Sadi Carnot on Political Economy. Science, Morals, and Public Policy in Restoration France (original) (raw)

Abstract

There is good reason to believe that Sadi Carnot took almost as keen an interest in political economy as he did in the theory of the heat engine. His brother Hippolyte implied as much in his Mémoires sur Carnot par son fils (1863), where he referred to Sadi as having devoted himself to economics “with remarkable penetration”, especially after a visit in 1821 to see his father, Lazare, in exile in Magdeburg. Sadi, it seems, had borne the hopes of his father, who insisted that political economy would never become the rigorous “new science” he wanted it to be until mathematicians turned their minds to the discipline and applied “the experimental method”. Hippolyte elaborated the point some years later in the biographical sketch that he appended to the 1878 edition of the Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu. In the sketch, he reproduced a “fragment sur l’économie politique”, which appears either to have been copied from a manuscript of Sadi’s now lost or to have been composed by Hippolyte on the basis of his reading of such a manuscript or possibly of one of the few manuscripts in Sadi’s hand that have survived. Thereafter, Carnot’s ideas on political economy went unnoticed until an important paper by Jacques Grinevald drew attention to them during the conference of 1974 to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Réflexions.

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Notes

    1. Hippolyte Carnot, Mémoires sur Carnot par son fils, 2 vols. (Paris: Pagnerre, 1863), vol. 2, 616.
    1. Hippolyte Carnot, “Notice biographique sur Sadi Carnot”, in Sadi Carnot, Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu et sur les machines propres à développer cette puissance (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1878), 71–87, esp. (for the transcribed text) 84–86.
    1. Jacques Grinevald, “Présentation d’un manuscript inédit de Sadi Carnot”, in Sadi Carnot et l’essor de la thermodynamique. Paris, Ecole polytechnique 11_–_13 juin 1974 (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1976), 383–387, followed by “Manuscrit inédit de Sadi Carnot concernant l’économie politique et les finances publiques”, 389–395. The latter text is Grinevald’s transcription of a manuscript subsequently published as Appendix B1 in the edition of Carnot’s Réflexions cited in the next footnote. The content of the fragment transcribed by Hippolyte (see note 2, above) corresponds very roughly to that of the first seven pages or so of this manuscript, but only a few passages in Hippolyte’s fragment appear verbatim in the manuscript.
    1. Sadi Carnot, Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu. Edition critique avec introduction et commentaire, augmentée de documents d’archives et divers manuscrits de Carnot par Robert Fox (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1978).
    1. Ibid., 273–312. All my subsequent references to Carnot’s manuscripts are to the texts on political economy as reproduced in these pages.
    1. On the broad similarity between Carnot’s ideas and Sismondi’s, I share the tentative opinion of Jacques Grinevald. See Grinevald, “Présentation d’un manuscript”, 385.
    1. Carnot, Réflexions (1978 edn.), 276, 281–282, and 309–310.
    1. Ibid., 276 and 309–310. Cf. the similar statement of these virtues in J.-C.-L. Sismonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, ou de la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population, 2 vols. (Paris: Delaunay, and Treuttel and Wurtz, 1819), vol. 2, 178–179. My subsequent references to the Nouveaux principes are to this edition. For a modern English edition with a helpful commentary, see Sismondi, New principles of political economy. Of wealth in its relation to population, trans. and ed. by Richard Hyse (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 1991).
    1. Carnot, Réflexions (1978 edn.), 284, 293, 295–296. The dangers of an uncontrolled growth in population are the subject of Book VII of Sismondi’s Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, vol. 2, 248–366.
    1. David Ricardo, Des principes de l'économie politique et de l'impôt, traduit de l'anglais par F.-S. Constancio, avec des notes explicatives et critiques par M. Jean-Baptiste Say, 2 vols. (Paris: J.-P. Aillaud, 1819), vol. 1, 63–106 (chapter 2, “Du fermage ou profit des terres [Rent]”).
    1. Ibid., vol. 2, 128–167 (chapter 22, “Des primes d’exportation, et des prohibitions d’importation”), esp. 153–154.
    1. Carnot, Réflexions (1978 edn.), 276–278.
    1. The consequences for agriculture of absentee landlords are explored in Book III of Sismondi’s Nouveaux principes d’économie politique; see, for example, chapter 3 (“De l’exploitation patriarcale”), in vol. 1, 166–177; also chapters 8–10, ibid., 217–251.
    1. Carnot, Réflexions (1978 edn.), 277.
    1. Ibid., 275.
    1. Ibid., 285.
    1. Jean-Baptiste Say, Traité d’économie politique, ou simple exposition de la manière dont se forment, se distribuent, et se consomment les richesses, 4th edn., 2 vols. (Paris: Deterville, 1819), vol. 1, 232–241 (Book III, chapter 4, “Des effets de la consommation improductive en général”), esp. 232. I quote the passage as translated in Say, A treatise on political economy [from the American edition of 1836], with a new introduction by Munir Quddus and Salim Rashid (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 396–401 (396). All subsequent references, however, are to the fourth French edition, the one most probably used by Carnot. For a more diffuse discussion in the same spirit, see Book II (“Formation et progrès de la richesse”) of Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, vol. 1, 60–149.
    1. Carnot, Réflexions (1978 edn.), 285–295.
    1. Ibid., 289
    1. Ibid., 285–289, 292–293, and 294.
    1. The theme dominates the notes in section B2, in Carnot, Réflexions (1978 edn.), esp. 297–308. It reappears in the manuscripts in section B3 in Hippolyte’s hand (but presumably copied from manuscripts of Sadi’s), esp. 311.
    1. For the metaphor of a father’s responsibility for his children, see ibid., 285 and 287.
    1. Ibid., 294–295.
    1. Ibid., 295.
    1. Ibid., 300.
    1. The point is made several times in the notes in section B2; ibid., esp. 300–306.
    1. Ibid., 302.
    1. Ibid., 302–303.
    1. On which, see my introduction to Carnot, Réflexions (1978 edn.), 16–36 and Fox, “The challenge of a new technology: theorists and the high-pressure steam engine before 1824”, in Sadi Carnot et l’essor de la thermodynamique, 149–167.
    1. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Lazare Carnot savant. A monograph treating Carnot’s scientific work, with facsimile reproductions of his unpublished writings on mechanics and on the calculus, and an essay concerning the latter by A. P. Youschkevitch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 90–100 and “The scientific work of Lazare Carnot, and its influence on that of his son”, in Sadi Carnot et l’essor de la thermodynamique, 23–32. Gillispie identifies parallels between Sadi’s conditions for achieving maximum efficiency in a heat engine and Lazare’s criteria for maximizing power from water-wheels and other hydraulic machinery. In a water-wheel, for example, Lazare set it as a condition that the water in a millstream should be travelling with the same velocity as the vanes of the wheel, so as to avoid wasteful percussion. See below on Sadi’s analogous discussion of the need to avoid a wasteful re-establishment of the equilibrium of caloric.
    1. Although Quesnay’s manuscript sketch dates from 1758, the Table was not printed until 1759, when the 12-page “Explication du tableau économique” was also printed with it in a third edition of the Tableau économique. For the Tableau and its publishing history, see François Quesnay et le physiocratie, 2 vols. continuously paginated (Paris: Institut national d’études démographiques, 1958), vol. 2, 667–668 and 675–682, and the plates between 672 and 673.
    1. Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, vol. 1, 112.
    1. Ibid., 81–82 and 84, corresponding to Réflexions (1824 edn.), 23–24 and 26.
    1. Carnot, Réflexions (1978 edn.), 275–276.
    1. Say was appointed as the first holder of the chair in 1819. The designation “industrial economy” appears to have been chosen in preference to “political economy” in an attempt to divert criticism by the reactionary regime of the Bourbon Restoration.
    1. Carnot, Réflexions (1978 edn.), 32–36.
    1. Say, Traité d’économie politique (1819 edn.), vol. 1, 226–241, where “consommation improductive” and “consommation reproductive” appear in the titles of chapters 3 and 4 of Book III. The same titles had been used in the first edition (of 1803) and continued to be used in all later editions.
    1. Ibid., vol. 2, 242–263 (in Book III, chapter 5).
    1. Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, vol. 1, 288.
    1. See, for example, Sismondi’s identification of the overriding goal of government as the advancement of “jouissances nationales” (“national enjoyments”, as Richard Hyse’s translation has it), in Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, vol. 1, 53–55. Cf. also the opening words of the book: “The science of government takes, or should take, as its aim the happiness of men in society” (p. 1).
    1. Carnot, Réflexions (1978 edn.), 280, 297–299 and 306–312.

Acknowledgements

I am pleased to record my debt to Donald Winch for helpful discussions of Carnot’s manuscripts on political economy during our stay at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where we were both members in 1974–1975. I also have grateful memories of a discussion and subsequent correspondence with Keith Hutchison. Both Donald and Keith will almost certainly have forgotten these exchanges. But this article bears the marks of their comments. Correspondence with Jacques Grinevald too has been important, and I express my equally warm thanks to him.

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    Robert Fox

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    Jed Z. Buchwald

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Fox, R. (2011). Sadi Carnot on Political Economy. Science, Morals, and Public Policy in Restoration France. In: Buchwald, J. (eds) A Master of Science History. Archimedes, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2627-7\_23

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