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THE
CLASSICAL LIBERAL TRADITION dmhart@mac.com © 2003 |
THE
RADICAL LIBERALISM OF CHARLES COMTE AND CHARLES
DUNOYER 5. CHARLES COMTE'S THEORY OF LEGISLATION AND SLAVERY |
Updated:
October 28, 2003 |
In the political repression which followed the assassination of the duc de Berry in February 1820 Charles Comte's career as a journalist came to an end with his conviction for offences against the press laws and the forced closure of Le Censeur européen. Comte went into exile rather than face his conviction so he and his wife fled to Geneva and then Lausanne, spending a total of five years in exile first in Switzerland and then in England. Comte first went to Geneva where he spent fifteen happy and profitable months working on his treatise on legislation. He found Geneva, the city which had been home to Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël, more conducive to his work and more accepting of his liberal views than the conservative régime in Paris. After the difficulties he had faced in Paris Geneva must have seemed like a breath of fresh air. Comte described Geneva as
a town where all men can devote themselves to useful study, and is assured of finding resources of all kinds; where (given its size) one can meet more educated men and find more intellectual activity than in any other town in the world; where party spirit is almost without influence in discussions and where I could flatter myself to have a number of friends..."[481]
In Geneva Comte got to know Étienne Dumont, the editor and translator of Bentham, Simonde de Sismondi, who had just finished writing his mammoth history of the Italian republics, and the scientist Candolle. After fifteen months in Geneva, Comte was approached by the government of the canton of Vaud with an offer to assume the post of Professor of Natural Law and to teach a course on legislation at the University of Lausanne. Although he was reluctant to leave Geneva he decided to accept the offer in 1821 and he spent the next two years in Lausanne teaching and working on his Traité.
But the long arm of the conservative régime in Paris was not content to allow a liberal like Comte, who had been such a thorn in its side in the early years of the Restoration, to live and work unmolested in Switzerland. Once more he was forced to leave his home and occupation in order to seek refuge in a foreign country, this time in England. The reason for Comte having to leave Switzerland was the invasion of Spain by a French army in April 1823 to support Ferdinand VII against the liberal revolution. Part of the French government's campaign to assist Ferdinand was the exertion of diplomatic pressure by the French ambassador on Switzerland to expel the French and Spanish emigrés who were sympathetic to the Spanish liberal cause. Comte was a close supporter of the liberal cause in Spain and had reported on their activities in Le Censeur and Le Censeur européen.[482] Comte feared that if his Swiss hosts did not submit to the French diplomatic pressure they might face more than just threats from the French government. The French ambassador endeavoured to have him extradited, although the Lausanne council rejected its application. Nevertheless Comte felt obliged to resign in 1823 in order to spare his hosts any embarrassment and perhaps even danger from French retribution for their obstinacy. Writing to the cantonal officials, Comte thanked his hosts for entrusting their law students to his hands and stated that under no circumstances would he allow himself to be the cause of an act of French hostility towards the Swiss people.[483] Thus to spare the Swiss government any embarrassment Comte reluctantly handed in his resignation and decided to leave for England of his own accord. Comte described his reasons for leaving Switzerland in the following words:
The aggression which was directed at that time against the constitutional government of Spain was a great shock to all those governments whose existence was founded upon the consent of the people and not on divine right. The diplomatic notes addressed (in this instance) to the various governments of Switzerland concerning foreigners living on their territory, appeared to be the prelude to a more serious attack. Knowing how easy it is for power to cover the gravest crimes (attentants) under the most frivolous and even most ridiculous pretexts, I resigned my position and withdrew to England.[484]
After leaving Switzerland Comte spent three years in England from 1823-26 where he continued to work on his book on legislation. Not a lot is known about Comte's stay in England, although it is clear that he had some contact with the Benthamites (perhaps even meeting Bentham himself) and the liberals associated with the Edinburgh Review. It is quite possible that Comte also met the young John Stuart Mill either on a trip to England or perhaps when Mill was visiting France, as Mill's two letters to Comte in 1828 tantalisingly suggest.[485] Although Comte enjoyed the more liberal atmosphere he found in both Switzerland and England, he was keen to return to France to continue the struggle for liberal constitutionalism and the free market. This time, though, it would be in a less activist and more scholarly fashion than in the first years of the Restoration. Sometime in 1826, as soon as he was legally able to, he returned to France. This was possible since his conviction and fine from his brush with the censors in 1820 expired after five years. One of his first acts was to attempt to get his name back on the list of advocates, but he was still considered to be an undesirable radical by the government and his application was turned down. As a career in journalism or law was now impossible for him, Comte turned to more scholarly pursuits in order to occupy himself.
Soon after his return to France the first part of his long-awaited magnum opus, the Traité de législation, finally appeared in print and was well received by the reading public, winning the prestigious Montyon Grand Prize in 1828 from the French Academy for the best work on moral philosophy.[486] Comte's Traité de législation was to have a considerable impact in liberal circles during the last years of the Restoration and the early years of the July Monarchy. It was still highly regarded by the editors and contributors of the Dictionnaire de l'économie politique, the pre-eminent laissez-faire liberal encyclopaedia, when it appeared in the early 1850s. Gustave de Molinari, who later in the century became one of the most influential liberal political economists in France as editor of the Journal des Économistes, was part of the generation of liberals in France who imbibed their liberalism from reading the works of Comte and Dunoyer. In a biographical article on Comte for the Dictionnaire de l'économie politique Molinari described Comte's Traité de législation as a "a veritable scientific monument" which well deserved the Academy's prize.[487] The economist Blanqui had equally high praise for Comte's work, describing it in the same article as "a veritable treatise of social economy" giving particular praise to the section on slavery, which he thought was the best thing ever written on the subject.[488] The free trade advocate and politician Frédéric Bastiat confessed that he too owed Comte much in the formulation of his liberal ideas. He relates a story about one liberal, at least, who said that it was the one book he would take with him if he were ever stranded on a desert island or imprisoned in solitary confinement!
I know of no other book which makes one think more, which reveals more new and productive insights or which produces to the same degree the feeling of evidence. Without unjustly abandoning the opinion I developed of this magnificent monument of genius when I was a studious youth, perhaps I would not have had the courage to make this pronouncement, knowing how much I ought to be on my guard in these matters, if I couldn't seek the support of two authorities: that of the Academy which awarded a prize to the work of Comte, and that of a man of the highest merit, to whom I put the question bibliophiles often ask themselves: if you were condemned to solitary confinement and you were only permitted one modern book, what would you choose? "Comte's Treatise on Legislation," he answered, "because, if it isn't the book which says the most about things, it is the book which makes one think the most."[489]
The enthusiasm for Comte's book of this unnamed liberal is only unusual for its intensity. Most of the liberals of the July Monarchy period seemed to share it to some extent. In the preface to the first edition of the Traité de législation, written in Paris 28 May 1826, Charles Comte explained the circumstances which led to the Traité de législation being written over a period of nearly fifteen years and in three different countries. He began work on it during the last few years of Napoleon's reign, his aim being to combine in one work a theoretical and a practical study of jurisprudence based upon the methodology of the empirical sciences.
Devoted at quite a young age to the study and practice of jurisprudence, but at the same time led by an irresistible desire towards philosophical study, I had busied myself for a number of years on a "Treatise on Legislation" when the Imperial government was overthrown. The double aim I had set myself was to apply to the study of law the method followed in the other sciences and to carry over into the judgement of legislative theory the knowledge which had been acquired in practice. This way of verifying one thing by another (two things which had almost always been treated separately) pleased me all the more as it was the only way I had to reconcile a profession which I had taken up by choice with a taste (for philosophy) which had become a passion.[490]
In this much acclaimed but now largely forgotten work Comte wanted to show how natural laws governed the development of society and what impediments existed to impede its progress. He tried to adopt an "empirical" approach, based upon the example of Jeremy Bentham in the field of legislation and the political economists in the area of economics and social change, rather than the more customary "theoretical" approach used by most authors of similar universal natural histories of the world. As he expressed it in the long title to his work, the study of these natural laws revealed the forces which governed the way in which people prospered, declined or remained in equilibrium, a kind of legal and sociological equivalent to Adam Smith's "wealth of nations."[491] These laws or forces could be discovered, Comte believed, by observing human nature and the milieu in which they lived. This explains why Comte devoted so much attention to a study of the diversity of human civilisation, in both a geographic and temporal sense, over hundreds of pages in the Traité de législation. As he clearly stated in the introduction to the second edition of the work published in 1837 his aim was to demonstrate:
that, in all locations and in all stages of their life, men of all races obey the same law. This truth seems to me to be beyond any shadow of a doubt. By seeking to determine the influence on social organisation and on the laws which depend on it, of the means of existence used by diverse classes into which the majority of nations are divided, another question presents itself. It is this: to discover what are the circumstances which determine the choice of these means (of existence).[492]
It was in an effort to answer this question that Comte wrote the two treatises on legislation and property over a lengthy period spanning the late empire, the turmoil of the Restoration, his exile and then return to Paris.
Comte's book of some 500 very dense pages with two closely printed columns per page is divided up into five "livres" the first of which deals with the proper method of analysing legislation and "morals" (or what I have translated as political culture), and a discussion of the varying theoretical underpinnings which scholars have devised for law, namely the natural law tradition, the social contract, religion, and utility. Book two deals with the nature of law, the power of the legislator, Comte's distinction between the "arbitrary régime" and the "legal régime", a critique of Bentham's view of the principle of pleasure and pain, and the limits of the law. Book three concerns the extraordinary diversity of human development, a study of the various human races and their varying degrees of success in "perfecting" or improving themselves. It also includes an interesting example of Comte's class analysis where he examines the rise of a "military aristocracy" in Egypt and North Africa to a position of domination over a conquered people. Book four deals with theories of climate, its influence on civilisation, and a discussion of the origins of slavery (including a criticism of Rousseau on the origin of inequality). Book five deals almost exclusively with slavery, its origin, its influence on political culture and the economy, Comte's reaction to the debate among the political economist on the economics of slave labour, and the prospects for its abolition.
Given the limits of space and the specific concerns of this dissertation I propose to discuss briefly the first two books of Comte's treatise, which deal with his view of law, legislation and the legislator. The third and fourth books on race and climate are less interesting and will not be discussed. Although modern readers might find Comte's discussion of these topics somewhat antiquated and irrelevant, they were an important part of his agenda to show the universal nature of his liberal economic and legal ideas across races, physical geography and time. I will focus most attention on the fifth book on slavery for reasons which have arisen repeatedly throughout this dissertation, namely the continuing fascination of Restoration liberals in the problems raised by slavery, the stimulus the study of slavery gave to liberal ideas of class analysis and economic exploitation, the place of slavery in the historical development of the modern world, the impact of slavery on modern French society and law, and the prospects for the evolution of post-revolutionary societies towards a liberal industrial ideal.
At the centre of Comte's view of the world was the idea that there existed an observable "natural order" in both the physical and moral realms which operated according to "invariable laws".[493] The science of legislation was a study of these "invariable laws" as they applied to relationships between individuals or groups of individuals within society, and which governed the relationship between individuals and physical things or property. An interesting twist to Comte's formulation of the study of legislation was the emphasis he gave to "disturbances" in this natural order caused by the use of violence by one group of individuals against another group of individuals. This "disturbance" could take the form of war, conquest, various forms of economic exploitation, or, as we will see, one of Comte's prime interests - slavery. Comte states quite forthrightly that the
The science of legislation has as its object knowledge of the natural relationships which exist between the various members or the various groups which make up each society, as well as those between men and the things destined to provide for their existence or their preservation. Therefore it ought to make us aware of the nature of these relationships, the various ways in which they can be disturbed (troublés) or broken (rompus), the causes and consequences of the perturbations that they undergo, the various means by which human societies maintain and extend them...[494]
The method of analysis which Comte believed was appropriate to the study of political culture (morale) and legislation was the "analytic method" of utilitarianism, by which he meant "the description of the good and bad effects which result from human customs and institutions and to make use of (this information)" in order to improve the human condition.[495] He wanted to show the chain of cause and effect (what Comte defined as "natural law")[496] of individual action and human institutions, especially the destabilising effects of government intervention in the "natural order" created by voluntary individual activity and private property. Comte sprang to the defence of Jeremy Bentham who had been accused by writers like Benjamin Constant (in the introduction to his work on religion) of peddling a dangerous doctrine which threatened all established authority by holding it up to examination in order to determine its "utility". Comte argued that, on the contrary, what was dangerous was to allow harmful (vicieux) government practices to continue:
If the application of the analytical method to the study of political culture and legislation has no other purpose but to bring to our attention the causes and effects of human actions and institutions, one cannot say that it is dangerous, unless one is claiming that good customs (moeurs) and good laws are inseparable from ignorance and error and that men will cease to conduct and govern themselves well as soon as they learn about the damage caused by harmful (vicieux) legislation and conduct.[497]
Although Comte was impressed with Bentham's principle of utility he firmly opposed Bentham's rejection of the idea of natural law. Comte agreed with Bentham that the theory that there were innate ideas common to all mankind or that men left an historical state of nature at some undetermined time in the past were very insecure grounds upon which to build a theory of natural law. But unlike Bentham, Comte did not therefore reject the idea of natural law itself but argued that it required a different theoretical foundation, i.e. a detailed historical and sociological analysis of human civilisation based upon a proper understanding of liberal political economy together would reveal the invariable and universal links between cause and effect. Furthermore, Comte rejected Bentham's claim that the idea of natural law was in its turn "anarchic" and highly dangerous because it encouraged the revolutionary overthrow of governments.[498] The radical liberal Comte suggested that Bentham had really very little to fear from excessive revolution as the true danger to society was the too ready willingness of most people to submit to political authority. Perhaps thinking of the willingness of the French people to submit to the Restored Bourbon monarchy Comte wrote:
Far from fearing resistance to good laws one should rather fear a too facile submission to harmful laws. For every people who resist good institutions one could find ten who submit to institutions which are and which are known to be bad. The fear that a government feels of harming the nation's idea of justice or morality and of driving them to resistance ought to produce in the end more good than bad, since there is as much enlightenment and morality among the people as in the government and because there is a greater and more immediate interest in being subject only to good laws.[499]
What Comte understood by "good laws" were those laws "inherent in human nature", namely those laws which protected the individual's right to life, liberty and property (to put it in its Jeffersonian formula). He rejected as the source of "bad laws" the political traditions of Rousseau and the social contract, the theocrats who saw God and the Church as the foundation of temporal law, and the strict Benthamites who judged all law according to its utility irrespective of whether or not a moral claim was "inherent in human nature" or not. Comte reserved some of his most acerbic comments to those governments, like that of the Jacobins during the revolution, which viewed social reform as a matter of the legislature expressing its will in so many laws. Montesquieu, Rousseau and the early modern jurists were all equally criticised for ascribing too much power and authority to the minds of the legislators and perpetuating the ancient Roman myth that the people should conform to the laws rather than the laws conform to human nature. As he so often did Comte viewed this disagreement over the source of just law in terms of the relationship between the slave and the slave master. A legislator who made laws in violation of human nature was no better than a slave master; citizens who obeyed such laws were no better than slaves.
This system (of legislation) is only that of slavery reduced to the simplest expression and taken to its furthest extreme. The most abject form of slavery, that which is endowed with the most flexible organisation, could not be made more complete than by becoming the expression of the master's thought, and the most despotic slave master could not demand anything more from the most submissive slave. It is very true that this system is only that of unlimited slavery, which only requires that the word "master" be substituted for that of "legislator" in order to realise the difference. This substitution changes nothing of substance since the two words equally describe the same man. This system has been able to arise and develop only in those nations formed originally by slavery, where the words appropriate to servitude have been abandoned but where the customs of slavery have been preserved. It is natural among such people that one group aspires to be masters and proclaim the maxims of despotism under the name of legislators, and another group see in their own persons only slaves under the name of subjects or citizens.[500]
Even those modern states where the rule of law either prevailed or was sought after by liberal reformers were attacked by Comte. The mere rule of law, even if equally applied to all citizens in a non-arbitrary fashion (as the contemporary liberal bureaucratic reformers wished to do in creating the Rechtstaat), did not qualify a state to be classified as a "régime légal" as opposed to a "régime arbitraire".[501] Returning to his criticism of Constant's liberal constitutionalism Comte reaffirmed that the form or structure of the government was less important than the kind of laws which it enforced. A state which openly declared the law and applied it impartially by independent judges might not have created a society where true individual liberty might be enjoyed, but a society in which oppression and "extortion" was equally shared by the subject class. So long as one class benefited from political power at the expense of those without power, so long as legislation (more properly termed "ordonnances") maintained a system based upon taxation, regulation, and slavery, then so long would "arbitrary" government which violated the prosperity and rights of the people exist.[502] Comte summed up his understanding of the nature of true law and mere decrees of power, of arbitrary and legal government in the following passage:
By ("régime légal") is meant exclusively the state of a people who only obey the laws of their own nature, those laws which contribute to their own development and prosperity. By ("régime arbitraire") is meant the state of all people who are subject to a harmful power no matter how this power is exercised. It is evident that a government falls into arbitrariness the moment it commands or forbids actions which are not required or prohibited by the laws of our nature. It is of little importance whether these orders or prohibitions are written or not written, and whether they are or are not observed in all cases where they apply. These circumstances do not make arbitrariness disappear. The name "law" ought to be exclusively reserved for those powers which are part of the nature of man or the nature of things, and which are not in the power of any individual to alter. The orders or prohibitions of government are more properly called "ordonnances" and have been so called for centuries.[503]
The only true "régime légal" was a laissez-faire liberal one, according to Comte, where an ultra-minimalist state interfered as little as possible in the lives of the citizens, intervening only to protect property and liberty in an impartial manner. By strictly limiting the power of the state Comte hoped to maximise what he called the "forces naturelles" stemming from the exercise of all individuals' "inherent" rights, and to minimise or eliminate entirely what he called the "forces artificielles" which the government exercised for the benefit of the ruling elite.[504] He concluded that the less the government acted the greater would be the prosperity of the people.[505]
I would like to conclude this brief discussion of Comte's view of legislation with an interesting analysis he provides of the utilitarian foundation for a liberal class analysis of society which was to underpin his own elaborate analysis of slavery. Comte uses a very Benthamite interpretation of the individual's basic desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain to create a theory of class according to the principle of methodological individualism. Comte argues that the pleasure-pain principle applies to relations between individuals and groups of individuals as much as it does to an individual's own personal actions and choices. The desire to avoid the "pain" of physical labour but still to be able to enjoy the "pleasure" of labour's rewards is the origin of class and the struggle between classes throughout history. Comte elevates his insight to the status of one of his natural laws which govern the conduct of human affairs. The following passage is striking for the phrasing Comte uses to describe the origin of class struggle and the fundamental position such analysis has in his theory of history. One might even be reading a liberal Marx who turned Bentham rather than Hegel on his head:
If we observe the factors which cause one part of the human species to act upon other parts we find among the principle causes the desire to obtain physical enjoyments and the desire to avoid pain of the same kind. It is in order to avoid the pain of labour (travail) and to obtain plentiful subsistance, agreeable clothing and spacious accommodation that some men come to possess other men called slaves. It is to achieve the same end that, in all nations, one part of the population dominates or seeks to dominate the others, and it is to avoid the more or less burdensome physical evils that the group of men called the governed, subjects or slaves obey or attempt to avoid the action imposed upon them. The history of the human species is comprised, in one word, of struggles (luttes) which have arisen from the desire to seize the physical enjoyments of the entire species and to impose upon others all the pain of the same kind.[506]
The "class struggles" which arise inevitably from Comte's theory of human nature and historical observation are universal and adaptable because he believes human nature is universal. In all times and at all places some individuals will attempt to live off the labour of others, thus giving rise to a ruling class and an exploited class of labourers. In the absence of an established and organised state the exploitation will be sporadic and disorganised. Once a state has been established the exploitation of one class by another will become regular and entrenched through custom, ideology, legislation, and force. One of the clearest case studies Comte provides of such class struggle and economic exploitation is that of slavery.
One of the topics which later liberals most admired in Comte's Treatise was that of slavery. As was shown above in the case of Dunoyer, both Comte and Dunoyer returned to the issue of slavery in their major published works of the mid and late 1820s at a time when they both had academic posts (Comte in exile in Lausanne, Switzerland and Dunoyer at the Athénée Saint-Germain in Paris) and were able to develop the ideas they had first put forward as essays and reviews in Le Censeur européen, before they were forced to shut it down. It is apparent that the years Comte spent completing the Traité de législation were the years when the debate amongst abolitionists and political economists on the economics of slave labour was at its peak in the early and mid-1820s. A quick perusal of Comte's footnotes reveals the names of the main protagonists of this contemporary debate (Say, Sismondi, Storch and the many pamphlets of the Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing Slavery) scattered among the more traditional authorities on ancient and modern slave societies such as the Roman historians, Montesquieu, Volney, Robertson, Alexander von Humboldt and so on. In the Traité de législation Comte not only made an important contribution to this debate about the economics of slave labour and the class structure of slave societies but also developed important insights into the nature of class society in general in a similar direction to Dunoyer in L'Industrie et la morale (1825).[507] Comte's discussion of slavery in the Traité de législation was highly influential and was regarded by many French liberals as path breaking. For example, the economist and historian Simonde de Sismondi stated that
Indeed, we regard this (excellent book) as the most complete, the most knowledgable and the most philosophic treatise which has ever been written on the subject of slavery and its disastrous effects.[508]
Probably the most important influence on the development of Comte's view of slavery was Jean-Baptiste Say and the dispute which his work provoked in abolitionist and political economy circles. Comte readily accepted Say's arguments about the inappropriateness of a narrowly based comparison between the costs of slave and free wage labourers. As Say suspected and asserted but did not elaborate upon, Comte developed at some length the idea that the slave system could only survive economically because it had the protection of tariffs in the home market and subsidies from the home government funded by the metropolitan taxpayers. If it had to compete in a fully free market, slavery's economic inefficiencies would be quickly exposed and the system would collapse, thus rendering the argument about the relative cost of slave labour versus free wage labour irrelevant. Comte developed Say's insights on the economics of slavery and combined them with his own ideas on the social, class and legal structure of slavery in the Traité de législation which appeared in late 1826 and 1827.
In Book Five of the Traité de législation Comte distinguished between two historical forms of slavery which have existed since the earliest stages of human development. "Political slavery" was the first form and arose when an organised band of warriors invaded a land peopled by an "industrious population," then settled among them after subduing them by force and exploited them in common as a subject race, much like the "conquest theory" of class which Augustin Thierry developed in his histories of France at this time.[509] Comte's analysis of political slavery appears to owe a great deal to Thierry's conquest theory of history, in which the origin of class itself was thought to come from the conquest of one "nation" or racial group by another. The prime example of this, and one which Thierry wrote on at some length in Le Censeur européen before expanding his analysis into a book-length history, was the Norman conquest of England. Another example which was a favourite of Thierry was the relationship between the Gauls and the Franks in French history. According to Thierry's view of class, post-conquest society was one divided into "two castes," with the conquering class having a monopoly of political power and ownership of land and the other more populous "working class" being forced to labour for the former in carefully controlled occupations which would not allow them any chance of enriching themselves or liberating themselves from their oppressors. The similarity of Comte's theory can be seen from the following passage:
Thus we have been led to observe the nature, the causes and the effects of political slavery. We have seen armies of barbarians organise themselves to invade countries occupied by industrious populations, to divide among themselves after the victory the lands and those conquered, to exploit them in common, to live in abundance and luxury, to abandon themselves to laziness or to devote themselves entirely to exercises designed to perpetuate their domination, to leave to the conquered peoples only that which is absolutely necessary for them to work and to forbid them any occupation which could facilitate their liberation (affranchisement). Everywhere two people are found like this on the same soil they remain divided into two castes even when eventually share a common language. The conquerors seize the monopoly of power and at the same time possession of the soil. The conquered people, condemned to work for the profit of the latter, have become the working class (la classes ouvrière) and make up the bulk of the population.[510]
What distinguishes political slavery from the second form of "domestic slavery," in Comte's view, is the manner in which the slave labour is exploited. In the former, it is as a conquered people who are exploited "en masse" as a group and who are forced to provide food, taxes and other goods to the ruling class. In the latter form of slavery, the slaves are divided up and owned and exploited individually and are forced to work for their individual master (in his household, so to speak) by means of "active and continuous" control and supervision.[511] If the method of exploitation has changed for "domestic slaves" then so too has the nature of the ruling class. In a society based upon the forced labour of domestic slaves, Comte argues, the owners of the slaves form an "aristocracy" or an "aristocratic class" as he chose to call it. Aristocracy was a term which Comte chose deliberately and defined carefully. By it he meant a class of people, usually family based, who possessed a monopoly of political power which had been seized by force and who treated their position as a form of personal property, even to the extent of being able to pass it on to their heirs. Comte contrasted this form of aristocracy, which he believed was a central aspect of all slave societies, with "les classes supérieures" with which it was often confused. The latter, Comte believed, was the "natural" result of any peaceable human endeavour and arose because of the inherent differences in skills, knowledge, and application between individuals.[512] But whatever the particular form of slavery, whether "political" or "domestic," according to Comte there were three features all forms of slavery shared: it was a way of exploiting the labour of some for the material benefit of a few, it gave rise to a definite class structure of the few exploiters and the many exploited, and resulted in a legal system which classified men as either property owners or the property of someone else. The former enjoyed the full protection of the law, whilst Comte likened the latter, the slaves, to "a piece of furniture" with all the legal rights of such a physical object.[513]
Comte did allow for the existence of a third or "middle" class in his scheme. The middle class varied in size from country to country and, where it was substantial, there was an inevitable and bitter conflict or struggle ("lutte") with the aristocratic class. However, the middle class was not of uniform composition and did not have a single class interest (as Marx might phrase it) since it was made up of at least three sub-groups: those who lived in the privileged medieval towns; those who enriched themselves in service to the aristocracy; and those who were the true "industrials," who rose up from the working class by dint of hard work. According to Comte, since the second and third factions of the middle class acquired their wealth in quite different ways, they would by necessity have very different and opposed class interests.[514]
A considerable proportion of Book Five of the Traité de législation is devoted to an exhaustive historical and sociological analysis of the three great periods of slavery: ancient Rome up to the fall of the Empire; the feudal period; and the establishment of European colonies in the New World. Comte's interest extends to the effect of slavery on a variety of aspects of the various classes which make up slave societies, including physical characteristics, intellectual achievements, "morals,"[515] personal security, interclass relationships, the nature of government, nationalism, religion, as well as the economic issues raised by the debate begun by Say on the profitability of slave labour and the slave system which was discussed in a previous chapter. The first purely economic problem Comte turns to is the effect slavery has on what he calls "les facultés industrielles" of the three classes which make up slave societies, namely the slave owners, the slaves, and the middle class, in the three great periods of slavery (ancient Greece and Rome, the feudal period, and modern European colonies).[516] Since the slave owners are able to avoid all productive labour whatsoever, an inevitable consequence is that the slave owning class comes to disdain such work and this attitude is expressed in works of political philosophy (such as Aristotle and Plato) and history (such as Plutarch and Dionysis of Halicarnassus). The underlying purpose of the disdain for useful labour, according to Comte, is an economic one. The aristocratic class had amassed vast tracks of land and used slave labour to cultivate it and to engage in commerce and industry on their behalf. By encouraging the view that productive labour was somehow beneath the dignity of a truly free man and only the province of a slave, Comte believed the aristocratic class was merely trying to establish a monopoly of these economic activities, especially that of the sale of grain.[517]
Nevertheless, there are three exceptions to this general rule of aristocratic disdain for labour. The aristocratic class considers only two occupations to be worthy of nobles, that of the warrior and that of the statesman, with a possible third occupation which Comte sarcastically discusses, that of buying and selling slaves. The first two occupations were acceptable to slave owners because they did not involve the voluntary exchange of one value for another, which was the hallmark of any productive activity as defined by Jean-Baptiste Say and as adopted by Comte and Dunoyer in their social theory. Citing Plutarch's "Life of Cato," Comte makes the following biting remarks which also reveal his continuing strong anti-classical position:
There is however one industry which (in the system of) slavery was not considered debasing in the eyes of the members of the aristocracy: it is the industry which consisted in raising, renting, buying and selling human beings. The very same person who feared being debased by using his noble hands in the cultivation of a field or in the exercise of a profession felt no fear of having his dignity affronted (déroger) in raising his slaves himself to carry out activities which he judged the most vile, even that of the gladiators. A citizen would have been dishonoured if he had busied himself in the renting out of horses, but a senator or a consul could be a renter of human beings without tarnishing his dignity. It is said that one of the ancestors of Octavius sullied his reputation by being a banker, but Cato bought and sold human beings. He specialised in selling old people who brought him only a small profit and who could become useless, and Cato was the guardian of morals (moeurs).[518]
Referring to the period of European feudalism Comte asserted that the warrior made a living by means of violent pillage, whilst the public official or statesman lived off forced contributions such as taxes, tithes and requisitions. What was significant to Comte was that these occupations were attractive to the aristocratic class precisely because they were not industrial occupations, but in fact the very opposite.[519]
The ultimate economic consequences of slavery was economic collapse and "decadence." This came about because whatever talents the aristocratic class had they were not used in improving the methods of production and the occupations they did follow, such as war, public service, and slave owning, were a net drain on productive activity. In fact, Comte considered the class of slave owners to be a parasitic class whose miraculous disappearance would leave the total industrial capacity of the world untouched, much like Saint-Simon's famous political parable of 1819 which might well have been known to Comte. Concerning slavery, Comte posed a very similar question to that of Saint-Simon:
If, by some great catastrophe, the race of masters suddenly disappeared from a country where slavery was practised not a single type of work would be suspended and no wealth lost whose going would be regretted. Work in general would take a direction more useful to human kind and periods of rest would be better managed. But labour would gain in energy and in intelligence to the extent that it was diminished in duration.[520]
The slave class had no economic incentive to work hard, preferring to do the barest minimum of labour required to avoid physical punishment from their masters. The slave owners had a vested interest in keeping their slaves as ignorant as possible (with the unfortunate economic side-effect of keeping their labour unskilled) in order to prevent rebellion. The middle class in slave societies finds itself in a similar situation to that of the slaves. Middle class artisans and farmers have to compete with the slaves doing the same kind of work, but they lack the capital resources of the slave owners. If they can get regular work, it is poorly paid and lacks the dignity which free labour should have because of the stigma attached to productive work by the aristocratic class. In ancient Rome, Comte argues, free industrial workers were reduced to a state of indigence and free farmers virtually driven off the land. In the slave states of the United States Comte observed a polarisation of class structure as the free workers "deserted" the south to find employment in the North. In both cases, the existence of slavery made it almost impossible for free labour to exist side-by-side. Comte concluded that, unless all members of a society are active in productive industrial occupations, the necessary skills for economic improvement are gradually lost and the burdens on what productive activity there is become so great that economic decline is an inevitable consequence of slavery.[521]
The economic decline brought about by slavery also has an effect on cultural activities. Comte expresses surprise that traditional explanations of the decadence of ancient Roman technology, taste, morals and language by writers as diverse as Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Rousseau did not attribute it to the pernicious influence of slavery. These political philosophers preferred to develop elaborate theories about the life-cycle of all states, which went through a progression from childhood, manhood, old age and then death. They thus missed the most important cause, namely the anti-industrial economic effects of using slave labour on a wide scale.[522]
Comte then turns to the central question of the profitability of slave labour in three important chapters.[523] Perhaps the most startling conclusion Comte comes to, after having read Adam Smith and the debate between Say, Hodgson, Storch and Sismondi on the profitability of slave labour, is that the very question first asked by Smith in The Wealth of Nations is mistaken. When the question is phrased in the way Smith chose to, namely to place oneself in the shoes of the slave owner and ask whether the costs of labour ("wear and tear" as Smith called them) were more or less for free or slave labour, Comte believed the unspoken assumption behind the question was that individual labourers, whether slave or free, were nothing more than machines whose movement could be arbitrarily directed, accelerated or slowed down. Comte rejected this approach as not one which a true philosophe, a true moralist, or a true legislator should take since it was partisan. It took the perspective of the slave owner at the literal expense of the slave labourer. By not asking about the morality and justice of slave labour in the first place, economists who argued purely about the relative costs of the two different forms of labour were like the pirates or highway robbers who weighed up the costs and benefits of a new raid against travellers. With evident approval Comte cites a passage from Say's fifth edition of the Traité d'économie politique (1826) in which Say describes as "feeble calculators" those economists who consider that force counts for everything and justice for nothing when adding up the costs and benefits of a given distribution of property.
Those who count force for everything and equity for nothing are weak calculators. (That (kind of analysis) leads to the system of exploitation of the Bedouin Arabs who stop a caravan, seize the merchandise which it is carrying and believe that it costs them nothing more than a few days of ambushing and some powder for their guns. There is only one long-lasting and certain way of producing things legitimately and there is only one legitimate way to do this and that is where the advantages of one party are not acquired at the expense of the other. [524]
Comte expressed the same idea and laid the blame for the prevalence of naked economic calculation over moral questions of property and justice at the feet of Adam Smith.
I concede that pirates and highway robbers discuss amongst themselves whether the benefits they receive in ransoming travellers cost them more than the benefits they might get in carrying out some other branch of industry. As far as they are concerned the issue could not be clearer and they have no desire to discuss they matter either as moralists or legislators. But to raise an analogous question among civilised (policés) people and to treat it as a science is, it seems to me, to renounce that impartiality which must preside over all scientific research and to return us to barbarism. Adam Smith, whose spirit elsewhere was so just, has put the question badly and it has led into error almost all those who have discussed the matter since.[525]
A more honest and indeed more scientific way of expressing the same question, Comte thought, was:
... to ask if the labour which one man obtains from a large number of other men by tearing the skin off their backs with the blows of a whip, costs him more dearly than the labour that he would get from them by paying them a just wage.[526]
Not surpisingly few if any of the political economists contributing to the debate expressed the question in this way, even though most of them would have agreed with Comte's sentiments. To Comte the phrasing of the question in the way made popular by Smith was "unscientific" because it was so value-laden and was therefore not likely to lead to a "good solution" to the problem. It seemed to view the problem exclusively from the perspective of the slave owner, who asked himself how he could minimise his labour costs. In fact, Comte surmised that the way the question was phrased suggested that the first writers on the subject must have been slave owners and that it was to further their own interests that they investigated the problem of the economics of slave labour. A fairer and more general question would be to ask all parties to the transaction for an assessment of their perception of the costs and benefits involved. And this, of course, would involve the slaves as participants rather than as objects or "machines." Comte asks rhetorically why the slaves' costs have never been included in any economic calculation:
It would never have occurred to enslaved men to ask themselves whether the meagre subsistance which they obtain as the price of their labour costs them less in suffering and fatigue than that which costs free workers for the wages they obtain for their labour. However this question is the same as the preceding one. There is no difference between the one and the other except that in the former it is the masters who consider whether it is convenient for them to pay their workers with lashes of the whip or hard cash, whilst in the latter it is the slaves who ask themselves which of the two methods of payment is more convenient.[527]
A valid scientific inquiry into the problem had to be impartial and could not assume the position of one of the parties at the expense of the other. Thus Comte refused to take the perspective of either master or slave, king or subject, citizen or foreigner in what he wanted and expected to be a scientific analysis of the problem of slavery.[528]
Of course Comte knew very well that, by rejecting the traditional Smithian approach to the problem and introducing the issue of the perception of costs and benefits of the slave, he was going to the heart of the contradiction and injustice of slavery, namely that a human being could be a form of property and thus be the mute object of a transaction. Comte granted that many slave owners behaved exactly like this, treating their slaves like so many English post-horses whose owners drove to death, since it was cheaper to replace them with fresh horses than to care for them in the long term. In a discussion of the Dutch colony in Guyana Comte concluded pessimistically that
Owners (maîtres) of the English post find that it is more economical to exhaust a good horse over a few years and to replace it than to demand a moderate about of work and to feed it well over a long period of time. This is the calculation that owners of human beings do in the colonies.[529]
Interestingly, Dunoyer had a different explanation for the brutal treatment of slaves by their masters. He argued that the owner of a horse will treat it "humanely" because he has no fear of it rising up in revolt against him. He will treat a slave harshly precisely because he is a fellow human being who might do what a horse will not. Thus the slave needs to be kept in a constant state of submission.[530]
Comte argued that a slave owner or a pirate might be able and willing to make a calculation such as Smith had in mind, but the independent thinking social theorist was not in such a position. As he put it with considerable passion:
... but we, who have no table of values (tarif) to determine the value of our fellow human beings; we, who do not know what is the legitimate price for which one buys the power to commit violence against men, children and women; we, who do not admit that the largest part of the human race has been created for the pleasure of the members of the aristocracy; we, who can see in the relationship between master and slave only the action of force and brutality on weakness and ignorance; we, in whose eyes slaves are human beings just like the masters, and who ought to calculate the cost of a product, not to such and such men, but to the entire human race; and finally we, who cannot count for nothing the violence and the misery to which the (slave) populations are subjected for the benefit of a more or less numerous aristocracy; we ought to reason differently to the owners of slaves.[531]
But this moral outburst, for all its truth and feeling, did not mean that Comte was not interested in the economic consequences of slavery. His concern, like Henri Storch's, was the overall economic, moral, religious, social and political consequences of slavery. Comte's interest in slavery was a systemic one (or the perspective of "the entire human race" as he put it) rather than an interest in the peculiar problems of the slave owner in balancing his plantation account books by weighing the economic pros and cons of using slaves or free wage labourers. However unlike Storch, Comte was unwilling to countenance the possibility of paying slaves for their labour as a kind of half-way house between slavery and free labour. The moral imperatives of abolition were too strong for him to accept any form of coerced labour as coolly as Storch, perhaps more realistically, was able to do. Nevertheless, Comte's interest in slavery as a system of organising labour led to the asking of a set of economic questions similar to those put forward by Hodgson and Storch, about how slavery affected the total amount of wealth created in society, how it affected the way in which that wealth was distributed and consumed, and how it affected the costs of producing that wealth.[532]
We have already mentioned Comte's answer to the first question: he believed that societies dependent on slave labour stagnated economically and, like the fall of the Roman Empire, became both economically and politically "decadent." Furthermore, slave societies lacked the incentives for innovation and technical improvements. Comte argued that what distinguished the modern economy from the ancient world and made economic progress possible was the twin introduction of machines and the division of labour. In systems of slave labour there were unbreachable barriers to both innovations.[533] Yet, although Comte rejected the traditional Smithian formulation of the question about the profitability of slave labour as one designed to take the side of the slave owners, much of his analysis, as was Say's and Storch's, was still taken from Smith. One need only compare Comte's discussion of the use of machinery and the division of labour with the following passage from Smith's Wealth of Nations concerning the use of slaves in ancient Athens and Rome to see this.
Slaves, however, are very seldom inventive; and all the most important improvements, either in machinery, or in the arrangement and distribution of work which facilitate and abridge labour, have been the discoveries of freemen. Should a slave propose any improvement of this kind, his master would be very apt to consider the proposal as the suggestion of laziness, and a desire to save his own labour at the master's expense. The poor slave, instead of a reward, would probably meet with much abuse, perhaps with some punishment.[534]
The slave owners disdained all industrial activity, whilst the slaves were not encouraged to improve their skills or develop new methods of production as they were not rewarded for their effort and had no security of person or property. As far as the contribution of the slave owners to national wealth, Comte dismisses their activity as "completely lost to the production of wealth."[535] Lacking technical innovators and an ever increasing division of labour, slave economies remained locked into agriculture as their sole means of wealth production. One of Comte's observations which most attracted Say's attention in editions of his Traité d'économie politique after 1827 was that a considerable number of plantation owners were highly indebted. In spite of their exploitation of slave labour and the tariffs which guaranteed a market for their produce in their home countries, many plantation owners in the British and French colonies were close to bankruptcy, thus prompting a considerable pamphlet literature on their predicament.[536] In other sectors of the economy slave societies were extremely backward and impoverished. Comte cites the examples given by French travellers' accounts in the United States of supposedly wealthy slave societies being unable to exploit local resources, such as forests, because of the lack of skilled labour. Without local masons, carpenters, market gardeners and ship-builders, plantation owners had to spend vast sums purchasing material from the northern cities or even from as far away as England.[537] Comte blamed the slave system for preventing the natural development of job skills and the division of labour and thus hampering growth in an important part of the southern economy. If the economy was lacking on the supply side, it was also lacking on the demand side. Without a prosperous and free working and middle class there was no market for the services of masons, carpenters and market gardeners, even if they had existed.[538]
As for the second question, Comte seemed to borrow Storch's concept of "national wealth" and concluded that slave economies made little contribution to any increase in overall national wealth. However, Comte's innovation was to go beyond Storch and to inquire into the redistribution of wealth from one class to another within slave societies. He observed that slave owners were very successful at redistributing existing wealth away from the slaves and the consumers and taxpayers of the metropole. In fact, the slave owners were consummate exploiters, directly exploiting their slave workers by forcing them to work in their plantations and homes, and indirectly exploiting the consumers and taxpayers of the metropole by their exclusive access to the home market by means of tariffs and other protective measures.
To extort the capital of the rich by violence is not to increase the (total) sum of wealth but to transfer (déplacer) wealth which has already been produced. Furthermore, to extort the labour of a poor person by blows with the whip or by analogous means is not to reduce the costs of production but to deprive (ravir) the mass of the population of its means of existence in order to fatten up the members of the aristocracy. What is true for comparisons between individuals is true for comparisons between nations. There is no difference between the former case and the latter except that, in the latter brigandage is established on a much larger basis and produces more disastrous consequences.[539]
Therefore, an important social consequence of slavery was the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few wealthy slave owners. Comte describes the development of a highly unequal class structure in ancient Rome, Attica and contemporary British and French colonies in some detail. He concluded that the vast bulk of property and wealth was concentrated in a small number of British plantation owners, perhaps as few as seventeen or eighteen hundred by Comte's estimate, who controlled the lives and fate of more than 800,000 slaves.[540] A similar calculation put the number of French sugar plantation owners at about thirteen hundred and the number of slaves at approximately 284,400.[541]
The other important source of exploitation for the slave owning "aristocracy" were the consumers and taxpayers of the metropole. This is an argument which Say had made in the third and fourth editions of his Traité before his contact with Hodgson and Storch, but which he had not developed at any length. What had been an off-the-cuff remark by Say was now turned into the lynch-pin of Comte's analysis of the entire modern slave system. Whereas in the ancient world slavery was made possible by the supply of cheap slaves made possible by war, in the modern world Comte believed that without the financial "support" provided by the metropole the slave system would sink into bankruptcy and economic collapse. In both cases the economic inefficiencies of slave labour were kept hidden by actions of the state. A clear example of this was provided by the British planters in the Caribbean who, each year it seemed, appealed to Parliament to relieve their economic "distress" by maintaining the lucrative monopoly for their goods in the British market. The monopoly profits which they derived from this exclusive access to the British market made up a considerable proportion of their income over and above the profits they were able to extort from their slaves' labour in the fields.[542] A similar situation existed in the French slave colonies. When Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Bourbon were returned after 1814, the slave owning class was near bankruptcy and thus sought and got exclusive trading rights in France to enable them to repay their considerable debts. Comte estimated this privilege cost French consumers some F20-30 million per annum in extra costs for sugar alone in the mid 1820s.[543]
The monopoly profits from the exclusive trading rights with the metropole were not the only economic benefits to be had. Another source of subsidy to the slave system were the costs of administration and defence which were borne by the metropolitan taxpayers. Comte estimated that up to one half of the cost of administering the colonies was a direct subsidy from the taxpayers. In addition to this administrative cost there were the costs of stationing troops on the islands to prevent slave revolts and maintaining naval protection for the traders bringing their produce to France.[544] When all the subsidies to the slave colonies were added up, Comte believed the annual amount reached F50 million in the late 1820s. Thus the slave owners have a lucrative source of income in addition to the use of slaves directly on their plantations. For example, the larger sugar growers who numbered some 318 directly benefited from the F20-30 million per annum extorted from the French consumers and this was proof enough to Comte that the slave system was an efficient system of class exploitation by a small number of "aristocratic" beneficiaries.[545] Comte concluded his analysis of the exploitation which the colonial system made possible with the observation that the exploitation of the slaves was like employers who paid a portion of their wage in kind and the rest in a new form of money, the strokes of the whip. On the other hand, the exploitation of the metropolitan consumers by means of the exclusive trading rights and tariffs on cheaper non-French sources was like a man who refuses to buy his supplies from the manufacturer, but prefers to sell stolen goods. To add insult to injury, these stolen goods are not sold more cheaply but at a much higher price - surely a clever form of extortion if it could be maintained.
Previously I made the observation that , in order to obtain the labour of a slave, a master paid him a small part in grain or clothing and the other part in blows with the whip. We cannot consider what is acquired by this latter kind of money differently from the way we consider the benefits acquired by the individuals who ransom travellers on the highways. Thus, when we grant a monopoly in grain sold by land owners who obtain the labour of their workers only with blows of the whip, in preference to those (land owners) who obtain labour by paying a just salary, we find ourselves in the situation of a man who refuses to buy the products of a manufacturer but prefers to buy only stolen merchandise. Such commerce done by a dishonest person would be natural if the stolen goods were sold below the market price. But if the thieves, in view of the dangers of their profession, demanded for the goods a higher price than the market price, what would we think of those who preferred to do business with them?[546]
Comte concludes this section of his argument by observing that, since it is the slave owner who has stolen from the slave by not paying him or her "a just wage," it follows that it is not theft if the slave takes property from the slave owner. Comte viewed it as a legitimate act on the part of the slaves to redress the imbalance in their wages by demanding to be paid more in kind than in the alternate "currency" of the plantations.[547]
The third economic question Comte posed is how slavery affected the costs of producing wealth. He argued that most of the surplus the slave owners were able to "extort" from the slave was dissipated by the high cost of living in a distorted and inefficient economy. Thus their much vaunted wealth, attributed to the cheapness of coerced slave labour, was in fact an illusion.[548] Unlike Storch, Comte did not limit his analysis to the drain on net productivity caused by the unproductive use of large numbers of domestic slaves in the slave owner's household, but extended it to include the effect on the entire economy. Comte uses examples of the great disparities in wages between low priced rented slave labour and high priced free wage labour in South Africa, the American slave states, and the French Caribbean, to make the point that, if the cost of plantation labour by slaves was cheap, the rest of the economy was plagued by labour shortages, especially of skilled artisans, which kept the slave economy in an overall backward and undeveloped state. The northern American states could cope with relatively high wage levels for two reasons. The output of these highly paid and highly skilled workers was considerable and the value of the resources being transformed into saleable products by them provided an excellent return on one's investment, in spite of the high level of wages paid. In the slave owning South the opposite was the case. The low wages for slaves reflected low productivity and under utilised resources. As Comte put it, "the costs of exploitation were equal to or greater than the value of the product," which explained the high level of indebtedness of many slave owners.[549] Once again the source of Comte's argument appears to come from Smith. In an interesting comparison between slave labour in Turkish mines and free wage labour in Hungarian mines, Smith comes to the conclusion that although slave labour is cheap, it is inefficient, and conversely, that whilst free labour is expensive, it is highly productive and thus profitable to the mine owner.
In the manufactures carried on by slaves, therefore, more labour must generally have been employed to execute the same quantity of work, than in those carried on by freemen. The work of the former must, upon that account, generally have been dearer than that of the latter. The Hungarian mines, it is remarked by Mr. Montesquieu, though not richer, have always been wrought with less expense, and therefore with more profit, than the Turkish mines in their neighbourhood. The Turkish mines are wrought by slaves; and the arms of those slaves are the only machines which the Turks have ever thought of employing. The Hungarian mines are wrought by freemen, who employ a great deal of machinery, by which they facilitate and abridge their own labour.[550]
Comte next turned to an analysis of the costs of production in the colonies for the so-called "colonial wares" of sugar, indigo, coffee and such like. Here he found more proof for his claim that the total costs of production of slave labour were far higher than for free wage labour, thus leading to the lower prices for goods produced by free labour. The examples Comte uses to make his case come from two sources. The first are those colonies such as Cuba, where the ratio of slave to free labour is much less than in the French colonies, and the second are those sugar producers where no slaves at all are used in production, namely India and Cochin China. In the former example, the assumption Comte makes is that, since the high cost of producing sugar is almost exclusively due to the presence of slave labour (with other local factors such as soil fertility and climate discounted for his polemical purposes), the greater the proportion of slaves used in production, the greater will be the costs of production. Hence, the final sale price to consumers will be high. Using Say as his authority, Comte claims that the slave colonies with the least number of slaves can produce sugar up to one third more cheaply than the other slave colonies.[551]
The second source of examples provide a much sounder basis for argument than the rather weak one of Cuba. In spite of using very primitive methods, lacking any labour-saving machines or modern processes, and facing the higher costs of shipping to Britain, the (East) Indian sugar producers were much more competitive that their West Indian counterparts. Comte ascribed this to the fact that they only used free wage labour and not slaves. Likewise with the sugar producers of Cochin China. Both producers were, for all intents and purposes, kept out of the British and French markets by hefty taxes which raised the internal domestic sale price of foreign imported sugar to the much higher level of slave produced sugar. Comte calculated the extra cost to French consumers of these taxes and trade restrictions in 1826 to be more than F30 million per annum. He regarded this cost as both an unnecessary burden on consumers as well as a direct subsidy to the French slave owners.[552] Comte reminded his readers that the benefits of free trade in sugar and other colonial products would not only be felt by existing consumers of sugar. The lower price would enable large numbers of other people, who were prevented from consuming it at all because of the high price, to purchase sugar, with benefits to themselves and to the producers which an expanded market would create.[553] Comte summed up his analysis of the economic consequences of slavery as an "invincible obstacle" to the formation and accumulation of wealth and a serious handicap to any increase in the productivity of labour. The result was a social system with a highly inequitable distribution of wealth, which was against all principles of equality, morality, and justice.[554]
Although Comte had certainly read Hodgson and Storch and quoted from them several times, he virtually ignores their arguments about how to make slave labour more productive. The reason Comte does this is twofold. Firstly, it must be remembered that he is an "immediatist" in his demand for the termination of slavery. In his eyes slavery is so immoral, such an evil, that anything which might prolong it by giving the slave owners an economic incentive to keep it, even in an altered and perhaps ameliorated form, should be avoided. Secondly, Comte had deliberately changed the focus of the debate away from the "peu philosophique" concern with labour profitability to what he considered to be the deeper, institutional and legal underpinnings of slavery, namely protective tariffs, exclusive access to the metropolitan market, tax subsidies for administration and defence, and a legal system which made ownership of others possible. When compared to these matters the experiments of a few planters seemed to pale into insignificance. Steele might have been able to get better productivity from his slaves by paying them a small wage but, in one of the few passages where this issue of paying slaves a wage is addressed, Comte concludes that, without a legal system which could guarantee the slaves that their earnings could be kept in security from their master, they were still slaves at the mercy of their master's whim. What guarantee was there, after their progressive master had died, that any property they had accumulated would not be confiscated by the new slave owner? Comte comes to the interesting conclusion that, if it could somehow come to pass that slaves could enjoy with some security the wages they earned, they would in fact be better off than most so-called free taxpayers, who see their taxes increase every year. Furthermore, if this security of enjoyment of their property continued long enough the slaves would eventually accumulate enough capital to purchase their freedom from their master, thus bringing to an end the entire system of slave exploitation. Playing comparing the reform-minded slave owners to a mythical William the Conqueror, the cynical Comte doubted it would be in the slave owners' long-term interest to act in this fashion and therefore something they, as a class, or the legal system itself, would not allow to happen (even though the occasional individual slave owner might do so).
... if such a situation (the right to work for wages and security of ownership) were guaranteed them and if the sum demanded from them (tax or payment to the master) was unchanged for them and for posterity, in a short time the position of the majority of them would be better than those people who consider themselves to be free and who have extracted from them annually, under the name of taxes, half of their earnings. If William the Conqueror, for example, had been declared the legitimate owner of all the people who lived in England; if he had subjected them to the same conditions to which a number of colonists subject their black slaves, and if neither he nor his successors had ever increased this obligation isn't it clear that the poorest people would be less imposed upon today than in fact they are, that the greatest part of the population long ago would have become rich enough to buy themselves back and that they would now only belong to themselves? But (of course) the domains of the crown are inalienable.[555]
As long as protective tariffs, metropolitan subsidies and a cheap source of slaves made exploitation even slightly profitable, Comte thought the slave system would continue.
Storch's aim of abolishing slavery "without pain" ("insensiblement") by persuading the slave owners that it was in their economic interest to pay slaves wages in order to increase their productivity, was rejected by Comte as insufficiently sensitive to the injustices being committed against both the slaves and the metropolitan consumers and taxpayers. Comte had another solution to the problem of slavery which he thought would be just as non-violent and painlessly felt as Storch's. The abolition of "this horrible system" as Comte called it follows quite logically from his views on the economic viability of the slave system and the nature of what the legal system should be.[556] He believed slavery could be ended by a combination of "negative" and "positive" steps which would be in keeping with liberal principles. By "negative" Comte meant the withdrawal of state activity from an area in which had been active; by "positive" Comte mean the opposite - action by the state in an area in which it had been inactive. The "negative" step involved immediately withdrawing economic privileges granted by the state to the slave owners and thus forcing them to confront market forces. Without the monopoly profits from their exclusive access to the home market and the subsidies paid by the metropolitan taxpayers for administration and defence, the slave owners would not be able to maintain their system of labour. Cheaper goods grown by producers who did not use slave labour, the prospect of higher local taxes to pay for local administration, and the threat of slave uprisings without the comforting presence of French soldiers and sailors, the slave owners would be forced to free their slaves and introduce wages in order to compete. If they could not compete because of their lack of management skills and "industrial" values necessary to be an efficient producer, then Comte was happy to see them go bankrupt and be replaced perhaps by free and independent black producers using land that once belonged to their masters for more productive purposes.[557] Comte found that future quite an enticing one, if it could be achieved immediately before the slaves lost their patience. Not only would the slaves be freed, but the burden on the metropolitan consumers and taxpayers would be lifted if colonial tarrifs and other subsidies could be eliminated.
The "positive" step to end slavery involved the extension of the protection offered by the legal system to include blacks as well as whites. Slavery to Comte was much more than an economic system for the exploitation of the numerous "working class" by the minority "aristocratic class." One of its essential features was a legal system and the property rights which derived from this legal system, which favoured the class of slave owners at the expense of those who were owned. At the core of this legalistic view of slavery was the idea that slavery was a legal privilege accorded to those who were considered to have full rights acknowledged by the law. A slave on the other hand, either had no rights as a person at all or had very limited rights (such as some restrictions as to the kind of punishment which a slave owner could inflict on him or her) which were very difficult to enforce in a society where most of the public officials, including the judges, were either slave owners themselves or relatives of slave owners. Ultimately, the legal difference between a slave and a slave owner was that the latter had the right in law to own another human being, whereas the former was in fact that type of property. Comte's third way to end slavery was to end this discrimination in law between slave owners and slaves by making all human beings equal under the law. Only in this way could blacks enjoy the benefits of property ownership themselves and the tranquillity and repose the rule of law should make possible to all. Comte's legalistic view of slavery and how the liberation of the slaves could be achieved comes across clearly in the following passage:
What does it mean to free an enslaved man? Quite simply it means to withdraw him from the violence and caprice of one or more individuals, to submit him to the regular activity of public authority; in other words, it means to prevent one man called a master abandon himself to extortion, violence, cruelty with impunity towards other men called slaves. To free men is not to open the door to trouble or disorder but to repress them, because disorder exists everywhere violence, cruelty and debauchery know no limit. The most frightening disorder rules wherever the most numerous part of the population is exposed to some men without any defence, (men) who can abandon themselves without reserve to all vices and all crimes, that is to say wherever slavery exists. Order rules, on the other hand, wherever no one can indulge with impunity in extortion, injury, violence; wherever no one can fail in their obligations without being subject to chastisement, wherever each person can fulfil their duties without suffering any penalty. Order is liberty.[558]
Comte's analysis of slavery in the Traité de législation had considerable impact on Jean-Baptiste Say's Cours complet d'économie politique which appeared in 1828. Say strengthened his argument that the issue of tariff protection for the slave economies was more important than the problem of the comparative costs of free and slave labour. Furthermore, the discussion of the nature of class exploitation in the colonies and the problem of the growing indebtedness of many plantations owed much to Comte's pioneering work, whilst Say's confidence in the spread of "republicanism" weakening the political power of the slave states obviously drew upon Storch for its support. For reasons of space it is impossible to go into any details about Say's final word on the question of slavery, except to say that the debate among the abolitionists and the political economists had raised many problems which Say had not discussed in his earlier works. He had been forced to confront these problems with the result that he had drifted much closer into the position of his son-in-law, Charles Comte, with his class analysis of slavery.
In spite of his good intentions not to be distracted from completing his theoretical work by issues of the moment Comte did not have the character to allow himself to remain aloof from contemporary political matters for too long. Soon after the Traité de législation appeared he became involved in three issues of great importance to liberals which occupied his time in 1826 and 1827. The first issue concerned the rôle of the state in assisting industry at tax-payers' expense. In a pamphlet Comte argued against state-funded public works such as highways and canals which some engineers believed could help overcome France's inability to compete with Great Britain.[559] According to Molinari, Comte attacked a work by the engineer M. Derbigny, Paris, port de mer (n.d.) who foolishly proposed to turn the city of Paris into an internal port by a programme of massive public works. The aim was to overcome Paris's competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis London, which was claimed to owe its dynamic economy to the fact that it was a port city on the Thames river. Comte scoffed at this proposal and argued that London and Britain generally owed its prosperity and industrial might to other, more subtle institutional and cultural factors which France lacked. No amount of public works schemes, for example, could overcome the barriers to industry posed by French tariffs and regulation.
The second political issue was the attempt by the government to suppress the citizen militia or the national guard. In 1827 the government dissolved the Paris National Guard and issued the ordinances of 25 July. Comte reacted to these events by publishing a work on the Histoire de la garde national de Paris (1827), reminding the French people of the active role the guard had played in the French Revolution of 1789 and how attacks on the institution of the National Guard had always been immediately followed by attacks on the people's liberty. Interestingly, Comte's book on the National Guard had sufficiently impressed John Stuart Mill, who read it soon after it was published, to write to Comte twice in 1828 asking for assistance in a review Mill was writing for the Westminster Review on the French Revolution.[560] In the letter of 25th January, 1828 Mill asks Comte for more information on the National Guard to assist him in writing a review of Sir Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon[561] and for advice on what to read for his proposed history of the French Revolution.[562] Mill concluded his friendly letter with a request for Comte to pass on his regards to Comte's wife as well as Monsieur and Madame Say, whom Mill also probably had met at some time. In June Mill sent Comte copies of his completed review of Scott's book with the hope that Comte would give Say and other leading French liberals some copies and thus prove that some one in England at least (Mill presumably) had "rendered justice to the revolution."[563]
In his scathingly critical review of Sir Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon Mill refers admiringly to Comte's opposition to Napoleon. Mill takes Scott to task for perpetuating the conservative critique of French liberalism, that it was a dangerous offshoot of Jacobinism. Mill also scolded Scott for treating "the libéraux of the present day... with greater asperity and unfairness than is shewn towards the revolutionists themselves." In a long and sometimes angry footnote devoted entirely to Comte, Mill reveals his sympathy for Comte in particular and the more radical French liberals in general. It is worth quoting in full:
Every one who knows what the libéraux of the present century are, is aware that they comprise every shade of political opinion from Mounier to Carnot. Our author, however, industriously identifies all of them with the extinct, and now universally detested, sect of Jacobins. As an example of his mode of dealing with individuals, we may instance his treatment of Comte, known to all of Europe as the intrepid writer who, at great personal risk, vindicated the principles of constitutional reform in the Censeur Européen, at a time when there were few to aid him in the glorious conflict; and who has suffered five years exile, and the mean-spirited persecution of the Holy Alliance, in consequence of his manly and steadfast adherence to liberal opinions. This individual, of whom Sir Walter Scott is so consummately ignorant as to have discovered the correct orthography of his name only time enough to insert it in the Errata, he does not scruple to accuse of having been "a promoter of Bonaparte's return." Will it be believed, that when Napoleon was in full march towards Paris, M. Comte published a pamphlet, which went through three editions in an many days, denouncing the imperial government as tyrannical, and calling upon the French people to resist the usurper! This work (of which we possess a copy) was translated and widely circulated in Germany, as a proof that the enlightened portion of the French people were hostile to Bonaparte. Let the reader give credit after this to our author's imputations against men of whom he knows nothing.[564]
As a trained lawyer Charles Comte was concerned also with the abuse of judicial power under the restored monarchy. This was the third issue he was concerned with before the 1830 revolution opened up an entirely new career for him as a government official under the July Monarchy. He was particularly worried by the way in which judges were chosen, which he believed showed partiality on the part of the government. The state naturally preferred to select judges who were most amenable to being political instruments of the reaction and Comte accused the government of abuse of power and partiality. As a liberal and as an advocate of the independence of the judiciary, Comte considered the behaviour of the government to be intolerable. He and other concerned individuals were prompted to establish a group to monitor the activities of these government-appointed, politically partial judges.[565]
Comte had taken an interest in judicial politics and the need for an independent judiciary, whose rôle it was to limit arbitrary state power, since his early days as a law student. One way in which the partiality of the judges might be overcome, he argued, was through the use of juries, the hope being that juries selected from the public would be more likely to support the Charter than the judges appointed by the conservative government. If the state continued to arrest people in violation of the principles of the Charter and found support in sentencing from the judges, then there was the hope that a jury might exercise their right to bring in a verdict of not guilty and thus frustrate the government. As in so many areas for Restoration liberals, the model of proper constitutional and judicial practice came from England and America, in this instance their practice of using juries in criminal cases. In that hectic year of 1817 Comte had published a translation of a book on the institution of trial by jury by an Englishman, Sir Richard Phillips, with an introduction of his own on the situation of the French judiciary, or as he phrased it "a critical examination of our judicial system."[566] The basis of his criticism of the French judiciary was that the guarantees created by the Charter were so easily overcome or ignored by a compliant judicial system at the tremendous cost of civil liberties. Comte declared in some exasperation "how weak are the guarantees that (the judiciary) offers against the interests and the political passions of the executive power and its agents!"[567] When the British government in 1825 codified and reformed the laws relating to juries, Comte translated these acts of the British Parliament in a second edition of the 1817 book on juries which he published in 1828, which included a revised introductory essay on the French judiciary with derogatory comparisons with the freer British system.[568]
It was involvement in activities such as these which prevented Comte from publishing the remaining volumes of his work on legislation and property immediately. As it turned out, a period of some six years intervened between the appearance of the Traité de législation from the Traité de la propriété which will be discussed in the following chapter.