Siegmund Feilbogen, Smith und Turgot (1892)

Siegmund Feilbogen’s monograph combines a comparison of Adam Smith and Turgot with an argument about how economics becomes a science. Its central question is why Smith’s Wealth of Nations transformed economic thinking when Turgot had already expressed many supposedly “Smithian” doctrines. Feilbogen’s answer distinguishes scientific achievement from priority: Smith’s superiority lies both in the evidential form he gave shared propositions and in his establishment of productive labour, rather than land or unrestricted freedom, as economics’ organizing principle. The book’s five sections move from problem and method through the similarities between the thinkers, Turgot’s remaining “semblance of science,” and Smith’s formal and substantive superiority.

Feilbogen first separates uncertain personal influence from demonstrable relations between published works. The lost correspondence and sparse testimony cannot establish who borrowed from whom; more importantly, borrowing does not determine scientific worth. He distinguishes subjective originality—the uncertain provenance of an individual’s ideas—from objective originality, a work’s power to make knowledge effective:

Die objective Originalität eines Werkes ist die von ihm der Menschheit mitgetheilte Kraft zu geistigem Fortschritt; sie ist der erst durch dieses Werk bewirkte geistige Gewinn.

English translation: The objective originality of a work is the power for intellectual progress that it communicates to humanity; it is the intellectual gain brought about only through this work.

A proposition anticipated but left unproved or ineffective is not equivalent to knowledge secured for subsequent inquiry. Feilbogen accordingly rejects histories that subtract every precursor’s statement from a major thinker’s achievement. His alternative compares the epoch-making author with the “contingent predecessor”: the nearest and most advanced representative of the same intellectual direction. Turgot supplies this benchmark for Smith. Feilbogen acknowledges that differences between works include incidental weaknesses as well as strengths, and that historical circumstances contribute to success; causal claims therefore require further corroboration.

The second section deliberately establishes substantial resemblance. Turgot understood division of labour, capital advances, and their contribution to prosperity. He also advocated private property, the removal of corporate restrictions, governmental noninterference, and international free trade, frequently more categorically than Smith. Feilbogen’s reversal is pointed: much condemned as Smithian individualism is actually Turgot’s programme, subsequently moderated by Smith. Turgot’s prohibition of occupational associations contrasts especially sharply with Smith’s recognition that suppressing such meetings would violate liberty and justice.

The third section explains why these insights nevertheless failed, in Feilbogen’s judgment, to establish economic science. His developmental scheme distinguishes accumulated experience, superficially scientific explanation, and genuine science. Sectarian systems survive by exposing their opponents’ weaknesses without adequately testing their own foundations. Analysis must dissolve misleading connections, but criticism alone cannot replace a system: a better synthesis must meet the explanatory need that sustained it.

Nicht Meinungen oder Gesinnungen, sondern Beweise!

English translation: Not opinions or convictions, but proofs!

Turgot’s dispersed sketches, unfinished investigations, scant presentation of evidence, and dogmatic formulations exemplify the failure to unite convictions with sufficient proofs. His subsistence-wage doctrine leaves crucial terms and demographic premises unexamined; his physiocratic synthesis generalizes agricultural circumstances into a universal explanation. Feilbogen nevertheless preserves a distinction between scientific and practical achievement. Turgot’s concentration on agriculture and freedom served urgent French reform needs, while his generosity and integrity remained exemplary. The statesman’s determination could be historically valuable even where it obstructed the investigator’s self-questioning.

Smith’s formal superiority, examined through division of labour, concerns the internal organization of knowledge rather than elegant style:

Der Zweck der Wissenschaft ist die Darbietung einer nothwendig unvollendeten Bewusstseinsarbeit als eines Mittels zu weiterer Arbeit.

English translation: The purpose of science is to present a necessarily unfinished work of consciousness as a means for further work.

Scientific exposition must make claims clear, prove them through complementary methods, and establish their proper explanatory importance. Smith’s pin-making example joins observable quantities to causal analysis; the market’s extent then bounds the effects of specialization. Feilbogen also criticizes Smith’s speculative derivation of specialization from exchange and self-interest: uncertain philosophical origins must not become foundations for secure empirical findings. His defence of Smith thus supports methodological pluralism, not uncritical acceptance.

The substantive comparison identifies labour productivity as the principle connecting Smith’s treatment of income, capital, exchange, distribution, and government. Wealth concerns the population’s provision with goods, including its lowest ranks, rather than accumulated riches alone. Labour supplies a specifically economic and broadly applicable explanation, unlike physiocratic land productivity or freedom conceived as a political panacea.

Die Freiheit ist ihm als Mittel willkommen, um die Productivität der Arbeit von Hemmnissen zu befreien; oberster Zweck und ausschliessliche Regel ist die Freiheit bei Smith nie gewesen.

English translation: He welcomes freedom as a means of freeing the productivity of labour from impediments; freedom was never Smith’s supreme end or exclusive rule.

The concluding policy analysis consequently treats liberty and equality as subordinate to public welfare. Feilbogen finds nine grounds for intervention, including education, defence, worker protection, prevention of exploitation, and public purposes beyond private capacity. He emphasizes Smith’s opposition to employer collusion, sympathy with higher wages, and taxation protecting productive activity. Yet this social reading is qualified: encouragement targets striving workers, including entrepreneurs, rather than weakness indiscriminately, and Feilbogen rejects class conflict as a route to prosperity. Labour ultimately becomes an ethical principle of useful cooperation and self-discipline. The book’s contemporary purpose is to renew Smith through historical-statistical and deductive-analytical inquiry, retaining his productive core while revising policies and assumptions rendered obsolete by industrial concentration and world commerce.