Exchange is Political Economy—it is Society itself—for it is impossible to conceive Society as existing without Exchange, or Exchange without Society. I shall not pretend in this chapter to exhaust so vast a subject. To present even an outline of it would require the entire volume.
If men, like snails, lived in complete isolation, if they did not exchange their ideas and exertions, and had no bargain or transactions with each other, we might have multitudes, indeed—human units—individuals living in juxtaposition—but we could not have Society.
Nay, we should not even have individuals. To man isolation is death. But then, if he cannot live out of society, the legitimate conclusion is that the social state is his natural state.
All the sciences tend to establish this truth, which was so little understood by the men of the eighteenth century that they founded morals and politics on the contrary assertion. They were not content with placing the state of nature in opposition to the social state—they gave the first a decided preference. “Men were blessed,” said Montaigne, “when they lived without bonds, without laws, without language, without religion.” And we know that the system of Rousseau, which exercised, and still exercises, so powerful an influence over opinions and facts, rests altogether on this hypothesis—that men, unhappily, agreed one fine morning to abandon the innocent state of nature for the stormy state of society.
It is not the design of this chapter to bring together all possible refutations of this fundamental error, the most fatal which has ever infested the political sciences; for if society is the fruit of invention and convention, it follows that every one may propose a new model, and this, since Rousseau’s time, has in fact been the [p098] direction in which men’s minds have tended. I could easily demonstrate, I believe, that isolation excludes language, as the absence of language excludes thought; and man, deprived of thought, instead of being a child of nature, ceases to be man at all.
But a peremptory refutation of the idea upon which Rousseau’s doctrine reposes, flows naturally from some considerations on Exchange.
Want, Effort, Satisfaction,—such is man in an economical point of view.
We have seen that the two extreme terms are essentially intransmissible, for they terminate in sensation, they are sensation, which is the most personal thing in the world, as well the sensation which precedes the effort and determines it, as the sensation which follows the effort and rewards it.
It is then the Effort which is exchanged; indeed, it cannot be otherwise, since exchange implies action, and Effort alone manifests the principle of activity. We cannot suffer or enjoy for one another, unless we could experience personally the pains and pleasures of others. But we can assist each other, work for one another, render reciprocal services, and place our faculties, or the results of their exercise, at the disposal of others, in consideration of a return. This is society. The causes, the effects, the laws, of these exchanges constitute the subject of political and social economy.