Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi

Independent activity 1773–1842 ○ Stomach cancer

Genevan historian who first criticised laissez-faire and first called the working class the proletariat

Born in 1773 into an upper-class Genevan family named Simonde, he took the name Sismondi after becoming an author. At first a follower of Adam Smith, in Nouveaux principes d'économie politique (1819) he argued that economics studied the increase of wealth too much and its use for happiness too little. Against Say and Ricardo he denied that equilibrium arrives on its own, became the first theorist of periodic crises, and was the first to call the working class created by capitalism the proletariat. The Communist Manifesto treated him as the head of petty-bourgeois socialism, though he was not a socialist. He also wrote histories of the Italian republics and of France, and sat in the Geneva Assembly in his last years.

Also known as: Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi