![](\"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Louis_Blanc_by_Carjat_1848-300.jpg\")
\nLouis Blanc (1811-1882)<\/p>\n
\nLouis Blanc (1811-1882)<\/p>\n
When I was researching Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bastiat\u2019s series of anti-socialist pamphlets which he wrote between 1848 and 1850 I looked at the works of the main socialist theorists who were the subject of his ire (Louis Blanc, Victor Considerant, Ledru-Rollin, and Joseph Proudhon). Out of this I drew up a list of their main objections to private property and the free market. These socialist writers also provoked a spirited response from the political economists (Charles Dunoyer, Michel Chevalier, L\u00e9on Faucher) who in turn wrote a series of critical works to rebut these criticisms in the period between 1845 and 1853, of which Bastiat\u2019s essays were only a small part of a larger whole but which were of special note for their wit and cleverness.<\/p>\n
I plan to put online as many of the works (both pro- and anti-socialist) online as I can. Also, in a series of posts I plan to outline the main criticisms of markets and wage labour by the socialists, the response by the political economists, beginning with the French and then moving on to the English and Germans.<\/p>\n
I will begin with the French socialists because Paris and the intellectuals who gathered there played a very important role in the emergence of socialist ideas in the first half of the 19th century. The French form of socialism can found in a variety of flavors:<\/p>\n
The so-called \u201cutopian socialists<\/strong>\u201d who wanted to create model socialist communities on a voluntary basis in which the superiority of socialist ways of living and working could be demonstrated to others. This group included Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and their major works were: The electoral or political socialists<\/strong> who wanted to work within the electoral system and to introduce legislation in order to regulate the \u201ccapitalist\u201d or free market system and to encourage the creation of alternative ways of organizing labour and production, where the state would guarantee jobs for every worker (\u201cle droit au travail\u201d (the right to a job)) which would be paid for by taxpayers. In order to do this, the voting franchise had to be expanded to allow ordinary working people to vote (this was severely limited in pre-1848 France), and these new voters had to be persuaded to vote for socialist candidates in the elections. Gustave de Molinari called this kind of socialism \u201csocialism from below.\u201d The main theorists of and political activists in this form of socialism were Louis Blanc (1811-1882), Victor Considerant (1808-1893), and Alexandre Ledru-Rollin (1807-1874). It should be noted that Considerant wrote a \u201csocialist manifesto\u201d the year before Karl Marx wrote his famous Communist Manifesto<\/em> in February 1848, and Ledru-Rollin later that same year. Their main works include: The anarchist socialism<\/strong> of Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) which combined aspects of utopian socialism (workers starting and running their own workshops outside of the state) and electoral socialism (using the government\u2019s taxing and regulating powers to set up a \u201cPeople\u2019s Bank\u201d to offer low or zero interest rate loans to these workshops). Proudhon\u2019s main works from this period are: The bureaucratic or state socialism<\/strong> of political leaders like Louis Napol\u00e9on Bonaparte (Napoleon III 1852-70) who used the power of the state run by elites to introduce socialist measures \u201cfrom the top down\u201d. Molinari called this form of socialism \u201csocialism from above\u201d. It would be continued under Otto von Bismarck in the Second German Reich (1871-1918) between 1883-89 when the foundations of the modern welfare state were laid down. Louis Napol\u00e9on Bonaparte had been influenced by the socialist ideas of Saint-Simon as he shows in his books Des id\u00e9es napol\u00e9oniennes<\/em> (1839) and L\u2019Extinction du paup\u00e9risme<\/em> (1844).<\/p>\n Mention shield also be made of the revolutionary or so-called \u201cscientific\u201d socialism<\/strong> of Karl Marx (1818-1883) who lived and worked in Paris 1843-45, Brussels 1845-48 (where he attended a meeting of the free market Congress of Economists in 1847 to deliver a speech critical of free trade), and Paris 1848-49. His major works from this period include: The French socialists had an opportunity in the early months of the February Revolution of 1848 to put some of their ideas into practice with the National Workshops scheme run by Louis Blanc. This was the first attempt to create a modern welfare state, and was the precursor of what would emerge after WW2 in western Europe, UK, and later USA. The idea was for the state to provide tax-payer funded employment for those who were out of work as the first step towards a universal state-guaranteed “right to a job\u201d (droit au travail), a measure which they also tried to make part of the new French constitution which was debated over the summer of 1848.<\/p>\n This is how Louis Blanc in 1841 conceived the role of government in running the \u201cateliers sociaux\u201d (social workshops) which would replace private firms operating in a free market and which he attempted to put into practice in 1848:<\/p>\n \nLe gouvernement serait consid\u00e9r\u00e9 comme le r\u00e9gulateur supr\u00eame de la production, et investi, pour accomplir sa t\u00e2che, d\u2019une grande force. \nThe government ought to be considered as the supreme regulator of production, and ought to be invested with great coercive powers in order to carry out its task. Source: \u201cConclusion. De quelle mani\u00e8re on pourrait, selon nous, organiser le travail\u201d in Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail. Association universelle. Ouvriers. – Chefs d\u2019ateliers. – Hommes de lettres<\/em>. (Paris: Administration de librairie, 1841. First edition 1839), pp. 76-93.<\/p>\n What is important for our purposes here is that is was during this period that the basic socialist criticisms of the free market were first expressed at some length and with some coherence, and solutions proposed (usually involving state ownership, regulation of economic activity, and transfer payments to the poor and unemployed) which would remain essentially the same for the next hundred years or so.<\/p>\n I will describe the socialists criticisms of the free market and wage labour and the response by the political economists in another post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Louis Blanc (1811-1882) When I was researching Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bastiat\u2019s series of anti-socialist pamphlets which he wrote between 1848 and 1850 I looked at the works of the main socialist theorists who were the subject of his ire (Louis Blanc, Victor Considerant, Ledru-Rollin, and Joseph Proudhon). Out of this I drew up a list of their … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-socialism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n1. Saint-Simon, L\u2019Organisateur<\/em> (1819-1820) and Du syst\u00e8me industriel<\/em> (1822)
\n2. Charles Fourier, Le Nouveau monde industriel et soci\u00e9taire<\/em> (1829-30).<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Considerant300.jpg\")
\nVictor Considerant (1808-1893)<\/p>\n
\n1. Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail. Association universelle. Ouvriers<\/em> (1841) in French HTML<\/a> and English HTML<\/a>; and Le Socialisme. Droit au travail, r\u00e9ponse \u00e0 M. Thiers<\/em> (1848)
\n2. Victor Considerant, Principes du Socialisme. Manifeste de la D\u00e9mocratie au XIXe si\u00e8cle<\/em> (1847) in French HTML<\/a> and English HTML<\/a>; and Droit de propri\u00e9t\u00e9 et du droit au travail<\/em> (1848)
\n3. Ledru-Rollin, \u201cThe Election Manifesto of the Montagnards\u201d (Manifeste des repr\u00e9sentants de la Montagne) (Dec. 1848)<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/LedruRollin_by_Mongez300.jpg\")
\nAlexandre Ledru-Rollin (1807-1874)<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Proudhon300.jpg\")
\nPierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)<\/p>\n
\n1. Qu’est-ce que la propri\u00e9t\u00e9? ou Recherches sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernement<\/em> (1840) in French HTML<\/a> and English HTML<\/a>; Syst\u00e8me des contradictions \u00e9conomiques, ou philosophy de la mis\u00e8re<\/em> (1846); Le droit au travail et le droit de propri\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em> (1850); and his debate with Bastiat on Free Credit<\/em> (1850)<\/p>\n
\n– Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844<\/em> (The Paris Manuscripts) written while he was living in Paris
\n– Wage Labour and Capital<\/em> (1847)
\n– Undelivered speech in Brussels to the Congress of Economists attacking free trade, \u201cThe Protectionists, the Free Traders and the Working Class\u201d (16 and 18 September 1847)
\n– Manifesto of the Communist Party<\/em> (1848) presented to the German Workers Association in Paris in February 1848
\n– these early writings would be consolidated into his more mature works such as Grundrisse<\/em> (Sketch of a Criticism of Political Economy (1857); A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy<\/em> (1859); and Capital<\/em>, Vol. I (Das Kapital) (1867)<\/p>\n
\nCette t\u00e2che consisterait \u00e0 se servir de l\u2019arme m\u00eame de la concurrence, pour faire dispara\u00eetre, la concurrence.
\nLe gouvernement l\u00e8verait un emprunt, dont le produit serait affect\u00e9 \u00e0 la cr\u00e9ation d\u2019*ateliers sociaux* dans les branches les plus importantes de l\u2019industrie nationale.
\nCette cr\u00e9ation exigeant une mise de fonds consid\u00e9rable, le nombre des ateliers originaires serait rigoureusement circonscrit; mais, en vertu de [103] leur organisation m\u00eame, comme on le verra plus bas, ils seraient dou\u00e9s d\u2019une force d\u2019expansion immense.
\nLe gouvernement \u00e9tant consid\u00e9r\u00e9 comme le fondateur unique des *ateliers sociaux*, ce serait lui qui r\u00e9digerait les statuts. Cette r\u00e9daction, d\u00e9lib\u00e9r\u00e9e et vot\u00e9e par la repr\u00e9sentation nationale, aurait forme et puissance de loi.
\nSeraient appel\u00e9s \u00e0 travailler dans les *ateliers sociaux*, jusqu\u2019\u00e0 concurrence du capital primitivement rassembl\u00e9 pour l\u2019achat des instruments de travail, tous les ouvriers qui offriraient des garanties de moralit\u00e9.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nThis task would entail using the weapon of competition itself in order to make competition disappear.
\nThe government would raise a loan the proceeds of which would be used to create *social workshops* in the most important sectors of national industry.
\nThis creation (of workshops) would require the investment of considerable funds and the number of of workshops would at first be strictly limited; but in virtue of the fact of their very organisation, as one will see below, they would be endowed with a huge power of expansion.
\nSince the government would be considered to be the sole founder of these *social workshops,*it would be it (the government) which would draw up the statutes. This document, deliberated and voted upon by the national representative body would have the form and power of the law.
\nAll workers who could offer guarantees of their moral (uprightness) would be called upon to work in the *social workshops*, until (enough) primitive capital had been gathered to purchase the tools of work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n