Tocqueville, Physiocratic Despotism, and Foucault (and Coleridge and Adam Smith), EP XXXXII

About the middle of the [eighteenth] century, a class of writers devoted their attention to administrative questions; they had many points in common, and were hence distinguished by the general name of economists or physiocrats. They are less conspicuous in history than the philosophers; they exercised a less direct influence in causing the Revolution, but still I think its true nature can best be studied in their writings. The philosophers confined themselves, for the most part, to abstract and general theories on the subject of government; the economists dealt in theories, but also deigned to notice facts. The former furnished ideal, the latter practical schemes of reform. They assailed alternately all the institutions which the Revolution abolished; not one of them found favor in their eyes. All those, on the other hand, which are credited especially to the Revolution, were announced beforehand and warmly lauded by them: it is not easy to mention one whose substantial features are not to be found in some of their writings.

Their books, moreover, breathe that democratic and revolutionary spirit with which we are so familiar. They hate, not certain specific privileges, but all distinctions of classes; they would insist upon equality of rights in the midst of slavery. Obstacles they regard as only fit to be trampled on. They respect neither contracts nor private rights; indeed, they hardly recognize individual rights at all in their absorbing devotion to the public good. Yet they were quiet, peaceable men, of respectable character, honest magistrates, able administrators; they were carried away by the peculiar spirit of their task.

Their contempt for the past was unbounded. “The nation,” said Letronne, “is governed on wrong principles; every thing seems to have been left to chance.” Starting from this idea, they set to work to demand the demolition of every institution, however old and time-honored, which seemed to mar the symmetry of their plans. Forty years before the Constituent Assembly divided France into departments, one of the economists suggested the alteration of all existing territorial divisions and of the names of all the provinces.

They conceived all the social and administrative reforms effected by the Revolution before the idea of free institutions had once flashed upon their mind. They were in favor of the removal of all restrictions upon the sale and conveyance of produce and merchandise. But of political liberty they took no thought; and when it first occurred to them they rejected the idea. Most of them were strongly opposed to deliberative assemblies, to local and subordinate authorities, and to the various checks which have been established from time to time in free countries to counterbalance the supreme government. “The system of counterpoises,” said Quesnay, “is a fatal feature in governments.” A friend of his was satisfied that “the system of counterpoises was the fruit of chimerical speculations.”

The only safeguard against despotism which they proposed was public education; for, as Quesnay said, “Despotism is impossible in an enlightened nation.” “Mankind,” says one of his disciples, “have invented a host of fruitless contrivances to obviate the evils arising from abuses of power by governments, but they have generally neglected the only one that could really be of service, namely, a general permanent system of public education in the essence of justice and natural order.” Such was the literary nonsense they wanted to substitute in the place of political guarantees.

Letronne bitterly deplores the government’s neglect of the rural districts, and describes them as having no roads, no industry, no intellectual progress; but he never seems to have imagined that they would have been better regulated if their affairs had been intrusted to the people themselves.

Even Turgot, with all his peculiar breadth of view and rare genius, was but little fonder than they of political liberty. He had no taste for it till late in life, when public opinion pointed in that direction. Like the economists, he conceived that the best of all political guarantees was public education afforded by the state; but he desired it to be conducted in a particular spirit, and according to a particular plan. His confidence in this intellectual course of medicine—or, as a contemporary styled it, this “educational mechanism on fixed principles”—was unbounded. “I will venture to answer,” said he to the king, in a memorial on the subject, “that in ten years the nation will be so thoroughly altered that you shall not recognize it; and that, in point of enlightenment, morality, loyalty, and patriotism, it will surpass every other nation in the world. Children now ten years old will then be men, trained in ideas of love for their country, submissive to authority from conviction, not from fear, charitable to their fellow-countrymen, habituated to obey and to respect the voice of justice.”

It was so long since political liberty had flourished in France that its conditions and effects had been well-nigh forgotten. More than this, its shapeless relics, and the institutions which seemed to have been framed to take its place, rather aroused prejudice against it. Most of the surviving state assemblies exhibited the spirit as well as the forms of the Middle Ages, and hindered instead of assisting social progress. The Parliaments, which were the only substitutes for political bodies, could not arrest the mischief done by government, and often impeded it when it desired to do good.

The economists did not think it possible to use these old institutions as instruments for the accomplishment of the Revolution, nor did they approve the idea of intrusting the business to the nation as sovereign; they doubted the feasibility of effecting so elaborate and intricate a reform by the aid of a popular movement. Their designs, they thought, could be best and most easily accomplished by the crown itself.

The royal power had not taken its rise in the Middle Ages, and bore no mediæval stamp. They discovered in it good as well as bad points. It shared their proclivity for leveling all ranks, and making all laws uniform. It detested as heartily as they did the old institutions which had grown out of the feudal system, or which favored oligarchy. It was the best organized, the greatest and strongest government machine in Europe. Its existence seemed to them a very fortunate accident; they would have called it providential had it been the fashion then as now to allude to Providence on all possible occasions. Letronne observes that “France is much more happily situated than England; for here reforms that will change the whole state of the country can be accomplished in a moment, whereas in England similar measures are always exposed to be defeated by party strife.”

Their idea, then, was not to destroy, but to convert the absolute monarchy. “The state must govern according to the laws of natural order (règles de l’ordre essentiel),” says Mercier de la Rivière; “on these conditions it should be absolute.” “Let the state,” said another, “understand its duty thoroughly; this secured, it should be untrammeled.” All of them, from Quesnay to Abbé Bodeau, were of the same mind.

They were not satisfied with using the royal power to effect social reforms; they partly borrowed from it the idea of the future government they proposed to establish. The one was to be, in some measure, a copy of the other.

The state, said the economists, must not only govern, it must shape the nation. It must form the mind of citizens conformably to a preconceived model. It is its duty to fill their minds with such opinions and their hearts with such feelings as it may judge necessary. In fact, there are no limits either to its rights or its powers. It must transform as well as reform its subjects; perhaps even create new subjects, if it thinks fit. “The state,” says Bodeau, “moulds men into whatever shape it pleases.” That sentence expresses the gist of the whole system. --Tocqueville, The Old Regime and Revolution. Book II, CHAPTER XV: How the French Sought Reform Before Liberties (translation from 1856)

Near the end of Foucault's first lecture of the Birth Of Biopolitics (10 January, 1979), he remarks about the physiocrats being "the first political economy." And he adds that they "concluded that political power must be power without external limitation, without counterbalance, and without any bounds other than arising from itself, and this what they called despotism." The editors of his edition add a note here to P.P.F.J.H. Le Mercier de La Rivière, L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (published without the author’s name, London: Jean Nourse, and Paris: Desaint, 1767) ch. 24: “Du despotisme legal.” Foucault goes on to lecture "Despotism is an economic government, but an economic government which not hemmed in and whose boundaries are not drawn by anything but an economy which it has itself defined and which it completely controls." (p. 14) As I have noted elsewhere (recall here; and here) Foucault treats the physiocrats as a kind of exemplary temptation toward despotism within the development of economics, including some branches of liberal economics.

Adam Smith was a respectful critic of physiocracy. And to the best of my knowledge he does not single them out as especially tending towards despotism.  Since he is not shy about calling mercantilists dangerous warmongers, and he explicitly calls political rule by merchant run companies 'despotical,' (WN 4.7.c.104, p. 638), this got me reflecting a bit on Foucault's characterization, and its source(s). I don't think this is an eighteenth century view of physiocrac. (I am open to suggestions otherwise!)

To be sure, Smith strongly implies that France in his day -- then at least shaped by if not sometimes governed by physiocrats and their followers -- is a mild form of despotism, so in context he may well be thinking of them. But he writes so in the context of discussion of ecclesiastic privileges (in Book V of the Wealth of Nations) not in the context of his treatment of physiocracy in Book IV.* I also don't think that a fondness for despotism is something that one immediately notices about most physiocrats, although once one is alerted to it it jumps out at you.

As it happens, Smith tends to treat most physiocrats as rather derivative from Quesnay. But he does praise Le Mercier de La Rivière as being the best of the lot ("the most distinct and best connected account of this doctrine is to be found in a little book written by Mr. Mercier de la Riviere,  sometime Intendant of Martinico, intitled, The natural and essential Order of Political Societies." (WN 4.9.38, p. 679. A book Smith owned in French, as the editors of the Glasgow edition note.) As Smith recognizes, Le Mercier de La Rivière was a colonial administrator.

Interestingly enough, Coleridge, in his Essays entitled The Friend, explicitly connects physiocracy to despotism, and he singles out Le Mercier de La Rivière (see here), the "simplicity" of his theory "promised the readiest and most commodious machine for despotism." (Essay IV) This work dates I think from 1812. Since he is writing while Boneparte is emperor the concern with despotism is a living one. I am inclined to think that Coleridge may even be the original source of connecting physiocracy with despotism. But I leave that for others to explore.

It's pretty likely, however, that Tocqueville inspired the characterization we find in Foucault. (When I say that I don't mean to deny that Foucault would have read the sources he mentions himself; I tend to think that even when he is manifestly relying on another authority he will have read the underling sources.) And the reasons I say that are four-fold.

First, when Foucault introduces the physiocrats for the first time, he explicitly links them to despotism and reminds the audience [vous savez] that this is common ground (recall: "The first political economy was, of course, that of the physiocrats, and you know that from the very start of their economic analysis the physiocrats...and this is what they called despotism.") And while this can be a rhetorical affect, I think it's also a way of alluding to work with presumed canonical status. It's, of course, not obvious everyone in the audience would have recognized that Foucault is alluding to Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. After all, the very erudite editors of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics don't mention it, and just last week (recall) I read a reputable scholar (Behrent) denying that Foucault was "inspired by the political liberalism of Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, or Francois Guizot, whom other intellectuals were busily dusting off at the time." But this at least suggests that Tocqueville was in the Parisian air in the late 70s.

Second, Tocqueville suggests that while the physiocrats were relatively obscure their writings reveal the true nature of the Revolution. He very explicitly and at length links physiocratic despotism with the idea of public enlightenment. And this Foucault echoes in the third lecture, when he treats the "physiocratic conception of enlightened despotism" (emphasis added, 24 January, 1979, p. 24) as the main exemplar of "governmental naturalism." 

In fact that the physiocrats exhibit a kind governmental naturalism is even more explicit in Tocqueville's French: "Ils sont, il est vrai, tre s­favorablcs au libre echange des denrees, au laisser-faire ou au laisser-passer dans le commerce et dans l'in­dustrie" (emphasis in original; the English translation that They were in favor of the removal of all restrictions upon the sale and conveyance of produce and merchandise is not so eloquent in comparison).

Third, Tocqueville attributes the governmental naturalism explicitly to Mercier de La Rivière  (“The state must govern according to the laws of natural order (règles de l’ordre essentiel)"; the French is in the English translation. And, in turn, Tocqueville emphasizes the significance of the absence of counterbalances.

Finally, Tocqueville anticipates Foucault in identifying the complex, reflexive nature about the relationship between future model, which is supposed to shape (as of yet not existing) social reality and the underlying existing social reality as a source for the the model. (Recall: "They were not satisfied with using the royal power to effect social reforms; they partly borrowed from it the idea of the future government they proposed to establish. The one was to be, in some measure, a copy of the other. The state, said the economists, must not only govern, it must shape the nation. It must form the mind of citizens conformably to a preconceived model.") Admittedly, Foucault doesn't say this about the physiocrats, but he posits it as a general property of governmental practice at the start of the first lecture, "I tried to locate the emergence of a particular type of rationality in governmental practice, a type of rationality that would enable the way of governing to be modeled on something called the state which, in relation to this governmental practice, to this calculation of governmental practice, plays the role both of a given—since one only governs a state that is already there, one only governs within the framework of a state—but also, at the same time, as an objective to be constructed. (pp, 3-4).

To sum up, I think Foucault is treating Tocqueville's characterization of the physiocrats as common ground between his audience and himself. And while it is surely possible that he and Tocqueville were struck by the same issues in physiocracy, I think it's also highly plausible that Tocqueville directed Foucault's attention in these sources. 

 

 

*Here's what Smith writes "The rights, the privileges, the personal liberty of every individual ecclesiastic, who is upon good terms with his own order, are, even in the most despotic governments, more respected than those of any other person of nearly equal rank and fortune. It is so in every gradation of despotism, from that of the gentle and mild government of Paris, to that of the violent and furious government of Constantinople." (WN 5.1.g.19, p. 799) I doubt Hume would ever call the French government 'despotic.' 

 

+Here's the French for the Foucault passage: "La première économie politique, c'est bien entendu celle des physiocrates et vous savez que les physiocrates (j'y reviendrai par la suite) ont à partir même de leur analyse économique conclu que le pouvoir politique devait être un pouvoir sans limitation externe, sans contrepoids externe, sans frontière venue d'autre chose que de lui-même, et c'est cela qu'ils ont appelé le despotisme. Le despotisme c'est un gouvernement économique, mais qui n'est enserré, qui n'est dessiné dans ses frontières par rien d'autre qu'une économie qu'il a lui-même définie et qu'il contrôle lui-même totalement."