Nineteenth-Century French Liberal Economists’ Reading of Ricardo Through the Lenses of Their Fear of Socialism

In a paper dealing with the “French views on the existence of an ‘English’ classical school”, Arena speculated that the distinction between a French school of economics and an English one introduced by most of the French liberal economists may have been “a trick to restrain the intellectual competition of the Ricardian school”. This article takes this hypothesis seriously and aims to explain the reasons of such a strategy, by drawing a parallel between the French Liberals’ reading of Ricardo and the evolution of socialist thought, as they interpreted it. The first section deals with their position regarding Ricardo’s method: at first, they unanimously criticized it, which they considered as too abstract and unsuitable for a “moral” science like economics; then, some of them changed their mind on the topic, when the Historical school developed in Germany and rejected the idea of natural laws in economics. The subsequent two sections present the response of French liberal economists to the use of several "laws" originating in classical economists, and put forth in the socialist critique of the unequal distribution of income within capitalist society. They questioned the validity of these “laws”. On the one hand, this led them to oppose Ricardo’s theory of rent: they attempted both to legitimize the payment of a rent to the landowner and claimed that Ricardo’s conclusions, that land rent grows as population increases, was contradicted by facts. On the other hand, they rejected Ricardo’s inverse relationship between wage and profit: they stated that in capitalism, there was no conflict between the interests of workers and capitalists and consequently that there was no necessity for the implementation by the State of a social legislation that more and more Socialists asked for.