Heterodox economics movement

Preface

The Heterodox Traditions in Economics began when Jean-Jacques Rousseau , a Swiss political philosopher of the Enlightenment and purported father of the French Revolution, wrote his book Discourse on Political Economy (Economie Politique) (1755) which became the entry on the subject in Diderot's Encyclopedie.

Utopians and Socialists

Rousseauvian Socialism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1788 wrote Discourse on Political Economy (1755), an article which contains no obvious economic theory and is merely a pre-taste of the political philosophy he was to lay out in his Social Contract (1762). His earlier polemical Discourse on Inequality (1754) - which argued that civilization had destroyed man's "natural goodness" and thus was the source on inequality - is prescient of the Marxian doctrine of "alienation".

Rousseau's work had a little direct impact on economics, but exerted a substantial indirect influence. He shared with his fellow Enlightenment philosophers the faith in the existence of a "natural state" of society - which one could thereby extend to social equilibrium and "natural value" concepts - which were very much ingrained in the thinking of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. His appeal to this state via his "natural man", the "noble savage", is reminiscent of the analogies formed in modern economics.

A thorough pessimist about existing human society, Rousseau recognized that this "natural state" was perverted by "civilization" and that the appetites and motivations of civilized man had been consequently corrupted and constructed by his interaction with society - "Man is born free and is everywhere in chains" as he wrote in his famous opening to the Social Contract

The "natural state", Rousseau claimed, could only be achieved via wholesale social reform which envisioned a collective state with extra-personal dedication to a "General Will"''. Only in such a state, Rousseau asserted, could the true "natural man" exist and be truly free. It is these last observations that make Rousseau the father of Socialism (utopian and otherwise) - and earned him much emnity from later anti-Socialists such as Hayek.

His publications got him arrested and his books were burned throughout France. He ran off to England, being hosted and supported by David Hume where he wrote his polemical Letters from the Mountain Soon he returned to France, where he wandered in poverty until his death in 1778.