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2
ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY *1
1895
I said above that for the moment I did not propose to show the application of my ideas to politics and
to moral ethics, but by applying them to political economy—fairly freely by the way and without
binding myself to a methodical order—I am beginning partially to fill in this gap. Even though this
science has for its proper subject that fraction of human activity engaged in industrial work, it long
ago extended and increased its domain to include any form of activity. Precursors of the sociologists,
the economists strove to expand over the whole field of the sociologists, who did not feel the
insufficiency of their mutilated sociology until the socialists protested; these socialists were
themselves forerunners of the sociologists, and no less defective than the economists. The error of the
economists, let us say right away, was to construct only individual teleology, to present it falsely as a
social teleology, as the whole of social teleology, and to think themselves able to create the latter
without any considerations drawn from logic.
The successive encroachments of political economy are manifest. Think of its principal divisions
—production, division, consumption of wealth—and examine them separately. It will be seen that
basically all three are usurpations: the first from political science, the second from legal science, the
third from ethics. As far as production is concerned, I am well aware that the liberal school of
economists advocates the non-intervention of the state, but advising the state to withdraw when its
presence is indiscreet and harmful to its own ends is nonetheless speaking as a statesman and positing
rules for an intelligent policy. If politics, that superior art, claimed to become a science in its turn—
imitating pedagogy, that modest art which suddenly presumed to inflate itself into a sublime science—
it would be engaged in formulating the causes of the national strength as well as its constituent
elements. But at a time when strength seems to be included in wealth, as the species in the genus, it
seems that the best way to attain maximum power is to seek the maximum of general wealth.
Moreover, individualism and liberalism seem to have been less a constitutional characteristic than a
passing accident or a childhood illness, as it were, of the nascent political economy, misled by the
Leibnitzian optimism of the harmonist Bastiat *2 and by blind faith in providence, which would make
foresight useless. As it grows, political economy discloses its socialist goals and plays politics with
everything. And in fact, what is a minister or a great king or leader of people for, if not to direct the
productive forces of the nation in the direction most favorable to public enrichment? . . .
Thus the economist begins as a statesman and ends up as a jurist and moralist. This means that
above and beyond economic science, itself somewhat limited, there is an economic point of view
applicable to all branches of human behavior. What is the distinctive characteristic of this point of
view? How should it be rectified? What are its gaps and its necessary complement? It is these
questions that we shall now try to answer.
The economic point of view is a way of conceiving social teleology, a conception applicable to
everything—military operations and administrative functions, artistic compositions and works of
charity—and one that tends to prevail more and more in our age of imitation-fashion even if at some
later time, when the spirit of tradition is reborn, it pales once again before a sufficiently increased
legal and moral conception. Shall we say that the jurists and the moralists are primarily occupied
with coordinating man’s various goals, while the economist prefers to study means, which he terms