The contribution of French political economists to the development of liberal political thought is generally held to be weak
and negligible.
1 This is equally the case when it comes to their contributions to pure economic theory.
2 Their importance is acknowledged neither by historians of economic theory nor by historians of political liberalism. But
this scholarly assessment contrasts sharply with their actual stature in the nineteenth century. Just as France was then a
significant player in the economic, political and diplomatic domains, so were the French economists, who were well known in
both Europe and America. Jean-Baptiste Say’s
Traité d’économie politique was regarded as an important contribution to the development of political economy, and thanks to its many translations was
widely used by students and men of letters taking their first steps in that science. Moreover, in 1842, French political economists
succeeded in creating a close-knit group called the Société d’économie politique, which met regularly throughout the rest
of the century and became a sort of think tank with a considerable public profile. This was thanks, in large part, to the
publication of a journal, the
Journal des économistes which was
launched at the end of 1841, and the work of Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin, who published many of their books. The group was a
recognized success and was imitated elsewhere, for instance in Italy where economists gathered around the
Giornale degli economisti. This only further begs the question of how it could be that such an influential and well-organized group is, to a large
extent, excluded from the history of French liberalism.
In order to set the record straight and provide a proper assessment of their accomplishments, it is necessary to examine their
views on the connections between political economy and the tasks of government, which is what I propose to do here. The French
economists did not regard political economy as a theoretical type of knowledge that was reserved for experts; they continuously
upheld the idea that the practical side of their science took precedence over the theoretical. Political economy, they often
repeated, was both a science and an art.
3 Thus, they saw explaining the laws of political economy to both the administration and society at large as their primary
task. These laws concerned self-interested behaviour, as well as the management of this behaviour by a specific device: the
competition generated by free markets.
The first section of this chapter deals with Jean-Baptiste Say’s views on the government of self-interested behaviour and
the role of the administration. This is a necessary starting point since Say was regarded as an authority and was influential
long after his Traité was superseded by other publications. A second section of this chapter shows that political economists like Charles Dunoyer
and Frédéric Bastiat regarded competition and the spreading of economic knowledge as effective political tools that would
increase the degree of freedom enjoyed by French citizens. A third and final section briefly examines how these issues were
dealt with at the end of the century, when political economists such as Paul Leroy-Beaulieu took up positions against thinkers
prone to giving more emphasis and power to other springs of action, notably Auguste Comte’s altruism, and to the central state.
Since Say believed that the strength of a nation lay in its population and its interests rather than in its government with
its regulations, it is not surprising to find him writing in favour of a ‘minimal state’.
4 He regarded government spending as falling into the category of ‘unproductive consumption’, which meant that the value of
the goods consumed was not reproduced as it was in productive consumption (investment). This did not mean, however, that government
spending was useless, since it provided services fostering the well-being of the population. As a general proposition, Say
believed that the less the government spent, the more accrued to the production of wealth and to private consumption driven
by self-interest. He illustrated this by the use of numerous estimations of the cost of police, justice, etc., which he regarded
as too high. In public lectures at the Athénée Royal, he made this point very clear.
5 In the third lecture, for example, he explained to his audience how political economists like himself viewed government.
A society could exist without any government, he explained, noting that this had actually happened during the French Revolution.
It had also occurred in the new states before they became members of the United States of America.
6 Say reasserted this position in a paper published in
L’Encyclopédie progressive in 1826, and finally in the last volume of his lengthy
Cours complet d’économie politique pratique.
7 A more radical expression of the idea is also expressed in the manuscript of a volume he intended to publish under the title
‘La politique pratique’.
8 There, he toyed with the idea that order and security might be produced by the citizens themselves, or produced by entrepreneurs
on the citizens’ behalf.
9The rationale behind Say’s view of the minimal state can be explained by the prominence he accorded to enlightened, self-interested
behaviour. Following Adam Smith and utilitarian philosophers such as Helvétius, d’Holbach and Bentham, Say regarded self-interested
behaviour as the principal building block of any progressive society. Consistently following one’s own interest was the first
step to wisdom, he wrote. What is important to note, however, is that this basic rule was valid only as long as self-interest
was regulated by market competition. Say was adamant on this point.
Say acknowledged that the public was often exposed to ‘the stupidity, the madness or the whims’ of individuals. But he also
believed that protection against such irrational forces was provided ‘whenever production is ruled by free competition’. Where
free competition reigned, the ‘madness and stupidity’ of individuals was negated. In the following editions of his
Traité, Say generalized his idea. ‘Self-interest is always the best judge of the size of the benefits one may expect from production’,
he wrote. But he also realized that ‘self-interest may be misled in some occurrences’. What was needed, then, was for various
self-interests to ‘balance each other’ through competitive markets.
10The point is that self-interest could be socially inefficient, for example when individuals were shortsighted. In such cases,
Say held that the government might actually have a clearer and better view of the situation. Therefore, he acknowledged that
government had positive functions to perform, as long as its members were enlightened
and the administration in charge of implementing the government’s decisions was equally enlightened. Say referred to this enlightened
governmental–administrative nexus in the ‘Preliminary discourse’ to his
Traité:
Even when a monarch and his main ministers are learned in the principles upon which the wealth of a nation is grounded, would
their knowledge be useful if they did not have in all the layers of the administration men able to follow their views and
implement what they had in mind? The wealth of a city, of a province, sometimes depends on bureaucratic work, and the head
of a small administration may often have an influence far superior to that of the legislator.
11
Say’s views were also based on a contrast between ‘enlightened interests’, on the one hand, and ‘sinister interests’ (a formula
coming from Bentham)
or ‘vanity’ on the other. According to Say, ‘vanity’ reigned within the governmental–administrative nexus, and was increased
by the fact that the costs of politicians and administrators were covered not by their own money but by funds collected through
taxes. For Say, vanity was measured by the number of people under the direction of an administrator,
12 and it contrasted markedly with their usefulness to society. Vanity also constituted an important danger to industrial society
because it allowed self-interested behaviour to free itself from the competitive pressure of the market. This was particularly
true of entrepreneurs who tried to escape the pressure coming from abroad by convincing the administration to raise custom
duties or tariff barriers:
As soon as a man or a class of men can rely upon the public authority to circumvent competition, they get a privilege costly
to society; they get profits which are not entirely due to the services they have produced, because a part of these profits
comes from a tax upon the consumers, a tax they usually share with the public authority which unduly helped them in this case.
The legislator is at pains not to deliver these privileges since they are asked by the very producers that would benefit from
them, and since their profits are presented in a plausible way as profits accruing to the whole industrial class and the nation,
because they and their workers are parts of the industrial class of the nation.
13
In other words, the governmental–administrative nexus was a dangerous part of the social body because it could become a trap
within which vanity and ignorance worked together against industrial activity and at the cost of the wealth produced by enlightened
interests. The importance Say accorded to this issue becomes clear when one considers the fact that he opened his famous chapter
on outlets (
Les débouchés) with a harsh critique of the errors and fallacies of entrepreneurs when it came to the conditions most favourable to the
healthy functioning of the markets. These errors and fallacies were, according to Say, directly linked to the government’s
mistakes in the realm of freedom of international trade and economic policy.
14Say recognized that there was no easy way out of this situation. In the first edition of the
Traité, he argued that it was better to pay a good salary
to government administrators, since competent persons were more likely to provide useful services, while incompetent ones
might be willing to accept a lower salary for less useful services, i.e. too expensive for their quality.
15 However, Say was not always consistent on this point. Would competition provide a possible solution? He did not think so,
because a person might accept a low salary and then use his position to benefit unduly from his administrative power.
16 In the
Cours complet Say did not offer any solution to this dilemma and nothing on the subject is to be found in the unfinished manuscript of
‘La politique pratique’.
Confronted by the strength and perceived dangers of the governmental–administrative nexus, Say believed instead in the capacity
of educated citizens to act in their own enlightened interest. An important prerequisite, however, was that they have access
to the truth discovered by political economists. In this respect, it was not accidental that Say devoted most of his time
to diffusing knowledge. Through public lectures – from 1815 to 1819 at the Athénée royal, from 1819 to 1832 at the Conservatoire
royal des arts et metiers, and from 1830 to 1832 at the Collège de France
17 – and through the publication of multiple editions of his books,
18 he hoped to provide as many intellectual tools as possible to the public. Say strongly believed that citizens should devote
part of their time to public affairs, notably in order to check the decisions coming from the government–administrative nexus.
19 A paragraph added to the third edition of the
Traité illustrates this point. In this paragraph, Say argues that the modern financial system required the government to explain
to the public what its resources and needs were, and the reasons why it needed to borrow money. Enlightened citizens needed
a clear understanding of the functioning of the government and its budget. This is also why Say thought that representative
governments created ‘a moral revolution’ in the relationship between the state and the citizen. In this sense, Say was close
to Benjamin Constant, since, like Constant, Say stressed that modern liberty necessarily involved a commitment to
public affairs.
20
During the 1820s and 30s, Say’s position in favour of self-interest enlightened by political economy and competitive markets
was criticized by other ‘industrialist’ publicists.
21 This is notably the case with Henri de Saint-Simon after 1819 and then with the Saint-Simonian School after the death of
Saint-Simon in 1825. The Saint-Simonians did not disagree with Say’s view on the importance of knowledge, but they came to
think that he had given too much importance to rational knowledge and not enough to passions and religious feelings. This
launched a long debate on the role of self-interest in the functioning of an industrial society. According to the Saint-Simonians,
philanthropy was as necessary as self-interest, and it was the role of their new religion to emphasize its positive function.
Philanthropy would allow all members of the industrialist class to improve their situation, the lower classes of workers included.
Moreover, with the difficulties created by the first industrial economic crises – notably the one in 1825 – the Saint-Simonians
came to believe that competition involved a large amount of waste compared to what could be achieved through the organization
of production.
22 These two claims challenged the views of Say and the French liberal economists, who responded by reiterating their belief
in the positive role of economic knowledge and competition.
The importance given to the diffusion of economic knowledge can be seen in the
Journal des économistes, which devoted a significant number of its pages to this topic. Under the pen of Adolphe Blaise, the journal offered information
on lectures given at the Collège de France, the Conservatoire Royal des arts et métiers and then the École des ponts et chaussées.
The importance accorded to the teaching of political economy became even more salient in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution
of 1848, when the new government decided to suppress the chair of political economy at the Collège de France – Michel Chevalier
was then the
appointed professor. This decision provoked a bitter reaction from the editor of the
Journal des économistes, soon followed by the Société d’économie politique,
23 which categorically rejected the government’s idea that a ‘republican political economy’ dedicated to making the whole people
of France rich should replace the ‘monarchist and constitutionalist political economy’ which had previously favoured only
the wealthiest classes. ‘No form of government is powerful enough to change the character of a science. A science is the expression
of the truth; and truth is unique and unalterable, whether under an autocracy, a monarchy or a democracy.’
24 Later on, when the Second Empire entered its so-called liberal period, the teaching of political economy was again on the
agenda when the government made it possible to offer public lectures on the topic. At the beginning of the 1880s, political
economy was also made part of the curriculum in secondary schools (as a part of the philosophy courses) and in the faculties
of law. It goes without saying that French liberal economists were among those who provided the schoolboys and law students
with textbooks. Following the lead of Say himself, who wrote three books devoted to the diffusion of political economy and
had a lifelong commitment to teaching, all the major French liberal economists wrote a textbook.
25Beyond this general trend, Frédéric Bastiat and Charles Dunoyer endeavoured to expand Say’s insights into the combined positive
role of competition and economic knowledge. Bastiat’s actions and writings are a perfect example of Say’s view on the importance
of spreading economic knowledge among the French elites.
26 His correspondence with Richard Cobden illustrates the point. Bastiat wrote to Cobden that he had ‘the conviction that I
[Bastiat] am truly helping my country, either in popularizing the sound economic doctrines or in debunking the men guiltily
nurturing the fatal doctrines of protectionism’.
27 Strongly impressed by the
success of the Anti-Corn Law League, Bastiat soon came to link popularization and mobilization through what could be called
free trade unrest (
agitation) and he praised Cobden for the progress he made in the art of unrest (
l’art d’agiter).
28 He lamented that the poor condition of his health prevented him from becoming a true man of action.
29 This importance given to popularizing political economy was grounded on the difference that Bastiat saw between two different
types of science, as he explained in the conclusion of the first series of his
Sophismes économiques:
Certain sciences may in some respects be known only by scholars. These sciences are the province of professionals. The remainder
of society benefits from the science in spite of its ignorance: being ignorant of physics and astronomy does not prevent anyone
from enjoying the usefulness of a watch, does not prevent anyone from benefiting from steamboats and trains, thanks to the
knowledge of engineers and pilots … But there are some sciences from which the public benefits in proportion to its knowledge
of the science. These sciences are effective not through the knowledge accumulated in a few exceptional minds, but by virtue
of their diffusion in the common mind.
30
Bastiat was convinced that it was the ignorance and not the self-interested behaviour of entrepreneurs that was the real difficulty
to be overcome, as he explained in the opening pages of the same volume: ‘I do not belong to those who say: “protectionism
is grounded on interests” – I believe that it rests on errors or, incomplete truths.’
31 When confronted by the growth of the socialist movement in 1848, he repeated the same idea to Cobden: ‘Difficulties are accumulating
at our doors;
interests are not our unique adversary. Public ignorance is revealing itself in all its sad importance.’
32 In a book he considered to be his most important contribution to economic science – even though French economists paid no
attention to it
33 – Bastiat elaborated on the role of self-interest and of competition, giving them a religious flavour. God himself had put
self-interest in the human heart, but God had also put another spring of action in man: competition. The second is a force
of coercion that prevents self-interested men from manipulating resources to their own selfish advantage and instead forces
them to offer to everyone, through the free market, the progress
made by each of them.
34 According to Bastiat, competition, self-interest and progress all required the diffusion of economic knowledge.
A different line of thought was at the heart of Dunoyer’s approach to competition and economic knowledge. Dunoyer had been
directly in touch with Say when he was the director, along with Charles Comte, who eventually became Say’s son-in-law, of
a liberal journal, Le censeur (1814–15) and then Le censeur européen (1817–19). In a critical comment on Say’s fifth edition of the Traité d’économie politique, Dunoyer explained that Say’s views on the productivity of ‘immaterial services’ were unsatisfactory. According to Dunoyer,
Say was right when arguing against Smith that immaterial services created value as did any material production, but Say had
not fully implemented his own discovery. Dunoyer’s seminal idea was to stress that immaterial services could last much longer
than the period during which they were created and consumed. This was most obviously the case, he wrote, when these services
were fully embodied in the human beings who consumed them and contributed to their freedom. This was not a minor point in
Dunoyer’s writings, since he devoted a whole volume of his De la liberté du travail to explaining it.
Dunoyer defined freedom as the power men have when they can make use of their forces; accordingly, any means facilitating
the implementation of men’s forces could be said to improve their freedom.
35 Forces could be either individual or collective. This led Dunoyer to a distinction which is close to the one we have seen
in Bastiat’s writings: ‘Private and political affairs differ because implementation of improvements may be immediate in the
case of the former, while in the latter, implementation requires that the ideas of the philosopher become common among the
public.’
36 Consequently, ignorance and passions were the major difficulties to overcome. Taking stock of his critique of Say’s views
on material services, Dunoyer explained that the arts that act upon people themselves are the most important, since they produce
individuals endowed with good health, taste, knowledge and manners. He was thinking, among other things, not only of medicine
and gymnastics (for the body), arts (for the imagination) and education (for intelligence and good manners), but also religion
and government (for good manners).
37 All these providers of immaterial services improved the human material with which society was made. They improved the freedom
of men who benefited from better
health and physical strength, and also from an improved intelligence, an enriched imagination and better manners, since all
these elements increased the use of men’s forces. Dunoyer’s was a bold move for a liberal economist to make, since it implied
an appreciation of the actions of government anytime the latter made these kinds of services more available to the population.
Dunoyer was in fact endorsing the idea that transforming human capacities was the most important task the government of an
industrial society should undertake.
Dunoyer did not succeed in convincing his fellow economists to change the definition of political economy. His book was, however,
read and very much appreciated by the founder of sociology, Auguste Comte. In the case of Dunoyer, Comte made an exception
to his ‘mental hygiene’ regime by which he had stopped reading his contemporaries. As he wrote to John Stuart Mill, Comte
found something to praise in Dunoyer’s book, something that was directly in line with his own thinking.
38 Comte notably agreed with Dunoyer that government could (and should) encourage public and individual morality through a good
educational system. Yet while Dunoyer had in mind the propagation of ideas appropriate to a society driven by the competitive
ethos, Comte believed that the same mechanism could help create a society driven by
altruism as well as egoism (the former being mainly associated with women). In sharp contrast with Dunoyer’s utilitarianism, Comte
believed that altruism should be highly valued and disseminated in industrial society in order to ensure progress and combat
the dangers posed by egoism. Not surprisingly, Comte’s approach to social behaviour was severely criticized by some French
liberal economists on the grounds that his political philosophy accorded too much importance to the state. Yet Comte’s views
could not be so easily pushed aside and some French liberals, such as Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, did take them seriously and elaborated
on them.
French liberal economists were, according to Schumpeter, overly interested in the practical side of political economy, to
such a degree that they failed to produce any scientific results. In light of the present inquiry, however, this ‘failure’
had some positive effects, since it implied that French economists paid a great deal of attention to the governance of industrial
society.
In this regard, it is not surprising that even socialist thinkers were given the opportunity to explain their points of view
in the pages of the
Journal des économistes, where the proper role of the governmental–administrative nexus was a key issue of contention.
39 August Comte never wrote a line in this journal, but this does not mean that his views were entirely absent from the debate.
As early as 1845, Gustave de Molinari wrote an article about Comte’s system of morality in the
Journal. Molinari’s assessment was highly critical: positivism, he said, was a new form of utopia in which there was nothing of interest,
in terms of either moral philosophy or the social sciences. It was a non-authoritarian form of utopia and in this respect
only was it better than socialist systems. Molinari ended his article wondering how a ‘distinguished mathematician’ could
err so profoundly.
40 Later on, Henri Baudrillart made only a brief comment on altruism while criticizing Bentham’s utilitarianism.
41 However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the debate with Comte’s ideas was clearly on the agenda of French liberal
economists. Clémence Royer wrote a harsh critique of Comte’s sociology in Léon Say and Joseph Chailley’s
Dictionnaire de l’économie politique. In fact, it was so critical that the editors explained in a footnote that they did not endorse all of Royer’s views.
42 André Liesse’s entry on sociology was no less critical, claiming that not a single positive result could come from the so-called
science of society advocated by Comte.
43 In the same period, Maurice Block considered the issues of sociology and egoism versus altruism in a book that he hoped would
provide a full update of political economy since Adam Smith.
44 His assessment of Comte was unambiguously negative. Sociology, Block wrote, was the fruit of Comte’s imagination and would
never reach the status of a true science.
45 Block’s main criticism concerned the confusion between science and art: Comte’s synthetic approach was worthless in
the domain of science, in which the principle of the division of labour compels scientists to specialize in one or two sciences.
Block presented a similar line of argument in a chapter devoted to altruism and egoism. He categorically rejected the idea
that economists were preaching an egoistic point of view; rather, he argued, they were dealing with ‘legitimate self-interest’
or ‘enlightened interest’.
In the introductory chapters of his four-volume
Traité théorique et pratique d’économie politique, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu also took up the issue of egoism and altruism. On the one hand, he explained that egoism and self-interest
were not identical, because the former was a morbid exaggeration of the latter.
46 At the same time, he argued that altruism did actually have an important role to play within political economy. According
to Leroy-Beaulieu, self-interest was appropriate whenever the production and distribution of wealth was at stake, but altruism
took command in the consumption process and, more generally, within the family.
47 In a previous book, Leroy-Beaulieu had already explained that generosity and gift-giving were increasing with progress, so
that economists were misled when they grounded their science upon self-interest alone.
48 As his discussion of altruism versus self-interest in the context of the administration makes him a clear descendant of Say,
it is worth taking a closer look at Leroy-Beaulieu’s ideas.
Leroy-Beaulieu made extensive use of the notion of self-interested behaviour in his critique of the administration in the
modern state. On this topic, he first wrote a series of papers in a leading journal of the time,
La Revue des deux Mondes, and then developed his thoughts in his lectures at the Collège de France, which soon accumulated into a substantial book.
49 Leroy-Beaulieu was a fierce anti-statist French economist; and, like many of his colleagues, he only reluctantly accepted
the republican form of government installed in France after the demise of the Second Empire, the military defeat of 1870 and
the Parisian Commune.
50 These elements gave his ideas on the economic functions of the modern state
a particular flavour. Compared to Say, who wrote at the beginning of the ninteenth century, Leroy-Beaulieu faced a very different
ideological situation, which now contained a strong current of thought favourable to state interventionism. This current was
not so much related to French socialism, which captured people’s attention in the middle of the century, but came rather from
German philosophers (Hegel and Lorenz von Stein) and economists, the so-called ‘socialists of the chair’ (Adolph Wagner and
Albert Schäffle). Leroy-Beaulieu rejected their idea that the state should be regarded as the ‘brain’ of the ‘social body’.
This was not so, he wrote, since the state had no intellectual privilege over individuals. On the contrary, the state was
subject to the fads and fashions that spread in society at the time of elections;
51 furthermore, it lacked the most ‘sublime human quality’, the capacity to invent new combinations (
l’esprit d’invention), which was at the root of the entrepreneurial spirit.
52 Leroy-Beaulieu’s critique did not stop there; he went on to reassess Say’s strictures on the administration, with special
emphasis on the consequences of the political instability that plagued the modern state, especially France and the United
States. The relationship of the governmental–administrative nexus to political economy was still on the agenda of French economists,
as is illustrated by Block’s huge dictionary on French administration.
53 In the entry on ‘administration’, Block explained the basic components of the government–administration nexus and the role
played by political economy:
The administrative science may be considered from the economic or from the legal point of view. In the first case, principles
of political economy are applied to a category of social events; in the second, one gathers acts and rules related to these
events in order to build the administrative law.
Political economy applied in this sense may be considered as the theory of the administration; it contains the underpinnings
and most of the motives of administration, the others come from politics or special circumstances. Administration in this
sense is not speculative knowledge, but a pure applied science. Thus, if applied political economy may be, as it is the case
with any science, relative to the views of one or a few scientists, the administration represents the thought of
a whole generation, at least the thought of the legislator or of the influential part of the nation …
The administration may be defined as the body of public services aimed at executing the government’s thoughts and the implementation
of laws bearing on the general interest.
54
In this governmental–administrative nexus, Leroy-Beaulieu stressed the fact that the government (
l’État) had the monopoly on legitimate constraint and on the levying of taxes, but the modern state was also characterized by the
elective process and the mobility of the people in charge of the administration. The combination of these traits was disastrous
according to Leroy-Beaulieu. It meant that political struggles were nothing but struggles between two armies of greedy politicians
eager to benefit from the large revenues generated by taxes, while political mobility stemming from the passions of the citizens
meant that no continuity was to be expected from politicians.
55 This was strengthened by the fact that the greedy politicians knew that they were in charge for a limited period of time
and that their behaviour was not ‘driven or moderated by self-interest’.
56 Worse, if any of them was ruled by the feeling of honour, then he would look for ‘what is great instead of what is useful’,
a new form of administrative vanity which Say had criticized at the beginning of the century.
57 Finally, Leroy-Beaulieu made clear that he was more pessimistic about this issue than Molinari: he did not believe in the
idea of political competition through the so-called right of secession. There were no examples of parts of any country that
had been in a position to leave their former nation-state in order to join a new one.
58 As a result, the situation appeared a rather hopeless beyond a ‘minimal state’ view: competition was lacking in the political
domain and Leroy-Beaulieu did not see any means of introducing competitive, self-interested behaviour in the modern state.
Historians of both economic theory and political liberalism are certainly right in their assessments of French liberal political
economists: they did not add substantially either to economic analysis or to the theory of liberal government. However, as
this chapter has tried to document, their contribution is of great interest to our understanding of liberalism as a new form
of governmentality. Their defence of competition and self-interested
behaviour against the social thinkers, and the huge importance they accorded to the diffusion of economic knowledge, are clear
illustrations of what Michel Foucault labelled ‘liberal governmentality’ in his study of the writings of the Physiocrats.
In this type of government, self-interested behaviour in competitive markets is in charge of providing security (food included)
to a population when a government by law and discipline cannot achieve such results.
59 Political economy thus became the appropriate cognitive tool for designing and managing markets, understood as the new social
devices required for achieving the aims of the government. It is not by accident that Friedrich Hayek studied these French
debates in detail and delved into the writings of some French economists in order to build his own view of the market system
against any form of social engineering.
60In this sense, French political economists are important links in the chain joining the birth of political economy as a science
of government in the eighteenth century to the development of the neoliberal point of view in the second part of the twentieth
century. Their interest in the administrative dimension of the government on the one hand, and their opposition to other springs
of action (altruism and virtue) on the other, explain their specific place compared to other liberal thinkers.