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values? This is a fairly well founded distinction, but here again is it not just a difference in the degree
of attention? The economist himself is not loath to prescribe a particular duty, or to blame some other
motive. What characterizes his manner, it seems to me, is the consideration of human activity from its
quantitative and measurable side and not, like the jurist and the moralist, from its qualified and
unmeasurable side. The jurist and the moralist think of their subjects as heterogeneous, often
incommensurable and governed separately; thus they see the rights that they proclaim as innately
singular privileges, the duties that they formulate as the consecration of particular instincts and of
historical circumstances, the joys and the advantages that they sanction as original modes of feeling.
For them the affective, sui generis side of impressions, volitions, passions, pleasures, and pains
masks the common basis of this multicolored undulation—whence the predilection of ages of custom,
and especially ages of primitive, or heterogeneously fragmented custom, for the juridical way of
seeing things. But the economist implicitly affirms the fundamental identity hidden beneath this
luxuriant diversity. He summarizes everything in the idea of wealth, which he regards as a
homogeneous entity capable of indefinite increase and mathematical summation. If this view is
legitimate, both its popularity and its scientific superiority are understandable. But is it legitimate?
That is the first question to be asked, and political economy was wrong to pass by without taking
notice of it.
It is thus a matter of proving what the economist affirms. We can do so by showing that wealth is
the incarnation of a combination of desire and belief (in which desire plays the main role) and by
recalling the following consideration: that all our passions, all our pains and our pleasures are simple
or complex movements of positive or negative desires just as all our sensations and our ideas are
extracts of judgments, of acts of faith; that either from one state to another within the same individual
or from one individual to another, belief and desire do not change nature but include innumerable
symmetrically opposable degrees of intensity, and consequently can legitimately be subtracted or
added. Unfortunately, until now political economy has not been aware of its true support.
All the prescriptions of this science are based on judgments of greater or lesser general utility. All
its formulas express or claim to express relationships between singular entities, simultaneously
increasing or decreasing, which it treats as real quantities: work, credit, capital, value, and so forth.
Now assuredly these are not at all real quantities, but no less certainly there is something quantitative
about them, and I should say the same for everything that in popular parlance is considered capable of
increasing and decreasing, of being superior or inferiorto something else. Every time, then, that an
economist uses, as he is forced to do, the usual terms of tightening or loosening of credit, of progress,
of well-being and activity, and so forth, either he is talking and saying nothing or he is implicitly
affirming that these diverse collections or accumulations of apparently so heterogeneous things (work,
an accumulation of the most varied muscular or mental efforts; capital, a collection of all sorts of
provisions; credit, a group of acts of faith, and so forth) are in fact summations of homogeneous and
comparable things, which must be defined. And therein lies the difficulty—what are these things?
Until now the answer has been the degrees of affliction or enjoyment which accompany the multiform
states of mind grouped in this manner. Such is the defective analysis of the utilitarians. Completely
misunderstanding the intellectual and judicial element, which nonetheless appears right on the surface
in credit, and obstinately refusing to see anything more in security than an advantage reducible to
pleasures or anything more in effort than a lively or not so lively pain of greater or lesser duration,
they thought they could summarize in these two words, “pain” and “pleasure,” the alpha and the
omega, the cause and the goal of political economy. The ideal would be to procure for oneself the
maximum of pleasure with a minimum of pain.