General Principles

The 3 aims of the study of political economy and sociology are:

1. Having a collection of recipes that are useful to individuals and public authorities in their economic and social activity.

I only have this usefulness in view, just like an author of a handbook rabbit breeding is useful to those who breed rabbits.

2. To propagate a doctrine

There is a difference between a collection of recipes and a treatise on morals.

It is exactly thesame, but rather less obvious, when the author takes for granted the doctrine that he considers to be the best one and simply declares that he is studying the phenomena for the good of humanity.1

By following such a path, botany would study plants in order to identify the ones that are useful to man, geometry would study lines and surfaces for purposes of land surveying, etc.

Sciences have begun in this way.

They were initially arts, but gradually set about studying the phenomena independently of any other aim.

3. To study and ascertain the uniformities present in the phenomena, i.e., their laws , without having any direct practical usefulness in view, without being concerned with providing recipes or precepts, without even seeking the happiness, the utility, or the welfare of mankind, or of one part of mankind.

The aim, in this case, is exclusively scientific: it is to seek knowledge and nothing else.

This Manual is concerned only with procuring this third objective.

This does not imply in the least that I mean to run down or disparage the other two; I only wish to make a distinction among alternative ways of analyzing the material, and to indicate the one that will be adopted in this book.

I will use only words that clearly fit real, well-defined objects, and never to use words that may influence the reader.

I repeat that I do not in the least wish to run down or disparage the latter procedure, which I hold, on the contrary, to be the only one that is capable of carrying conviction with a large number of individuals, and which must be resorted to if one is aiming at this result.

But in this book, I am not trying to convince anybody; I am looking for the uniformities in the phenomena. Those with another objective will have no difficulty in finding plenty of books that will give them satisfaction; they may draw nourishment from these and dispense with reading this one—which, as Boccaccio said of his tales, will not run after anybody to get read. As the proverb says, the world is beautiful because it is varied. 

2. In nearly every branch of human knowledge, the phenomena have been studied from the three points of view we have just indicated; and, usually, the chronological order of these points of view corresponds to that of my enumeration; however, the first one is often mixed with the second, and, in certain very practical matters, the second one is of little use.

Cato’s work, De re rustica, belongs to the first kind;

In the Preface, however, he sometimes adopts the second point of view. The works published in England around the end of the th century advocating new methods of cultivation belong, in part, to the second kind and in part to the first. The treatises on agricultural chemistry and on other similar sciences belong to a large extent to the third kind.

Pliny’s natural history contains chemical and physical recipes; other recipes are to be found in books on alchemy. Modern works on chemistry, on the other hand, belong to the third kind.

3. In most works devoted to political economy, the three methods are still in use, and science has not yet been separated from art.

Not only is this third point of view not clearly and frankly adopted in the treatises on political economy, but most authors disapprove of the exclusive use of this method.

Adam Smith clearly states that:

This would amount to adopting our first point of view exclusively. Fortunately, Smith does not keep to his definition, and most of the time he adopts our third point of view.

John Stuart Mill declares that “Writers on Political Economy profess to teach, or to investigate, the nature of wealth, and the laws of its production and distribution.”

This definition belongs to the third kind; but Mill often adopts the second point of view and preaches the cause of the poor.

M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu says he has reverted to Adam Smith’s method.

Perhaps he has even gone further. In his Traité, he mostly keeps to the first method; he sometimes uses the second one, but rarely the third.

4. Human actions reveal certain uniformities, and it is only because of this property that they can be the object of scientific inquiry. These uniformities bear still another name; they are called laws.

5. Anyone studying a social science, anyone who makes an affirmation about the effects of such an economic, political, or social measure, implicitly acknowledges the existence of these uniformities; otherwise, his inquiry would have no object, his affirmations would be baseless.

If there were no uniformities, one could not, with any degree of approximation, draw up the budget of a state or of a municipality any more than one could, say, that of an industrial company.

Some authors, although not acknowledging the existence of economic uniformities (laws), propose nevertheless to write the economic history of the people of such and such a country; but this is an obvious contradiction.

In order to make a choice among the facts that occurred at a moment in time, and to separate those that are to be retained from those that are to be discarded, the existence of certain uniformities must be acknowledged.

If the facts A, B, C, . . . are to be separated from the facts M, N, P, . . . , this is because it has been observed that the former occur in a uniform sequence, whereas this is not the case with the latter; to assert this is to assert a law. If the man who describes the sowing of wheat does not acknowledge the existence of uniformities, he will have to tell us, for instance, whether the sower’s hair is red or black, as well as to note that sowing takes place after plowing.

Why is the first fact omitted, and the second taken into account? Because, one would say, the first has nothing to do with germination or the growth of wheat. But what does this mean?

Simply that wheat germinates and grows in the same way, whether the sower’s hair is black or red, i.e., that the combination of these two facts presents no uniformity. On the contrary, such a uniformity exists between the fact of the soil having or not having been tilled and the fact that the wheat grows well or badly.

6. When we assert that A has been observed together with B, we do not usually say whether or not we consider this coincidence fortuitous. It is on the strength of such an ambiguity that those writers learn who want to construct a political economy while denying that it is a science.

If you point out the existence of a uniformity or a law, they reply: “We are simply relating what happened.”

But, after having secured acceptance for their proposition in this sense, they use it in another and state that the economic or social phenomena A and B have in some cases been linked in the past, one draws the conclusions that they will also be linked in the future, one is obviously in the process of asserting a uniformity, a law; after that it is ridiculous to seek to deny the existence of economic and social laws.

If one does not admit that there are uniformities, knowledge of the past and the present is mere curiosity, and nothing may be inferred from it regarding the future; the reading of a knightly romance or of the Three Musketeers would have the same value as that of Thucydides’ history.

If, on the contrary, from knowledge of the past, one claims one can draw the slightest inference regarding the future, it is because one admits, at least implicitly, the existence of uniformities.

7. Strictly speaking, there can no more be exceptions to economic and social laws than to other scientific laws. A uniformity that is not uniform is meaningless. But scientific laws have no objective existence. The imperfection of our minds does not permit us to apprehend the phenomena in their entirety,2 and we are obliged to study them separately.

Consequently, instead of general uniformities, which are and will always remain unknown, we are compelled to consider an infinite number of partial uniformities, which crisscross each other, are superimposed on and clash with each other in a thousand ways. When one of these uniformities is considered, and when its effects are modified or hidden by the effects of other uniformities, which we do not intend to consider, we usually say, although the expression is improper, that the uniformity or the law that is considered admits of exceptions.[a] If this way of putting the point is accepted, physical and chemical laws, and even mathematical laws,3 admit of exceptions in the same way as economic laws.

According to the law of gravity, a feather thrown up into the air should fall toward the center of the earth. On the contrary, under the influence of the wind, it is often blown upward. One could thus say that the law of gravity admits of exceptions; but this is an improper expression, which physicists do not use. We are simply in the presence of other phenomena that are superimposed upon those to which the law of gravity refers.4

8. A law or a uniformity is true only under certain conditions, which serve precisely to indicate which phenomena are to be singled out.

For instance, chemical laws that depend upon affinity are different according to whether the temperature is kept within certain limits, or whether it exceeds those limits. Up to a certain temperature, two bodies will not combine; above that temperature, they combine; but if the temperature rises beyond a certain limit, they dissociate.

9. Some of these conditions are implicit; others are explicit. Among the first, one should include only those that can be easily inferred by everybody without the least possibility of error; otherwise, we should have a conundrum and not a scientific theorem.

There is no proposition that cannot be verified under certain specified conditions. The conditions of a theorem are an integral part of the theorem and cannot be separated from it.

10. We do not know, and may never know, a concrete phenomenon in every detail; a gap always remains.5 This is sometimes materially verified.

For instance, it was thought that the entire composition of the atmosphere was known; but one fine day argon was discovered, and a little later, in the same way, a large number of the other gases were discovered in the atmosphere. What could be simpler than the fall of a solid body? However, we do not know and shall never know all its particulars.

11. A great many important conclusions flow from the preceding observation.

As we do not have complete knowledge of any concrete phenomenon, our theories of these phenomena are only approximative. We know only ideal phenomena, which more or less approximate the concrete phenomena. We are in the position of someone who knows of an object only through photographs; however perfect, they will always differ in some way from the object itself. We should thus never judge the value of a theory by trying to find out whether it deviates from the real facts, because no theory can stand or will ever stand such a test.