Initial continuities and discontinuities

This chapter shows the first continuities and the first discontinuities with the work of the founding fathers. It does so in the political, economic and sociological fields. The continuity is found in Edmund Burke and Benjamin Constant, in Herbert Spencer and in Carl Menger. The discontinuity is constituted by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and the sociology of Auguste Comte. The chapter also highlights Herbert Spencer's debts towards Smith and Charles Darwin's debts towards Hume and Smith. It can well be said that, with their attention to the problem of voluntary co-adaptation of individual plans, Mandeville, Hume, Montesquieu and Smith were "Darwinians before Darwin”. This allows us to understand that, if we consider the continuities and the discontinuities in the field of economic theory, the distinction between classical and neoclassical economists becomes misleading: because it is more important to distinguish between the representatives of the evolutionary tradition and the exponents of the utilitarianism in the strict sense. Finally, Section 4 contains a clarification of the intellectual relationship between Spencer and Darwin.