Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
Emma Rothschild
a set of abstract principles for the conduct of financial business, for the
scientific observation of one aspect of human life, the Economic nature
of man?’
10
Ricardo’s Principles and Smith’s Wealth of Nations were strikingly different,
in size and shape and idiom. The Wealth of Nations was a large, discursive,
historical investigation. It was, in the description of the American statesman
Woodrow Wilson, ‘a book of digressions – digressions characterised by
more order and method, but by little more compunction, than the wondrous
digressions of Tristram Shandy’ (Wilson 1893,p.16). There were by contrast
no digressions in Ricardo’s Principles. There were almost no proper names of
persons, with the exception of the names of writers on political economy;
or of places, except in an idiom of counterfactual example (‘if Portugal had
no commercial connexion with other countries . . . ’). Even the numbers
were counterfactual (‘if my income is 1000l.perannum...’)(Ricardo1817,
pp. 157, 321). Approximately 500 pages of the final edition of the Weal th of
Nations were concerned with colonial and commercial companies; Ricardo’s
chapter on colonial trade was of no more than fifteen pages.
‘I was the spiritual father of [James] Mill, and Mill was the spiritual father
of Ricardo’, Jeremy Bentham wrote towards the end of his life, and the
idiom of Ricardo’s Principles was in substantial part Mill’s invention. It was
an enterprise, in James Mill’s description, of sorting and classifying; a kind
of post office of thought, not unlike his own business office, in the English
East India Company, of Assistant Examiner of Correspondence. ‘You want
some practice in the art of laying down your thoughts’, Mill wrote to
Ricardo in 1815; the objective ‘is, when all the ideas are on paper, then
to put them together in their proper parcels’. ‘What I want to see, in the
first place, is – all the ideas’, he wrote again in 1816; ‘we will then lay our
heads together, to see how it may be sorted and shaped’.
11
The scientific
organisation of political economy was for Mill a constituent, in turn, of
an even vaster ordering, or sorting, of all the sciences of political life. The
objective of Mill’s own book of 1817,hisHistory of India, was no less than
that of ‘laying open the principles and laws of the social order’, as he wrote
to Ricardo. His eventual plan was yet more awesome, he wrote in another
10 Beatrice (Potter) Webb, ‘The History of English Economics’, 3: 16, 3: 23, ‘Diary’, 8 August 1886,
x,p.695: Passfield MSS, London School of Economics.
11 Bentham 1838–43, x,p.498; letters from James Mill to David Ricardo, in Ricardo 1951–73, vi,
pp. 321, 330, vii,pp.73, 99, 108–9.
754
Political economy
letter of 1817: ‘If I had time to write a book I would make the human mind
as plain as the road from Charing Cross to St Pauls.’
12
But the new scientism of economic thought was in no respect a rejection
of the public world of politics. Ricardo, Bentham and James Mill were
all virtuosos of political, economic and financial information; Ricardo as
a stockbroker, Member of Parliament and investor in East India Company
obligations, Mill in the Company’s correspondence office, and Bentham as
a sort of one-person Worldwide Web, with his network of correspondents
from Honduras to Bengal, and his indefatigable secretaries, John Bowring
and others.
13
The enthusiasm for science, in the 1810s, 1820sand1830s,
was also an enthusiasm for the public understanding of science; for all the
innovations in popular knowledge, from halls of science and conversations
about chemistry to travelling exhibitions and pocket encyclopaedias, which
were such a conspicuous characteristic of the post-revolutionary world. As
the apostle of free trade Richard Cobden asked in 1835, ‘We have our
Banksian, our Linnaean, our Hunterian Societies; and why should not
at least our greatest commercial and manufacturing towns possess their
Smithian Societies?’ (Cobden 1835,p.30).
Even the vast ocean would soon be covered by newspapers, reviews,
journals, statistical information and ‘severe economic studies’, the Italian
poet Giacomo Leopardi predicted; a ‘Ganges of political writings’ of the
new century, from ‘Morocco to Cathay’ and ‘from Boston to Goa’.
14
Jean-
Baptiste Say followed his Trait
´
ed’
´
Economie Politique of 1803 with a Cat
´
echisme
d’
´
Economie Politique, ou Instruction Famili
`
ere in 1815, two volumes of eco-
nomic notes (on Ricardo and on the Russian economist Storch), and a
Cours Complet d’
´
Economie Politique Pratique, in seven volumes, in 1828–33.
Ricardo’s friend Mrs Jane Marcet proceeded from Conversations on Chemistry
to Conversations on Political Economy; her books were estimated to have sold
well over 200,000 copies (Polkinghorn 1993,pp.3, 35). Economic thought,
in the new media, was a middling or medium sor t of thought; the ‘business
of everyone’, in Say’s description, and in particular of ‘la classe mitoyenne’,
the individuals working in offices, the heads of very small administrations,
12 Letter of 19 October 1817 from James Mill, in Ricardo 1951–73, vii,p.196; extract of a letter from
James Mill to Francis Place, British Library, Add. Mss. 35153 (Place Papers, vol. 84), f. 29,andsee
Hal
´
evy 1901–4, ii,p.173.
13 On Bowring, see Todd 2008b; on Bentham, Rammohun Ray and revolutionary Guatemala, see
Bagchi 2005,pp.250–62.
14 ‘Palinodia al Marchese Gino Capponi’, 1835,inLeopardi1993, i,pp.38–40.
755
Emma Rothschild
upon whom the prosperity of provinces depended (Say 1803, i, pp. xxvii–
xxix).
The abstract propositions of economic science were invoked in practical
politics, and the successes of policy were invoked in support of economic
abstractions. Scientific political economy was associated, in particular, with
two sets of policies, which were in each case reforms of the elaborate
systems of ‘protection’, external and internal, that the post-revolutionary
governments of the nineteenth century had inherited from their disparate
old regimes. It was ‘the immense success of Free Trade as an experimental
proof of the current doctrines of laisser faire’, Beatrice Webb wrote in her
history of economics, which, together with the reform of the English Poor
Laws, explained ‘the self complacent dogmatism that overcame the minds
of the Political Economists in the first half of this century’ (Webb 1886, 3:
33–4).
The invention of free trade and its ‘other’, protectionism, was the out-
come of disparate coalitions in different countries; evangelical and radical (in
England), Catholic and colonial (in France), slave-owning and Anglophile
(in the United States). It was a religious movement, in the sense that sev-
eral of the most prominent of its exponents, including Richard Cobden
(an Anglican and phrenologist) and Fr
´
ed
´
eric Bastiat (a devout Catholic,
who died in Rome), identified the universal laws of society with universal
religion. It was religious, too, or almost religious, in its identification of nat-
ural, social and providential laws (see Hilton 1988;Todd2008a). But the free
trade movement was cold-hearted, in the view of its opponents. It was the
expression of English insincerity, for Friedrich List, in which national inter-
est was concealed within the cosmopolitan arguments of Adam Smith, with
their ‘spirit of sophistry – of scholasticism – of obscurity – of dissimulation
and hypocrisy’ (List 1841, p. lviii).
The disputes over the reform of social protection were even more spir-
ited. Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population,inits
successive editions from 1798 to 1826, was a bitter attack both on French
revolutionary proposals for social protection or social security – ‘that a fund
should be established, which should assure to the old an assistance pro-
duced in part by their own former savings’ – and on the ‘pernicious system’
of English poor relief, with its consequences of ‘wide-spreading tyranny,
dependence, indolence, and unhappiness’. Malthus’ principle of population,
or ‘the acknowledged tendency of the human race to increase faster than
the means of subsistence’, was the basis, in turn, of a dismal prospect of
endless penury; of wages that would never rise, more than fleetingly, above
756
Political economy
the level of subsistence (Malthus 1826, ii,pp.4, 42, 337, 347). The ‘mon-
ster Malthus’ and his followers were the theorists, in the journalist William
Cobbett’s description, of the ‘unfeeling oligarchs and their toad-eaters’, or
of ‘a grinding, an omnipresent, never-sleeping oligarchy of money’ (Cobbett
1830,p.356, 1831, ii,no.5,p.119).
The political economists were inculpated, eventually, in what was
described as an awesome enterprise of moral and spiritual destruction. The
study of political economy, William Godwin wrote in 1820, was considered
to be responsible for ‘the heart of flint that has disgraced the beginning
of the nineteenth century’ (Godwin 1820,p.112). The critique was in a
part a continuation of the polemics of the early years of the century; the
denunciation of the economists for their disrespectful view of the state, and
of the state’s responsibility for religious and moral improvement. But it also
turned, more insidiously, on a conflict of conceptions of human nature.
The poet Robert Southey described Smith as a Diogenes of the modern
employee, poised to ‘pluck the wings of his intellect, strip him of the down
and plumage of his virtues, and behold in the brute, denuded, pitiable
animal, the man of the manufacturing system!’ (Southey 1812,p.337).
The effect of materialist doctrines, the French Catholic theorist F
´
elicit
´
e
de Lamennais wrote in 1820, was to transform society into an anarchy of
interests and desires. The new economic society would be a universalisation
of England; a country that was dead because of its morality or mentality, a
corpse galvanised only by the convulsions of cupidity, or by ‘an unquiet and
prodigious activity, which some take to be life, and which is life, as fever is
life, as the contractions of a galvanism are life’ (Lamennais 1820, i,pp.74,
375).
The tendency of political economy, on this view, was to destroy the moral
foundations of social existence and individual virtue. The economists were
criticised for being cold and hard-hearted in the policies they proposed, and
for having a dismal view of the future of society. They were criticised, too,
for their dismal view of the nature of men in general, and of the working
classes in particular: ‘inert, sluggish, and averse from labour’, and induced
by vice into ‘inextricable unhappiness’, in Malthus’ description of 1798;
or stimulated by the desire for money, with ‘self-love for the mainspring
of the great machine’ (Malthus 1798,pp.70, 207, 363). The consequence
of all this coldness, in turn, was even more sinister. The economists were
putting forward a description of society, and in the view of their critics,
they were at the same time changing societies, and changing individual
dispositions.
757
Emma Rothschild
The theorists of political economy were closely involved, thereby, in the
most profound of all the political discussions of the times, over the nature
of the human mind. ‘The first question in regard to any man of speculation
is, what is his theory of human life?’ John Stuart Mill wrote in 1838;‘every
Englishman of the present day is by implication either a Benthamite or a
Coleridgian’. The Benthamite theory, with its ‘idea of the world [as] that
of a collection of persons pursuing each his separate interest or pleasure’,
was inspired, in Mill’s account, by the French philosophy of the eighteenth
century. The ‘Germano-Coleridgian’ theory of the ‘culture of the inward
man [and] the formation of national character’ was inspired by Herder and
Goethe. These were universal conceptions and they posed a universal, dire
dilemma: ‘sensualism is the common term of abuse for the one philosophy,
mysticism for the other. The one doctrine is accused of making men beasts,
the other lunatics.’
15
It was this conflict of conceptions of human nature, in an extended dialec-
tical process, which shaped the subsequent course of nineteenth-century
political economy. The early nineteenth-century depiction of ‘Smithian’
political economy was a parody, at least in respect of Smith’s own writings,
which were only occasionally abstract, and almost excessively preoccupied
with the inner lives of excise officers. Even Malthus, with his vista of
beastly vices, was closely involved in theories of conscience and prudence
(see Winch 1996). But it was this parody, Bonald’s or Southey’s travesty,
which the political economists of the 1810sand1820s embraced. It was an
‘unconscious generalisation of one type of man, the city man’, in Beatrice
Webb’s description; Ricardo ‘accepted as axioms of human nature certain
generalised facts of one aspect of human nature, the economic aspect and he
tacitly asserted that no other side of it existed’ (Webb 1886–7,pp.690–1).
John Stuart Mill’s own essay on the definition of political economy, which
he published in 1836, the year of his father’s death, is a poignant illustration.
Political economy, in his account, was obliged to abjure any interest in ‘the
whole conduct of man in society’. It was concerned with ‘him solely as
a being who desires to possess wealth . . . [and] makes entire abstraction of
every other human passion or motive’; it ‘considers mankind as occupied
solely in acquiring and consuming wealth’. This was the Faustian renun-
ciation required of modern science: ‘not that any political economist was
ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really thus constituted, but
15 John Stuart Mill, ‘Bentham’ (1838) and ‘Coleridge’ (1840), in Mill and Bentham 1987,pp.151, 155,
180, 185, 200–1.
758
Political economy
because this is the mode in which science must necessarily proceed’ (Mill
1836b, pp. 318, 321–2). Mill himself, some years later, came to renounce his
youthful renunciation. ‘It was one of my father’s main objects to make me
apply to Smith’s more superficial view of political economy, the superior
lights of Ricardo’, he wrote in his autobiography, of his own initial and
‘thorny’ instruction. In the end, he chose ‘the practical and popular manner
of Adam Smith’ over ‘the abstract manner of Ricardo and my father’, and
sought, in his own Political Economy, to ‘bring in, or rather to bring out, a
great number of opinions on incidental matters, moral and social’.
16
But the
dialectic of thesis, in the form of abstraction (or Smithianism/Benthamism),
and antithesis, in the form of the morality of society, had by then assumed
its own, virtually global momentum.
In the illustrated children’s series of 1841, ThePrivateandPublicLifeof
Animals, there was a story by Balzac about the search for the best form
of government. The hero of the story, a philosopher-sparrow, was given
to reflection on such political questions as ‘our rights, our duties, and our
future’ (‘where are Sparrows going? where do they come from? why can
they not weep?’). He had been chosen by the birds of Paris as a special
envoy to investigate the different governments of the world. He travelled
far: to an absolute monarchy (the kingdom of the Bees), whose motto was
‘PUBLIC ORDER’; to a Spartan republic of absolute equality (the Lupian
Republic); and to a neighbouring island, the Formic Empire.
17
The regime of the Ants, or the Formicalians, had been described to the
philosopher-sparrow as a model form of government. It was a society in
which the people obeyed the laws, and were the servants only of their
own morality, or mentalities. The first sight which greeted him was of
the ‘marvellous activity of this nation’, ‘everywhere the Ants were coming
and going, loading and unloading commodities’. But the ants were all the
same, as depicted in the artist Grandville’s illustration of steam engines,
ships, porters, carriers, tunnel-diggers and ant-labourers unpacking crates
of opium: ‘they were all black, very clean as though varnished, but without
any individuality’. As one of the patricians, a queen ant, explained, ‘our
worker ants are very proud to belong to the Formic Empire, and work with
good heart, singing Rule, Formicalia!’ ([Balzac] Sand 1977,pp.149, 151–2,
156).
16 Autobiography,inMill1981,p.31; letters of 1844 and 1847,inMill1963b, pp. 642, 708.
17 [Balzac] Sand 1977,pp.146, 164; letter of 1841 in Sand 1964–95, v,pp.322–4.
759
Emma Rothschild
The prosperity of the empire was founded, the philosopher-sparrow
concluded, on a ‘shocking inequality’ at home, and on unjust aggression
overseas. The Formicalians were endlessly setting off for or returning from
expeditions of conquest. You have grain, and we have wood, they would
say to distant sovereigns; ‘it is not permissible to keep commodities which
are in abundant supply, while we have shortages: this is against the laws of
good sense. Let us exchange.’ If the foreign ants refused, the Formic Navy
would set sail, as required by ‘formic honour and commercial freedom’. ‘I
departed’, the philosopher-sparrow recalled, ‘really afflicted by the perfec-
tion of this oligarchy and the boldness of its egotism’ ([Balzac] Sand 1977,
pp. 153, 155, 157).
3 Economic cultural history
The outset of the counter-revolution of historical political economy was
generally identified, in late nineteenth-century histories of historicism, with
the publication, in 1843, of the lecture notes, on subjects from ‘income’
and ‘luxury’ to ‘giro-banks’, of the G
¨
ottingen professor Wilhelm Roscher.
It was Roscher’s three and a half page preface, the economic historian W.
J. Ashley wrote in 1894, which ‘sounded the first clear note of the new
movement’. Political economy (Staatswirthschaft) was a political science (eine
politische wissenschaft), Roscher told his students, and its objective was ‘to
pass judgement on men, to rule over men’. It did this by representing ‘what
nations have thought, willed, and felt in the economic field’. It proceeded
in the closest union with legal history, political history, and cultural history;
it understood that nations were not only the mass of individuals living at
any particular time. It sought to compare all nations, ‘so closely entwined
with one another’ in modern times, and to make the responsibilities of
legislators and administrators more rather than less complicated (Roscher
1843,pp.iv–v;Ashley1894,p.100).
The ‘historical method’ in political economy was remote from the ‘school
of Ricardo’, Roscher concluded. It was closer to Malthus, and it was
inspired, above all, by historical jurisprudence. Its duty, he explained a
little confusingly, was to provide to history ‘somewhat the same service
as histology and organic chemistry render today to natural history’. The
study was itself organised in the manner of a textbook; it concluded with a
bibliography of the ‘reaction against Adam Smith’, from the work of a Vene-
tian monk writing in 1771 (Errori Populari Intorno all’Economia Nazionale),
to Alexander Hamilton’s reports on trade, and to the ‘extreme socialists’,
760
Political economy
including the Cat
´
echisme des Industriels, and Saint-Simon’s plans of 1814 for
reorganising ‘European society’ into a ‘single political body’ (Roscher 1843,
pp. v, 149–50).
The investigation of the new economic-cultural history was within a
very few years a matter of considerable political importance, in Germany
and elsewhere. The Marburg professor and later member of the Frankfurt
Parliament Bruno Hildebrand identified the reform of economic thought,
in 1848, with a revolution, long overdue, against the philosophy of the
Enlightenment. Smith, or the ‘Smith’sche Schule’, was once again the
object of obloquy, for its cosmopolitanism – ‘a sort of universal political
economy for the world and humanity’ – its atomism – an ‘economic ratio-
nalism’, associated with the constitutional theory of the enlightenment –
and its ‘materialism’ – a ‘deification of private-egotism’. So too was the
English model of industrial inequality, as depicted, for Hildebrand, in
Friedrich Engels’ Condition of the Working Classes in England. The philoso-
pher Proudhon, in Hildebrand’s account, had demonstrated ‘the relativity
of all economic institutions’, and the ‘one-sidedness’ of the application of
abstract concepts to ‘concrete cases’ of economic policy; he showed ‘the
necessity of a historical method in economic science’ (Hildebrand 1848,
pp. 27, 30–4, 52, 275, 326–9, 1863,p.3).
The historical method of the mid-nineteenth century was anti-Ricardian,
in the sense of refusing the supposed abstraction of English or French
political economy. It was Hegelian, in the sense of identifying the spirit of
nations as the most important object of economic investigation, and the
state as the ‘most important incorporeal capital of every nation’ (Roscher
1882, i,p.154). As Marx wrote in 1847, apropos Ricardo, Hegel and
Proudhon’s historical method, ‘if the Englishman transforms men into hats,
the German transforms hats into ideas’ (Marx n.d. [1847], pp. 87–8,and
letter of 1846,pp.152–4). But the historical political economists were also,
for the most part, practical and enterprising men. They were historians of
railways, forests and rivers; specialists of what Roscher described as ‘the
stages of economic development’, or the ‘laws of the development of the
economy of a nation’ (Roscher 1882, i,pp.87, 293).
In the almost worldwide economic expansion of the 1850sand1860s,
the historical economists were theorists of the state and its role in economic
development; of ‘dominion over nature’, in the expression of the Irish
economist Thomas Cliffe Leslie, inspired by a visit to the Ruhr, in a ‘world
of change and progress’ (Cliffe Leslie 1870,pp.230, 241, and see Hobs-
bawm 1975). They were theorists, too, of the natural capital of Germany,
761
Emma Rothschild
expanding to the east, or of the United States, expanding to the west. Cap-
ital was abstract, financial and international, in the historical economists’
parody of English or Ricardian political economy: men into hats, hats into
bonds, and bonds into men. It was national and natural, in their own vista,
embodied in the destinies of historical nations.
18
Historical political economy, in the course of the economic expansion
of the mid-nineteenth century, became a dominant mode of economic
thought, in Germany and eventually elsewhere. The successive historical
schools were extraordinarily efficient in the enterprise of ideological inven-
tion, or popularisation, with which James Mill and Jean-Baptiste Say had
been so involved in the 1820s. They were far more solidly established in
university life in Germany than the opposing ‘schools’ in France or England;
they were schools in a literal sense, as Roscher explained in his celebrated
preface, for young men who aspired to an administrative career. They were
supported, as the Ricardians and Cobdenites were in Britain, by a pro-
lific universe of committees, journals, charities and associations, notably the
Verein f
¨
ur Sozialpolitik,createdin1872 by Hildebrand and others, includ-
ing the most powerful of all the younger historical economists, Gustav
Schmoller, to promote social reform in the new German Empire. They
were responsible for a new language of popular economic thought, with
its own codes and mnemonics. Almost a century of disputes over Adam
Smith’s economic ideas was thus summarised, from the 1860s, in the new
concept of Smithianismus. Smithianismus was opposed to culture, society and
law itself, its leading critic, the Rostock law professor Hermann Roesler
explained in 1868; his dire conclusion, which he described as ‘at first glance
astonishing’, was that ‘Socialism is the pure consequence of Smithianismus’
(Roesler 1871,p.36).
The institutional successes of historical political economy extended far
beyond Germany. The yearning for an economic-cultural histor y of nations
was itself international. The economists of the world made their way to
Germany; Richard Ely, the principal founder of the American Economic
Association, who went to study in Germany in 1877, recalled a ‘joyous
expansion’, ‘the feeling when I went there that I had entered into a new
heritage of freedom’. He and the other young Americans were wear y of
‘endless harangues over paper money’, they were inspired by ‘the idea of
relativity as opposed to absolutism’, and they aspired to base their thoughts
‘on the world’s experience instead of conventional English ideas’; the ‘warm
18 On the German and American frontiers, and the spirit of mastery over nature, see Blackbourn 2006.
762
Political economy
humanitarianism of the German theorists moved the Americans of my day
deeply’ (Ely 1910,pp.68, 69, 77, 78, 80; Grimmer-Solem and Romani
1998).
The American Economic Association was founded, in 1885,onthe
model of the Verein f
¨
ur Sozialpolitik. A young Japanese law professor, Kanai
Noburu, who had studied in Heidelberg, like Ely, in Halle together with
Max Weber, and in Berlin with Schmoller, founded the Shakai Seisaku
Gakkai (Association for the Study of Social Policy), also on the model of
the Verei n (Marshall 1977,p.85;Pyle1974,p.139). The German economists,
meanwhile, made their own way to the world. Professor Roesler of Ros-
tock, having been dismissed from his post in the conflict between Bismarck
and the Catholic bishops, was appointed as one of the earliest foreign legal
advisers to the Meiji court in Japan, with special responsibility for the com-
mercial code to be promulgated in connection with the new constitution
of 1889. He remained in Japan until almost the end of his life, an expo-
nent of ‘social law’ in the internal discussions over the Meiji constitution,
and a representative of the emperor in negotiations in Belgium and China;
he was described as an ‘enthusiastic Japanese’ and ‘persona ingratissima’ in
England, who ‘of all the foreigners who influenced the making of modern
Japan, played the greatest role’ (Siemes 1968, p. xi; Suzuki 1941,pp.61, 78).
In India, too, the historical political economy of the German theorists was
identified as a prospect of freedom. The new discipline which the Bombay
jurist Mahadev Ranade introduced as ‘Indian Political Economy’, in 1892,
was to be national, historical, and inspired, above all, by Friedrich List;
a theory of the ‘full and many-sided development of national productive
powers’. India had been an experimental object in ‘laissez-faire policy’, or
in ‘the so-called maxims of rigid Economical Science’, in the description
of the Indian historical economists. There was a ‘levelling up of Oriental
Institutions to the requirements of the most radical theorists in Europe’, or
to the circumstances of ‘happy England’ (Ranade 1906,pp.20–1, 36, 314–
15, and see Ambirajan 1978; Goswami 2004; Mehta 1999;Stokes1959).
The new ‘Indian’ political economists of the later nineteenth century were
inspired, in contrast, by the Indian-ness of India; by everything that was
un-English and un-European in India’s national past and future.
The characteristic idiom of political economy, in its new, historical role,
was the statistical series. It was to be an ‘economic cultural history in the
context of the history of the total political and legal development of nations,
and statistics’, as Hildebrand wrote in the first issue of the Jahrb
¨
ucher f
¨
ur
National
¨
okonomie und Statistik (Hildebrand 1863,p.3). It was also an effort
763