Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Economic Thought

It has been twenty-five years since the appearance of Albert Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests, a seminal analysis of the Enlightenment social and economic imaginary. ¹ Hirschman argued that moralists who believed the passions might be kept in check by using one passion to restrain another came to the conclusion in the eighteenth century that the role of "balancing" passion could best be played by interest--the passion for wealth. Interest was suitable for this role, Hirschman suggested, because it was regarded as a calm and regular passion, one that, if not exactly laudable, was at least rational and predictable. Construed as a check on humankind's more destructive urges, he claimed, interest began a slow transition that transformed it from a vice into a quasi-virtuous dis-position, a transition signaled in his view by the emergence of representations that cast trade as a gentle, civilizing force--le doux commerce. With acquisitive drives represented in such a positive light, Hirschman argued, the way was open to imagining a social order based on exchange relations that would be conjunctive rather than disjunctive. The remaking of interest as a check on the passions was central to the development of a moral language that would legitimate an emerging commercial society.

In light of Hirschman's conclusions, it is jarring to read Abbé Sieyès's Essai sur les privilèges (1788), published on the eve of the Revolution. Sieyès claimed that there were two dominant human passions: the desire for money and the desire for honor. The desire for honor naturally led people to perform actions that benefit society, Sieyès argued, because in return for such actions they received the approbation and esteem of others. He represented the desire for money, however, as an antisocial force that the passion for honor could be used to tame. According to Sieyès, "The desire to merit the public esteem. . . is a necessary brake on the passion for riches." ² Sieyès's views were not idiosyncratic. Most commentators in the late eighteenth century continued to evince a distinct suspicion of the profit motive; many believed that it was precisely the passion for wealth that most needed to be inhibited. There was some consensus that a drive well suited to checking selfish acquisitive instincts was the passion for honor, an impulse usually characterized as "emulation." Emulation is, literally, an impulse to imitate or surpass others in virtue or merit, but moralists assumed that such striving was prompted by a hunger for honor. That emulation was prompted by the lure of honor, rather than more tangible rewards, is illustrated in a piece of advice attributed to the father of the economist François Quesnay. The elder Quesnay told his son that "the temple of virtue is supported by four columns, honor, reward, shame, and punishment." He suggested that François choose one of these columns as the basis of his own virtue "because it is necessary to choose to do good through emulation, through interest, through decency, or through fear." ³ As reward was aligned with interest, and punishment with fear, so honor was linked with emulation.

Reservations about interest and enthusiasm for emulation developed in the 1750s and 1760s as patriotism became an increasingly dominant feature of the French cultural landscape. ⁴ Many patriotic publicists manifested a deep ambivalence toward commerce. Patriots acknowledged that all of France's economic resources would have to be mobilized if the nation was to be regenerated in the aftermath of the disastrous Seven Years' War. On the other hand, among the central lessons French patriots derived from that struggle was that Britain owed its military supremacy as much to its successful cultivation of public spirit as to its naval power or commercial preeminence. ⁵ If France was to compete, it would have to animate its own citizens with a similar zeal for the public good. However, most social commentators assumed that commercial activity created a personality...