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This is an enormous mutilation, which, far from clarifying anything, confuses everything. For in
pleasures and pains, all sui generis, it is the qualitative, nonmeasurable character that predominates.
But in examining these two ideas we see that it can be taken as self-evident that pleasure is simply the
quality of a sensation insofar as it is desired, and pain simply the quality of a sensation insofar as it
is rejected. If we push the analysis further we shall also see in physical or moral pain and in physical
or moral pleasure simply on alternate, continual, unconscious high or a low of our faith in ourselves,
in our value, our strength, our physical or moral, individual or social virtuality.
In a word, the question is whether faith and desire really have a quantitative nature. If so, economic
science is possible; if not, it is rightly labeled bad literature. Political economy, once again,
postulates necessarily but implicitly the propositions that I am putting forward, which this work
develops.
As long as people persist in basing political economy on the equivocal idea of services and
satisfactions, which, I repeat, presents desire and faith combined with dissimilar sensate elements
and is of an especially salient heterogeneity, this science will be rendered radically inappropriate for
any philosophical development whatsoever. The ambiguity of this idea of service encourages the
continuing conflict between the theoretical, deductive, generalizing, unitary school of economists such
as Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and the majority of the French, and the historical, inductive, particularist
school, which, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, never succeeds in crushing its rival nor ceases
to resist it. Why this battle? Because, without knowing it or perceiving it clearly, some lean on the
fact that the most diverse pleasures and sufferings of sight, of hearing, of no matter what sense, be it
physical or moral, have in the final analysis something comparable, something truly identical,
measurable, or evaluable by an internal tribunal—whence they gain the right to group these things
together; whereas others, protesting apparently not without reason, base their objection on the radical
diversity of joy and pains considered as sensations. This second group, for example, analyzes the
word wealth, which in political economy is what force is in mechanics, the fundamental thing whose
production, direction, and expenditure must be studied. And what is wealth? The flocks of a pastoral
people, the plowed land of the peasant, the casket of the miser, the wardrobe of a woman—just so
many objects, so many special pleasures with no relation to one another, without any common
measure, so to speak. . . . 1
If they speak the truth, political economy rests on a mere name, flatus vocis, or on ground alien to
science, for there is no science of the qualitative as such. And in this case we must agree with Cournot
that the common denominator of values, money—whether metallic or paper—is a pure fiction
and a matter of convention. But if in accordance with our way of seeing things we give each of these
two schools its due, we see why, despite the erudition, the wit, the sharp good sense of the historical
school, the theoretical school is unassailable. It would, however, be stronger yet if it were conscious
of its true raison d’etre, namely the theoretical possibility of measuring faith and desire. I say
theoretical, and that is sufficient for it to take place in a science of economics. But what will always
prevent this science from becoming fixed, from formulating itself in exact and verifiable laws is the
impossibility of measuring belief and desire practically and conveniently other than as a single entity
with inadequate approximations.
When, by accident, the economists struck on the idea of desire rather than service, they made fairly
poor use of it. For example, as the source of production they gave desire for wealth. Desire for
wealth is in political economy what desire for happiness is in ethics: a pure tautology. We might as
well speak of desire for the desired, since the fact of being individually desired raises any state of
being to the rank of happiness, and the very fact of being desired generally raises any object or