Joseph-Michel Dutens

Biography

Entered with the royal School of the Highways Departments in 1783, it makes then all its career in this body. Its principal work of engineer is the realization of the Canal of Berry as well as design of the tubular bridge of Tranchasse with Colombiers (Expensive) which crosses it.

In the economic domain, where he is the disciple of François Quesnay and the Physiocrate S, he makes appear in 1835 a Philosophie of the political economy , which is worth to him to be elected member of the Academy of Science morals and political in 1839. Proudhon thus criticized its ideas on the property:

Mr. Joseph Dutens, physicist, engineer, geometrician, but very little legist and not the philosophical whole, is author of a philosophy of the political economy, in which he believed to have to break lances in the honor of the property. Its metaphysics appears borrowed of Destutt De Tracy. It starts with this definition of the property, worthy of Sganarelle: “The property is the right by which a thing belongs into clean to somebody. ” Literal Translation: the property, it is the property right. After some twistings on the will, freedom, the personality; after having distinguished from the natural properties immaterial and natural properties material, which returns to the innate and acquired properties of Destutt De Tracy, Mr. Joseph Dutens concludes by these two general proposals: 1) the property is in any man a natural and inalienable right; 2) the inequality of the properties is a result necessary of nature; which proposals are converted into this other simpler: all the men have an equal right of unequal property. It reproaches Mr. De Sismondi for having written that the territorial property does not have an other base only the law and conventions; and he says itself, speaking about the respect of the people for the property, that “its good sense reveals to him the nature of the primitive contract signed between the company and the owners. ” It confuses the property with the possession, the community with the equality, the Juste with the naturalness with the possible one: sometimes it takes these various ideas for equivalent, sometimes it seems to distinguish them, with such sign that it would be an infinitely less work to refute it than to include/understand it. Attracted initially by the title of the book, philosophy of the political economy, I found, among darkness of the author, only of the vulgar ideas; this is why I will not speak about it.

The price Joseph Dutens is a quinquennial price of the Academy of Science morals and policies intended to reward a work relating to the political economy or its history and its applications.

Joseph-Michel Dutens is the nephew of Louis Dutens.

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