Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi

Disliking—it is said—the climate, they returned to Geneva, but found the state of affairs still unfavourable; there is even a legend that the head of the family was reduced to selling milk himself in the town.The greater part of the family property was sold, and with the proceeds they emigrated to Italy, bought a small farm in Pescia near Lucca and Pistoia, and set to work to cultivate it themselves.[11] Sismondi worked hard there, with both his hands and mind, and his experiences gave him the material of his first book, Tableau de l'agriculture toscane, which, after returning to Geneva, he published there in 1801.He apparently published his first work on the subject of political economy, De la richesse commerciale ou principes de l'economie politique appliqué à la legislation du commerce (1803) to explain and popularize Smith's doctrine, but following this Sismondi spent a considerable amount of time dedicated to historical research.Nonetheless, in protesting against laissez faire and invoking the state "to regulate the progress of wealth,"[11] he was an interesting precursor of the German Historical school of economics.Key to his philosophy, Sismondi saw these class divisions to coincide with crises in the economy and didn't see extreme social reform as the answer, but rather moderate versions that allowed for technological advances to be slowed for the economy to catch up, via limiting production and the limitation of what he referred to as “the prevailing glorification of free competition”, all while, most importantly, allowing individuals to retain private property and any revenues generated from it.[18] Meanwhile, he began to compile his great Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen Âge, and was introduced to Madame de Staël.But during this journey he met the Countess of Albany, widow of Charles Edward, who all her life was gifted with a singular ability to attract the affection of men of letters.[11] In 1807 appeared the first volumes of the above-mentioned book about the Italian republics, which, though his essay in political economy had brought him some reputation and the offer of a Russian professorship, first made Sismondi a prominent man among European men of letters.Sainte-Beuve has, with benevolent sarcasm, surnamed the author "the Rollin of French History," and the praise and the blame implied in the comparison are both perfectly well deserved"."[25] Henryk Grossman argued that Sismondi was a significant methodological and theoretical predecessor of Marx, particularly by identifying the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value as fundamental to capitalism.Lenin said, The contributor to Russkoye Bogatstvo states at the very outset that no writer has been "so wrongly appraised" as Sismondi, who, he alleges, has been "unjustly" represented, now as a reactionary, then as a utopian.[28] The historian Jerzy Jedlicki writes: All sorts of labels were pinned on this humanist from Geneva who lived in the period of the beginnings of industrial capitalism: he was regarded as a reactionary and a radical, a petty-bourgeois socialist and a romanticist.