III. Des divers ordres de travaux et de fonctions qu'embrasse la société industrielle.

CHAP. 13: III. Of the diverse orders of labors and functions that the industrial society embraces.

§ 1. I have sought, in the first volume of this work, what were the conditions of liberty, considered in a general manner and outside of any special mode of activity. It has been seen that it depended on: 1st, race, 2nd, external circumstances, 3rd, culture; that is to say, that men succeeded all the more in enlarging the sphere of their activity and in putting themselves in a position to act with facility and with power, as nature had endowed them with more perfect organs, as they had been placed in circumstances more favorable to the development of their forces, and finally as they had more developed them. I have applied myself above all to showing how much liberty depended on the degree of culture. I have successively reviewed the principal modes of existence through which the human species appears to have passed, and I have constantly found that man was all the more free as he had reached a more perfected state of culture. Thus the facts have clearly demonstrated to us that there was more liberty in nomadic life than in savage life; in sedentary life than in nomadic life; in servitude, such as it existed in the Middle Ages, than in the domestic slavery of the ancients; under the regime of privilege than in the semi-servitude of the Middle Ages; among peoples dominated by a common tendency toward the industry of place-seeking than in countries where everything is done by privilege. Finally, having arrived at that manner of living which I call industry, industrial life, it has appeared to me, while taking into account the obstacles that liberty still found here, that this mode of existence was, of all those I had traversed, the best appropriated to the nature of man, the most favorable to the full development of his faculties, that, in a word, in which he could become the most free.

§ 2. I now return to this last state. After having considered it in its entirety, it remains for me to envisage it in its details. I have to speak of the diverse orders of labors and functions that it embraces. I have to make known the nature, the influence, and principally the means of these diverse modes of activity. But I must first seek what are all these modes of activity that the industrial society comprises. I have previously made known its nature; I have said what was the common character of all its labors [^330]; but I have not said what were the labors and actions of which it is composed. The order of ideas requires that I begin there. Before seeking under what conditions all labor can be freely executed in the society with which I am occupied, I must say what is the ensemble of professions and functions that enter into the economy of this society and that concur in the development of its forces.

§ 3. Since industry, as we have seen, consists in doing something useful; since industry is production of utility, it is evident that it will be necessary to call industrious classes all the useful classes, all the productive classes. But who is, and who is not a producer? and, in this multitude of professions that concur simultaneously in social activity, what are those that truly contribute to production? I do not know if the thing is very difficult to determine; but it is certain that in this regard we are still far from being in agreement.

In habitual language, one recognizes as productive, and consequently calls industrial, only the classes whose activity is exercised upon physical nature, and whose products are realized in something material. Thus one calls a producer, a man of industry, the cultivator, the mason, the wheelwright, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the locksmith, and a multitude of other workers who, with the aid of certain forces, certain tools, and a certain artifice, succeed in fixing certain utilities in things. But as for all those who act upon persons, as for the doctor, the teacher, the lawyer, the preacher, the functionary, the musician, the actor, etc., one adds that they are not people of industry; and the reason given is that their labor is not executed upon any matter, that it leaves behind it nothing real, nothing durable, nothing that is susceptible of being accumulated and sold; whence one concludes that it is unproductive.

“The labor of some of the most respectable classes of society,” says Smith, “produces no value; it is not fixed, is not realized in any thing that can be sold, that subsists after the cessation of labor, and that can serve to purchase thereafter a like quantity of labor. The sovereign, for example, as well as all the other civil and military magistrates who serve under him, the whole army, the whole fleet, are so many unproductive laborers. Their service, however honorable, however necessary it is, produces nothing with which one can afterward purchase a like quantity of service. The protection, the tranquility, the defense of the commonwealth, which are the result of the labor of one year, cannot serve to purchase the protection, the tranquility, the defense that are needed for the following year. Some of the most serious professions, and some of the most frivolous, must in this regard be put on the same rank: these are those of ecclesiastics, of men of law, of doctors, of men of letters of every kind, and those of actors, jesters, musicians, singers, dancers of the Opera, etc. The labor of the noblest as well as that of the vilest of these professions produces nothing with which one can afterward purchase or have done a like quantity of labor. Their labor, all of it, such as the declamation of the actor, the delivery of the orator, or the chords of the musician, vanishes at the very moment it is produced [^331].”

M. de Tracy, whose mind is so clear and so firm, does not, in this regard, see things otherwise than the author of the Wealth of Nations. While beginning by recognizing, which Smith does not, that all our useful labors are productive [^332], he then finds, like Smith, several kinds of unproductive labors, although they appear to him eminently useful. “It is not doubtful,” he says, “that any government whatsoever is very necessary to any society: its members must indeed be judged, administered, protected, defended, guaranteed, against every kind of violence [^333] ;” and nevertheless, “a first very certain thing,” he adds, “is that the government cannot be ranked among the consumers of the industrious class... Its consumption is definitive; nothing remains of the labor it pays for [^334].” M. de Tracy says as much of the personal services of lawyers, doctors, soldiers, domestics: “their utility is that of the moment of need, like that of a concert, a ball, a spectacle, which is instantaneous, and disappears at once [^335].” The author had already expressed the same ideas in another work.

“Let us never forget,” he said, “that productive labor is that from which result values superior to those consumed by those who devote themselves to it. The labor of soldiers, of governments, of lawyers, of doctors can be useful; but it is not productive, since nothing remains of it. All that is employed to pay soldiers, sailors, judges, administrators, priests and ministers, is absolutely lost; none of these people produces anything that replaces what they consume [^336].”

I find this whole same doctrine in M. de Sismondi. Society, according to this author, cannot do without administrators, judges, military men; and, nevertheless, “this whole guardian population, from the head of State to the least soldier, produces nothing, for the reason,” he says, “that its work does not take on any material form, and is not susceptible of being accumulated.” Society can equally not do without teachers, priests, scientists, artists; and, nevertheless, the labors of these men are unproductive, “because they do not give material fruits, and one does not hoard that which belongs only to the soul.” Finally, society has no less need of the professions that care for the body of man, than of those that perfect his intelligence; and yet, according to M. de Sismondi, the labors of doctors and surgeons are just as unproductive as those of scientists and artists, for the reason that “the effects of these labors can likewise not be accumulated [^337].”

Another writer, Mr. Malthus, in his Principles of Political Economy, appears to say the same things implicitly. He recognizes as real wealth only that which is fixed in material objects, and finds that it is to overturn the principles of the science from top to bottom to regard as productive any industry whose activity is not exhausted upon matter [^338].

I have before me the book of another English economist, Mr. Mill, who recognizes that the government, when it confines itself to its true object, fulfills a function of the greatest importance; and, nevertheless, he does not fail to rank in the class of sterile consumptions the price that its labor costs, saying that it concurs in production only in a very indirect manner, and that directly it produces nothing [^339].

M. Say is, to my knowledge, the only economist who has tried to rectify this doctrine, and it seems to me, I must say, that this attempt is far from having been a happy one [^340]. Unlike Smith and the other economists I have just cited, he places in the rank of productive professions the industries of the doctor, the teacher, the lawyer, the man of letters, the functionary, and in general of all the classes of workers that Smith qualifies as unproductive. M. Say says that these classes are producers of immaterial products; but such at the same time is the nature he assigns to these products, that it would be as good as if he had said, like Adam Smith, that the industries that create them are not at all productive. In effect, the products to which he gives the name of immaterial are, according to his own words, products that are not attached to anything, that vanish as they are born, that it is impossible to accumulate, that add nothing to the national wealth, that it is disadvantageous to multiply, and whose nature is such, finally, that the expense one makes to obtain them is unproductive.

One designates by the name of immaterial products, says M. Say, a utility produced that is not attached to any matter [^341]; and he cites for example the doctor's prescription, the surgeon's operation, the lawyer's consultation, the sentence rendered by the judge, the air sung by the musician, the performance of the actor who represents a play, etc. What characterizes these products, he adds, is that they have no duration but the very time of their production, and that they must necessarily be consumed at the very moment they are produced [^342]. From the nature of immaterial products, says M. Say again, it results that one cannot accumulate them, and that they do not serve to increase the national capital; the capital of a nation where there would be a crowd of musicians, priests, employees, would receive from all the labor of these industrious men no direct increase [^343]. M. Say concludes equally from the nature of immaterial products that it is not as advantageous to multiply them as any other kind of products [^344]. Finally, he places the expense made to obtain them in the rank of sterile consumptions. It is thus that after having (book 1, chap. 13, of his Treatise) placed the services rendered by a teacher, a moralist, a judge, an administrator, among the most real, most useful, most necessary products, he places (book 3, chaps. 4 and 6) in the rank of unproductive consumptions the expenses made to obtain these products. It is by unproductive consumptions, he says, that man acquires knowledge, that he extends his intellectual faculties, that he raises his children, etc. The expenses he makes for his moral perfection are equally unproductive consumptions; these consumptions add nothing to the wealth of society, as has been repeated too often [^345]. Although public functionaries, when they render real services, are productive workers, he says again, their labor in no way increases the national capital: the utility they produce is destroyed as it is produced, like that which results for private individuals from the labor of doctors and other producers of immaterial products [^346]. The governors, whom M. Say places among the productive workers, nevertheless appear to him so little productive, that he calls the protection they procure a negative advantage, and of which one is little touched; that he says of the sums that taxpayers pay them, that they are delivered to them gratuitously and without compensation; that he finally assimilates the taxes collected by them, in exchange for their services, to a pure and simple destruction, similar to those operated by natural scourges, like hail, frost [^347]. In such a way that M. Say, who begins by putting Smith on trial because he did not place the doctor, the lawyer, the judge, the administrator, in the rank of productive workers, ends by going further than Smith himself, and by assimilating to a dead loss what one pays to the government and its agents.

[^329]: See above, book III, chap. 9. [^330]: See above, book III, chap. 11. [^331]: Wealth of Nations, book II, chap. 3. [^332]: Commentaire sur l'Esprit des Lois, chap. 13. [^333]: Traité d'économie politique, part I, sect. 2. [^334]: Traité d'économie politique, part I, sect. 2. [^335]: Traité d'économie politique, part I, sect. 2. [^336]: Commentaire sur l'Esprit des Lois, chap. 13. [^337]: Nouveaux principes d'économie politique, book II, chap. 1. [^338]: Principes d'économie politique, sect. 1. [^339]: Élémens d'économie politique, chap. 4, sect. 2. [^340]: Traité d'économie politique, book I, chap. 13. [^341]: Traité d'économie politique, book I, chap. 13. [^342]: Traité d'économie politique, book I, chap. 13. [^343]: Traité d'économie politique, book I, chap. 13. [^344]: Traité d'économie politique, book I, chap. 13. [^345]: Traité d'économie politique, book III, chap. 4. [^346]: Traité d'économie politique, book III, chap. 6. [^347]: Traité d'économie politique, book III, chap. 7.Thus there are in society a multitude of workers—not those whose products begin by being realized in things, but those who act directly upon men, those who occupy themselves with the conservation of their health, the development of their forces, the culture of their intelligence or their imagination, the direction of their affective faculties, and the formation of their moral habits; there are, I say, the doctor, the gymnastics master, the scientist, the artist, the magistrate, the moralist, who are not at all producers, according to Smith and other writers of his school, and who, according to M. Say, are but equivocal producers who do indeed create products, it is true, but products such that the expense one makes to obtain them is unproductive,—that there is a disadvantage in multiplying them, that they add absolutely nothing to social wealth,—and this for the reason that they do not attach to anything, that they perish as they are born,—and that it is impossible to preserve and accumulate them.

§ 4. It seems to me that, on this very capital point, ideas need to be better clarified than they have been by the founders of the science. I believe, without wishing to make the slightest attack on the rights they have, in so many other respects, to the esteem and gratitude of readers, that they give us here rather unjust notions of the nature of things, and that they have but imperfectly understood the role that the very numerous and very important classes of workers in question at this moment play in the social economy and the part they take in production.

It is not exact to say, in my opinion, that the labor of these classes does not contribute to production, or, what amounts to absolutely the same thing, that what they produce is consumed at the same time it is produced. What is consumed at the same time it is produced is their labor: it has that in common with the labor of workers of all classes; but the utility that results from it is certainly not.

It is for want of having distinguished the labor from its results (and I ask that one pay attention to this distinction, for it is of the most essential), it is, I say, for want of having distinguished the labor from its results, that Smith and his principal successors have fallen into the error I am pointing out. All useful professions, whatever they may be, those that work on things as well as those that operate on men, perform a labor that vanishes as it is executed, and all create utility that accumulates as it is obtained. One must not say with Smith that wealth is accumulated labor; one must say that it is accumulated utility. Once again, it is not the labor that one accumulates, it is the utility the labor produces: labor dissipates as it is done; the utility it produces remains [^348].

Very assuredly, the lesson that a professor delivers is consumed at the same time it is produced, just as the handiwork spread by the potter over the clay he holds in his hands; but the ideas inculcated by the professor in the minds of the men who listen to him, the shaping given to their intelligence, the salutary impression made upon their affective faculties, are products that remain just as well as the form impressed upon the clay by the potter. A doctor gives a piece of advice, a judge renders a sentence, an orator delivers a speech, an artist sings an air or declaims a tirade: that is their labor; it is consumed as it is performed, like all possible labors; but it is not their product, as M. Say wrongly claims: their product is in the result of their labor, in the useful and durable modifications that the ones and the others have made upon the men on whom they have acted, in the health that the doctor has restored to the sick man, in the morality, instruction, and taste that the judge, the artist, the professor have spread. Now, these products remain; they are susceptible of being preserved, of growing, of being accumulated, and we can acquire more or less virtues and knowledge, just as we can amass more or less wheat, cloth, money, and all those utilities that are of a nature to be fixed in things.

It is true that instruction, taste, and talents are immaterial products. But do we ever create any others? and is it not surprising to see M. Say distinguish between material and immaterial ones, he who so judiciously remarked that we cannot create matter, and that in all things we never do anything but produce utilities? The form, the figure, the color that an artisan gives to raw bodies are things just as immaterial as the science that a professor communicates to intelligent beings; they both do nothing but produce utilities, and the only real difference that can be remarked between their industries is that one tends to modify things, and the other to modify men.

One cannot say that the products of the professor, the judge, the actor, the singer, do not attach to anything; they attach to men, just as the products of the spinner, the weaver, the dyer are realized in things.

One cannot say that it is impossible to sell them: what is not sold, at least in countries civilized enough to no longer have slaves, are the men in whom industry has fixed them; but as for these products themselves, they are very susceptible of being sold, and the men in whom they exist do in fact sell them continually. Industry, capacities, talents, are an object of exchange like utilities of any other kind; these values likewise flock to the market; their price is established in absolutely the same manner, and the marketplace is covered with people who offer to communicate, in return for a certain payment, the qualities, talents, and faculties that art has fixed in their person, just as a crowd of other merchants offer to cede, for a price in money, the utilities that art has realized in the things they possess; only the latter deliver the things with the utility they contain, whereas the former communicate the utility that is in them, without for all that delivering themselves [^349].

One cannot say that the values fixed in men are not of a nature to be accumulated: it is as easy to multiply in ourselves the useful modifications of which we are susceptible, as it is to multiply in the things that surround us the useful modifications they can receive.

One cannot say that there is a disadvantage in multiplying them: what one cannot multiply without disadvantage are the labors necessary to obtain any kind of product; but as for the products themselves, one surely cannot say that there is a disadvantage in increasing them: one no more sees men complain of having too much industry, knowledge, good sentiments, or virtues, than one sees them complain of possessing too many utilities of any other kind [^350].

One cannot say that the expense made to obtain these products is unproductive; what would be unproductive would be the costs one would incur uselessly to create them; but as for the necessary costs for that, they are not unproductive, since a real wealth can result from them, and a wealth superior to its costs of production: it is surely not rare that acquired talents are worth more than the expense made to acquire them; it is not impossible that a government may give rise, by an enlightened administration of justice, to moral habits of a price very superior to the expense that must be made for that [^351].

One cannot say, finally, that these products add nothing to the national capital: they increase it as really as products of any other kind can do. A capital of knowledge or good habits is worth no less than a capital of money. A nation does not only have physical needs to satisfy: it is in its nature to experience many intellectual and moral needs; and, if it has but a little culture, it will place virtue, instruction, and taste in the rank of its most precious riches. Then these things, which are real riches in themselves, by the pure and elevated pleasures they procure, are in addition indispensable means for obtaining that other kind of values that we manage to fix in material objects. It is not enough, in effect, to produce the latter, to possess workshops, tools, machines, commodities, currencies: one needs strength, health, science, taste, imagination, good moral habits, and the men who work at the creation or perfection of these products can with just title be considered producers of the riches improperly called material, just as well as those who work directly to create them. It is perceptible, in a word, that if a nation increases its capital by extending its cultivation, by improving its lands, by perfecting its factories, its instruments, its livestock, it increases it, with all the more reason, by perfecting itself, it which is the force par excellence, the force that directs and makes all the others valuable.

It is all the more strange that one refuses to the numerous classes of workers who labor at the education of the human species the title of productive workers, that the economists who refuse them this title on one side almost all grant it to them on another. It is thus that Smith, after having said, in the passages of his book that we have cited above, that men of letters, scientists, and other similar persons are workers whose labor produces nothing, says expressly elsewhere that the useful talents acquired by the members of society (talents that could only have been acquired with the help of these men whom he calls unproductive workers), are a product fixed and realized, so to speak, in the persons who possess them, and form an essential part of the general fund of society, a part of its fixed capital [^352]. It is thus that M. Say, who says of the same classes of industrious men that their products are not susceptible of being accumulated and that they add nothing to social wealth, pronounces formally, on the other hand, that the talent of a public functionary, that the industry of a worker (evident creations of these men whose products one cannot accumulate), form an accumulated capital [^353]. It is thus that M. de Sismondi, who, on the one hand, declares the labors of teachers, etc., unproductive, affirms positively, on the other hand, that letters and artists (the incontestable work of these teachers) form part of the national wealth [^354].

How could such strong and logical minds have fallen into so evident a contradiction? By a single cause: because they did not think to distinguish here the labor from its results. Sometimes they saw the products of the doctor, the professor, the musician, the dramatic artist, in their labor, in the prescription of the one, in the lesson of the other, in the song or the performance of the third and the fourth, and then they said, very consequently, that it was in the nature of these products to be unable to be accumulated, to be consumed at the very instant of their birth: it is clear, in effect, that the air with which a musician strikes our ears, that the speech a speaker delivers, that the few words a doctor articulates at the bedside of his patient, do not by themselves form any product that can be retained and put in reserve: “Their production,” to use the very words of M. Say, “their production is to say them, their consumption to hear them: they are consumed at the same time they are produced [^355].” Sometimes, on the contrary, the same economists saw the products of these classes of workers in the result of their labor, in the strength and health that the doctor restored to the sick, in the salutary impression that the priest from the height of his pulpit made on the souls of his listeners, in the useful modifications that the professor made upon the intelligence of his pupils; and then they said, very consequently again, that their products were a capital fixed and realized in the very persons on whom they had acted. However, it is clear that the products of these workers cannot be at once a thing that evaporates and a thing that is fixed, values that vanish in being born and values that accumulate as they are born. [^356]

The truth, for these workers as for all possible industrious men, is that only their labor vanishes in being performed, and that, as for their products, they are as real as those of the most evidently productive classes. What can one do better, in effect, to increase the capital of a nation than to multiply therein the number of healthy, vigorous, skillful, instructed, virtuous men, practiced in acting well and living well? What wealth, even if it were only a question of exploiting the material world well, could appear superior to that one? What wealth is more capable of giving birth to others? Now, that is precisely what is produced by all the classes of workers who act directly upon men, in contrast to those who work for them only by acting upon things. A government, when it is what it ought to be, is a producer of men subject to public order and broken to the practice of justice; a true moralist is a producer of moral men; a good teacher is a producer of enlightened men; an artist worthy of the name is a producer of men of taste and soul, of men practiced in feeling all that is good and beautiful; a fencing master, a riding master, a gymnastics master, is a producer of bold, agile, robust men; a doctor is a producer of healthy men. Or else, if one wishes, these diverse industrious men are, according to the nature of the art they exercise, producers of health, strength, agility, courage, instruction, taste, morality; all things that one certainly hopes to acquire when one consents to pay for the services destined to give them birth, all things whose price is, so to speak, quoted; having consequently a market value, and forming the most precious and most fecund portion of the productive forces of society.

It is therefore incontestably wrong that Smith regards as absolutely unproductive, and M. Say as productive only of a kind of fugitive utility, destroyed as soon as created, and adding nothing directly to social wealth, the labors of doctors, teachers, artists, officers of morality, public functionaries, and in general of all the classes of workers whose industry is exercised immediately upon men. What is destroyed at the same time it is produced is the labor of these industrious men: it has, I have said, that in common with the labor of industrious men of all classes; but as for the results of their labor, as for the faculties it develops in man, these are real, durable, transmissible, exchangeable riches, just like those that other classes of workers manage to attach to raw bodies, to inanimate matter. One can even say that these riches are more susceptible of conservation and growth than those we manage to fix in matter; for we cannot use the latter without destroying them, nor transmit them without losing them, whereas ideas, affections, and sentiments are perfected by use and grow by communication.

Once again, it is therefore to limit in a very inexact manner the meaning of the word producer to restrict it to only those industrious men whose activity is exhausted upon things and to refuse it to those who work upon men, or else to say that the latter are less productive than the others, that their products are less susceptible of being preserved, of being accumulated, of adding to the mass of our riches. The only real difference there is between these two great classes of workers is that the ones fix in things utilities of a certain kind, and the others in men utilities of another kind; that the ones give to things a multitude of forms, figures, odors, sounds, colors, flavors, and the others to men a no less great multitude of notions, knowledge, talents, aptitudes, habits, etc. But as for the utilities that the ones fix in things, and those that the others realize in men, they are equally utilities; those who produce them are equally producers, and it must be said, in speaking of the ones and the others, that they all contribute, each in their own way, to the life, the prosperity, the strength, the glory, the dignity of the human species.

[^348]: See above, book III, chap. 11. [^349]: See above, book III, chap. 11. [^350]: See above, book III, chap. 11. [^351]: See above, book III, chap. 11. [^352]: Wealth of Nations, book II, chap. 1. [^353]: Traité d'économie politique, book I, chap. 11. [^354]: Nouveaux principes d'économie politique, book II, chap. 1. [^355]: Traité d'économie politique, book I, chap. 13. [^356]: See above, book III, chap. 11.Thus, several classes of individuals must be brought into society that economists have not yet admitted, or have not admitted by their true title, or admit only temporarily, so to speak. Smith denies that civil and military officers, ecclesiastics, men of law, doctors, men of letters, actors, artists of every kind are producers: we have just seen that they are, or at least that they can be. — M. Say, while holding them to be producers, says that it is in the nature of their products to vanish as they are produced, to be unable to be accumulated, to add nothing to social wealth: we have just seen, on the contrary, that their products are conserved, that they are accumulated, and that they contribute to the growth of social capital as much as any other species of values. -Other writers wish that certain of these workers, notably magistrates and agents of the public force, be destined to figure in society only for a time, observing that the necessity of their services is felt less and less, and that their social importance follows a decreasing course [^357]: the answer is that the subject matter upon which the workers in question here act is no easier to know, to regulate, to exhaust, than the diverse subjects upon which the workers of all the other classes act. In truth, their task, like that of all industries, gradually becomes easier; but we have no reason to think that it will one day be useless, and consequently there is no more reason to admit them into society only provisionally than to admit other classes of workers in a purely provisional fashion.

Allow me, in finishing this long paragraph, to remark upon the slow gradation with which ideas develop and the difficulty science experiences in forming itself. At first, men of no class had any part in the creation of the world's goods. Wealth was a gift from heaven, existing in society ready-made, existing there from all eternity, passing from the hands of some into those of others, distributing itself in the most unequal and varied proportions, but otherwise undergoing no alteration in its mass and being susceptible neither to increase nor to diminution. Then came the sect of the economists, who, struck by the vegetative force of the soil, recognized in the men who solicit this force, in the farmers, the power to increase the mass of wealth, but who refused this power to all other classes of society. Later, the same power to produce was extended to the men who subject the materials furnished by agriculture to useful transformations, to the manufacturers, but without yet granting it to the agents of commerce: it was positively declared, on the contrary, that commerce is not creative [^358]. Then, however, it was remarked that this industry transports, distributes the products that the others transform, and that by giving them this final fashioning, by thus making them arrive into the hands of the consumer who demands them, it adds still more to the value they already had: commerce was therefore ranked among the productive industries. But after having thus successively recognized in all the industries that work upon things the power to increase the mass of values spread throughout society, this power was still refused to all the arts that are occupied with the culture of the species, to the arts exercised by the statesman, the magistrate, the professor, etc.; they were spoken of as manufactures and commerce had been spoken of at first: it was agreed that they were useful, but they were formally declared unproductive. Soon, however, an attempt was made to prove that they too contributed to production; but without succeeding in showing how they in fact contributed to it: confusing their products and their labor, and seeing their products in their labor itself, it was said that their products vanished as they were born, because in effect their labor dissipated as it was executed. Finally, distinguishing from their action the results it produces, I believe I have succeeded in clearly establishing that their action, like that of all the arts, leaves behind it, when it is well directed, the most real and most useful results. Thus, it was only very late that it began to be perceived that social wealth was the work of society, and it was only after a long series of gropings and hesitations that it was gradually managed to recognize that all the professions of society, from that of the simple plowman to that of the statesman, from the most mechanical to the most intellectual, contributed immediately, each in its own way, to the growth of the forces, virtues, talents, utilities, values of every kind of which the national capital is composed.

§ 5. But in saying that all the professions of society can contribute to production, must we admit that they contribute to it in all circumstances? There is here a second, very singular error to point out. While, in common ideas, only certain classes of men are called productive, one would like to extend this qualification to all their ways of acting. On the one hand, the only creators of wealth are the workers whose products are realized in things; and, on the other hand, these men are producers, people of industry, whatever use they may otherwise make of their faculties. A capitalist makes himself an accomplice to an unjust enterprise by lending the necessary funds to execute it? That is the act of an industrialist. A shipowner rents his ships to carry to Chios the troops who are to exterminate its inhabitants? He performs an act of industry. When the Genoese merchants, established in the suburbs of Constantinople, betrayed their Greek allies, and delivered the city to the Turks, with whom they hoped to do the same business as with the Greeks, they were faithful to the spirit of their profession, they performed an act of commerce.

Men of industry do bad actions, bad actions are acts of industry: these are surely two very different propositions. Crimes can be committed in all professions; they are unfortunately committed in all: does it follow that crime is a creation of utility, and that he who makes himself guilty of it performs the act of a man of industry?

What makes a man a productive worker is not the profession he exercises, but the manner in which he acts; it is not the instrument he uses, but the manner in which he uses it. All the professions of society can be called industrial, since all, as we have just seen, can contribute to production; but it is clear that none is so when it makes a destructive use of its forces. The peasant who uses the share of his plow to till his land is at that moment a man of industry: he will be nothing more than a murderer if he comes to use his tool to strike a man down. A banker participates with his funds in the execution of a useful work, that is industry: he contributes with his money to the success of an iniquitous war, that is brigandage. A manufacturer is a man of industry when he employs his intelligence to perfect his workshops or his machines, and a knight of industry when he uses his wit to obtain from the authorities that they deliver him from the competition he fears, and that they force consumers to buy dearly from him what they could have elsewhere cheaply. A legislator, a prince, a magistrate are industrialists of the first order when they repress malefactors, when they correct their malevolent inclinations; and they are themselves malefactors of the worst kind when they employ the force that society has entrusted to them to commit, for their own account, crimes similar to those they are charged with repressing. In the current state of society in Europe, there are few professions that are completely productive; there are few that are purely predatory. Among us, a baker, a butcher, a printer, a broker, a stockbroker, a notary, are men of industry by the art they exercise, and men of exaction by the monopoly they enjoy. The same magistrate can be at once a man of industry, a producer of utility, in the sense that he can contribute, in certain respects, to giving birth to good civil habits, and an agent of tyranny, a destroyer of utility, in the sense that, on the other hand, he can himself give the example of injustice and contribute to depraving society. In short, the manufacturer, the banker, the judge, the soldier, men of all professions can be men of industry, since all can make a very useful, very productive use of their forces, very proper to increasing our faculties of one kind or another; but if the soldier puts his sword at the service of despotism, if the judge sells it his conscience, if the banker rents it his money, if the manufacturer buys iniquitous privileges from it, it is clear that they must all receive another qualification. One can no more call a man of industry the man of Nantes who engages in the slave trade, than the man of Tripoli who engages in the white slave trade; the shipowner who rents his ships to the assassins of the Greeks, than the imperial officer who assists them with his saber; the money-merchant who goes about offering his purse to all solvent tyrannies, than the statesman who traffics his counsel with them. In whatever way one participates in a harmful action, one is not a man of industry in taking part in it. I do not say that there is always virtue in producing; I say that crime is never productive; I say that after a bad action there is destruction, displacement, but never an increase of wealth in the world; I say in a word that brigandage, whatever the instruments it employs and the manner in which it uses them, must always be very carefully distinguished from industry [^359].

§ 6. One therefore abuses terms equally when one extends the word industrious, producer, only to certain classes of men, and when one seeks to extend it to all their ways of acting; when one wishes to grant it only to workers who act upon matter, and when one still gives it to them when they enrich themselves by misdeeds. The true industrial society would not be one where one saw only agents of agriculture, manufacturing, commerce; but one where all professions, from that of the last artisan to that of the first magistrate, would be cleansed of any mixture of injustice and violence. So that the social state in question here is society itself, in the midst of which we live, minus whatever people there may be who enrich themselves by despoiling others; or rather, as there are hardly any professions, even among the most honorable, that do not owe, legally or illegally, a part of their profits to means that justice disavows, it is the ensemble of all useful professions, minus whatever is mixed in of privileges, monopolies, exactions, or any other kind of injustices, injustices which form no essential part of any of these professions, and which, in any case, cannot be considered productive of utility, nor consequently be confused with industry.

After such explanations, it would be quite superfluous to say that, in such a society, there is no place for any privileged order. Nothing, doubtless, prevents admitting into it the men to whom, by a sentiment of courtesy, one still grants noble qualifications; for these men, by their moral qualities, by their talents, by their lands, by their capital of every kind, can render important and varied services; but it is evident that they can figure there only by the same title as everyone else, that is to say, as useful men and not as privileged ones. In this latter quality, there is no means of including them; for, in this quality, they are anything but producers; what they gain by this title is not the measure of what they produce, but of what they extort; they do not contribute to the life of society, they live off its life; they nourish themselves on its substance.

“Do not ask,” said the Abbé Sieyès energetically and very sensibly, “what place the privileged classes ought to occupy in the social order: that is to ask what place one wishes to assign in the body of a sick person to the malignant humor that undermines and torments him. This humor must be neutralized; the health and play of all the organs must be re-established well enough so that there no longer form any of these morbific combinations fit to vitiate the most essential principles of vitality [^360].”

Thus there are here statesmen, legists, military men, priests, scholars, artists, plowmen, manufacturers: there is a whole concourse of professions, a whole ensemble of organs that participate in a thousand ways in the movement, the life, the development of the social body: but one does not know what democracy, aristocracy, nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie are; and none of all that, with its diversely dominating pretensions, can come take its place in a society where no one lives but from the utilities he creates by himself or by the things he possesses, or else from those he can obtain by the exchange of a part of those against utilities created by others. Let us note well above all that this state does not only exclude the privileges of a superior order. If, at the time when the Estates-General were convoked, the numerous communities of the third estate had wanted, in the manner of the clergy and the nobility, to come figure in the national assembly to defend there, each on its own side, their iniquities, their exactions, their particular thieveries, these pretensions, just as intolerable as those of the superior orders, ought not to have been tolerated either. In their quality as monopolists, in effect, the guilds of arts and trades were no less outside of society than the clergy and the nobility, and consequently they could no more figure in an assembly where there were to be found only the representatives of all the honest and useful professions of the nation.

§ 7. We have just seen what acts it is impossible to include under the word industry, and what is the ensemble of professions that the industrious society embraces. I will perhaps be asked now in what order these professions wish to be classed. I will answer that it appears impossible to assign them any order; that there is, among them, neither first nor last; that they are in a mutual dependence; that each has need of all the others; that all contribute to the life of each. Is there an order, tell me, between the diverse apparatuses that contribute to the life of the individual? To which organ belongs the first place? Is it to the nervous system, to the encephalon, to the lungs, to the heart, to the stomach? It belongs to none; it belongs to all; none can do without the others; all work for the maintenance of the common life. Well, it is absolutely the same for the diverse orders of professions that enter into the economy of society. The arts that appropriate material objects to the needs of man; those that prepare man for the exploitation of the material world; those that cultivate his physical nature, those that educate his intelligence or his imagination, those that give care to his affective faculties, all are essential, all are honorable, all present difficulties and demand, to be well exercised, a union of talents and moral qualities unfortunately rather rare. An agricultural establishment is no less important than a judicial establishment; it is no easier to govern a school or a manufactory than to direct a tribunal; nor to manage a great house of commerce or of banking than to conduct a ministry. Only the most foolish and stupid fatuity could seek to constitute any of the great divisions of human industry in a state of inferiority. There are doubtless, in society in general, and in each order of professions in particular, well-bred men and ill-bred men, strong men and weak men, poor men and rich men, hence men very unequally placed in the esteem and consideration of their fellows. There is also in each particular enterprise an indispensable subordination of those who execute to those who direct, of the workers to the workshop heads, of the workshop heads to the head of the enterprise. But there is otherwise no obligatory subordination of any class of professions to any other. The particular order of labors to which one gives the name of government governs or should govern only its specialty, a specialty which consists above all in repressing unjust pretensions, in correcting antisocial inclinations; and, far from the other professions depending naturally on this one, it seems that this one, by its very nature, should be the most dependent of all, since, unlike the others, which act of their own movement, because they act for their own account, it acts only for the account and consequently should act only on the mandate of society.

§ 8. Of all the professions that enter into the social economy, there is not one that does not have man for its object; but all do not have man for their subject. I have already indicated that they are divided into two great classes, one of which is composed of all the industries that appropriate things to the needs of man, and the other of all those that are exercised directly upon him. I will first occupy myself with the former. I will then treat the latter.However, my work would be incomplete if I were to stop there. There are, outside of all the labors that the life of the social body necessitates, certain orders of facts, actions, or functions, as one may wish to call them, which are not industries, but which all industries need to execute, and which all without distinction do execute. Such are the facts of associating, exchanging, and bequeathing. To associate with a view to a labor to be done is surely not to work; but there is not an order of labors in which one does not need, to succeed in one's enterprises, to form various sorts of societies, leagues, or coalitions. To sell, buy, and exchange the fruits of labor is not to work either; but there is not a class of workers that does not find itself in the indispensable necessity of presenting in the marketplace the utilities it creates, in order to procure, with the price of those, all the ones it needs, and which other classes produce. To transmit, at the moment of one's death, the fortune one has created by one's labor is not to work either; but the progress of society is closely linked to the very fact of this transmission and to the manner in which it is effected.

To give a complete idea of the economy of society, it will therefore be necessary, after having spoken of the principal orders of labors that it embraces, for me to also occupy myself with the functions I have just indicated. But, above all, I need to expound the general conditions to which the power of all professions and all functions is linked. It will then only remain for me to make known in what manner and to what extent these general principles apply to each order of professions and functions in particular.

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Notes

[^330]: Voy. above, ch. XI. [^331]: Wealth of Nations, book 2, ch. 3. [^332]: "The truth is, quite simply, that all our useful labors are productive." (M. de Tracy, Traité d'éc. polit., ed. of 1823, in-18, p. 85.) [^333]: Ibid., p. 267. [^334]: Ibid., p. 268. [^335]: Ibid., p. 244. [^336]: Commentary on Montesquieu, ed. of 1822, in-18, p. 307, in a note, and 218. [^337]: New Principles of Political Economy, second ed., vol. I, p. 141, 144, 145, 147. [^338]: The work of Malthus in question here is unavailable to me, and I cite it only from what M. Say says of it in his Letters to Malthus, etc., 8vo, pp. 32 to 46. [^339]: Political Economy of J. Mill, author of the History of India, sect. IV, p. 261 et seq. of the transl. Paris, 1823. [^340]: At the moment of sending this volume to press, I discover that M. Storch has made the same attempt, and with more success. I will show, in another note, how he was more fortunate. [^341]: Catechism of Political Economy, third ed., p. 52; Treatise on Political Economy, fifth ed., vol. I, p. 147. [^342]: Catechism of Political Economy, third ed., p. 53; Treatise on Political Economy, fifth ed., vol. I, p. 144 et seq. [^343]: (3) Traité d'éc. pol., vol. I, p. 148. [^344]: Ibid., p. 149. [^345]: Ibid., vol. III, p. 26. [^346]: Catéch. d'éc. pol., p. 174 and 175; Traité, vol. III, p. 66 and 67. [^347]: Traité, vol. III, p. 188, 69 and 293. [^348]: This important distinction between the work performed and the utility produced, which I believed to be perfectly new the first time I published it (in the Rev. Encyclop. of April 1827, in reviewing M. Say's Traité d'éc. pol.), M. Storch had the idea a few years before me, in responding to certain criticisms that M. Say had made of his work; and he had very well unraveled where the doctrine of the author of the Traité d'éc. pol. on immaterial products was flawed. M. Storch had understood that M. Say's error came from his having mistaken the cause for the effect, the tree for the fruit; from his having placed the products of the scholar, the lawyer, the doctor, the public official in the services of these classes of workers, and not in the results of their services. However, it does not seem to me that M. Storch had succeeded in showing very clearly in what these results were realized and what the classes in question here truly produced. V. vol. V of his work, where he has tried to reduce his ideas in this regard to their simplest expression. [^349]: Things happen differently in countries where there are slaves. Everyone knows that in those countries one buys not only the services, but even the persons who are in a state to render them, when these persons are possessed by others. Thus, in the colonies, one buys a carpenter, a mason, a joiner, just as among the ancients one bought a rhetorician, a grammarian, a philosopher. Among us, instead of buying a philosopher, one pays to acquire philosophy, just as one buys joinery, instead of acquiring the man who makes it. [^350]: What is disadvantageous to multiply, I say, is the labor necessary to obtain any product whatsoever. Therefore, M. Garnier is visibly wrong, in his Abrégé élémentaire des princ. de l'éc. pol. and in the notes he added to his translation of Smith (note xx), to think that one could usefully multiply the labor of the doctor, the lawyer, the public official, etc. But is not M. Say, who blames him (Traité d'éc. pol., vol. 1, p. 149, fifth ed.) for believing that the labor of these professions can be as advantageously multiplied as any other, wrong himself to imply by these words that any other labor could be advantageously multiplied? Would tearing up one's wheat to make work for the laborer be more advantageous than complicating one's laws to give more to do to the judge? It is clear that there is no more profit in multiplying the labor necessary for one product than in multiplying the labor necessary for another; but it is also certain that there is an advantage in multiplying and perfecting all products, as much those of the judge who works, by applying the laws, to make good habits germinate in men, as those of the farmer who seeks, by plowing his land, to increase the quantity of wheat fit to feed them. [^351]: M. Say is surely quite right to say that the government does not return the money one gives it, by spending it: if it returns the money, it receives, in its place, other values, commodities, time, services, which it consumes and does not return. But, in exchange for these values that are delivered to it and that it consumes, it exercises an action on society which, when it is well directed, leaves behind it true products of the highest price. These products are not wheat, wine, cattle, things that are not of its making, but men corrected of their bad inclinations, men made more fit for civil life: good citizens, that is above all what a good government creates and multiplies: the true title of this great producer is that of AMPLIATOR CIVIUM, which the Romans gave, in a much less just sense, to certain of their emperors. [^352]: Wealth of Nations, book 2, ch. I. [^353]: Traité d'éc. pol., fifth ed., vol. I, p. 151, and vol. II, p. 277. [^354]: Nouveaux princ. d'éc. pol., second ed., vol. I, p. 147. [^355]: Traité d'éc. pol., vol. I, p. 144, of the fifth ed. [^356]: M. Say, in manuscript notes in response to the observations I had made on his Traité in the Revue encyclopédique, notes which he was kind enough to communicate to me, says that the meaning of his entire doctrine on immaterial products is that it is the labor of those who create them that vanishes, and not the result of their labor, not their products themselves. I beg his pardon, but the very title of the chapter where he treats these products resists this explanation. That title is: Of Immaterial Products, or OF VALUES THAT ARE CONSUMED AT THE MOMENT OF THEIR PRODUCTION. Moreover, everything he says to characterize these products tends to represent them as vanishing as they are born. He says expressly that they have a duration only for the time of their production; that they must necessarily be consumed at the very moment they are produced; that it results from their nature that they cannot be accumulated, and that they do not serve to increase the national capital, etc. See the passages I have cited above; and M. Say says the same things in thirty places in his works. [^358]: Raynal, vol. X, book 19, p. 140, of his Hist. philos. Geneva, 1781. [^359]: The truth of this doctrine that crime cannot be productive of utility cannot suffer the slightest contradiction. Here, however, is an objection that has been made to me. Suppose, I have been told, that instead of engaging in the slave trade of blacks, one were to engage in the slave trade of the pirates of the Mediterranean: the action would evidently be criminal, for it is not permissible to trade in men, even the most guilty; yet will you deny, it is added, that this criminal action would not at the same time be a very useful action? I reply without hesitation that this action would be useful in what is licit about it, and fatal in what it would offer of the criminal. I reply that it would be useful to repress piracy, and that this, moreover, would be entirely licit; but I add that, to repress piracy, it would not be at all necessary to engage in the slave trade of pirates, and that this very condemnable act would at the same time be very pernicious. I say, in a word, that an action useful to humanity cannot be an immoral action, and that any criminal act is a disastrous act; or else that a single act is never immoral in what is truly useful about it, nor ever useful in what it offers of the criminal. [^360]: What is the Third Estate? p. 224, new ed. Paris, 1822.