Hellmut O Pappe(unpublished) Sismondi, Constant and Tocqueville

Hellmut Pappe died in 1998. Since the publication of Sismondi’s Weggenossen (Geneva, 1956), he had been planning a new biography of Sismondi intended both to replace J. R. Salis’s Sismondi, 1775-1842: la vie et l'oeuvre d'un cosmopolite philosophe (1932) and to give a fuller view of Sismondi’s influence, particularly over significant luminaries of nineteenth century European thought. Although Hellmut Pappe continued working until his death, his published work in this field was limited to a number of articles on Sismondi and editions of such works as the ‘Statitique du Departement du Leman’. Among the papers he left to the University of Sussex, however, were transcriptions of Sismondi’s mother and sister’s diaries, three chapters of the biography describing Sismondi’s life up to 1800, and some miscellaneous papers, destined for the second volume of the biography, describing Sismondi’s relationships with his contemporaries. The paper published here comes from the latter collection and appears to have been one of the last papers that Hellmutt Pappe completed. For reasons of brevity, the version of the paper published here omits the final section of the manuscript version, dealing with Sismondi’s view of North America, in addition to several of the more extensive notes. The paper underlines Pappe’s concern to restore Sismondi to the first rank of European political economists and historians.