V
THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS of the social question were connected to the conceptual and political transformation that saw the subject of capitalism move from the French right to the French left. By 1847 a multivolume Histoire de la classe ouvrière depuis l’esclave jusqu’au prolétaire de nos jours written by a Christian and socialist named Joseph Robert, known as Robert du Var, could announce:
Rejoice, proletarian, your emancipation is at hand. It is sure and it is certain because you have come to know the cause and remedy of the misfortunes that have befallen you. Placed as you are above the factual by the ideal that you incarnate, you have come to know a higher life than the life that capitalism has made for you and still seeks to prolong. Proletarian, you are not simply a republican; you are a socialist, a socialist like Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen, Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc, Proudhon and, like them, you understand human solidarity and association. You know how to reason of labour and capital and talk of science and art. You know the worth of humanity.1
This was the usage that meant that a term which, until then, had been used mainly in political commentary and in legitimist and royalist political propaganda became more like the concept of capitalism that was passed down from the nineteenth century.
The new meaning was registered very clearly in 1848 in a note added to a eulogy of a once-famous French philanthropist named Benjamin Delessert whose life and achievements as a sugar manufacturer, liberal politician, and philanthropist were the subject of a prize competition put on in 1846 by the Royal Academy of Science, Arts and Fine Arts of his native city of Lyon. In his speech introducing the prize-winning entry, the secretary of the committee responsible for making the award made a point of highlighting the relationship between capital and philanthropy. “Capital,” he asserted, “is the lever used by trade and industry to make the world turn around (remouer). Break that lever that is presently held in the hands of the rich; divide it among everyone; what would you be able to do with that atom of a lever, that drop of water from the immense sea which, once divided, would not be able to turn even a mill made of paper? Let it not be forgotten: wealth divided is universal poverty.”2 To reinforce the point, he inserted a note saying that there had, recently, been a struggle between the poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine and the journalist and socialist Louis Blanc that, he wrote, had given rise to a new word: capitalism. “It is not on capital,” the latter was said to have proclaimed, “that we have declared war, but on capitalism.” But, to the supporter of philanthropy, Blanc’s distinction was meaningless. Capitalism still called for capitalists.
This is something I can see perfectly well and we can all understand this. We can see that it is not really capital that irritates you, but capitalists. But can Monsieur Louis Blanc tell us what will become of capital without capitalists? It will, I suppose, become what water becomes if you take away the reservoir containing it.3
But there was, in fact, a significant distinction between capitalism and capitalists. Capitalists were individuals who owned property, which, because they owned it, was private property. Capitalism, however, did not have to refer immediately or directly either to private property or to real individuals because, as Louis Blanc insisted, it was the name of a system. It was this distinction that was really at issue in the protracted public argument between Louis Blanc and Alphonse de Lamartine.
The argument had, in fact, begun several years earlier when, late in 1844, Lamartine published what he called “a long article on political economy” in the periodical Le Bien public, which, at that time, was something like his own house periodical. The article was entitled “Du droit au travail et de l’organisation du travail” (On the right to work and the organisation of work) and was a full-blooded attack not only on Louis Blanc’s famous pamphlet, Organisation du travail, first published in 1839, but also on what, in his private correspondence, Lamartine called an assortment of “communists, Fourierists, etc.,” who, like Louis Blanc, had adopted the call for the right to work.4 The concept itself was introduced to public debate by the strange early nineteenth-century French socialist Charles Fourier. “I have no wish,” he announced in his Theory of the Four Movements, which began to appear in 1822, “to start an argument about those re-hashed Greek daydreams about the rights of man, which have become so ridiculous. After the revolutions that they caused we are now heading for more troubles because we have forgotten the chief and only useful right among them, the right to work.”5 By the 1830s, Fourier’s new concept had become a subject of a considerable interest. Lamartine’s aim was clearly to add a measure of critical intensity to this debate because he made a point of sending the proofs of his pamphlet to the Parisian press magnate Emile de Girardin to ensure that it would be given as much publicity as possible. Girardin passed it on to the political economist Adolphe Blanqui while Lamartine sent another copy to the equally well-known political economist Frédéric Bastiat. Bastiat published a critical comment on Lamartine’s pamphlet, as too, but with a different objective, did Blanc. The “new word,” capitalisme, that was singled out at a prize-day ceremony in Lyon was therefore the product of a debate between Lamartine and his more forthright political-economist allies, Bastiat and Blanqui, on the one side and Blanc and his more forthright socialist allies, Victor Avril and Pierre Leroux, on the other.
The argument between the two sides began, therefore, long before the subject of the right to work became a live political issue with the revolution of February 1848. It continued even after the 1848 revolution ended with the election of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to be president of the soon-to-be-terminated second French Republic. One measure of its scale and scope was a large two-volume compilation entitled Le droit au travail published by Lamartine’s press ally Emile de Girardin in 1849. The scale and scope of the debate were a measure of the real analytical challenge to the idea of the right to work that Lamartine issued in his 1844 pamphlet. As he presented it, there was a radical contradiction between the concepts of the right to work and individual liberty. In practice, he argued, each could have a real existence only at the expense of the other. In this respect, Lamartine’s treatment of the subject of the right to work was similar to Constant’s treatment of negative and positive liberty. Where Constant took negative liberty to be a threat to positive liberty and called for some sort of unspecified combination of the two, Lamartine acknowledged that the absence of work gave rise to the call for the right to work, but, unlike Louis Blanc, rejected the claim that recognition of the right would in fact supply the work. Over time, the substance of the argument was largely forgotten; it is only relatively recently, notably in the work of Michel Foucault and his student François Ewald, that it has begun to be seen again as something fundamental to the intellectual history of the welfare state and, more broadly, to the intellectual foundations of both modern political thought and modern politics.6
Lamartine set out the problem built into the concept of the right to work very clearly. The initial problem with the concept, he wrote, was that it was a right and, like any other right, it was, by definition, enforceable. Unlike purely moral entitlements or social conventions, rights were legal and could be enforced by government, laws, and the state. “As for the organisation of labour,” Lamartine wrote in 1844, “meaning some sort of sovereign intervention by the state in the relationship of workers to employers and capital to wages, an intervention in which the state regulates production and consumption and governs capital and wages, we have to confess that we do not have enough intelligence to rise up to an understanding of how a free government can be ruled by what is arbitrary and for monopoly to be the basis of free competition.”7 He then went on to spell out the implications of this impossible combination as a series of rhetorical questions.
What do you mean, we need to ask, by the organisation of labour? Is it to be the reestablishment of exclusive guilds and workers’ corporations, of jurandes and maîtrises, to form a set of legal cadres that only a certain number of workers would be allowed to enter for fear that any larger number would exceed the needs of the trade and begin to compete with one another? But it is not hard to see that by guaranteeing work for those inside the cadre, you will be denying it to those outside the cadre and ruin with one hand the work that you want to guarantee with the other. The French Revolution was made so that every type of employment could be freely accessible to every citizen, but do you want now to begin by declaring that work and wages and our daily bread will be accessible to some and inaccessible to others? Having toppled the aristocracy and feudalism from the pinnacle of society, do you want to restore an aristocracy of labour and a feudalism of wages at the lowest levels of your social order? Having destroyed the nobility of ranks, do you want to create a nobility of tools? Having won civil and political liberty, do you now want to establish occupational slavery and arbitrariness? But this would be the most stupid of counterrevolutions! It would mean having two contradictory principles of government in the same state and cutting the nation in two. It amounts to declaring that what is true above is false below and that, while the political and property-owning part of the country will be ruled by liberty, the working and proletarian part will be ruled by what is arbitrary, meaning that there will be a nation of citizens and a nation of slaves. But what is the point of discussion? It is enough to challenge anyone who wants to achieve it to go about realising this suicide of liberty. If there is anyone foolish enough to try it, where is the people that is prepared to suffer it?8
But, for all its rhetorical power, Lamartine’s attack on the concept of the right to work won few supporters, if only because he made it clear that his aim was to identify a position somewhere between free-market liberals like Bastiat and socialists like Blanc.
To Bastiat, Lamartine’s attack on the concept of the right to work did not go far enough. Justice, he argued, was a clear and simple principle that states and their governments existed to maintain and enforce. This was, however, not the case with more nebulous principles like welfare, solidarity, or fraternity. “Fraternity,” Bastiat wrote, “involves, by definition, making a sacrifice for someone else and working for someone else. This, when it is free, spontaneous, and voluntary, I can understand and applaud. The greater the sacrifice the more I am prepared to applaud. But if the principle of fraternity is to be imposed on society by law, meaning, in plain language, if the distribution of the fruits of labour is to be done by legislative means, with no consideration of the rights of labour itself, who is to say how far this principle will go; what form it will be given by legislative caprice; and in what institutions it would come to be incarnated by decrees made from one day to the next? Can a society even exist on these terms?”9
The argument that Bastiat used was an updated version of the old distinction between perfect and imperfect rights established in the tradition of modern natural jurisprudence in the seventeenth century by Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf. Perfect rights, like those attached to contracts, property, or inheritance, could be enforced by law. Imperfect rights, like those associated with friendship, hospitality, or neighbourliness, were voluntary. As Bastiat presented it, the right to work was a right of the latter type. To rely on the state to secure and protect work in the way that it secured and protected property was, Bastiat asserted, a category mistake. Work and employment were, ultimately, matters of individual choice. Property, however, either existed or did not exist. Someone would still be the same person with or without work, but something would be a very different thing depending on whether or not it was owned. At most, the state’s responsibility was to establish conditions that made as many choices and as much work available to as many of its members as possible.
As Bastiat recognised, Lamartine’s position, despite their differences, was nearer to his own. The problem, for Lamartine, was that there did not seem to be a tenable position midway between Bastiat and Blanc, or between the old binary opposition between perfect and imperfect rights. As with the opposition between positive and negative liberty, there did not seem to be a position between individual contracts of employment and generalised legal rights. Opting for the first meant following Bastiat. Opting for the second meant following Blanc. Significantly, however, it was Blanc himself who began to show that a third position was possible, and that it was likely to be found by thinking more fully and clearly about the differences between capitalists and capitalism. Thus, although it is the case that the word “capitalism” was used intermittently quite independently of Blanc, there is still some reason to associate the concept of capitalism with Louis Blanc and, more specifically, with the substance of his argument with Lamartine.10
Blanc first used the term in a vigorous reply to Lamartine. “You reproach the socialists,” he wrote in his periodical Le Nouveau Monde in 1849, “with wanting to suppress capital and capitalists. Idiocy (Bêtise)! What you are doing here is to conflate something that socialists would never conflate and which allows you to attribute your own ignorance to them. In any system, note this well, capital is absolutely indispensable to the work of agricultural or industrial production. But, far from losing its utility in passing from the service of an isolated individual to the service of an association, it actually magnifies it. By concentrating, far from perishing, capital actually grows. The suppression of capitalism has nothing to do with the suppression of capital. Is assembling the separate detachments of an army the same as destroying it?”11 Capitalism, for Blanc, meant the private appropriation of capital. The solution, therefore, was to socialise or nationalise it. Capital was, therefore, the means to neutralise capitalism. National or social capital would have all the advantages of scale and scope that were unavailable to capital that was privately and individually owned. It could be raised in bulk, invested in bulk, to produce in bulk and, on the basis of this massive increase in output, could then be used to distribute in bulk. It would provide the means to turn many separate small-scale organisations into a smaller number of much larger vertically and horizontally integrated organisations. Capital without capitalism was production on a social scale and the promise of a different world. This was the reason for the title of Louis Blanc’s periodical, Le nouveau monde (The new world), and its close similarity to the title of the Anglo-Welsh socialist Robert Owen’s The New Moral World.