Sismondi: Prices, Markets, Wealth, and Happiness

Following earlier research on Sismondi's vision of the instability of a market economy linked to his price theory and to money and banking, the present essay connects these themes with his approach to the social contract by inserting these main results into the Sismondian trilogy of freedom, happiness and wealth. Accordingly, the relationships between social value and wealth are central to this paper: is it possible for Sismondi to conceive of the dynamic emergence of a set of social values that would lead to a social approval of the behaviour that leads to a market coordination and its consequences? Social and material expectations must indeed be simultaneously coordinated for a spontaneous order to exist. It is not enough for Sismondi to postulate market coordination via a price system to achieve a lasting spontaneous order. As the present author has shown in previous articles, since the market mechanism is seen by Sismondi as dysfunctional, it implies that there is no synchronic order and hence it renders the diachronic order unattainable. Some directions of research suggested by Sismondi to resolve this conundrum of an economically inefficient and morally unjust system are eventually discussed. For Sismondi, markets and government would only succeed together to guarantee not only that such an order exists (and that it leads to a coordinated result of economic interactions) but also that it does not offend the sensibility of the agents’ morality.