The Restoration (1814–1830) was a golden age for liberal philosophy in France, especially in the field of politics. The political thought of Benjamin Constant and François Guizot, two of the most well-known theorists of the representative regime, is today regarded as particularly useful for understanding the meaning of many of the institutions which post-revolutionary democracies inherited. However, this paper reveals the existence of another great theory of the representative regime in circulation during the French Restoration: that popularized in the pages (...) of Le Censeur (1814–1815), a major liberal newspaper of the time. Its editors, Charles Comte (1782–1837) and Charles Dunoyer (1786–1862), are today known for their important contribution to the rise of liberal political economy in France. Their earliest journalistic writings contrast with the rest of their work and predate their discovery of the Treatise on Political Economy by Jean-Baptiste Say. During the first Bourbon Restoration (1814), Comte and Dunoyer were concerned almost exclusively with political philosophy. Before adopting the doctrine of ‘industrialism’, they attempted to make a synthesis of the political thought of Rousseau and Montesquieu, in order to give a liberal form to the idea of popular sovereignty compatible with monarchical government. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the class theory of Jcan-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), Charles Comte (1782-1838) and Charles Dunoyer (1786-1862). However, in order to be fully accurate, this title should be qualified in several respects. First, the thinking of these men can not be examined in complete isolation, divorced from traditional liberal ideas, the works of their contemporaries and the intellectual currents of the day. Secondly, their class theories strictly speaking cannot be separated from what we might (...) now consider the separate specializations of economics, history and political theory. This is the nature of the times as well as in the nature of the.. (shrink)