Siegmund Feilbogen, “Nationalökonomie und Sozialismus im gegenwärtigen Frankreich” (1910)

The file is a journal-published single-author scholarly study surveying French political economy and socialism under the Third Republic. Feilbogen’s sixteen-part structure moves from a polemic against the bad reputation of French social science, through liberal individualism, Marxism, reform socialism, syndicalism, academic economics, Le Play, Catholic social thought, sociology, and solidarism. Its central thesis is that France around 1900 is no longer intellectually derivative but a laboratory of conflict and synthesis.

Denn um die Wende des Jahrhunderts haben die Nationalökonomie und der Sozialismus Frankreichs die Unselbständigkeit ihrer Lehrjahre überwunden und neues Leben regt sich im Gedankenkreise des Individualismus, des Sozialismus und des vermittelnden Sozialindividualismus.

English translation: For at the turn of the century French political economy and socialism have overcome the dependency of their apprentice years, and new life is stirring within the circles of thought of individualism, socialism, and the mediating social individualism.

Feilbogen’s first conceptual move is to explain French liberalism sociologically rather than dismiss it as doctrinaire. Individualism survives because France, with its small proprietors, savings, provincial bourgeoisie, and revolutionary memory, gives liberal economics more empirical plausibility than elsewhere.

Vor allem ist Frankreich dasjenige Land, in welchem der ökonomische Liberalismus der Wahrheit verhältnismäßig am nächsten kommt. Die Überzeugung, daß jeder arbeitsame und sparsame Mensch es durch eigene Kraft bei völliger Freiheit des Individuums zu einem relativen Wohlstand bringen könnte, ist für kein Land durch die Tatsachen so sehr bekräftigt wie für Frankreich.

English translation: Above all, France is the country in which economic liberalism comes comparatively closest to the truth. The conviction that every industrious and thrifty person could, by his own strength and with complete freedom of the individual, achieve a relative prosperity is confirmed by the facts for no country so strongly as for France.

The study then differentiates generations: Passy as moral-pacifist liberal, Molinari as utopian anti-statist, Levasseur as empirical realist; then Leroy-Beaulieu, Guyot, Foville, Neymarck, and specialists of finance and statistics. Feilbogen admires their energy but sees a crisis: liberalism risks becoming the ideology of capital unless it absorbs the social claim.

Socialism is presented with equal differentiation. French Marxism arrives late through Guesde and Lafargue, but the French temperament and institutions quickly fragment it into rival tendencies: orthodox, reformist, syndicalist, and synthetic.

So ringen denn gegenwärtig innerhalb des französischen Sozialismus drei Richtungen um die Vorherrschaft: die rein marxistische, die reformistische und die syndikalistische.

English translation: Thus at present three currents within French socialism are contending for predominance: the purely Marxist, the reformist, and the syndicalist.

Syndicalism is the most dangerous and intellectually provocative form. Feilbogen treats Sorel as the theorist of proletarian violence and the general strike, but he avoids reducing him to mere agitation: Sorel’s “myth” matters because it mobilizes, not because it is clear or true.

Ein Mythos ist ein Volksmotiv. Er braucht nicht klar, er braucht nicht wahr zu sein, wenn er nur begeistert.

English translation: A myth is a popular motive force. It need not be clear, it need not be true, so long as it inspires.

Against both laissez-faire and revolutionary violence, Feilbogen’s own sympathies lie with mediating currents: Cauwès and Gide in the universities, Le Play’s monographic social science, Catholic social reform, Durkheimian and Wormsian sociology, and especially Bourgeois’s solidarism. The key structural claim is that modern society cannot be governed by either pure individualism or pure socialism.

Es kann daher noch Kämpfe auf Leben und Tod zwischen den Extremen setzen, aber auf die Dauer werden immer die vermittelnden Richtungen siegen. Denn nur diese gewähren der Gesellschaft einen Gleichgewichtszustand, der den sozialen Frieden ermöglicht.

English translation: There may therefore still be struggles of life and death between the extremes, but in the long run the mediating currents will always prevail. For only these grant society a state of equilibrium that makes social peace possible.

The academic section is crucial because Feilbogen sees universities and journals as instruments of emancipation from dogma. Cauwès brings historical and interventionist economics into the law faculty; Gide joins economics to cooperation, social economy, and moral seriousness.

Diese Revue ist eine Tat; sie bedeutet die Emanzipation der französischen Wissenschaft vom Dogmatismus.

English translation: This Revue is a deed; it signifies the emancipation of French science from dogmatism.

The culminating doctrine is solidarism. Bourgeois gives the mediating impulse its juristic and ethical formula: society is not abolished into collectivism, but individual freedom and property are morally encumbered by a social debt. Feilbogen’s language of “Hypothek” captures the work’s central synthesis.

Bourgeois anerkennt also die volle Berechtigung der individuellen Freiheit und des Privateigentums; dies trennt ihn von den Sozialisten. Aber diese Freiheit ist gewissermaßen mit einer Hypothek zu Gunsten der Gesamtheit belastet, und die Anerkennung dieser Hypothek trennt ihn von den Individualisten.

English translation: Bourgeois thus recognizes the full legitimacy of individual freedom and private property; this separates him from the socialists. But this freedom is, so to speak, encumbered with a mortgage in favor of the community, and the recognition of this mortgage separates him from the individualists.

The study’s relevance lies in its refusal to treat doctrines as abstract systems alone. Feilbogen maps ideas through institutions, parties, journals, biographies, national character, property forms, and educational structures. He writes as an Austrian observer of France, but his real object is European modernity: the search for a social order that preserves individuality while binding it to collective responsibility.

Was er webt, das weiß kein Weber. Eines aber ist sicher: Es wird viel gearbeitet. Eine neue Welt wird geboren.

English translation: What it is weaving, no weaver knows. But one thing is certain: much is being worked. A new world is being born.