It is this transmission of efforts, this exchange of services, which forms the subject of Political Economy; and since, on the other hand, economical science is condensed and summed up in the word Value, of which it is only a lengthened explanation, it follows that the notion of value would be imperfectly, erroneously, conceived if we were to found it upon the extreme phenomena of our sensibility—namely, our Wants and Satisfactions—phenomena which are personal, intransmissible, and incommensurable as between two individuals, in place of founding it on the manifestations of our activity, upon efforts, upon reciprocal services, which are interchanged because they are susceptible of being compared, appreciated, estimated, and which are capable of being estimated precisely because they are capable of being interchanged.
In the same chapter we arrived at the following formulas:— [p134]
“Utility (the property which certain things and certain acts have of serving us, of being useful to us) is complex,—one part we owe to the action of nature, another to the action of man.”—“With reference to a given result, the more nature has done the less remains for human action to do.”—“The co-operation of nature is essentially gratuitous—the co-operation of man, whether intellectual or muscular, exchanged or not, collective or solitary, is essentially onerous, as indeed the word Effort implies.”
And as what is gratuitous cannot possess value, since the idea of value implies onerous acquisition, it follows that the notion of Value would be still erroneously conceived, if we were to extend it, in whole or in part, to the gifts or to the co-operation of nature, instead of restricting it exclusively to human co-operation.
Thus, from both sides, by two different roads, we arrive at this conclusion, that value must have reference to the efforts which men make in order to obtain the satisfaction of their wants.
In the third chapter we have established that man cannot exist in a state of isolation. But if, by an effort of imagination, we fancy him placed in that chimerical situation, that state contrary to nature, which the writers of the eighteenth century extolled as the state of nature, we shall not fail to see that it does not disclose to us the idea of Value, although it presents the manifestation of the active principle which we have termed effort. The reason is obvious. Value implies comparison, appreciation, estimation, measure. In order that two things should measure each other, it is necessary that they be commensurable, and, in order to that, they must be of the same kind. In a state of isolation, with what could we compare effort? With want? With satisfaction? In that case, we could go no farther than to pronounce that the effort was more or less appropriate, more or less opportune. In the social state, what we compare (and it is this comparison which gives rise to the idea of Value) is the effort of one man with the effort of another man,—two phenomena of the same nature, and, consequently, commensurable.
Thus, the definition of the word Value, in order to be exact, must have reference not only to human efforts, but likewise to those efforts which are exchanged or exchangeable. Exchange does more than exhibit and measure values—it gives them existence. I do not mean to say that it gives existence to the acts and the things which are exchanged, but it imparts to their existence the notion of value.
Now, when two men transfer to each other their present efforts, or make over mutually the results of their anterior [p135] efforts, they serve each other; they render each other reciprocal service.
I say, then, Value is the relation of two services exchanged.
The idea of value entered into the world the first time that a man having said to his brother, Do this for me, and I shall do that for you—they have come to an agreement; for then, for the first time, we could say—The two services exchanged are worth each other.