Biography of Sismondi

He was a historian and economist, the first critic of industrial capitalism. He was not a socialist, his views can be described by the expression of Lenin “Economic Romanticism”: he regretted the “costs” that industrialization has laid on the “proletarians” his own term, and yearned for simple personal relations, characteristic of the agricultural economy of last days.

But his critical attitude was formed slowly, as a result of a deep crisis that arose after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Then, 10 years of his life, he gave to gigantic work in Tom, dedicated to the history of the Italian republics, followed by an even more extensive languid story of France. Convinced that the new industrial system is doomed to inevitable repeated crises and a chronic tendency to lack, it was especially concerned about the economy of living labor due to technological progress.

He did not see another solution to this problem besides deep state intervention, including the guaranteed minimum fee for both working and unemployed, limiting maximum working hours, restricting maximum and minimum working age and introduction of a profit system. Sismondi met with Ricardo, Maltus and Say. All of them, except Maltus, subjected him to crushing him. In fact, it is quite obvious that his work “New Principles” Nouveuux Principles had a deep influence on the work of Maltus “Principles of Political Savings” by Principips of Political Economy, the same emphasis on what we would call in our time a lack of combined demand, the same tendency to abandon the system of comparative Statistics and to consider the concept of aggregate demand from a dynamic point of view as a issue of reproduction of income flows of this period in the next period - all this is present in both of these books.

In fact, the spirit of Keynesianism in the work of Sismondi is much stronger than in the work of Maltus. Keynes should have proclaimed his predecessor precisely Sismondi, but not Maltus. Sismondi can also be considered as a true predecessor of Marx not only in view of the fact that he allocated the working class as a pre-emptive victim of the factory system, but also thanks to the understanding that workers and owners are involved in the eternal “class struggle”-another new term created by him.

Throughout his life, Sismondi lived alternately in Switzerland, France, Italy and England, conducted extensive correspondence with his contemporaries - historians, economists and statesmen. He was offered twice academic positions, and he twice rejected these proposals. His works were popular, especially among the socialists, throughout the 19th century - even in the city of Lenin, he considered it an important figure for criticism in one of his two economic works, “characteristic of economic romanticism: Sismondi and our domestic systems” Literature: G.