Say on a person’s property right in their own “industrious faculties” (1819)

Say’s Treatise on Political Economy had a profound impact in both France and America where it was used as a college text book throughout the 19th century (there were several editions after its first appearance in 1803). Unlike modern economics textbooks Say includes a chapter on the right to own property fairly early on in the treatise, in fact just before his famous chapter “On Markets.”

This passage includes a very interesting footnote in which Say talks about property in things other than material things, such as what he terms “les talents industrielles” which the 19th century American translator calls “the industrious faculties.” By this Say has in mind those aspects of an individual’s person and character which makes him or her a productive or “industrious” individual such as knowledge, skills, motivation, capacity to plan or invent, and so on. A Lockean political philosopher might call this “self-ownership”.

Say described this right to property in one’s own faculties and talents as “sacred.” Also of interest is Say’s claim that the justice of this form of property is more clear cut (or “supérieur”) than other, more commonly recognized forms of property such as land or capital. The former, he thought, could often be traced back to an original act of plunder (such as dispossession of an original owner), or in the case of the latter, from some piece of favorable government legislation which allowed the accumulation of capital to take place.