Liberal economists and Owenism: Blanqui and Reybaud

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the reaction to Owen’s work in the circle associated with the liberal Journal des Économistes. It attempts to reconstruct the liberal argument against utopian socialist schemes of ‘regeneration’ and ‘redistribution’, and against those associated with Robert Owen in particular. It focuses on the works of Louis Reybaud (1799–1879) and Adolphe Blanqui (1798–1854) and their critical engagement with the writings of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen. It offers a detailed analysis of Reybaud’s Études sur les réformateurs, ou socialistes modernes (1840), which did much to popularise the term ‘socialist’ in France, and Blanqui’s Histoire de l’économie politique en Europe depuis les anciens jusqu’à nos jours (1837). The article’s central argument is that these works appeared at an inflection point in the history of liberal political economy in France. Both started from the premise, shared with the socialist authors they were analysing, but increasingly suspect to liberal economic opinion, that the solution to the social question lay in the proper harnessing of the spirit of association as opposed to unregulated competition. The question at issue for Blanqui and Reybaud was what form this ‘associationism’ should take.