A pre-history of misesian calculation: The contribution of adolphe thiers

Mises’s argument on the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, first proposed in 1920, has forerunners. One of the early forerunners was Adolphe Thiers in his book De la propiété, which was published in 1848. Thiers understood that he was fighting for the case of the economists against socialists and communists. He wrote a popular book after the socialist revolution of 1848 putting forward an eloquent defense of property as the foundation of society. Although largely neglected, his work is interesting because he based economic argument on a property-rights framework and because he already hinted towards the problem of economic calculation under socialism. The particular force of his argument lies in the refutation of economic calculation under socialism not only on grounds of practicability, but of a theoretical reasoning about the role of property and thus the role of the market and prices for the allocation of goods. Being himself a politician he was compromising in the application of his own principles, which makes especially the last part of his book, On Taxation, contradictory in view of the preceding parts. Thiers’s argument can be interpreted as resulting from the tradition of the natural-law school of the Physiocrats, who could themselves draw on the Catholic tradition of natural law and the discussion of the “just price.”

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