[205]Ibid., p. 417.
[206]Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 425-6.
[207]Ibid., p. 429.
[208]Ibid., pp. 434-5.
[209]Thus, if Tugan Baranovski, championing Say-Ricardo’s views, tells us about the controversy between Sismondi and Ricardo (Studies on the Theory and History of Commercial Crises in England, p. 176), that Sismondi was compelled ‘to acknowledge as correct the doctrine he had attacked and to concede his opponent all that is necessary’; that Sismondi himself ‘had abandoned his own theory which still finds so many adherents’, and that ‘the victory in this controversy lies with Ricardo’, this shows a lack of discrimination—to put it mildly—such as is practically unheard-of in a work of serious scientific pretensions.
[210]‘L’argent ne remplit qu’un office passager dans ce double échange. Les échanges terminés, il se trouve qu’on a payé des produits avec des produits. En conséquence, quand une nation a trop de produits dans un genre, le moyen de les écouler est d’en créer d’un autre genre’ (J. B. Say, Traité d’Économie Politique, Paris, 1803, vol. i, p. 154).
[211]In fact, here again, Say’s only achievement lies in having given a pompous and dogmatic form to an idea that others had expressed before him. As Bergmann points out, in his Theory of Crises (Stuttgart, 1895), the work of Josiah Tucker (1752), Turgot’s annotations to the French pamphlets, the writings of Quesnay, Dupont de Nemours, and of others contain quite similar observations on a natural balance, or even identity, between demand and supply. Yet the miserable Say, as Marx once called him, claims credit as the evangelist of harmony for the great discovery of the ‘théorie des débouchés’, modestly comparing his own work to the discovery of the principles of thermo-dynamics, of the lever, and of the inclined plane. In the preface and table of contents, e.g. to the 6th edition of his Traité (1841, pp. 51, 616) he says: ‘The theory of exchange and of vents, such as it is developed in this work, will transform world politics.’ The same point of view is also expounded by James Mill in his ‘Commerce Defended’ of 1808, and it is he whom Marx calls the real father of the doctrine of a natural equilibrium between production and demand.
[212]Say in Revue Encyclopédique, vol. 23, July 1824, pp. 20 f.
[213]Nouveaux Principes ..., vol. i, p. 117.
[214]Say, loc. cit., p. 21.