Piero Sraffa’s St. Simonian temptations. An examination of the Sraffa Papers

Abstract

Why did Piero Sraffa (1898–1983), one of the most important economists of the 20th century, undertake such a significant—albeit never published—study of the St. Simonian texts? And to what extent does Sraffa’s evident interest underline the continuing relevance of St. Simonism today? This paper seeks to determine the exact parameters of Sraffa’s engagement with the St. Simonian school, and then with Saint-Simon himself, through two particular moments: the first comes in a lecture course that Sraffa, an Italian emigrant, gave in Cambridge from 1929 to 1930; the second concerns an apparent project to publish the works of Saint-Simon, which seemed to have consumed a significant part of Sraffa’s energies from the end of the 1950s into the 1960s. In view of the particular characteristics of these unpublished works, the paper makes some interpretative proposals.

Keywords:

• Sraffa
• St. Simonism
• continental banking
• philosophy of science
• philosophy of history

JEL classification:

• B10
• D63
• N00

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous referees, Richard Arena, Giancarlo de Vivo, Nerio Naldi, and Jean-Pierre Potier for their advice and suggestions. We also thank Jonathan Smith for his help with the Sraffa collection. All deficiencies in the text, of course, remain entirely our own responsibility.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 On the organization and accessibility of the Unpublished Papers, or Sraffa Papers, see in particular, De Vivo (2001), Garegnani (1998), Kurz (1998, 2012), Pasinetti (2001), and Smith (1988).

2 These are Sraffa’s notes for a conference scheduled at the Italian Society in Cambridge on 14 May 1929 (Sraffa’s notes are based on the work of the historian Armando Sapori in the 1920s, concerning the merchant companies Bardi and Peruzzi, in the 13th and 14th centuries).

3 It was in 1930 that Sraffa officially became the editor of Ricardo’s writings.

4 Sraffa rejected Keynes’s proposal in 1926 to design a course on value and a course on distribution, but accepted his third proposal for a more applied (“realistic” in Keynes’s words) subject matter: Sraffa then proposed a course on value theory divided into two parts, and a “realistic” course on the relations between banking and industry in continental Europe. In the end Sraffa taught a course entitled “Advanced Theory of Value,” held in autumn of 1928, but separated from the course we are interested in here (cf. Potier 1991, 35; Marcuzzo 2005).

5 Sraffa never quotes any of Saint-Simon’s writings. Saint-Simon is mentioned only through reference to the disciples’ presentations (O. Rodrigues in Le Producteur 1826, and Exposition 1830: D25.1, 10 and 11). De Cecco (2013, 188) wrongly equates Saint-Simon with his disciples. On the role of banks in Saint-Simon, see Yonnet (2004).

6 EDSS gathers together a series of public sessions in 1828–29, prepared collectively, and published in three editions from 1830 (another series of public sessions cover 1829–1830, although Sraffa limits his references to the first years only). This corpus is the main collective reference for St. Simonism after Saint-Simon: it was developed after the death of the master (1825) at a time when the collective doctrinal elaboration of the disciples of Saint-Simon was in full development (just before and after the July Revolution in 1830). The second year covers the oral sessions from November 1829 to June 1830, published in two editions in 1831 and 1831–1832. These sessions have acquired a reputation for being strongly religious in tone, which has often led them to be excluded from the “socialist” and sometimes “republican” framework that would quickly become attached to St. Simonism, at least in France. The passages quoted by Sraffa cover DSS, 259–261, 267, and 273 of the 3rd edition. The pagination indicates that Sraffa used this edition published in August 1831, which was reproduced in 1924 [1831] (Collective author) with the introduction and important scientific notes by Bouglé and Halévy. At that time, Sraffa did not use this reprint, which is still a reference (regarding the first year of the sessions). Nevertheless, it is this edition that he would later buy, and that we find in his library (cf. part II).

7 Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864) was a polytechnic engineer, and one of the two “supreme fathers” of the École saint-simonienne after the death of Saint-Simon in 1825. He worked for a long time at the Mortgage Office (Caisse hypothécaire) and was one of the main editors of the St. Simonians’ banking theory. Olinde Rodrigues (1795–1851), from a family of Portuguese immigrant bankers, and a great mathematician, was one of Saint-Simon’s first disciples during the master’s lifetime. Adolphe d’Eichthal (1804–1886), a banker linked along with his brother Gustave to the disciples of Saint-Simon, also participated in Crédit Mobilier, of which he was vice-president in 1854. Saint-Amand Bazard (1791–1832) was not a banker, but, before becoming “supreme father” of the School with Enfantin, translated and wrote a dissertation on Bentham’s Defence of Usury concerning the decrease in the interest rate.

8 This expression is Sraffa’s translation into English of the expression “l’industrie des banquiers” used by the St. Simonians on the page cited by Sraffa (EDSS, 267).

9 In the St. Simonian scheme, the bank is the physiological transposition of the nervous system (brain and nerves) into the organized social body; the influence of physicians on the doctrine (Bichat, Cabanis and Buchez in particular) was powerful.

10 Émile Pereire (1800–1875) and Isaac Pereire (1806–80) were two brothers from a Portuguese Jewish family who settled in Spain and then in Bordeaux, France, in the middle of the 18th century One of the first disciples of Saint-Simon, Olinde Rodrigues, also linked to the banking world, and brother-in-law of the Pereire family, introduced them to the doctrine of Saint-Simon in 1825.

11 April Issue, 90–93 and 400. Sraffa uses the selection of articles published in book form in 1911. In Unpublished Papers, Sraffa notes “during this period, having acted as liquidator of a large joint-stock bank, he was able to write his monograph on ‘La caduta del Credito Mobiliare,’ which is still unequalled as an analysis of the continental type of banque d’affaires, a veritable masterpiece comparable in some respects to Bagehot’s ‘Lombard Street’” (Manuscript typed in D3.4.1, 1 and 2; Sraffa underlines).

12 Sraffa rightly notes that Aycard was a small Parisian banker who might well fear the influence of Crédit Mobilier (D2.5.1, 3).

13 “Excellent chapters on Credit Mobilier and Crédit Foncier in France and in Germany” (D2.5, 51; our translation from Italian).

14 Loria (1857–1943), in his Corso completo di economia politica (1910), makes room for Saint-Simon in the analysis of the historical development of political economy, as “the first socialist writer in modern times,” but “without scientific or positive content” (1910, 108–109). The presentations of Fourier, Owen and Blanc follow that of Saint-Simon. But in Book IV, Chapter XV (L’organizzazione del credito), Loria returns to the fall of Crédit Mobilier in France (1910, 557–59), emphasizing its negative aspect and the need to respect the specialization of banks. It should also be noted that Paul Lafargue’s text on La propriété. Origine et evolution (1890), whose Italian translation was preceded by a substantial critical introduction written by Loria (1895–1896), contains in part 6 on “capitalist finance” a presentation of the experience of Crédit Mobilier and the banking approach of Saint-Simon and Enfantin (1896, 356–60). Despite his reserved opinion on Loria, given the needs of his training in Turin and also his political commitments, Sraffa was familiar with these texts (Loria was also known for his criticism of Marx’s theory of value in 1901 and his de facto participation in a so-called revisionist movement on the “Marxism crisis”).

15 Einaudi (1874–1961) played a major role in Turin and Italy. Although he was not Sraffa’s direct teacher in financial science (despite his famous course), he was the rapporteur of his PhD thesis. Einaudi discussed monetary issues and policy with Sraffa (mostly in 1927). He was also known for his monographs on economic history and his texts on the history of economic thought. His references to St. Simonism are very limited. When he speaks of the cooperative movement, he shows more sympathy for the Fourierist utopia than for that of Saint-Simon, which he saw as a centralizing and planning precursor of socialism. It should be noted, however, that the title of one of his articles of January 1919, published in the Rivista d’Italia, uses the famous St. Simonian notion of the “government of things.” Regarding La Riforma sociale, which quickly became the voice of the Laboratorio d’economia politica di Turino, in which Einaudi also played an essential role, two notable articles were published in the period: an article in Italian by G. Weill (1894) 2004, an historian and French interpreter of St. Simonism, on the origins of the doctrine of Saint-Simon; and an article by Bernardo Mosca (1921), the son of Gaetano Mosca (see below) on the perception of Saint-Simon’s thought over the last century. Here again, one might think that, given the role of Einaudi in Turin, the links with Sraffa’s father and Sraffa’s assiduous and brilliant work during his training, all these elements were known to him.

16 Solari (1872–1952) was in Turin from 1918. He attached great importance to Auguste Comte’s positivism and to questioning the crisis of individualism in philosophy of law. He directed Renato Treves’s PhD thesis on St. Simonism in Turin (published in 1931). Concerning R. Treves, see the second moment.

17 G. Mosca (1858–941) was a member of Sraffa’s PhD committee. Sraffa had clearly read and worked on his Elementi di Scienza politica (1896, revised and expanded in 1923) as part of his training. Mosca is often considered as the founder of political science in Italy. He underlines three decisive contributions of St. Simonism in political theory: a theory of the political class which is not built on the examination of forms of government (democratic, monarchical etc.), but on the effective modes of exercise of power; a role recognised for a part of society prefiguring the theory of elites; the hypothesis that the ideally organized State is based on an absolute correspondence between services rendered by the individual to society and the rank he is led to occupy (theory of capacities and works). With Auguste Comte as his secretary, Saint-Simon is considered as highly important, and situated in the line of Machiavelli, Marx and Engels, and Gumplowicz and Michels (Mosca 1921, 446, 526 to 530, 535–537, 666, 726). Mosca’s student Federici published a book on Saint-Simon in 1922, prefaced by Mosca in the same vein. It is among Mosca and his entourage that we find the most important and systematic references to Saint-Simon, and these may have influenced Sraffa in his scholarship.

18 Arena stressed the importance of the expression “society” in Sraffa’s main published text (1960), making a link with the term “forms of life” (Wittgenstein’s concept). The Continental Banking manuscript, however, is much less explicit about the notion of “compromise between conflicting interest” (i.e., conventions) than the later 1941–43 Lectures on Industry. The relationships between banking and industrial interests, the formation of cartels of banks, and “amalgamation”, the “permanent organisations for certain classes of businesses” in the 1910–1920s, are not examined from this perspective (cf. the last part of the lecture).

19 See the programmatic page D2.53, 3 in which Sraffa seems to set the framework for his reasoning, linking institutions, history and economic dynamics.

20 It is on this basis that Sraffa feels the need to engage in what may seem like a long digression on the St. Simonian school, with 4 pages of quotation in French from EDSS (D2.51:10–12; D2.52:1–4). These pages were written by Sraffa’s mother, Irma Tivoli (de Cecco 2013, 179).

21 Sraffa undoubtedly underestimates the close ties forged by the Pereire family with Louis Napoleon before and just after the 1851 coup d’état, and the interest Napoleon had from the outset in the creation of Crédit Mobilier against the private Rothschild banks and their links with Bourbons. On the links between the Pereire brothers and Napoléon III, see Davies (2015), especially 107–17.

22 “This form, incidentally, could become dominant only in a country like France, where neither the credit system nor large-scale industry had reached the modern level of development” (Marx (1894) 2004, Book III, section VI, 36, 451).

23 To anticipate our discussion later in the paper, we could say, with Sraffa (1945–1967, D3.12.42, 21-22) that in the case that interests us here, the St. Simonian ideology becomes a cause of changes in the mode of production, not as a “determination,” but as an “abstract cause,” excluding a similarity between the two terms of the relationship.

24 Kurz wrote: “In this context it is worth mentioning, as de Cecco (2005) pointed out, that in his lectures on continental banking, which Sraffa gave to third year undergraduates in Cambridge in the springs of 1929 and 1930, he introduced the idea that different assets and commodities may be arranged in order of liquidity. According to de Cecco, Keynes in his theory of liquidity preference was in all probability influenced by Sraffa’s respective argument, which can be traced back to Sraffa’s studies of “forward exchange rates, around 1919, and provided Keynes with data on the lira’s forward rates” (Kurz and Salvadori 2015, 122 n.15).

25 See especially Enfantin and Rodrigues (1825) and Enfantin (1831)

26 There are also elements scattered in H3.48, 5, 9, and a reference to the OEuvres de Saint-Simon et Enfantin in ed. Dentu (for an examination of the Works of Saint-Simon only) in H3/54. The part on Saint-Simon’s works covers 11 volumes of this edition, but is rarely cited by Sraffa and not found in his library.

27 For instance, an extract from Gouhier’s (1936) book (H3.25, 12–13), or the famous documentary fund of Léon de La Sicotière on Saint-Simon’s manuscripts, for sale at the Hotel Drouot in Paris on November 30, 1959 (H3.25, 41–42, 1–8).

28 All these Saint-Simon’s texts were in Sraffa’s ownership (De Vivo 2014), with 21 others books, and 11 manuscripts (C1 to C11).

29 This concerns the person and work of Jacques Rigomar Bazin. Sraffa undertook research on this author, a friend of Saint-Simon who lived with him, because there was sometimes doubt about the authorship of his writings: his Epître aux dames or Lettre aux dames was sometimes attributed to Saint-Simon (H3/25, 6 and 23–25, diary September 2, 1960; see also H1.11).

30 On 28 September 1958 (see E30: 111), Sraffa seems to have had an appointment with Renato Treves, a legal sociologist and the author in 1931 of a thesis on Saint-Simon (see above). One might think that Treves played a role in encouraging Sraffa to work on Saint-Simon. However, after his return from Argentina (1947), to where he had emigrated in 1938, in 1957 Treves became the de facto president of the Italian Social Science Association (ISSA), the official president being Luigi Einaudi, in the context of the reconstruction of Italian social sciences after fascism and the war: one might therefore also surmise that the meeting, renewed at the International Congress of Sociology held in Milan in September 1959, had a more global and institutional purpose. Surprisingly, Sraffa never refers to Treves’s thesis (1931) and it is not in his library.

31 From December 1958 to March 1961, Sraffa made 10 visits to Paris (5 of which make reference to Saint-Simon), 3 to Milan (all of which referred to Saint-Simon), and 2 to London (all of which referred to Saint-Simon). There are 13 other mentions which appear in the diaries during this most active period. The total number of references from 1958 to 1967 is 27, with a peak of 16 in the 1959–1960 diary.

32 These letters (in H3.41) are exclusively from disciples (not from Saint-Simon). They come from the Fonds La Sicotière, and would therefore have been purchased in 1959 by Sraffa (see description in the official document announcing the sale at the Hôtel Drouot mentioned above in H3.25, 41–42). Concerning this exchange mentioned, see below.

33 The complete edition by Cambridge University Press would run from 1951 to 1973.

34 In Sraffa’s 1966–67 diary we find a handwritten mention of a meeting with Meldolesi on 22 May 1967 (E39, 67).

35 The 2001 English version (published in “A Memoir”: xxxvii) differs somewhat from the Italian: “The work on Ricardo is in itself sufficient to disprove the common assumption that Sraffa was a lazy and inconclusive man. And at the same time there exist many more, little-known examples of his work: on the witches’ trials, on the curate Meslier’s testament, and above all on Saint-Simon and the St. Simonians—research conducted in the French archives for years before being abandoned because the authors were considered too tedious.”

36 While his interest in both authors dates apparently to 1959, the final diary mention of Meslier is on 19 January 1961, whereas the final mention of Saint-Simon dates to 14 June 1966 (assuming, of course, that we can rely on the diaries). The documents concerning Saint-Simon grouped in the Papers are more voluminous than those concerning Meslier; diary mentions are more numerous (27 as opposed to 12), as are the relevant works in his library.

37 Sraffa wondered whether Rodrigues possessed manuscripts by Saint-Simon that were still unknown, as he could not find any trace in the manuscripts of certain pages mentioned by Rodrigues in Le Producteur of 1826.

38 The handwritten letters can still be found today in the collection of the Institute, under the item “Paul Rochette Papers” (ARCH01193).

39 Apart from the books (see part II), the library of Sraffa contains 11 groups of manuscripts of Saint-Simon. It is indicated that « the following documents with the exception of C1 [Projet d’Encyclopédie] have been bound together and at a later date taken apart. The intention seems to have been to rebind or to edit the documents in a different order…” (De Vivo 2014, section C, 24).

40 In Saint-Simon’s time, the association of fluids with vital phenomena was quite common (e.g., Vicq d’Azyr, Lamarck, Cabanis), including the idea of an electrical fluid.

41 On the emphasis on physics and physiology in Saint-Simon’s methodology, and its philosophical significance in the transition from the 18th to the 19th century, the best work remains Frick (1981, first part).

42 Our translation. Quoted by Potier (1991, 30) and partly by de Vivo (2017, 96).

43 In addition to short excerpts, this page contains no less than eleven remarks and questions (in French) on the text by Saint-Simon. Pages H3.25, 17, then 21 (misplaced page), and then 19 and 20 are the most important pages of the Papers dedicated to Saint-Simon (H3.24 and H3.25). These pages of Sraffa’s comments refer to pages 649–690 of the modern edition of the quoted OC (2012, vol. I).

44 We have seen above that Sraffa had set it aside from the set of eleven Saint-Simon manuscripts he possessed (De Vivo 2014, Sraffa Collection, C1, 24).

45 “The divisions of the Encyclop[édie] are incomplete but not a ‘galimatia’”; to make a binary division a general principle of organization of the scientific system is erroneous (H3.25, 17, our translation). Sraffa’s earlier references to Bacon can be found in the Papers of December 1927–December 1928 (concerning efficient causes and final causes). Sraffa made his comments in the context of the debate on causality, his critical view on the “subjective” foundations of economics, and especially his approach to the theory of value and prices based on “objective” magnitudes (Kurz and Salvadori 2005; Arena 2015; and others).

46 Sraffa was thus not influenced by Gouhier (1936) depreciative views of Saint-Simon’s position on science. On Saint-Simon’s philosophy of science, Gouhier’s position has been contested by several specialist philosophers (J.-P. Frick, F. Dagognet, P. Macherey, J. Grange…) or historians (M. Pickering).

47 In Mirsky we find this phrase: “…an explanation in history is an explanation only if it is materialistic, that is to say only if it explains the fact of history by the facts of the physical world” (1931, 454). Minsk also refers critically to Eddington and Jeans (1931, 457).

48 See also: “The purpose of my work is to perfect political science. It seemed right to me to base this science on observations and therefore to elevate it to the level of positive science. I have undertaken, in a word, to create physico-political science…” (Eléments préparatoires du Projet d’Encyclopédie, manuscrit, about 1808, in OC 2012, vol. 1, 441. Our translation).

49 “In Saint-Simon, we find the breadth of view of a genius to whom we owe most of the ideas of future socialism, which is not strictly economic” (Engels 1892 [1911]; this sentence is not found in the book on Dühring, nor in the first text of 1880 and has been added in the English edition of 1892). In Saint-Simon’s own words (Le politique (1819–1820): in OC 2012, 2007–2008): “As for us, we believe that politics must be a sister of astronomy, chemistry and physiology, and that it must not be directly generated by any of them. In a word, it seems to us that the series of historical facts that record the progress of civilization is just as good and as solid a basis for political science as the series of observations on the progress that the stars have followed to found the science that aims to calculate the progress that they will follow” (Our translation).

50 It should be remembered that in October 1947 Sraffa had advised Giulio Einaudi to publish Engels’s Anti-Dühring in Italian (Sraffa, 2017, 12–13). We might also venture (as did Sraffa?) to compare the structure of this text with those of Saint-Simon, since both posit an objective philosophy of nature (dialectical in Engels, physico-organicist in Saint-Simon) as a precondition for a study of social phenomena.

51 Labriola (1895–1896) wrote: “positivism, as elaborated by Saint-Simon in Littré, was essentially historicism, that is to say it tended to explain history, and instead, in Italy all those who call themselves positivists… fell into materialism before Feuerbach…”; and he called A. Comte the “reactionary degenerator of the genius Saint-Simon” (Saggi II: 11; our translation). Sraffa sent the Saggi to Tasca at the end of February 1928 on the occasion of their discussion about the publication of the correspondence between Engels and Labriola (Sraffa 1991, introd. Gerratana, XXIX and note).

52 Sraffa had in his library (De Vivo 2014) the article by Sée (1925) on the subject. But this article is much more concerned with the disciples than with Saint-Simon himself, and, moreover remains rather superficial.

53 Engels 1892 [1911], 3rd part, chap. II. See also chap. I concerning Saint-Simon.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Agence Nationale de Recherche’s research program (ANR) St. Simonism 18-21.