Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Emma Rothschild
sides of the state (the monarchy, the military, monetary institutions) with
reverence, and to others with reforming and even revolutionary disrespect.
Nineteenth-century political economy had an odd relationship, at the
same time, to the familiar classification of kinds of thought: into high or
scientific thought; the ‘middle principles’ through which, as Mill wrote of
Bentham, the ideas of speculative philosophy ‘diffuse themselves through
these intermediate channels’ over ‘the ocean of mind’; and the low thought
of large numbers of people (Mill and Bentham 1987,pp.132–3, 235).
The effort to distinguish a science of political economy was at the heart
of nineteenth-century economic thought, as has been seen. The scientific
models in question included chemistry, anatomy, astronomy, physiology, his-
tology, comparative jurisprudence, celestial mechanics, kinematics, biology,
historical philology, physics, psychics and successive sciences of the mind
from phrenology to associationism, Herbartianism (from the G
¨
ottingen
educational psychologist Johann Friedrich Herbar t), and the microscopy of
morality of ‘these English psychologists’, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s descrip-
tion (‘people tell me they are just old, cold, boring frogs’) (Nietzsche
1994b, p. 11). But all these nineteenth-century sciences were themselves
engaged with a larger semi-scientific world of public influence and public
understanding.
The shifting frontier between scientific and ‘intermediate’ thought ran
through the lives of almost all the economists with whom this chapter has
been concerned. David Ricardo, who was identified as one of the ‘highest’
or most abstract of nineteenth-century economists, was a kind-hearted
stockbroker, who was continually being interrupted by visitors, intimidated
by the dire father–son duo of Bentham and James Mill, and distracted by
invitations to make speeches about bullion, or become a director of the East
India Company. Carl Menger, one of the other indisputably philosophical
nineteenth-century economists, was successively a press information offi-
cer in the Austro-Hungarian ministry, tutor to the Austrian crown prince
Rudolf, and a prolific contributor to the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna.
In respect of ‘popular science,’ too, political economy was a model of
inventiveness. The most widely read writer on political economy of the
first half of the nineteenth century was probably ‘Mrs Marcet’, or Jane
Haldimand Marcet, the daughter of an Englishwoman from Spitalfields
and a Turin-born Swiss silk merchant, mother of four children, friend of
Ricardo and Say, and the author of thirty-two books, including Conversations
on Political Economy, Conversations on Vegetable Physiology, The History of Africa
and Willy’s Holidays: or, Conversations on Different Kinds of Governments. Her
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friend Harriet Martineau (Illustrations of Taxation, Poor Laws and Paupers
Illustrated, Letters on Mesmerism) was similarly prolific; even by late in the
century, political economy was a subject for women writers, including
Margaret Benson (Capital, Labour and Trade) and Millicent Fawcett (Tales
in Political Economy). Richard Ely found German historicism (or German
social theory-cum-social policy) so exhilarating, he recalled, because the
only economic instruction for undergraduates at Columbia University in
the 1870s had consisted of weekly recitations from ‘Mrs. Fawcett’s “Political
Economy for Beginners”’ (Ely 1910,p.70).
The statistical idiom of writing on social reform constituted a different
model of intermediate thought, or of the diffusion of ideas. The historical
school of Gustav Schmoller’s associations and yearbooks and bureaux was
unified, if at all, by the use of statistics, and by a political rhetoric which
sought to convince with numbers (see Grimmer-Solem 2003). In England,
social reform was itself a distinctively feminine subject. The French histo-
rian and psychologist Hippolyte Taine observed that psychology, statistics
and political economy were proceeding together in England, and that the
‘social sciences’ were substantially a concern of women; he mentioned
Louisa Twining, Barbara Collett, Mary Carpenter, Florence Hill, Florence
Nightingale, Bessie Parkes, Sarah Remond, ‘Mistress Wiggins’ and Jane
Crowe (Taine 1872,pp.99, 338). For Alfred Marshall, it was rather ‘gen-
eral economic principles’ of a ‘dictatorial sort’, which were associated with
women writers; ‘never again will a Mrs Trimmer, a Mrs Marcet, or a Miss
Martineau earn a goodly reputation by throwing them into the form of a
catechism or of simple tales’ (Marshall 1897,p.117).
The diffusion of economic ideas was important, above all, to the rise, over
the entire course of the century, of large-scale political movements. The
nineteenth century was an age of ‘-isms’: Philoguillotismus, Demokratismus
and Antirevolutionairrismus, as the historian Bartold Niebuhr complained in
the 1790s; Obscurantismus, Enthusiasmus, Sophisticismus, Fanatismus,andEgo-
ismus, according to a work of 1802 about enlightenment and revolution
(Niebuhr 1926, i,pp.7, 32, 35, 37; Salat 1802,pp.162, 187, 193). These
were abstract nouns which identified political or religious opinions. But
the most successful abstractions of the later nineteenth century identified
(or collected together) economic opinions. Like the religious ideolog ies or
‘-isms’, they had a connotation of Catechismus, and its etymology of oral
instruction, or of resonance and downwardness. This process of instruction
in turn required the simplification of complicated ideas into single con-
cepts. It was a process, too, which required extensive material resources;
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the organisation of parishes and printed catechisms in the case of religious
instruction, and of weekly newspapers, monitors, encyclopaedias, public
meetings and statistical registers, in the case of the production of economic
beliefs.
The history of ‘intermediate’ political economy in the nineteenth cen-
tury is a remarkable illustration of this sort of institutional and organisational
inventiveness. It is also an illustration of the extent to which the imposing
simplifications of economic thought were concerned with collections of
ideas which were of different local origins, which were exchanged across
very long distances, and which were transformed in the course of interna-
tional exchange. Smithianismus is only an extreme example, as a German
noun that described a school or direction, in Germany and elsewhere, which
had very little relationship to Adam Smith, and which was committed, or
so it was believed, to the universalism of the human spirit. There was also
Cobd
´
enisme,andGermanismo italiano,andtheRichtung Burke-Savigny’s (the
Burke-Savigny direction), described by Carl Menger; there were, above all,
the twin ideologies of free trade and protectionism, in which The Economist
had its origin, and its ‘other’; the ideas, in Bagehot’s expression, which were
‘“in the air” of the age’ (Menger 1883,pp.205, 207, 212; Bagehot 1860,
p. 1291).
The politics of nineteenth-century political economy was odd, most of
all, because of its relationship to the ideas of those whom Marx described
in The German Ideology as ‘the real living individuals themselves’ (Marx
and Engels 1978b, p. 47). The great drama of nineteenth-century economic
thought, as has been suggested in this chapter, was the dialectic of the under-
standing of human nature; of the supposedly ‘Smithian’ conception of cold-
spirited and self-interested men, which was successively rejected, embraced,
re-rejected and re-embraced over the entire course of the long nineteenth
century. But this dialectic was itself part of a more imposing drama, of polit-
ical destiny. The great question of early nineteenth-century politics was thus
of whether the novel of the French Revolution (in Napoleon’s expression)
was really over; of what the people were really like, and whether they could
be restrained by religion, or the executioner, or public instruction. One of
the great questions of 1848, and of subsequent debates over the extension
of the suffrage, was of what the new men of an incipiently universal politics
would really be like. One of the great questions of the end of the century
was of racial difference and racial heroism, and of what the conquerors
and the conquered were really like, in a world filled with empires. Of all
the anxieties of nineteenth-century political thought, these are now among
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the most archaic. They were associated with psychological, religious and
historical theories that were almost forgotten by the 1920s. But they were
the setting in which the economists’ own political drama unfolded.
The economists’ conception of human life was in Mill’s early account
no more than an act of abstraction. For Carl Menger, too, the ‘so-called
“dogma” of human self-interest’ was an abstraction, like a mathematical
surface or the chemist’s idea of pure hydrogen (Menger 1985,p.87). It
was a ‘postulate’, in Walter Bagehot’s account of 1876. As Bagehot added
reprovingly, ‘modern economists know their own limitations; they would
no more undertake to prescribe for the real world, than a man in green
spectacles would undertake to describe the colours of a landscape’. But the
conception that Bagehot described as the ‘standard of economic man’ was at
the same time very much more grandiose. Bagehot explained that ‘in some
very large scenes of our present English life, Political Economy is exactly
true’. It was a description of the world, ‘in a society of grown-up competitive
commerce, such as we have in England’; a commerce which is ‘about the
most definite thing we have, the thing which it is most difficult to help
seeing’ (Bagehot 1908,pp.2, 7–9, 22, 104, 109, 126). For his obituarist,
Bagehot’s achievement was ‘to prove as against the historical school that
there is an age and society – t he whole business world of England at the
present time, and a large part of other modern communities – in which
the assumptions of English political economy are approximately true in the
concrete as well as in the abstract. We are in an economic age, and the
leading assumptions of political economy are applicable with comparatively
little friction, so that the abstract doctrines can be applied to a concrete
world’ (Giffen 1891,p.lxxiv).
The worldwide drama of self-interested man was thus in substantial part a
drama about Englishness, and the English mind. ‘Mr Bagehot felt so strongly
the inapplicability of the assumptions of the system to the greater part of
the world’, Cliffe Leslie wrote in 1879, ‘that he actually limited political
economy to England at its present state of commercial development, and
to the male sex in England’ (Cliffe Leslie 1879,p.399, and see Bagehot
1908,p.28). India, even in James Mill’s History, had been widely described
as an economising society; ‘the Gentoos are indefatigable in business’, and
‘they are the acutest buyer s and sellers in the world’ (Mill 1818, i,pp.317,
328). But a generation later, for Sir Henry Maine, India was a land of
wayward children; ‘this is a society in which, for centuries upon centuries,
theimaginationhasrun riot...WhattheNativeMindrequires,is stricter
criteria of truth’ (Maine 1881,pp.275–6). For Bagehot himself, India,
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like China, was unmodern and uncommercial. The ‘imperfect but thickly
populated civilisations, like those of China and of India’, he wrote in a
startling description of new, old and modern peoples, were no more than
economic obstructions, fit only ‘to cumber the ground’ (Bagehot 1873,
p. 122).
25
It was this prospect of perfection that was so much in question by the last
years of the century. The psychological idiom of late nineteenth-century
political economy is by now unfamiliar, with its Herbartianism and its
Spencerism. But the political idiom is even odder. Political institutions, in
these turn of the century economic prospects, were understood not as ends
in themselves, but as means to the more important end of political culture,
or political civilisation. Hermann Roesler, the nemesis of Smithianismus,
commented in his observations on the Meiji code that the general object
of a constitution was to elevate the people, and to secure the civilisation
of the state; ‘the enjoyment of political rights, and the security of civil
rights based thereon, strengthens the development of human forces, moral,
intellectual and economical’ (Siemes 1968,p.51). Even the liberal idyll of
an ‘age of discussion’, or of ‘government by discussion’, was identified, in
Bagehot’s Physics and Politics, as an instrument of progess, a ‘principal organ
for improving mankind’, a polity which ‘tends to diminish our inherited
defects’ (Bagehot 1873,pp.162, 179, 200).
The nineteenth century was an economic century in the sense that the
study of political economy was transformed from a mildly subversive form of
political writing into the conquering academic and administrative discipline
of the 1890s; and in the sense that economic relationships were vastly more
extensive than in any earlier period. It is ‘the true London maxim, that every
thing is to be got with money’, Jane Austen wrote in Mansfield Park,andthe
entire world, in the course of the century, had come to be depicted as a vast
London (Austen 1985,p.90). There were vistas of endless economic life, and
of endless disruption, as in Marx’s and Engels’ prospect of international and
industrial capitalism in The Communist Manifesto; ‘constant revolutionising
of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
25 Bagehot’s reference was to the ‘strange chance which has un-peopled so great a part of the world
just when civilised people wanted to go there. It is strange to think how different would have been
the f ate of this and coming generations, if America and Australia had possessed imperfect but thickly
populated civilisations, like those of China and of India. In climate, and in all external circumstances,
America seems as fit for an early civilisation as India. Happily, it did not possess one, nor did Australia.
There is nothing there now left to cumber the ground.’
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ones ...theneed of a constantly expanding market for its products chase the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere’ (Marx and Engels 2002,
p. 223).
But the nineteenth century was also an economic century in a different
and less familiar sense, the sense with which so many of the nineteenth-
century economists were themselves preoccupied, of the transformation
of sentiments and minds, or ways of thinking. The economists enquired
tirelessly, like Balzac’s philosopher-spar row, into the nature of existence;
where are men going? where do they come from? why can they not weep?
They were involved, like the editors of The Economist, or like Hermann
Roesler in Meiji Japan, in the immense nineteenth-century enterprise of
the production of beliefs. They were on all possible sides in the great political
questions of the times. They were completely confused, above all, about
how it might be possible to invent a science of, or to write the history of all
these endlessly changing sentiments, ideas and conditions of mind. In this,
at least, they are very much like the economists, or the historians, of later
times.
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23
German socialism and social democracy
1860–1900
vernon l. lidtke
1 Origins of socialist political thought
It might have been expected that the political thinking of German social
democracy would build upon a variety of European socialists who wrote
before 1848. However, that was seldom the case. To be sure, German
intellectuals knew something of the ideas of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet,
Proudhon, Simonde de Sismondi, Owen, Blanqui and Blanc, but it is diffi-
cult to show that those ideas guided the later organisations of the German
labour movement. People familiar with the polemical literature in German,
notably that produced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, often gained
their knowledge of early socialist thought second hand. The intention of
Marx and Engels, of course, was not to disseminate the ideas of those they
labelled ‘utopian’, but to discredit them. To be sure, in 1888, August Bebel
published a very sympathetic account of Fourier’s ideas, but he also stressed
the weaknesses of the ‘utopian’s’ thinking.
If we look within Germany itself, it is also true that the ideas of socialist
thinkers of the early nineteenth century – with the exception of Marx and
Engels – resonated only to a limited degree in the German labour movement
after the 1860s and did not serve as a foundation for the political thought
of social democracy. Although Wilhelm Weitling gained recognition with
the publication of Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1842), his influence
waned in Germany when he emig rated to the United States. Among the
Young Hegelians Ludwig Feuerbach proved to be a great stimulant for
Marx’s critical thinking, but he provided no foundation for the political
thought of the socialist movement. Other Young Hegelians on the left,
notably Bruno Bauer, Moses Hess and Karl Gr
¨
un, did influence socialist
political thinking, but only to a very limited degree. The individualistic
anarchism of Max Stirner was diametrically opposed to the collectivist
orientation of most socialist thought. In retrospect it is striking that despite
the number of socialist thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century,
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German socialism and social democracy 1860–1900
they appear only sporadically in social democratic discourse in the later
decades of the century.
Early social democratic political thought g rew much more directly out
of the liberal and democratic movements in Germany than from the theo-
rising of early socialist thinkers. This is exemplified in several ways in the
revolutions of 1848–9, when, for the first time, one can speak of a labour
movement that reached throughout most of the German-speaking states. A
variety of organisations appeared in 1848–9, but some of the most impor-
tant were the Workers’ Educational Societies (Arbeiterbildungsvereine). Of
these, the Workers’ Brotherhood (Arbeiterverbr
¨
uderung) in which Stephan
Born was especially prominent, manifested the importance of liberal and
democratic ideas for the emerging labour movement. Two principles were
central at that time: the right of free association and workers’ education. For
‘education’ they preferred the German term Bildung in order to indicate that
in addition to transmitting elementary knowledge, their programmes were
designed to promote the cultivation and development of the free individual.
The failure of the Revolution and return to reactionary policies by 1849–
50 meant the suppression of most associations and public meetings. For a
decade German public political life stagnated. With few exceptions, the
voices of labour, liberalism and democracy were silenced within Germany
(Birker 1973,pp.191–7;Noyes1966,pp.124–53;Roth1998; Welskopp
2000,pp.29–33).
Despite the great disappointment and pessimistic implications of failure,
the revolutions of 1848–9 also left a positive legacy. Liberalism and democ-
racy had set the agenda, if only for a short time; a progressive constitution
for a unified Germany had been drafted, though not implemented; arti-
sans and workers had learned how to create organisations to promote their
goals; demonstrations, meetings and elections had created for the first time
a truly animated public sphere; and seminal social and political ideas had
been spread throughout much of the population. Within little more than a
decade the positive lessons drawn from this legacy would help to revitalise
public political life in Germany.
As the political atmosphere in Prussia, and Germany, relaxed gradually
after 1858 when Wilhelm I became regent, many Workers’ Educational
Societies were revived and new political associations created, including the
liberal Nationalverein (1859) and organisations of democrats, especially in
south Germany. Although these democrats, whose leaders included Ludwig
Eckardt (Karlsruhe), Karl Mayer (Stuttgart) and Ludwig B
¨
uchner (Darm-
stadt), held conferences beginning in 1863 and thought of themselves as
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Vernon L. Lidtke
a Demokratische Volkspartei (Democratic People’s Party) they could not
create a unified organisation because the W
¨
urttemberg group, one of the
strongest, held extreme federalist views and initially opposed the establish-
ment of a central national party. When these particularist obstacles were
finally overcome in September 1868, Johann Jacoby (K
¨
onigsberg), a promi-
nent democrat of 1848, and Leopold Sonnemann (Frankfurt am Main),
owner of the Frankfurter Zeitung, were leader s in founding the Deutsche
Volkspartei (German People’s Party) that, though never large, maintained a
presence in German national politics until the early years of the twentieth
century. The programme of the Deutsche Volkspartei embodied principles
that were rooted in the revolutions of 1848 and widely shared by democrats
throughout Germany. They called for parliamentary government, universal
manhood suffrage, a people’s militia to replace standing armies, separation of
church and state, and unrestricted right of association. They fiercely rejected
German unification under Prussian dominance (most of them also opposed
Austrian control), but demanded a federal structure in which all German
states would be equal. The party also called for legislation to improve the
condition of workers, rejected the strict laissez-faire capitalism embraced by
most German liberals, and maintained a close relationship with the emerg-
ing labour movement (Elm 1968;Mayer1912; Weber 1968).
The liberals in the Nationalverein assumed that artisans and workers
would be loyal followers, but in fact the members of the Workers’ Educa-
tional Societies favoured the politics of the democratic left and collaborated
closely with the Volkspartei. When Ferdinand Lassalle, in 1863, called on t he
Workers’ Educational Societies to reject collaboration with other parties,
including liberals and democrats, a substantial number agreed and helped
form the new party, the General Association of German Workingmen (All-
gemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein). However, many of the Workers’ Edu-
cational Societies declined to join the Lassalleans. Instead they established
a league of their own, the Union of German Worker s’ and Educational
Societies (Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine) which, although not strictly
a political party worked closely with the democratic Volkspar tei. At the
annual congresses of the Union between 1863 and 1869 educated middle-
class leader s continued to articulate a programme of workers’ education,
co-operatives and democratic political principles. Some of the most promi-
nent of these included Leopold Sonnemann, Dr Emil Roßm
¨
aßler, Dr Max
Hirsch, and Friedrich Albert Lange, philosopher and author of numerous
books. August Bebel greatly admired Lange, and devoted three appreciative
pages to the philosopher in his memoirs (Bebel 1911–13, i,pp.97–100).
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German socialism and social democracy 1860–1900
For the most part, the participation of these educated middle-class leaders
ceased when, first at the Union’s congress in 1868, Wilhelm Liebknecht
and August Bebel persuaded the delegates to affiliate with the First Inter-
national, and second in 1869 (at Eisenach) when they dissolved the Union
and created the Social Democratic Labour Party, commonly referred to as
Eisenachers (Dowe 1980,pp.149–65, 187–8). This meant splitting from the
Volkspartei organisationally, and an intention to enter the German political
arena as an independent workers’ party with a socialist orientation. There
were thus two socialist parties, Lassalleans and Eisenachers, competing for
the allegiance of workers and artisans.
2 Ferdinand Lassalle
No one influenced the political thought of German socialism in the early
decades more than Ferdinand Lassalle, but it is also true that even during his
lifetime and subsequently the worth and implications of his ideas have been
sharply debated. Although it is impossible to say how the labour movement
would have developed had he not met an untimely death, one can assume
that Social Democrats would have been more flexible on the potential of
the existing state to implement social reforms that would genuinely benefit
workers. It must be emphasised that Lassalle’s political programme, no less
than Marx’s, did not stand alone, but was interlinked with his ideas about
history, legal systems, economics and society. Although much influenced by
Hegel, notably with respect to the state, Lassalle was an intellectual of broad
learning who drew easily on the work of a wide range of thinkers. He often
cited the works of Jean-Baptiste Say, Simonde de Sismondi, Adam Smith,
David Ricardo and many others. He particularly admired John Stuart Mill,
who, he declared in 1863 was ‘the greatest living English national economist’
(Lassalle 1919–20, iii,p.188). In one of his speeches on constitutions, he
praised England as a ‘country in which there is a real constitution’, that
is, in contrast to sham constitutions for which he had so much contempt.
To him the repeal of the Corn Laws in England was a model of how
to bring about progress through sustained ag itation. He even implied that
his ongoing demand for universal manhood suffrage might turn out to be
comparable to Cobden’s campaign against the Corn Laws (Lassalle 1919–20,
iv,pp.129–34).
Lassalle believed strongly that the intellectual and moral foundation on
which acquired rights and privileges rested had to be thoroughly destroyed.
That meant that he had to engage critically with some of the principles
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