Publication of a critical edition of Sismondi's economic works began in 2012 with an edition of De la richesse commerciale (1803) and a volume of Écrits d'économie politique, 1799–1815 (reviewed by P. Steiner in European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 21 (2014), 350–354). The editorial team, Bridel, Dal Degan and Eyguesier, now follow this up with the first critical edition of Sismondi's major contribution to political economic thought – the Nouveaux principes d'économie politique of 1819 – and a further volume of economic writings spanning the latter half of Sismondi's career, up to his death in 1842. There has long been a need for a variorum edition of the Nouveaux principes, widely recognised as one of the seminal texts of the first half of the nineteenth century and now the subject of increasing scholarly interest, in part driven by renewed attention to his voluminous historical and political writings. It is a mark of the neglect into which Sismondi's economic thought fell in the second half of the nineteenth century that, after the second edition of the book was published in 1827, it took until 1971 before another French edition was essayed by Jean Weiller and Guy Dupuigrenet-Desroussilles for Calmann-Lévy. Even then, Weiller could not persuade the publisher to reissue both volumes of the book; the second volume eventually appeared in 1976 in a special edition of the journal Économies et Sociétés (10.1, 1976). English-language readers have had the benefit of Richard Hyse's carefully annotated translation (Transaction, 1991); but the edition prepared by Bridel et al. will facilitate new critical approaches to the text.
Sismondi's first economic treatise, De la richesse commerciale, was framed as a reworking of the ideas of Adam Smith. The Nouveaux principes marked a partial break with the Smithian framework, motivated, as the editors suggest, by engagement with the work of Malthus on population. Rejecting Jean-Baptiste Say's insistent claim that aggregate production and consumption were correlative, Sismondi set out an account of commercial crises driven by underconsumption that was to have a lasting impact on nineteenth-century debates around the so-called 'social question', influencing figures as diverse as Prosper Enfantin, Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. Population growth and more intensive use of machinery combined to drive down wages to the point where working-class consumption was unable to absorb current levels of production. Attempts to find an outlet through exports would fail, as the British found to their cost after 1815, when dumping on international markets led to retaliatory protectionist measures. The only solution was to find some means of moderating population growth and ensuring that a better balance was struck between the respective rewards of capital and labour. Sismondi's solution, in the first edition, was to suggest firstly, that employers must be made to bear the cost of maintaining labour through periods of underemployment and secondly, that the indigent should be prevented from marrying. Both suggestions evoked storms of protest from early reviewers, and the second proposal was quietly dropped in the second edition. More far-reaching were Sismondi's proposals for land reform, modelled on his experience of Tuscan agricultural conditions, which aimed at protecting and expanding small-scale cultivation. The overall object was a rebalancing of the economy towards peasant-proprietorship and artisanal manufacturing.
Sismondi may, as Marx would later charge, have been whistling in the wind; certainly many early readers were more engaged by his pessimistic analysis of the emerging industrial economy than by his positive prescriptions to remedy its flaws. The new edition of the book and the accompanying volume of occasional writings permit the reader to study the evolution of Sismondi's ideas, and chart his response to critics. For the first time, the article 'Économie Politique' is made available in French in a transcription from the original manuscript held in Pescia – it was drafted in 1817, but published only in Carlyle's English translation for Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia in 1825, and is significant because it foreshadows many of the arguments of the Nouveaux principes. Our understanding of Sismondi's complex relationship with Say is deepened, and the influence of the latter in shaping Sismondi's views of the development of English manufacturing is made clear. Sismondi's deep interest in the development of British agriculture, industry and finance emerges from a series of book reviews published through the 1820s and 1830s, as does a growing interest in the development of the English dominion in India, and the nascent French colony in Algeria. More substantial essays from the Annales de législation et de jurisprudence, the Revue encyclopédique, the Revue mensuelle d'économie politique and the Bibliothèque universelle expand upon and develop the ideas laid out in the Nouveaux principes on the balance of production and consumption, the reform of landholding and the condition of workers: many of these essays would be collected in Sismondi's Études sur les sciences sociales (1836–1838), which is scheduled to appear as volume VI in this series.
As with their earlier volumes, the editors provide detailed and contextually sensitive introductions to each of the texts, helpfully clearing up the chronology of Sismondi's works. For the student of classical political economy, these volumes are an invaluable resource. If a note of regret may be struck in concluding, however, it would concern the scope of this edition. As frequently emerges in the editors' commentary, it is difficult to separate Sismondi's economic thought from broader historical and political concerns. It is understandable, given the vast scale of his historical works on Italy and France, that there is little appetite for including these works in an edition primarily aimed at historians of economics, but if a truly comprehensive picture of Sismondi's thought is to emerge, it cannot neglect engaging with his wider œuvre.
By Thomas Hopkins
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