Joseph Charlier is best known as the author of the first proposal for a nationwide basic income. This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of this reformer by highlighting the originality and coherence of his overall project, situated within the intellectual and political context of the nineteenth century. A committed socialist, Charlier advocated not only the introduction of a universal dividend but also the nationalization of land ownership and the establishment of an extensive system of public education, conceived as means of guaranteeing everyone an equal right to the development of their capacities and of putting an end to the domination of capital over labor. At the same time, he displayed a strong attachment to several fundamental principles of economic liberalism. The article shows that this articulation, far from reflecting doctrinal inconsistency, outlines a “third way” avant la lettre, aimed at reconciling social justice, individual freedom, and economic efficiency. It concludes with an analysis of the historical failure of this proposal and of the contemporary relevance of some of its theoretical contributions.
This article examines how the conceptualisation of consumption in terms of marginal utility took shape in the political economy of William Stanley Jevons and how this conceptualisation differed from John Stuart Mill’s perspective. For Mill, consumption was a practice, an action desired for its own sake that provided enjoyment. Consequently, he excluded consumption from the science of political economy, situating it instead within the art of domestic economy. This article argues that Jevons’s conceptualisation of consumption drew inspiration from Richard Jennings’ Natural Elements of Political Economy (1855), which integrated the principles of physiological psychology into political economy. Jennings’ psychological and methodological approach altered Mill’s conception of the desire to consume, enabling him to reintegrate consumption into the scientific framework of political economy. In the process, the meaning of consumption changed: it was no longer the wasteful destruction of wealth that classical economists saw in it, but rather the use of wealth as one of the springs of action. As a result, consumption was no longer an end in itself or the end of political economy; instead, it became a means to maximise satisfaction.
