At the Origins of the Valorisation of the Economy (15th–19th Centuries) – Article 5/5
During the eighteenth century, Great Britain conferred an unprecedented status on the economy. The development of credit and investment projects, the gradual emergence of a manufacturing industry and a consumer society, the expansion of an increasingly integrated domestic and colonial market—all this helped make enrichment an ordinary horizon. The theoretical justifications offered by Hutcheson, Mandeville, and above all Smith provided these transformations with a moral and political grammar: well-understood interest, the division of labour, and commerce appeared as legitimate drivers of social order. By the end of the eighteenth century, the economy was no longer merely a set of necessary practices; it tended to be established as a social principle capable of sustaining political cohesion.
From this point of view, the American and French revolutions can be seen as indirect factors in the valorisation of the economy. They did not erupt in the name of growth or purchasing power, but in the name of political motives: liberty against tyranny, equality after the society of orders, the pursuit of happiness, or fraternity. The Declaration of Independence evokes happiness as a legitimate end, and the American Constitution gives explicit place to prosperity; yet neither the Founding Fathers nor the philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle reduces happiness to material accumulation alone. Prosperity itself is not a new word: efforts to enrich kingdoms already occupied much of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century policy. What changes over time is the growing weight of the economy in the very definition of these political objectives.
The first Industrial Revolution, at the hinge of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, amplified the impulse given in Great Britain. Industry provided a model of social organisation—Saint-Simon saw in it the matrix of a new society—and an era of sustained growth opened in several European countries. But for the question that concerns us here, that revolution is not an absolute starting point: it extends and intensifies a process of valorisation already under way. The real novelties of the nineteenth century lie less in techniques or volumes produced than in the theoretical and moral frameworks that make it possible to think of economy, work, and distribution as structures of social life. In this final article, therefore, event-history will recede into the background, in favour of an inquiry into the categories that installed the economy at the heart of politics.
The argument unfolds in four stages. We shall first examine how utilitarianism provided, in the nineteenth century, a general justification for the centrality of the economic sphere. We shall then present the many critiques directed at the moralities of interest. The third part will show how work is instituted as a social value, a principle of integration, and an experience of identity. Finally, the fourth part will analyse the distribution of wealth as the knot of economic politics, before a general conclusion returns to four centuries of valorisation of the economy and to the impasses it now reveals.
From the Ethics of Virtues to Calculable Utility
Bentham: Utility against Natural Right
At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jeremy Bentham systematised utilitarianism by formulating it as an explicit principle of government.1 The “principle of utility” approves or disapproves of any action according to the tendency it shows to increase or diminish the happiness of those concerned. Its aim is to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number. To make this criterion operational, Bentham argues that, at least in principle, pleasures and pains can be compared by their intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, and their chain effects. He thus develops a calculus designed to guide not only individual choices but, above all, legislation: criminal law, taxation, and institutions must be assessed by their aggregated effects on collective well-being. Compared with Smith, who already linked economic order to the dynamics of individual interests, Bentham radicalises the move by reducing interest to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and by subordinating every public decision to an evaluation of its measurable consequences.
This formalisation breaks with the Enlightenment political process founded on natural right and the “rights of man.”2 Bentham sees in these allegedly natural rights political fallacies: formulas with no real referent, whose force derives from their rhetorical power rather than any ontological consistency. To claim that, prior to any positive law, there would exist inalienable liberty or equality is, for him, to misunderstand what actually moves individuals—the pursuit of their interests—and to misidentify the task of government. Government must begin from what it observes: subjects who seek certain pleasures, avoid certain pains, and institutional arrangements capable of altering the reckoning they make between advantages and sacrifices.
The political problem is then framed as follows: how can individuals be brought to give up certain immediate pleasures, or to accept certain constraints, so that society, taken as a whole, can function? For Bentham, to govern is to work on the material of interests by adjusting the system of punishments and rewards. The goal is to secure the sacrifices required to maintain social cohesion by linking, as far as possible, each person’s well-understood interest to the utility of the greatest number. Abstract rights, posited as prior and superior to laws, provide no instrument for this operation; on the contrary, they foster the illusion that institutions could be judged without regard to their concrete effects on individual experience.
This is the basis of his critique of the French Revolution.3 The 1789 Declaration, by erecting natural rights as a supreme norm, offers, in his view, a permanent justification for insurrection against existing laws: it has an “anarchic” character in that it places positive law under the threat of a constant appeal to an imaginary nature. The so-called natural rights thus undermine the only effective rights—the legal rights—that members of a society can possess, since they hold only through the guarantees that a government is able to provide. Liberty, equality, security do not precede laws: they are “juridical creatures”, produced and protected by the legal order. By substituting for the metaphysics of natural right an anthropology of interests and a criterion of calculation, Bentham opens the way to permanent reformism: institutions are valid insofar as they contribute, in a verifiable way, to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Mill’s Liberal Utilitarianism vs Comte’s Positivism
John Stuart Mill retains the utilitarian grammar—the calculation of consequences in terms of happiness—but combines it with a liberalism that gives more place to autonomy and to “higher pleasures”, those that engage the highest intellectual and moral faculties.4 Even if utility remains the ultimate criterion, the flourishing of individuality, the diversity of ways of life, and culture become essential components of the happiness to be measured. Political economy, far from being a mere art of governing, must then take the form of a science capable of describing and comparing social states in light of these ends.
In the Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill puts this demand to the test when he analyses the stationary state of wealth. Against the obsession with indefinite growth, he argues that an economic context in which wealth and population cease to increase may be preferable to an unlimited race for accumulation, provided that a better distribution of wealth is secured. In such a situation, humanity has leisure to cultivate freely the pleasures of life, to contemplate nature, to progress intellectually, morally, and socially; and techniques, instead of being limited to the creation of wealth, make it possible to reduce working time.5 The central economic issue is no longer production alone, but the conditions of an “art of living” that sacrifices neither nature nor autonomy to the increase of capital. Mill does not break with utilitarianism; he stretches its consequences towards a critique—still topical—of the ideology of unlimited material progress.
This concern also appears in On Liberty (1859), where Mill fears the “tyranny of opinion” and the conformist pressure of a commercial society that tends to impose uniform ways of life.6 He worries about a form of social despotism, more diffuse than political oppression, in which the commercial spirit dictates not only the means of life but its ends. Hence the demand to protect minority “experiments in living”, not in the name of an abstract right, but because a society that truly maximises happiness must preserve a diversity of characters, lifestyles, and values. Here again, the language is utilitarian, but the target is the hegemony of an economic rationality that claims to replace any other hierarchy of goods.
Auguste Comte’s positivism shares with Mill a desire to conceptualise social facts through science. Comte acknowledges, even more radically, the intellectual crisis opened by the French Revolution and by industrialisation. In the wake of Saint-Simon, who makes industry the organising principle of a new society, he affirms the need for a complete reorganisation of knowledge and institutions on the basis of the positive sciences.7 But whereas Saint-Simon explicitly entrusts power to the “industrialists”, Comte and Mill converge on a point that Lucien Lévy-Bruhl brings to light in the correspondence between the two men: Europe’s “mental regeneration” must precede its moral regeneration.8 So long as categories inherited from theology and metaphysics dominate, no lasting reform of mores and institutions is possible.
Mill admires in Comte the effort to construct a “social physics” that ranks the sciences and makes sociology the synthesising science of human phenomena.9 He nevertheless judges the Comtean construction to be too systematic: the claim to enclose all knowledge within a unified doctrine, crowned by a “Religion of Humanity”, seems to him incompatible with the critical independence that science requires. The break crystallises around two connected issues. On the one hand, Comte maintains a traditional hierarchy between the sexes, whereas Mill makes equality between men and women a central stake of modern freedom (The Subjection of Women).10 On the other hand, Mill refuses to reduce psychology to a mere appendix of physiology and sociology: he defends the idea of a science of character (“ethology”) that cannot be reduced to the Comtean scheme.11
However different they are, these trajectories converge towards a scientification of social questions. With Comte and Quetelet, “social physics” and social statistics seek to extract numerical regularities of crime, marriage, mortality, and class behaviours.12 Virtues and vices tend to be reformulated in terms of variables, causes, and effects; the old grammar of virtues gives way to that of social laws and incentives. But this scientification only marginally alters the underlying economic logic: scarcity, competition, and the search for interest continue to structure the horizon of the possible. Mill opens a breach with the idea of a stationary state, Comte with his critique of the disorders born of the Revolution; neither of them, however, re-elaborates in depth the status of growth and accumulation. The economy remains the basic language that these approaches tend to render rigorous and calculable.
The Economy as a Target of Critique
The Many Critiques of the Moralities of Interest
If the moralities of interest—by which we mean a set of doctrines that, without being reducible to utilitarianism, take the pursuit of one’s own advantage as an ordinary—and often legitimate—driver of social order13—gradually establish themselves as the dominant philosophical grammar of political economy throughout the nineteenth century, they also provoke a series of critiques from very different milieus: political, economic, literary, philosophical, sociological, and religious.
Tocqueville sees in modern democracy the temptation to retreat into the “love of material enjoyments”: in Democracy in America he fears that a “soft despotism” could settle in, where a benevolent administrative power organises existence around mere convenience, at the risk of infantilising individuals primarily concerned with comfort.14 In The Old Regime and the Revolution he warns about the formation of an “industrial aristocracy” that durably subordinates lives to the logic of economic interests just as noble privileges recede.15 Political critique thus points to the danger of a social order in which utility and interest override civic liberty.
On the side of heterodox economists, Sismondi, in the Nouveaux principes d’économie politique (1819), contests the idea that wealth is a good in itself.16 He stresses that unlimited industrialisation generates crises, insecurity, and misery, and holds that production cannot be judged solely by its volume but by its effects on people’s lives. He demands that the science of government take as its goal “the happiness of men”, which he describes as moral happiness (the first aim) and physical well-being (the object of political economy). From this perspective, government must ensure everyone’s participation “in the enjoyments of physical life, which wealth represents.” Proudhon, for his part, makes property and credit the pivots of a system of domination in which the economic sphere frames politics and morals: in What Is Property? and then in the System of Economic Contradictions, he shows how the institution of property and the organisation of credit structure durable relations of dependence under the guise of contractual freedom.17 Marx, one of the leading critics of utilitarianism in the nineteenth century, will be discussed in the following section.
“Romantic” critics deplore the reduction of social bonds to calculations of interest. Carlyle denounces the cash nexus, that monetary tie which tends to replace organic and moral attachments in industrial England. In Past and Present, he castigates a society in which human relations are reduced to wages and prices.18 Ruskin, in Unto This Last, maintains that “there is no wealth but life”: the naked pursuit of profit destroys crafts, works, and landscapes, and ruins the very possibility of a culture that can be shared.19 Morris, in his political writings and in News from Nowhere, sets against industrial capitalism a society in which work is limited, made enjoyable, and directed towards simple needs, and in which quantitative accumulation gives way to qualitative abundance.20 These authors do not merely challenge economic mechanisms; they defend another hierarchy of values, in which beauty, craftsmanship, and community take precedence over output.
In philosophy and sociology, criticism becomes more systematic. Hegel develops the notion of a “system of needs”: the economic sphere organises the satisfaction of particular interests, but tends to dissolve common ethical life.21 In the Elements of the Philosophy of Right he argues that the state must reintegrate that sphere into a higher end—ethical life (Sittlichkeit)—otherwise society fragments into competing “systems of needs”. Nietzsche directly targets English utilitarianism and the ideal of comfort. In Beyond Good and Evil he accuses this morality of collapsing human ends into the search for moderate enjoyments, sacrificing greatness, risk, and the creation of new values.22 Tönnies, with the distinction between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft), analyses the shift from a community grounded in personal ties, custom, and proximity to a society of impersonal exchanges mediated by contract and interest.23 Durkheim, finally, shows in The Division of Labour in Society that unregulated economic individualism breeds anomie: when moral and professional rules no longer frame competition, the division of labour stops producing solidarity and becomes a source of disintegration.24
By the end of the century, Catholic social doctrine also formulated an explicit critique of “utilitarian economy”. In Rerum novarum (1891), Leo XIII condemned “unrestrained free competition” and the forms of exploitation engendered by industrial capitalism.25 Without calling private property into question, he defended the existence of human goods not reducible to price—workers’ dignity, family stability, the right to a wage that permits an “honest” life—and affirmed that economic order must be subordinated to a moral and social end. Nineteenth-century contestation of utilitarianism is therefore not confined to a debate internal to philosophy: it runs through literature, theology, and sociology, and signals, in multiple ways, the malaise of a society in which the useful tends to be established as a supreme value.
Marx: Growth as the Condition for Overcoming Capitalism
In Marx, critique does not stop at the moralities of interest; it targets capitalism as a historical totality—a mode of production founded on private ownership of the means of production, the subordination of labour to capital, and the generalisation of the commodity form. Alienation is not merely psychological; it stems from the social form of production and cooperation: associated producers do not control either the ends or the organisation of their activity, governed by the search for surplus value and by competition, which present themselves as “objective” economic forces. Yet Marx does not deny the scale of production as such. In the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he writes that “no social formation ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room within it have been developed”: the expansion of productive forces thus appears as the historical condition for overcoming capitalism, not as a vice to be contained in itself.26
Two texts particularly frame this orientation. In Book III of Capital, Marx distinguishes a “realm of necessity”, that of labour imposed by material reproduction, and a “realm of freedom” that begins “where labour dictated by necessity and external ends ceases”. This second realm presupposes that socially necessary labour time is reduced to a minimum: only very high productivity makes it possible to free up time for the development of “human powers” as ends in themselves.27 In the 1857–58 manuscripts known as the Grundrisse, Marx radicalises the point: true wealth is no longer measured by labour time, but by available time, released through the social appropriation of productivity gains arising from science, techniques, and cooperation.28 Productive abundance, once torn from the logic of capital, must be converted into free time and individual development—not into the indefinite accumulation of commodities.
At the same time Marx diagnoses within capitalism a dynamic of “production for production’s sake”, or “accumulation for accumulation’s sake”. Value sets itself in motion to valorise itself, and that movement tends to become autonomous from any substantive end: production appears as an end in itself, with human needs taken into account only as supports for valorisation.29 It is this compulsion to expand capital, inscribed in competition and the pressure to innovate, that Marx criticises, without opposing to it a policy of “less production”. The central problem lies in the purpose (producing for capital or for socially defined needs) and in the social relation (class domination or association of free producers), not in the idea of growing productive forces as such. In Marx, history remains structured by the rise of productive capacities and by their contradictions with existing social relations: economic accumulation thus remains at the heart of historical movement, even if that movement must be reversed in a communism where productive means are finally put to other ends.
A nuance often mobilised today concerns Marx’s ecological sensitivity. He already sees limits and damages clearly: soil exhaustion, rupture of the metabolism between society and nature, urbanisation that disrupts material cycles. In Book I of Capital, he analyses modern large-scale agriculture as an art of “robbing” both worker and land, ruining the sources of all wealth.30 The contemporary notion of “metabolic rift”, developed notably by John Bellamy Foster, builds on these passages to show that Marx perceives how capitalism breaks material exchanges between town and countryside and compromises long-term ecological reproduction.31 But again Marx attributes these destructions to the capitalist form of agriculture and industry, not to production or technique in general: he wagers on a conscious reorganisation of the metabolism with nature in a post-capitalist society rather than on a voluntary limitation of productive power.
The true counterpoint to this relative confidence in extending productive forces is found in authors such as Mill, Sismondi, Ruskin, or Morris. Where Marx focuses on the “for whom/for what” of production and relies on maximal development of productive forces to free time, they more explicitly advance the argument of “too much”—of a growth whose excess threatens the very forms of life it is supposed to serve.
Work: Value, Ontology, and Social Bond
After seeing how growth and productive forces structure nineteenth-century hopes and critiques, let us look at the place taken by work itself—as a measure of value, a principle of social belonging, and a foundation of republican cohesion.
Source of Value and Remedy to Idleness
For classical economists, work stands at the heart of economic analysis not as a virtue but as a principle of production and distribution. Smith opens The Wealth of Nations by presenting the “annual labour of a nation” as the primitive fund from which everything consumed over the year comes—directly or by exchange.32 He distinguishes use value from exchange value and shows, in simple societies of hunters or shepherds, that exchange ratios are first regulated by the quantity of labour necessary to produce each good. Ricardo radicalises this view: in On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation he makes the quantity of labour embodied the dominant measure of value, and develops his reasoning around how the social product is shared between wages, profits, and rents.33 Work thus becomes the key to understanding the system of relative prices and incomes without any moral heroisation of the worker: it remains a factor of production whose “natural price” gravitates around subsistence level and whose remuneration conditions the level of profit. Later debates on labour value, from Ricardo to Marx, continue this objectification of work as an abstract, measurable magnitude rather than constructing a strong moral doctrine of work.34
With utilitarianism and Victorian England, this centrality of work shifts towards a problem of trade-off between labour and leisure. Within utilitarian and then neoclassical frameworks, work is treated as a disutility compensated by wages, while leisure represents another possible use of time; analysis therefore tends to present commitment to work as a response to a system of incentives – wages, legal working hours, sanctions – rather than as a vocation or a metaphysical duty. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy fits into this approach: work appears there as a cost that must be justified by an overall gain in utility, even if Mill introduces qualitative considerations regarding intellectual and moral pleasures. At the same time, Victorian society establishes an ethos of respectability that values sobriety, punctuality, frugality, and diligence. It is manuals and improving narratives, rather than economic treatises, that codify these virtues – beginning with Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, published in 1859, which extols self-discipline, hard work, and saving as paths of advancement for the middle and popular classes.35 In this culture, work is less celebrated as an abstract principle than as a daily practice of self-improvement, supported by a morality of individual responsibility and social respectability.36
Guizot offers another angle. In his lectures on the History of Civilisation in Europe, he interprets modernity as the rise of the middle classes—groups combining economic activity, property, and education, thereby called to play a central role in representative government.37 Civilisation progresses, for him, through the extension of that middle class, the diffusion of education, and the learning of civic responsibility, expressed both in private conduct and in public participation. The famous injunction “Enrichissez-vous”, addressed in 1843 to supporters of widening suffrage, condenses the view: it is not enough to work to claim the vote; one must have turned one’s work into property, capital, and independence.38 Work counts here for the discipline it imposes, the wealth it enables one to accumulate, and the respectability it confers, rather than as the direct foundation of a political right.
Hence a striking gap: in economic theories, work tends to be affirmed as the primary source of value; in the political order, it does not yet ground citizenship. In the early nineteenth century, in most European representative regimes, electoral participation depends on a minimum level of wealth measured by a property qualification (cens): only affluent citizens, with sufficient education, are able to take part in political life.39 The property-less wage-earner remains legally dependent and therefore excluded. Work is then valued primarily as a remedy to an idleness deemed dangerous to moral and social order: it occupies bodies, stabilises conduct, reduces risks of disorder. Philanthropists, hygienists, and social reformers demand material improvement and instruction for labouring classes to prevent misery and “demoralisation”, more than to recognise to workers an autonomous political voice. In this framework, the political conception of work remains largely pre-modern: a useful, disciplining activity ordered to property and social peace rather than a principle of justice or sovereignty. The emergence around 1848 of a new conception of work—seen as the only truly productive activity and as the basis of a unified working class—will be required for work to ground claims to political rights in the name of its very performance.40
Work as Social Model and as Essence
In the 1830s, work is established as a principle of social regrouping and as a point of rupture with liberalism. Socialists, republicans, and labour activists strive to secure recognition of a working class unified by its condition: the same exploitation, the same vulnerabilities, the same political exclusion. The centrality of work thus spills beyond economics, becoming a moral and political argument against a regime that reserves power for those who live off property. The Saint-Simonians take this further: in the manner of the Physiocrats, Saint-Simon describes society as a whole made up of “productive classes”, yet he identifies industrial labour as the only genuinely useful activity—leading him to formulate the paradox of a proletariat that is at once the most necessary, the most numerous, and the poorest.41 Work therefore supplies the main criterion for mapping society, but also for contesting the existing order.
After Saint-Simon’s death, his disciples organise themselves as a “Church” and spread the “New Christianity”, seeking to convert workers to a regenerated vision of industrial society. Following them, the republican societies that emerge from 1830—such as the Société des Droits de l’Homme—address workers explicitly: they portray them as dispossessed of political rights, crushed by excessive toil and by public burdens decided by the rich. The idea takes hold that those who “make society run” are precisely those who have no voice in it. Work then becomes the basis of a claim to citizenship: only a republic endowed with extended suffrage could make workers the central political subject. Yet this politicisation comes with a major blind spot: women workers, who represent a significant share of the labour force, remain largely invisible in these constructions—showing that the centrality of work does not erase gender hierarchies.42
The point of divergence between these socialist currents and liberals lies in their understanding of work as the matrix of another social order. For the Saint-Simonians, and later for Louis Blanc, Proudhon, or Pecqueur, work—understood as a fundamentally cooperative activity—has a moral superiority over market competition.43 If reorganised into associations, it can provide the model of a society in which cooperation replaces rivalry, and in which private appropriation of the means of production gives way to collective or mutualist property. Fourier, for his part, opposes Saint-Simonian industrialism with his phalansteries: voluntary associations of agricultural and industrial producers in which each individual can engage in several activities according to their inclinations, within groups formed by affinities.44 The organisation of work must here guarantee each person’s fulfilment and produce a social “Harmony”; the very form of daily cooperation serves as a model for the coming order.
Proudhon crystallises the centrality of organising work in the notion of “industrial democracy”, an intermediate idea between his economic mutualism and his political federalism.45 This is an autonomous organisation of workers, meant to replace both state authority and capitalism’s “industrial feudalism” as the forces that order society. Industrial democracy thus appears as a principle for going beyond representative government and as the vehicle for moving from capitalism to a new overall social organisation.46 In these projects, work is no longer merely an activity to be protected or remunerated, but a matrix of new institutions (associations, cooperatives, federations) and the very model of the future society.
In Hegel, the centrality of work is first expressed in the master–slave dialectic. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, the slave’s labour appears as mediation between consciousness and the world: by transforming nature under constraint, the slave does not merely produce objects for the master; he forms himself, acquires stable inwardness, and becomes aware of his own power.47 The master, surrendered to immediate consumption, remains dependent on work he does not perform; the slave, by contrast, internalises the negativity of labour that transforms things, the anxiety before death, and the discipline of toil, and thereby reaches a form of independence. Dependence is reversed through work: in shaping the world, the slave gains a truth of himself the master lacks. Hegel does not yet speak of exploitation in the economic sense, but he establishes that work is the moment in which human essence is realised, in a tension between social servitude and self-conquest.
Marx radicalises and materialises this intuition by making work not only the essence of humanity48 but the principal site of exploitation. In Capital, living labour produces value and surplus value, while wages represent only part of it. Distribution depends on relations of production (as against an ethic of merit or contribution) that authorise private appropriation of surplus value by capital.49 Wage labour thus condenses capitalism’s contradictions: it is at once the source of all social wealth and the place where that wealth turns against those who produce it, in the form of alienation, dependence, and precarity. The centrality of work here has a double sense: it remains the privileged expression of human essence as transformative activity, but as long as it is framed by the capital/labour relation, it expresses above all the domination of one class over another. Emancipation can therefore no longer consist in morally “recognising” work or rewarding it better, but in transforming the relations of production that determine its form and meaning.
Work, Virtue, and Social Bond in French Republicanism
After 1848, and even more so under the Third Republic, republican language makes work and education the foundations of political order. The motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité” is accompanied, in school and civic practices, by a fourth implicit term—work—serving as a criterion of respectability and loyalty to the nation. The “honest worker” is depicted as a pillar of the Republic: not in the name of a Protestant ethic, but in the name of a civic republicanism and a national economy that values productive effort, discipline, and prudence, opposed to idleness and rentier parasitism.50
The Ferry laws of 1881–82, by making primary school free, compulsory, and secular, provide the instrument of this republican moralisation through work. They assign to primary education the task of forming disciplined, punctual citizens attached to the homeland and to the idea that each person must “do their part” through their professional activity. Teachers—those “black hussars of the Republic”—inculcate habits of regularity, obedience to rules, and respect for intellectual and manual labour, explicitly linking school assiduity to the pupil’s future economic usefulness and to the power of the nation.51
The manuals of moral and civic instruction that spread after the Ferry laws reinforce this pedagogy of work. Works such as Gabriel Compayré’s Éléments d’éducation civique et morale present industrious activity as the citizen’s primary virtue: work is described at once as a source of personal autonomy (earning one’s living honestly), as a condition of social dignity (not “weighing” on others), and as a direct contribution to the Republic’s prosperity. Idleness is stigmatised as a moral vice, whereas regularity in work appears as a civic duty as essential as respect for the law or participation in voting.52
In this context, Durkheim’s sociology offers a theoretical conceptualisation of work’s social role. In De la division du travail social, he distinguishes a “mechanical” solidarity, founded on similarity, from an “organic” solidarity, specific to modern societies and based on the differentiation of functions. The deeper the division of labour becomes, the more individuals have a specific sphere of action, and the more they depend on one another to satisfy their needs. Work, tied to the specialisation of functions, thus strengthens both individuality and interdependence: society holds together through the adjustment of professions, like an organism in which each organ has its own physiognomy but cannot live separately.53
Jean-Fabien Spitz shows that Durkheim reads socialism as the “cry of pain” of a society troubled by an anomic division of labour: justice is indeed at the heart of the socialist claim, but the proposed solution—directly subordinating the economy to state power, making economic bodies instruments of the working class against the capitalist class—seems to him inadequate, notably because it is not scientific. In his view, socialism arises when juridical equality has been formally established but a society of individuals, regulated by a just organic solidarity, has not yet been realised: economic power relations distort the freedom of contracts and produce modern malaise.54
Durkheim takes up from Saint-Simon and from the economists the idea that modern societies are largely permeated by economic interests, but he refuses to conclude from this that the economic sphere can be self-sufficient under the sole rule of maximising advantages. Where Saint-Simon tends to consider that industrial activities should obey only an endogenous norm of productive efficiency, Durkheim insists that no rule concerned solely with the means of satisfying desires can claim the status of a moral rule. The emancipation of the economy from former religious constraints therefore does not mean that it escapes all normativity; rather, it indicates a shift from an external subordination (religious, state-authoritarian) to an internal subordination, arising from the very requirements of life in common.55
From this perspective, economic activities seek, “blindly”, the conditions of their own legitimacy: they can prosper durably only if they respect the dignity of individuals and if the functions they distribute prove compatible with one another. The rules of compatibility that result from this gradually become objectified in law and in the action of the organising state, without the latter imposing a socialist plan from outside. The role of solidarity is not to abolish competition, but to temper it by bounding desires, so that “the generality of men may be content with their lot”. According to Durkheim, the subjective acceptance of positions adds itself to the evolution of law and to the role of intermediate bodies in correcting economic injustices. He explicitly refuses to reduce society to a utilitarian device intended to maximise satisfactions: the priority is not to increase enjoyments without end, but to guarantee an order in which each person is treated as someone of equal worth.56
At the crossroads of this sociology and republican pedagogy, work is simultaneously valued as a civic virtue—through the schoolchild learning punctuality, diligence, and respect for labour—and conceived as a principle of integration, through the organic solidarity that links specialised functions. Durkheim seeks to humanise the economy, not to overturn its productivist logic: he accepts the centrality of the economic sphere in modern society while demanding that it be regulated by norms guaranteeing social cohesion and respect for individuals.
Distribution as the Heart of Economic Politics
Once work grounds value and social bond, how should the wealth it produces be distributed?
The Classics: Primary Distribution as the Central Problem
For classical political economy, the crucial question is not only how wealth is created, but how it is shared among social classes. Ricardo opens his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by stating that the principal problem of political economy is to determine the laws governing the distribution of the product between landowners, capitalists, and workers.57 Primary distribution—wages, profits, rents—is immediately at the centre of analysis, prior to any reflection on taxation or assistance.
In Ricardo’s framework, the division of wealth depends on concrete real structures: scarcity and fertility of land, the “natural” wage close to subsistence, capital productivity. Land rent results from cultivating land of declining quality; it expresses a positional privilege tied to the ownership of a rare factor rather than to any particular productive merit.58 Wages gravitate around a minimum compatible with reproducing labour power, while profit appears as a residual—what remains once wages and rents are paid. Any institutional change—corn laws, enclosures, property rights over land—therefore shifts class boundaries and becomes a direct political issue.59
Marx pushes this intuition to its limit by giving distribution an aetiology: what is distributed is not a neutral “cake”, but a surplus extracted from labour power within a specific social relation. In Capital, he distinguishes the sale of labour power from the sale of a service; the value created by the worker exceeds the wage necessary for their reproduction, and this surplus – surplus value – is appropriated by the holders of capital.60 What Marx calls “vulgar economy” sees wages, profit, interest, and rent as four autonomous sources of income, each attached to a “factor” (labour, capital, money-capital, land). Marx channels this apparent plurality into a simpler structure: wages pay labour power, while profit, interest, and rent are historically distributed shares of one and the same surplus value arising from surplus labour.
Institutions play a structuring role here. In Great Britain, agrarian laws and enclosures concentrate land; Poor Laws frame relief for the indigent; association law limits or authorises workers’ coalitions. Polanyi will later show how the rise of a “free” labour market involved a progressive dismantling of communal protections and a redefinition of poverty as individual responsibility rather than a matter of rank or status.61 E. P. Thompson stresses the active making of an English working class through struggles over working time, wages, and bread prices.62
For Ricardo as for Marx, justice thus arises upstream: it concerns how rights over land, capital, and labour are defined; the rules governing the labour contract; and collective capacity to resist or not resist employers’ arbitrariness. It is not a question of ex post compensation but of the structure of primary distribution: who is entitled to what, and on what basis. Classical political economy does not yet strictly separate, as later welfare theory will, productive efficiency from the question of classes’ respective shares in the social product.
The Marginalists: From Marginal Productivity to the Separation of Efficiency and Equity
The “marginalist revolution” of the 1870s reshapes this landscape. In Jevons, Menger, or Walras, value is no longer conceived from labour and classes, but from the marginal utilities and marginal productivities of individual agents.63 Prices are supposed to reflect, at the margin, the equalisation of utilities for consumers and productivities for producers. Distribution now appears as the result of impersonal adjustments: each factor of production (land, labour, capital) is remunerated according to its marginal contribution to output.
Walras systematises this approach in general equilibrium: goods and factor markets are interdependent; at equilibrium, prices ensure both equality of supply and demand across all markets and remuneration of factors at marginal productivity.64 Edgeworth graphically represents these results in Mathematical Psychics through the “box” that bears his name: the set of freely accepted contracts converges towards a contract curve where no one can improve their position without worsening another’s.65 Distribution is no longer described in terms of class conflicts, but as a compromise of voluntary exchanges among individuals endowed with given property rights.
Normatively, an implicit message takes hold: if the assumptions of competition, information, and well-defined property rights are satisfied, the market allocates resources efficiently. Later developments in welfare theory will formalise this intuition in the form of the first theorem: every competitive equilibrium is Pareto-efficient; and of the second theorem: every Pareto-efficient allocation can, in principle, be reached through an appropriate redistribution of initial endowments followed by the free play of the market.66 Efficiency is attributed to the market; equity is referred back to the question of initial endowments and, therefore, to public action.
This conceptual architecture paves the way for a lasting separation: on the one hand, primary distribution as it results from the functioning of markets under given property rights; on the other hand, redistribution, ensured through taxation and transfers. Debate then turns to the progressivity of income tax and the generosity of benefits, but less to the legitimacy of initial positions – who owns what, who controls the assets, who sets the rules of the game. Justice is shifted towards ex post correctives, rather than towards contesting structures of property and power.
In this context, the terms can be specified. By functional primary distribution, we mean the sharing of income between broad categories of factors: the wage share, the capital share, land rents. By personal primary distribution, we mean the distribution of market incomes among individuals or households before taxes and transfers. Redistribution refers to the modifications of this initial distribution through compulsory levies and public spending (cash transfers, public services valued at cost). The split “efficiency through the market / equity through redistribution” establishes itself around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a durable grammar of economic policy, even though it will later be vigorously contested.
Nineteenth-Century Counter-currents: Acting on Distribution before Redistribution
Alongside the rise of marginalism, several currents insist on the need to act directly on primary distribution. The issue is not only to correct inequalities after the fact through taxation, but to change upstream the rights and rules determining wages, rents, and inheritances.
Henry George, in Progress and Poverty (1879), offers a simple and radical diagnosis: economic progress goes with the persistence—even the increase—of poverty because private ownership of land allows rent to be captured.67 Land value results from collective development (urban growth, infrastructures, proximity of markets); it is thus an “unearned increment” that should legitimately return to the community. Hence his “single tax” project: a single tax on land value that socialises land rent while leaving the ownership of buildings and private initiative intact. This is indeed a lever on primary distribution: by taxing rent at its source, an illegitimate income is reduced while public goods are financed.
Workers’ movements and British social reform follow a similar logic. The Factory Acts from 1833 regulate working hours, prohibit the employment of the youngest children, and impose industrial inspections; the Ten Hours Act of 1847 limits the working day of women and young people to ten hours.68 The legalisation of unions with the Trade Union Act of 1871, then the reforms of 1875, recognise the right of association and collective bargaining.69 These measures do not merely provide social protection ex post: they modify workers’ bargaining power, the conditions of labour supply, and thereby wage formation and labour’s share of value added. It is primary distribution that is shifted.
Durkheim represents another way of acting “before redistribution”. In The Division of Labour in Society he seeks to “moralise” economic life through professional groups able to set fair rules of competition and remuneration, in accordance with an organic solidarity where functions mutually recognise one another.70 In Lessons in Sociology, he criticises the all-powerful right of inheritance and envisages limits designed to prevent excessive concentration of wealth that generates “fundamental injustices”: the only legitimate inequalities are those that “result from the inequality of services rendered to society”. He thus wishes to reintroduce a collective dimension into patrimonial transmission.71 Distributive justice passes for him through legal and professional norms framing property titles and income gaps.
In the background, utilitarianism plays an ambiguous role. By reducing moral evaluation to the aggregation of utilities, it tends to neutralise the question of initial entitlements: it matters little who owns what, provided the sum of satisfactions is maximised.72 From Bentham to contemporary rational-choice theories, property is often treated as a given, a simple starting point for calculations of interest. Hence an orientation of justice towards adjustments – poor relief, redistributive taxation – rather than towards challenging initial positions. The nineteenth-century counter-currents embodied by George, trade unions, Sismondi, or Durkheim instead remind us that what matters most is settled in the definition of those positions: in the way institutions distribute, from the outset, rights of access to resources, to work, and to collective decision-making.
From Moral Comparison to Statistical Visibility: Distribution Made Political
Since the eighteenth century, moral judgement about inequalities relied largely on the social “spectacle”: contrasts between luxury and misery, narratives of poverty, moral sensibilities shaped by novels, sermons, and philanthropic inquiries. This gaze, discussed in the previous article, organised a qualitative comparison of each with each: one saw, felt, and recounted disparities, but they remained difficult to measure or debate numerically.
In the nineteenth century, comparison changes nature with the rise of economic and social statistics. The construction of price and wage series, measurement of workers’ budgets, and early forms of national accounting transform the perception of gaps. Frédéric Le Play inaugurates a systematic method of household-budget inquiry in Les ouvriers européens; he describes in detail incomes, expenditures, housing, and family composition among different types of workers across Europe.73 By the end of the century, Charles Booth in London and Seebohm Rowntree in York map urban poverty and define poverty lines based on a “minimum vital” in terms of food, housing, and clothing.74
These devices produce a new visibility: they make it possible to say not only that there are poor people, but how many, at what wage levels, what shares of income are absorbed by housing or food, and how these figures compare between neighbourhoods, professions, or countries. “Comparison of each with each” ceases to be only moral; it becomes statistical comparison, organised in tables, maps, and later graphs. Distribution moves from the background to the foreground as an object of public controversy.
On this basis, debates develop about the “just wage”, the family wage, the vital minimum, and the conditions of a wage that allows participation in social life. Unions mobilise wage and working-time figures to legitimise their claims; social reformers rely on workers’ budgets to argue for more ambitious social legislation or a more progressive tax system. The distributive question thus ties itself to measurement tools that objectify disparities and, later in the twentieth century, to large statistical series on labour and capital shares, or on income and wealth fractiles highlighted by contemporary inequality research.75
A Disruptive Economy
Four Centuries of the Valorisation of the Economy: An Overview
From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, we have followed how the economy gradually asserted itself as a structuring principle of social and political life. In the Renaissance Italian city-states, private wealth was rehabilitated on condition that it served the common good: financing artworks, supporting public spending, enhancing the city’s prestige. Private life expanded, commerce gained new social recognition, and work imposed itself as a factor of success in business. Subordinated to morality and politics, the economy was assigned a positive role in stabilising power and enabling urban elites to flourish.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rise of empires gave the economic sphere a geopolitical reach. The Spanish empire rested on an extractive model based on territorial conquest and inflows of precious metals; the United Provinces developed, by contrast, a commercial and financial power grounded in merchant companies, control of sea routes, and capital markets. Wealth no longer merely adorned palaces or financed charity: it directly conditioned military and diplomatic power. In this context, early treatises produced at Salamanca and elsewhere sought to frame commerce, the just price, and interest-bearing loans through law and morality. The economy began to be thought of as a specific domain, capable of being analysed and regulated as such.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England took up the torch in a setting where reason of state put the economy to its service. “Mercantilist” policies—trade regulations, maritime legislation, protection of manufactures, management of public debt—aimed to consolidate the Crown’s power. In parallel, the Civil War and then the Glorious Revolution redefined the balance of power between monarchy and Parliament. Political sovereignty tended to legitimise itself as contracts and compromises, where subjects’ consent passed through guarantees of their possessions and a certain material security. Political order was recomposed around stabilised and negotiated interests.
In eighteenth-century Great Britain, this reconfiguration was expressed in a proliferation of economic “projects”: agricultural improvements, industrial enterprises, technical innovations, trading companies. A relative social openness, more fluid circulation of information and people, and the density of clubs, learned societies, and printers created an environment favourable to experimentation. An industry still in its infancy accompanied the rise of a consumer society: new products, new desires, increasing recourse to credit, gradual transformation of ways of life.
At the same time, philosophical and moral discourses on interest supplied a language for this transformation. From Pufendorf to Hutcheson, from Mandeville to Smith, a grammar developed that made interest a central driver of behaviour. In Smith, the analysis of work, division of tasks, and exchange led to the idea of a certain “harmony of interests” within commercial society: individual pursuits could, under certain conditions, contribute to the growth of social product. The economy was no longer an object of permanent suspicion; it was described as a relatively coherent order endowed with its own laws, which could be observed and organised.
Utility, Work, Distribution: a New Grammar of the Social
The nineteenth century, the focus of this article, does not merely extend this valorisation of the economy; it reconfigures its categories. Three notions now structure social life—utility, work, distribution—and organise the way industrial societies understand themselves.
The moralities of interest, with utilitarianism foremost, propose to evaluate institutions by the satisfactions they allow to be maximised. In Bentham, laws, administrations, and reforms are oriented towards calculating pleasures and pains; in Mill, this utilitarian grammar remains central, even as it is accompanied by reflection on autonomy, “higher pleasures”, and the risk of a “tyranny of opinion”. With the search for greater prosperity, rising incomes or consumption, political economy finds a normative justification.
Within this framework, work changes status. Classical thought had already placed it at the centre of production and exchange; the nineteenth century makes it the cornerstone of social order. Industrialisation, the rise of wage labour and workers’ movements, republican and socialist experiments all help promote work as a principle of integration and a criterion of respectability. In France, after 1848 and under the Third Republic, the “honest worker” becomes a cardinal figure supported by school, civic rituals, and political discourse. In Great Britain, the Victorian ethos of respectability values diligence, sobriety, and saving. Work simultaneously enslaves and emancipates: it lies at the heart of domination, but also of identity, autonomy, and dignity.
Finally, the distribution of wealth produced by this work asserts itself as a central issue. The Classics, Ricardo foremost, place primary distribution—wages, profits, rents—at the heart of analysis: who captures what, and by virtue of which property and production relations? Marx radicalises this questioning by interpreting apparent forms as modes of appropriating surplus value, tied to a certain regime of private property. Later marginalist theories shift the problem: economics is now charged first with showing how, under certain conditions, competitive markets ensure efficient allocation of resources; questions of justice and legitimacy in distribution tend to be pushed towards corrective policies conceived as ex post interventions.
Social statistics, inquiries into poverty and working-class conditions, the rise of insurance and social legislation give distribution a concrete face: income gaps, wealth inequalities, life trajectories constrained by precarity or, conversely, by inheritance. Utility, work, distribution thus compose a new grammar of the social. Utility provides the criterion for evaluating institutions; work supports both production and symbolic integration; distribution translates into numbers the hierarchies and compromises of a given society. The economy thereby structures the categories through which society and public action are thought.
Change of Software?
Once this trajectory is sketched, the centrality of the economy appears less as a conjunctural phenomenon than as the result of a long historical configuration. It is all the less visible because it permeates social fabric: individual success is judged by career and income, political solidity by the capacity to secure growth and employment, justice by the way economic gains are redistributed. Yet that centrality becomes a civilisational problem when the horizon of continuous and sustained growth fades.
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, the model of indefinite expansion has run up against several limits: slowing productivity gains in some sectors, ecological limits, relative saturation of certain material equipment. Automation, digitisation and, in recent years above all, the rise of artificial intelligence and robotics intensify these tensions: they promise efficiency gains, but risk further detaching wealth production from the creation of stable jobs. With AI and robotics, automation reaches a degree that challenges the Schumpeterian promise of “creative destruction”: new activities no longer guarantee that job creation will compensate job losses.
Other factors—the rise of Asian countries, demographic ageing in many world regions—feed anxieties, even if they can, to some extent, be interpreted as long-term historical adjustments rather than definitive ruptures. In any case, the implicit assumption that increasing output mechanically ensures improved living conditions for all loses its obviousness.
In a society structured by the economy, the instability and feverishness of growth do not translate only into more difficult budget trade-offs; they call into question the symbolic foundations of social order. If individuals’ value is largely indexed to their place in market work, what is to be done when professional trajectories fragment, when unemployment and precarity become durable states for part of the population? If institutions’ legitimacy rests on their capacity to produce and redistribute wealth, how can trust be maintained when gains concentrate and purchasing power stagnates or declines for many? Appeals to virtue—sobriety, responsibility, frugality—legitimate as they may be, are not sufficient to offset imbalances rooted partly in the theoretical structures of production and distribution.
It is at this point that the idea of a “change of software” comes to the surface. It does not refer to a mere technical adjustment of economic policies, but to a questioning of the values that have underpinned modernity: prosperity as a collective horizon, work as an identity pillar, growth as the primary criterion of success. The point is not to advocate a return to a golden age of pre-market virtues, nor to deny the importance of material security. It is rather to ask what other principles of recognition, participation, and meaning might, in time, coexist with a less exclusive role attributed to paid work and monetary income; and what place the economy should occupy in a society that can no longer rely on unlimited expansion of its material and monetary flows.
From this angle, the present situation may in some respects recall the upheavals of the late eighteenth century, when European societies challenged the foundations of political sovereignty. Then, the issue concerned the limits of authority, its legitimacy, and its embodiment—king, nation, people. Today, without strict equivalence, what is at stake is the place of the economy in defining the common good. History reminds us that such recompositions can be accompanied by extreme violence; it also shows that they are not reducible to that violence, and that they open spaces for thought, deliberation, and institutional invention. It remains to be seen whether we shall collectively know how to take advantage of those spaces to question the values that have structured economic modernity, rather than letting crises decide brutally in our stead.
Notes
1 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Clarendon Press, 1996.
2 Pierre Dardot et Christian Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde. Essai sur la société néolibérale, La Découverte, 2009.
3 Jeremy Waldron, ‘Nonsense upon Stilts’: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man, Methuen, 1987.
4 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, 2015.
5 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume II, ed. John M. Robson, University of Toronto Press / Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. See in particular the chapter « Of the Stationary State ».
6 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, 2015.
7 Henri de Saint-Simon, Du système industriel, Hachette BNF, 2016 (éd. orig. 1821).
8 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (éd.), Correspondance de John Stuart Mill et d’Auguste Comte, L’Harmattan, 2007 (éd. orig. 1899).
9 Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, Bachelier, 1830-1842 ; see also Michel Bourdeau, « Comte, Auguste (1798-1857) », in The Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
10 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, in On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, 2015.
11 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, « Auguste Comte et Stuart Mill. Les enjeux de la psychologie », Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, no 8, 2003.
12 Adolphe Quetelet, Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale, Bachelier, 1835 ; see also Odile Faron, « Adolphe Quetelet, Physique sociale ou essai sur le développement des facultés de l’homme », Annales de démographie historique, 1998.
13 “Moralities of interest” here refers to doctrines which, without being reducible to utilitarianism, treat the pursuit of one’s own advantage as an ordinary—and often legitimate—basis of social order: modern contractualism (Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke), the philosophy of doux commerce (Montesquieu, Hume, Smith), liberalism of “well-understood interest” (in which Tocqueville participates while denouncing its drifts when he warns against the “love of material enjoyments” and the “industrial aristocracy”), bourgeois moralities of work, foresight, and respectability, and, at the end of the nineteenth century, marginalist economic theories modelling the individual as a maximiser of utility.
14 Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Gallimard, 1986.
15 Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Gallimard, 1985.
16 Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, Jeheber, 1951.
17 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété ? ou Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement, J.-F. Brocard, 1840 ; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère, Garnier, 1850.
18 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Chapman and Hall, 1843.
19 John Ruskin, Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy, George Allen, 1902.
20 William Morris, Useful Work versus Useless Toil, in Political Writings of William Morris, Lawrence & Wishart, 1973 ; William Morris, News from Nowhere, Armand Colin, 2004.
21 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit, Presses Universitaires de France, 2013.
22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Par-delà bien et mal – La Généalogie de la morale, Gallimard, 1971.
23 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen, Fues, 1887.
24 Émile Durkheim, De la division du travail social, Félix Alcan, 1893.
25 Léon XIII, Rerum novarum, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1891.
26 Karl Marx, Contribution à la critique de l’économie politique, Éditions sociales, 1969.
27 Karl Marx, Le Capital, livre III. Le procès d’ensemble de la production capitaliste, Gallimard, 1968.
28 Karl Marx, Manuscrits de 1857-1858, dits « Grundrisse », Éditions sociales, 1980.
29 Karl Marx, Le Capital, livre I, op. cit.
30 Karl Marx, Le Capital, livre I. Le procès de production du capital, Éditions sociales, 1983.
31 John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Monthly Review Press, 2000.
32 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Liberty Fund, 1981 (1776).
33 David Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa with the Collaboration of M.H. Dobb (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). Vol. 1 Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
34 Ronald L. Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, Lawrence & Wishart, 1956.
35 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct, John Murray, 1859.
36 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
37 François Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, Pichon et Didier, 1828.
38 Samuel Hayat, « Comment le travail est devenu un concept révolutionnaire », Cogito – Le magazine de la recherche de Sciences Po, Presses de Sciences Po, 2022. URL : https://www.sciencespo.fr/research/cogito/home/comment-le-travail-est-devenu-un-concept-revolutionnaire/
39 https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/cens-electoral/
40 Samuel Hayat, op. cit.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Jean-Numa Ducange, Razmig Keucheyan, Stéphanie Roza (dir.), Histoire globale des socialismes, XIXe–XXIe siècle, PUF, 2021.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, La Phénoménologie de l’Esprit : tome 1, Aubier-Montaigne, 1939.
48 Karl Marx, Manuscrits de 1844, Les Éditions sociales, 1972.
49 Karl Marx, Le Capital, livre I, op. cit.
50 Charles Renouvier, Manuel républicain de l’homme et du citoyen, Pagnerre, 1848. URL : https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5802152m. In particular, p. 26: ‘It is necessary, and indispensable, that a fraternal Republic recognise and guarantee two rights to all citizens: the right to work and to subsist through one’s work; the right to receive education, without which a worker is only half a man.’
51 Damiano Matasci, L’école républicaine et l’étranger. Une histoire internationale des réformes scolaires en France, 1870-1914, ENS Éditions, 2015, chap. 6 ; Laurence Loeffel, « Instruction civique et éducation morale : entre discipline et « métadiscipline » », dans Daniel Denis et Pierre Kahn (dir.), L’École républicaine et la question des savoirs, CNRS Éditions, 2003.
52 Gabriel Compayré, Éléments d’éducation civique et morale, P. Garcet, Nisius et Cie, 1880. URL : https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4236020q
53 Émile Durkheim, De la division du travail social, Presses universitaires de France, 2017.
54 Jean-Fabien Spitz, Le moment républicain en France, Gallimard, 2005, p. 312 sq.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Cambridge University Press, 1951.
58 Ibid.
59 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Beacon Press, 1957.
60 Karl Marx, Le Capital, livre I, op. cit.
61 Karl Polanyi, op. cit.
62 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin Books, 1968.
63 William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, Macmillan, 1871 ; Carl Menger, Principles of Economics, Edward Elgar, 1981 (éd. Orig. 1871) ; Léon Walras, Éléments d’économie politique pure, Librairie générale de l’enseignement, 1874 ; trad. angl. Elements of Pure Economics, Richard D. Irwin, 1954.
64 Ibid.
65 Francis Y. Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, Kegan Paul, 1881.
66 Anthony B. Atkinson et Joseph E. Stiglitz, Lectures on Public Economics, Princeton University Press, 2015 ; Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, Cambridge University Press, 1997 ; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014.
67 Henry George, Progress and Poverty, Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 2006 (éd. orig. 1879).
68 UK Parliament, The 1833 Factory Act, UK Parliament Education Service, s.d.
69 House of Commons Library, Trade Unions and Industrial Relations, UK Parliament, 2024.
70 Émile Durkheim, De la division du travail social, Presses universitaires de France, 2013 (éd. orig. 1893).
71 Émile Durkheim, Leçons de sociologie, PUF, 2017 (1950), p. 347 sq.
72 Pierre Dardot et Christian Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde. Essai sur la société néolibérale, La Découverte, 2009.
73 Frédéric Le Play, Les ouvriers européens, Imprimerie impériale, 1855.
74 Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Macmillan, 1902 ; B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, Macmillan, 1901.
75 Thomas Piketty, op. cit.