Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
K. Steven Vincent
transparency of amour de soi-m
ˆ
eme. Also like Rousseau, Godwin was fearful
of the possible dependence of one individual on another, something that
was fostered by associations and other co-operative organisations. Godwin
once wrote to Shelley that the ‘pervading principle’ of his book Political
Justice was ‘that association is the most ill-chosen and ill-qualified mode of
endeavouring to promote the political happiness of mankind’ (Godwin to
Shelley, 4 March 1812, cited in Marshall 1984,p.296).
Where Godwin parted company with Rousseau was in the latter’s
belief that governments were not necessarily identified with dependency.
Rousseau had suggested that a positive form of politics was possible, if it
were based on law and if the particular wills of individuals were replaced
by the sovereignty of the general will. Such a political association could
avoid personal dependency. To clarify this distinction, Rousseau contrasted
‘dependence on things’, which was natural and affected all humans equally
(dependence on the law of gravity, for example), with ‘dependence on
men’, which was unnatural and harmful to freedom and morality. Rousseau
believed that the morally debilitating dependence of one human being on
another could be avoided in a political system that relied on a morally benign
dependency that paralleled the natural ‘dependence on things’ – namely in
a political system that located supreme political authority in all the members
of the community.
11
Godwin, on the other hand, made no such distinc-
tions, and in what became a classic anarchist position, he concluded that
all governments inevitably fostered personal dependence and worked at the
expense of making men virtuous. All governments, therefore, should be
eliminated.
There was a convergence of republican themes and Calvinist princi-
ples in Godwin’s thoughts concerning the interrelationship of dependence
and politics. Both traditions praised independence and condemned luxury,
and both traditions were critical of existing governmental institutions. The
result, in Godwin’s case, was the transferral of the concern for promoting
justice from the political to the moral realm. Or, to use the terminology
of republicanism, the focus shifted from ‘principle’ to ‘spirit’ – from faith
in political institutions to faith in socio-political mores, mores which in
Godwin’s case were to be based on reason and private judgement. As he
putitinPolitical Justice, ‘virtue demands the active employment of an ardent
11 Rousseau contrasts t hese two types of dependence in
´
Emile (Rousseau (1970, iv,p.311). Also see
the discussions by Durkheim and Grimsley (Durkheim 1960,pp.88–95;Grimsley1973,pp.101ff.).
444
Visions of stateless society
mind in the promotion of the general good’ (Godwin 1976, Book i, vii,
p. 153).
The moral basis of Godwin’s philosophy is evident in his stance that duties
were to take precedence over rights. Unlike his contemporary Thomas
Paine, who argued that duties depended on the prior existence of rights,
Godwin emphasised duties, and argued that rights depended upon man’s
fulfilment of the duty to act in conformance with justice.
There is no sphere in which a human being can be supposed to act, where one mode of
proceeding will not, in every given instance, be more reasonable than any other mode.
That mode the being is bound by every principle of justice to pursue ...Ifthenevery
one of our actions falls within the province of morals, it follows that we have no rights
in relation to selecting them. No one will maintain, that we have a right to trespass
upon the dictates of morality. (Godwin 1976, Book ii,v,p.192)
There was also no room in Godwin’s system for self-interest, a position
that was highlighted in Godwin’s ongoing argument with Thomas Malthus
(Rosen 1987,pp.120–43).
The event which, in Godwin’s case, served as the catalyst for bringing
into focus all of his thoughts about politics and morality was the French
Revolution. This was true in two ways: it stimulated him intellectually to
embark on theoretical works like Political Justice; it also created the environ-
ment for more practical writing about English political and constitutional
issues. He wrote essays, for example, defending reformers who had been
arrested by the English government and tried for treason. Indeed, it was the
defence of English liberties – liberties which Godwin judged the govern-
ment to be endangering – that provided the enduring focus for Godwin’s
practical political writings. He wrote an especially impassioned defence of
liberty when the government introduced the Treason and Sedition Acts in
1795.
12
One notable aspect of these essays is their repudiation of appeals to pop-
ular opinion, an indication of the moderate nature of Godwin’s stance. His
1795 pamphlet against the Treason and Sedition Acts, for example, was
published under the name of ‘a lover of order’, and it contained passages
warning against ‘the headlong rage of faction’ and critical of organisa-
tions like the London Corresponding Society that would ‘not endure to
hear of any cautionary restraints upon freedom’ (Godwin 1993, Book ii,
12 William Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills Concerning Treasonable and
Seditious Practices, and Unlawful Assemblies, in Godwin 1993, ii,pp.123–62.
445
K. Steven Vincent
pp. 123–5). In 1797, in a reference to English enthusiasts of the French
Revolution (including himself), he lamented that ‘the friends of innovation
were somewhat too imperious in their tone’ (Godwin 1993, Book v,p.78).
And in 1801, he described the reign of Robespierre as ‘atrocious and inhu-
man’ (Godwin 1993, Book ii,p.167). By 1806, he was writing that change
in England should be ‘gentle, temperate, almost insensible’ (Rosen 1987,
p. 198). This moderation also informed theoretical works like Political
Justice,
13
but it is par ticularly pronounced in his more practical writings.
For all the apparent radicalism of Godwin’s repudiation of dependence and
government, therefore, he consistently warned against violent change. God-
win suggested that reason and benevolence were the appropriate paths to
political reform and social transformation, and he argued that the appro-
priate locus for the flowering of reasoned consideration of these issues was
intimate conversation.
The French Revolution confirmed Godwin not only in his insistence that
reform was to be achieved by philosophy and reason rather than by agita-
tion; it also pushed him towards a more critical, but also more conservative,
position concerning the issues of property and economic well-being. In the
revised edition of Political Justice published in 1796, Godwin commended
the increased prosperity created by commercial society and reaffirmed his
position that the state should play no role in economic concerns. But he
also reaffirmed his critical stance towards luxury and gaudy ostentation,
continued to insist that all had a right to subsistence and expanded his crit-
icisms of the inequality, avarice, and greed fostered by commercial society.
His proposals for effecting change, however, remained extremely moderate.
He made it clear that reform should come about peacefully and that some
physical property inequities were justified. In his consideration of how pri-
vate modes of the expenditure of wealth would benefit the poor (public
expenditure was precluded because there was to be no state), he concluded
that inequities were justified if they led to beneficent expenditure – if wealth
was ‘applied to cheer the miserable, to relieve the oppressed, to assist the
manly adventurer, to advance science, and to encourage art’ (Godwin 1993,
v,p.159).
What was needed to overcome poverty, therefore, was to change the
opinions which had predominated in the past and which continued to
13 In the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin writes that ‘Revolution is instigated by a horror
against tyranny, yet its own tyranny is not without peculiar aggravations. There is no period more at
war with the existence of liberty’ (Godwin 1976, iv, ii, p. 270).
446
Visions of stateless society
control understanding in the present. What was needed, in short, was more
reason and more enlightened education. Especially pernicious, in Godwin’s
mind, were those faulty opinions that were insinuated by the presence of
government, and to counter these Godwin advocated more liberty and less
government.
14
Suspicious of all associations larger than the intimate rational
conversation between two equals, Godwin discounted civil and political
liberty for intellectual liberty. He had the belief – common in the late
eighteenth century but unusual in the nineteenth – that rational intellectual
growth would produce justice and happiness. ‘Make men wise’, he wrote,
‘and, by that very operation, you make them free. Civil liber ty follows as
a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of
opinion’ (Godwin 1976, Book iv,i,p.263).
For Godwin, therefore, the exercise of intellectual liberty would serve as a
bridge between the individual and the social. This eighteenth-century, pre-
sociological account of how individuals combined and operated as social
wholes gave immense privilege to education and to literary and verbal skills.
It was based on the conviction – some would prefer to call it a pious hope –
that conversation, reason and enlightened commerce would be sufficient to
improve the human condition.
5 Thomas Hodgskin and individualist anarchism
Thomas Hodgskin shared with William Godwin an antipathy towards gov-
ernment, but the focus of his writings was not political justice but political
economy and the harmonious natural order that he believed God had pro-
vided for mankind. The free market replaced private judgement and public
discussion as the context for the exercise of liberty and the realisation of
justice.
A naval officer who saw service in the Napoleonic wars, Thomas
Hodgskin got into a dispute concerning military discipline when he was
twenty-five years old, which led to his being placed on half pay and even-
tually to his exit from the service. He travelled on the European continent
14 To the extent that Godwin considered institutional organisation, he preferred limited democracy
with most decisions left to the prerogatives of small communities. This, he believed, would be the
regime that would best allow reason to broaden. He spoke with approval of communities which ‘were
contented with a small district, with a proviso of confederation in cases of necessity’, and contrasted
such communities with those that aspired ‘to embrace a vast territory, and [to] glut their vanity with
ideas of empire’ (Godwin 1976, vii, iii, p. 644). But such institutional concessions were made only
reluctantly by Godwin, who clearly preferred the more intimate context of rational conversation.
447
K. Steven Vincent
after the end of the Napoleonic wars (1815–18), lived for some years in
Edinburgh, and then moved to London, where he worked on various jour-
nals and wrote the books that made his reputation as a critic of government
and a founder of proletarian economics.
15
Hodgskin’s most famous publication was his 1825 book (first published
by Mechanics’ Magazine) Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital, where
he challenged the view that capital was productive. His economic doctrine
is based on the distinction between labourers and idlers and on a critique
of what he judged to be the unjustified power given to the latter group
by governments and legal conventions. Workers ‘are the main pillars of
the social edifice’, according to Hodgskin (Hodgskin 1922,p.50). They
produce all value, and commodities ought to be exchanged in propor tion
to the quantity of labour which their production has cost. Unfortunately,
labourers have been prevented from enjoying this value because of social
regulations and laws that favour the accumulation of riches by landowning
and capitalist idlers.
Thedistress our people suffer...and the povertyweall complain of, is not caused by
nature, but by some social institutions, which either will not allow the labourer to exert
his productive power, or which rob him of its fruits. (Hodgskin 1966,pp.267–8)
Hodgskin’s books of the late 1820s and early 1830s (in addition to Labour
Defended, he published Popular Political Economy (1827)andNatural and Arti-
ficial Right of Property Contrasted (1832)) were devoted to defending this posi-
tion against economists who argued that land and capital were productive,
and against Malthusians who claimed that population growth entailed sub-
sistence wages (or worse) for labourers. Against the economists, Hodgskin
argued that it was not landlords and capitalists who stimulated growth by
their investment and directions; all benefits attributed to these in fact ‘arise
from co-existing and skilled labour’ (Hodgskin 1922,p.19). Labour cre-
ated value, and if the exploitative relationship between labour and capitalist
were eliminated a ‘natural’ order of free exchange would allow labourers to
enjoy the fruits of their efforts. Against the Malthusians, Hodgskin claimed
that there was no evidence that population growth led to economic and
demographic disaster; rather, growing populations were the natural source
of all progress and improvement.
15 G. D. H. Cole suggests that Hodgskin ‘founded . . . proletarian economics’ (Hodgskin 1922,p.17).
Max Beer recommends Hodgskin’s Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital as ‘one of the most
aggressive and closely reasoned pamphlets of the labour and socialist movement’ (Beer 1948,p.261).
448
Visions of stateless society
Both stances relied on an underlying belief, common among deists of
this era, that there was a naturally harmonious order to the world, an order
that Hodgskin argued was violated by the artifice of legislative restr ictions,
especially the artificial rights of property. Misery and poverty are created,
according to Hodgskin, by legislative meddling; laws are sinister because
they are implemented for the defence of the private interests of the privi-
leged and powerful. The so-called iron law of wages, for example, is a result
not of natural competitive forces, but of the unreasonable power that legal
arrangements have given to capitalists and landlords. Hodgskin believed, in
his own words, ‘that all law-making, except gradually and quietly to repeal
all existing laws, is arrant humbug’ (Hodgskin 1973,p.i).
The proper standard for all judgement, according to Hodgskin, was nat-
ural law, which was often opposed to man-made positive law. As he put it
in his Popular Political Economy, ‘there already exists a code of natural laws,
regulating and determining the production of wealth’ (Hodgskin 1966,p.
xx). This contrasts sharply with the views of, say, Bentham and James Mill
who believed that rights were the result of legislation. For Hodgskin, man
is born within society and with natural rights, and human laws could not
conceivably be considered as creating either. Indeed, such laws could at best
record the existence of natural rights.
A similar dichotomy informs Hodgskin’s view of property. He begins
with a Lockean view of one’s ‘natural’ property rights in those things with
which one has mixed one’s labour.
There is no other wealth in the world but what is created by labour, and by it continually
renewed. This principle, now universally acknowledged, makes the right of property
appear more absolute and definite than it was in Mr. Locke’s comprehension, because
the right to own land is in fact only the right to own what agricultural or other labour
produces. (Hodgskin 1973,p.36)
This must be distinguished from the ‘artificial’ right of property which is
established by law:
The law . . . is a set of rules and practices laid down and established, partly by the
legislator, party by custom, and partly by the judges, supported and enforced by all the
power of the government, and intended as far as our subject is concerned, to secure
the appropriation of the whole annual produce of labour. Nominally these rules and
practices are said to have for their object to secure property in land; to appropriate tithes,
and to procure a revenue for the government; actually and in fact they are intended
to appropriate to the law-makers the produce of those who cultivate the soil, prepare
clothing, or distribute what is produced among the different classes, and among different
communities. Such is law. (Hodgskin 1973,pp.46–7)
449
K. Steven Vincent
The law is controlled, that is, by the wealthy and the powerful for their own
economic domination. But this ‘artificial’ right is a travesty of justice. ‘The
natural right of property far from being protected, is systematically violated,
and both government and law seem to exist chiefly and solely, in order to
protect and organise the most efficacious means of protecting the violation’
(Hodgskin 1973,p.53).
The solution is quite simple: eliminate the legal regime which allows non-
labourers to accumulate artificial property; provide labourers the freedom to
exchange the natural proper ty which they produce. Hodgskin exemplifies
what Elie Hal
´
evy has termed the ‘anarchist prejudice’ on issues of political
systems and juridical frameworks, for he did not attack particular laws but
rather the idea of law itself (Hal
´
evy 1956,pp.171–6). It is interesting, in
this regard, that Hodgskin even came to condemn worker s’ combinations
as inappropriate interferences between capital and labour, though in his
writings of the 1820s he had seen these as necessary to protect the interest
of wage-earners against the demands of capitalists. As Hal
´
evy has pointed
out, when confronted with the choice between bourgeois free trade and
working-class ‘interventionism’, Hodgskin chose the former (Hal
´
evy 1956,
pp. 145–7). What Hodgskin came to rely upon, therefore, was what Adam
Smith had called the ‘higgling of the market’. He opposed Owenite calls for
the elimination of competition, a position that clearly separated Hodgskin
from the socialists.
16
Hodgskin was convinced that there were moral laws analogous to laws
describing the movements of the physical universe. As he put it in Travels
in the North of Germany (1820), ‘the moral laws of nature are as regular and
unalterable as her physical laws. He, who has so beautifully constructed our
bodies, has not left our conduct, on which our happiness depends, to be
regulatedbychance...Regularlawsareestablishedinthemoralworld,and
we have a capacity to discover them, and so to regulate our conduct by them,
that we may diminish or destroy every species of evil’ (quoted in Hal
´
evy
1956,p.51). Such a position explains Hodgskin’s opposition to Benthamite
utilitarianism, which reduced moral considerations to individual prudential
calculations. Hodgskin believed that there were moral promptings which
inhered in all persons and which, if listened to, would provide the basis
16 George Lichtheim concludes that Hodgskin’s theory is ‘labourist rather than socialist’ (Lichtheim
1969,p.135). Some of Hodgskin’s contemporaries were critical of his acceptance of individual
competition. See, for example, William Thompson (1827).
450
Visions of stateless society
for the harmonious interactions of all humanity. This too was the realm of
‘natural laws’.
Hodgskin believed in the correctness of his analysis because he thought
he understood the ‘natural laws’ which regulated the production of wealth,
and because he was convinced that production was a part of ‘a complicated
and harmonious whole’ which ‘springs from a higher source than the fore-
planning wisdom of man’ – a higher source that he also referred to as the
Master Power and God (Hodgskin 1973,pp.261–8; see also pp. 28–35).
Such beliefs – that a Supreme Being had made provisions for the terres-
trial happiness of mankind and that there were scientific laws governing
socio-economic relations – are a particularly stark example of a common
nineteenth-century tendency that we have already noted; namely, the belief
in ‘laws’ which were descriptive and normative, and which when discovered
by the reasoned intellect would unlock the secrets of social interaction.
17
It
was this optimistic scientism, based on a deistic belief in a harmonious world
order, that allowed Hodgskin to, in effect, turn Malthus on his head: while
the latter believed that there were secular laws of demographic and pro-
ductive change that always led to want and scarcity, Hodgskin believed that
these ‘natural laws’ were benevolent and favourable to humanity’s economic
development.
Hodgskin’s belief in the existence of such natural laws and his convic-
tion that these laws were at once harmonious and beneficent for humanity
found echoes in other contexts, most notably the United States, where the
widespread influence of natural rights philosophy and classical liberal eco-
nomic doctrine provided a congenial cultural environment for individualist
anarchism. Josiah Warren (1798–1874), for example, viewed government
and man-made laws as the chief enemy of a free and just society, arguing
that the ‘sovereignty of the individual’ would flourish if oppressive gov-
ernmental rules and institutions were abolished. Warren – who is often
referred to as ‘the first American anarchist’ – believed that the economic
order should be based on ‘equitable commerce’, a system resting on the idea
that the value of goods should reflect the labour expended in production.
Suspicious of any associations which constrained individual sovereignty (he
was an opponent even of apprenticeship), Warren expected sellers to act
17 Illustrative here is the epigraph by J.-B. Say that Hodgskin placed at the beg inning of Popular Political
Economy: ‘The laws which determine the prosperity of nations are not the work of man: they are
derived from the nature of things. We do not establish; we discover them’ (Hodgskin 1966). On this
general issue, see Stack 1998.
451
K. Steven Vincent
ethically in pricing their goods, and he expected buyers to pay this fair
price and to provide information concerning their additional economic
needs (Hall 1974;Martin1957,pp.11–34;Warren1852). Though Warren
relied less on the ‘higgling of the market’ than did Hodgskin, there is a
strong similarity in their views of economic value and of the existence of
‘natural laws’.
Even closer to Hodgskin were two of Warren’s contemporaries, Lysander
Spooner (1808–84) and Stephen Pearl Andrews. Spooner firmly defended
‘natural law’ – which he believed self-evident to all – from man-made
statute law and, like Hodgskin, he also believed in absolutely unfettered
competition. Pearl Andrews is best remembered for his attempt, in The
Science of Society (1851), to provide individualist anarchism with an irrefutable
scientific defence. Arguing that it is a ‘natural law’ that no two individuals are
alike biologically, he concluded that each individual should be absolutely
sovereign. The most famous exponent of individualist anarchism in the
United States during the nineteenth century was Benjamin R. Tucker
(1854–1939), who also believed that a truly equitable system would emerge
naturally from the self-interested behaviour of individualists operating in a
completely free market.
Individualist anarchism is, of all the visions of stateless society, the closest
to liberal ideals of individual sovereignty and laissez-faire conceptions of the
market, which the anarchists wished to purge of all legal and state-enforced
restraints. Like Hodgskin, American individualist anarchists were partisans
of private property and were committed to free market economic ideals.
They believed that the system of free exchange could provide the model
for all social relations.
There was an analogous intellectual tradition in France that grew out of
Physiocratic economic thought of the eighteenth century. The best-known
nineteenth-century exemplar of this tradition was Jean-Baptiste Say, the
French political economist often credited with popularising Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations on the continent of Europe. By the time Say wrote
his famous work, Tra i t
´
ed’
´
Economie Politique (1803), he had shed many of
his earlier hopes for a political republic and for state-directed monetary
policy and, instead, focused on the science of political economy. Political
economy, he argued, was to create wealth and to ameliorate the harsh
inequality and dire poverty that plagued modern societies, and it was to do
this independent of government. Say was also concerned with social mores,
believing that it was necessary to foster a moral culture of industriousness
452
Visions of stateless society
and frugality. Unlike eighteenth-century doux commerce theorists, therefore,
who believed that commerce fostered an advance of ‘politeness’ and good
manners, Say argued that the growth of commerce in a society would
be positive only if republican mores – industriousness, frugality, honesty,
courage, temperance, wisdom, benevolence and mutual respect – were
widespread. Without this culture, according to Say, commerce could lead to
libertinism, moral laxity and ultimately international war. What he shared
with the individualist anarchists is a belief that economic reforms must
precede or replace constitution building; the economy was more central
than the state.
A less ‘republican’ and more libertarian version of market reform was
envisaged by Fr
´
ed
´
eric Bastiat (1801–50). Bastiat believed that the free market
was inherently a source of ‘economic harmony’ among individuals, and
that the role of government should be restricted to protecting life, liberty
and property. Famous in France during the late 1840s for his arguments
in favour of economic freedom, Bastiat also co-operated with leaders of
the British Anti-Corn Law League such as Richard Cobden. In his books
Sophismes
´
Economiques (1845)andHarmonies
´
Economiques (1850), he opposed
all taxes on land and all forms of trade restrictions, endearing him to later
economists of the Austrian School and presaging late nineteenth-century
Social Darwinists who attacked the state.
The most famous English proponent of a proto-libertarian attack on the
state was Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). In his youthful writings Spencer
had argued for land nationalisation, but by the time of his greatest fame
in the 1880sand1890s, he was the leading theorist of the so-called Indi-
vidualists who were defending what they viewed as the true principles
of liberalism that the English Liberal Party was in the process of aban-
doning. State action, the Individualists argued, should be kept to a strict
minimum; legal restrictions of liberty were justified only when absolutely
necessary for the preservation of individual liberty. Beyond the essential
duties to provide for military defence, for the administration of justice and
for the enforcement of contracts, government actions were illegitimate.
There should be no involvement of the state in education, religion, the
economy or care for the indigent. As Spencer put it in The Man versus
the State (1884), ‘the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured,
not by the nature of the government machinery he lives under ...but by
the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him’ (Spencer 1969,
p. 79).
453