SISMONDI, JEAN-CHARLES-LÉONARD SIMONDE DE. - Historian and economist, b. at Geneva on 9 May 1773, d. there on 25 June 1842. A philosopher still in the Enlightenment sense, both for the breadth of his interests and for his idyllic humanitarianism.
A son of independent Geneva, "Protestant and republican," he nevertheless made his own the language and culture of three peoples — English, French and Italian — becoming in the end almost a Tuscan by adoption. Engaged at first in economic studies and interests, he did not take regular courses (he is described as a student of law in an unpublished Abstract of the English Constitution, dated London 1793). The revolutionary storm drove his family first to England, then to Tuscany, to Valchiusa near Pescia. There he began, between 1798 and 1799, his studies on the "constitutions of free peoples," reacting against the uniformity and the extrinsic character of the institutions imposed by the revolutionary conquest, yet accepting the principle of popular sovereignty and still often drawing inspiration from the thought of Rousseau. Setting the manifold national traditions and the native, spontaneous "liberties" against Jacobin despotism, he began to resolve the doctrinal problem of a new political science into a series of historical investigations: thus was born the Histoire des Républiques italiennes au moyen âge, conceived in contact with the Coppet circle, which he frequented in the early years of the nineteenth century (placed on the Index by decree of 22 Dec. 1817).
The friendship of Mme de Staël, of B. Constant, etc., yielded S. a livelier sense of the value of national individualities, and contact with the nascent Romantic taste, German and Swiss, influenced his conception of history — rather literary than scientific, always moralizing, and in this still bound to the ideals of Rousseau, of a G. Müller, of pre-Romanticism in general (E. Fueter). More novel was his patriotism, medieval only in appearance, through its cult of the "small State" (W. Kaegi) and of federated States, of free cities that develop in fruitful civic emulation, as in the age of the Communes in Italy. Hence his influence was great on the first Italian Romantic writers and liberal patriots, from Di Breme to the other contributors of the Conciliatore and to the Florentines of the Antologia. He nevertheless provoked the reaction of Manzoni (Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica), on account of the Protestant and Socinian aspect of his liberalism; and that of Mazzini, on account of the aristocratic and legalistic character of his political ideals, which rejected the most genuine democratism and the impulse of rebellion of Mazzinian patriotism.
In 1815 S. drew near, for a moment, like B. Constant, to Napoleon, preferring a liberal version of Napoleonism to the restoration of the legitimists. He then returned to exercising the function of a free mediator among the different national cultures, probing further certain economic and social problems, in the Nouveaux principes d'économie politique (Paris 1819), then in the Etudes sur les sciences sociales (ibid. 1836), which also collect political essays, such as the one Des prétentions de la démocratie à la souveraineté, et du suffrage universel, in which he notes the "retrograde spirit of the masses." Also of the greatest importance is his polemic against the followers of the classical liberal school, developed from 1819, under the impression of the distress of the English industrial proletariat, down to 1837 (Etudes d'économie politique, 2 vols., Paris 1837-38).
Bibliography7 works
Ettore Passerin