Hayek’s Review of La tradition littéraire des idéologues (1944)

Friedrich August von Hayek’s August 1944 book review assesses Émile Cailliet’s study of the French idéologues as a contribution to intellectual history with particular promise for historians of economics. Its opening establishes that relevance without attributing an economic subject to the book itself:

Though in no way directly concerned with economics, this book ought some day to provide the background for one of the more interesting chapters in the history of economics which has yet to be written.

Hayek’s historical claim is that the group’s economic importance has been obscured by its neglect and by the altered meaning Napoleon and Marx gave its name. He locates its contribution in a lineage of subjective value theory:

From their master Condillac they took over the subjective approach to the value problem.

J. B. Say’s participation in the circle, Destatt de Tracy’s continuation of Condillac’s utility analysis, and Louis Say’s subsequent development of it supply the outlines of the history Hayek believes remains to be written.

The review then situates Cailliet alongside earlier scholarship by Picavet, Van Duzer, and Chinard. Hayek credits the new study with showing more precisely where the idéologues belong in the secular tradition of philosophical thought. Yet this contextual achievement also creates an imbalance: their intellectual background and later continuators sometimes receive more attention than their own work. He partly excuses this through the programmatic character of their writings and the premature termination of their activities.

The central reservation concerns Cailliet’s tendency to make the group precursors of Comtean positivism. Hayek questions that genealogy, suggesting that Comte owed more to physicists and Curier, while stressing the moderation Cailliet himself recognizes in the idéologues. He frames the interpretive choice sharply:

But with the author's evident sympathy for the Comtean tradition he hardly has an alternative: either one must regard the ideologues as men who had too much good sense to pursue to extremes some of the more rash pronouncements about the treatment of the study of ideas as a branch of zoology of which they were occasionally guilty, or one has to see them as an earlier attempt of a movement which culminated with Comte and produced its last great figure in H. Taine.

The distinction turns on whether isolated naturalistic formulations define the group’s historical significance or whether its restraint deserves independent weight. Hayek leaves that dispute unresolved here, closing with a strong recommendation of the study, its production, and its full bibliography. The review thus combines recovery of a neglected economic lineage with a caution against interpreting its members chiefly through the later positivist movement.