Studia Gilsoniana (Jun 2024)
Platonic Sources of Modern Political Economy in Traité de l’economie politique by Antoine de Montchrétien
Abstract
The article is an analysis of the influence of the Platonic concept of the state on the first attempts to build a modern concept of political economy in French. Unlike the English-language economic theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the French Traité de l’économie politique by Antoine de Montchrétien is not just an attempt to analyze economic phenomena such as labor productivity, new technologies, or the development of agriculture, industry, and crafts, but is also an attempt to relate the new view of economics with the traditionally Platonic understanding of the state as a three-part structure in which each social group does only its own work. However, the understanding of Platonic justice as each social group doing its own thing is simplified in Montchrétien’s work. The French thinker relies on an archaic form of the social contract, in which individual social groups are dogmatically understood as elements of a fixed and immutable structure, of which the French monarchy system is an expression. On this point, Montchrétien diverges from the author of Republic because the Platonic state - contrary to Popper’s view - is not an example of a closed society along the lines of a feudal or aristocratic monarchy, but a flexible republic in which there is the possibility of passing from one social group to another, provided one possesses adequate personal qualities. It seems that Montchrétien’s attempt to promote the people as a new social class was not successful because his revolutionary demand was not followed by a proposal to build a new social contract through which the goods-producing class could become the real subject and source of the state’s wealth. The new social contract was introduced in Europe as a result of the Industrial Revolution and a series of political revolutions led by the French Revolution while the Montchrétien treatise remained a purely theoretical attempt to build a new concept of political economy.
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