Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to bring attention to Sismondi's forgotten ethical critique of laissez-faire capitalism. It is a forgotten critique because Sismondi has to a large extent been neglected in the literature. He has been too quickly labelled an ‘economic romanticist’. It is ethical because Sismondi questioned what he called chrematistics, which to him was becoming the chief end of economics. Chrematistics is the science of the increase of wealth conceived of abstractly and not in relation to man or society. This was opposed to the provisioning principle which Sismondi saw as the key principle of economics. To Sismondi the object of economics is man not wealth. His critique of laissez-faire capitalism was from this perspective. This led Sismondi to propose state containment of capitalism so that the well-being of the whole community was attained. This proposal is an alternative to Marx's complete liquidiation of capitalism. Sismondi's ethical critique is important not only from the point of view of the history of political economy but also for an insight into what values and principles should be given priority in our economic systems today.
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Ross E. Stewart is a Ph.D. Student at the Department of Accountancy, University of Glasgow. He was previously Lecturer at the Department of Management Studies, University of Waikato, New Zealand and is holder of the Thomson McLintock Post-Graduate Fellowship in Accounting at the University of Glasgow. The present paper was presented at an Ethics Seminar on property at Regent College, Vancouver, B.C. Other publications have been in the Financial Accounting and Auditing areas, e.g. ‘Accounting for Goodwill’, R-112, New Zealand and Society of Accountants, September, 1980, and ‘Independence the Auditor's Cornerstone’, The Accountant's Journal (October, 1977).
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Stewart, R.E. Sismondi's forgotten ethical critique of early capitalism. J Bus Ethics 3, 227–234 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00382924
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00382924