Destutt de Tracy extended this analysis to include the activity of trade or commerce, arguing that the merchant, being “neither a parasite nor an inconvenient person” (133), was also, exactly like the industrial entrepreneur, a producer of utility. It was thus no exaggeration to say of these two groups that they were “really the heart of the body politic, and their capitals are its blood” (201).

      Having explained how wealth was created and who created it, Destutt de Tracy turned his attention to issues of consumption. Consumption, in his view, was the contrary of production and we were all consumers. However, consumption came in various forms, and Destutt de Tracy was eager in particular to make a distinction between that of “idle” and “active” capitalists (199). The expenditure of the former, he contended, largely deriving from a fixed income in the form of rent or interest on capital, was devoted to their personal satisfaction and, as such, was “absolutely pure loss” and “sterile” (199). In its extreme form it degenerated into “unbridled luxury” (199), the excessive and superfluous expenditure that was both “repugnant to good sense” (204) and damaging to the economy. In contrast, the active capitalist was modest in his consumption patterns. “Industrious men,” Destutt de Tracy wrote, “are commonly frugal, and too often not very rich” (200). They spent little to satisfy personal and family needs and returned their capital to the productive process, thereby increasing the growth and circulation of wealth throughout society.

      Patterns