POLITICAL SCIENCE 287 



thinking of the last half of the eighteenth century. 

 Through the writings of Smith and Ricardo, who were 

 both clearly indebted to them, physiocratic influence 

 was carried over into the economic thought of the nine- 

 teenth century. 



But with the close of the eighteenth century, with 

 the exception of J. B. SAY, France neither produced 

 any important economic works, nor possessed a school 

 of economists, until about 1845, although Utopian 

 Socialism flourished in this period. 



The rationalism of the eighteenth century led in 

 scientific circles to an unobtrusive but insistent realism, 

 to a distrust of large abstractions, and to a search for 

 objective facts. In the social sciences, this temper re- 

 sulted in the subordination of the theory of distribu- 

 tion to the concrete problems of State administration and 

 local amelioration. SISMONDI and SAINT-SIMON are 

 more characteristic of the temper of French thought than 

 J. B. SAY and Frederic BASTIAT, and, as might be sup- 

 posed, the positive contribution of France in the social 

 sciences is in sociology rather than in economics. Al- 

 though the liberal views of the eighteenth century have 

 maintained a strong hold on French opinion, there has 

 been a skepticism and a tendency to reaction, which 

 appeared in its extreme forms in the Utopian com- 

 munism of SAINT-SIMON and FOURIER and in the socialism 

 of Louis BLANC and PROUDHON. This reaction against 

 the mechanistic theories was not without its influence 

 upon John Stuart Mill. 



The passion of the realist for facts appears notably in 

 LE PLAY'S monographs of families, in the historical work 

 of LEVASSEUR, and in the highly diversified work of P. 

 LEROY-BEAULIEU. 



About the middle of the century, there was a revival of 

 "classical" economic thought, which was associated with 



