William Emmanuel Rappard, La Conversion de Sismondi (1943)

Rappard’s historical article examines Sismondi’s passage from the Smithian liberalism of De la richesse commerciale (1803) to the social interventionism of the Nouveaux principes d’économie politique (1819). Its four sections ask when the conversion occurred, why it happened, what changed, and toward what reforms it led. The central distinction is between continuity of purpose and reversal of prescription: Sismondi always understood political economy as an instrument of human happiness, but ceased to believe that unrestricted competition could secure that happiness. Rappard locates his enduring importance less in a successful theory of economic crises than in his justification of protection for workers.

The opening section reconstructs a conversion in three stages. Between 1803 and his return to economic writing around 1817–1818, Sismondi devoted himself chiefly to history and literature while accumulating observations incompatible with his inherited confidence in market harmony. David Brewster’s invitation to contribute an article on political economy to the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia supplied the occasion for reconsideration. Expecting merely to explain an established science, Sismondi instead reconstructed its reasoning:

Je remontai aux principes, j'en tirai les conséquences à ma manière, et je recommençai la théorie, comme si rien n'était encore établi.

English translation: I went back to the principles, drew their consequences in my own way, and began the theory anew, as though nothing had yet been established.

Rappard treats this testimony as evidence of a decisive intellectual encounter between accumulated facts and renewed analysis, rather than an instantaneous revelation. The encyclopaedia article nevertheless retained an emphatic allegiance to Smith; the Nouveaux principes completed the break by deriving practical conclusions opposed to those of the master. Rappard dates the process cautiously, acknowledging that he could not verify the article’s reported publication in 1818 from its first appearance.

The second and longest section identifies three sources of disillusionment: industrial workers’ suffering, overproduction and commercial crises, and agricultural changes that increased landlords’ net returns while diminishing rural employment and welfare. Their common implication was that private gain need not coincide with collective prosperity. Competitive contracts could express desperation rather than meaningful equality, while apparently richer nations could contain impoverished majorities. Historical evidence also challenged the claim that public intervention necessarily obstructed wealth creation.

Rappard then subjects Sismondi’s account of his own conversion to critical scrutiny. Despite claiming to have witnessed industrial distress in Italy, Switzerland, and France, Sismondi supplied comparatively little evidence of it; his argument depended chiefly on Britain, which he had not visited since 1794. His sparse references leave the precise channels of information uncertain. Rappard therefore investigates British visitors, publications, and Geneva’s intellectual networks, advancing Robert Owen as a probable major influence. Similar diagnoses of machinery, depressed wages, inadequate consumption, and industrial insecurity converge with evidence of a prolonged conversation at Coppet in summer 1818.

This attribution remains conjectural, as Rappard explicitly concedes, although his concluding language is firmer. Sismondi’s later acknowledgment establishes agreement on general overproduction, but not acceptance of Owen’s cooperative solution:

Sans partager en aucune façon les opinions de M. Owen sur les moyens de parer à cette calamité, j'ai admis comme lui, dans mes nouveaux Principes d'économie politique, le fait de cet encombrement universel ¹).

English translation: Without sharing in any way Mr. Owen’s opinions on the means of averting this calamity, I accepted, as he did, in my new Principles of Political Economy, the fact of this universal glut.

A second proposed influence is Étienne Dumont, Sismondi’s close friend and the French interpreter of Bentham. The utilitarian conception of property as a legal institution justified by public benefit supplied grounds for regulating it when its exercise injured society. Rappard recognizes an embryonic version of this idea in the earlier work, so Dumont’s influence concerns its development rather than its creation.

The third section states the article’s governing interpretation:

Ce qui s'est modifié dans sa doctrine, c'est sa vision et son interprétation de la réalité contemporaine et par conséquent aussi les leçons d'ordre politique qui s'en dégageaient pour lui.

English translation: What changed in his doctrine was his perception and interpretation of contemporary reality, and consequently also the political lessons that followed from it for him.

Sismondi’s normative conception of economics had always differed from what Rappard presents as Smith’s primarily explanatory enterprise. Once competition appeared destructive, the same commitment to happiness demanded intervention instead of abstention. Rappard finds Sismondi’s theory of general overproduction obscure and contradictory, but separates those weaknesses from the independent case for social legislation. His conversion was, in this assessment, more moral than intellectual: historical attentiveness and sympathy generated reforms more durable than his theoretical explanations.

The final section examines their scope and tensions. Agricultural legislation should reunite labour and ownership through freer land transfers and equal inheritance. Industrial policy should cease artificially accelerating expansion; Sismondi remained opposed to industrial tariff protection and even questioned invention privileges. More coercively, he proposed prohibiting indigent marriages. His humane aims thus coexisted with paternalistic restrictions.

The most ambitious proposal was a professional guarantee making employers responsible for workers’ sickness, old age, inadequate earnings, and unemployment. It would protect labour while discouraging businesses from transferring their costs to society:

Si elle est onéreuse, son industrie est donc une industrie perdante; il vaut mieux qu'il y renonce que d'en faire supporter la perte à la société.

English translation: If it is burdensome, then his industry is a loss-making industry; it is better that he abandon it than make society bear the loss.

Rappard distinguishes this programme from the more familiar demands for limits on child labour and working hours, and rejects an unsupported attribution of statutory minimum wages. He closes with Sismondi’s recognition that justice does not immediately yield practicable legislation. The article’s lasting contribution is this qualified portrait of interventionism: an effort to align private incentives with social responsibility, pursued under an enduring, if sometimes strained, commitment to individual liberty.