1 10 5 https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/intellectualhistory/files/original/3cde8a35d84591d4d4cd351544421111.pdf a4de2dabed312b11dbdd03b3fce249aa PDF Text Text Donald Winch Access to land: land reform and commons preservation in nineteenthcentury England A presentation given at the 75th Anniversary Conference of the Economic History Society in Glasgow as part of the sessions on ‘Morality, Markets and Policy’, Saturday, March 31, 2001 I My starting point in making some observations on an impossibly large topic will have to be a simple assertion. If one could conduct a canvas of opinion during the second half of the nineteenth-century on the deprivations and injustices associated with industrialization and urbanization, loss of access to land for purposes of work or leisure would come high on the lists of a large segment of the British public. There are also good grounds for thinking that the canvas would reveal this sentiment to have become more strident during the last two decades of the century. To students of the history of land reform agitation in England during this period, these assertions will appear commonplace; they underlie the activities of what can now be seen as a linked sequence of pressure groups dedicated to the removal of the actual and perceived deficiencies of the English system of land tenure. Instead of linked sequence one could also speak of a relay race combined with some features of the game of leap-frog – a mixed image that may provide a clue both as to momentum and to the failure to reach the finishing line in good order. While abolition of primogeniture and entail had remained staple elements on the agenda of reformers since the late eighteenth century, by the end of the nineteenth the campaign reached much further into the sanctum of private property in land. Radicals of the CobdenBright variety who espoused the cause of ‘free trade’ in land saw themselves as carrying the crusade against landed monopoly and aristocratic privilege to its logical conclusion by making the regulations surrounding the transfer of land conform to the priorities of a middle-class world of unrestricted commerce. From the late 1860s onward they found themselves being overtaken on their left by organisations such as the Land Tenure Reform 1 �Association, the Land Nationalisation Society, and the various Land Restoration Leagues formed in the wake of Henry George’s speaking tours and his book on Progress and Poverty (1880). These associations were variously dedicated to the creation of peasant proprietorships and the curtailment of private landownership, wholly or in part, through nationalisation, municipalisation, and/or taxes based on the legitimacy of communal appropriation of the ‘unearned increment’ in rental incomes and urban site values. Weaving between these competing groups were the activities of the Commons Preservation Society designed to prevent urban landowners from infringing rights of access to common land in and around cities. Some of these ideas found their way into Joseph Chamberlain’s ‘unauthorised programme’ in 1885, and into the manifestos of the Liberal and Labour parties during the decades that span the turn of the century. From a party political perspective they can be seen as attempts to address the perceived needs of the new electorate created by the Second and Third Reform Acts, which added urban and rural working-class males to the middle-class electorate originally addressed by Cobdenites. In any written version of this communication a footnote would now be inserted directing attention to a distinguished body of secondary literature on this topic.1 Taking this literature as read, how does it relate to the theme of these sessions on ‘Morality, Markets and Policy’, bearing in mind the article on ‘Moral Choice and Economic Change’ that our organiser, Barry Supple, has given us as a starting point? The conviction that one of the most important, even tragic, consequences of economic change was rural depopulation and the progressive exclusion of the working classes from the benefits of landownership might appear to be part of a familiar lament based on a form of Virgilian nostalgia to which the British have been held to be peculiarly prone. Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in the eighteenth century and William Wordsworth passim in the nineteenth were merely the leading poetic spokesmen for this mood. Some aspects of land reform are undoubtedly susceptible to such 1 For general treatments, in addition to the specific works cited in later footnotes, see M. Beer, A History of British Socialism, G Bell, London, 1929, Vol. II, pp. 237-45; H M. Lynd, England in the 1880s, New York, 1945; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists; Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861-1881, Routledge, London, 1965; D. E. Martin, ‘Land Reform’ in P. Hollis (ed), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England, 1974; and R. Douglas, Land, People and Politics; A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom, 1878-1952, 1976. 2 �‘pastoral’ or ‘romantic’ interpretations. But the feature on which I shall be focussing concerns the way in which the movement obtained leadership and support from a couple of generations of members of the professional middle classes, many of them priding themselves on being serious students of Britain’s economic history -- the kind of men who were accustomed to analysing contemporary institutions and policies in the languages of political economy.2 Plural usage here is required, first, to take account of the way in which the secular and deductive approach of emerging orthodoxy, chiefly associated with Ricardo and his followers, never established complete hegemony in public debate, even during its heyday.3 And secondly, because orthodox methods of analysis increasingly came under attack from historicists and inductivists from the 1860s onwards, despite the continued authoritative status of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848-71). Especially when confronting the problems raised by land tenure, agrarian economic history, the new form of evolutionary historical jurisprudence associated with Henry Maine, and comparative studies of land tenure furnished evidence that could be used to support or deny conclusions derived from a narrower form of economic analysis.4 Without suggesting that political economy in its increasingly mixed forms during the third quarter of the century was univocal, especially when it came to framing policies, one thing can be taken for granted: its exponents cannot be accused, as many of the spokesmen for radical, Chartist, and romantic agrarian alternatives can, of being hostile towards the selfinterest principle, competition, and private property in general. Moreover, since support for 2 I have spoken of men because all those with whom I shall be concerned here were men. But there were some prominent women involved, notably John Stuart Mill’s step-daughter, Helen Taylor, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Octavia Hill, with Hill’s interest emerging as a byproduct of her concern with the urban housing problem; see Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor, 1875, Cass reprint, 1970. 3 For Christian versions of political economy see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865, Oxford, 1988; and for the Malthusian variant D. Winch, Riches and Poverty; An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834, Cambridge, 1996. Part III. For a persistent conservative and protectionist challenge to orthodoxy see Anna Gambles. Protection and Politics; Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815-52, Royal Historical Society, The Boydell Press, 1999. 4 On the ways in which Maine and his Continental sources, chiefly von Maurer and Nasse, became embroiled in land reform politics see J. W. Burrow, ‘”The Village Community” and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth-Century England’ in N. McKendrick (ed), Historical Perspectives; Studies in English Thought and Society in honour of J. H. Plumb, London: Europa Publications, 1974, pp. 255-84. See also C. Dewey, ‘Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology’, Modern Asian Studies, 6, 3, 1972, 291-328; ‘Particular Polities: Political Economy and the Historical Method’ in S. Collini, D. Winch, and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics , Cambridge, 1983. [[/ 247-75; and A. Diamond (ed), The Victorian Achievment of Sir Henry Maine, Cambridge, 1991. 3 �free trade was an issue on which most economists, if not economic historians, were univocal, their views on land reform had to recognize the global economic implications of any policy solutions they advocated. That such exponents of land reform could come to the conclusion that improving access to land was a practical goal worth pursuing through legislation and state intervention raises issues that go beyond rural preservation and conservation, the kinds of things we associate with the founding of bodies like the National Trust in 1895. Again, while my cast of land reformers was not entirely immune to such ideas, and has been found seriously wanting in qualities of hard-headedness on other grounds, what distinguished them was an obligation to show that their objectives conformed with political, economic, and administrative realities. To this one could add the fact that use of the state as an instrumentality was not the first recourse for a generation or two that had learned from domestic and foreign example the dangers of bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, and special interest pleading. Any solutions proposed had to bear in mind such experience and be economically viable as well as desirable on other grounds. To avoid another kind of confusion, it has to be added that hard-headedness does not imply moral neutrality. Quite the reverse in fact, though a modicum of professional distance came with the academicization of economics and economic history at the end of the century. Campaigns against the English system of land ownership on whatever economic grounds were permeated by those powerful moral and political undercurrents which were fed by the well-known successes of the territorial aristocracy in retaining its position in local and national affairs, despite repeal of the Corn Laws and the passage of three reform bills. Indeed, Harold Perkin, the historian who has probably done most to draw attention to the new professional middle classes as a social and political force in nineteenth-century Britain, identified them as being more likely ‘to see politics in moral terms rather than those of economic interest.’5 This clearly does not apply to those professions such as land surveying and the branches of law that stood to lose most from changes in the ways in 5 See ‘Land Reform and Class Conflict in Victorian Britain’ in J. Butt and I. F. Clarke (eds), The Victorians and Social Protest, David and Charles, Archon Books, 1973, pp. 196-7; and The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969, Chapter 7, section 4. 4 �which landed property was registered and transacted.6 For others, however, freedom from the constraints posed by obvious economic interests of their own, until the state offered opportunities for employment in bureaucratic roles at least, meant that judgments based on moral criteria assumed a larger role. No student of Victorian politico-economic debate is likely to underestimate the breadth and depth of this moral dimension.7 But the question on which I wish to focus is the relationship between economic hard-headedness and those issues which a later, more profession-conscious generation of economists was apt to describe – sometimes innocently, sometimes with depreciating intent -- as the ‘non-economic’ arguments. In terms that, for once, combine fashionable correctness with responsiveness to the concerns of the period, I am interested in what would now be described as the cultural and institutional context within which economic arguments about the impact of economic change were debated. II At this point we confront another commonplace. Although significant residues of the nineteenth-century campaigns can be found in twentieth-century party programmes and legislation, the nineteenth-century record of achievement fell pathetically short of its original aspirations, especially when the longevity and extent of the effort involved is taken into account. F. M. L. Thompson ranked it alongside republicanism, teetotalism and disestablishmentarianism in this respect, while conceding that ‘it was a movement worthy of more than such cranky associates’.8 Judged by statistics of rural depopulation, the failure of the owner-occupied sector of farming to grow significantly, and the stubborn concentration of land ownership in England (more so in Scotland), the problems addressed were real enough. Yet in becoming a standard element in Liberal and Labour party programmes these problems acquired an emblematic, sometimes merely a strategic status, especially in the post-1884 6 On the surveyors see F. M. L. Thompson, Chartered Surveyors; The Growth of a Profession, London: Routledge, 1968; and on the role of solicitors in obstructing land reform see A. Offer, Property and Politics, 1870-1914; Landowners, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England, Cambridge University Press, 1981. 7 For two contrasting studies that reveal the character of the moral dimension see S. Collini, Public Moralists; Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991; and G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 8 ‘Land and Politics in England in the Nineteenth Century, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1964, p. 23. 5 �era of ‘democratic’ politics. They were sufficiently serious emblems, however, to provoke Conservative anxieties and counter-proposals, as well as the formation of organisations such as the Liberty and Property Defence League which brought together those who believed that they posed a serious threat to private property in general.9 With the possible exception of Ireland, the changes in the agrarian order that actually took place owed little to the efforts of land reformers. Attempts to substitute owner occupation for tenancy, and peasant proprietorships for wage labour, came to little when measured against the impact of persistent market forces, especially those released by prolonged agricultural depression after 1873. Rent rolls fell, and if depression did not make agricultural land completely unsalable, it certainly allowed defenders of landed property to reverse the logic of their critics by pointing to the possibility of an ‘unearned decrement’. A. J. Balfour, speaking in 1885, in the hostile atmosphere of the Industrial Remuneration Conference, thought that depression allowed the tenure of land to be addressed in ‘a spirit of scientific impartiality’. It may have been in this spirit that he likened the efforts of land reformers who wanted to halt the downward pressure on urban wage and employment levels caused by rural migration to attempts ‘to drain the German Ocean by cutting a few gaps in a Lincolnshire sea-wall’.10 Impartial or not, Balfour was justified in drawing attention to the gap between diagnosis and the likely results of the remedies proposed. In this respect his remark could be inscribed on the tombs of several of the nineteenth-century land reform campaigns. Some convincing hypotheses, political and economic, have been advanced to explain why so little came from so much effort. My concern, however, is more with the intellectual character and momentum of land reform than with its economic or legislative outcomes. And for once, when addressing an audience of economic historians, it is not necessary to apologize for beginning at least with the leading spokesmen for economic orthodoxy. 9 For a work that gives prominence to land reform as one of the main threats to which Conservatives were responding see Matthew Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, 1886-1914, Edinburgh University Press, 1990. See also N. Soldon, ‘Laissez-Faire as Dogma: The Liberty and Property Defence League, 1882-1914’ in K. D.Brown (ed), Essays in Anti-Labour History, 1974, pp. 208-33; and E. Bristow, ‘The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism, 1882-1914, Historical Journal, 18, 1975, 761-89. 10 See Industrial Remuneration Conference; Report of the Proceedings and Papers read in Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly under the Presidency of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, London: Cassell, 1885, p. 347. 6 �Balfour’s perceptive survey of the reasons why land rather than capital was the focus of popular discontent in Britain, and why in consequence town versus country issues had dominated British politics for so long, adduced the following important consideration: ‘To this tendency, produced by party politics, a powerful impulse has been given by the language of theoretical economists. For, according to economic terminology, the products of industry are divided into rent, interest, and wages; the recipients of these three portions being respectively the landlord, the capitalist, and the labourer. And, according to economic theory, the landlord’s share was received by him in exchange for an instrument of production, which, however acquired, was not the result of his or of any human industry, and for one which had besides a constant tendency to increase in value, as society advanced, without any expenditure or exertion on his part. He neither made its original, nor earned its subsequent value. Economic theory, in Balfour’s opinion, had thereby ‘…accidentally given scientific form to any floating jealousy there may be, or rather must be, of a species of wealth, which, from obvious causes, constantly tends to appear larger than it is, and which influences the imagination to a degree out of all proportion to its magnitude, as compared with that of riches accumulated in other and less obvious forms.’11 With the opposite intent, Richard Cobden had made much the same point two decades earlier in a speech often cited in the reform literature: ‘If I were five-and-twenty or thirty, instead of, unhappily, twice that number of years, I would have a League for free trade in Land, just as we have a League for free trade in Corn. You will find just the same authority in Adam Smith for the one as for the other; and if it were only taken up as it must be taken up to succeed, not as a political, revolutionary, Radical, Chartist notion, but taken up on politico-economic grounds, the agitation would be sure to succeed.’12 Cobden’s decision to appeal to Smith’s authority may have had some strategic elements (as we shall see, it overlooks Smith’s more controversial followers), but it was not an arbitrary choice. The Wealth of Nations contains some forthright judgements on primogeniture and entail treated as feudal residues that continued to restrict agricultural development, 11 12 Industrial Remuneration Conference., p. 339. Speech delivered November 23, 1864. 7 �particularly in Scotland.13 Thomas Paine could draw as much ammunition from the work as he could from a more traditional radical source, the story of the Norman Yoke. Smith had a soft spot for the English yeomanry and his remarks on the superiority of owner-occupation in agriculture were to be regularly recycled in the land reform literature.14 But it was two of Smith’s earliest followers, Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, who were to supply the economic theory summarized by Balfour. They helped to form nineteenthcentury opinion on land questions by launching theories that treated economic rent as a unique form of income, and land as a factor of production with marked peculiarities that differentiated it from capital and labour. Moreover, in making the central problem of political economy the need to find ways of accommodating Malthusian pressures under conditions in which agriculture was believed to suffer from the law of diminishing returns, they focussed on rising rents as one of the main consequence of economic growth. This basic model conformed with pre- and post-1815 economic conditions and was tailored to the peculiarities of the English tripartite system of land tenure, according to which landowners received contractual rents paid by capitalistic tenant farmers in search of profit, employing wage labour in the process. Another assumption too obvious to be articulated was that concentration of landownership counter-posed the interests of a rich few against the many, a problem of wealth and income distribution that was compounded by the political dominance of the landed interest and imperfections in the market for land. At the end of the century the assumption could be voiced in the form of a convincing retrospective hypothesis: land nationalisation would not have found political favour in a less dynamic economy where any rise in land values was divided among a large number of owner-occupiers.15 Ricardo in particular, especially when his conclusions were fortified by the radical logic of James and John Stuart Mill, left a legacy of argumentation that supports Balfour’s case 13 Wealth of Nations, Glasgow edition, III.ii.6; IV.ii.b.19. ‘Those laws and customs so favourable to the yeomanry, have perhaps contributed more to the present grandeur of England than all their boasted regulations of commerce taken together’. Ibid., III.ii.14. 15 As Balfour said of Continental socialists: ‘It is neither their interest nor their inclination to attack private property in land; not their interest, because such an attack would inevitably array against them the whole body of peasant owners…; not their inclination, because it is the capitalist and shopkeeper, not the landowner, who is the special object of their dislike’; see Industrial Remuneration Conference, pp. 337-8. See also the conclusion of the articles by F. C. Montague on ‘increment, the unearned’ and ‘land nationalisation’ in R. H. I. Palgrave (ed), Dictionary of Political Economy, London: Macmillan, 1896. 14 8 �while casting doubt on the ‘accidental’ nature he imputed to the connection with economic theory. The younger Mill acted as the link between the early Ricardian-inspired attacks on the landowning interest during the post-1815 Corn Law debates and the revival of land-reforming campaigns from the 1860s onwards. He played a prominent (he thought decisive) role in the parliamentary debates that led up to the Irish Land Act of 1870, and did little to calm the fears of those who believed that any meddling with ‘free contract’ by granting fixed tenure and fair rents in Ireland would have consequences for English landowners.16 Mill, after all, had drawn up the programme of the Land Tenure Reform Association in 1869, a programme that went well beyond the case for removing obstacles to the sale of land.17 It included state purchase of land for the purposes of subdivision, the construction of smallholdings on crown land, reclamation of waste land for the same purpose, and the formation of agrarian cooperatives to reap the advantages of scale. In an effort to retain the support of working-class reformers seeking outright nationalisation, the programme also included the proposal for a tax on the unearned increment, an idea that can be traced back to James Mill, and one that led to the son’s name being dropped from the Cobden Club Committee.18 The other clauses in the programme incorporated the aims of another pressure group that proved far more successful; the Commons Preservation Society founded in 1865, with Mill’s disciple, Henry Fawcett, playing a major part. They insisted that waste lands, and those requiring an Act of Parliament to enclose them, should be permanently reserved for national purposes, leaving the less fertile land around cities to be ‘retained in a state of wild natural beauty, for the general enjoyment 16 On his contribution to the Irish Land Act see Autobiography in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, thirty-three volumes, Toronto, 1965-91, vol I, p.[206]. Hereafter cited as CW. 17 For a detailed study of Mill’s role see David Martin, John Stuart Mill and the Land Question, University of Hull, 1981. 18 Louis Mallet was responsible for J. S. Mill’s name being dropped on the grounds that useful free-trade reforms were being sacrificed in the interests of what he described as communism, adding that ‘between Feudalists and Communists, there is no chance for Freedom.’ As cited in Clive J. Dewey, ‘The Rehabilitation of the Peasant Proprietor in NineteenthCentury Economic Thought’, History of Political Economy, 6, 1, 1974, p. 38. The full extent of Mallet’s dislike for Mill and Cairnes’s position on land was not revealed until his son edited his father’s Free Exchange; Papers on Political and Economical Subjects, including Chapters on the Law of Value and Unearned Increment, London, 1891. The Cobden Club later found itself divided when some of its members adopted the more radical positions on land reform and welfare of what became known as ‘new liberalism’ towards the end of the century. On this see A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 136-141, 192-4. 9 �of the community, and encouragement in all classes of healthful rural tastes, and of the higher order of pleasures’.19 At this point, then, we can observe the confluence of what is now described as ‘romantic ecology’, with its pervasive Wordsworthian overtones, and those arguments that make Mill a precursor of twentieth-century forms of neo-Malthusian eco-criticism and an exponent of the zero-growth economy.20 Close readers of his Principles would not have been surprised by any of the clauses in the Land Tenure Reform Association’s programme. The chapters questioning the absolute right to landed property, and the enthusiastic survey of the merits of peasant proprietorship throughout Europe, summarized a burgeoning literature and provided a rallying point for a new generation of reformers that included, alongside Fawcett, such figures as William Thornton, John Elliot Cairnes, and Thomas Cliffe Leslie.21 All this ensured Mill a prominent place in the litany of politico-economic experts incanted by later land reformers. Mill also played a more direct, though hardly intentional, role in passing the baton to a new generation when he recruited Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection in biology, to the cause of the Land Tenure Reform Association. Wallace was responsible for inclusion of a clause that incorporated preservation of ‘all natural objects or artificial constructions attached to the soil, which are of historical, scientific or artistic interest’. More significantly, he carried the fight into the last quarter of the century by means of his own Land Nationalisation Society formed in 1881. Wallace in turn passed the baton to Henry George, while attempting later to distinguish his own reforms from those advocated by the Georgeite Land Restoration Leagues.22 The spectacular success of George’s campaign 19 See ‘Land Tenure Reform’ in Essays in Economics and Society in CW, vol V, pp. 689-95. Fawcett’s part in the Commons Preservation Society is covered by L. Stephen, Life of Henry Fawcett, London, 1885,Chapter VII. For another contemporary account see G. Shaw Lefevre, English Commons and Forests: The Story of the Battle during the last Thirty Years for Public Rights over the Commons and Forests of England and Wales, Cassell, London, 1894. 20 See J. Bate, Romantic Ecology; Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, Routledge, London, 1991. For Mill’s environmentalist credentials see D. Winch, ‘Thinking Green, Nineteenth-Century Style, John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin’ in M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds), Markets in Hisorical Contexts; Ideas and Politics in the Modern World, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 21 For a study of this group see J. Lipkes, Politics, Religion and Classical Political Economy in Britiain: John Stuart Mill and His Followers, London: Macmillan, 1999. 22 See A. R. Wallace, Land Nationalization: Its Necessity and its Aims, London, 1882. Two unpublished dissertations deal with the activities of the Wallace and George associations; see A. J. Peacock, ‘Land Reform 1880-1919: A Study of 10 �is the most striking evidence of the popular appeal of land reform at the close of the century, though the foundations had been well and truly laid by the native radical tradition before his arrival from the United States.23 Even those who were committed to a broader view of the nature of exploitation in capitalist society, the Social Democratic Federation, were forced to engage with George, with some of them, notably William Morris, expressing admiration for his impact on opinion.24 George made converts among the early Fabians, Bernard Shaw in particular. Having decided to do without the benefit of Karl Marx’s analysis, the Fabians granted a large space in their programme for the Law of Rent, land reform, and the taxation of unearned incomes.25 As Sidney Webb proudly noted in retrospect: ‘Tested by a whole generation of further experience and criticism, I conclude that, in 1889, we knew our Political Economy, and that our Political Economy was sound’.26 By the end of the century, then, long-established conceptions of the equal right of all men to the fruits of the earth, and ideas of the historic injury inflicted by enclosure, were now expressed as much in the languages of utilitarianism and political economy as in the more fundamentalist language of rights and injustices. The heady intermixture of economic theory, historical and empirical study of land tenure arrangements, and rural nostalgia was sufficiently entrenched to constitute a problem for the emerging generation of academic economists. They had to engage with a large body of literature -- some of it reaching a mass audience -- that either condemned the science of which they were the newest guardians, or claimed that its founding fathers had provided support for radical conclusions on matters of land reform and taxation. In both respects, professional pride plus a regard for the superior qualities of post-marginalist modes of analysis required them to distinguish popular fallacies and enthusiasms from sound economic inferences. III the Activities of the English Land Restoration League and the Land Nationalisation Society’, MA thesis, University of Southampton, 1961; and S. B. Ward, ‘Land Reform in England, 1880-1914’, PhD thesis, University of Reading, 1976. 23 See J. Saville, ‘Henry George and the British Labour Movement’, Science and Society, XXIV, 1960, 321-33. For a similar comment by a contemporary see J. A. Hobson, ‘The Influence of Henry George in England’, Fortnightly Review, 68, December 1897, pp. 835-44. 24 W. Morris, ‘Henry George’, Justice, April 5, 1884. 25 See A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884-1918, Cambridge, 1966, Chapter II. 26 Preface to Fabian Essays, 1920. 11 �Those whom we now call neo-classical economists were almost bound to provide a more sceptical interpretation of the merits of land reform. This was certainly the case with Alfred Marshall, who overcame his scruples about engagement in public controversy by joining the attack on the economics of George and Wallace, while confining more measured discussion of the implications of the rent doctrine to his Principles of Economics (1890).27 Instead of considering in detail how the neo-classicists went about their task, however, I want to pose a more direct question: to what extent was the earlier generation of land-reforming political economists guilty of economic naïveté when endorsing petite culture, and on what grounds were they prepared to sacrifice economic advantage to social and political benefit? A convenient way of stating the issues can be found in an article on Fabian economics by George Stigler, a doughty representative of Chicago-style neo-classicism, who posed the following shrewd question: ‘How could one seriously make a heavy indictment of private property in land when free trade had made wheat – and land – cheap? Late Victorian England was an odd place to offer heavy criticism of feudalism.’ 28 Stigler’s conclusion, in brief, was that the land problem was essentially the creation of intellectuals, who, when faced with emotive issues, were unable to think straight about economics and measure economic magnitudes accurately. To this criticism can be added another expressed by Balfour, echoing Marshall’s criticisms a few years earlier: ‘Whatever be the merits of a system of small holdings, and whatever the demerits of a system of large ones, it cannot be maintained, in face of the fact that England grows nearly twice as much wheat per acre as France, and more than twice as much as Germany and Russia, that the first is favourable, the second unfavourable, to a large gross production of food. And what is true of gross, is manifestly still more true of net production.’29 In a later neo-classical terminology, Balfour was asking why, if you are already on the frontier marked out by the production-possibilities curve, you would wish to opt for a position within 27 See ‘Three Lectures on Progress and Poverty’ given in 1883, as reprinted in Journal of Law and Economics, 12, 1969 and now contained in Collected Works of Alfred Marshall edited by P. Groenewegen in eight volumes, Overstone Press, Bristol, 1997, vol. I, pp.161-203. See also ‘On Rent’ in vol. 2, pp. 489-507, Marshall’s reply to the criticisms of the Duke of Argyll, The Unseen Foundations of Society; An Examination of the Fallacies and Failures of Economic Science due to Neglected Elements, John Murray, London, 1893. 28 ‘Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and the Theory of Fabian Socialism’ as reprinted in Essays in the History of Economics, Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 275. 29 Industrial Remuneration Conference, p. 349. 12 �the space marked out by the curve? He assumed that ‘in old and settled countries it is usually more profitable to farm and pay rent for much land, than to own and cultivate little.’ Or, as Marshall put it: ‘It requires as much capital to buy twenty acres as it does to farm a hundred.’ Rich landlords who were willing to take a low rate of return on their capital, possibly for 30 status reasons, performed a useful function, leaving the tenant farmer to employ his more limited capital and greater agricultural skills to best account. It was not necessary to be in possession of marginal productivity theories to appreciate such arguments. For example, take Ricardo’s blunt answer to Malthus’s argument that free trade in corn would entail loss of employment and income from earlier investment in agriculture: ‘We might just as fairly have been told, when the steam-engine, or Mr. Arkwright’s cotton machine, was brought to perfection, that it would be wrong to adopt the use of them, because the value of the old clumsy machinery would be lost to us.’31 Such views enabled Ricardo to predict that the resulting shift of capital and labour into commerce and manufacturing would constitute a gain to every class except landowners, thereby heightening the radical diagnosis of the inherent conflict between the interests of rent-receivers and those of the rest of society. But a case for repeal of the Corn Laws that drew attention to artificially-sustained rental incomes did not carry with it the implication that English tenurial arrangements were incompatible with the most efficient available methods in agriculture -- though entails were often thought to be responsible for under-investment by short-sighted and impoverished inheritors belonging to overly long-sighted families. Ricardo not only assumed the existence of the English arrangements throughout the Principles, but relied on the existence of competitive market forces to generate the conclusions of his ‘strong case’. As a Whig, Malthus may have been more tender-hearted towards the landowning classes, more sensitive to frictions and the social costs of economic change, but he was perfectly 30 Collected Works, vol. I, p. 185. Essay on Profits in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo edited by P. Sraffa, Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, eleven volumes, 1952-1973, vol. IV, p. 33. 31 13 �capable of understanding Ricardo’s logic. Indeed, he had been the first to employ it when faced with those who believed that pauperism could be removed by adoption of the ‘cow system’. He was particularly surprised to find Arthur Young, the most outspoken advocate of enclosure in Britain and a much-cited critic of inefficient peasant forms of agriculture in France, advocating the cow system during the grain scarcity of 1800.32 The outcome of such a system, Malthus argued, would be ‘the most cruel and fatal blow to the happiness of the lower classes of people in this country, that they had ever received.’33 Hence too his warnings about the dangers of excessive subdivision of agrarian properties in post-revolutionary France, a diagnosis that was later to be dramatically underlined by Irish problems. Ireland showed what could happen when the facility of potato culture made population increase independent of the price of food and the demand for labour.34 The cow system in England would encourage marriage in the same way that Malthus alleged was true of the unreformed Poor Law, though with the added drawback that it lacked the restraining effect associated with the ‘laudable repugnance to the receiving of parish relief’. Malthus would only support the cow system as a supplement to reform of the Poor Laws, and then only if the acquisition of land was the result of ‘personal exertions’. Since peasant agriculture was vulnerable to crop failure, landownership could never become the ‘principal dependence’ of the poor. The cottager’s prospects would be better served if he retained his status as labourer earning an adequate wage income to support a modest family. One of Malthus’s most persistent tasks in defending his population principle was to emphasize the difference between gross and net agricultural product when weighing the merits of solutions to population pressure, with China (later Ireland) serving as the example of a ‘forced’ population dependent on agriculture dedicated solely to maintaining gross product. 32 Young maintained that scarcity could be avoided if ‘every country labourer in the kingdom’ who had three or more children, could own ‘half an acre of land for potatoes [as an alternative to wheat], and grass enough to feed one or two cows’. See The Question of Scarcity Plainly Stated, 1800. 33 See T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population edited by Patricia James, Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, two volumes, 1989, vol. II, Chapter XI. 34 See T. R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy edited by J. M. Pullen, Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, two volumes, 1989, vol I, pp. 232-52, 396, 393-401. 14 �John Ramsay McCulloch was, if anything, a more determined defender of the existing system of land tenure. Like Malthus, he was in favour of primogeniture on economic and political grounds. He also advocated fixed-term leases because they provided tenant farmers with an incentive to invest; and recommended setting rents at competitive levels because that would require occupiers ‘either [to] exert themselves or go to the wall.’ The worst aspect of existing English practice, in McCulloch’s opinion, was that ‘tenants who do not fall behind their neighbours are treated nearly as well as those who go forward’. When judged by these market criteria it followed that the peasant systems of tenure to be found throughout Europe, including those like Prussia that had benefitted from the Stein-Hardenberg reforms, were guilty of allowing ‘slovenly’ agricultural practices: they retarded mechanization and did not provide scope for economies of scale. 35 When faced with Irish problems, McCulloch not only attacked all forms of ‘tenant right’, but managed to mount a daring economic defence of the innocuity of absentee landlordism.36 It follows, almosta fortiori, that he was firmly opposed to James Mill’s proposals for taxing the unearned increment. Indeed, Ricardo, who was probably the first to be made privy to the proposals was also unwilling to give them his support. He agreed that rent could properly be subject to special taxation under Asiatic conditions, but was not convinced that such a policy was practicable or desirable in a developed economy in which a market in land values was fully established.37 Reference to Asiatic conditions recalls the fact that James Mill was responsible for applying Ricardo’s theory of rent to the Indian land revenue question. Exaggerating somewhat, one could say that Mill père et fils, in their daily occupation as servants of the East India Company, were engaged in administering a system that required them to act as the owners of the ultimate title to land, exacting neither more nor less than pure rent from the ryot or peasant cultivator for the ‘original and indestructible powers of the soil’. They became life-long opponents of the pro-landlord prejudices of those who sought to create, by means 35 See J. R. McCulloch, A Treatise on the Succession to Property Vacant by Death, London, 1848; see also D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch; A Study in Classic Economics, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970, pp. 288-9. 36 See A Treatise on the Letting and Occupancy of Land as reprinted in Treatises and Essay on Subjects Connected with Economical Policy, Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh, 1853. Quotation on p. 168. 37 For James Mill’s proposals and Ricardo’s criticisms of them see Elements of Political Economy as reprinted in D. Winch (ed), James Mill; Selected Economic Writings, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966, pp. 197-200, 338-42. 15 �of ‘permanent settlement’, an Indian landowning class along English lines.38 It was partly across Indian territory that John Stuart Mill advanced on the Irish problem of tenant right.39 Nor was he alone in this: George Campbell, Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces of India, did so in less extreme fashion in a pamphlet on The Irish Land (1869) that was to prove helpful to Gladstone when preparing his 1870 and 1881 Irish Land Bills. An uncertain combination of Indian and Irish experience, with a strong dash of Francophilia, helped to shift Mill’s inherited anti-landlord views decisively in favour of peasant proprietorship in the 1840s, thereby overturning the original classical remedy for Ireland, namely the imposition of the English system of capitalist farming.40 Transmutation of the Irish cottar into a day-labourer was ‘rather a scheme for the improvement of Irish agriculture, than of the condition of the Irish people. .[It] has no charm for infusing forethought, frugality, or self-restraint, into a people devoid of them’.41 English ideas and prejudices were not applicable to Indian and Irish problems, to societies where competition merely had destructive effects on the peasantry, and where different customs dictated different solutions. The same inheritance prevented Mill from adopting what might be described as the Burkean position: English customs and peculiarities were too deeply infected by landlordism to be defensible. This was not a mode of thought that came naturally to Mill, which makes his willingness to appropriate Wordsworth’s sentimental defence of the Lakeland ‘statesmen’ and Maine’s arguments on village communities all the more remarkable – or perhaps one should say, all the more opportunistic.42 At this point other considerations connected with Mill’s idealism and neo-Malthusian ecological concerns must be brought into the picture. These were revealed in a pessimistic economic diagnosis of the future for the labouring classes under the existing system of 38 For the classic study of this episode see E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. For the connections and disjunctions between thinking on Ireland and India see R. D. C. Black, ‘Economic Policy in Ireland and India in the Time of J. S. Mill’, Economic History Review, XXI, 1968, 321-36 now reprinted in Economic Theory and Policy in Context; The Selected Essays of R. D. Collison Black, Edward Elgar, Aldershot, 1993, pp.18-33. 40 For Mill’s part in achieving this shift see R. D. C. Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817-1870, Cambridge, 1960, Chapter 2. 41 Principles in CW, vol II, p. 326. 42 On the Lakeland statesmen see Principles in CW, p. 253. On Maine see Mill’s enthusiastic review of Village Communities in Writings on India in CW, vol ??, pp. 215-28. 39 16 �wage labour, where any increase in numbers faced the prospect of rising food costs. Peasant proprietorships in agriculture and cooperative manufacturing enterprises were the ultimate solution to this dilemma. Unlike his mentors Mill had come to the conclusion that further economic growth in a mature industrial society, such as he perceived England to be at the century’s mid-point, was no longer the best means of raising living standards. Nor was he happy with the prospect of a society permanently dedicated to a competitive scramble for material wealth. With firm control having been established over population growth by means of delayed marriage and contraception, aided, if necessary, by emigration, it would be preferable to embrace a state of affairs in which population remained stable and any net capital formation was directed towards reduced physical toil and improvements in the quality of life.43 A large part of Mill’s case for peasant proprietorship was based on the increased prudence in population matters that he observed in France. With such prudence came reduced risk of the Irish problem of sub-division of properties, together with all the other benefits deriving from the productive ‘magic’ of ownership. One could say, therefore, that Mill’s idealistic eye was as much focussed on an improved future for wage-earners in a virtuous stationary state as on the realities of maintaining a domestic agricultural system capable of producing food by least-cost methods. Repeal of the Corn Laws had reduced the priority attached to this problem, and Mill had formally announced that preserving sources of capital accumulation in Britain was no longer a problem.44 Alternatively, one could conclude that whatever economic benefits England derived from ‘high farming’ were being purchased at too high a social cost in the form of exclusion from roles that allowed scope for non-dependency and selfdevelopment. Mill’s late followers did not remain faithful to him in all these particulars, but he certainly succeeded in setting the moral tone of their contributions to land reform. But it is important not to exaggerate the extent to which Mill’s antagonisms and future projections affected his capacity for hard-headed analysis and regard for practical 43 44 See especially Principles in CW, vol III, pp. 754-6. See Principles, CW, vol. III, Book IV, Chapter IV. 17 �realities. The intemperate language and radical proposals contained in England and Ireland (1868) were not reflected in his parliamentary speeches on the Irish Land Bill. Nor was he entirely unequivocal in his Irish recommendations in all editions of the Principles. But in the late 1860s preservation of the Anglo-Irish Union in the face of the twin threat posed by English insularity and indifference on the one side, and Fenian outrage on the other, suggested the need to frighten the English public into accepting Gladstone’s more moderate measures.45 And while Mill advocated state purchase and disposal of land, and governmentappointed commissions to value land for the purpose of fixing rents in Ireland and assessing the unearned increment in England, he was opposed to all schemes that did not entail giving landowners full compensation at current market prices. Confidence in the Ricardian prediction of rising land values made this seem like a good bargain for the state. In resisting the demands for land nationalisation within the Land Tenure Reform Association, Mill did so on familiar grounds: state management was unfit for the task.46 The administration of commons and waste lands was as much as could be expected from the state for the moment. 47 IV In casting doubt on Mill’s attempt to construct a scheme of social reform ‘on the somewhat frail foundation of a peasant proprietory’, Balfour thought Mill had overreacted to the defects of English land tenure, many of which had been removed in the interim. How could it be claimed, in the abstract, that any one system of tenure was preferable: 45 A large literature now surrounds this subject. See E. D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics; Tenant-Right and Nationality, 1865-1870, Cambridge, 1974, Chapter II; idem, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: The Principles of Political Economy, 1848-1865’, Historical Journal, XIII, 1970, 216-36; idem, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: Reform and the Integrity of Empire’, Historical Journal, XIII, 1970, 419-42; L. Zastoupil, ‘Moral Government: J. S. Mill on Ireland’, Historical Journal, XXVI, 1983, 707-17; and B. L. Kinzer, ‘J. S. Mill and Irish Land: A Reassessment’, Historical Journal, XXVII, 1984, 111-27. See also the chapter on Ireland in B. L. Kinzer, A. P. Robson, and J. M. Robson (eds), A Moralist In and Out of Parliament 1865-1868, Toronto, 1992. 46 Fawcett did not favour taxation of the unearned increment and became a major opponent of land nationalisation; see ‘The Nationalisation of Land’, Fortnightly Review, December 1, 1872, pp.627-43. For another admirer of Mill who carried on the fight against Henry George see A. Toynbee, Progress and Poverty; A Criticism of Mr. Henry George, Kegan Paul, London, 1883. 47 ‘… I do not know that it may not be reserved for us in the future; but at present I decidedly do not think it expedient. I have so poor an opinion of State management, or municipal management either, that I am afraid many years would elapse before the revenue realized for the State would be sufficient to pay the indemnity which would justly be claimed by the dispossessed proprietors.’ See speech on Land Tenure Reform, 15 May, 1871 as reprinted in Public and Parliamentary Speeches, CW, vol. ??, p. 419.and 18 �‘…before judgment is passed with respect to any given country, reference must be made, not merely to general considerations, which apply to it in common with other countries, but to the peculiarities of its soil and climate, to the distances of its markets, to the aptitudes of its people, their usages, and the character of their agriculture.’48 Mill was vulnerable to such criticisms. His version of historical and cultural relativism did not apply to England. He had minimized the less favourable results of peasant proprietorship abroad and did not pay much attention to the problems of converting English agricultural labourers into farmers on their own account, requiring access to capital in order to do so effectively. The kind of supplementary role played by allotments, of a kind that even the most status-quo minded commentators would have accepted, fell far short of Mill’s hopes. Mill and his followers certainly succeeded in altering an Irish perception of political economy as a landlord science, but they did not convince a succeeding generation of more hard-headed economists that the case for peasant proprietorship in England had been established, outside the realm of market gardening at least. With the benefits of free trade in foodstuffs arriving now in the form of cheap wheat from the Middle West, and the advent of refrigerated shipping, only ‘high farming’ could compete, where this entailed a larger acreage per farm than the advocates of peasant proprietorship envisaged. It also entailed exacerbation of those features of British society that Wallace and George deplored and attributed to private landowning -- further rural depopulation, emigration to the United States and the ‘new’ colonies of Australasia and Canada, and the growth of towns and cities. Cutting a few gaps in the Lincolnshire sea-wall would not reverse this process. Rural labour was being pushed into the towns by depression and mechanization rather than by the greed of status-seeking landowners. It was also being pulled there by cheaper transport, the spread of education, and rising consumer expectations. This meant too that the best hope for wageearners (when suitably equipped by education to appreciate the virtues of thrift and the need to avoid alcoholic excess) came from higher wages and steady employment – a return to Malthus’s priorities against a background in which pauperism had chiefly become an urban phenomenon. The new advocates of the cow system, like Chamberlain’s lieutenant, Jesse 48 Industrial Remuneration Conference, p. 342. 19 �Collings, could still extol the virtues of owner-occupation and rural life generally, but only in tandem with protectionism, the fate of which was settled, temporarily, by the defeat of Tariff Reform in 1906.49 If there is a moral to this story it does not lie in any summary of the brute facts of agrarian economic life at the end of the century. After all, if anything the case for land reform was spurred on by depression and survived agricultural revival. It was not going to be killed off by anything as cerebral as the opinions of people like Balfour and Marshall. The jealousies about which Balfour had complained retained their force during and after the First World War, though Lloyd George was thwarted by that event from introducing his own ambitious programme of land reform. But within the loose-knit yet hard-headed community I have been considering, there was less disposition to emphasize the radical conclusions that could be drawn from classical forms of political economy and more awareness of living in a different world. Any campaign directed solely at the monopolistic properties of landowning, especially when accompanied by ‘single-tax’ proposals, was bound to raise the question of discriminatory treatment, plus fears that if land became the first it would not be the last form of property to come under attack. In what respects did land differ from other forms of capital? In a society that was no longer dependent on domestic agriculture to meet most of its demand for food and raw materials, how did agriculture differ in essentials from other forms of capitalistic enterprise? If it was accepted that there were economies of scale in manufacturing, how did the trend towards larger farm size differ in its rationale from the increasing size of industrial enterprises? On such matters the marginal productivity approach did have an effect on the way in which economists approached the questions. Since I cannot deal with this at the end of an over- long presentation, let me illustrate the change of perspective with two brief examples, both of which centre on Marshall, the representative figure for the 1890s. It was a sign of a more pervasive shift in perspective when Marshall, supported by other economist-witnesses before the Royal Commission on Local Taxation in 1897, made 49 See J.Collings, Land Reform, Occupying Ownership, Peasant Proprietary and Rural Education, Longmans Green, New York, 1906 20 �the simple opening announcement that ‘taxes are paid by persons, not things’; and that in consequence the inquiry should not relate to ‘the distribution of the burden of taxation between different kinds of property, but to the distribution of the burden between different classes of person with special reference to their interests in different kinds of property’.50 My second example involves a contrast with the entire classical approach adopted by Ricardo and his followers, up to and including Mill and Cairnes. For these two generations of political economists, the clue to rising wages could be found almost exclusively in what happened to food prices. Marshall, having announced the temporary suspension of the law of diminishing returns in agriculture, having declared that rent was ‘simply the chief species of a large genus of economic phenomena’, and after taking full account of the similarities between the various factors of production when interpreted in the light of the theory of marginal productivity, was able to argue that in a modern economy the wage-earner had an equally important stake in what happened, say, to the price of steel.51 50 See Official Papers by Alfred Marshall, Macmillan for the Royal Economic Society, London, 1926, p.334. For temporary suspension see ‘Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry’ in A. C. Pigou (ed), Memorials of Alfred Marshall, Macmillan, London, 1925, p. 326. The other conclusions are a distillation of the conclusions of Principles, Book VI on the distribution of the national income, but see especially Chapters IX and X on rent and land tenure respectively and Chapters XI and XII on distribution of the national product. 51 21 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Major Pieces Description An account of the resource Conference and seminar presentations, lectures, unpublished essays, and research papers. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Donald Winch Access to land: land reform and commons preservation in nineteenthcentury England A presentation given at the 75th Anniversary Conference of the Economic History Society in Glasgow as part of the sessions on ‘Morality, Markets and Policy’, Saturday, March 31, 2001 I My starting point in making some observations on an impossibly large topic will have to be a simple assertion. If one could conduct a canvas of opinion during the second half of the nineteenth-century on the deprivations and injustices associated with industrialization and urbanization, loss of access to land for purposes of work or leisure would come high on the lists of a large segment of the British public. There are also good grounds for thinking that the canvas would reveal this sentiment to have become more strident during the last two decades of the century. To students of the history of land reform agitation in England during this period, these assertions will appear commonplace; they underlie the activities of what can now be seen as a linked sequence of pressure groups dedicated to the removal of the actual and perceived deficiencies of the English system of land tenure. Instead of linked sequence one could also speak of a relay race combined with some features of the game of leap-frog – a mixed image that may provide a clue both as to momentum and to the failure to reach the finishing line in good order. While abolition of primogeniture and entail had remained staple elements on the agenda of reformers since the late eighteenth century, by the end of the nineteenth the campaign reached much further into the sanctum of private property in land. Radicals of the CobdenBright variety who espoused the cause of ‘free trade’ in land saw themselves as carrying the crusade against landed monopoly and aristocratic privilege to its logical conclusion by making the regulations surrounding the transfer of land conform to the priorities of a middle-class world of unrestricted commerce. From the late 1860s onward they found themselves being overtaken on their left by organisations such as the Land Tenure Reform 1 Association, the Land Nationalisation Society, and the various Land Restoration Leagues formed in the wake of Henry George’s speaking tours and his book on Progress and Poverty (1880). These associations were variously dedicated to the creation of peasant proprietorships and the curtailment of private landownership, wholly or in part, through nationalisation, municipalisation, and/or taxes based on the legitimacy of communal appropriation of the ‘unearned increment’ in rental incomes and urban site values. Weaving between these competing groups were the activities of the Commons Preservation Society designed to prevent urban landowners from infringing rights of access to common land in and around cities. Some of these ideas found their way into Joseph Chamberlain’s ‘unauthorised programme’ in 1885, and into the manifestos of the Liberal and Labour parties during the decades that span the turn of the century. From a party political perspective they can be seen as attempts to address the perceived needs of the new electorate created by the Second and Third Reform Acts, which added urban and rural working-class males to the middle-class electorate originally addressed by Cobdenites. In any written version of this communication a footnote would now be inserted directing attention to a distinguished body of secondary literature on this topic.1 Taking this literature as read, how does it relate to the theme of these sessions on ‘Morality, Markets and Policy’, bearing in mind the article on ‘Moral Choice and Economic Change’ that our organiser, Barry Supple, has given us as a starting point? The conviction that one of the most important, even tragic, consequences of economic change was rural depopulation and the progressive exclusion of the working classes from the benefits of landownership might appear to be part of a familiar lament based on a form of Virgilian nostalgia to which the British have been held to be peculiarly prone. Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in the eighteenth century and William Wordsworth passim in the nineteenth were merely the leading poetic spokesmen for this mood. Some aspects of land reform are undoubtedly susceptible to such 1 For general treatments, in addition to the specific works cited in later footnotes, see M. Beer, A History of British Socialism, G Bell, London, 1929, Vol. II, pp. 237-45; H M. Lynd, England in the 1880s, New York, 1945; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists; Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861-1881, Routledge, London, 1965; D. E. Martin, ‘Land Reform’ in P. Hollis (ed), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England, 1974; and R. Douglas, Land, People and Politics; A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom, 1878-1952, 1976. 2 ‘pastoral’ or ‘romantic’ interpretations. But the feature on which I shall be focussing concerns the way in which the movement obtained leadership and support from a couple of generations of members of the professional middle classes, many of them priding themselves on being serious students of Britain’s economic history -- the kind of men who were accustomed to analysing contemporary institutions and policies in the languages of political economy.2 Plural usage here is required, first, to take account of the way in which the secular and deductive approach of emerging orthodoxy, chiefly associated with Ricardo and his followers, never established complete hegemony in public debate, even during its heyday.3 And secondly, because orthodox methods of analysis increasingly came under attack from historicists and inductivists from the 1860s onwards, despite the continued authoritative status of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848-71). Especially when confronting the problems raised by land tenure, agrarian economic history, the new form of evolutionary historical jurisprudence associated with Henry Maine, and comparative studies of land tenure furnished evidence that could be used to support or deny conclusions derived from a narrower form of economic analysis.4 Without suggesting that political economy in its increasingly mixed forms during the third quarter of the century was univocal, especially when it came to framing policies, one thing can be taken for granted: its exponents cannot be accused, as many of the spokesmen for radical, Chartist, and romantic agrarian alternatives can, of being hostile towards the selfinterest principle, competition, and private property in general. Moreover, since support for 2 I have spoken of men because all those with whom I shall be concerned here were men. But there were some prominent women involved, notably John Stuart Mill’s step-daughter, Helen Taylor, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Octavia Hill, with Hill’s interest emerging as a byproduct of her concern with the urban housing problem; see Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor, 1875, Cass reprint, 1970. 3 For Christian versions of political economy see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865, Oxford, 1988; and for the Malthusian variant D. Winch, Riches and Poverty; An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834, Cambridge, 1996. Part III. For a persistent conservative and protectionist challenge to orthodoxy see Anna Gambles. Protection and Politics; Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815-52, Royal Historical Society, The Boydell Press, 1999. 4 On the ways in which Maine and his Continental sources, chiefly von Maurer and Nasse, became embroiled in land reform politics see J. W. Burrow, ‘”The Village Community” and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth-Century England’ in N. McKendrick (ed), Historical Perspectives; Studies in English Thought and Society in honour of J. H. Plumb, London: Europa Publications, 1974, pp. 255-84. See also C. Dewey, ‘Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology’, Modern Asian Studies, 6, 3, 1972, 291-328; ‘Particular Polities: Political Economy and the Historical Method’ in S. Collini, D. Winch, and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics , Cambridge, 1983. [[/ 247-75; and A. Diamond (ed), The Victorian Achievment of Sir Henry Maine, Cambridge, 1991. 3 free trade was an issue on which most economists, if not economic historians, were univocal, their views on land reform had to recognize the global economic implications of any policy solutions they advocated. That such exponents of land reform could come to the conclusion that improving access to land was a practical goal worth pursuing through legislation and state intervention raises issues that go beyond rural preservation and conservation, the kinds of things we associate with the founding of bodies like the National Trust in 1895. Again, while my cast of land reformers was not entirely immune to such ideas, and has been found seriously wanting in qualities of hard-headedness on other grounds, what distinguished them was an obligation to show that their objectives conformed with political, economic, and administrative realities. To this one could add the fact that use of the state as an instrumentality was not the first recourse for a generation or two that had learned from domestic and foreign example the dangers of bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, and special interest pleading. Any solutions proposed had to bear in mind such experience and be economically viable as well as desirable on other grounds. To avoid another kind of confusion, it has to be added that hard-headedness does not imply moral neutrality. Quite the reverse in fact, though a modicum of professional distance came with the academicization of economics and economic history at the end of the century. Campaigns against the English system of land ownership on whatever economic grounds were permeated by those powerful moral and political undercurrents which were fed by the well-known successes of the territorial aristocracy in retaining its position in local and national affairs, despite repeal of the Corn Laws and the passage of three reform bills. Indeed, Harold Perkin, the historian who has probably done most to draw attention to the new professional middle classes as a social and political force in nineteenth-century Britain, identified them as being more likely ‘to see politics in moral terms rather than those of economic interest.’5 This clearly does not apply to those professions such as land surveying and the branches of law that stood to lose most from changes in the ways in 5 See ‘Land Reform and Class Conflict in Victorian Britain’ in J. Butt and I. F. Clarke (eds), The Victorians and Social Protest, David and Charles, Archon Books, 1973, pp. 196-7; and The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969, Chapter 7, section 4. 4 which landed property was registered and transacted.6 For others, however, freedom from the constraints posed by obvious economic interests of their own, until the state offered opportunities for employment in bureaucratic roles at least, meant that judgments based on moral criteria assumed a larger role. No student of Victorian politico-economic debate is likely to underestimate the breadth and depth of this moral dimension.7 But the question on which I wish to focus is the relationship between economic hard-headedness and those issues which a later, more profession-conscious generation of economists was apt to describe – sometimes innocently, sometimes with depreciating intent -- as the ‘non-economic’ arguments. In terms that, for once, combine fashionable correctness with responsiveness to the concerns of the period, I am interested in what would now be described as the cultural and institutional context within which economic arguments about the impact of economic change were debated. II At this point we confront another commonplace. Although significant residues of the nineteenth-century campaigns can be found in twentieth-century party programmes and legislation, the nineteenth-century record of achievement fell pathetically short of its original aspirations, especially when the longevity and extent of the effort involved is taken into account. F. M. L. Thompson ranked it alongside republicanism, teetotalism and disestablishmentarianism in this respect, while conceding that ‘it was a movement worthy of more than such cranky associates’.8 Judged by statistics of rural depopulation, the failure of the owner-occupied sector of farming to grow significantly, and the stubborn concentration of land ownership in England (more so in Scotland), the problems addressed were real enough. Yet in becoming a standard element in Liberal and Labour party programmes these problems acquired an emblematic, sometimes merely a strategic status, especially in the post-1884 6 On the surveyors see F. M. L. Thompson, Chartered Surveyors; The Growth of a Profession, London: Routledge, 1968; and on the role of solicitors in obstructing land reform see A. Offer, Property and Politics, 1870-1914; Landowners, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England, Cambridge University Press, 1981. 7 For two contrasting studies that reveal the character of the moral dimension see S. Collini, Public Moralists; Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991; and G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 8 ‘Land and Politics in England in the Nineteenth Century, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1964, p. 23. 5 era of ‘democratic’ politics. They were sufficiently serious emblems, however, to provoke Conservative anxieties and counter-proposals, as well as the formation of organisations such as the Liberty and Property Defence League which brought together those who believed that they posed a serious threat to private property in general.9 With the possible exception of Ireland, the changes in the agrarian order that actually took place owed little to the efforts of land reformers. Attempts to substitute owner occupation for tenancy, and peasant proprietorships for wage labour, came to little when measured against the impact of persistent market forces, especially those released by prolonged agricultural depression after 1873. Rent rolls fell, and if depression did not make agricultural land completely unsalable, it certainly allowed defenders of landed property to reverse the logic of their critics by pointing to the possibility of an ‘unearned decrement’. A. J. Balfour, speaking in 1885, in the hostile atmosphere of the Industrial Remuneration Conference, thought that depression allowed the tenure of land to be addressed in ‘a spirit of scientific impartiality’. It may have been in this spirit that he likened the efforts of land reformers who wanted to halt the downward pressure on urban wage and employment levels caused by rural migration to attempts ‘to drain the German Ocean by cutting a few gaps in a Lincolnshire sea-wall’.10 Impartial or not, Balfour was justified in drawing attention to the gap between diagnosis and the likely results of the remedies proposed. In this respect his remark could be inscribed on the tombs of several of the nineteenth-century land reform campaigns. Some convincing hypotheses, political and economic, have been advanced to explain why so little came from so much effort. My concern, however, is more with the intellectual character and momentum of land reform than with its economic or legislative outcomes. And for once, when addressing an audience of economic historians, it is not necessary to apologize for beginning at least with the leading spokesmen for economic orthodoxy. 9 For a work that gives prominence to land reform as one of the main threats to which Conservatives were responding see Matthew Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, 1886-1914, Edinburgh University Press, 1990. See also N. Soldon, ‘Laissez-Faire as Dogma: The Liberty and Property Defence League, 1882-1914’ in K. D.Brown (ed), Essays in Anti-Labour History, 1974, pp. 208-33; and E. Bristow, ‘The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism, 1882-1914, Historical Journal, 18, 1975, 761-89. 10 See Industrial Remuneration Conference; Report of the Proceedings and Papers read in Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly under the Presidency of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, London: Cassell, 1885, p. 347. 6 Balfour’s perceptive survey of the reasons why land rather than capital was the focus of popular discontent in Britain, and why in consequence town versus country issues had dominated British politics for so long, adduced the following important consideration: ‘To this tendency, produced by party politics, a powerful impulse has been given by the language of theoretical economists. For, according to economic terminology, the products of industry are divided into rent, interest, and wages; the recipients of these three portions being respectively the landlord, the capitalist, and the labourer. And, according to economic theory, the landlord’s share was received by him in exchange for an instrument of production, which, however acquired, was not the result of his or of any human industry, and for one which had besides a constant tendency to increase in value, as society advanced, without any expenditure or exertion on his part. He neither made its original, nor earned its subsequent value. Economic theory, in Balfour’s opinion, had thereby ‘…accidentally given scientific form to any floating jealousy there may be, or rather must be, of a species of wealth, which, from obvious causes, constantly tends to appear larger than it is, and which influences the imagination to a degree out of all proportion to its magnitude, as compared with that of riches accumulated in other and less obvious forms.’11 With the opposite intent, Richard Cobden had made much the same point two decades earlier in a speech often cited in the reform literature: ‘If I were five-and-twenty or thirty, instead of, unhappily, twice that number of years, I would have a League for free trade in Land, just as we have a League for free trade in Corn. You will find just the same authority in Adam Smith for the one as for the other; and if it were only taken up as it must be taken up to succeed, not as a political, revolutionary, Radical, Chartist notion, but taken up on politico-economic grounds, the agitation would be sure to succeed.’12 Cobden’s decision to appeal to Smith’s authority may have had some strategic elements (as we shall see, it overlooks Smith’s more controversial followers), but it was not an arbitrary choice. The Wealth of Nations contains some forthright judgements on primogeniture and entail treated as feudal residues that continued to restrict agricultural development, 11 12 Industrial Remuneration Conference., p. 339. Speech delivered November 23, 1864. 7 particularly in Scotland.13 Thomas Paine could draw as much ammunition from the work as he could from a more traditional radical source, the story of the Norman Yoke. Smith had a soft spot for the English yeomanry and his remarks on the superiority of owner-occupation in agriculture were to be regularly recycled in the land reform literature.14 But it was two of Smith’s earliest followers, Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, who were to supply the economic theory summarized by Balfour. They helped to form nineteenthcentury opinion on land questions by launching theories that treated economic rent as a unique form of income, and land as a factor of production with marked peculiarities that differentiated it from capital and labour. Moreover, in making the central problem of political economy the need to find ways of accommodating Malthusian pressures under conditions in which agriculture was believed to suffer from the law of diminishing returns, they focussed on rising rents as one of the main consequence of economic growth. This basic model conformed with pre- and post-1815 economic conditions and was tailored to the peculiarities of the English tripartite system of land tenure, according to which landowners received contractual rents paid by capitalistic tenant farmers in search of profit, employing wage labour in the process. Another assumption too obvious to be articulated was that concentration of landownership counter-posed the interests of a rich few against the many, a problem of wealth and income distribution that was compounded by the political dominance of the landed interest and imperfections in the market for land. At the end of the century the assumption could be voiced in the form of a convincing retrospective hypothesis: land nationalisation would not have found political favour in a less dynamic economy where any rise in land values was divided among a large number of owner-occupiers.15 Ricardo in particular, especially when his conclusions were fortified by the radical logic of James and John Stuart Mill, left a legacy of argumentation that supports Balfour’s case 13 Wealth of Nations, Glasgow edition, III.ii.6; IV.ii.b.19. ‘Those laws and customs so favourable to the yeomanry, have perhaps contributed more to the present grandeur of England than all their boasted regulations of commerce taken together’. Ibid., III.ii.14. 15 As Balfour said of Continental socialists: ‘It is neither their interest nor their inclination to attack private property in land; not their interest, because such an attack would inevitably array against them the whole body of peasant owners…; not their inclination, because it is the capitalist and shopkeeper, not the landowner, who is the special object of their dislike’; see Industrial Remuneration Conference, pp. 337-8. See also the conclusion of the articles by F. C. Montague on ‘increment, the unearned’ and ‘land nationalisation’ in R. H. I. Palgrave (ed), Dictionary of Political Economy, London: Macmillan, 1896. 14 8 while casting doubt on the ‘accidental’ nature he imputed to the connection with economic theory. The younger Mill acted as the link between the early Ricardian-inspired attacks on the landowning interest during the post-1815 Corn Law debates and the revival of land-reforming campaigns from the 1860s onwards. He played a prominent (he thought decisive) role in the parliamentary debates that led up to the Irish Land Act of 1870, and did little to calm the fears of those who believed that any meddling with ‘free contract’ by granting fixed tenure and fair rents in Ireland would have consequences for English landowners.16 Mill, after all, had drawn up the programme of the Land Tenure Reform Association in 1869, a programme that went well beyond the case for removing obstacles to the sale of land.17 It included state purchase of land for the purposes of subdivision, the construction of smallholdings on crown land, reclamation of waste land for the same purpose, and the formation of agrarian cooperatives to reap the advantages of scale. In an effort to retain the support of working-class reformers seeking outright nationalisation, the programme also included the proposal for a tax on the unearned increment, an idea that can be traced back to James Mill, and one that led to the son’s name being dropped from the Cobden Club Committee.18 The other clauses in the programme incorporated the aims of another pressure group that proved far more successful; the Commons Preservation Society founded in 1865, with Mill’s disciple, Henry Fawcett, playing a major part. They insisted that waste lands, and those requiring an Act of Parliament to enclose them, should be permanently reserved for national purposes, leaving the less fertile land around cities to be ‘retained in a state of wild natural beauty, for the general enjoyment 16 On his contribution to the Irish Land Act see Autobiography in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, thirty-three volumes, Toronto, 1965-91, vol I, p.[206]. Hereafter cited as CW. 17 For a detailed study of Mill’s role see David Martin, John Stuart Mill and the Land Question, University of Hull, 1981. 18 Louis Mallet was responsible for J. S. Mill’s name being dropped on the grounds that useful free-trade reforms were being sacrificed in the interests of what he described as communism, adding that ‘between Feudalists and Communists, there is no chance for Freedom.’ As cited in Clive J. Dewey, ‘The Rehabilitation of the Peasant Proprietor in NineteenthCentury Economic Thought’, History of Political Economy, 6, 1, 1974, p. 38. The full extent of Mallet’s dislike for Mill and Cairnes’s position on land was not revealed until his son edited his father’s Free Exchange; Papers on Political and Economical Subjects, including Chapters on the Law of Value and Unearned Increment, London, 1891. The Cobden Club later found itself divided when some of its members adopted the more radical positions on land reform and welfare of what became known as ‘new liberalism’ towards the end of the century. On this see A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 136-141, 192-4. 9 of the community, and encouragement in all classes of healthful rural tastes, and of the higher order of pleasures’.19 At this point, then, we can observe the confluence of what is now described as ‘romantic ecology’, with its pervasive Wordsworthian overtones, and those arguments that make Mill a precursor of twentieth-century forms of neo-Malthusian eco-criticism and an exponent of the zero-growth economy.20 Close readers of his Principles would not have been surprised by any of the clauses in the Land Tenure Reform Association’s programme. The chapters questioning the absolute right to landed property, and the enthusiastic survey of the merits of peasant proprietorship throughout Europe, summarized a burgeoning literature and provided a rallying point for a new generation of reformers that included, alongside Fawcett, such figures as William Thornton, John Elliot Cairnes, and Thomas Cliffe Leslie.21 All this ensured Mill a prominent place in the litany of politico-economic experts incanted by later land reformers. Mill also played a more direct, though hardly intentional, role in passing the baton to a new generation when he recruited Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection in biology, to the cause of the Land Tenure Reform Association. Wallace was responsible for inclusion of a clause that incorporated preservation of ‘all natural objects or artificial constructions attached to the soil, which are of historical, scientific or artistic interest’. More significantly, he carried the fight into the last quarter of the century by means of his own Land Nationalisation Society formed in 1881. Wallace in turn passed the baton to Henry George, while attempting later to distinguish his own reforms from those advocated by the Georgeite Land Restoration Leagues.22 The spectacular success of George’s campaign 19 See ‘Land Tenure Reform’ in Essays in Economics and Society in CW, vol V, pp. 689-95. Fawcett’s part in the Commons Preservation Society is covered by L. Stephen, Life of Henry Fawcett, London, 1885,Chapter VII. For another contemporary account see G. Shaw Lefevre, English Commons and Forests: The Story of the Battle during the last Thirty Years for Public Rights over the Commons and Forests of England and Wales, Cassell, London, 1894. 20 See J. Bate, Romantic Ecology; Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, Routledge, London, 1991. For Mill’s environmentalist credentials see D. Winch, ‘Thinking Green, Nineteenth-Century Style, John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin’ in M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds), Markets in Hisorical Contexts; Ideas and Politics in the Modern World, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 21 For a study of this group see J. Lipkes, Politics, Religion and Classical Political Economy in Britiain: John Stuart Mill and His Followers, London: Macmillan, 1999. 22 See A. R. Wallace, Land Nationalization: Its Necessity and its Aims, London, 1882. Two unpublished dissertations deal with the activities of the Wallace and George associations; see A. J. Peacock, ‘Land Reform 1880-1919: A Study of 10 is the most striking evidence of the popular appeal of land reform at the close of the century, though the foundations had been well and truly laid by the native radical tradition before his arrival from the United States.23 Even those who were committed to a broader view of the nature of exploitation in capitalist society, the Social Democratic Federation, were forced to engage with George, with some of them, notably William Morris, expressing admiration for his impact on opinion.24 George made converts among the early Fabians, Bernard Shaw in particular. Having decided to do without the benefit of Karl Marx’s analysis, the Fabians granted a large space in their programme for the Law of Rent, land reform, and the taxation of unearned incomes.25 As Sidney Webb proudly noted in retrospect: ‘Tested by a whole generation of further experience and criticism, I conclude that, in 1889, we knew our Political Economy, and that our Political Economy was sound’.26 By the end of the century, then, long-established conceptions of the equal right of all men to the fruits of the earth, and ideas of the historic injury inflicted by enclosure, were now expressed as much in the languages of utilitarianism and political economy as in the more fundamentalist language of rights and injustices. The heady intermixture of economic theory, historical and empirical study of land tenure arrangements, and rural nostalgia was sufficiently entrenched to constitute a problem for the emerging generation of academic economists. They had to engage with a large body of literature -- some of it reaching a mass audience -- that either condemned the science of which they were the newest guardians, or claimed that its founding fathers had provided support for radical conclusions on matters of land reform and taxation. In both respects, professional pride plus a regard for the superior qualities of post-marginalist modes of analysis required them to distinguish popular fallacies and enthusiasms from sound economic inferences. III the Activities of the English Land Restoration League and the Land Nationalisation Society’, MA thesis, University of Southampton, 1961; and S. B. Ward, ‘Land Reform in England, 1880-1914’, PhD thesis, University of Reading, 1976. 23 See J. Saville, ‘Henry George and the British Labour Movement’, Science and Society, XXIV, 1960, 321-33. For a similar comment by a contemporary see J. A. Hobson, ‘The Influence of Henry George in England’, Fortnightly Review, 68, December 1897, pp. 835-44. 24 W. Morris, ‘Henry George’, Justice, April 5, 1884. 25 See A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884-1918, Cambridge, 1966, Chapter II. 26 Preface to Fabian Essays, 1920. 11 Those whom we now call neo-classical economists were almost bound to provide a more sceptical interpretation of the merits of land reform. This was certainly the case with Alfred Marshall, who overcame his scruples about engagement in public controversy by joining the attack on the economics of George and Wallace, while confining more measured discussion of the implications of the rent doctrine to his Principles of Economics (1890).27 Instead of considering in detail how the neo-classicists went about their task, however, I want to pose a more direct question: to what extent was the earlier generation of land-reforming political economists guilty of economic naïveté when endorsing petite culture, and on what grounds were they prepared to sacrifice economic advantage to social and political benefit? A convenient way of stating the issues can be found in an article on Fabian economics by George Stigler, a doughty representative of Chicago-style neo-classicism, who posed the following shrewd question: ‘How could one seriously make a heavy indictment of private property in land when free trade had made wheat – and land – cheap? Late Victorian England was an odd place to offer heavy criticism of feudalism.’ 28 Stigler’s conclusion, in brief, was that the land problem was essentially the creation of intellectuals, who, when faced with emotive issues, were unable to think straight about economics and measure economic magnitudes accurately. To this criticism can be added another expressed by Balfour, echoing Marshall’s criticisms a few years earlier: ‘Whatever be the merits of a system of small holdings, and whatever the demerits of a system of large ones, it cannot be maintained, in face of the fact that England grows nearly twice as much wheat per acre as France, and more than twice as much as Germany and Russia, that the first is favourable, the second unfavourable, to a large gross production of food. And what is true of gross, is manifestly still more true of net production.’29 In a later neo-classical terminology, Balfour was asking why, if you are already on the frontier marked out by the production-possibilities curve, you would wish to opt for a position within 27 See ‘Three Lectures on Progress and Poverty’ given in 1883, as reprinted in Journal of Law and Economics, 12, 1969 and now contained in Collected Works of Alfred Marshall edited by P. Groenewegen in eight volumes, Overstone Press, Bristol, 1997, vol. I, pp.161-203. See also ‘On Rent’ in vol. 2, pp. 489-507, Marshall’s reply to the criticisms of the Duke of Argyll, The Unseen Foundations of Society; An Examination of the Fallacies and Failures of Economic Science due to Neglected Elements, John Murray, London, 1893. 28 ‘Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and the Theory of Fabian Socialism’ as reprinted in Essays in the History of Economics, Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 275. 29 Industrial Remuneration Conference, p. 349. 12 the space marked out by the curve? He assumed that ‘in old and settled countries it is usually more profitable to farm and pay rent for much land, than to own and cultivate little.’ Or, as Marshall put it: ‘It requires as much capital to buy twenty acres as it does to farm a hundred.’ Rich landlords who were willing to take a low rate of return on their capital, possibly for 30 status reasons, performed a useful function, leaving the tenant farmer to employ his more limited capital and greater agricultural skills to best account. It was not necessary to be in possession of marginal productivity theories to appreciate such arguments. For example, take Ricardo’s blunt answer to Malthus’s argument that free trade in corn would entail loss of employment and income from earlier investment in agriculture: ‘We might just as fairly have been told, when the steam-engine, or Mr. Arkwright’s cotton machine, was brought to perfection, that it would be wrong to adopt the use of them, because the value of the old clumsy machinery would be lost to us.’31 Such views enabled Ricardo to predict that the resulting shift of capital and labour into commerce and manufacturing would constitute a gain to every class except landowners, thereby heightening the radical diagnosis of the inherent conflict between the interests of rent-receivers and those of the rest of society. But a case for repeal of the Corn Laws that drew attention to artificially-sustained rental incomes did not carry with it the implication that English tenurial arrangements were incompatible with the most efficient available methods in agriculture -- though entails were often thought to be responsible for under-investment by short-sighted and impoverished inheritors belonging to overly long-sighted families. Ricardo not only assumed the existence of the English arrangements throughout the Principles, but relied on the existence of competitive market forces to generate the conclusions of his ‘strong case’. As a Whig, Malthus may have been more tender-hearted towards the landowning classes, more sensitive to frictions and the social costs of economic change, but he was perfectly 30 Collected Works, vol. I, p. 185. Essay on Profits in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo edited by P. Sraffa, Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, eleven volumes, 1952-1973, vol. IV, p. 33. 31 13 capable of understanding Ricardo’s logic. Indeed, he had been the first to employ it when faced with those who believed that pauperism could be removed by adoption of the ‘cow system’. He was particularly surprised to find Arthur Young, the most outspoken advocate of enclosure in Britain and a much-cited critic of inefficient peasant forms of agriculture in France, advocating the cow system during the grain scarcity of 1800.32 The outcome of such a system, Malthus argued, would be ‘the most cruel and fatal blow to the happiness of the lower classes of people in this country, that they had ever received.’33 Hence too his warnings about the dangers of excessive subdivision of agrarian properties in post-revolutionary France, a diagnosis that was later to be dramatically underlined by Irish problems. Ireland showed what could happen when the facility of potato culture made population increase independent of the price of food and the demand for labour.34 The cow system in England would encourage marriage in the same way that Malthus alleged was true of the unreformed Poor Law, though with the added drawback that it lacked the restraining effect associated with the ‘laudable repugnance to the receiving of parish relief’. Malthus would only support the cow system as a supplement to reform of the Poor Laws, and then only if the acquisition of land was the result of ‘personal exertions’. Since peasant agriculture was vulnerable to crop failure, landownership could never become the ‘principal dependence’ of the poor. The cottager’s prospects would be better served if he retained his status as labourer earning an adequate wage income to support a modest family. One of Malthus’s most persistent tasks in defending his population principle was to emphasize the difference between gross and net agricultural product when weighing the merits of solutions to population pressure, with China (later Ireland) serving as the example of a ‘forced’ population dependent on agriculture dedicated solely to maintaining gross product. 32 Young maintained that scarcity could be avoided if ‘every country labourer in the kingdom’ who had three or more children, could own ‘half an acre of land for potatoes [as an alternative to wheat], and grass enough to feed one or two cows’. See The Question of Scarcity Plainly Stated, 1800. 33 See T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population edited by Patricia James, Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, two volumes, 1989, vol. II, Chapter XI. 34 See T. R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy edited by J. M. Pullen, Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, two volumes, 1989, vol I, pp. 232-52, 396, 393-401. 14 John Ramsay McCulloch was, if anything, a more determined defender of the existing system of land tenure. Like Malthus, he was in favour of primogeniture on economic and political grounds. He also advocated fixed-term leases because they provided tenant farmers with an incentive to invest; and recommended setting rents at competitive levels because that would require occupiers ‘either [to] exert themselves or go to the wall.’ The worst aspect of existing English practice, in McCulloch’s opinion, was that ‘tenants who do not fall behind their neighbours are treated nearly as well as those who go forward’. When judged by these market criteria it followed that the peasant systems of tenure to be found throughout Europe, including those like Prussia that had benefitted from the Stein-Hardenberg reforms, were guilty of allowing ‘slovenly’ agricultural practices: they retarded mechanization and did not provide scope for economies of scale. 35 When faced with Irish problems, McCulloch not only attacked all forms of ‘tenant right’, but managed to mount a daring economic defence of the innocuity of absentee landlordism.36 It follows, almosta fortiori, that he was firmly opposed to James Mill’s proposals for taxing the unearned increment. Indeed, Ricardo, who was probably the first to be made privy to the proposals was also unwilling to give them his support. He agreed that rent could properly be subject to special taxation under Asiatic conditions, but was not convinced that such a policy was practicable or desirable in a developed economy in which a market in land values was fully established.37 Reference to Asiatic conditions recalls the fact that James Mill was responsible for applying Ricardo’s theory of rent to the Indian land revenue question. Exaggerating somewhat, one could say that Mill père et fils, in their daily occupation as servants of the East India Company, were engaged in administering a system that required them to act as the owners of the ultimate title to land, exacting neither more nor less than pure rent from the ryot or peasant cultivator for the ‘original and indestructible powers of the soil’. They became life-long opponents of the pro-landlord prejudices of those who sought to create, by means 35 See J. R. McCulloch, A Treatise on the Succession to Property Vacant by Death, London, 1848; see also D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch; A Study in Classic Economics, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970, pp. 288-9. 36 See A Treatise on the Letting and Occupancy of Land as reprinted in Treatises and Essay on Subjects Connected with Economical Policy, Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh, 1853. Quotation on p. 168. 37 For James Mill’s proposals and Ricardo’s criticisms of them see Elements of Political Economy as reprinted in D. Winch (ed), James Mill; Selected Economic Writings, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966, pp. 197-200, 338-42. 15 of ‘permanent settlement’, an Indian landowning class along English lines.38 It was partly across Indian territory that John Stuart Mill advanced on the Irish problem of tenant right.39 Nor was he alone in this: George Campbell, Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces of India, did so in less extreme fashion in a pamphlet on The Irish Land (1869) that was to prove helpful to Gladstone when preparing his 1870 and 1881 Irish Land Bills. An uncertain combination of Indian and Irish experience, with a strong dash of Francophilia, helped to shift Mill’s inherited anti-landlord views decisively in favour of peasant proprietorship in the 1840s, thereby overturning the original classical remedy for Ireland, namely the imposition of the English system of capitalist farming.40 Transmutation of the Irish cottar into a day-labourer was ‘rather a scheme for the improvement of Irish agriculture, than of the condition of the Irish people. .[It] has no charm for infusing forethought, frugality, or self-restraint, into a people devoid of them’.41 English ideas and prejudices were not applicable to Indian and Irish problems, to societies where competition merely had destructive effects on the peasantry, and where different customs dictated different solutions. The same inheritance prevented Mill from adopting what might be described as the Burkean position: English customs and peculiarities were too deeply infected by landlordism to be defensible. This was not a mode of thought that came naturally to Mill, which makes his willingness to appropriate Wordsworth’s sentimental defence of the Lakeland ‘statesmen’ and Maine’s arguments on village communities all the more remarkable – or perhaps one should say, all the more opportunistic.42 At this point other considerations connected with Mill’s idealism and neo-Malthusian ecological concerns must be brought into the picture. These were revealed in a pessimistic economic diagnosis of the future for the labouring classes under the existing system of 38 For the classic study of this episode see E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. For the connections and disjunctions between thinking on Ireland and India see R. D. C. Black, ‘Economic Policy in Ireland and India in the Time of J. S. Mill’, Economic History Review, XXI, 1968, 321-36 now reprinted in Economic Theory and Policy in Context; The Selected Essays of R. D. Collison Black, Edward Elgar, Aldershot, 1993, pp.18-33. 40 For Mill’s part in achieving this shift see R. D. C. Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817-1870, Cambridge, 1960, Chapter 2. 41 Principles in CW, vol II, p. 326. 42 On the Lakeland statesmen see Principles in CW, p. 253. On Maine see Mill’s enthusiastic review of Village Communities in Writings on India in CW, vol ??, pp. 215-28. 39 16 wage labour, where any increase in numbers faced the prospect of rising food costs. Peasant proprietorships in agriculture and cooperative manufacturing enterprises were the ultimate solution to this dilemma. Unlike his mentors Mill had come to the conclusion that further economic growth in a mature industrial society, such as he perceived England to be at the century’s mid-point, was no longer the best means of raising living standards. Nor was he happy with the prospect of a society permanently dedicated to a competitive scramble for material wealth. With firm control having been established over population growth by means of delayed marriage and contraception, aided, if necessary, by emigration, it would be preferable to embrace a state of affairs in which population remained stable and any net capital formation was directed towards reduced physical toil and improvements in the quality of life.43 A large part of Mill’s case for peasant proprietorship was based on the increased prudence in population matters that he observed in France. With such prudence came reduced risk of the Irish problem of sub-division of properties, together with all the other benefits deriving from the productive ‘magic’ of ownership. One could say, therefore, that Mill’s idealistic eye was as much focussed on an improved future for wage-earners in a virtuous stationary state as on the realities of maintaining a domestic agricultural system capable of producing food by least-cost methods. Repeal of the Corn Laws had reduced the priority attached to this problem, and Mill had formally announced that preserving sources of capital accumulation in Britain was no longer a problem.44 Alternatively, one could conclude that whatever economic benefits England derived from ‘high farming’ were being purchased at too high a social cost in the form of exclusion from roles that allowed scope for non-dependency and selfdevelopment. Mill’s late followers did not remain faithful to him in all these particulars, but he certainly succeeded in setting the moral tone of their contributions to land reform. But it is important not to exaggerate the extent to which Mill’s antagonisms and future projections affected his capacity for hard-headed analysis and regard for practical 43 44 See especially Principles in CW, vol III, pp. 754-6. See Principles, CW, vol. III, Book IV, Chapter IV. 17 realities. The intemperate language and radical proposals contained in England and Ireland (1868) were not reflected in his parliamentary speeches on the Irish Land Bill. Nor was he entirely unequivocal in his Irish recommendations in all editions of the Principles. But in the late 1860s preservation of the Anglo-Irish Union in the face of the twin threat posed by English insularity and indifference on the one side, and Fenian outrage on the other, suggested the need to frighten the English public into accepting Gladstone’s more moderate measures.45 And while Mill advocated state purchase and disposal of land, and governmentappointed commissions to value land for the purpose of fixing rents in Ireland and assessing the unearned increment in England, he was opposed to all schemes that did not entail giving landowners full compensation at current market prices. Confidence in the Ricardian prediction of rising land values made this seem like a good bargain for the state. In resisting the demands for land nationalisation within the Land Tenure Reform Association, Mill did so on familiar grounds: state management was unfit for the task.46 The administration of commons and waste lands was as much as could be expected from the state for the moment. 47 IV In casting doubt on Mill’s attempt to construct a scheme of social reform ‘on the somewhat frail foundation of a peasant proprietory’, Balfour thought Mill had overreacted to the defects of English land tenure, many of which had been removed in the interim. How could it be claimed, in the abstract, that any one system of tenure was preferable: 45 A large literature now surrounds this subject. See E. D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics; Tenant-Right and Nationality, 1865-1870, Cambridge, 1974, Chapter II; idem, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: The Principles of Political Economy, 1848-1865’, Historical Journal, XIII, 1970, 216-36; idem, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: Reform and the Integrity of Empire’, Historical Journal, XIII, 1970, 419-42; L. Zastoupil, ‘Moral Government: J. S. Mill on Ireland’, Historical Journal, XXVI, 1983, 707-17; and B. L. Kinzer, ‘J. S. Mill and Irish Land: A Reassessment’, Historical Journal, XXVII, 1984, 111-27. See also the chapter on Ireland in B. L. Kinzer, A. P. Robson, and J. M. Robson (eds), A Moralist In and Out of Parliament 1865-1868, Toronto, 1992. 46 Fawcett did not favour taxation of the unearned increment and became a major opponent of land nationalisation; see ‘The Nationalisation of Land’, Fortnightly Review, December 1, 1872, pp.627-43. For another admirer of Mill who carried on the fight against Henry George see A. Toynbee, Progress and Poverty; A Criticism of Mr. Henry George, Kegan Paul, London, 1883. 47 ‘… I do not know that it may not be reserved for us in the future; but at present I decidedly do not think it expedient. I have so poor an opinion of State management, or municipal management either, that I am afraid many years would elapse before the revenue realized for the State would be sufficient to pay the indemnity which would justly be claimed by the dispossessed proprietors.’ See speech on Land Tenure Reform, 15 May, 1871 as reprinted in Public and Parliamentary Speeches, CW, vol. ??, p. 419.and 18 ‘…before judgment is passed with respect to any given country, reference must be made, not merely to general considerations, which apply to it in common with other countries, but to the peculiarities of its soil and climate, to the distances of its markets, to the aptitudes of its people, their usages, and the character of their agriculture.’48 Mill was vulnerable to such criticisms. His version of historical and cultural relativism did not apply to England. He had minimized the less favourable results of peasant proprietorship abroad and did not pay much attention to the problems of converting English agricultural labourers into farmers on their own account, requiring access to capital in order to do so effectively. The kind of supplementary role played by allotments, of a kind that even the most status-quo minded commentators would have accepted, fell far short of Mill’s hopes. Mill and his followers certainly succeeded in altering an Irish perception of political economy as a landlord science, but they did not convince a succeeding generation of more hard-headed economists that the case for peasant proprietorship in England had been established, outside the realm of market gardening at least. With the benefits of free trade in foodstuffs arriving now in the form of cheap wheat from the Middle West, and the advent of refrigerated shipping, only ‘high farming’ could compete, where this entailed a larger acreage per farm than the advocates of peasant proprietorship envisaged. It also entailed exacerbation of those features of British society that Wallace and George deplored and attributed to private landowning -- further rural depopulation, emigration to the United States and the ‘new’ colonies of Australasia and Canada, and the growth of towns and cities. Cutting a few gaps in the Lincolnshire sea-wall would not reverse this process. Rural labour was being pushed into the towns by depression and mechanization rather than by the greed of status-seeking landowners. It was also being pulled there by cheaper transport, the spread of education, and rising consumer expectations. This meant too that the best hope for wageearners (when suitably equipped by education to appreciate the virtues of thrift and the need to avoid alcoholic excess) came from higher wages and steady employment – a return to Malthus’s priorities against a background in which pauperism had chiefly become an urban phenomenon. The new advocates of the cow system, like Chamberlain’s lieutenant, Jesse 48 Industrial Remuneration Conference, p. 342. 19 Collings, could still extol the virtues of owner-occupation and rural life generally, but only in tandem with protectionism, the fate of which was settled, temporarily, by the defeat of Tariff Reform in 1906.49 If there is a moral to this story it does not lie in any summary of the brute facts of agrarian economic life at the end of the century. After all, if anything the case for land reform was spurred on by depression and survived agricultural revival. It was not going to be killed off by anything as cerebral as the opinions of people like Balfour and Marshall. The jealousies about which Balfour had complained retained their force during and after the First World War, though Lloyd George was thwarted by that event from introducing his own ambitious programme of land reform. But within the loose-knit yet hard-headed community I have been considering, there was less disposition to emphasize the radical conclusions that could be drawn from classical forms of political economy and more awareness of living in a different world. Any campaign directed solely at the monopolistic properties of landowning, especially when accompanied by ‘single-tax’ proposals, was bound to raise the question of discriminatory treatment, plus fears that if land became the first it would not be the last form of property to come under attack. In what respects did land differ from other forms of capital? In a society that was no longer dependent on domestic agriculture to meet most of its demand for food and raw materials, how did agriculture differ in essentials from other forms of capitalistic enterprise? If it was accepted that there were economies of scale in manufacturing, how did the trend towards larger farm size differ in its rationale from the increasing size of industrial enterprises? On such matters the marginal productivity approach did have an effect on the way in which economists approached the questions. Since I cannot deal with this at the end of an over- long presentation, let me illustrate the change of perspective with two brief examples, both of which centre on Marshall, the representative figure for the 1890s. It was a sign of a more pervasive shift in perspective when Marshall, supported by other economist-witnesses before the Royal Commission on Local Taxation in 1897, made 49 See J.Collings, Land Reform, Occupying Ownership, Peasant Proprietary and Rural Education, Longmans Green, New York, 1906 20 the simple opening announcement that ‘taxes are paid by persons, not things’; and that in consequence the inquiry should not relate to ‘the distribution of the burden of taxation between different kinds of property, but to the distribution of the burden between different classes of person with special reference to their interests in different kinds of property’.50 My second example involves a contrast with the entire classical approach adopted by Ricardo and his followers, up to and including Mill and Cairnes. For these two generations of political economists, the clue to rising wages could be found almost exclusively in what happened to food prices. Marshall, having announced the temporary suspension of the law of diminishing returns in agriculture, having declared that rent was ‘simply the chief species of a large genus of economic phenomena’, and after taking full account of the similarities between the various factors of production when interpreted in the light of the theory of marginal productivity, was able to argue that in a modern economy the wage-earner had an equally important stake in what happened, say, to the price of steel.51 50 See Official Papers by Alfred Marshall, Macmillan for the Royal Economic Society, London, 1926, p.334. For temporary suspension see ‘Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry’ in A. C. Pigou (ed), Memorials of Alfred Marshall, Macmillan, London, 1925, p. 326. The other conclusions are a distillation of the conclusions of Principles, Book VI on the distribution of the national income, but see especially Chapters IX and X on rent and land tenure respectively and Chapters XI and XII on distribution of the national product. 51 21  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Access to Land: Land Reform and Commons Preservation in Nineteenth-Century England Description An account of the resource A presentation given at the 75th Anniversary Conference of the Economic History Society in Glasgow as part of the sessions on ‘Morality, Markets and Policy’. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Winch Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 31 March 2001 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context IHA/Winch/77 A. J. Balfour Adam Smith Alfred Marshall Alfred Russel Wallace Arthur Young Barry Supple Chartism Cobden Club Commons Preservation Society Corn Laws David Ricardo Entails F. M. L. Thompson Fabianism George Stigler Harold Perkin Henry Fawcett Henry George J. E. Cairnes J. R. McCulloch James Mill John Stuart Mill Joseph Chamberlain Land Nationalisation Society Land Reform Land Restoration League Land Tenure Reform Association Liberty and Property Defence League Malthus Marx Oliver Goldsmith Political Economy Poor Laws Primogeniture Reform Act Richard Cobden Thomas Cliffe Leslie Utilitarianism William Thornton William Wordsworth https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/intellectualhistory/files/original/6edb1e64164da094ab62e3b1c42134e3.pdf c9822c8abc80e72590dbb982d06c33ca PDF Text Text Donald Winch The Social Sciences and the Scottish Enlightenment Richard Whatmore, in the two previous lectures in this series, has given you some idea of what two figures in the French Enlightenment, Montesquieu and Rousseau, represent when seen within the context of the history of the social sciences; he will be giving further illustrations of this when he deals with Turgot and Condorcet in a future lecture, bringing the subject closer to the social and political event that dominated much social and political analysis at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, namely the French Revolution. In this lecture and the next in the series the scene is shifted to Scotland and to the two main figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith, the younger of whom Smith, died in the first year of the French revolution. Their names are more firmly linked with other revolutions: the American revolution which broke out in the year of Hume’s death, where his political essays and ideas proved valuable to the framers of the American constitution, and where Smith’s economic ideas were also influential; the English rovolution of 1688, an event that continued to dominate English political thinking; and another historical revolution, more distant in time, but equally significant to them as social and political theorists, namely the transition from feudalism to commercial or civil society. If you know something about Smith’s work, WN, you might think that I should add the Industrial Revolution in Britain to this list. But I shall try to show in my next lecture and a later one on classical political economy, this association is a misleading one, where not downright wrong. Let me take two of the revolutions mentioned so far. The first is the English revolution of 1688, when England deposed a Stuart monarch for the second time, but this time, instead of undergoing a civil war and attempting to create a Puritan commonwealth or republic, as they did unsuccessfully between 1642 and 1660, they established a peculiar form of mixed governement, a limited or parliamentary monarchy -- a system that was widely considered throughout Europe to have endowed Britain with a combination of liberty and stability not to 1 �be found in the absolute monarchies on the Continent, including the richest and most powerful monarchy, that of France. Native English pride in such matters was fortified by the interest shown in its political institutions by such foreigner observers as Montesquieu and Voltaire. This revolution and the peculiarities of the English form of government were of special interest to Hume, partly because he wrote a History of England that tried to place English events in a larger European framework, partly because he wrote a number of influential essays on English political institutions and party ideologies. Hume and Smith, speaking as Scottish observers of the English scene -- a scene Scotland had joined with the Act of Union in 1707 -- took a cooler, less congratulatory, and more cosmopolitan view of English history and institutions than many of its patriot supporters. But like everybody else in the eighteenth century, Hume and Smith found it impossible not to remember that English and Scotttish history in the previous century had been dominated by civil strife centring on conflict over religion. Remember too, that in Scotland in particular there were still Jacobites, supporters of the Stuart claimants to the throne, and that there was a Jacobite rebellion in 1745, during the lifetime of Hume and Smith. England might seem, therefore, to be the embodiment of political stability under its relatively new constitution, but they had good reason not to feel too complacent about its permanency, its immunity from fundamental conflict over religion and related constitutional matters. The second of the remaining revolutions that was important to both men was, if anything, more significant because they both devoted considerable attention to it in their writings. It was the silent revolution that had occurred first and most completely in England some two to three hundred years before. It was the revolution that had led to the decline of feudalism and the creation of a centralised form of monarchy as a result of various socio-economic forces connected with the emergence, first in the towns, later in the countryside, of what they called commercial or civil society. Hume provided an analysis of this process in his History, and Smith followed his lead, devoting Book III of WN to the way in which it had occurred. Indeed, Smith’s account of this revolution was to be the foundation on which a long series of authors in the nineteenth century, among them Marx and Weber, were to construct their 2 �own account of this process separating the modern world of commerce, later to be called capitalism, from its feudal predecessor. From Marx’s perspective, therefore, Hume and Smith were among those bourgeois pioneers of a form of history that he called materialism, applying the insights provided by economic changes into an understanding of large-scale social and political change. While I think that the proto-Marxian aspects of Scottish thinking can and have been exaggerated in histories of social science, there is no doubt that this was where Marx obtained much of his own inspiration. For Hume and Smith, however, although there was an economic foundation to the process of transition, what they stressed were the legal and political benefits, those that centred on the creation of civil liberty defined as security of property and person under the rule of law. This was the most significant achievment of modern society, and it also explains why justice plays such an important role in their moral and political theorising. One of the best accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment that has appeared since our reading list was compiled, Christopher Berry’s Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, gives a balanced account of this feature of Scottish thinking, usually known as a form of ‘conjectural’ or ‘philosophical’ history, organised, in the case of Smith, into four stages, where each can be associated with a particular mode of subsistence: hunter-gatherers at the bottom of the scale, followed by pastoralists, and then, in Europe at least, by the system known as feudalism or settled forms of agrarian life, with commercial society being the latest stage. Such histories of social change over long periods became the hallmark of a number of Scottish thinkers, notably Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Smith’s pupil, John Millar. They provided ways of classifying different types of society and tracing the different forms of law, government, and manners associated with the different stages. Thus Millar employed it in his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks to discuss the phenomenon later known as class, using the role of women in each type of society as a kind of index of other changes in social relations. The other main use to which conjectural history was put was to provide a comparative-historical framework in which historical and anthropological evidence, especially that concerning non-European societies, could be situated and subjected 3 �to closer analysis. Harking back to Montesquieu, an influential figure in Scotland as elsewhere, one can say that it supplied the kind of historical dimension that his classifications and sociological analyses of different forms of government lacked. Montesquieu, of course, employed historical evidence, but he did not possess a strong notion of the dynamics of historical change. Conjectural history organised according to stages was, therefore, a peculiarly Scottish way of meeting what I described in my opening lecture as the challenge of increased knowledge concerning non-European societies. Incidentally, do not take the term ‘conjectural’ too literally: the conjectures involved a theory of development, but they both made efforts to ensure that it conformed with the state of real historical knowledge of their time. It was conjectural in respect of earlier periods, where no written records existed, but where new ethnographic evidence concerning pastoralists and hunter-gatherers could be used to supplement the record. The use of history, in this conjectural form, however, can only be properly understood as part of the larger impulse outlined in my first lecture, a philosophical impulse that had shfited towards offering naturalistic explanations for social, political, and economic events and institutions. And since this impulse has a philosophical foundation I need to say something about the philosophy of Hume and Smith, beginning this week with Hume, who was undoubtedly the most original of all the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, where originality also entailed considerable controversy. Hume announced his intentions boldly in his first book, the THN, in 1739. giving the work a subtitle that announced its purpose, namely to introduce the experimental method, the method of Newton, into moral subjects. Many eighteenth-century philosophers might have announced such an intention, but there are reasons why Hume’s attempt was more far-reaching, more radical than most of his contemporaries. For Hume, the experimental method was not simply an attempt to apply empirical methods to moral subjects, where this included morals, politics, and economics, but to dispense entirely with religion and the kinds of arguments that linked science with theology. In other words, Hume was a militant secularist, an agnostic if not an atheist (for reasons to be mentioned shortly), and all his writings are a covert or explicit attack 4 �on the byproducts of what he called the ‘religious hypothesis’. Many eighteenth-century philosophers were anti-clerical, attacking through satire the clergy and the doctrines of the Church. Some of these were deists, those who were content to believe that there was sufficient evidence of design in the moral and physical universe to warrant acceptance of the idea of a Designer, but whose religion might not go much further than that to accord significance to the bible or what was known as revealed truth. In Hume’s case, however, he not only applied his empiricism to undermine belief in miracles and other sources of religious faith, but attacked the entire idea that we could infer the existence of God from the existence of order in the universe. In short, he was the complete secularist and humanist, placing man and man’s creations at the centre of the philosophical universe as completely as Copernicus had placed the sun at the centre of the astronomical world. Hume, in fact, did what Darwin was to do over a century later, namely show that one could give an account of the workings of the biological world that showed how design and order could be achieved without a Designer, proving too that no religious or moral conclusions concerning human conduct could be drawn from what occurred in Nature, however well-ordered. To appreciate this aspect of Hume fully one has to consider the interpenetration of science and religion during this pre-Darwinian period -- Hume’s intellectual radicalism. Holding such positions, and taking only minimal precautions to disguise the more shocking aspects of them, meant that Hume could not be apponted as a teacher in a university, as Smith and most other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment were. Even praising the peaceful nature of Hume’s death in 1776, as Smith did, made Smith himself highly suspect in the eyes of orthodox Christians. No infidel could be allowed to have died in anything but a state of anguish. In the history of the social sciences there are many examples of those who combined their scientific aims with a personal or philosophical attachment to religion. Smtih was thought to be some kind of deist, and Malthus, a figure I shall speak about in a later lecture, was actually a clergyman. Science and religion do not have to be in conflict with one another, though that seemed to be the conclusion that should be drawn from both Hume and Darwin’s work. More 5 �often in the social sciences, however, what one finds is that religion, a set of metaphysical beliefs that has no empirical foundation, has been reinvented by social scientists. This was certainly the case with August Comte’s ‘religion of humanity’ and many would argue that Marxism gave its form of social science religious colouring, lending its historical message a kind of Messianic flavour. In another sense, of course, religious beliefs and practices have become an important field of study for social scientists, especially sociologists and anthropologists. Whatever the personal religious affiliations of the social scientist, religion cannot be ignored in any empirical account of social and political cohesion. Indeed, one of the lessons drawn by social scientists after the French revolution -- when an attempt was made to create a secular form of religion that would replace Catholicism -- was that religious belief was essential to understanding social and political behaviour. That could also be described as one of Hume’s conclusions. He would not have been a very good historian if he had tried to ignore the religious dimension to English history. Nor would he have been a good political scientist for his own day if he had ignored the role played by what he called ‘superstition’ and ‘enthusiasm’ in provoking and even defining people’s political aims and behaviour. A great deal of the rhetoric of political life was soaked in religious doctrine, where the doctrine of the divine right of kings was only the most obvious example. Being a patriotic Englishman during the eighteenth century and beyond also meant being a Protestant, very much as it does to the Unionist community in Northern Ireland today. Given Hume’s position on religion, however, it will not surprise you to learn that he thought that this kind of mixture of religion with politics was the most divisive and most potentially destructive kind of forces, the enemy of moderation, clear-thinking, and the most dangerous source of political instability. Hence too one of his most sensible or Machiavellian opinions, depending on your point of view, namely that the Anglican system of having an established church, where the clergy were, so to speak, on the payroll of the state, was one way of keeping them in order, preventing them from seeking fame by becoming popular demagogues. So far, I have not said enough about the core of Hume’s philosophy, the grounds on which he defended his brand of scepticism. This can be found in what can either be described as his 6 �secular empiricism or his anti-rationalism. Hume rejected some forms of extreme scepticism, otherwise known as Pyrrhonism -- those that denied that it was possible to acquire any real knowledge of the external world of objects and persons. To Hume this was like atheism or a destructive kind of relativism. Atheism was simply a mirror version of religious dogmatism: it proclaimed dogmatically that nothing could be known about God, rather than being content with saying that we do not have enough evidence to believe in God. This may seem like an over-subtle distinction in religion, but it certainly is not when we are talking about science defined as I said in my first lecture simply as our capacity to acquire regular, rule-governed forms of knowledge. To Hume, the extreme sceptics refuted themselves every time they undertook the simplest of everyday transactions. Thus even if they pretended to be total sceptics in their studies, believing that nothing could be known about the external world, they disproved themselves when they chose to leave their studies by the door rather than by the window. We could not live our lives without some assumption about regularities in our physical surroundings and social circumstances, some belief that causes were regularly accompanied by effects. Life was not a series of random events, and none of us lived our lives with such a ridiculous preconception. Nevertheless, Hume’s brand of scepticism which he called ‘mitigated scepticism’ was anti-rationalist in the sense that it denied our capacity to demonstrate rationally, a prioristically, that ‘a’ would always cause ‘b’ under any and all circumstances. Establishing causal connections was simply a matter of observing that ‘a’ seemed to occur in conjunction with ‘b, and possibly before ‘b’ in time. But this was purely a matter of empirical generalisation, rather than a mathematical or deductive demonstration. In Hume’s language, we could acquire proofs but not demonstrations, where the proofs took the form of observations of ‘constant contingency’ that had so far not been disproved, such as our expectation that the sun will rise tomorrow. The existence of such proofs of regularity ruled out total scepticism and complete relativism as well, though it also meant that someone who had lived his life in a hot climate would have good reason to be sceptical if he was told that in cold climates an elephant could stand on water. Hence Hume’s description of himself as 7 �a mitigated sceptic, which simply meant that one should always proportion belief in causal regularity to the degree of reliable evidence and act accordingly. In matters of morals and politics, where the evidence was not as obvious as the daily rising of the sun, this meant that one should believe and act on probabilistic evidence: the most probable hypothesis, carrying the most weight by explaining the largest number of observations, if not all of them. This cautious empiricism also explains something important about the social and political theorising of Hume and Smith: their unwillingness to engage in predictions of future social states. There was sufficient evidence to explain many past events and social developments, even to propound various laws and maxims when faced with present policies and regimes, but the knowledge we had of human affairs did not license predictions, if only because the human factor -- the role of sheer folly and stupidity, if you like -- ruled this out. For the remainder of this lecture I would now like to show how Hume’s scepticism and anti-rationalism influenced the nature of his substantive contributions to moral and political theorising, taking two main examples, his theory of justice and the related attack he launched on the doctrine of the social contract as a theory of political obligation. In other words, how he set about accounting for the phenomenon of political allegiance, stability, and breakdown. But first justice, where this relates to what Hume considered the most fundamental aspect of life in society, the ability to regulate disputes centring on ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. No society could exist without such rules. We can understand this by means of a comparison with Hobbes's state of nature as one of war of all against all. In Hume's terms, that is comparable to a shipwreck, in which the only rules are those of individual survival, where no rules of justice have relevance. At the other end of the spectrum lies a world of plenty and universal brotherhood: that too is a world in which mine and thine do not need to be distinguished. I can meet your needs without stinting on my own. But we live most of our lives in circumstances that are intermediate between these extremes. The goods of the world do not exist in abundance by comparison with our needs and wants, and we are selfish animals equipped with limited benevolence towards our fellow creatures. In such circumstances rules to determine the inevitable conflicts over matters of rightful ownership 8 �are essential: social life is impossible without them. They are in this respect, probably prior to in time, and more important than the precise forms of government under which men have lived. This was to become one of Hume's responses to those who advanced contractarian theories to explain the origin of government: it enabled him to say that men could arrive at peaceful ways of living together before subjecting themselves to the authority of government. Hume, and Smith agreed on this, regarded the establishment of rules or conventions on this matter, rules of commutative justice, as essential to any form of society, regardless of how rich or poor, how much or how little property there was to become the object of disputes. Having said this, there is no doubt that the richer society becomes, the greater the necessity for rules regarding security of property become: hence what I said earlier about the transition from feudalism to commercial society, where feudalism was associated in their minds with disorder. How societies arrived at such rules or conventions, therefore, was the most important question concerning their origins and survival prospects. Since you have heard a lecture on Rousseau, you will have obtained some idea of how important questions about the origin of society were to social science in the eighteenth century, and Hume and Smith provide a sharp contrast with Rousseau’s manner of theorising, chiefly because they start from a quite different assumption. As Hume said: 'Man is born in a family, is compelled to maintain society from necessity, from natural inclinations, and from habit.' In brief, they assume at the outset that man has always lived in society of some kind; that he could not exist in some imagined state of nature outside society; and that there was no need to have resort to fictions like the social contract to explain why or how he consented to form society and under what conditions he agreed to remain there. These were all rational constructs that had little or no empirical foundation, and they also tended to rely on another dubious hypothesis, namely that since men were at heart unsociable creatures they had to be manipulated into accepting the rules of social existence, where the manipulators could be the rich and powerful, or simply those who were most cunning. Rather than use such rational constructs and conspiracy theories, they preferred to seek explanations in the ordinary everyday transactions of social life, where 9 �instincts and passions common to all men, were the chief motivating factors rather than reason. Hence Hume’s famous aphorism that reason is and always ought to be the slave of the passions, because reason could never motivate an action, merely justify it in retrospect. Hence too his account of justice as an artificial rather than a natural virtue. You will see a quotation in the handbook, p. 17, number 3, from an essay on the original contract, which gives a highly condensed version of Hume’s position on this. I advise you to read the whole section there before turning to his other work for fuller exposition. On Hume's account, the natural virtues were those most obviously displayed in our friendships and within our families. They depended on qualities like affection, generosity, humanity, gratitude, liberality, fidelity, and prudence, with each social act being capable of arousing sympathetic pleasure and hence approval in the eyes of spectators. Such transactions were autonomous and self-sufficient; they required no further justification. The motive and the result were transparent. Nor were they capable of being reduced to complicated versions of self-love, as was held by Hobbes. By contrast, an artificial virtue, such as justice and the performance of promises, where Hume treats the repayment of a debt as his textbook example, was not selfsufficient: they required a motive for performance, and each transaction was dependent on the belief that other transactions of a similar kind would conform to the same rules. The mere honesty of the act was not a sufficient motive. Nor is an appeal to self-interest: left to my own devices, I would not repay the loan. Nor are you likely to get much further by saying that it is in the public interest for me to repay my debts. That is too remote, too refined a motive to act on most people when the act conflicts with private interest. We need to find another motive, or if you like, we need to invent another motive: hence its artificiality. But Hume was anxious to distinguish his idea of artificiality from that advanced by more cynical moralists, such as Bernard de Mandeville, who had argued that all moral codes as well as the rules of justice were an imposition on unsociable man in the interests of making him sociable. They were literally inventions, but by the powerful and cunning in society, or the rich and powerful, who realised that unless they could induce their fellow men to accept ideas of honour, virtue, and justice by working on their pride, life would decline into savagery. 10 �Hume's assumption of natural sociability dispenses with part of Mandeville's argument, but in describing justice as artificial, Hume obviously felt the necessity to disclaim that the rules of justice were arbitrary. For this purpose he has recourse to the idea of convention. A convention differs, however, from a promise. And the homely example he uses to bring this home is as follows: 'Two men who pull the oars of a boat do it by an agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each other.' We do it because we have learned that it is the only way in which we shall get to where we want to be. Similarly, in the case of justice, we form conventions or tacit agreements based on a sense of common interest to abstain from infringing the property rights of others because we have learned to recognise that this is the only way of preserving the benefits conferred on us by society. In this way we establish a motive that connects private interest with public interest. What one can say, therefore, is that self-interest is converted, through acceptance of the convention, into a remedy for the defects of our selfishness, our avidity, our short-sightedness, which might otherwise lead us to obey only those rules that coincide with our short-term interests. Hume expressed this by means of a comparison between a wall built up by the natural virtues and a vault constructed on artificial virtues. The wall was composed of individual acts of natural benevolence, where each act simply added to the height or thickness of the wall. The vault, however, though equally composed of individual stones or bricks, could not be built in this fashion. It required something more to hold it in place: a prior acceptance that a vault was needed and that it could only be constructed by following a strict set of rules, even though following the rules did not coincide with our personal interests and inclinations on all occasions. One had to accept justice holistically, making a kind of cost-benefit calculation of gains and losses: 'It is sufficient if the whole plan or scheme be necessary to the support of civil society, and if the balance of good, in the main, do thereby preponderate much above that of evil.' (E,305) Public utility or a sense of what was conducive to the regular continuation of social existence could therefore be the only motive for acting justly. So justice is artificial, but not arbitrary. It becomes ‘second nature’, another interpretation of artificial. 11 �There are several important consequences of Hume's position. Let me list three of them before dealing with them more fully. First, the rules of justice presume a social learning process, which also means that they have a history. Secondly, the way in which Hume has posed the problem focusses very much on property. Thirdly, it is important to note that he has confined the rules of justice to commutative justice rather than distributive justice. The rules of justice arise out of ordinary experiments in daily life. It is a learning-bydoing process which has some evolutionary characteristics: we find out what works, and what goes wrong when we disregard the rules we have formulated in the course of our social dealings. Children have to learn to respect the mine and thine of life, and so do families and whole societies. The learning process can also be compared and linked with what Hume has to say about our powers of understanding. In the ordinary course of social life we form conjunctions between acts and events. These become the basis for stable expectations: having worked to our advantage in the past, we expect them to work in the same manner in future. Custom and habit extend experience from case to case, allowing us to form general rules. Reflection on these conjunctions enables us to form general rules, and their inflexibility gives stability, predictability, coherence, confidence, reducing the costs and increasing the benefits of social life, giving us courage to undertake things. Notice too, that although Hume had objected to the idea of these rules being imposed arbitrarily, from above, or behind our backs by the wise or cunning, he was prepared to acknowledge that once the rules existed, it was possible for politicians to assist nature, to lend artificial reinforcement to them. But he still denied the Mandevillian position: 'The utmost politicians can perform, is, to extend the natural sentiments beyond their original bounds; but still nature must furnish the materials, and give us some notion of moral distinctions'. (T, 500) Secondly, there is the emphasis on protection of property that some have said gives Hume's position an economic bias. By emphasising the problem of scarcity of resources in relation to wants, this is certainly the case. Hume's way of thinking is capable of being extended to cover personal rights as well as property rights, but the property bias does 12 �illustrate the importance Hume attaches to economic life, to material prosperity as the key to what he describes as civilisation, another learning process which I will deal with tomorrow. Finally, there is the restriction to commutative justice -- a confirmation of what I have just said about the economic bias of Hume's thinking. But it is worth considering why Hume rejects the idea that we can formulate rules concerning the distribution of property and incomes. This would entail general acceptance of some scale of relative merit, wisdom, or virtue that can be applied to individuals -- one that could be used to determine who should get more, who less. Hume could hardly deny that ideas on this matter had been given currency, though, typically, he treats the ideas of levellers as those of political fanatics, where the fanaticism has to be attributed to religion. He acknowledged that there was something agreeable about a communistic ideal in a world of plenty; and in the idea of redistributing goods from the very rich to the very poor. Nevertheless, he did not think our ideas on merit were sufficiently stable to establish the degree of consensus needed to form enforceable rules on the subject, rules capable of dealing with the mass of cases between the extremes. Schemes for equalising property, such as the ancient agrarian law, had either failed, or had not prevented inequalities reestablishing themselves: 'Render possessions ever so equal, men's different degrees of art, care, and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence; and instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community.' But his most important criticism was that a commitment to equality would entail a 'rigorous inquisition', and increase in the powers of government over individual lives that could not fail to become tyrannical. These are, or were to become, the standard arguments on the subject of attempts to establish equality of outcome, which are quite different, of course, from arguments about equality before the law, political equality, and equality of opportunity. There is an economic dimension here, once more, but you also have to remember that private property was also thought of as a counterbalancing factor when dealing with the powers of monarchs. 13 �As I anticipated, there is not sufficient time to deal with Hume’s devastating attack on all forms of contract thinking when dealing with the question of political obedience. But it links with what I have said so far on two levels. First, historically, one of his reasons for attacking the idea was that the idea of contract had become the ‘fashionable’ theory adopted by many Whigs during the eighteenth century; it was used to proclaim the superiority of English arrangements by suggesting that only the English had had the wisdom to come to a formal contractual arrangement with their monarch. It was also capable of being used as the basis for an argument as to why, having given their consent in this manner, it was possible for the people to withdraw that consent in order to vest power elsewhere. On the second level, Hume’s arguments against contractual explanations is linked closely with what I have said about his theory of justice, which means that if you have grasped the logic of this you should be able to see how the same reasoning is applied to undermine the rationalist bias of the contract. We give allegiance to forms of government for reasons based on what might be termed Hume’s ‘sociology of convention’. We do so either because we believe that the system has acquired legitimacy by persisting successfully over long periods of time (an argument that has a ‘Tory’ flavour), or because we perceive the public utility of sustaining regular government (a Whiggish argument) when compared with the alternatives. In neither case do we give our formal consent, and in neither case does it require us to believe that the origins of governments were legitimate when first established, or that governments have to be perfect before we accept them. These were not the kinds of arguments likely to commend themselves to those who stressed the ‘rights of resistance’ that accompanied some forms of the contractual argument, and Hume’s purpose was to discomfort such advocates, encouraging moderation in political debate. Thus Hume can be treated as a ‘conservative’ political theorist, though I think it more accurate in the context of the history of the social sciences to say that his scepticism and anti-rationalism engendered a form of sociological realism. Hume and Smith are undoubtedly the most original figures in the Scottish Enlightenment; they were also close friends and shared many basic philosophical positions on the foundations 14 �of knowledge, on how moral questions should be tackled naturalistically, and on political and economic subjects. I want to begin this lecture by mentioning some of these points which they held in common before moving on to consider some characteristic contributions of Hume to the sciences of morals and politics as those sciences were understood throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. In particular, I shall concentrate on Hume’s theory of justice treated as an artificial virtue and his criticisms of contractual ideas on government. Hume stood apart from Scottish and many English philosophers and moralists by virtue of his decidedly unorthodox position on religion: he was a skeptic, a secularist, and unbeliever, and therefore an infidel. Smith was more cautious on such matters, as can be judged from the simple fact that whereas he was appointed to a Chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow, Hume was considered far too unsound on religious matters to be appointed to any university post. Smith's policy of keeping his cards closer to his chest on these matters has allowed many to believe that he was at best, or at worst, depending on your point of view, a theist or deist. My own opinion is that it went a bit further than that, as became clear when he wrote his brief encomium on the life and death of Hume. By praising the Stoic calmness and good humour with which Hume approached death, Smith earned the enmity of all those who claimed that unrepentant infidels were not entitled to die in anything but torment. At a time when all questions of truth in matters of natural and moral philosophy were intimately bound up with Christian theology, this antagonism or luke-warmness towards organised religion and theology is more than a simple matter of personal preference; and I shall indicate ways in which it impinged on the philosophical and political opinions of Hume and Smith later. In broad terms, Hume and Smith were both social Newtonians. Hence Hume's declaration in the subtitle of the THN that it was 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects'. Slightly less obviously, the same aim is proclaimed in the self-conscious title of Smith's first book: a theory of moral sentiments, an attempt to provide an explanatory overview of how moral sentiments worked to produce the kinds of moral codes that could be observed in modern societies. The full title of his more famous work, An 15 �Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations makes its naturalistic intentions plain. As does his espousal in that work of something he called 'a system of natural liberty'. Hume and Smith, then, were both committed to the construction of systems of morals and politics that would meet the test of observation and experiment, where this could be based on everyday observation of social institutions and practices, comparative and historical evidence of life in other societies at other times, and by an appeal to the kind of knowledge we all have as intelligent social actors, capable of reflecting on our own motives as well as those of others.. Both authors, then, were also keen to create naturalistic systems of moral philosophy based on 'immediate sense and feeling' and on the assumption that human sociability was a natural state of affairs rather than something imposed from above, or arrived at artificially by a ruse on the part of the cunning and powerful, or by means of some treaty between creatures possessing rational foresight. As Hume said: 'Man is born in a family, is compelled to maintain society from necessity, from natural inclinations, and from habit.'Sociability was what ultimately distinguished man from the animal kingdom. This had an important consequence for political theory. For if man's instinct for society was an entirely natural one, if man had never actually been observed outside some primitive form of society, albeit one that might not be more than an extended family or tribe, it was not necessary to resort to speculations about pre-social man in a state of nature, and how this state came to be relinquished, whether by historical accident, rational calculation, or conspiracy on the part of the few or the many. What David Hume has to say in opposition to contractual modes of dealing with the origins and legitimacy of society or government, goes for Smith, his closest friend and intellectual ally, as well. They rejected all known version of the idea: the Hobbesian version based on fear; the Lockean version based on a utilitarian perception of mutual self-interest; and the Mandeville-Rousseau idea of a corrupt social compact imposed by the rich and cunning on the poor and unknowing. All such devices were at best unnecessary intellectual fictions, at worst a hindrance to proper understanding, and hence to stability in 'free governments' that were dependent on opinion based on understanding. 16 �Hume and Smith can also be described as anti-rationalists: appeals to reason, God-given or not, were simply teleological short-cuts, no substitute for the business of understanding based on natural instincts or passions that were common to all men in some degree or mixture. But there were regularities of social existence that justified the pursuit of science: in Hume's case, these derived from the effect of custom, usually as embodied in certain institutions, to create stable expectations. Human behaviour possessed regularity because it consisted in following rules, consciously. In other words, he was not treating man as some kind of machine. In his first work Hume had attempted to show that there were inherent limitations in our capacity to understand the world. The limitations centre on his famous demonstration of our inability through reason alone to penetrate beyond our immediate sensations to create determinate models of the world; that the causal connections we posited could never be necessary connections, susceptible to demonstration, but would have to remain constant conjunctions. We have no other resource than to believe that what had been observed to be conjoined in the past would also hold for the future. We might be able to marshall evidence in favour of our beliefs, but it was always going to fail the test of demonstrability. Although Hume had clearly stared into the abyss of total scepticism, he had retreated, and urged others to retreat into what he called practical or mitigated scepticism. It was right to reject the claims of ethical rationalists to the effect that God had endowed us with the rational capacity to intuit right and wrong; but Hume also wished to repudiate the conclusions of a more fullblooded scepticism that concluded that all moral judgements were arbitrary; that anything goes. Mitigated scepticism entailed proportioning belief to evidence rather than denying that any evidence can be adequate for belief. We should be content with proofs rather than demonstrations. But the point I wish to stress when mentioning Hume's scepticism on epistemological issues is that it lends some truth to the verdict that Hume wished to place man at the centre of a universe from which he had been displaced by Copernicus. Moreover, in rejecting the idea of God as the author of the universe, as the ultimate designer, in the manner of Newton, 17 �this was a far more radical form of humanism, comparable to Darwin's later demonstration that the biological world may have some of the characteristics of a design without a designer, but lacks any discernible moral purpose that could be corroborated, apart from the ones with which we choose to endow it. Although it is possible to exaggerate the Darwinian parallels, they do help to suggest why Hume was regarded as such a subversive figure for many of his contemporaries. Smith may not appear to go as far as Hume in such matters. In TMS, though not WN, you will find plenty of references to Providence, the Great Geometer or watch-maker and so on as the explanation for what was known as 'final causes'. He makes extensive use of teleological or functionalist arguments suggesting that the world is a complex piece of machinery in which all the parts are neatly adjusted to the ends they were designed to serve. Nevertheless, what Smith is also saying is that questions that require such answers are beyond our comprehension: hence our resort to hypotheses of an all-wise and beneficent deity. This has the further implication that we were better advised to stick with what was entirely within our powers, namely an understanding of 'efficient' causes of this-worldly events, the subject to which he devotes most of his attention. There are more detailed points of similarity and difference between Hume and Smith on other matters: on the role of sympathy in moral judgements, on the origins and nature of the rules of justice, on the psychological foundations of authority, whether seen as allegiance to government or as deference within a society composed of ranks, as well as on the more mundane issues of everyday political and economic life. I will deal with some of these in the course of these lectures, but I wanted to begin with some fundamental points they held in common. *** Politics, defined in its original or Aristotelean sense as dealing with 'men united in society and dependent on one another', was to be one of the sciences that Hume believed could be reformulated along new lines by his discoveries in the science of human nature, his epistemological writings on the limits of human reason in achieving understanding. The most 18 �essential element in Hume's science of politics can be found in THN, and later in the Enquiries concerning the principles of morals: and it centres on what he has to say about justice as an artificial virtue. Anyone who grasps Hume's meaning and purpose on this subject, or so it seems to me, has mastered much of what is distinctive about Hume's philosophical and political vision and the links between them. I shall spend the rest of this opening lecture on the subject. But first let me give some general reasons why the subject of justice was so important to Hume. Hume believed that the evolution of rules of justice to deal with the meum and tuum of social life was the most important feature of the formal social bond as well as being one of man's most important historical achievments. No society could exist without such rules. We can understand this by means of a comparison with Hobbes's state of nature as one of war of all against all. In Hume's terms, that is comparable to a shipwreck, in which the only rules are those of individual survival, where no rules of justice have relevance. At the other end of the spectrum lies a world of plenty and universal brotherhood: that too is a world in which mine and thine do not need to be distinguished. I can meet your needs without stinting on my own. But we live most of our lives in circumstances that are intermediate between these extremes. The goods of the world do not exist in abundance by comparison with our needs and wants, and we are selfish animals equipped with limited benevolence. In such circumstances rules to determine the inevitable conflicts over matters of rightful ownership are essential: social life is impossible without them. They are in this respect, probably prior to in time, and more important than the precise forms of government under which men have lived. This was to become one of Hume's responses to those who advanced contractarian theories to explain the origin of government: it enabled him to say that men could arrive at peaceful ways of living together before subjecting themselves to the authority of government. Furthermore, when making comparative-historical assessments of different forms of government, Hume made their capacity to administer the rules of justice with a tolerable degree of impartiality the main criterion. This was to give rise to another divergence from received wisdom when he refused to condemn France, an absolute monarchy, as living under a system of slavery, as lacking liberty. Hume's position was that modern liberty should be 19 �defined in terms of security under the rule of law, and by this criterion, civilised absolute monarchies were perfectly capable of passing the test. The final reason for beginning any study of Hume with what he has to say about justice considered as an artificial virtue is that it helps to understand what he has to say about allegiance and theories of obligation. It is therefore important to his rejection of contractarian modes of justifying obedience to government with all of their unacceptable consequences. Why then was it so important for Hume to treat justice as an artificial virtue? Yesterday I laid considerable stress on Hume's view of justice as based on convention. I also said that it provided the key to another of Hume's distinctive positions -- those expressed in his rejection of all ideas based on the social contract. I want to begin with Hume's views on this subject today, before moving on to consider some of his other ideas on the benefits derived from modern commercial forms of society, and his views on the workings of the British eighteenth-century constitution. But first a brief word about the works with which I shall be dealing. Following the failure of THN to evoke much of a response, Hume turned to the essays, and later to history as a way of cultivating his science of politics. This was a change of style but not of aim. It conforms with another aim, namely Hume's belief that philosophy should be brought out of the scholarly closet and into society. It should, as he said, be made 'conversible', which does not mean that it should be less serious, merely a polite form of entertainment with some uplifting qualities. Hume mixed serious essays on political and economic subjects with others of a more ephemeral nature, but this should not detract from the original aim. Some of the essays -- on first principles of government, on the original contract, and passive obedience -- are the kinds of things that might have appeared in treatises on government. Indeed, they are often popular versions of what Hume had written in THN and Enquiries. I commend to you the three or four paragraphs in the essay on the original contract which summarize what he has to say on justice as an artificial virtue. Others -- such as the nature of parties under the British system of government, on the independence of parliament from the executive -are more by way of serious inquiry into the sociology of British political institutions, always 20 �with an historical and comparative dimension added. They are political science in a narrower sense, where it should be borne in mind that Hume was interpreting an unwritten constitution that was still in process of development, and where interpretations of what was essential to its working, what was detrimental, were either a byproduct of party divisions, or had yet to become part of contemporary understanding. The same goes for the group of economic essays on commerce, money, interest, public credit, taxes, and foreign trade. In this case, however, Hume was entering territory that had less of a history of learned cultivation by philosophers and natural lawyers; and while the essays are often penetrating, they could not match what Adam Smith was to do in WN, namely provide a complete philosophical system to explain the causes of the growth of opulence in commercial societies. There is a commonplace observation that runs to the effect that profound political theorising is always the result of living through major political disruptions of one kind or another. To those who believe such things, the eighteenth century, is often thought to be a somnolent period in English political history, and hence in political analysis. It was poised between a period in which the English had the peculiar distinction of having decapitated one monarch and forced another into exile, becoming a godly commonwealth or republic in between, on the one side, and the upheaval of the French revolution at the end of the century on the other. Wars, another source of social and political upheaval in our century, were a permanent feature of eighteenth-century life, but they were all fought in Europe or more far-flung places like India and North America. Hume did not live to see the outcome of the American revolution, but he clearly expected it and was not altogether dismayed by the prospect of Britain losing its western empire. But apart from the doubtfulness of the original hypothesis, one has to bear in mind the continuing reverberations of late 17th century events on English political dispositions and arguments. It was these atavistic or backward-looking elements that Hume sought to counter, partly through his rewriting of the history of England, and partly through his essays attacking the hang-overs from the English revolution. There was also, it has to be said, especially for a Scotsman who regarded himself as a North Briton, and therefore a supporter of the union of 21 �England and Scotland in 1707, the constant reminder that the Hanoverian settlement was still subject to contest, notably from the supporters of the Stuart claims to the throne -- claims that were backed by military successes before Culloden finally put paid to them in 1745. These fundamental issues of allegiance to the old or the new royal families were also kept alive by the party divisions between Whigs and Tories, where many of the latter were non-jurors, those who refused or avoided taking an oath of allegiance where possible. Hume was hostile to the way in which party divisions were expressed in terms of speculative principles on the nature of government, with the upholders of the divine right of kings commanding passive obedience of their subjects on one side, and those who maintained that the English had reenacted a form of original contract in 1688, voluntarily or consensually entrusting powers of government to the new royal line, while retaining certain rights to resist or withdraw support under certain, not very easily specifiable circumstances. It was hardly likely that someone with Hume's religious beliefs would give much credence to divine right theories; they could hardly meet the kinds of empirical criteria which he had set himself. How could we know if it was true that God had meant rulers to exercise divine powers? Hume mainly contented himself with the mischievous observation that if rulers were placed over us by a beneficent deity, why had God conferred this right on some pretty awful ones, such as the Borgias, as well as some good ones? The doctrine of original contract seemed to have a bit more going for it. For example, it contained the idea of consent, of voluntary submission to a government that could guarantee peace and stability. What Hume rejected here, as he had rejected it earlier when dealing with justice as an artificial virtue, was the further idea that the contract involved a promise, albeit a conditional one that allowed the promisor to withdraw his allegiance if he was disappointed with the results. This abstract idea was not supported by history or by the everyday practices and beliefs of rulers and ruled. At best it was an unnecessary fiction, at worst a dangerously destabilising doctrine. Most established forms of government had originated in violence, conquest, or usurpation. When writing his history of England, Hume stressed how small the oligarchy of active politicians who engineered revolution was. Nevertheless, obedience to 22 �government, whatever their origins, was a natural response that did not require any further reinforcement. In fact, Hume regarded the voluntary consent idea as one that undermined rather than reinforced the natural deference we are always inclined to give to established authority. It was, potentially at least, a seditious doctrine. Governments cannot turn on shifting interpretations of whether private interests are best served by continuing obedience. That would be like abandoning the convention that underlies the rules of justice in property matters whenever one's private interest was harmed. You bought governments holus-bolus, not on those occasions on which it suited you to do so. As in the case of property, present possession must carry a good deal of weight; and long possession comes in as reinforcement: we do as a matter of plain observation accept what exists and has long existed. Time and custom must be allowed their full weight; they overcome memories of the irregularities, the violence and injustice that attended the first formation. Hume also ridiculed the weaker notion of our giving tacit consent to be ruled by virtue of remaining a subject or citizen: 'We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.' Another version of the same idea in more serious guise can be found in Hume's argument that since society is not a static entity, but rather is composed of new generations joining, and old ones leaving, this 'perpetual flux' meant that the newcomers were not free to exercise choice. It is, if you like, Hume's version of an idea that was later to be expressed by Burke as a contract that bound past, present, and future, rather than a contract between those who happened to exist at any given moment of time. As in the case of justice, promises to obey are not based on contracts, promises are the result of conventions, artifices, or inventions, which means that obligation must have a solid basis in human nature since we form the convention or make the invention. What then are our motives for doing so? We give our allegiance for two main reasons: because we have learned to appreciate the advantages of regular government, to appreciate the public benefits it confers, and we have therefore acquired an opinion in its favour based on interest. 23 �Alternatively, we have a natural deference towards long-established regimes, we have formed an opinion of who has the right to rule which underlies our obedience. You can call these two forms of allegiance, active and passive psychological principles, and you can also say that Whigs have more of the former, while Tories have more of the latter. If that had remained the basis of party divisions, they would be matters of emphasis only; there would be more room for mutual accommodation and for keeping all disagreements within existing constitutional boundaries. Hume's chief criticism of the 'fashionable system' based on the contract was that it created a form of ideological politics that magnified the differences and brought the very idea of government into question. It follows that Hume had no time for the related topic, namely rights of resistance. The dissolution of government was the worst of all eventualities, and discussion of the circumstances in which established governments could be overthrown encouraged a dangerously voluntaristic and valetudinarian attitude in such matters. As Hume said, placing emphasis on rights of resistance was like making a theory of divorce the foundation for understanding the institution of marriage, its rights, duties, and obligations. Another major divisive force was factionalism, particularly when the faction was united around a speculative opinion, one that could not be readily settled by any known empirical methods. The worst form of these, in Hume's opinion, was the faction derived from religious enthusiasm. To a man of Hume's temperament and experience, such factions involved a species of irrationalism. Political differences based on an apparent or actual clash of economic interests could be dangerous, but interests were capable of being assessed empirically and, where necessary, used against one another in a mutually checking fashion -- this was one of the parts of Hume's teaching that was to be important to James Madison when taking part in American constitutional debates in the 1780s. **** Some of Hume's political essays, as I mentioned earlier, take a different form. They are attempts to diagnose how the English system of government actually works, as compared with how some of its partisans suggested that it ought to be working. The best example of 24 �this kind of analysis can be found in Hume's discussion of the problem that most exercised party politics during and after Walpole's long period of office, namely what was known as the 'influence' of the Crown, as exercised through its capacity to gain support for the executive in parliament by means of bribes and jobbery. The Country party opponents of Walpole's methods regarded this form of corruption as one designed to undermine the independence of parliament. And since the constitution could be described as requiring a balance between the elements that composed its mixture of Crown, Lords, and Commons, anything that disturbed this balance, by increasing the discretionary powers of the crown, could seem to pose a fundamental threat to the constitution. Hume's response to this kind of party rhetoric was to show that the combined wealth of those represented in parliament had grown to the point where it could challenge the monarchy through its power over the purse. It could in theory even create a republic. Why does it not do so? Because the crown has many offices at its disposal which enable it to buy support for the executive. Looked at from a Court party perspective, the capacity of parliament, if unmanaged by Walpolean methods, to disrupt the executive, prevent it from acting, could lead to deadlock of the kind that one still sees in the American constitution, and where 'log-rolling' remains a method of management. Under these circumstances, 'influence' or corruption, call it what you will, was, in Hume's opinion, essential to the running of the system. Instead of railing against corruption, the Country party should think about how balance should be maintained, rather than use a heightened rhetoric that saw every bit of jobbery as undermining the constitution itself. Once more, Hume appears in the guise of a moderate, standing above party, and reminding those who are the chief players to keep their eye on what matters most, the continuity and stability of government. **** I would now like to turn to the group of essays that Hume wrote on economic subjects, where these too have an important dimension that is both historical and political. The economic essays, as Duncan Forbes noted, display Hume in his least sceptical guise. He gives an account of the benefits of commerce and the spread of luxury that is almost entirely 25 �positive, while at the same time keeping at arm's length from Mandeville's scandalously cynical defence of luxury. Hume does this by acknowledging that the moral distinctions between 'innocent' and 'blameable' forms of luxury are genuine, whereas Mandeville's paradoxes derived much of their force by refusing to make any such distinction. Unlike Smith and other Scottish writers on the same theme, however, Hume does not draw attention to any of its possible social and political drawbacks. There is nothing in Hume, for example, to match what Smith and Ferguson have to say about the mental mutilation associated with the narrowing effects on the mass of society of partaking in the division of labour. In his essay on commerce Hume proclaims that there can be no conflict between the private material interests and happiness of subjects and the greatness of a state. Private and public interest are united. He qualifies this a little later, but there can be no doubt that what he was doing was challenging an entire republican tradition that warned against the dangers to res publica posed by luxury and inequality. Virtue and public spirit could only suffer when unlimited scope was given to the private pursuit of wealth and luxury. Men became effeminate, societies enfeebled, unable to defend themselves, incapable and unwilling to undertake the supreme patriotic task of fighting for, and, if necessary, dying for one's country. Such republican ideas remained alive and well among Hume's Scottish contemporaries, and there was of course a large body of ancient literature on the subject, much of it centring on the fall of Rome. Characteristically, therefore, Hume denies that the fall of Rome was due to such factors: it was more the result of basic defects in its system of governance due to the expansion of empire. The optimistic sequence begins as soon as agriculture becomes sufficiently improved to furnish a surplus beyond the subsistence needs of those who work in agriculture. This enables a society to support an urban sector devoted to the production of luxuries. In ancient republics, the labour of slaves served public purposes by enabling citizen armies to be maintained. But the ancient policy of suppressing the desire for the kinds of goods that could be acquired through manufacture and commerce meant that there were no incentives to improve agriculture, no spur to emulate the finer products that could be imported, to improve 26 �on the mechanical arts. There was also no storehouse of labour that could, in time of war, be withdrawn from luxury production into defence of the realm. It is a stagnant form of society that survives only by acting contrary to the ‘common bent of mankind’ to seek novelty, activity, and refinement. It begets indolence at the expence of what Hume describes as the 'quick march of the spirits'. The search for refinement in commercial societies, however, animates all aspects of society: 'We cannot reasonably expect that a piece of woolen cloth will be wrought to perfection in a nation which is ignorant of astronomy, or where ethics are neglected.' Industry, knowledge, sociability, and humanity are linked by an 'indissoluble chain'. These yield public benefits too: the love of liberty grows, governments improve, factions become less inveterate. Liberty benefits most from the growth of the middling ranks, thereby filling the gap between lords and peasants: such people 'covet equal laws' and are watchful of encroachments of monarchical and aristocratic power. In short, commerce begets 'free governments', just as, in return, commerce is more likely to thrive under free governments. Republics seek to control trade, and absolute monarchies create a climate in which commerce carries an element of social stigma. All this can be read as a celebration of the superiority of modern over ancient societies; and it is again part of Hume's campaign against atavism, the tendency among some of contemporary political moralists to indulge in nostalgia for ancient simplicity and virtue. As when he was criticising the tendency to look backwards for evidence of legitimacy when dealing with the grounds of political allegiance, Hume was counselling a policy of counting blessings, of building on the achievments of the recent past rather than regretting a glory that was long past and whose credentials often did not bear close scrutiny. As historian of England, Hume reinforced this campaign... In other economic essays, those on money, the rate of interest, the balance of trade, and jealousy of trade, Hume is beginning the process of questioning another popular body of maxims, those associated with what Smith was to call the mercantile system: the confusion of specie and monetary indicators with the real sources of wealth that lie in labour and technology; the anxieties over a favourable balance of trade that had led to a confusion of 27 �trade with power. Whereas power was a zero-sum game in which the weakening of your opponent added to your strength, trade was a positive sum game in which since both parties could gain, you should pray for the prosperity of your neighbours. It becomes a case for freedom of trade by virtue of its destruction of a number of popular objections and fears. In only one instance -- though it is a significant one -- does Hume fail to take the sanguine position on the prospects opened up by commerce as the foundation for national prosperity: the case of public credit, an institution that had been brought to a fine art in Britain and had allowed her to prosecute war against France so successfully. It was the foundation of what economic historians now refer to as the 'fiscal-military' state. Although Hume did not endorse all the fears expressed by spokesmen for the landed interest when faced with the growth of a monied interest, he took a dim view of the tax burden associated with rising public debt, and allowed himself to become alarmist about the growing influence of the debtholders on government. The alarm can be judged by the fact that he counselled a policy of voluntary bankruptcy, of repudiation of all public debt, before it undermined the constitution and ruined the nation. The main source of Hume's worries, so far as Britain was concerned, was that this policy was more likely to be adopted by absolute monarchies like France. Free governments were more likely to delay until it was too late, meaning that forced bankruptcy would occur, possibly during a war. Hume's alarmism on this has provided some of the evidence needed to convict, or praise, him for having Tory sympathies. While that judgment is almost certainly wrong, it shows that the Court-Country spectrum during the eighteenth century was a genuine spectrum, allowing movement along its length. On this subject, Hume entertained the Country diagnosis and fears, whereas on influence, corruption, and the need for 'management' he took a Court position. It may be significant, however, that when Hume speculated as to whether the English form of government was likely to move in the direction of a republic or become an absolute form of monarchy, he made it clear that he would favour the latter route. The entire line of speculation, of course, suggests a much older approach, one that sees all forms of government as suffering from characteristic forms of decay. If not conflict, there 28 �is room for a gap to have appeared between Hume's optimistic account of the connections between commerce and free governments, and his fears about the political stability of such types of government. The English now enjoyed the most complete realisation of a free government, with liberty as its main achievment. It enjoyed liberty of the press, religious toleration, a degree of political participation, and safeguards against arbitrary taxation. Hume refused to tell the story of English constitutional developments as an heroic struggle: neither the monarchs nor the puritan parliamentarians were fit subjects for such treatment. Instead of a landscape of heroes and villains, it was populated by people acting out the roles assigned to them by circumstances, sometimes doing better, sometimes worse. Even the best of men, acting in those circumstances, could not do better than they did. It was this coolness that made Hume's history seem anti-Whig and hence Tory. He was depriving Whigs and other politicians of one of their main resources in defining themselves and arguing their corner: historical precedent. As Duncan Forbes has stressed, another unusual feature of Hume's history was its cosmopolitanism. The parochial events of 1688 were placed within a European-wide context in which the breakdown of feudalism was the revolution that was most important to modern governments. A similar cosmopolitanism describes Hume's position within a Scottish context. As in the case of Smith, though one can find evidence of an awareness of Scotland's relative backwardness -- as well as, in Smith's case, a certain pride in Scottish educational institutions -- the audience to which they were appealing was a cosmopolitan one. Both had strong French contacts, and one could even describe Hume's cosmopolitanism as Francophilia matched by an element of Anglophobia. What worried Hume, particularly as he grew older, was the possibility that liberty in England had gained too much at the expense of authority, thereby threatening both liberty and authority. Forms of government were not immortal. Hume's views on public credit point up an intriguing feature of his political outlook. On the one hand, he urges wholehearted acceptance of the modern world of commerce and material opulence, not necessarily because he places high value on private enjoyments, but 29 �because it creates the kind of society and polity that he favours. On the other hand, Hume is a nervous optimist, someone who is aware of the fragility of modern achievements and civilisation: the benefits are hard won, worth celebrating, but also vulnerable to destructive forces. On this perhaps some clarification can be gained from returning to what Hume has to say about the importance of opinion and belief systems. Zealots and enthusiasts, those who formed factions based on abstract principle, can never be entirely defeated. It is a constant battle which may be lost. But if conventions are strengthened through a learning process, why are those that have a long tradition behind them fragile? This question is not easy to answer, but consideration of it may help to explain Hume's emphasis on opinion as the medium that supports or subverts free governments; and his preference in matters of politics for machinery rather than men. Only by subjecting political behaviour to institutional constraints could such behaviour be controlled and stabilised. Hume's constitutionalism flows from the jurisprudential foundations of his political thinking. Though impartiality and moderation were his main lessons as a political writer, Hume remained rather nervous about the fragility of our beliefs and hence arrangements. Attempting to be calm, dispassionate, and impartial was the best service a philosopher could perform in a heated and excitable world. Far better than the technocrat offering devices, another Enlightenement model, best illustrated perhaps by someone like Condorcet, and more actively by Sieyes. There is only one apparent exception to this in Hume's work, his essay on the idea of perfect commonwealth, and it is worth noting that it begins with a typical Humean warning: 'To tamper...or try experiments merely upon the credit of supposed argument and philosophy, can never be the part of a wise magistrate, who will bear a reverence to what carries the marks of age.' He also says that all utopian speculations based on 'great reformation in the manners of mankind are plainly imaginary'. He carries out his own imaginary exercise simply because there might be a 'future age' in which, through the dissolution of government an opportunity of translating theory into practice might exist. Oddly enough, the opportunity arose not long after Hume's death when the new American republic attempted to use materials from the eighteenth-century science of politics, as developed by Montesquieu and Hume, 30 �to build a federal republic containing all the checks and balances of a piece of clockwork. Madison's reading of Hume's essays was to prove very helpful in these circumstances. He certainly made good use of the following advice in the perfect commonwealth essay when writing Federalist Paper 10 on the need to curb factions or use them to counterbalance one another: 'Though it is more difficult to form a republican government in an extensive country than in a city; there is more facility, when once it is formed, of preserving it steady and uniform, without tumult and faction.' There is no clear agreement on how to label Hume's politics. Just as he has had to be rescued from some contemporary judgements, such as the Tory label, so he needs to be protected from some modern attempts at recruitment. Thus attempts to see him as yet another possessive individualist on the basis of his stress on the economic basis of modern civilisation, as another figure in a bourgeois tradition stretching from Locke to Mill, are not, in my opinion, very insightful, and fairly easily countered. If the anachronistic labels are to be employed, one can say that Hume's jurisprudence conforms with some versions of negative liberalism as we have later defined them. He is also a utilitarian, but not of the Benthamite kind. Conservatism is another anachronistic label, usually reserved for those, like Burke, who lived long enough to react against the French revolution. French events made it plain that there was an ancien regime to be defended, and that despite good intentions -- Burke would not even have conceded that to the leaders of the revolution -- nothing permanent can be built on bloodstained foundations. We can only speculate what Hume's position might have been. The emergence of a conservative position in British politics, largely based on Burke, allows us to see Hume in that light, though one major element is missing in Hume: religion and Burke's idea that church and state are part of an indisolvable union. Hume's conservatism lacks piety, an element of the sacred, and hence mystery. Those who can only live on the oxygen of 'first principle' of legitimacy, obligation, allegiance etc will find Hume sceptical on all such matters. 31 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences Description An account of the resource Lectures by Donald Winch for the 'Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences' course at the University of Sussex. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Donald Winch The Social Sciences and the Scottish Enlightenment Richard Whatmore, in the two previous lectures in this series, has given you some idea of what two figures in the French Enlightenment, Montesquieu and Rousseau, represent when seen within the context of the history of the social sciences; he will be giving further illustrations of this when he deals with Turgot and Condorcet in a future lecture, bringing the subject closer to the social and political event that dominated much social and political analysis at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, namely the French Revolution. In this lecture and the next in the series the scene is shifted to Scotland and to the two main figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith, the younger of whom Smith, died in the first year of the French revolution. Their names are more firmly linked with other revolutions: the American revolution which broke out in the year of Hume’s death, where his political essays and ideas proved valuable to the framers of the American constitution, and where Smith’s economic ideas were also influential; the English rovolution of 1688, an event that continued to dominate English political thinking; and another historical revolution, more distant in time, but equally significant to them as social and political theorists, namely the transition from feudalism to commercial or civil society. If you know something about Smith’s work, WN, you might think that I should add the Industrial Revolution in Britain to this list. But I shall try to show in my next lecture and a later one on classical political economy, this association is a misleading one, where not downright wrong. Let me take two of the revolutions mentioned so far. The first is the English revolution of 1688, when England deposed a Stuart monarch for the second time, but this time, instead of undergoing a civil war and attempting to create a Puritan commonwealth or republic, as they did unsuccessfully between 1642 and 1660, they established a peculiar form of mixed governement, a limited or parliamentary monarchy -- a system that was widely considered throughout Europe to have endowed Britain with a combination of liberty and stability not to 1 be found in the absolute monarchies on the Continent, including the richest and most powerful monarchy, that of France. Native English pride in such matters was fortified by the interest shown in its political institutions by such foreigner observers as Montesquieu and Voltaire. This revolution and the peculiarities of the English form of government were of special interest to Hume, partly because he wrote a History of England that tried to place English events in a larger European framework, partly because he wrote a number of influential essays on English political institutions and party ideologies. Hume and Smith, speaking as Scottish observers of the English scene -- a scene Scotland had joined with the Act of Union in 1707 -- took a cooler, less congratulatory, and more cosmopolitan view of English history and institutions than many of its patriot supporters. But like everybody else in the eighteenth century, Hume and Smith found it impossible not to remember that English and Scotttish history in the previous century had been dominated by civil strife centring on conflict over religion. Remember too, that in Scotland in particular there were still Jacobites, supporters of the Stuart claimants to the throne, and that there was a Jacobite rebellion in 1745, during the lifetime of Hume and Smith. England might seem, therefore, to be the embodiment of political stability under its relatively new constitution, but they had good reason not to feel too complacent about its permanency, its immunity from fundamental conflict over religion and related constitutional matters. The second of the remaining revolutions that was important to both men was, if anything, more significant because they both devoted considerable attention to it in their writings. It was the silent revolution that had occurred first and most completely in England some two to three hundred years before. It was the revolution that had led to the decline of feudalism and the creation of a centralised form of monarchy as a result of various socio-economic forces connected with the emergence, first in the towns, later in the countryside, of what they called commercial or civil society. Hume provided an analysis of this process in his History, and Smith followed his lead, devoting Book III of WN to the way in which it had occurred. Indeed, Smith’s account of this revolution was to be the foundation on which a long series of authors in the nineteenth century, among them Marx and Weber, were to construct their 2 own account of this process separating the modern world of commerce, later to be called capitalism, from its feudal predecessor. From Marx’s perspective, therefore, Hume and Smith were among those bourgeois pioneers of a form of history that he called materialism, applying the insights provided by economic changes into an understanding of large-scale social and political change. While I think that the proto-Marxian aspects of Scottish thinking can and have been exaggerated in histories of social science, there is no doubt that this was where Marx obtained much of his own inspiration. For Hume and Smith, however, although there was an economic foundation to the process of transition, what they stressed were the legal and political benefits, those that centred on the creation of civil liberty defined as security of property and person under the rule of law. This was the most significant achievment of modern society, and it also explains why justice plays such an important role in their moral and political theorising. One of the best accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment that has appeared since our reading list was compiled, Christopher Berry’s Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, gives a balanced account of this feature of Scottish thinking, usually known as a form of ‘conjectural’ or ‘philosophical’ history, organised, in the case of Smith, into four stages, where each can be associated with a particular mode of subsistence: hunter-gatherers at the bottom of the scale, followed by pastoralists, and then, in Europe at least, by the system known as feudalism or settled forms of agrarian life, with commercial society being the latest stage. Such histories of social change over long periods became the hallmark of a number of Scottish thinkers, notably Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Smith’s pupil, John Millar. They provided ways of classifying different types of society and tracing the different forms of law, government, and manners associated with the different stages. Thus Millar employed it in his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks to discuss the phenomenon later known as class, using the role of women in each type of society as a kind of index of other changes in social relations. The other main use to which conjectural history was put was to provide a comparative-historical framework in which historical and anthropological evidence, especially that concerning non-European societies, could be situated and subjected 3 to closer analysis. Harking back to Montesquieu, an influential figure in Scotland as elsewhere, one can say that it supplied the kind of historical dimension that his classifications and sociological analyses of different forms of government lacked. Montesquieu, of course, employed historical evidence, but he did not possess a strong notion of the dynamics of historical change. Conjectural history organised according to stages was, therefore, a peculiarly Scottish way of meeting what I described in my opening lecture as the challenge of increased knowledge concerning non-European societies. Incidentally, do not take the term ‘conjectural’ too literally: the conjectures involved a theory of development, but they both made efforts to ensure that it conformed with the state of real historical knowledge of their time. It was conjectural in respect of earlier periods, where no written records existed, but where new ethnographic evidence concerning pastoralists and hunter-gatherers could be used to supplement the record. The use of history, in this conjectural form, however, can only be properly understood as part of the larger impulse outlined in my first lecture, a philosophical impulse that had shfited towards offering naturalistic explanations for social, political, and economic events and institutions. And since this impulse has a philosophical foundation I need to say something about the philosophy of Hume and Smith, beginning this week with Hume, who was undoubtedly the most original of all the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, where originality also entailed considerable controversy. Hume announced his intentions boldly in his first book, the THN, in 1739. giving the work a subtitle that announced its purpose, namely to introduce the experimental method, the method of Newton, into moral subjects. Many eighteenth-century philosophers might have announced such an intention, but there are reasons why Hume’s attempt was more far-reaching, more radical than most of his contemporaries. For Hume, the experimental method was not simply an attempt to apply empirical methods to moral subjects, where this included morals, politics, and economics, but to dispense entirely with religion and the kinds of arguments that linked science with theology. In other words, Hume was a militant secularist, an agnostic if not an atheist (for reasons to be mentioned shortly), and all his writings are a covert or explicit attack 4 on the byproducts of what he called the ‘religious hypothesis’. Many eighteenth-century philosophers were anti-clerical, attacking through satire the clergy and the doctrines of the Church. Some of these were deists, those who were content to believe that there was sufficient evidence of design in the moral and physical universe to warrant acceptance of the idea of a Designer, but whose religion might not go much further than that to accord significance to the bible or what was known as revealed truth. In Hume’s case, however, he not only applied his empiricism to undermine belief in miracles and other sources of religious faith, but attacked the entire idea that we could infer the existence of God from the existence of order in the universe. In short, he was the complete secularist and humanist, placing man and man’s creations at the centre of the philosophical universe as completely as Copernicus had placed the sun at the centre of the astronomical world. Hume, in fact, did what Darwin was to do over a century later, namely show that one could give an account of the workings of the biological world that showed how design and order could be achieved without a Designer, proving too that no religious or moral conclusions concerning human conduct could be drawn from what occurred in Nature, however well-ordered. To appreciate this aspect of Hume fully one has to consider the interpenetration of science and religion during this pre-Darwinian period -- Hume’s intellectual radicalism. Holding such positions, and taking only minimal precautions to disguise the more shocking aspects of them, meant that Hume could not be apponted as a teacher in a university, as Smith and most other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment were. Even praising the peaceful nature of Hume’s death in 1776, as Smith did, made Smith himself highly suspect in the eyes of orthodox Christians. No infidel could be allowed to have died in anything but a state of anguish. In the history of the social sciences there are many examples of those who combined their scientific aims with a personal or philosophical attachment to religion. Smtih was thought to be some kind of deist, and Malthus, a figure I shall speak about in a later lecture, was actually a clergyman. Science and religion do not have to be in conflict with one another, though that seemed to be the conclusion that should be drawn from both Hume and Darwin’s work. More 5 often in the social sciences, however, what one finds is that religion, a set of metaphysical beliefs that has no empirical foundation, has been reinvented by social scientists. This was certainly the case with August Comte’s ‘religion of humanity’ and many would argue that Marxism gave its form of social science religious colouring, lending its historical message a kind of Messianic flavour. In another sense, of course, religious beliefs and practices have become an important field of study for social scientists, especially sociologists and anthropologists. Whatever the personal religious affiliations of the social scientist, religion cannot be ignored in any empirical account of social and political cohesion. Indeed, one of the lessons drawn by social scientists after the French revolution -- when an attempt was made to create a secular form of religion that would replace Catholicism -- was that religious belief was essential to understanding social and political behaviour. That could also be described as one of Hume’s conclusions. He would not have been a very good historian if he had tried to ignore the religious dimension to English history. Nor would he have been a good political scientist for his own day if he had ignored the role played by what he called ‘superstition’ and ‘enthusiasm’ in provoking and even defining people’s political aims and behaviour. A great deal of the rhetoric of political life was soaked in religious doctrine, where the doctrine of the divine right of kings was only the most obvious example. Being a patriotic Englishman during the eighteenth century and beyond also meant being a Protestant, very much as it does to the Unionist community in Northern Ireland today. Given Hume’s position on religion, however, it will not surprise you to learn that he thought that this kind of mixture of religion with politics was the most divisive and most potentially destructive kind of forces, the enemy of moderation, clear-thinking, and the most dangerous source of political instability. Hence too one of his most sensible or Machiavellian opinions, depending on your point of view, namely that the Anglican system of having an established church, where the clergy were, so to speak, on the payroll of the state, was one way of keeping them in order, preventing them from seeking fame by becoming popular demagogues. So far, I have not said enough about the core of Hume’s philosophy, the grounds on which he defended his brand of scepticism. This can be found in what can either be described as his 6 secular empiricism or his anti-rationalism. Hume rejected some forms of extreme scepticism, otherwise known as Pyrrhonism -- those that denied that it was possible to acquire any real knowledge of the external world of objects and persons. To Hume this was like atheism or a destructive kind of relativism. Atheism was simply a mirror version of religious dogmatism: it proclaimed dogmatically that nothing could be known about God, rather than being content with saying that we do not have enough evidence to believe in God. This may seem like an over-subtle distinction in religion, but it certainly is not when we are talking about science defined as I said in my first lecture simply as our capacity to acquire regular, rule-governed forms of knowledge. To Hume, the extreme sceptics refuted themselves every time they undertook the simplest of everyday transactions. Thus even if they pretended to be total sceptics in their studies, believing that nothing could be known about the external world, they disproved themselves when they chose to leave their studies by the door rather than by the window. We could not live our lives without some assumption about regularities in our physical surroundings and social circumstances, some belief that causes were regularly accompanied by effects. Life was not a series of random events, and none of us lived our lives with such a ridiculous preconception. Nevertheless, Hume’s brand of scepticism which he called ‘mitigated scepticism’ was anti-rationalist in the sense that it denied our capacity to demonstrate rationally, a prioristically, that ‘a’ would always cause ‘b’ under any and all circumstances. Establishing causal connections was simply a matter of observing that ‘a’ seemed to occur in conjunction with ‘b, and possibly before ‘b’ in time. But this was purely a matter of empirical generalisation, rather than a mathematical or deductive demonstration. In Hume’s language, we could acquire proofs but not demonstrations, where the proofs took the form of observations of ‘constant contingency’ that had so far not been disproved, such as our expectation that the sun will rise tomorrow. The existence of such proofs of regularity ruled out total scepticism and complete relativism as well, though it also meant that someone who had lived his life in a hot climate would have good reason to be sceptical if he was told that in cold climates an elephant could stand on water. Hence Hume’s description of himself as 7 a mitigated sceptic, which simply meant that one should always proportion belief in causal regularity to the degree of reliable evidence and act accordingly. In matters of morals and politics, where the evidence was not as obvious as the daily rising of the sun, this meant that one should believe and act on probabilistic evidence: the most probable hypothesis, carrying the most weight by explaining the largest number of observations, if not all of them. This cautious empiricism also explains something important about the social and political theorising of Hume and Smith: their unwillingness to engage in predictions of future social states. There was sufficient evidence to explain many past events and social developments, even to propound various laws and maxims when faced with present policies and regimes, but the knowledge we had of human affairs did not license predictions, if only because the human factor -- the role of sheer folly and stupidity, if you like -- ruled this out. For the remainder of this lecture I would now like to show how Hume’s scepticism and anti-rationalism influenced the nature of his substantive contributions to moral and political theorising, taking two main examples, his theory of justice and the related attack he launched on the doctrine of the social contract as a theory of political obligation. In other words, how he set about accounting for the phenomenon of political allegiance, stability, and breakdown. But first justice, where this relates to what Hume considered the most fundamental aspect of life in society, the ability to regulate disputes centring on ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. No society could exist without such rules. We can understand this by means of a comparison with Hobbes's state of nature as one of war of all against all. In Hume's terms, that is comparable to a shipwreck, in which the only rules are those of individual survival, where no rules of justice have relevance. At the other end of the spectrum lies a world of plenty and universal brotherhood: that too is a world in which mine and thine do not need to be distinguished. I can meet your needs without stinting on my own. But we live most of our lives in circumstances that are intermediate between these extremes. The goods of the world do not exist in abundance by comparison with our needs and wants, and we are selfish animals equipped with limited benevolence towards our fellow creatures. In such circumstances rules to determine the inevitable conflicts over matters of rightful ownership 8 are essential: social life is impossible without them. They are in this respect, probably prior to in time, and more important than the precise forms of government under which men have lived. This was to become one of Hume's responses to those who advanced contractarian theories to explain the origin of government: it enabled him to say that men could arrive at peaceful ways of living together before subjecting themselves to the authority of government. Hume, and Smith agreed on this, regarded the establishment of rules or conventions on this matter, rules of commutative justice, as essential to any form of society, regardless of how rich or poor, how much or how little property there was to become the object of disputes. Having said this, there is no doubt that the richer society becomes, the greater the necessity for rules regarding security of property become: hence what I said earlier about the transition from feudalism to commercial society, where feudalism was associated in their minds with disorder. How societies arrived at such rules or conventions, therefore, was the most important question concerning their origins and survival prospects. Since you have heard a lecture on Rousseau, you will have obtained some idea of how important questions about the origin of society were to social science in the eighteenth century, and Hume and Smith provide a sharp contrast with Rousseau’s manner of theorising, chiefly because they start from a quite different assumption. As Hume said: 'Man is born in a family, is compelled to maintain society from necessity, from natural inclinations, and from habit.' In brief, they assume at the outset that man has always lived in society of some kind; that he could not exist in some imagined state of nature outside society; and that there was no need to have resort to fictions like the social contract to explain why or how he consented to form society and under what conditions he agreed to remain there. These were all rational constructs that had little or no empirical foundation, and they also tended to rely on another dubious hypothesis, namely that since men were at heart unsociable creatures they had to be manipulated into accepting the rules of social existence, where the manipulators could be the rich and powerful, or simply those who were most cunning. Rather than use such rational constructs and conspiracy theories, they preferred to seek explanations in the ordinary everyday transactions of social life, where 9 instincts and passions common to all men, were the chief motivating factors rather than reason. Hence Hume’s famous aphorism that reason is and always ought to be the slave of the passions, because reason could never motivate an action, merely justify it in retrospect. Hence too his account of justice as an artificial rather than a natural virtue. You will see a quotation in the handbook, p. 17, number 3, from an essay on the original contract, which gives a highly condensed version of Hume’s position on this. I advise you to read the whole section there before turning to his other work for fuller exposition. On Hume's account, the natural virtues were those most obviously displayed in our friendships and within our families. They depended on qualities like affection, generosity, humanity, gratitude, liberality, fidelity, and prudence, with each social act being capable of arousing sympathetic pleasure and hence approval in the eyes of spectators. Such transactions were autonomous and self-sufficient; they required no further justification. The motive and the result were transparent. Nor were they capable of being reduced to complicated versions of self-love, as was held by Hobbes. By contrast, an artificial virtue, such as justice and the performance of promises, where Hume treats the repayment of a debt as his textbook example, was not selfsufficient: they required a motive for performance, and each transaction was dependent on the belief that other transactions of a similar kind would conform to the same rules. The mere honesty of the act was not a sufficient motive. Nor is an appeal to self-interest: left to my own devices, I would not repay the loan. Nor are you likely to get much further by saying that it is in the public interest for me to repay my debts. That is too remote, too refined a motive to act on most people when the act conflicts with private interest. We need to find another motive, or if you like, we need to invent another motive: hence its artificiality. But Hume was anxious to distinguish his idea of artificiality from that advanced by more cynical moralists, such as Bernard de Mandeville, who had argued that all moral codes as well as the rules of justice were an imposition on unsociable man in the interests of making him sociable. They were literally inventions, but by the powerful and cunning in society, or the rich and powerful, who realised that unless they could induce their fellow men to accept ideas of honour, virtue, and justice by working on their pride, life would decline into savagery. 10 Hume's assumption of natural sociability dispenses with part of Mandeville's argument, but in describing justice as artificial, Hume obviously felt the necessity to disclaim that the rules of justice were arbitrary. For this purpose he has recourse to the idea of convention. A convention differs, however, from a promise. And the homely example he uses to bring this home is as follows: 'Two men who pull the oars of a boat do it by an agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each other.' We do it because we have learned that it is the only way in which we shall get to where we want to be. Similarly, in the case of justice, we form conventions or tacit agreements based on a sense of common interest to abstain from infringing the property rights of others because we have learned to recognise that this is the only way of preserving the benefits conferred on us by society. In this way we establish a motive that connects private interest with public interest. What one can say, therefore, is that self-interest is converted, through acceptance of the convention, into a remedy for the defects of our selfishness, our avidity, our short-sightedness, which might otherwise lead us to obey only those rules that coincide with our short-term interests. Hume expressed this by means of a comparison between a wall built up by the natural virtues and a vault constructed on artificial virtues. The wall was composed of individual acts of natural benevolence, where each act simply added to the height or thickness of the wall. The vault, however, though equally composed of individual stones or bricks, could not be built in this fashion. It required something more to hold it in place: a prior acceptance that a vault was needed and that it could only be constructed by following a strict set of rules, even though following the rules did not coincide with our personal interests and inclinations on all occasions. One had to accept justice holistically, making a kind of cost-benefit calculation of gains and losses: 'It is sufficient if the whole plan or scheme be necessary to the support of civil society, and if the balance of good, in the main, do thereby preponderate much above that of evil.' (E,305) Public utility or a sense of what was conducive to the regular continuation of social existence could therefore be the only motive for acting justly. So justice is artificial, but not arbitrary. It becomes ‘second nature’, another interpretation of artificial. 11 There are several important consequences of Hume's position. Let me list three of them before dealing with them more fully. First, the rules of justice presume a social learning process, which also means that they have a history. Secondly, the way in which Hume has posed the problem focusses very much on property. Thirdly, it is important to note that he has confined the rules of justice to commutative justice rather than distributive justice. The rules of justice arise out of ordinary experiments in daily life. It is a learning-bydoing process which has some evolutionary characteristics: we find out what works, and what goes wrong when we disregard the rules we have formulated in the course of our social dealings. Children have to learn to respect the mine and thine of life, and so do families and whole societies. The learning process can also be compared and linked with what Hume has to say about our powers of understanding. In the ordinary course of social life we form conjunctions between acts and events. These become the basis for stable expectations: having worked to our advantage in the past, we expect them to work in the same manner in future. Custom and habit extend experience from case to case, allowing us to form general rules. Reflection on these conjunctions enables us to form general rules, and their inflexibility gives stability, predictability, coherence, confidence, reducing the costs and increasing the benefits of social life, giving us courage to undertake things. Notice too, that although Hume had objected to the idea of these rules being imposed arbitrarily, from above, or behind our backs by the wise or cunning, he was prepared to acknowledge that once the rules existed, it was possible for politicians to assist nature, to lend artificial reinforcement to them. But he still denied the Mandevillian position: 'The utmost politicians can perform, is, to extend the natural sentiments beyond their original bounds; but still nature must furnish the materials, and give us some notion of moral distinctions'. (T, 500) Secondly, there is the emphasis on protection of property that some have said gives Hume's position an economic bias. By emphasising the problem of scarcity of resources in relation to wants, this is certainly the case. Hume's way of thinking is capable of being extended to cover personal rights as well as property rights, but the property bias does 12 illustrate the importance Hume attaches to economic life, to material prosperity as the key to what he describes as civilisation, another learning process which I will deal with tomorrow. Finally, there is the restriction to commutative justice -- a confirmation of what I have just said about the economic bias of Hume's thinking. But it is worth considering why Hume rejects the idea that we can formulate rules concerning the distribution of property and incomes. This would entail general acceptance of some scale of relative merit, wisdom, or virtue that can be applied to individuals -- one that could be used to determine who should get more, who less. Hume could hardly deny that ideas on this matter had been given currency, though, typically, he treats the ideas of levellers as those of political fanatics, where the fanaticism has to be attributed to religion. He acknowledged that there was something agreeable about a communistic ideal in a world of plenty; and in the idea of redistributing goods from the very rich to the very poor. Nevertheless, he did not think our ideas on merit were sufficiently stable to establish the degree of consensus needed to form enforceable rules on the subject, rules capable of dealing with the mass of cases between the extremes. Schemes for equalising property, such as the ancient agrarian law, had either failed, or had not prevented inequalities reestablishing themselves: 'Render possessions ever so equal, men's different degrees of art, care, and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence; and instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community.' But his most important criticism was that a commitment to equality would entail a 'rigorous inquisition', and increase in the powers of government over individual lives that could not fail to become tyrannical. These are, or were to become, the standard arguments on the subject of attempts to establish equality of outcome, which are quite different, of course, from arguments about equality before the law, political equality, and equality of opportunity. There is an economic dimension here, once more, but you also have to remember that private property was also thought of as a counterbalancing factor when dealing with the powers of monarchs. 13 As I anticipated, there is not sufficient time to deal with Hume’s devastating attack on all forms of contract thinking when dealing with the question of political obedience. But it links with what I have said so far on two levels. First, historically, one of his reasons for attacking the idea was that the idea of contract had become the ‘fashionable’ theory adopted by many Whigs during the eighteenth century; it was used to proclaim the superiority of English arrangements by suggesting that only the English had had the wisdom to come to a formal contractual arrangement with their monarch. It was also capable of being used as the basis for an argument as to why, having given their consent in this manner, it was possible for the people to withdraw that consent in order to vest power elsewhere. On the second level, Hume’s arguments against contractual explanations is linked closely with what I have said about his theory of justice, which means that if you have grasped the logic of this you should be able to see how the same reasoning is applied to undermine the rationalist bias of the contract. We give allegiance to forms of government for reasons based on what might be termed Hume’s ‘sociology of convention’. We do so either because we believe that the system has acquired legitimacy by persisting successfully over long periods of time (an argument that has a ‘Tory’ flavour), or because we perceive the public utility of sustaining regular government (a Whiggish argument) when compared with the alternatives. In neither case do we give our formal consent, and in neither case does it require us to believe that the origins of governments were legitimate when first established, or that governments have to be perfect before we accept them. These were not the kinds of arguments likely to commend themselves to those who stressed the ‘rights of resistance’ that accompanied some forms of the contractual argument, and Hume’s purpose was to discomfort such advocates, encouraging moderation in political debate. Thus Hume can be treated as a ‘conservative’ political theorist, though I think it more accurate in the context of the history of the social sciences to say that his scepticism and anti-rationalism engendered a form of sociological realism. Hume and Smith are undoubtedly the most original figures in the Scottish Enlightenment; they were also close friends and shared many basic philosophical positions on the foundations 14 of knowledge, on how moral questions should be tackled naturalistically, and on political and economic subjects. I want to begin this lecture by mentioning some of these points which they held in common before moving on to consider some characteristic contributions of Hume to the sciences of morals and politics as those sciences were understood throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. In particular, I shall concentrate on Hume’s theory of justice treated as an artificial virtue and his criticisms of contractual ideas on government. Hume stood apart from Scottish and many English philosophers and moralists by virtue of his decidedly unorthodox position on religion: he was a skeptic, a secularist, and unbeliever, and therefore an infidel. Smith was more cautious on such matters, as can be judged from the simple fact that whereas he was appointed to a Chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow, Hume was considered far too unsound on religious matters to be appointed to any university post. Smith's policy of keeping his cards closer to his chest on these matters has allowed many to believe that he was at best, or at worst, depending on your point of view, a theist or deist. My own opinion is that it went a bit further than that, as became clear when he wrote his brief encomium on the life and death of Hume. By praising the Stoic calmness and good humour with which Hume approached death, Smith earned the enmity of all those who claimed that unrepentant infidels were not entitled to die in anything but torment. At a time when all questions of truth in matters of natural and moral philosophy were intimately bound up with Christian theology, this antagonism or luke-warmness towards organised religion and theology is more than a simple matter of personal preference; and I shall indicate ways in which it impinged on the philosophical and political opinions of Hume and Smith later. In broad terms, Hume and Smith were both social Newtonians. Hence Hume's declaration in the subtitle of the THN that it was 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects'. Slightly less obviously, the same aim is proclaimed in the self-conscious title of Smith's first book: a theory of moral sentiments, an attempt to provide an explanatory overview of how moral sentiments worked to produce the kinds of moral codes that could be observed in modern societies. The full title of his more famous work, An 15 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations makes its naturalistic intentions plain. As does his espousal in that work of something he called 'a system of natural liberty'. Hume and Smith, then, were both committed to the construction of systems of morals and politics that would meet the test of observation and experiment, where this could be based on everyday observation of social institutions and practices, comparative and historical evidence of life in other societies at other times, and by an appeal to the kind of knowledge we all have as intelligent social actors, capable of reflecting on our own motives as well as those of others.. Both authors, then, were also keen to create naturalistic systems of moral philosophy based on 'immediate sense and feeling' and on the assumption that human sociability was a natural state of affairs rather than something imposed from above, or arrived at artificially by a ruse on the part of the cunning and powerful, or by means of some treaty between creatures possessing rational foresight. As Hume said: 'Man is born in a family, is compelled to maintain society from necessity, from natural inclinations, and from habit.'Sociability was what ultimately distinguished man from the animal kingdom. This had an important consequence for political theory. For if man's instinct for society was an entirely natural one, if man had never actually been observed outside some primitive form of society, albeit one that might not be more than an extended family or tribe, it was not necessary to resort to speculations about pre-social man in a state of nature, and how this state came to be relinquished, whether by historical accident, rational calculation, or conspiracy on the part of the few or the many. What David Hume has to say in opposition to contractual modes of dealing with the origins and legitimacy of society or government, goes for Smith, his closest friend and intellectual ally, as well. They rejected all known version of the idea: the Hobbesian version based on fear; the Lockean version based on a utilitarian perception of mutual self-interest; and the Mandeville-Rousseau idea of a corrupt social compact imposed by the rich and cunning on the poor and unknowing. All such devices were at best unnecessary intellectual fictions, at worst a hindrance to proper understanding, and hence to stability in 'free governments' that were dependent on opinion based on understanding. 16 Hume and Smith can also be described as anti-rationalists: appeals to reason, God-given or not, were simply teleological short-cuts, no substitute for the business of understanding based on natural instincts or passions that were common to all men in some degree or mixture. But there were regularities of social existence that justified the pursuit of science: in Hume's case, these derived from the effect of custom, usually as embodied in certain institutions, to create stable expectations. Human behaviour possessed regularity because it consisted in following rules, consciously. In other words, he was not treating man as some kind of machine. In his first work Hume had attempted to show that there were inherent limitations in our capacity to understand the world. The limitations centre on his famous demonstration of our inability through reason alone to penetrate beyond our immediate sensations to create determinate models of the world; that the causal connections we posited could never be necessary connections, susceptible to demonstration, but would have to remain constant conjunctions. We have no other resource than to believe that what had been observed to be conjoined in the past would also hold for the future. We might be able to marshall evidence in favour of our beliefs, but it was always going to fail the test of demonstrability. Although Hume had clearly stared into the abyss of total scepticism, he had retreated, and urged others to retreat into what he called practical or mitigated scepticism. It was right to reject the claims of ethical rationalists to the effect that God had endowed us with the rational capacity to intuit right and wrong; but Hume also wished to repudiate the conclusions of a more fullblooded scepticism that concluded that all moral judgements were arbitrary; that anything goes. Mitigated scepticism entailed proportioning belief to evidence rather than denying that any evidence can be adequate for belief. We should be content with proofs rather than demonstrations. But the point I wish to stress when mentioning Hume's scepticism on epistemological issues is that it lends some truth to the verdict that Hume wished to place man at the centre of a universe from which he had been displaced by Copernicus. Moreover, in rejecting the idea of God as the author of the universe, as the ultimate designer, in the manner of Newton, 17 this was a far more radical form of humanism, comparable to Darwin's later demonstration that the biological world may have some of the characteristics of a design without a designer, but lacks any discernible moral purpose that could be corroborated, apart from the ones with which we choose to endow it. Although it is possible to exaggerate the Darwinian parallels, they do help to suggest why Hume was regarded as such a subversive figure for many of his contemporaries. Smith may not appear to go as far as Hume in such matters. In TMS, though not WN, you will find plenty of references to Providence, the Great Geometer or watch-maker and so on as the explanation for what was known as 'final causes'. He makes extensive use of teleological or functionalist arguments suggesting that the world is a complex piece of machinery in which all the parts are neatly adjusted to the ends they were designed to serve. Nevertheless, what Smith is also saying is that questions that require such answers are beyond our comprehension: hence our resort to hypotheses of an all-wise and beneficent deity. This has the further implication that we were better advised to stick with what was entirely within our powers, namely an understanding of 'efficient' causes of this-worldly events, the subject to which he devotes most of his attention. There are more detailed points of similarity and difference between Hume and Smith on other matters: on the role of sympathy in moral judgements, on the origins and nature of the rules of justice, on the psychological foundations of authority, whether seen as allegiance to government or as deference within a society composed of ranks, as well as on the more mundane issues of everyday political and economic life. I will deal with some of these in the course of these lectures, but I wanted to begin with some fundamental points they held in common. *** Politics, defined in its original or Aristotelean sense as dealing with 'men united in society and dependent on one another', was to be one of the sciences that Hume believed could be reformulated along new lines by his discoveries in the science of human nature, his epistemological writings on the limits of human reason in achieving understanding. The most 18 essential element in Hume's science of politics can be found in THN, and later in the Enquiries concerning the principles of morals: and it centres on what he has to say about justice as an artificial virtue. Anyone who grasps Hume's meaning and purpose on this subject, or so it seems to me, has mastered much of what is distinctive about Hume's philosophical and political vision and the links between them. I shall spend the rest of this opening lecture on the subject. But first let me give some general reasons why the subject of justice was so important to Hume. Hume believed that the evolution of rules of justice to deal with the meum and tuum of social life was the most important feature of the formal social bond as well as being one of man's most important historical achievments. No society could exist without such rules. We can understand this by means of a comparison with Hobbes's state of nature as one of war of all against all. In Hume's terms, that is comparable to a shipwreck, in which the only rules are those of individual survival, where no rules of justice have relevance. At the other end of the spectrum lies a world of plenty and universal brotherhood: that too is a world in which mine and thine do not need to be distinguished. I can meet your needs without stinting on my own. But we live most of our lives in circumstances that are intermediate between these extremes. The goods of the world do not exist in abundance by comparison with our needs and wants, and we are selfish animals equipped with limited benevolence. In such circumstances rules to determine the inevitable conflicts over matters of rightful ownership are essential: social life is impossible without them. They are in this respect, probably prior to in time, and more important than the precise forms of government under which men have lived. This was to become one of Hume's responses to those who advanced contractarian theories to explain the origin of government: it enabled him to say that men could arrive at peaceful ways of living together before subjecting themselves to the authority of government. Furthermore, when making comparative-historical assessments of different forms of government, Hume made their capacity to administer the rules of justice with a tolerable degree of impartiality the main criterion. This was to give rise to another divergence from received wisdom when he refused to condemn France, an absolute monarchy, as living under a system of slavery, as lacking liberty. Hume's position was that modern liberty should be 19 defined in terms of security under the rule of law, and by this criterion, civilised absolute monarchies were perfectly capable of passing the test. The final reason for beginning any study of Hume with what he has to say about justice considered as an artificial virtue is that it helps to understand what he has to say about allegiance and theories of obligation. It is therefore important to his rejection of contractarian modes of justifying obedience to government with all of their unacceptable consequences. Why then was it so important for Hume to treat justice as an artificial virtue? Yesterday I laid considerable stress on Hume's view of justice as based on convention. I also said that it provided the key to another of Hume's distinctive positions -- those expressed in his rejection of all ideas based on the social contract. I want to begin with Hume's views on this subject today, before moving on to consider some of his other ideas on the benefits derived from modern commercial forms of society, and his views on the workings of the British eighteenth-century constitution. But first a brief word about the works with which I shall be dealing. Following the failure of THN to evoke much of a response, Hume turned to the essays, and later to history as a way of cultivating his science of politics. This was a change of style but not of aim. It conforms with another aim, namely Hume's belief that philosophy should be brought out of the scholarly closet and into society. It should, as he said, be made 'conversible', which does not mean that it should be less serious, merely a polite form of entertainment with some uplifting qualities. Hume mixed serious essays on political and economic subjects with others of a more ephemeral nature, but this should not detract from the original aim. Some of the essays -- on first principles of government, on the original contract, and passive obedience -- are the kinds of things that might have appeared in treatises on government. Indeed, they are often popular versions of what Hume had written in THN and Enquiries. I commend to you the three or four paragraphs in the essay on the original contract which summarize what he has to say on justice as an artificial virtue. Others -- such as the nature of parties under the British system of government, on the independence of parliament from the executive -are more by way of serious inquiry into the sociology of British political institutions, always 20 with an historical and comparative dimension added. They are political science in a narrower sense, where it should be borne in mind that Hume was interpreting an unwritten constitution that was still in process of development, and where interpretations of what was essential to its working, what was detrimental, were either a byproduct of party divisions, or had yet to become part of contemporary understanding. The same goes for the group of economic essays on commerce, money, interest, public credit, taxes, and foreign trade. In this case, however, Hume was entering territory that had less of a history of learned cultivation by philosophers and natural lawyers; and while the essays are often penetrating, they could not match what Adam Smith was to do in WN, namely provide a complete philosophical system to explain the causes of the growth of opulence in commercial societies. There is a commonplace observation that runs to the effect that profound political theorising is always the result of living through major political disruptions of one kind or another. To those who believe such things, the eighteenth century, is often thought to be a somnolent period in English political history, and hence in political analysis. It was poised between a period in which the English had the peculiar distinction of having decapitated one monarch and forced another into exile, becoming a godly commonwealth or republic in between, on the one side, and the upheaval of the French revolution at the end of the century on the other. Wars, another source of social and political upheaval in our century, were a permanent feature of eighteenth-century life, but they were all fought in Europe or more far-flung places like India and North America. Hume did not live to see the outcome of the American revolution, but he clearly expected it and was not altogether dismayed by the prospect of Britain losing its western empire. But apart from the doubtfulness of the original hypothesis, one has to bear in mind the continuing reverberations of late 17th century events on English political dispositions and arguments. It was these atavistic or backward-looking elements that Hume sought to counter, partly through his rewriting of the history of England, and partly through his essays attacking the hang-overs from the English revolution. There was also, it has to be said, especially for a Scotsman who regarded himself as a North Briton, and therefore a supporter of the union of 21 England and Scotland in 1707, the constant reminder that the Hanoverian settlement was still subject to contest, notably from the supporters of the Stuart claims to the throne -- claims that were backed by military successes before Culloden finally put paid to them in 1745. These fundamental issues of allegiance to the old or the new royal families were also kept alive by the party divisions between Whigs and Tories, where many of the latter were non-jurors, those who refused or avoided taking an oath of allegiance where possible. Hume was hostile to the way in which party divisions were expressed in terms of speculative principles on the nature of government, with the upholders of the divine right of kings commanding passive obedience of their subjects on one side, and those who maintained that the English had reenacted a form of original contract in 1688, voluntarily or consensually entrusting powers of government to the new royal line, while retaining certain rights to resist or withdraw support under certain, not very easily specifiable circumstances. It was hardly likely that someone with Hume's religious beliefs would give much credence to divine right theories; they could hardly meet the kinds of empirical criteria which he had set himself. How could we know if it was true that God had meant rulers to exercise divine powers? Hume mainly contented himself with the mischievous observation that if rulers were placed over us by a beneficent deity, why had God conferred this right on some pretty awful ones, such as the Borgias, as well as some good ones? The doctrine of original contract seemed to have a bit more going for it. For example, it contained the idea of consent, of voluntary submission to a government that could guarantee peace and stability. What Hume rejected here, as he had rejected it earlier when dealing with justice as an artificial virtue, was the further idea that the contract involved a promise, albeit a conditional one that allowed the promisor to withdraw his allegiance if he was disappointed with the results. This abstract idea was not supported by history or by the everyday practices and beliefs of rulers and ruled. At best it was an unnecessary fiction, at worst a dangerously destabilising doctrine. Most established forms of government had originated in violence, conquest, or usurpation. When writing his history of England, Hume stressed how small the oligarchy of active politicians who engineered revolution was. Nevertheless, obedience to 22 government, whatever their origins, was a natural response that did not require any further reinforcement. In fact, Hume regarded the voluntary consent idea as one that undermined rather than reinforced the natural deference we are always inclined to give to established authority. It was, potentially at least, a seditious doctrine. Governments cannot turn on shifting interpretations of whether private interests are best served by continuing obedience. That would be like abandoning the convention that underlies the rules of justice in property matters whenever one's private interest was harmed. You bought governments holus-bolus, not on those occasions on which it suited you to do so. As in the case of property, present possession must carry a good deal of weight; and long possession comes in as reinforcement: we do as a matter of plain observation accept what exists and has long existed. Time and custom must be allowed their full weight; they overcome memories of the irregularities, the violence and injustice that attended the first formation. Hume also ridiculed the weaker notion of our giving tacit consent to be ruled by virtue of remaining a subject or citizen: 'We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.' Another version of the same idea in more serious guise can be found in Hume's argument that since society is not a static entity, but rather is composed of new generations joining, and old ones leaving, this 'perpetual flux' meant that the newcomers were not free to exercise choice. It is, if you like, Hume's version of an idea that was later to be expressed by Burke as a contract that bound past, present, and future, rather than a contract between those who happened to exist at any given moment of time. As in the case of justice, promises to obey are not based on contracts, promises are the result of conventions, artifices, or inventions, which means that obligation must have a solid basis in human nature since we form the convention or make the invention. What then are our motives for doing so? We give our allegiance for two main reasons: because we have learned to appreciate the advantages of regular government, to appreciate the public benefits it confers, and we have therefore acquired an opinion in its favour based on interest. 23 Alternatively, we have a natural deference towards long-established regimes, we have formed an opinion of who has the right to rule which underlies our obedience. You can call these two forms of allegiance, active and passive psychological principles, and you can also say that Whigs have more of the former, while Tories have more of the latter. If that had remained the basis of party divisions, they would be matters of emphasis only; there would be more room for mutual accommodation and for keeping all disagreements within existing constitutional boundaries. Hume's chief criticism of the 'fashionable system' based on the contract was that it created a form of ideological politics that magnified the differences and brought the very idea of government into question. It follows that Hume had no time for the related topic, namely rights of resistance. The dissolution of government was the worst of all eventualities, and discussion of the circumstances in which established governments could be overthrown encouraged a dangerously voluntaristic and valetudinarian attitude in such matters. As Hume said, placing emphasis on rights of resistance was like making a theory of divorce the foundation for understanding the institution of marriage, its rights, duties, and obligations. Another major divisive force was factionalism, particularly when the faction was united around a speculative opinion, one that could not be readily settled by any known empirical methods. The worst form of these, in Hume's opinion, was the faction derived from religious enthusiasm. To a man of Hume's temperament and experience, such factions involved a species of irrationalism. Political differences based on an apparent or actual clash of economic interests could be dangerous, but interests were capable of being assessed empirically and, where necessary, used against one another in a mutually checking fashion -- this was one of the parts of Hume's teaching that was to be important to James Madison when taking part in American constitutional debates in the 1780s. **** Some of Hume's political essays, as I mentioned earlier, take a different form. They are attempts to diagnose how the English system of government actually works, as compared with how some of its partisans suggested that it ought to be working. The best example of 24 this kind of analysis can be found in Hume's discussion of the problem that most exercised party politics during and after Walpole's long period of office, namely what was known as the 'influence' of the Crown, as exercised through its capacity to gain support for the executive in parliament by means of bribes and jobbery. The Country party opponents of Walpole's methods regarded this form of corruption as one designed to undermine the independence of parliament. And since the constitution could be described as requiring a balance between the elements that composed its mixture of Crown, Lords, and Commons, anything that disturbed this balance, by increasing the discretionary powers of the crown, could seem to pose a fundamental threat to the constitution. Hume's response to this kind of party rhetoric was to show that the combined wealth of those represented in parliament had grown to the point where it could challenge the monarchy through its power over the purse. It could in theory even create a republic. Why does it not do so? Because the crown has many offices at its disposal which enable it to buy support for the executive. Looked at from a Court party perspective, the capacity of parliament, if unmanaged by Walpolean methods, to disrupt the executive, prevent it from acting, could lead to deadlock of the kind that one still sees in the American constitution, and where 'log-rolling' remains a method of management. Under these circumstances, 'influence' or corruption, call it what you will, was, in Hume's opinion, essential to the running of the system. Instead of railing against corruption, the Country party should think about how balance should be maintained, rather than use a heightened rhetoric that saw every bit of jobbery as undermining the constitution itself. Once more, Hume appears in the guise of a moderate, standing above party, and reminding those who are the chief players to keep their eye on what matters most, the continuity and stability of government. **** I would now like to turn to the group of essays that Hume wrote on economic subjects, where these too have an important dimension that is both historical and political. The economic essays, as Duncan Forbes noted, display Hume in his least sceptical guise. He gives an account of the benefits of commerce and the spread of luxury that is almost entirely 25 positive, while at the same time keeping at arm's length from Mandeville's scandalously cynical defence of luxury. Hume does this by acknowledging that the moral distinctions between 'innocent' and 'blameable' forms of luxury are genuine, whereas Mandeville's paradoxes derived much of their force by refusing to make any such distinction. Unlike Smith and other Scottish writers on the same theme, however, Hume does not draw attention to any of its possible social and political drawbacks. There is nothing in Hume, for example, to match what Smith and Ferguson have to say about the mental mutilation associated with the narrowing effects on the mass of society of partaking in the division of labour. In his essay on commerce Hume proclaims that there can be no conflict between the private material interests and happiness of subjects and the greatness of a state. Private and public interest are united. He qualifies this a little later, but there can be no doubt that what he was doing was challenging an entire republican tradition that warned against the dangers to res publica posed by luxury and inequality. Virtue and public spirit could only suffer when unlimited scope was given to the private pursuit of wealth and luxury. Men became effeminate, societies enfeebled, unable to defend themselves, incapable and unwilling to undertake the supreme patriotic task of fighting for, and, if necessary, dying for one's country. Such republican ideas remained alive and well among Hume's Scottish contemporaries, and there was of course a large body of ancient literature on the subject, much of it centring on the fall of Rome. Characteristically, therefore, Hume denies that the fall of Rome was due to such factors: it was more the result of basic defects in its system of governance due to the expansion of empire. The optimistic sequence begins as soon as agriculture becomes sufficiently improved to furnish a surplus beyond the subsistence needs of those who work in agriculture. This enables a society to support an urban sector devoted to the production of luxuries. In ancient republics, the labour of slaves served public purposes by enabling citizen armies to be maintained. But the ancient policy of suppressing the desire for the kinds of goods that could be acquired through manufacture and commerce meant that there were no incentives to improve agriculture, no spur to emulate the finer products that could be imported, to improve 26 on the mechanical arts. There was also no storehouse of labour that could, in time of war, be withdrawn from luxury production into defence of the realm. It is a stagnant form of society that survives only by acting contrary to the ‘common bent of mankind’ to seek novelty, activity, and refinement. It begets indolence at the expence of what Hume describes as the 'quick march of the spirits'. The search for refinement in commercial societies, however, animates all aspects of society: 'We cannot reasonably expect that a piece of woolen cloth will be wrought to perfection in a nation which is ignorant of astronomy, or where ethics are neglected.' Industry, knowledge, sociability, and humanity are linked by an 'indissoluble chain'. These yield public benefits too: the love of liberty grows, governments improve, factions become less inveterate. Liberty benefits most from the growth of the middling ranks, thereby filling the gap between lords and peasants: such people 'covet equal laws' and are watchful of encroachments of monarchical and aristocratic power. In short, commerce begets 'free governments', just as, in return, commerce is more likely to thrive under free governments. Republics seek to control trade, and absolute monarchies create a climate in which commerce carries an element of social stigma. All this can be read as a celebration of the superiority of modern over ancient societies; and it is again part of Hume's campaign against atavism, the tendency among some of contemporary political moralists to indulge in nostalgia for ancient simplicity and virtue. As when he was criticising the tendency to look backwards for evidence of legitimacy when dealing with the grounds of political allegiance, Hume was counselling a policy of counting blessings, of building on the achievments of the recent past rather than regretting a glory that was long past and whose credentials often did not bear close scrutiny. As historian of England, Hume reinforced this campaign... In other economic essays, those on money, the rate of interest, the balance of trade, and jealousy of trade, Hume is beginning the process of questioning another popular body of maxims, those associated with what Smith was to call the mercantile system: the confusion of specie and monetary indicators with the real sources of wealth that lie in labour and technology; the anxieties over a favourable balance of trade that had led to a confusion of 27 trade with power. Whereas power was a zero-sum game in which the weakening of your opponent added to your strength, trade was a positive sum game in which since both parties could gain, you should pray for the prosperity of your neighbours. It becomes a case for freedom of trade by virtue of its destruction of a number of popular objections and fears. In only one instance -- though it is a significant one -- does Hume fail to take the sanguine position on the prospects opened up by commerce as the foundation for national prosperity: the case of public credit, an institution that had been brought to a fine art in Britain and had allowed her to prosecute war against France so successfully. It was the foundation of what economic historians now refer to as the 'fiscal-military' state. Although Hume did not endorse all the fears expressed by spokesmen for the landed interest when faced with the growth of a monied interest, he took a dim view of the tax burden associated with rising public debt, and allowed himself to become alarmist about the growing influence of the debtholders on government. The alarm can be judged by the fact that he counselled a policy of voluntary bankruptcy, of repudiation of all public debt, before it undermined the constitution and ruined the nation. The main source of Hume's worries, so far as Britain was concerned, was that this policy was more likely to be adopted by absolute monarchies like France. Free governments were more likely to delay until it was too late, meaning that forced bankruptcy would occur, possibly during a war. Hume's alarmism on this has provided some of the evidence needed to convict, or praise, him for having Tory sympathies. While that judgment is almost certainly wrong, it shows that the Court-Country spectrum during the eighteenth century was a genuine spectrum, allowing movement along its length. On this subject, Hume entertained the Country diagnosis and fears, whereas on influence, corruption, and the need for 'management' he took a Court position. It may be significant, however, that when Hume speculated as to whether the English form of government was likely to move in the direction of a republic or become an absolute form of monarchy, he made it clear that he would favour the latter route. The entire line of speculation, of course, suggests a much older approach, one that sees all forms of government as suffering from characteristic forms of decay. If not conflict, there 28 is room for a gap to have appeared between Hume's optimistic account of the connections between commerce and free governments, and his fears about the political stability of such types of government. The English now enjoyed the most complete realisation of a free government, with liberty as its main achievment. It enjoyed liberty of the press, religious toleration, a degree of political participation, and safeguards against arbitrary taxation. Hume refused to tell the story of English constitutional developments as an heroic struggle: neither the monarchs nor the puritan parliamentarians were fit subjects for such treatment. Instead of a landscape of heroes and villains, it was populated by people acting out the roles assigned to them by circumstances, sometimes doing better, sometimes worse. Even the best of men, acting in those circumstances, could not do better than they did. It was this coolness that made Hume's history seem anti-Whig and hence Tory. He was depriving Whigs and other politicians of one of their main resources in defining themselves and arguing their corner: historical precedent. As Duncan Forbes has stressed, another unusual feature of Hume's history was its cosmopolitanism. The parochial events of 1688 were placed within a European-wide context in which the breakdown of feudalism was the revolution that was most important to modern governments. A similar cosmopolitanism describes Hume's position within a Scottish context. As in the case of Smith, though one can find evidence of an awareness of Scotland's relative backwardness -- as well as, in Smith's case, a certain pride in Scottish educational institutions -- the audience to which they were appealing was a cosmopolitan one. Both had strong French contacts, and one could even describe Hume's cosmopolitanism as Francophilia matched by an element of Anglophobia. What worried Hume, particularly as he grew older, was the possibility that liberty in England had gained too much at the expense of authority, thereby threatening both liberty and authority. Forms of government were not immortal. Hume's views on public credit point up an intriguing feature of his political outlook. On the one hand, he urges wholehearted acceptance of the modern world of commerce and material opulence, not necessarily because he places high value on private enjoyments, but 29 because it creates the kind of society and polity that he favours. On the other hand, Hume is a nervous optimist, someone who is aware of the fragility of modern achievements and civilisation: the benefits are hard won, worth celebrating, but also vulnerable to destructive forces. On this perhaps some clarification can be gained from returning to what Hume has to say about the importance of opinion and belief systems. Zealots and enthusiasts, those who formed factions based on abstract principle, can never be entirely defeated. It is a constant battle which may be lost. But if conventions are strengthened through a learning process, why are those that have a long tradition behind them fragile? This question is not easy to answer, but consideration of it may help to explain Hume's emphasis on opinion as the medium that supports or subverts free governments; and his preference in matters of politics for machinery rather than men. Only by subjecting political behaviour to institutional constraints could such behaviour be controlled and stabilised. Hume's constitutionalism flows from the jurisprudential foundations of his political thinking. Though impartiality and moderation were his main lessons as a political writer, Hume remained rather nervous about the fragility of our beliefs and hence arrangements. Attempting to be calm, dispassionate, and impartial was the best service a philosopher could perform in a heated and excitable world. Far better than the technocrat offering devices, another Enlightenement model, best illustrated perhaps by someone like Condorcet, and more actively by Sieyes. There is only one apparent exception to this in Hume's work, his essay on the idea of perfect commonwealth, and it is worth noting that it begins with a typical Humean warning: 'To tamper...or try experiments merely upon the credit of supposed argument and philosophy, can never be the part of a wise magistrate, who will bear a reverence to what carries the marks of age.' He also says that all utopian speculations based on 'great reformation in the manners of mankind are plainly imaginary'. He carries out his own imaginary exercise simply because there might be a 'future age' in which, through the dissolution of government an opportunity of translating theory into practice might exist. Oddly enough, the opportunity arose not long after Hume's death when the new American republic attempted to use materials from the eighteenth-century science of politics, as developed by Montesquieu and Hume, 30 to build a federal republic containing all the checks and balances of a piece of clockwork. Madison's reading of Hume's essays was to prove very helpful in these circumstances. He certainly made good use of the following advice in the perfect commonwealth essay when writing Federalist Paper 10 on the need to curb factions or use them to counterbalance one another: 'Though it is more difficult to form a republican government in an extensive country than in a city; there is more facility, when once it is formed, of preserving it steady and uniform, without tumult and faction.' There is no clear agreement on how to label Hume's politics. Just as he has had to be rescued from some contemporary judgements, such as the Tory label, so he needs to be protected from some modern attempts at recruitment. Thus attempts to see him as yet another possessive individualist on the basis of his stress on the economic basis of modern civilisation, as another figure in a bourgeois tradition stretching from Locke to Mill, are not, in my opinion, very insightful, and fairly easily countered. If the anachronistic labels are to be employed, one can say that Hume's jurisprudence conforms with some versions of negative liberalism as we have later defined them. He is also a utilitarian, but not of the Benthamite kind. Conservatism is another anachronistic label, usually reserved for those, like Burke, who lived long enough to react against the French revolution. French events made it plain that there was an ancien regime to be defended, and that despite good intentions -- Burke would not even have conceded that to the leaders of the revolution -- nothing permanent can be built on bloodstained foundations. We can only speculate what Hume's position might have been. The emergence of a conservative position in British politics, largely based on Burke, allows us to see Hume in that light, though one major element is missing in Hume: religion and Burke's idea that church and state are part of an indisolvable union. Hume's conservatism lacks piety, an element of the sacred, and hence mystery. Those who can only live on the oxygen of 'first principle' of legitimacy, obligation, allegiance etc will find Hume sceptical on all such matters. 31  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Social Sciences and the Scottish Enlightenment Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Winch Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Undated. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context IHA/Winch/73 Adam Smith Aristotle Comte Condorcet Conservatism Copernicus Darwin David Hume Duncan Forbes Edmund Burke Hobbes Isaac Newton Malthus Mandeville Marx Montesquieu Richard Whatmore Rousseau Scottish Enlightenment Sociology Turgot Utilitarianism Walpole Weber https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/intellectualhistory/files/original/fa673885bb70288c99493a1cee5df83a.pdf 15a050624dfceb5c8e93df7ba29f2622 PDF Text Text Donald Winch John Stuart Mill's Map of the Social Sciences The subject of this afternoon’s lecture, John Stuart Mill, has already been mentioned in earlier lectures on Benthamite utilitarianism and classical political economy; and he could feature in a course on the history of the social sciences under various other headings as well. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century he became the leading philosopher of liberalism and Benthamite radicalism, an MP, a senior civil servant in the India Office, the archetypal intellectual in politics, the author of several important works on philosophy, politics, and economics, and the supporter of various causes, many of which seemed eccentric to his contemporaries: votes for women, proportional representation, birth control, reform in the civil service along meritocratic lines, cooperative socialism, taxation of incremental land values, peasant proprietorship in Ireland, and so on. Today he is best known perhaps for his essay On Liberty (1859), a work that has strong connections with the subject of my earlier lecture on Tocqueville. For it was in On Liberty that Mill tackled a problem which he believed was endemic to modern societies, namely a growing tendency towards homogeneity and conformism in matters of opinion and taste that needed to be combatted by drawing a ring fence around the purely self-regarding activities of the individual, thereby protecting him or her from the tyranny of majority opinion, whether or not it was backed up by law. One of Mill’s main reasons for fearing these majoritarian pressures arose not merely because ‘individuality’, the capacity of each individual to realise their potential, was important to him, but because he thought that the capacity for social progress was intimately bound up with moral and scientific ideas rather than mere interests. The ideas that were likely to determine the next stage of social progress were always the work of exceptional individuals commanding minority support; but he had great faith that such ideas, when their truth had been tested by experiment and open debate, would conquer prejudice and refute arguments that were merely rationalisations of the status quo and existing interests and power groupings. In this respect, although he shared with Marx a belief in the idea of progress, 1 �as most nineteenth-century thinkers did, he believed that it would result from a clash of ideas rather than a class of class interests. Moreover, he did not feel that the clash would be a simple one between truth and error, right and wrong. There was usually an element of truth in all positions that could only be winnowed out by the process of open and rational debate. As the leading British economist of his generation, he could hardly be unaware of the material or economic factors in modern life, and the importance of spreading the benefits of the new productive forces that capitalism had unleashed. In common with his earlier mentors, Smith and Ricardo, he had many proposals for ensuring that this would occur. But competitive forms of capitalism, though necessary for the forseeable future, might not be the answer to future social needs when other, and as he thought, higher aspects of human nature had developed. This explains his support for socialist experiments of a cooperative nature designed to overcome conflict between capital and labour, and it lies behind his speculations about a zero-growth society in which regard for the quality of life, including the environment, took precedence over the quantitative aspects of the expansion of population and material growth. It is also the basis for his campaign against the subjection of women. The supposed inferiority of women to men was largely based on custom and prejudice, but claimed to be based on innate or unalterable natural differences: here was a prejudice that could be exposed by means of social scientific argument and the evidence furnished by giving greater freedom for women to compete with men in the workplace and in the political arena. When as an MP Mill moved the motion to include women in the extension of suffrage envisaged by the 1867 Reform Bil, he was not downcast by the fact that he received only a handful of votes in the House of Commons. He regarded this as a small step in the right direction and was convinced that rationality would triumph in the end. It took much longer than he imagined. So far I have mentioned some of the ideas and causes which Mill, speaking selfconsciously as an advanced social thinker espoused. But for the purposes of this topic in the course and the examination, I want to concentrate on his writings on the philosophy of social science, specifically Book VI of his System of Logic, entitled ‘on the logic of the moral 2 �sciences’. This book has a special place in Mill’s career because it marks the point when he began to put together all the ideas he had acquired during a period of revolt from his utilitarian upbringing and was seeking a methodological standpoint from which to survey those parts of his upbringing that he wished to retain, and those parts he wished to reject or modify. The result was a new map of the social sciences, showing the territory already explored, the territory that needed to be annexed by means of science, and the specific methods of inquiry that should be employed in each branch. The result was a work that tells you what the social sciences looked like in the middle of the nineteenth century. It tells you what was left of the Enlightenment programme for naturalistic sciences of man in society after the upheavals of the French revolution had been absorbed by St Simon and Comte, and after Mill himself had absorbed some of the criticisms levelled at the utilitarian science of politics and political economy. In other words, it helps to explain the pattern of Mill’s own mature interests -- the ones I mentioned at the outset. But there was one major initial hurdle he had to negotiate which had great significance to him personally: the question of free will and determinism. His education at the hands of his father and Bentham had been a remarkable experiment designed to produce the consummate utilitarian reasoner and practical reformer. Those who have read about its rigours and the fact that it produced an infant prodigy who wrote his first articles when he was only 16 will not be surprised that it led to a nervous breakdown in his early 20s. It is also not surprising that he felt himself to be a manufactured person, someone who had been trained to pursue external goals by the methods of utilitarianism but whose education had neglected those internal states of mind which provide the motive and will to do so. As a social scientist fully committed to the idea that nurture could overcome nature and custom, he accepted that all individuals were the product of their environment and education. In this sense they were ‘caused’ in much the same way as physical events are caused. But if this is the case, does this mean we cannot speak of free will and human choice? With the further implication that we cannot speak of actions or behaviour being good or bad? If my character is so thoroughly formed by my circumstances, could one not argue that I cannot be a moral agent? Some of the followers 3 �of Robert Owen actually espoused this position, the one that Mill called ‘necessitarianism’, to the extent of arguing that criminals could not be held responsible for their actions; they are governed by inevitability; they cannot do anything other than what their characters deem necessary. Given his own personal dilemma, it is easy to see why Mill needed to resolve this question by finding a middle way between uncaused free will and necessitarianism. Roughly speaking, he did so by suggesting we should avoid using words like ‘necessity’ that connoted forms of fatalism by interpreting it to mean simply that we will act in a certain way unless something intervenes to prevent us from so doing. Mill maintained that our characters could be formed by us as much for us. Thus while our characters are formed by circumstance, we can shape those circumstances ourselves if we decide by an exercise of moral will to alter our character. ‘Our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing. Having surmounted this problem Mill could go on to argue that whatever difficulties there might be in framing and testing scientific propositions about human behaviour in society, these only created differences of degree rather than kind when compared with the hypothetico-deductive laws of the natural sciences. Our inability to predict the thoughts, feelings and actions of human beings in the manner of astronomy was due chiefly because we do not and probably could not know all the relevant circumstances in which individuals are or might be placed. This meant that we had to be content with statistical or probabilistic statements of tendency relating to groups or classes of individuals. Although this was a sufficient basis for social science, it was an important feature of Mill’s argument that we could never rest content with mere empirical laws. Only when these were connected deductively with universal laws of human nature, or shown to be corrollaries of such laws, could one speak of a scientific law. Only then could the empirical regularities of existence and succession, our historical and everyday observations, become part of a causal explanation. These laws would also enable one not merely to explain existing empirical generalisations but generate predictions about situations that could occur in future. 4 �What were these universal laws? For Mill they had to be derived from the science of the individual human mind, or as we would call it, psychology, though it differs from many modern versions of this science. Psychology of this kind was always the fundamental bedrock of all other social sciences to Mill, with the result that he was what is known as a ‘methodological individualist’, an idea to which I will return later. To this Mill added a further condition which marked a departure from the work of Comte, namely that this science of mind would not be physiological in character. In other words, it would not assume that mental states were necessarily the result of bodily conditions, though some might later prove to be physiological in origin. Mill believed that a science of mental states already existed and could be traced back to Hume’s theory of impressions, sensations, and ideas, and to the associationist psychology of his father. So far then, Mill was standing by an established tradition with Enlightenment roots. But his next move was to propose a new science that did not yet exist and which was the field he wanted to cultivate himself: the science of ethology or character formation. It would attempt to answer the basic question of why some groups of human beings, classified by gender, class or nationality, were more likely to feel and act in a certain way. Mill thought that by comparing the different reactions of such groups to other social variables such as educational experience and occupations, some bridging propositions could be framed that would link the science of the individual human mind to the kinds of social and political states that were of interest to social scientists. If ethology could be put on a scientific basis, Mill believed, for example, that it would be possible to demonstrate why women were more likely to act in certain ways as a result of their circumstances and occupations. It would strike another blow at the innatist or intuitiionist position mentioned in the first quotation on the handout. At the next level of generality on Mill’s map come the social sciences proper, those disciplines concerned with collective behaviour in politics, economics, and sociology. On politics Mill was to show that he had learned lessons from Macaulay’s attack on his father’s science, where induction, or reasoning from collections of particular cases up to more general conclusions, was being pitted against deduction, reasoning down from general assumptions to 5 �particular conclusions. You should be misled by the terms of the Mill-Macaulay dispute into believing that the distinction between deductive and inductive methods of inquiry conveys a clear idea of what was at stake. In some respects the contrast between deduction and induction is a false one, chiefly because there are few simple-minded believers in the idea that knowledge can be acquired solely by deductive or inductive methods. Clearly a mixture of both methods is involved in all scientific thinking. Thus even those Benthamites, like James Mill or Ricardo, who made great use of abstract deductive methods would have claimed that the assumptions which formed the basis for their deductions were meant to be approximations based upon wide historical experience and empirical knowledge of human behaviour. They would also have claimed that observation and empirical evidence was essential as a means of testing the conclusions of theories based on hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Similarly with professed inductivists like Macaulay, it would not be difficult to show that he makes full use of deductions in forming his conclusions. Nevertheless, the distinction between deduction and induction does help to show how the disputants saw themselves and their opponents. Thus when James Mill and other political economists attacked those who were, as they put it, "all for fact and nothing for theory", those who thought that one or two exceptions to a general rule based on probabilistic evidence constituted grounds for rejection of all theory, they thought of themselves as defenders of science against mere practice-based knowledge -the kind of thing that businessmen and everyday politicians prided themselves in possessing. Such defences of theory as a way of working out "If, then" propositions, of spelling out assumptions and working out their implications, have always been characteristic of the social sciences operating in a world where experiments are difficult to conduct and the participants in the economic, social and political game have developed a down-to-earth ordinary-language way of talking about what they do and how the system works. We are all familiar with charges made against social science to the effect that it is "mere theory", or that it is simply commonsense in jargon-ridden dress. Sometimes it may indeed be just what its critics say, but it does not follow that all theory, all attempts to use a hypothetical method of arguing 6 �from assumed cases in order to spell out possible implications, is misguided when applied to social affairs. Rejecting a theory is, of course, quite different from rejecting all theory. In Book VI of his Logic Mill attempted to give a balanced account of these differences of opinion, sticking by the need for apriori methods of deductive reasoning, while giving a posteriori or inductive methods of inquiry their due. He rejected Macaulay’s experimental, or chemical, method of proceeding. Mere observation in the social sciences, making use of historical or statistical evidence, was incapable of separating the complex causes at work in producing the historical outcomes. Even if we could make use of the various experimental methods by comparing situations in which one variable was present but not others, hoping thereby to establish its influence, we would still need to employ deductions to formulate our conclusions. Macaulay’s approach was the typically vulgar method of reasoning of politicians seeking to claim that the evidence supported their policies. You select a few convenient coincidences from the mass of possibilities and present this as support for your case. We are going to hear a lot of such reasoining during the forthcoming eloection. On the other hand, Mill was not prepared to defend his father’s deductive alternative, even though he thought the errors it embodied were more sophisticated ones. He called his father’s method the geometic one, and it was inappropriate to complex situations where explaining the outcome required consideration of the results of several chains of parallel deductive reasoning. This was particularly important when making normative or policy recommendations, where the conclusions of one branch of social science might need to be modified by other branches of knowledge in order to cope with modifying or disturbing influences. The first important casualty of Mill’s line of reasoning, therefore, was that he abandoned the idea of a deductive science of politics capable of making constitutional recommendations for all societies, regardless of national character and level of development. This can be seen as his concession to Tocqueville’s comparative political sociology, though it had other sources as well. The effect was to give a more conservative cast to Mill’s political ideas, reflecting the fact that he was no longer so convinced that the democratic reforms the early Benthamites 7 �had espoused would immediately produce the social advances they had hoped to secure. In other words, Mill was conceding that the critics of utilitarianism who had condemned its ahistorical and universalistic features were right. In line too with the conclusions he reached in On Liberty, he was more concerned than they had been with the consequences of majoritarian pressures and decision-making processes. Minorities might need to be protected by means of proportional representation and by such elitist devices as allowing those who had higher educational attainments to have more votes than those who had none. Another byproduct can be seen in his belief in the importance of free-standing or independent intellectual elites capable of challenging official orthodoxies. This was to become one of the justifications for academic freedom in universities, freedom from outside pressures to do certain types of teaching and research, though Mill himself never attended and was never employed by any university. It is hard to imagine Mill approving of the requirements of research councils today to favour research that has industrial applications rather than curiosity-driven research, though this is a consequence, like our student funding system, of the way in which British universities have become so reliant on public funding. Although Mill was in favour of state regulation of education, by setting standards and measuring achievments, he was not in favour of the state becoming the provider of education, as had happened in his own day in France. This might lead to excessive uniformity rather than he necessary diversity and experiment, and it might also lead to state control over the content of the curriculum. This underlies too his fear that the state might absorb an increasing proportion of the educated talent of society. so that while he wanted civil servants to be recruited by means of competitive examination, he did not want the state to establish a kind of monopoly of talent, thereby enhancing its powers and dwarfing its citizens. The state had some essential tasks to perform, many of which he outlined in his Principles of Political Economy, but like Tocqueville he was concerned that centralised administration should not take over from local government and local participation. While the Benthamite in Mill continued to favour the efficiency that might come from central provision, Mill was prepared to sacrfice competence and efficiency in the 8 �interests of what might be called educative participation, allowing people to gain experience of public affairs at the local level. The same concern with educative participation underlies his support for socialist experiments along cooperative lines, and it also explains why he could never have supported the state forms of socialism that emerged in Eastern and Western Europe during the twentieth century. Cooperative socialism offered ordinary people the chance to become involved in decision-making at their place of work. It is typical of Mill’s intermediary role, however, that he also tried to convince socialists that cooperation should not be at the expense of competition. Cooperative enterprises should compete with one another and with capitalistic enterprises. Although we are all workers in some kind of enterprise, we are also all consumers: competition was capable of lowering the prices we pay for goods and services, and it was also capable of raising wages when labour was the scarce commodity. As a convinced neo-Malthusian, a supporter of birth control within marriage, for feminst as well as economic reasons, Mill was convinced that the position of labour would improve as soon as the rate of population was brought under personal control, another respect in which he remained faithful to the earlier findings of political economists. In these respects Mill acted the part of the realistic political economist, preferring some form of what we might call market socialism. In regard to the parallel question of women: he was in favour of allowing women to compete freely with men, but I doubt if he would have been in favour of postive discrimination as a solution to their under-representation. Let me return in conclusion to Book VI of the Logic at this point. Although he was prepared to sacrifice the deductive science of politics as a separate entity, he was not prepared to do the same to political economy. Here the deductive method of Ricardo was justifiable because the self-interest assumption gave a useful approximation to actual behaviour in societies where competitive markets had gained sway. Other types of reasoning might be necessary for societies that were still based on custom rather than competition, but Mill clearly felt that economics was still potentially universal in scope. When it came to making policy recommendations, however, he accepted that the deductions of economic theory would 9 �need supplementation before being put into practice. Mill’s continued defence of a relatively autonomous science of political economy had other consequences that are important to the history of the social sciences. Thus although Mill went through a period in which he was an enthusiastic follower of St Simon and Comte, he was not prepared to join them in believing that socialism or sociology would eventually make political economy redundant, merely a special branch of the new sciences of social reorganisation. Here too Mill held fast to an earlier English tradition in the social sciences, and the manner in which Mill answered the sociologists is a good indication of the line taken by later English economists when faced with the claims of sociologists. fx Mill himself did much to publicise Comte’s programme for the new positive science of sociology in Britain, a science concerned with social statics and social dynamics, where the latter concerned the historical sequence of social states or social stages, those conditions which constitute the state of society or civilisation at any given time. As you may now see, but Mill did not, what he was doing was to return to the earlier Scottish interest in such matters. Having been immersed in utilitarian thinking in his youth, he thought that such concerns had been invented by French thinkers. Mill described the method appropriate to sociology as the historical method, or more strangely to our ears, as the ‘inverse deductive’ method. While the method entailed the study of progress, Mill was careful to point out that social change along certain lines did not necessarily mean improvemnent, though he believed that was the most likely description of the outcome. From what I have already said, however, you will also see why Mill denied Comte’s claim that the laws of social development were in fact laws, and that they were autonomous rather than derivative. They could only be empirical laws until they were connected with the laws of the individual human mind. Perhaps these empirical or historical laws would reveal higher uniformity in the later stages of social development, but at best such evidence would give a priori reasons for expecting certain outcomes: it would still be necessary to verify them by specific experience, using psychological and ethological laws to do so. It follows too from what I said earlier about Mill’s belief in the power of ideas derived from science, or what he calls ‘the speculative faculties of makind’ that social 10 �change was intimately linked to the enunciation or discovery of such ideas by exceptional individuals, such as Newton, and the diffusion of such ideas rather than material forces and the class relations based upon them. If Mill had krnow Marx’s writings, this would have been his response. On this subject he agreed with Comte’s stress on the progressive development of science as an influence on society, but it is also clear why Mill was a highly qualified admirer of Comte and became less so when he realised that Comte did not share his feminist ideas and conceived of social science in an authoritarian ora technocratic fashion that did not accord with the views expressed in On Liberty. This brings me to that feature of Mill’s position in Book VI which I referred to earlier as ‘methodological individualism’, and it is expressed pithily in the second quotation in the handout. Comte’s programme for studying the statics and dynamics of society was based on a functional and holistic approach that made collective entities central. Mill accepted that it was necessary to formulate generalisations about such entities, including classes, genders, and nations, but as in the case of his attitude towards all empirical and historical generalisations, he refused to concede that they were the be-all-and end-all of science. This could only be achieved when the underlying laws of individual interaction had been discovered: ‘Human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from and may be resolved into the laws of the nature of individual man.’ It is worth noting this position because it marks a major contrast with the ideas of a later founding father of sociology, Emil Durkheim, about whom I shall be speaking later in the sequence of lectures. You might also care to note that Weber, the subject of the final lecture, remained closer to Mill than to Durkheim when he defined the aims and methods of his version of sociology. [Moreover, apart from some highly optimistic programmatic statements about the benefits of education and the general enlightenment that would result from a free press and the establishment of good government along utilitarian lines, they seemed to suggest that in future society would take the form of a more efficiently operating economic system along existing capitalistic lines, and a more efficient type of democratic and bureaucratic government operating according to individualistic utilitarian principles. This confidence 11 �led to a kind of impatience or intolerance towards other types of society, especially those based on custom rather than market rationality. The laws of political economy seemed to be presented as universal propositions, applicable to all societies, past, present, and future. For an economist of Mill's generation, however, it was necessary to come to terms with various non-Marxist socialistic criticisms of political economy and various socialistic alternatives to capitalism. This is what he attempted to do in his restatement of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy in 1848, a work which survived into the 1870s as a guide to radical progressive thinking in Britain. Mill was even more troubled by the over-simplicity of the utilitarian science of government, which suggested that democratic forms of government could be prescribed as a universal panacea applicable to all European societies, regardless of historical and social circumstances. In this matter, as I pointed out last week, he found it necessary to reconsider some of the questions raised by the conservative opponents of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Bearing in mind what I said about the historical dimension of Scottish thinking, what we can say is that Mill found it necessary to return to, or revive, the historical approach by formulating, with the help of ideas drawn from St.Simon and Comte, a theory of social progress, a theory designed to shed light on the likely future state of society. Mill also became dissatisfied with the narrow and somewhat fixed view of human capacities adopted by his mentors. Was it not possible to envisage the emergence of a different kind of human nature in which cooperative rather than competitive characteristics predominated? Finally, Mill became worried about the deadening effect of a society composed of individuals enjoying substantial equality and becoming, under the influence of majoritarian pressures, ever more conformist. Was individualism becoming a substitute for individuality and diversity? If so, was this the new problem for modern societies, one that would pose a barrier to future progress long after the solution of existing economic problems? 19. This bare outline of later nineteenth-century attempts to broaden the base of a utilitarian approach to the social sciences by someone who was originally brought up to be a worthy successor to Bentham and his father, tells us something about the survival value of 12 �utilitarian ideas in Britain. Some earlier claims were relinquished, notably those connected with a science of government, where a more comparative and "sociological" approach had to be found. But Mill stuck to the idea that psychology was the fundamental science of man, without which statements about human behaviour in groups that could vary in size from the social class to a whole nation would remain purely empirical generalisations rather than laws. And he stuck to the idea of a separate science of political economy, thereby resisting the view of August Comte that all the special sciences of man in society would eventually be gathered under a single unified science called sociology. 13 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences Description An account of the resource Lectures by Donald Winch for the 'Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences' course at the University of Sussex. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Donald Winch John Stuart Mill's Map of the Social Sciences The subject of this afternoon’s lecture, John Stuart Mill, has already been mentioned in earlier lectures on Benthamite utilitarianism and classical political economy; and he could feature in a course on the history of the social sciences under various other headings as well. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century he became the leading philosopher of liberalism and Benthamite radicalism, an MP, a senior civil servant in the India Office, the archetypal intellectual in politics, the author of several important works on philosophy, politics, and economics, and the supporter of various causes, many of which seemed eccentric to his contemporaries: votes for women, proportional representation, birth control, reform in the civil service along meritocratic lines, cooperative socialism, taxation of incremental land values, peasant proprietorship in Ireland, and so on. Today he is best known perhaps for his essay On Liberty (1859), a work that has strong connections with the subject of my earlier lecture on Tocqueville. For it was in On Liberty that Mill tackled a problem which he believed was endemic to modern societies, namely a growing tendency towards homogeneity and conformism in matters of opinion and taste that needed to be combatted by drawing a ring fence around the purely self-regarding activities of the individual, thereby protecting him or her from the tyranny of majority opinion, whether or not it was backed up by law. One of Mill’s main reasons for fearing these majoritarian pressures arose not merely because ‘individuality’, the capacity of each individual to realise their potential, was important to him, but because he thought that the capacity for social progress was intimately bound up with moral and scientific ideas rather than mere interests. The ideas that were likely to determine the next stage of social progress were always the work of exceptional individuals commanding minority support; but he had great faith that such ideas, when their truth had been tested by experiment and open debate, would conquer prejudice and refute arguments that were merely rationalisations of the status quo and existing interests and power groupings. In this respect, although he shared with Marx a belief in the idea of progress, 1 as most nineteenth-century thinkers did, he believed that it would result from a clash of ideas rather than a class of class interests. Moreover, he did not feel that the clash would be a simple one between truth and error, right and wrong. There was usually an element of truth in all positions that could only be winnowed out by the process of open and rational debate. As the leading British economist of his generation, he could hardly be unaware of the material or economic factors in modern life, and the importance of spreading the benefits of the new productive forces that capitalism had unleashed. In common with his earlier mentors, Smith and Ricardo, he had many proposals for ensuring that this would occur. But competitive forms of capitalism, though necessary for the forseeable future, might not be the answer to future social needs when other, and as he thought, higher aspects of human nature had developed. This explains his support for socialist experiments of a cooperative nature designed to overcome conflict between capital and labour, and it lies behind his speculations about a zero-growth society in which regard for the quality of life, including the environment, took precedence over the quantitative aspects of the expansion of population and material growth. It is also the basis for his campaign against the subjection of women. The supposed inferiority of women to men was largely based on custom and prejudice, but claimed to be based on innate or unalterable natural differences: here was a prejudice that could be exposed by means of social scientific argument and the evidence furnished by giving greater freedom for women to compete with men in the workplace and in the political arena. When as an MP Mill moved the motion to include women in the extension of suffrage envisaged by the 1867 Reform Bil, he was not downcast by the fact that he received only a handful of votes in the House of Commons. He regarded this as a small step in the right direction and was convinced that rationality would triumph in the end. It took much longer than he imagined. So far I have mentioned some of the ideas and causes which Mill, speaking selfconsciously as an advanced social thinker espoused. But for the purposes of this topic in the course and the examination, I want to concentrate on his writings on the philosophy of social science, specifically Book VI of his System of Logic, entitled ‘on the logic of the moral 2 sciences’. This book has a special place in Mill’s career because it marks the point when he began to put together all the ideas he had acquired during a period of revolt from his utilitarian upbringing and was seeking a methodological standpoint from which to survey those parts of his upbringing that he wished to retain, and those parts he wished to reject or modify. The result was a new map of the social sciences, showing the territory already explored, the territory that needed to be annexed by means of science, and the specific methods of inquiry that should be employed in each branch. The result was a work that tells you what the social sciences looked like in the middle of the nineteenth century. It tells you what was left of the Enlightenment programme for naturalistic sciences of man in society after the upheavals of the French revolution had been absorbed by St Simon and Comte, and after Mill himself had absorbed some of the criticisms levelled at the utilitarian science of politics and political economy. In other words, it helps to explain the pattern of Mill’s own mature interests -- the ones I mentioned at the outset. But there was one major initial hurdle he had to negotiate which had great significance to him personally: the question of free will and determinism. His education at the hands of his father and Bentham had been a remarkable experiment designed to produce the consummate utilitarian reasoner and practical reformer. Those who have read about its rigours and the fact that it produced an infant prodigy who wrote his first articles when he was only 16 will not be surprised that it led to a nervous breakdown in his early 20s. It is also not surprising that he felt himself to be a manufactured person, someone who had been trained to pursue external goals by the methods of utilitarianism but whose education had neglected those internal states of mind which provide the motive and will to do so. As a social scientist fully committed to the idea that nurture could overcome nature and custom, he accepted that all individuals were the product of their environment and education. In this sense they were ‘caused’ in much the same way as physical events are caused. But if this is the case, does this mean we cannot speak of free will and human choice? With the further implication that we cannot speak of actions or behaviour being good or bad? If my character is so thoroughly formed by my circumstances, could one not argue that I cannot be a moral agent? Some of the followers 3 of Robert Owen actually espoused this position, the one that Mill called ‘necessitarianism’, to the extent of arguing that criminals could not be held responsible for their actions; they are governed by inevitability; they cannot do anything other than what their characters deem necessary. Given his own personal dilemma, it is easy to see why Mill needed to resolve this question by finding a middle way between uncaused free will and necessitarianism. Roughly speaking, he did so by suggesting we should avoid using words like ‘necessity’ that connoted forms of fatalism by interpreting it to mean simply that we will act in a certain way unless something intervenes to prevent us from so doing. Mill maintained that our characters could be formed by us as much for us. Thus while our characters are formed by circumstance, we can shape those circumstances ourselves if we decide by an exercise of moral will to alter our character. ‘Our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing. Having surmounted this problem Mill could go on to argue that whatever difficulties there might be in framing and testing scientific propositions about human behaviour in society, these only created differences of degree rather than kind when compared with the hypothetico-deductive laws of the natural sciences. Our inability to predict the thoughts, feelings and actions of human beings in the manner of astronomy was due chiefly because we do not and probably could not know all the relevant circumstances in which individuals are or might be placed. This meant that we had to be content with statistical or probabilistic statements of tendency relating to groups or classes of individuals. Although this was a sufficient basis for social science, it was an important feature of Mill’s argument that we could never rest content with mere empirical laws. Only when these were connected deductively with universal laws of human nature, or shown to be corrollaries of such laws, could one speak of a scientific law. Only then could the empirical regularities of existence and succession, our historical and everyday observations, become part of a causal explanation. These laws would also enable one not merely to explain existing empirical generalisations but generate predictions about situations that could occur in future. 4 What were these universal laws? For Mill they had to be derived from the science of the individual human mind, or as we would call it, psychology, though it differs from many modern versions of this science. Psychology of this kind was always the fundamental bedrock of all other social sciences to Mill, with the result that he was what is known as a ‘methodological individualist’, an idea to which I will return later. To this Mill added a further condition which marked a departure from the work of Comte, namely that this science of mind would not be physiological in character. In other words, it would not assume that mental states were necessarily the result of bodily conditions, though some might later prove to be physiological in origin. Mill believed that a science of mental states already existed and could be traced back to Hume’s theory of impressions, sensations, and ideas, and to the associationist psychology of his father. So far then, Mill was standing by an established tradition with Enlightenment roots. But his next move was to propose a new science that did not yet exist and which was the field he wanted to cultivate himself: the science of ethology or character formation. It would attempt to answer the basic question of why some groups of human beings, classified by gender, class or nationality, were more likely to feel and act in a certain way. Mill thought that by comparing the different reactions of such groups to other social variables such as educational experience and occupations, some bridging propositions could be framed that would link the science of the individual human mind to the kinds of social and political states that were of interest to social scientists. If ethology could be put on a scientific basis, Mill believed, for example, that it would be possible to demonstrate why women were more likely to act in certain ways as a result of their circumstances and occupations. It would strike another blow at the innatist or intuitiionist position mentioned in the first quotation on the handout. At the next level of generality on Mill’s map come the social sciences proper, those disciplines concerned with collective behaviour in politics, economics, and sociology. On politics Mill was to show that he had learned lessons from Macaulay’s attack on his father’s science, where induction, or reasoning from collections of particular cases up to more general conclusions, was being pitted against deduction, reasoning down from general assumptions to 5 particular conclusions. You should be misled by the terms of the Mill-Macaulay dispute into believing that the distinction between deductive and inductive methods of inquiry conveys a clear idea of what was at stake. In some respects the contrast between deduction and induction is a false one, chiefly because there are few simple-minded believers in the idea that knowledge can be acquired solely by deductive or inductive methods. Clearly a mixture of both methods is involved in all scientific thinking. Thus even those Benthamites, like James Mill or Ricardo, who made great use of abstract deductive methods would have claimed that the assumptions which formed the basis for their deductions were meant to be approximations based upon wide historical experience and empirical knowledge of human behaviour. They would also have claimed that observation and empirical evidence was essential as a means of testing the conclusions of theories based on hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Similarly with professed inductivists like Macaulay, it would not be difficult to show that he makes full use of deductions in forming his conclusions. Nevertheless, the distinction between deduction and induction does help to show how the disputants saw themselves and their opponents. Thus when James Mill and other political economists attacked those who were, as they put it, "all for fact and nothing for theory", those who thought that one or two exceptions to a general rule based on probabilistic evidence constituted grounds for rejection of all theory, they thought of themselves as defenders of science against mere practice-based knowledge -the kind of thing that businessmen and everyday politicians prided themselves in possessing. Such defences of theory as a way of working out "If, then" propositions, of spelling out assumptions and working out their implications, have always been characteristic of the social sciences operating in a world where experiments are difficult to conduct and the participants in the economic, social and political game have developed a down-to-earth ordinary-language way of talking about what they do and how the system works. We are all familiar with charges made against social science to the effect that it is "mere theory", or that it is simply commonsense in jargon-ridden dress. Sometimes it may indeed be just what its critics say, but it does not follow that all theory, all attempts to use a hypothetical method of arguing 6 from assumed cases in order to spell out possible implications, is misguided when applied to social affairs. Rejecting a theory is, of course, quite different from rejecting all theory. In Book VI of his Logic Mill attempted to give a balanced account of these differences of opinion, sticking by the need for apriori methods of deductive reasoning, while giving a posteriori or inductive methods of inquiry their due. He rejected Macaulay’s experimental, or chemical, method of proceeding. Mere observation in the social sciences, making use of historical or statistical evidence, was incapable of separating the complex causes at work in producing the historical outcomes. Even if we could make use of the various experimental methods by comparing situations in which one variable was present but not others, hoping thereby to establish its influence, we would still need to employ deductions to formulate our conclusions. Macaulay’s approach was the typically vulgar method of reasoning of politicians seeking to claim that the evidence supported their policies. You select a few convenient coincidences from the mass of possibilities and present this as support for your case. We are going to hear a lot of such reasoining during the forthcoming eloection. On the other hand, Mill was not prepared to defend his father’s deductive alternative, even though he thought the errors it embodied were more sophisticated ones. He called his father’s method the geometic one, and it was inappropriate to complex situations where explaining the outcome required consideration of the results of several chains of parallel deductive reasoning. This was particularly important when making normative or policy recommendations, where the conclusions of one branch of social science might need to be modified by other branches of knowledge in order to cope with modifying or disturbing influences. The first important casualty of Mill’s line of reasoning, therefore, was that he abandoned the idea of a deductive science of politics capable of making constitutional recommendations for all societies, regardless of national character and level of development. This can be seen as his concession to Tocqueville’s comparative political sociology, though it had other sources as well. The effect was to give a more conservative cast to Mill’s political ideas, reflecting the fact that he was no longer so convinced that the democratic reforms the early Benthamites 7 had espoused would immediately produce the social advances they had hoped to secure. In other words, Mill was conceding that the critics of utilitarianism who had condemned its ahistorical and universalistic features were right. In line too with the conclusions he reached in On Liberty, he was more concerned than they had been with the consequences of majoritarian pressures and decision-making processes. Minorities might need to be protected by means of proportional representation and by such elitist devices as allowing those who had higher educational attainments to have more votes than those who had none. Another byproduct can be seen in his belief in the importance of free-standing or independent intellectual elites capable of challenging official orthodoxies. This was to become one of the justifications for academic freedom in universities, freedom from outside pressures to do certain types of teaching and research, though Mill himself never attended and was never employed by any university. It is hard to imagine Mill approving of the requirements of research councils today to favour research that has industrial applications rather than curiosity-driven research, though this is a consequence, like our student funding system, of the way in which British universities have become so reliant on public funding. Although Mill was in favour of state regulation of education, by setting standards and measuring achievments, he was not in favour of the state becoming the provider of education, as had happened in his own day in France. This might lead to excessive uniformity rather than he necessary diversity and experiment, and it might also lead to state control over the content of the curriculum. This underlies too his fear that the state might absorb an increasing proportion of the educated talent of society. so that while he wanted civil servants to be recruited by means of competitive examination, he did not want the state to establish a kind of monopoly of talent, thereby enhancing its powers and dwarfing its citizens. The state had some essential tasks to perform, many of which he outlined in his Principles of Political Economy, but like Tocqueville he was concerned that centralised administration should not take over from local government and local participation. While the Benthamite in Mill continued to favour the efficiency that might come from central provision, Mill was prepared to sacrfice competence and efficiency in the 8 interests of what might be called educative participation, allowing people to gain experience of public affairs at the local level. The same concern with educative participation underlies his support for socialist experiments along cooperative lines, and it also explains why he could never have supported the state forms of socialism that emerged in Eastern and Western Europe during the twentieth century. Cooperative socialism offered ordinary people the chance to become involved in decision-making at their place of work. It is typical of Mill’s intermediary role, however, that he also tried to convince socialists that cooperation should not be at the expense of competition. Cooperative enterprises should compete with one another and with capitalistic enterprises. Although we are all workers in some kind of enterprise, we are also all consumers: competition was capable of lowering the prices we pay for goods and services, and it was also capable of raising wages when labour was the scarce commodity. As a convinced neo-Malthusian, a supporter of birth control within marriage, for feminst as well as economic reasons, Mill was convinced that the position of labour would improve as soon as the rate of population was brought under personal control, another respect in which he remained faithful to the earlier findings of political economists. In these respects Mill acted the part of the realistic political economist, preferring some form of what we might call market socialism. In regard to the parallel question of women: he was in favour of allowing women to compete freely with men, but I doubt if he would have been in favour of postive discrimination as a solution to their under-representation. Let me return in conclusion to Book VI of the Logic at this point. Although he was prepared to sacrifice the deductive science of politics as a separate entity, he was not prepared to do the same to political economy. Here the deductive method of Ricardo was justifiable because the self-interest assumption gave a useful approximation to actual behaviour in societies where competitive markets had gained sway. Other types of reasoning might be necessary for societies that were still based on custom rather than competition, but Mill clearly felt that economics was still potentially universal in scope. When it came to making policy recommendations, however, he accepted that the deductions of economic theory would 9 need supplementation before being put into practice. Mill’s continued defence of a relatively autonomous science of political economy had other consequences that are important to the history of the social sciences. Thus although Mill went through a period in which he was an enthusiastic follower of St Simon and Comte, he was not prepared to join them in believing that socialism or sociology would eventually make political economy redundant, merely a special branch of the new sciences of social reorganisation. Here too Mill held fast to an earlier English tradition in the social sciences, and the manner in which Mill answered the sociologists is a good indication of the line taken by later English economists when faced with the claims of sociologists. fx Mill himself did much to publicise Comte’s programme for the new positive science of sociology in Britain, a science concerned with social statics and social dynamics, where the latter concerned the historical sequence of social states or social stages, those conditions which constitute the state of society or civilisation at any given time. As you may now see, but Mill did not, what he was doing was to return to the earlier Scottish interest in such matters. Having been immersed in utilitarian thinking in his youth, he thought that such concerns had been invented by French thinkers. Mill described the method appropriate to sociology as the historical method, or more strangely to our ears, as the ‘inverse deductive’ method. While the method entailed the study of progress, Mill was careful to point out that social change along certain lines did not necessarily mean improvemnent, though he believed that was the most likely description of the outcome. From what I have already said, however, you will also see why Mill denied Comte’s claim that the laws of social development were in fact laws, and that they were autonomous rather than derivative. They could only be empirical laws until they were connected with the laws of the individual human mind. Perhaps these empirical or historical laws would reveal higher uniformity in the later stages of social development, but at best such evidence would give a priori reasons for expecting certain outcomes: it would still be necessary to verify them by specific experience, using psychological and ethological laws to do so. It follows too from what I said earlier about Mill’s belief in the power of ideas derived from science, or what he calls ‘the speculative faculties of makind’ that social 10 change was intimately linked to the enunciation or discovery of such ideas by exceptional individuals, such as Newton, and the diffusion of such ideas rather than material forces and the class relations based upon them. If Mill had krnow Marx’s writings, this would have been his response. On this subject he agreed with Comte’s stress on the progressive development of science as an influence on society, but it is also clear why Mill was a highly qualified admirer of Comte and became less so when he realised that Comte did not share his feminist ideas and conceived of social science in an authoritarian ora technocratic fashion that did not accord with the views expressed in On Liberty. This brings me to that feature of Mill’s position in Book VI which I referred to earlier as ‘methodological individualism’, and it is expressed pithily in the second quotation in the handout. Comte’s programme for studying the statics and dynamics of society was based on a functional and holistic approach that made collective entities central. Mill accepted that it was necessary to formulate generalisations about such entities, including classes, genders, and nations, but as in the case of his attitude towards all empirical and historical generalisations, he refused to concede that they were the be-all-and end-all of science. This could only be achieved when the underlying laws of individual interaction had been discovered: ‘Human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from and may be resolved into the laws of the nature of individual man.’ It is worth noting this position because it marks a major contrast with the ideas of a later founding father of sociology, Emil Durkheim, about whom I shall be speaking later in the sequence of lectures. You might also care to note that Weber, the subject of the final lecture, remained closer to Mill than to Durkheim when he defined the aims and methods of his version of sociology. [Moreover, apart from some highly optimistic programmatic statements about the benefits of education and the general enlightenment that would result from a free press and the establishment of good government along utilitarian lines, they seemed to suggest that in future society would take the form of a more efficiently operating economic system along existing capitalistic lines, and a more efficient type of democratic and bureaucratic government operating according to individualistic utilitarian principles. This confidence 11 led to a kind of impatience or intolerance towards other types of society, especially those based on custom rather than market rationality. The laws of political economy seemed to be presented as universal propositions, applicable to all societies, past, present, and future. For an economist of Mill's generation, however, it was necessary to come to terms with various non-Marxist socialistic criticisms of political economy and various socialistic alternatives to capitalism. This is what he attempted to do in his restatement of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy in 1848, a work which survived into the 1870s as a guide to radical progressive thinking in Britain. Mill was even more troubled by the over-simplicity of the utilitarian science of government, which suggested that democratic forms of government could be prescribed as a universal panacea applicable to all European societies, regardless of historical and social circumstances. In this matter, as I pointed out last week, he found it necessary to reconsider some of the questions raised by the conservative opponents of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Bearing in mind what I said about the historical dimension of Scottish thinking, what we can say is that Mill found it necessary to return to, or revive, the historical approach by formulating, with the help of ideas drawn from St.Simon and Comte, a theory of social progress, a theory designed to shed light on the likely future state of society. Mill also became dissatisfied with the narrow and somewhat fixed view of human capacities adopted by his mentors. Was it not possible to envisage the emergence of a different kind of human nature in which cooperative rather than competitive characteristics predominated? Finally, Mill became worried about the deadening effect of a society composed of individuals enjoying substantial equality and becoming, under the influence of majoritarian pressures, ever more conformist. Was individualism becoming a substitute for individuality and diversity? If so, was this the new problem for modern societies, one that would pose a barrier to future progress long after the solution of existing economic problems? 19. This bare outline of later nineteenth-century attempts to broaden the base of a utilitarian approach to the social sciences by someone who was originally brought up to be a worthy successor to Bentham and his father, tells us something about the survival value of 12 utilitarian ideas in Britain. Some earlier claims were relinquished, notably those connected with a science of government, where a more comparative and "sociological" approach had to be found. But Mill stuck to the idea that psychology was the fundamental science of man, without which statements about human behaviour in groups that could vary in size from the social class to a whole nation would remain purely empirical generalisations rather than laws. And he stuck to the idea of a separate science of political economy, thereby resisting the view of August Comte that all the special sciences of man in society would eventually be gathered under a single unified science called sociology. 13  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource J. S. Mill's Map of the Social Sciences Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Winch Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Undated. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context IHA/Winch/69 Comte David Ricardo Jeremy Bentham Macaulay Marx Political Economy Reform Act Sociology St Simon Tocqueville Utilitarianism https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/intellectualhistory/files/original/c96f3e37d7abd34a355a398209eb80d3.pdf 8c390a04ec4d569cfafbdddc6164d866 PDF Text Text Donald Winch Deductive Individualism: Utilitarianism and Political Economy 1. In this lecture I want to focus on another important strand of Enlightenment social science that survived the French Revolution and proved enormously influential as an intellectual force, especially in this country, where it also had considerable impact on a wide range of institutional reforms and changes in economic policy adopted in the period that runs from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the 1860s and 70s. It was known either as Benthamism or Utilitarianism, and its adherents also described themselves as Philosophic Radicals. Three of the major figures in this movement were also political economists, David Ricardo, James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, so the movement can be considered as a kind of hybrid. Its legal, political, and philosophical ideas derive largely from Jeremy Bentham; and its economic ideas are a development, largely due to innovations by Thomas Robert Malthus and Ricardo, of theories first propounded by Adam Smith. 2. Perhaps one of the best ways of introducing the subject is to contrast it with themes dealt with in my previous two lectures. Thus in dealing with the Enlightenment sciences of man in society I concentrated on a dimension, best illustrated by Montesquieu, Hume, Smith and Ferguson, which was historical, evolutionistic, comparative, inductive, and "sociological" in its emphases. By contrast, Utilitarianism developed another strand within Enlightenment thinking that concentrated on individual psychology, and was more mechanical than organic in its treatment of society. In terms of method it was also universalist rather than comparative and historical, and deductive rather than inductive. 3. Utilitarianism can also be contrasted with some of the ideas which emerged from the debate on the French Revolution. Thus in contrast to Burke's and later conservative theorists' emphases on the organic growth of society -- an emphasis that gave a prescriptive role to the history of institutions (i.e. there is a presumption that what has survived in the process of social and political evolution has positive values attached to it) -- Benthamite Utilitarianism treated such history as more likely to contain a record of human folly, superstition and 1 �corruption. It followed that arguments based on historical evidence were either likely to be apologetic or only of value in establishing how we arrived at our present situation. They were of no use in indicating how the present state of affairs ought to be improved. Instead of looking backwards for an understanding of the development of social and political institutions, they proposed to subject all existing and proposed policies and institutions to a future-minded test -- a test which they regarded as objective and value-free: Do they serve the greatest happiness of the greatest number in society? 4. By subjecting the law and its procedures to this test, and then by extending their ideas to cover the reform of Parliament as well as prisons, workhouses, and many other branches of legislation, the Philosophic Radicals, as their name suggests, acted as a radical reforming impulse, employing a unified body of practical and constructive reason to society. However, the Benthamites differed from other radicals such as those I described as opposing Burke last week. The emphasis on reason was similar, as was the emphasis on individuals. But the Benthamites rejected a cardinal tenet of such radicals as Paine, namely the idea that individuals should be considered as the locus of certain pre-social natural rights of the kind embodied in the American constitution and the French Declaration of Rights. Bentham regarded natural rights and natural law doctrines generally as "nonsense on stilts", as yet another example of the way in which confusing metaphysical doctrines had plagued discussion of law and government in the past, attributing law to God's purpose, to the wisdom of the ages, or to some idea of rights that existed outside any given form of government or society. According to the Benthamites, the only rights that existed were legal rights, those which emanated from a sovereign with the power to impose duties and enforce obligations under the law. Reform programmes had to be practical; they had to begin from the hereand-now, paying little attention to customary practices (except in so far as they embodied legitimate expectations, those that could be defended according to utilitarian criteria) and avoiding utopian dreams of a perfect future. The individual person or citizen was to be the basis of all legal and political thinking, as the natural rights radicals had argued as well; but the individual was prized rather as psychological datum than as a moral entity, and the 2 �external criteria that were brought to bear on the critique and reform of institutions was meant to be an objective standard embodied in the principle of utility. 5. Let us begin to unpack and illustrate these statements by taking a closer a look at the individualistic qualities of Benthamite utilitarianism. It derives from Lockean sensationalist psychology and develops it in what would be known today as a behaviouralist direction: the individual is an aggregate of his or her direct sense-experience of the world. The individual personality is built up through a chain of associations, happiness being attached to pleasant sensations and pain being attached to unpleasant sensations: hence the term associationist psychology which the Utilitarians took over from Hartley, and which provided the basis for their views on education -- a process of ensuring that the right sensations were reinforced. By analogy, society was an aggregation of individuals, each acting as rational hedonists; i.e. as pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding animals. 6. Much of the robustness of Utilitarianism derives from this reduction of diverse human motivation into a simple calculus of the pleasures and pains felt by individuals in their pursuit of happiness. It gave the principle of self-interest enhanced significance, and when this self-interest was directed towards material satisfactions it produced the standard model of "economic man". Adam Smith did not employ this simplifying assumption in the Wealth of Nations: self-interest might be a dominant motive in economic dealings, but it was not the only motive at work. His successors as political economists increasingly came to believe that rational economic man was the only psychological basis on which a science of political economy could be constructed, and in the process political economy became a narrower and more deductive form of inquiry. 7. The self-interest assumption could also be employed, as it was by James Mill, in putting forward a model of political behaviour designed to prove that wherever the governing Few were not constrained by representative institutions, they would pursue their interests at the expense of the subject Many. It could be employed, in other words, as a kind of conspiracy theory of government with Hobbesian overtones. Benthamites employed the conspiracy version of the self-interest axiom to expose the shortcomings of all unreformed corporate 3 �bodies, including the legal and other professions, the Church, the civil service, such dominant class groupings as landowners, and existing political parties such as the Tories and Whigs. These were all "sinister" interest groupings organised by the governing Few and operating against the interests of the Many. As we know from modern uses of the same reductionist, conspiracy notions of the interest principle, they can present what appear to be penetrating, deflating exposés of public and private life. The Philosophic Radicals relied a good deal on these shock tactics in their attempts to unmask the forces that underpinned Britain's system of aristocratic government and the class bias of parliamentary legislation. And in so doing they aroused furious debate about the precise status of the self-interest axiom when applied to all aspects of public and political life. This is well-illustrated by the two extracts on the circulated sheet, one by James Mill, the other by his Whig opponent, the historian Thomas Macaulay, charging that the axiom was either a truism or false; and that in consequence it could not serve, as the Utilitarians believed it could, as the psychological foundation for a "science of government and legislation". Notice, however, that use of the same axiom or assumption when dealing with economic behaviour was not subject to the same criticism -at least, not until much later. You might like to ask yourself why this was the case, bearing in mind that similar assumptions about economic man were also employed, albeit for different purposes, by Karl Marx in his attempt to build on Smithian and Ricardian political economoy. 7. Benthamism and the whole school of utilitarian thinking to which it has given rise has frequently been criticized as a selfish and materialistic set of moral doctrines. And this charge gains extra credence from Bentham's unwillingness to distinguish between qualities of pleasure as opposed to more quantitative dimensions such as intensity and duration of pain and pleasure. But the charge is misleading in several respects. First, non-materialistic pleasures have to be included within the utilitarian calculus as sources of happiness alongside others. Secondly, the pursuit of happiness by individuals does not have to be a purely selfish activity in the pejorative sense. Utilitarianism does not rule out altruism by denying that we may enhance our own happiness by seeking that of others. Indeed, what the utilitarians were attempting to discover was institutional structures offering rewards and punishments that 4 �would produce a net harmony between individuals at the aggregate level. Rewards would be offered to encourage activities that produced happiness for others as well as the main agent, and punishments would be used to deter or minimize the infliction of pain on others. This is the behaviourist side of utilitarianism, and it is best studied by examining some of the many Benthamite schemes, such as his Panopticon prison or his proposals for dealing with pauperism, indigence and the Poor Law. Thirdly, one must bear in mind that Utilitarianism was not primarily a moral doctrine concerned to give guidance to individual conduct. It was a practical public philosophy designed to furnish objective criteria for judging the puhlic consequences or aggregate impact of policies. Thus a somewhat different light is shed on one of Bentham's more notorious statements by this consideration. Bentham once said that "pushpin (pinball) was as good as poetry, if it generated the same amount of pleasure". This sounds like a rather phillistine remark, and it may well have been. But if it is a statement about the relative importance that the state should attach to these activities, rather than a comment on how a private person should rank these activities, it becomes an egalitarian assumption that the pleasures of some people should not be ranked above that of others. 5. It is this egalitarian quality that I want to stress by means of another Benthamite slogan: "Everyone to count as one, nobody to count as more than one". The public interest is to be arrived at by an aggregation of the pleasures and pains produced by any measure, treating each person's pains and pleasures as equal to everybody else's. Notice that the underlying assumption is that there is likely to be a conflict of interests, with some suffering pain while others achieve pleasure. This is obviously the case with measures which redistribute income from one group to another, and one of the best known generalisations of utility theory is embodied in the law of diminishing utility, which can be used, as it was by Bentham, to show that the gain in pleasure by a poor person from redistributive measures was likely to be larger than the loss of pleasure by the rich man. Economic equality was indeed one of the subordinate goals of legislation for utilitarians, but they placed security above equality, which entailed that the feasible legislative goal was a reduction of inequality rather than equality of outcome. 5 �8. Utilitarianism also has a built-in bias in favour of majoritarian solutions to the problem of conflict -- the greatest happiness of the greatest number -- and this goes along with an antagonism to paternalism. Utilitarians do not always assume that everybody always knows their interest -- the balance between pain and pleasure. Children, for example, have to be treated as being included in their parents'interests. But the utilitarian does tend to believe that education via schooling and a free press can easily make people aware of their interests. (This, incidentally, is one of the ways in which their use of conspiracy theories differ from those of Marxists: any element of false consciousness cannot long survive education and public exposure.) And once I am apprised of my interests, nobody can be assumed to know what will serve them better than I do -- which is one of the underpinnings of paternalist measures, and why the utilitarians prided themselves on taking an unsentimental attitude to reform. By keeping their eye firmly on the consequences of public measures judged in terms of the utility principle, rather than on good-hearted motives and intentions, sentiment need not enter into the matter. It would all be a matter of consequences objectively weighed. Hence the similarity with modern methods of cost-benefit analysis as a guide to public policy decisions, and the concentration on practical details fully worked out in advance that is the prime characteristic of a Benthamite proposal. Hence too the influence which followers of Bentham were able to exert on legislative measures, sometimes in collaboration with self-styled humanitarian reformers, sometimes in opposition. 8. I hope it will be clear from what I have said so far why Bentham could regard himself as in a direct line with earlier attempts to found a science of legislation and good government along Newtonian lines. In some respects, however, Bentham resembles more a different kind of natural scientist, namely the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, the scientist responsible for the creating the system of classification we still use for plants. Bentham certainly devoted a good deal of his effort to taxonomic activities, showing how rights, powers, duties, crimes, and administrative functions could be classified according to rational principles. Bentham's other claim to be operating naturalistically lay in his belief that he had shown a way of avoiding normative statements of what ought to be based on metaphysics and such fictions as natural 6 �rights. On the other hand, unlike some of his eighteenth-century predecessors, such as Smith, he had gone beyond the process of establishing how things worked and had come to be as they are. He was able to proceed more directly from what is to what ought to be. It was not simply a matter of explaining underlying order in society, but of giving detailed practical guidance as to what governments should or should not do to achieve harmony through a system of rewards and punishments and other legal and administrative constraints. Bentham's approach is therefore far more dirigiste, more actively directive or interventionist, than you will find in writers like Montesquieu and Smith, and this has led commentators to contrast the Smithian idea of natural harmony with Bentham's stress on artificial harmonization. It could be a useful initial distinction, but it quickly breaks down when one examines just how many exceptions Smith requires to the general principle of laissez-faire. 9. Bentham's early work was directed at legal and penal reform, and is best represented by his attempt to replace the English system of judge-made law based on custom and precedent with one based on a rational code of laws and punishments which would make the law more clear and certain to the public and reduce the element of discretion allowed to judges and lawyers. His ideas on prisons and punishment are best represented by his famous Panopticon proposals for a modern penitentiary, and the similar schemes he put forward for dealing with poverty and indigence. 10. Another fruitful way of looking at Benthamism is to see it as leading to a view of government, and indeed of modern social life generally, as essentially concerned with problems of legislation, leading to the setting up of self-regulating administrative structures of a bureaucratic kind. Put in terms of a story of progress, Benthamism is a forerunner of what Weber described as "legal-rational" forms of bureaucratic organisation, and a forerunner of other reformist movements which proceeded along bureaucratic lines, such as those led by the Webbs and other Fabians at the turn of the twentieth century. The prime characteristics of Benthamite administration are efficiency, economy, certainty, clarity of command and responsibility, and accountability. 7 �11. Although considerable controversy surrounds the precise influence exerted by Benthamites on British legislation in the nineteenth century, a list of the major reforms which they advocated will illustrate the nature and coverage of their vision. Law reform, prison reform, campaigns for free speech, the legalisation of combinations or trade unions, parliamentary reform along democratic lines, including the secret ballot and female suffrage, the appointment of civil servants according to merit and competitive examinations, reform of the poor law, safety codes, public health measures, birth control, taxation of inheritance, the donation of one's corpse for medical research, etc. etc. For these reasons you will understand why discussion of what has become known as the Victorian administrative state, indeed of the origins of the welfare state, has to take account of the Benthamite contribution. And I will add as an enormous footnote that you should bear in mind that two of Bentham's followers, James and J.S.Mill spent most of their lives as civil servants at India House and were responsible for the direction taken by British policy in India for over 40 years. 12. Having illustrated the fact that utilitarianism was by no means an armchair or closet form of social science, but was in fact a major effort to unite theory and practice, I should like to return to consider some of the methodological characteristics of the theory. I have probably said enough to justify the label "individualist", and the deductive quality will be apparent to readers of James Mill's Essay on Government. The use of the deductive method was also a characteristic of political economy, as shown in the Malthusian principle that "if unchecked by other influences, the potential for population increase is greater than the capacity to increase food production; or by the Malthus-Ricardo theory of rent which shows that under certain assumed conditions the law of diminishing returns in agriculture will result in a rise in a rise in the share of national income going to rent payments. Political economy, as I have hinted earlier, became a far more rigidly deductive science than it had been in Smith's hands; and it has retained this characteristic to the present day. 14. But I do not think you should be misled by the terms of the Mill-Macaulay dispute into believing that the distinction between deductive and inductive methods of inquiry convey a clear idea of what was at stake. In some respects the contrast between deduction and 8 �induction is a false one, chiefly because there are few simple-minded believers in the idea that knowledge can be acquired solely by deductive or inductive methods. Clearly a mixture of both methods is involved in all scientific thinking. Thus even those Benthamites, like James Mill or Ricardo, who made great use of rational deductive methods would have claimed that the assumptions which formed the basis for their deductions were meant to be approximations based upon wide historical experience and empirical knowledge of human behaviour. They would also have claimed that observation and empirical evidence was essential as a means of testing the conclusions of theories based on hypothetical deductive reasoning. Similarly with professed inductivists like Macaulay, it would not be difficult to show that he makes full use of deductions in forming his conclusions. Nevertheless, the distinction between deduction and induction does help to show how the disputants saw themselves and their opponents. Thus when James Mill and other political economists attacked those who were, as they put it, "all for fact and nothing for theory", those who thought that one or two exceptions to a general rule based on probabilistic evidence constituted grounds for rejection of all theory, they thought of themselves as defenders of science against mere practice-based knowledge -the kind of thing that businessmen and everyday politicians prided themselves in possessing. 15. Such defences of theory as a way of working out "If, then" propositions, of spelling out assumptions and working out their implications, have always been characteristic of the social sciences operating in a world where experiments are difficult to conduct and the participants in the economic, social and political game have developed a down-to-earth ordinary-language way of talking about what they do and how the system works. Thus we are all familiar with charges made against social science to the effect that it is "mere theory", or that it is simply commonsense in fancy or jargon-ridden dress. Sometimes it may indeed be just what its critics say, but it does not follow that all theory, all attempts to use a hypothetical method of arguing from assumed cases in order to spell out possible implications, is misguided when applied to social affairs. Rejecting a theory is, of course, quite different from rejecting all theory. 9 �16. But if we are not rejecting all theory and any use of deductive methods, it is still possible to criticize the more extreme uses we find, above all, in James Mill. And this is what his son John Stuart Mill did after Macaulay's attack. He set about the problem of defining the type of deductive method that should be used in the moral or social sciences, and showing the proper relationship that should exist between deduction and induction in order to stress the limits of a priori or hypothetical propositions as a stepping stone towards policy recommendations, where the conclusions of other social sciences may be needed to deal with modifying or disturbing influences. For this reason, Mill's treatment of these methodological questions in Book VI of his book on Logic became a nineteenth-century classic. 17. But Mill did a good deal more than give a balanced statement of the methodology of the social sciences as they existed in the 1840s. In order to understand his position we have to bear in mind the other criticisms that were ranged against the older style of utilitarian theorising, namely its a-historical and universalistic features, and the consequential neglect of what I shall loosely call a "sociological" dimension -- something that had been present in the work of earlier writers in the Enlightenment tradition, but which had disappeared under Bentham's influence. By a-historical and universalistic I mean simply that utilitarianism and political economy in their Benthamite and Ricardian forms seemed to take little or no account of the influence of time and place on political and economic arrangements. Moreover, apart from some highly optimistic programmatic statements about the benefits of education and the general enlightenment that would result from a free press and the establishment of good government along utilitarian lines, they seemed to suggest that in future society would take the form of a more efficiently operating economic system along existing capitalistic lines, and a more efficient type of democratic and bureaucratic government operating according to individualistic utilitarian principles. This confidence led to a kind of impatience or intolerance towards other types of society, especially those based on custom rather than market rationality. The laws of political economy seemed to be presented as universal propositions, applicable to all societies, past, present, and future. For an economist of Mill's generation, however, it was necessary to come to terms with various non-Marxist socialistic 10 �criticisms of political economy and various socialistic alternatives to capitalism. This is what he attempted to do in his restatement of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy in 1848, a work which survived into the 1870s as a guide to radical progressive thinking in Britain. Mill was even more troubled by the over-simplicity of the utilitarian science of government, which suggested that democratic forms of government could be prescribed as a universal panacea applicable to all European societies, regardless of historical and social circumstances. In this matter, as I pointed out last week, he found it necessary to reconsider some of the questions raised by the conservative opponents of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Bearing in mind what I said about the historical dimension of Scottish thinking, what we can say is that Mill found it necessary to return or revive the historical approach by formulating, with the help of ideas drawn from St.Simon and Comte, a theory of social progress, a theory designed to shed light on the likely future state of society. Mill also became dissatisfied with the narrow and somewhat fixed view of human capacities adopted by his mentors. Was it not possible to envisage the emergence of a different kind of human nature in which cooperative rather than competitive characteristics predominated? Finally, Mill became worried about the deadening effect of a society composed of individuals enjoying substantial equality and becoming, under the influence of majoritarian pressures, ever more conformist. Was individualism becoming a substitute for individuality and diversity? If so, was this the new problem for modern societies, one that would pose a barrier to future progress long after the solution of existing economic problems? 19. This bare outline of later nineteenth-century attempts to broaden the base of a utilitarian approach to the social sciences by someone who was originally brought up to be a worthy successor to Bentham and his father, tells us something about the survival value of utilitarian ideas in Britain. Some earlier claims were relinquished, notably those connected with a science of government, where a more comparative and "sociological" approach had to be found. But Mill stuck to the idea that psychology was the fundamental science of man, without which statements about human behaviour in groups that could vary in size from the social class to a whole nation would remain purely empirical generalisations rather than laws. 11 �And he stuck to the idea of a separate science of political economy, thereby resisting the view of August Comte that all the special sciences of man in society would eventually be gathered under a single unified science called sociology -- the subject of John Burrow's next lecture on the French positivism. 12 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences Description An account of the resource Lectures by Donald Winch for the 'Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences' course at the University of Sussex. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Donald Winch Deductive Individualism: Utilitarianism and Political Economy 1. In this lecture I want to focus on another important strand of Enlightenment social science that survived the French Revolution and proved enormously influential as an intellectual force, especially in this country, where it also had considerable impact on a wide range of institutional reforms and changes in economic policy adopted in the period that runs from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the 1860s and 70s. It was known either as Benthamism or Utilitarianism, and its adherents also described themselves as Philosophic Radicals. Three of the major figures in this movement were also political economists, David Ricardo, James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, so the movement can be considered as a kind of hybrid. Its legal, political, and philosophical ideas derive largely from Jeremy Bentham; and its economic ideas are a development, largely due to innovations by Thomas Robert Malthus and Ricardo, of theories first propounded by Adam Smith. 2. Perhaps one of the best ways of introducing the subject is to contrast it with themes dealt with in my previous two lectures. Thus in dealing with the Enlightenment sciences of man in society I concentrated on a dimension, best illustrated by Montesquieu, Hume, Smith and Ferguson, which was historical, evolutionistic, comparative, inductive, and "sociological" in its emphases. By contrast, Utilitarianism developed another strand within Enlightenment thinking that concentrated on individual psychology, and was more mechanical than organic in its treatment of society. In terms of method it was also universalist rather than comparative and historical, and deductive rather than inductive. 3. Utilitarianism can also be contrasted with some of the ideas which emerged from the debate on the French Revolution. Thus in contrast to Burke's and later conservative theorists' emphases on the organic growth of society -- an emphasis that gave a prescriptive role to the history of institutions (i.e. there is a presumption that what has survived in the process of social and political evolution has positive values attached to it) -- Benthamite Utilitarianism treated such history as more likely to contain a record of human folly, superstition and 1 corruption. It followed that arguments based on historical evidence were either likely to be apologetic or only of value in establishing how we arrived at our present situation. They were of no use in indicating how the present state of affairs ought to be improved. Instead of looking backwards for an understanding of the development of social and political institutions, they proposed to subject all existing and proposed policies and institutions to a future-minded test -- a test which they regarded as objective and value-free: Do they serve the greatest happiness of the greatest number in society? 4. By subjecting the law and its procedures to this test, and then by extending their ideas to cover the reform of Parliament as well as prisons, workhouses, and many other branches of legislation, the Philosophic Radicals, as their name suggests, acted as a radical reforming impulse, employing a unified body of practical and constructive reason to society. However, the Benthamites differed from other radicals such as those I described as opposing Burke last week. The emphasis on reason was similar, as was the emphasis on individuals. But the Benthamites rejected a cardinal tenet of such radicals as Paine, namely the idea that individuals should be considered as the locus of certain pre-social natural rights of the kind embodied in the American constitution and the French Declaration of Rights. Bentham regarded natural rights and natural law doctrines generally as "nonsense on stilts", as yet another example of the way in which confusing metaphysical doctrines had plagued discussion of law and government in the past, attributing law to God's purpose, to the wisdom of the ages, or to some idea of rights that existed outside any given form of government or society. According to the Benthamites, the only rights that existed were legal rights, those which emanated from a sovereign with the power to impose duties and enforce obligations under the law. Reform programmes had to be practical; they had to begin from the hereand-now, paying little attention to customary practices (except in so far as they embodied legitimate expectations, those that could be defended according to utilitarian criteria) and avoiding utopian dreams of a perfect future. The individual person or citizen was to be the basis of all legal and political thinking, as the natural rights radicals had argued as well; but the individual was prized rather as psychological datum than as a moral entity, and the 2 external criteria that were brought to bear on the critique and reform of institutions was meant to be an objective standard embodied in the principle of utility. 5. Let us begin to unpack and illustrate these statements by taking a closer a look at the individualistic qualities of Benthamite utilitarianism. It derives from Lockean sensationalist psychology and develops it in what would be known today as a behaviouralist direction: the individual is an aggregate of his or her direct sense-experience of the world. The individual personality is built up through a chain of associations, happiness being attached to pleasant sensations and pain being attached to unpleasant sensations: hence the term associationist psychology which the Utilitarians took over from Hartley, and which provided the basis for their views on education -- a process of ensuring that the right sensations were reinforced. By analogy, society was an aggregation of individuals, each acting as rational hedonists; i.e. as pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding animals. 6. Much of the robustness of Utilitarianism derives from this reduction of diverse human motivation into a simple calculus of the pleasures and pains felt by individuals in their pursuit of happiness. It gave the principle of self-interest enhanced significance, and when this self-interest was directed towards material satisfactions it produced the standard model of "economic man". Adam Smith did not employ this simplifying assumption in the Wealth of Nations: self-interest might be a dominant motive in economic dealings, but it was not the only motive at work. His successors as political economists increasingly came to believe that rational economic man was the only psychological basis on which a science of political economy could be constructed, and in the process political economy became a narrower and more deductive form of inquiry. 7. The self-interest assumption could also be employed, as it was by James Mill, in putting forward a model of political behaviour designed to prove that wherever the governing Few were not constrained by representative institutions, they would pursue their interests at the expense of the subject Many. It could be employed, in other words, as a kind of conspiracy theory of government with Hobbesian overtones. Benthamites employed the conspiracy version of the self-interest axiom to expose the shortcomings of all unreformed corporate 3 bodies, including the legal and other professions, the Church, the civil service, such dominant class groupings as landowners, and existing political parties such as the Tories and Whigs. These were all "sinister" interest groupings organised by the governing Few and operating against the interests of the Many. As we know from modern uses of the same reductionist, conspiracy notions of the interest principle, they can present what appear to be penetrating, deflating exposés of public and private life. The Philosophic Radicals relied a good deal on these shock tactics in their attempts to unmask the forces that underpinned Britain's system of aristocratic government and the class bias of parliamentary legislation. And in so doing they aroused furious debate about the precise status of the self-interest axiom when applied to all aspects of public and political life. This is well-illustrated by the two extracts on the circulated sheet, one by James Mill, the other by his Whig opponent, the historian Thomas Macaulay, charging that the axiom was either a truism or false; and that in consequence it could not serve, as the Utilitarians believed it could, as the psychological foundation for a "science of government and legislation". Notice, however, that use of the same axiom or assumption when dealing with economic behaviour was not subject to the same criticism -at least, not until much later. You might like to ask yourself why this was the case, bearing in mind that similar assumptions about economic man were also employed, albeit for different purposes, by Karl Marx in his attempt to build on Smithian and Ricardian political economoy. 7. Benthamism and the whole school of utilitarian thinking to which it has given rise has frequently been criticized as a selfish and materialistic set of moral doctrines. And this charge gains extra credence from Bentham's unwillingness to distinguish between qualities of pleasure as opposed to more quantitative dimensions such as intensity and duration of pain and pleasure. But the charge is misleading in several respects. First, non-materialistic pleasures have to be included within the utilitarian calculus as sources of happiness alongside others. Secondly, the pursuit of happiness by individuals does not have to be a purely selfish activity in the pejorative sense. Utilitarianism does not rule out altruism by denying that we may enhance our own happiness by seeking that of others. Indeed, what the utilitarians were attempting to discover was institutional structures offering rewards and punishments that 4 would produce a net harmony between individuals at the aggregate level. Rewards would be offered to encourage activities that produced happiness for others as well as the main agent, and punishments would be used to deter or minimize the infliction of pain on others. This is the behaviourist side of utilitarianism, and it is best studied by examining some of the many Benthamite schemes, such as his Panopticon prison or his proposals for dealing with pauperism, indigence and the Poor Law. Thirdly, one must bear in mind that Utilitarianism was not primarily a moral doctrine concerned to give guidance to individual conduct. It was a practical public philosophy designed to furnish objective criteria for judging the puhlic consequences or aggregate impact of policies. Thus a somewhat different light is shed on one of Bentham's more notorious statements by this consideration. Bentham once said that "pushpin (pinball) was as good as poetry, if it generated the same amount of pleasure". This sounds like a rather phillistine remark, and it may well have been. But if it is a statement about the relative importance that the state should attach to these activities, rather than a comment on how a private person should rank these activities, it becomes an egalitarian assumption that the pleasures of some people should not be ranked above that of others. 5. It is this egalitarian quality that I want to stress by means of another Benthamite slogan: "Everyone to count as one, nobody to count as more than one". The public interest is to be arrived at by an aggregation of the pleasures and pains produced by any measure, treating each person's pains and pleasures as equal to everybody else's. Notice that the underlying assumption is that there is likely to be a conflict of interests, with some suffering pain while others achieve pleasure. This is obviously the case with measures which redistribute income from one group to another, and one of the best known generalisations of utility theory is embodied in the law of diminishing utility, which can be used, as it was by Bentham, to show that the gain in pleasure by a poor person from redistributive measures was likely to be larger than the loss of pleasure by the rich man. Economic equality was indeed one of the subordinate goals of legislation for utilitarians, but they placed security above equality, which entailed that the feasible legislative goal was a reduction of inequality rather than equality of outcome. 5 8. Utilitarianism also has a built-in bias in favour of majoritarian solutions to the problem of conflict -- the greatest happiness of the greatest number -- and this goes along with an antagonism to paternalism. Utilitarians do not always assume that everybody always knows their interest -- the balance between pain and pleasure. Children, for example, have to be treated as being included in their parents'interests. But the utilitarian does tend to believe that education via schooling and a free press can easily make people aware of their interests. (This, incidentally, is one of the ways in which their use of conspiracy theories differ from those of Marxists: any element of false consciousness cannot long survive education and public exposure.) And once I am apprised of my interests, nobody can be assumed to know what will serve them better than I do -- which is one of the underpinnings of paternalist measures, and why the utilitarians prided themselves on taking an unsentimental attitude to reform. By keeping their eye firmly on the consequences of public measures judged in terms of the utility principle, rather than on good-hearted motives and intentions, sentiment need not enter into the matter. It would all be a matter of consequences objectively weighed. Hence the similarity with modern methods of cost-benefit analysis as a guide to public policy decisions, and the concentration on practical details fully worked out in advance that is the prime characteristic of a Benthamite proposal. Hence too the influence which followers of Bentham were able to exert on legislative measures, sometimes in collaboration with self-styled humanitarian reformers, sometimes in opposition. 8. I hope it will be clear from what I have said so far why Bentham could regard himself as in a direct line with earlier attempts to found a science of legislation and good government along Newtonian lines. In some respects, however, Bentham resembles more a different kind of natural scientist, namely the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, the scientist responsible for the creating the system of classification we still use for plants. Bentham certainly devoted a good deal of his effort to taxonomic activities, showing how rights, powers, duties, crimes, and administrative functions could be classified according to rational principles. Bentham's other claim to be operating naturalistically lay in his belief that he had shown a way of avoiding normative statements of what ought to be based on metaphysics and such fictions as natural 6 rights. On the other hand, unlike some of his eighteenth-century predecessors, such as Smith, he had gone beyond the process of establishing how things worked and had come to be as they are. He was able to proceed more directly from what is to what ought to be. It was not simply a matter of explaining underlying order in society, but of giving detailed practical guidance as to what governments should or should not do to achieve harmony through a system of rewards and punishments and other legal and administrative constraints. Bentham's approach is therefore far more dirigiste, more actively directive or interventionist, than you will find in writers like Montesquieu and Smith, and this has led commentators to contrast the Smithian idea of natural harmony with Bentham's stress on artificial harmonization. It could be a useful initial distinction, but it quickly breaks down when one examines just how many exceptions Smith requires to the general principle of laissez-faire. 9. Bentham's early work was directed at legal and penal reform, and is best represented by his attempt to replace the English system of judge-made law based on custom and precedent with one based on a rational code of laws and punishments which would make the law more clear and certain to the public and reduce the element of discretion allowed to judges and lawyers. His ideas on prisons and punishment are best represented by his famous Panopticon proposals for a modern penitentiary, and the similar schemes he put forward for dealing with poverty and indigence. 10. Another fruitful way of looking at Benthamism is to see it as leading to a view of government, and indeed of modern social life generally, as essentially concerned with problems of legislation, leading to the setting up of self-regulating administrative structures of a bureaucratic kind. Put in terms of a story of progress, Benthamism is a forerunner of what Weber described as "legal-rational" forms of bureaucratic organisation, and a forerunner of other reformist movements which proceeded along bureaucratic lines, such as those led by the Webbs and other Fabians at the turn of the twentieth century. The prime characteristics of Benthamite administration are efficiency, economy, certainty, clarity of command and responsibility, and accountability. 7 11. Although considerable controversy surrounds the precise influence exerted by Benthamites on British legislation in the nineteenth century, a list of the major reforms which they advocated will illustrate the nature and coverage of their vision. Law reform, prison reform, campaigns for free speech, the legalisation of combinations or trade unions, parliamentary reform along democratic lines, including the secret ballot and female suffrage, the appointment of civil servants according to merit and competitive examinations, reform of the poor law, safety codes, public health measures, birth control, taxation of inheritance, the donation of one's corpse for medical research, etc. etc. For these reasons you will understand why discussion of what has become known as the Victorian administrative state, indeed of the origins of the welfare state, has to take account of the Benthamite contribution. And I will add as an enormous footnote that you should bear in mind that two of Bentham's followers, James and J.S.Mill spent most of their lives as civil servants at India House and were responsible for the direction taken by British policy in India for over 40 years. 12. Having illustrated the fact that utilitarianism was by no means an armchair or closet form of social science, but was in fact a major effort to unite theory and practice, I should like to return to consider some of the methodological characteristics of the theory. I have probably said enough to justify the label "individualist", and the deductive quality will be apparent to readers of James Mill's Essay on Government. The use of the deductive method was also a characteristic of political economy, as shown in the Malthusian principle that "if unchecked by other influences, the potential for population increase is greater than the capacity to increase food production; or by the Malthus-Ricardo theory of rent which shows that under certain assumed conditions the law of diminishing returns in agriculture will result in a rise in a rise in the share of national income going to rent payments. Political economy, as I have hinted earlier, became a far more rigidly deductive science than it had been in Smith's hands; and it has retained this characteristic to the present day. 14. But I do not think you should be misled by the terms of the Mill-Macaulay dispute into believing that the distinction between deductive and inductive methods of inquiry convey a clear idea of what was at stake. In some respects the contrast between deduction and 8 induction is a false one, chiefly because there are few simple-minded believers in the idea that knowledge can be acquired solely by deductive or inductive methods. Clearly a mixture of both methods is involved in all scientific thinking. Thus even those Benthamites, like James Mill or Ricardo, who made great use of rational deductive methods would have claimed that the assumptions which formed the basis for their deductions were meant to be approximations based upon wide historical experience and empirical knowledge of human behaviour. They would also have claimed that observation and empirical evidence was essential as a means of testing the conclusions of theories based on hypothetical deductive reasoning. Similarly with professed inductivists like Macaulay, it would not be difficult to show that he makes full use of deductions in forming his conclusions. Nevertheless, the distinction between deduction and induction does help to show how the disputants saw themselves and their opponents. Thus when James Mill and other political economists attacked those who were, as they put it, "all for fact and nothing for theory", those who thought that one or two exceptions to a general rule based on probabilistic evidence constituted grounds for rejection of all theory, they thought of themselves as defenders of science against mere practice-based knowledge -the kind of thing that businessmen and everyday politicians prided themselves in possessing. 15. Such defences of theory as a way of working out "If, then" propositions, of spelling out assumptions and working out their implications, have always been characteristic of the social sciences operating in a world where experiments are difficult to conduct and the participants in the economic, social and political game have developed a down-to-earth ordinary-language way of talking about what they do and how the system works. Thus we are all familiar with charges made against social science to the effect that it is "mere theory", or that it is simply commonsense in fancy or jargon-ridden dress. Sometimes it may indeed be just what its critics say, but it does not follow that all theory, all attempts to use a hypothetical method of arguing from assumed cases in order to spell out possible implications, is misguided when applied to social affairs. Rejecting a theory is, of course, quite different from rejecting all theory. 9 16. But if we are not rejecting all theory and any use of deductive methods, it is still possible to criticize the more extreme uses we find, above all, in James Mill. And this is what his son John Stuart Mill did after Macaulay's attack. He set about the problem of defining the type of deductive method that should be used in the moral or social sciences, and showing the proper relationship that should exist between deduction and induction in order to stress the limits of a priori or hypothetical propositions as a stepping stone towards policy recommendations, where the conclusions of other social sciences may be needed to deal with modifying or disturbing influences. For this reason, Mill's treatment of these methodological questions in Book VI of his book on Logic became a nineteenth-century classic. 17. But Mill did a good deal more than give a balanced statement of the methodology of the social sciences as they existed in the 1840s. In order to understand his position we have to bear in mind the other criticisms that were ranged against the older style of utilitarian theorising, namely its a-historical and universalistic features, and the consequential neglect of what I shall loosely call a "sociological" dimension -- something that had been present in the work of earlier writers in the Enlightenment tradition, but which had disappeared under Bentham's influence. By a-historical and universalistic I mean simply that utilitarianism and political economy in their Benthamite and Ricardian forms seemed to take little or no account of the influence of time and place on political and economic arrangements. Moreover, apart from some highly optimistic programmatic statements about the benefits of education and the general enlightenment that would result from a free press and the establishment of good government along utilitarian lines, they seemed to suggest that in future society would take the form of a more efficiently operating economic system along existing capitalistic lines, and a more efficient type of democratic and bureaucratic government operating according to individualistic utilitarian principles. This confidence led to a kind of impatience or intolerance towards other types of society, especially those based on custom rather than market rationality. The laws of political economy seemed to be presented as universal propositions, applicable to all societies, past, present, and future. For an economist of Mill's generation, however, it was necessary to come to terms with various non-Marxist socialistic 10 criticisms of political economy and various socialistic alternatives to capitalism. This is what he attempted to do in his restatement of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy in 1848, a work which survived into the 1870s as a guide to radical progressive thinking in Britain. Mill was even more troubled by the over-simplicity of the utilitarian science of government, which suggested that democratic forms of government could be prescribed as a universal panacea applicable to all European societies, regardless of historical and social circumstances. In this matter, as I pointed out last week, he found it necessary to reconsider some of the questions raised by the conservative opponents of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Bearing in mind what I said about the historical dimension of Scottish thinking, what we can say is that Mill found it necessary to return or revive the historical approach by formulating, with the help of ideas drawn from St.Simon and Comte, a theory of social progress, a theory designed to shed light on the likely future state of society. Mill also became dissatisfied with the narrow and somewhat fixed view of human capacities adopted by his mentors. Was it not possible to envisage the emergence of a different kind of human nature in which cooperative rather than competitive characteristics predominated? Finally, Mill became worried about the deadening effect of a society composed of individuals enjoying substantial equality and becoming, under the influence of majoritarian pressures, ever more conformist. Was individualism becoming a substitute for individuality and diversity? If so, was this the new problem for modern societies, one that would pose a barrier to future progress long after the solution of existing economic problems? 19. This bare outline of later nineteenth-century attempts to broaden the base of a utilitarian approach to the social sciences by someone who was originally brought up to be a worthy successor to Bentham and his father, tells us something about the survival value of utilitarian ideas in Britain. Some earlier claims were relinquished, notably those connected with a science of government, where a more comparative and "sociological" approach had to be found. But Mill stuck to the idea that psychology was the fundamental science of man, without which statements about human behaviour in groups that could vary in size from the social class to a whole nation would remain purely empirical generalisations rather than laws. 11 And he stuck to the idea of a separate science of political economy, thereby resisting the view of August Comte that all the special sciences of man in society would eventually be gathered under a single unified science called sociology -- the subject of John Burrow's next lecture on the French positivism. 12  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Deductive Individualism: Utilitarianism and Political Economy Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Winch Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Undated. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context IHA/Winch/67 Adam Ferguson Adam Smith Comte David Hume David Ricardo Fabianism James Mill Jeremy Bentham John Stuart Mill Macaulay St Simon Utilitarianism https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/intellectualhistory/files/original/291793a035db6af77e256dffaa33f360.pdf a93928f52ec525ec2978ca7219fe6f83 PDF Text Text 1 Self-Consciousnessand the Paralysisof Will: A Theme in Nineteenth-CenturyEuropeanLiterature by JWBurrow I As we all know, John Stuart :Mill,in his twentiethyear,fellinto a state of depressionwhich ! I his subsequentaccountofit has madefamous. It was, it seems,a state of apathy,of a failureof will and desirein whichno aim seemed~orth achieving,no satisfactiopin achievingit imaginable.He wrote later 'In this frameof mindit occurredto me to put the questiondirectly to I I I myselt:"Supposethat allyour objectsin lifewere realised;that ~ the I . l changesin institutionsand opinionwhichyou are lookingfoIW3fdto, would be completelyeffectedat this veryinstant:would this be ~ great joy and happinessto you? " And an irrepressibleself-consciousness :distinctly I answered''No" I At this ... the wholefoundationon whichmy li{ewas ! constructedfell down ... I seemedto havenothingleft to liveroJ.' • I I I One's first reacti~)llto this I think is to regardthe state of mind:Milldescribesas [being a perennial i possibility,a-historicaland pennanentlyincidentto the humanconditionas one of its hazards,and I ! • I only:Mill'saccount ofit, and his attemptto diagnoseit, as beingmarkedfirst byihisdistinctive I I I persona}..umstances and secondby the periodin whichhe livedand the scho?l of moral and I psychologicalreasoningin whichhe had beenreared. :Millhimselfseemsto rectjgniseits I I perennialitywhen he comparesit to the Methodists'convictionof sin. CertainlyiI take it, such a state would earlierhave tended characteristically to attract eitherthe kind of Gal~nic,physiological explanationin which a work likeBurton's Anatomyof Melancholyis so fertile,or a religious �2 diagnosis,like the monasticaccide,or the lossof the senseof the love of God, the dreaded coldness of the heart to God and hence despairof one's salvation,recorded,for example,!by Bunyan. On the other hand,Mill's accountof his state,thoughpurelysecular,dofs not strike one as altogethermodem. It is perhapsopento questionhow far the relativeabsencefrom Mill's specific accountof his illnessof the figureof the overbearingfather,who dominatesthe first part of the I Autobiography.was due to a residualfilialreticenceratherthan the nineteenthcentury's lack of Freudianknowingness. What~ clearlylocatedin intellectualhistory,however,is Mill's own a~emptto, as we might say, psychoanalysehimselfin tenns of the only psychologyhe really knows,the post-Lockean,hedonisticpsychologypurveyedin his father's Analysisof the Phenomenaof the HumanMind and in the Benthamiteschoolof utilitarianism.It is that hedonism, both as a theory of humanmotivesand as a basisfor ethics,that I take it made Mill's depression seemto him not merelya personalmisfortunebut actuallyto constitutea kind of critiqueof utilitarianassumptions. As a psychologyutilitarianism proposedan appetitivehumanbeingwho constituteda problemfor practicalethicsonlybecause,in directionor extent, his appetitesand I I those of his fellowsmightnot be fullycompatible.But if appetiteshouldfail - ~d Mill,in later years, in On Liberty.for example,sometimesseemsto havefearedthat the phenomenonmight becomeuniversal- then utilitarianismas a tool of psychologicaland socialanalysisand social engineeringbecomesunworkable.Nothingin Mill's intellectualheritageseemedto provide groundsfor a diagnosisof the failureof desire. For his personaluse, as we know,he was drivento look beyondthe utilitarianaccountof endsto the emotionalhealinghe foundin Wordsworth'spoetry and the new personalidealhe found in a Romantic-cum-Hellenic conceptionof open-endedpersonaldeveloprrtent.But for a subsequentdiagnosisof his conditionhe did,in fact, and with considerableingenuity,findthe conceptualresourcesfrom withinhis own Lockeanand associationistpsychologicaltradition. �3 MilI's account,interestinglyfor our purpose,placesself-consciousness at the core of the explanationand relatesit to the paralysisof will,whilemakingthe essentialground of that selfconsciousnessa piece of theoreticalpsychologicalknowledge. His argument,you mayremember,runs likethis:Ideas of pleasureare formedby association. Onlyrelativelyfew of suchassociationsare directand natural;those betweenthe pleasureof satisfyingan instinctand the objectin whichsatisfactionis found. Most associations, however,are artificialand contingent.In a differentmilieu,with a differentupbringing,they could havebeen different. Once we know this,Mill's argumentruns,and becomeaware that our ends I havebeen contingentlyformedby circumstances,they losetheirvaluefor us becauseof this knowledge. The glue of association,as it were, is dissolvedby our knowledgeof its composition. What, to the modem eye, I take it, is missingin MilI'saccountof his own case, however,is the crucialpresenceof his father. For of courseit was onlyin one sensethat the formationof ends, for :tv1ill, had been contingent. No doubtthe discoveryof the contingentnatureof one's ends mightbe unsettling;ethicalrelativismrelieson this for its capacityto disturb. But in Mill's own case there was a furtherand probablyconsiderablymore disturbingconsideration.Certainlyhis convictionof the worth of certainends was contingentin the sensethat assertionsof their valuewere not necessarytruths, but psychologically one has to suspectthat this was not the root of his problem and that his analysiswas onlyhalf-complete.For thoughperhapscontingentin the logicalsense they were certainlynot randomlyor accidentallyformed;on the contrary,they nad been, and he knew that they had, most carefullyarrangedfor himby the masterof his earlydestiny,his father. We have to infer,I take it, that onceMillrecognisedthis,his existenceseemedto him not his own; there was a truth in the jeer that he was an artificialcreation,a constructedman, and constructed not by himselfbut by another. Programmedto desirecertainends,the most availableform of resistancewas not to desire anythingat all. In the longrun Millcould onlyrestore a sense of �4 worth to his lifethrough the adoptionof a Romanticnotionof autonomousself-development,of innerself-directednessand open-endedness,whichbecameso importantto himthat he cameto identifyit as the preconditionfor healthand continuingvitalitynot onlyin the individualbut in societyas a whole. In his subsequentdarkermomentsMillseemssometimesto view the prospects for modem societyas a whole in terms of morallassitudeand paralysisof will,projectinghis own earlycrisison to the future of civilisedand democraticsociety,shouldthe vital springof individual moralenergyfail. It was not, in fact, an uncommonfear in the middleand late nineteenthcentury,whichis why I have dwelt on it here, becausemy fundamentalconcernis not so much with Millhimselfas with the intellectualhistoryof the nineteenthcentury. I shouldperhapsapologisefor havingspent so-longon such a familiarsubjectas Mill'searlycrisis,but I have done so becauseI want to ask a questionabout it whichis not, I think,veryoftenposed. It is a questionabout its cultural • specificityor topicality. I have alreadydistinguished, perhapstoo strongly,betweenthe psychologicalstate and Mill's renderingofit in termsof his own philosophicalheritage,but I want now to broadenthe questionof its historicity,so to speak,by consideringit as a cultural phenomenonof what we maybroadlycallEuropeanRomanticism,and one to whichother cases, both actualand fictional,of the period,bear at leastsomeresemblances,though few if any derived froml\1ill's own specificutilitarianmatrix. The epigraphto this part of my papermightwellbe what Mill himselfsays of his relationto Byron's poetry,which,consideredas a pieceof culturalhistoryis, I think,rather startling. Every reader ofl\1ill's Autobiographyrememberswhat he saysabout the therapeuticvalue of reading Wordsworth. Much less often rememberedis what he saysabout readingByron,though it is for my presentpurpose more interesting.It had, he says,the reverseeffectto Wordsworth,and his reasonis striking. Byron's state of mind,he says,'was too likemy own ... His Harold and Manfred �5 had the sameburthen on them that I had'. Millperhapshardlyneededto add ' [and] I was not in a frameof mindto deriveany comfortfromthe vehementsensualpassionof his Giaours or the sullennessof his Laras.' It would, admittedly,havebeeninterestingif he had told us whether he had ever been in such a frame of mind. The idea of Mill's imaginationever dressingitself,as Byron in fact did, in the costumeof a Turkishor Albanianbrigandis an arrestingone but remainspurely conjecturaland probablyimplausible.The referenceto ChildeHarold is none the less provoking, though inexact. Byron's hero's malaisewas one of satiety;he is presentedas a man who has exhaustedhis passions. Milldoes not claimso muchfor himself Overworkingon Bentham's Laws of Evidencedoes not seem quitethe samething. Yet Mill's claimto psychologicalkinshipremainsstrikingand I do not want to discountit, but, on the contrary,to take it seriously.Byronismis, and I think in its own time was, recognised as a literaryfashion,a Europeanculturalphenomenon,though one which spilledover from literatureto life,likeWertherismbeforeit. Like the Sturmund Drang. the maladiedu siecleor the Decadence,it is one of the clichesof Europeanculturalhistoryand therefore,when found in life, under suspicionof beinga pose. Yet Mill,at least,was hardlya poseur;that deadlyearnestness was as remote from Byronicplayfulnessas fromByronicpassion. The personalcircumstances were hardlysimilareither. Byron grew up withouta father;Mill's was all-toopresent. Yet perhaps once we beginto invokethe notionof generationalconflict,withoutlayingtoo much stress on its individualpeculiarities,Mill's crisis,and not merelyhis remedyfor it, beginsplausiblyto fall into place as an incidentof the culturalphenomenonof EuropeanRomanticism.Millwas scarcelyalone in rejectingthe faith of his fatherand the creed of his family;what was unusualwas the fact that his father representedprogressiveand enlightenedopinion,or as Millsaid 'the eighteenthcentury'. Even that was not unique;AlexanderHerzen's father,for example,was such an eighteenthcentury rationalistand sceptic. �6 Mill himselfwas in a sensenot averseto, evendetenninedto, placehis revolt in the context of the generalculturalhistoryof his time,evenwhilehe stressedthe uniquenessof his education. He sharedto the fullthat generational,historicalkindof self-consciousness whichled notable contemporarieseach to presenthimselfas a kindof microcosmor epitomeof the cultural tendenciesof the age: an enfantdu siecle. Alfredthe Mussetdid this, in eo nomine,in Confessions d'un Enfant du Siecle;so did Lermontov,vicariously,in A Hero of our Time,so did Herzen, so did MatthewArnold,so did JamesAnthonyFroudein The Nemesisof Faith. Mill himselfdramatises the intellectualconflictbetweenhimselfand his father,thoughas so often the latter playshis role by implication,as the conflictbetweenthe nineteenthcenturyand the eighteenth,just as Carlyle,who not surprisinglyexerciseda considerableinfluenceoverMillafter his crisis,dramatisedin Sartor Resartusthe conflictbetweenthe mechanicalphilosophy,as he calledit, of the Enlightenmentand the pantheisticvitalismhe propoundedthere as a creed. For Carlyle'sfictionalalter ego, as for Mill,the transitionsfrom old to new -though Mill'sversionof'the nineteenthcentury' was somewhatdifferent- was markedby a periodof anguishedintrospectionand a sense of meaninglessness.Teufelsdrokhtoo was presentedby his impresario-authoras an historical microcosm,whose biography,presentedpredominantly in a mode of burlesque,takes himfrom a mock-Rousseauist,childhoodrusticidyll,througha Wertherishand Byronicepisodeof thwarted love and of nature worship,to his encounterwithEnlightenment,materialismand a resolutionin terms ofldealist metaphysicsand Goetheannotionsof work and duty. Diagnosesof the maladiedu sieclevaried,of course,from authorto author, evenfrom countryto country,though all tendedto stressnotionsof moraldislocation,alienationfrom society, lassitude,apathy,restlessnessand a suppressedparalysisor unfocussingof the will. One of the e3!liestto articulatethis, in the eighteentwenties,BenjaminConstant,in his novelAdolphe,spoke of �7 'une des principalesmaladiesmoralesde notre siecle,cette fatigue,_cette incertitude,cet absencede force,cette analyseperpetuellequi place une arriere penseea cote de tous les sentiments.' MatthewArnold's phraseshavebecomecanonical:'the unstrungwillof'Obermann'; 'the languid doubt', and 'the strangedisease[and] palsiedhearts' of modemlife,in contrastto the focused dedicationof the seventeenth-century scholargypsy. In contemporaryattemptsto diagnosethis modemmaladywe find a frequentlyexpressedsenseof belongingto an age of transition,making everyman with the senseof the centuryin his bonesinto, at leastinwardly,a wandererwithout settledconvictionsor an appropriatefieldfor action. Arnold'slinesfrom 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse'are perhapsthe best known: 'Wanderingbetweentwo worlds,one dead The other powerlessto be born. With nowhereyet to rest my head'. But Herzenwrote somethingalmostidenticalin his elegyon the Revolutionof 1848,From the Other Shore, and so did Carlyle,lessepigrammatically, in his own spleneticdenunciationof Europe in 1848and its aftermath,Latter Day Pamphlets.Two decadesearlierAlfredde Musset had writtenin what he clearlytook to be a pregnanttautology,'Tout ce qui etait n'est plus;tout ce que sera n' est pas encore. Ne cherchezpas ailleursle secretde nos maux'. What the past world and the unachievedfuturerepresentedvaried,at least in emphasis, betweenthe spiritualand the political,thoughin somecasesthey haveequalweight. For Arnold the antithesiswas betweenChristianityand science,or perhapstechnology,with the formertreated in terms of tender elegy,the latter withirony. The new worldwas greetedwith a somewhatlimpwristedwave: 'Too late for us your callye blow/ Whosebent was taken long ago.' �8 For Herzen it was predominantlythe transitionfromaristocracyand bourgeoisliberalismto democracyand socialism,though not withoutfearsthat the latter mightprove barbaric,and also with a strong, Feuerbachiansensethat futurehumanfreedomrequiredas he said, freedomfrom everythingreligious,everythingmystical.Nevertheless,he himselffelt acutelythe crisisof his generation,not so much, like Arnold,with a senseof religiouspathos, but as an elitewithout a followingand therefore condemnedto ineffectuality.It was particularlythe malaiseof the Russian intelligentsia,whether revolutionariesor merelyprogressive'Westernizers',estrangedfrom the institutionsof their nativeland,autocracy,orthodoxy,bureaucracy,serfdom,and without the representativeinstitutionsthroughwhichdiscontentcouldexpressitself,and hence condemnedto a fruitlessidealismand endlesstalk. The latterwas characterisedby an extremeself-consciousness and constant,restlessself-questioning, of the kindfamiliarto us in the heroes - or anti-heroes- or Turgenevand Tolstoy, in Levinin AnnaKareninaandPierre in War and Peace, and, most disturbingby far, in the anonymoussupposedauthorof Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. RussianssometimesblamedonlyRussianconditionsrather than the nineteenthcenturyas such,though Dostoevsky's anti-heromakesconstantironicplaywith 'the cultivatedman of the nineteenthcentury'. De Musset,as a Frenchman,born duringthe Napoleonicera, and one of the earliestdiagnosticiansof the 'maladiedu siecle',had anotherversionof the genesisof the malaise, whichis now - sinceMusset's novelConfessionsd'un Enfantdu Siecleis now largelyforgottenmost familiarthrough Stendhal'sJulianSorel. It was, accordingto Musset,the destructionof all culturaland moral certaintiesin the revolutionaryera (whatByron, in ChildeHarold, called'the wreck of old opinions') and the tamenessof the ensuingperiodand the squalidmediocrityof the rolesit offered. We are remindedof JulienwhenMussetsaysthat if his generationutters the word 'gloire' it is told 'Faites vous pretes,faitesvous pretes'. The imageofNapoleon hauntedthe imaginationsof such young men in continentalEuropein the first halfof the century;in England �9 Byronwas perhapsmore of a rarity. But what has thisto do with self-consciousness and the paralysisof will? Simply,I think,that it fostereda baffledmegalomania,a sensethat the lifeof actionrequiredextraordinarycircumstancesandthe exerciseof an extraordinarywill,attainable onlyin fantasyand far-removedfromthe humdrumconditionsof everydayeffectiveness.The Napoleonicimagewas a standingrebuketo modemineffectualityand, by the impossiblestandardit set, it made the latter, or at leastthe senseofit, more or lessinevitable.Byron treated Napoleonas an alter-egopreciselybecausehe had aspired'beyondthe fittingmediumof desire'. Of course, in the Romanticrefusalof commitmenttherewas oftena powerfularroganceand a sense of a world unworthyof one's attentions. The Napoleonicmodelset an impossiblestandard,yet it only epitomiseda centralRomanticdilemmawhosepsychologicalinterest,I take it, transcendsits culturalmatrix. Meeklyto acceptan assignedsocialrole was to be lessthan an individual,much lessthan a Napoleonichero, yet to refuseall availableroleswas to face oneselfwith the existential task of creatingmeaningfor oneselfin a worldconfessedlyemptyof suchmeaning. To accept another's standards,includingthose of a despoticGod, was self-betrayal,but to rejectthem was to livein a moralvoid, in Durkheimiantenns, anomic. It is hardlysurprisingthat the consequence shouldhavebeen experiencedas a paralysisof will,or a searchfor what one reallywas or wished to do, whichseemedonlyto probe an endlesslyelusiveselfwhichcould ask questionsof itselfbut never provideanswers. It is not surprisingthat the questfor identitysometimescameto be focusedon a kind of test, of neive and will,in whichthe selfwoulddefineitselfthroughan act of socialdefianceor even crime,an act unquestionablynot mundaneor sociallyprescribed;what later has come to be called an acte gratuit. For JulienSorel,whoselifeis a seriesof suchself-imposedtests, onlythe action againstthe grain, of societyor evenone's own inclinations,as thoughin a kind of ironicparody of the Kantianmoralimperative,reallycounts. His mistressMathilde,who shareshis addictionto the �10 ethicof the sublimeembodiedas inneror overtrebellion,has anotherversionof the same kind of thought when she saysto herself:with propheticirony,'I can see nothingconferringhonour on a man excepta sentenceof death. It is the onlythingthat cannotbe bought'. Julien,of course,was not the onlyfictionalhero to holdthe exampleofNapoleonbeforehim. Balzacsaid it was the bane of that generation. Nor was it onlyfor the French. The invocationof Napoleon,as a man superior to all ordinarystandardsof humanity,seemsto havebeen commonin Russia. War and Peace beginswith a discussionof Napoleonand crime. He was a modelfor the murdererRaskolmikovin Crimeand Punishmentand his prototype,Hermann,in Pushkin's macabrestory The Queen of Spades,who even tries to look likeNapoleon. It is possibleto distinguishthreemaintypesof suchself-imposedtests in the literatureof the nineteenthcentury,acts of commitmentin a moralvoid,on whichone's lifecouldbe seento be staked and whichthereforecouldhardlybe deniedsomekind of significance.They are, respectively,the crime,the duel and politicalrevolution.I have spokenbrieflyof crime,though a more extendedtreatmentwouldhaveto includeBalzac'sRastignacand Stendhal'sJulien,as well as the usuallynamelesscrimeswhichsupposedlyhauntthe Byronichero. The duel, and its preamble,the insult,are I thinkparticularlypsychologically interestinghere;it seemsto figure particularlyprominentlyin Russianliterature,as also,of coursein life:Pushkinand Lermontovboth diedin duels. Duels figurein the former's EugeneOneginand the latter's A Hero of Our Time.in War and Peace and in a minorclassicof the genredealingwith self-consciousness and ineffectuality,Turgenev's Diaxyof a SuperfluousMan. The duel is interesting,I think,becauseit lies,so to speak, on the interfacebetweensocialrole-playingand the a-socialor anti-socialacte gratuit. It is clearlya test, sinceit involvesstakingone's own lifeand perhapsbeingwillingto take another's. Yet it is also an extremecaseof approvedrole-playing;belongingto a fixed,inherited code of honour, callingon an entirelytraditional,if non-Christian,classethic. �11 For that reason,to hazardone's lifein a duelwas akinto what Durkheimlater categorised as-thealtruisticform of suicide,that of the manwho has lost his honour and offendedagainstthe consciencecollective,whichrequiresfrom himhis lifein expiation. This is the exact opposite of Romanticmoral individualism,whilethe code of honourwas one to whichthe more sensitiveor selfconsciousRomanticindividualistsat most onlyhalfsubscribed.Moreover,because ofits ritualisedcharacterthe duel more or less enforceda disjunction,a time interval,between the emotionwhichpromptedit and the actionwhichinevitablyfollowed. One mightinsultone's man in hot blood but one had to fighthim in cold,with ampleopportunityfor reflection,whether one by then wantedto or not. This made it. fromthe pointof viewwe have been considering,a kind of paradox:an act of pure willthat was also an act of extrememoralconfonnity:supposedlyan act of passion,or at least the consequenceof one, it gavethe agent ampleopportunityto ask himself whetherthe passionwas real, whetherone reallyhated one's opponent,or had merelyacted as seemedexpectedof one or out of pure boredomand casualimpulse. One literaryprotagonist, Pierre in War and Peace, feelsthese paradoxeskeenly. The challengeonce given, he feels·in the grip of an externalpower, whichwillsee to it that mattersproceedto their appointedend. He shoots his man, we gather, more or lessaccidentally,withouthatred, clumsily,because it is expectedof him. In Turgenev's story,the 'superfluousman' of the title, a man unableto imposehimselfon the world in any other way, issuesa challengeout of piqueand grazes his man accidentallywhile tryingto fire noblyin the air. His opponentthen humiliateshimby doingso successfully.The due~ we are madeto see I think, as an entirelyspurioustest of will,and merelyas a piece of self-. advertisement(whichfails). The 'UndergroundMan' in Dostoevsky'sstory (Notes from Underground),fightsno duel but he broods endlesslyon insultsgiven(or not given) and received; he tries to screw himselfup to insultan officerwhomhe thinkshas insultedhimby ignoringhim. �12 He wants, that is, to insult,or evento be consciouslyinsulted,simplyin order to affirmhis existenceand have it recognised,and, by a furthertum of the screw of self-consciousness(sincehe is alwaysa step ahead of the reader in self-awareness) he knowsthat this is his motiveand that his intendedaction is not merelyabortivebut entirelypointlessand futile. The third test is that of Revolution.Perhapsit is wrong to call it a test because,unlikea duel or a specificcrime,it couldbe a pennanentfocusfor idealism,for a dedicatedlife,whilenever reachingits intendedclimax. It allowedone the prospect,or at least the illusion,of significant action,of a kind to satisfyevenNapoleoniccravings,simultaneouslyrepudiatingall existingmoral standardsand mundaneends and apparentlyestablishingan identityand a vocationin a vacuum,yet in most cases obligedone to suspendactionitselfindefinitely.The archetype,in life,was Mikhail Bakunin;his literarycounterpart,at leastpartially,it seems,a portrait, is Turgenev's Rudin, in the novelof that name. Bakuninhas recentlybeenthe subjectof an impressivethough unsympathetic biographyby AileenKelly,who findsthe identificationof him and Rudin persuasive. I shalloutline Rudinfor those who may be unfamiliarwithit, and then considerKelly's interpretationof Bakunin. Rudin is an interestingvariantof the speciesTurgenevidentifiedas the Superfluousor UnwantedMan. Unlikethe protagonistof Turgenev's novelleThe Diruyof a SuperfluousMan, who is essentiallywhat the technicalmoralvocabularyof the late-twentiethcenturywould identify as a wimp,Rudin is a man of eloquenceand socialimpressiveness,even of power, and apparently an idealistas well as an adept in Gennanmetaphysics.He arousesenvy and also love. The story is the unfoldingof our disillusionment withhimand it ends in pity. He is revealedpartlyby his own actions,or rather the lack of them, partlythroughthe reminiscencesof a former studentfriendwho o~ce sharedlodgingswith him(as Turgenevhad donewith Bakunin). He is exposedas empty and ineffectual,a self-absorbedegoistwho attemptsto steela weak willand to fan tepid passionswith an extroverteloquence. He livesonlyby words,subjectinghis friend's passionfor a young woman �13 to such persistent,close analysisthat he destroysit. He is tonnentedby the desireto act and to be useful: "'Yes, I must act ... I mustn'twastemypowerson talk, emptyuselesstalk, on mere words ... " And his wordspouredout likea river. He spoke beautifully, heatedly,convincingly- aboutthe shamefulnessof a faintheart and apathy,about • the need to do what has to be done'. • ..He.is ~ut, not intentionally,to the test - the same,in fact, as Eugene Onegin's. The daughterof the house, simple,candidand encouragedby him,declaresher love for him. His first reactioncannotbe accusedoflackingauthenticity:'Oh my God!' Then, "'I am happy",he pronouncedto himselfin a low voice. "Yes,I reallyam happy'',he repeated.' Reflection,of course,is fatal, and his answeris essentiallyOnegin's, thoughmore prevaricating.He declaresthat they must submitto her mother's prohibition,provokingthe understandableretort, 'so this is how you put into practiceall your talk about freedom'. Here there is no such eventualironicreversalin st9re as for Onegin,but Rudinbecomes,likehim- and ChildeHarold- a wanderer,makingonly abortiveattemptsto make himselfeffectiveand useful. He does, however,come to a kind of selfknowledge,recognisinghis own ineffectuality and prophesyingthat 'I willend by sacrificingmyself for some nonsenseI don't evenbelievein.' Whetherwe are to take his death on the barricadesin Paris in 1848 as fulfillingthis prophecyis perhapsnot entirelycertain,but it is temptingto think so. Now for Bakunin. In Kelly'spersuasive,Rudinesqueversion,the imageofBakunin as a man of titanicrevolutionarypassionsis a self-mademisrepresentation.She sees a consistent trajectoryfromthe earlyFichteanIdealistegoistto the old anarchistrevolutionary.Her versionis a study of a self-absorbedegoisttrappedin his own megalomaniacfantasies,whose highlyselfconsciousdiagnosisof his situationis presentedin the languageof philosophicalIdealism. He is ineffectualbecausethe grandioseand abstractnatureof his projectcompelshimto wait for history �14 to presenthimwith the momentfor its fulfilment,whichnever,despitefalsedawns,anived. Kelly laysstress on his earlyadoptionof the metaphysicsofFichte and Schelling:on the presentationof the predicamentof the alienatedRussianintellectual,deniedany satisfyingoutlet for activity,in tenns of the splitbetweenconsciousnessandthe world,spiritand matter. The dichotomyof subjectand object,that is, was to overcomeby willin a kindof metaphysicalshadow-playor f~tasy, requiringno more than the abilityto endowone's frustrationswith cosmicsignificance. Bakunin,of course, movedawayfromFichteanegoismto a right-wingHegelianism,his famous 'reconciliationwith reality', and subsequentlyto revolutionarypoliticalactivism. But Kellysees his politicalcareer as anotherform of the searchfor personalwholeness,for a reconciliationof the reflectiveconsciousnesswith the externalworldthroughwill and action. The ostensibleobject- a federalisticcommunitarianEurope, is moreor lessaccidental.The centralpoint is the mergingof the selfin revolutionaryactionand the attemptto imposeit on the world through dominationof the revolutionarymovement. This is, of course, a reductionistaccount,seeingBakuninas always·essentiallyconcerned with a personaldilemma,strugglingto unifyhis own personalityand to satisfythe Idealist requirementof absolutefreedomin the worldthroughessentiallynegativemeans,destructionon the largestscale;consciousnessand the worldwouldbe reconcilednot throughthe establishmentof a rationalorderingof the world but in revolutionaryactionand dominationfor its own sake. It is a persuasiveaccount in Bakunin's caseand it is temptingtoo to add sociologicalto psychological reductionismwhen consideringthe wholeculturalphenomenonI havebeen attemptingto depict, and to see it as littlemore than the consequenceof whatthe later twentiethcenturywould call graduateunemployment,the paucityof careeropportunitiesfor educatedyoung•men, exacerbated by the crisisof faithwhichmade a careerin the churchmore problematicor evenunthinkable.In Russiaa careerfor the nobilitymeanteithergarrisonboredomin the armyor the stultifyingroutines �15 of the civilservice. In RestorationFranceJulienSorelstandsas a symbolof the compulsory hypocrisiesand frustrationsenduredby the ambitious,embitteredby historicmemoriesof the meteoriccareersof the Napoleonicperiod. 'Faites-vouspretres'. Easier saidthan done. In Englandand Germany,too, religiousorthodoxyand,as it mightseemhypocrisy,were preconditionsfor a universityas wellas a clericalcareer. Feuerbachwas denieda universitypost. The vacillatinghero or anti-heroof JamesAnthonyFroude's The NemesisofFaith (1848),which his friendCloughsaid spokefor his wholegeneration,saw the narrowingof the selfto a career,a function,as a sacrificeof essentialhumanity,just as his prototypeWertherhad done three quarters of a centuryearlier. Froude's (semi-autobiographical) charactertakes priest's orders with misgivingand renouncesthem amidscandal. Froude,ArthurHugh Clough,Matthew Arnold,after briefperiodsin Fellowships,were deniedby religioustests the obviouscareeropportunities,so successfullyexploitedby Arnold'sfatherThomasin the previousgeneration,for men of their talentsand education. The restlessnessof the eighteenfortiesand fifties,the endlessself-scrutinyto discoverwhat one reallybelievedor mightdo, oweda good dealto this predicament.When one addedto it, in some cases,the retrospectivemourningfor the Napoleonicsublime,the frustrationof its fantasiesand its scorn for mundanecompromises,or, on the other hand,the internalisedFichtean metaphysicaldramaof Selfand Other,one has richmaterialfor culturalintroversion. In conclusion,what lightmay any of thisthrow on our commonconcernhere, the notion of moralcertaintiesdestroyedby self-analysis?Lookingat the examplesI have consideredand trying to generalisefromthem one has to saythat in theircasesthe self-analysislooks more like a consequencethan a cause of suchmoraldislocation,and the agent of the latter it is easiestto summarisesimplyas 'history': the disillusionwiththe optimismof the Enlightenmentengendered by the revolutionaryperiod,the successiveshocksto the Europeanpolitical,socialand moral order sufferedbetweenthe summoningof the EstatesGeneralin 1789and - let us say - the publicationof �16 Strauss'sLeben Jesu in 1835. Even in the caseof Millwithwhom I began,who reallydoes try to explainhis moral disorientationin tenns of his self-consciousness about the psychologicalgrounds of moralconviction,his self-analysis,contraryto whathe tellsus about it, was surelythe consequencerather than the cause of the unsettlingof the convictionsin whichhe had been reared. The partialloss of the willto live,that is, precededthe analysisto whichhe subjectedit; it was not really,pace Mill himsel~its outcome. This,for all the idiosyncrasyof Mill'sown case,mayhave been general. If so there are perhapsexceptions. When Carlylespeaksscornfully,in the person ofTeufelsdrokh,of the view of virtueas 'but some Passion,somebubblein the blood,bubblingin the directionothers profitby' we are inclinedto see some memoryof a realpsychicwoundinflictedby educationin philosophical reductionism.His remedyfor introspectionwas WIihelmMeister's: do what lies nearestto your handto do. Some of his disciplesseemto haveusedthis consciouslyas a cure for paralysing doubts. CharlesKingsley,who advisedhisyoungwifeto 'think little' could uncharitablybe thought sometimesto have overdosedon the prescription.It is temptingto see Tolstoi'sPierre, druggedon uxoriousnessand peasantwisdom,as anothersuchcasualtyof speculation.In Russia in the eighteenthirtiesand fortiesGennanmetaphysicsandFrenchsentimentalhumanismseemto haveflowedmore or less effortlesslyintothe moralvacuumPierre had tried initiallyand unsuccessfullyto :fillwith Freemasoruy,creatingits Rudin-Bakunins,fortunatelyusuallyin pocket editions. And aftetwards- afterRomanticismandIdealism? Post-Romanticismis in fact as identifiablea culturalphenomenonin Europe as Romanticismitself As AlexanderHerzensaidof his contemporariesafter the 1848Revolution, 'we are humanity'sheadachethe next morning', It took differentformsin differentcountries,but alwaysas a kind of reductionor renunciation:in France,for example,characteristically, as an aesthete's controlledself-effacement, withthe Byronicquestingwandererreplacedby the coldly �• 17 observantboulevardierwhom nothingcan surprise,all-seeingbut detached,and managingtherefore to be a portentboth of aestheticismand naturalism.Flaubertsaid 'One is no longer a personbut an eye'. In England,in the words of MatthewArnold,the idiomof post-Romanticismis itself Romanticallyelegaic,but in a parasitic,historicallydistanced,ironicmode: 'What helpsit now that Byronbore ThroughEurope to the Aetolianshore The pageantof his bleedingheart?' The messageis resignation,withdrawaland, inevitably,an indulgedintrospection.In Russia,in the sixties,reductiontook anotherform, one halfpredictedby Arnold,amongthe not very ap_propriately namedNihilists,whose prototypeis Bazarovin Turgenev'sFathers and Sons; a renunciationof the role of the questioningintellectualfor the deliberateself-limitationof the scientifically trainedexpert,dedicatedto an unproblematic,practicalend: in Bazarov's case as a doctor. Bazarovmay havebeen a portent;HenryJames'sDr Prance could havegraduatedfrom the same medicalschool. But of coursehisRomanticantitypearrivesin the twentiethcenturytoo, as the unemployedor underemployedarts graduate:StephenDaedalus,Prufrock,Roquetin. Stretchingthe temporalperspectivein thisway begins,of course,to promptagainnotionsof perenniality,of a psychologicaltypologyratherthan of historically-conditioned culturalphenomena. In this mood one findsoneselfthinking,for example,that of coursethe Danishelectorspassed over Hamlet's claimto the throne;they recognisedthe type. But - to changesidesagain - we can then remindourselvesthat Hamlet's earlierbiographer,Saxo-Grammaticus, certainlydid not. So we are inclinedto revert to sayingthat the real Amleth,if therewas one, not merelywas not but for culturalreasonssimplycouldnot havebeeneitherthe irresoluteRenaissanceprinceor - stillless the 'sweet and noblenature' in whichnineteenthcenturyRomanticcriticsof the playlike Schlegel �.. 18 and Coleridgeseem rather flatteringlyto haveseen their own reflections. The boundariesbetween psychologyand culturalhistoryremain,it seems,undetermined. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Unpublished articles and written lectures Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 1 Self-Consciousnessand the Paralysisof Will: A Theme in Nineteenth-CenturyEuropeanLiterature by JWBurrow I As we all know, John Stuart :Mill,in his twentiethyear,fellinto a state of depressionwhich ! I his subsequentaccountofit has madefamous. It was, it seems,a state of apathy,of a failureof will and desirein whichno aim seemed~orth achieving,no satisfactiopin achievingit imaginable.He wrote later 'In this frameof mindit occurredto me to put the questiondirectly to I I I myselt:"Supposethat allyour objectsin lifewere realised;that ~ the I . l changesin institutionsand opinionwhichyou are lookingfoIW3fdto, would be completelyeffectedat this veryinstant:would this be ~ great joy and happinessto you? " And an irrepressibleself-consciousness :distinctly I answered''No" I At this ... the wholefoundationon whichmy li{ewas ! constructedfell down ... I seemedto havenothingleft to liveroJ.' • I I I One's first reacti~)llto this I think is to regardthe state of mind:Milldescribesas [being a perennial i possibility,a-historicaland pennanentlyincidentto the humanconditionas one of its hazards,and I ! • I only:Mill'saccount ofit, and his attemptto diagnoseit, as beingmarkedfirst byihisdistinctive I I I persona}..umstances and secondby the periodin whichhe livedand the scho?l of moral and I psychologicalreasoningin whichhe had beenreared. :Millhimselfseemsto rectjgniseits I I perennialitywhen he comparesit to the Methodists'convictionof sin. CertainlyiI take it, such a state would earlierhave tended characteristically to attract eitherthe kind of Gal~nic,physiological explanationin which a work likeBurton's Anatomyof Melancholyis so fertile,or a religious 2 diagnosis,like the monasticaccide,or the lossof the senseof the love of God, the dreaded coldness of the heart to God and hence despairof one's salvation,recorded,for example,!by Bunyan. On the other hand,Mill's accountof his state,thoughpurelysecular,dofs not strike one as altogethermodem. It is perhapsopento questionhow far the relativeabsencefrom Mill's specific accountof his illnessof the figureof the overbearingfather,who dominatesthe first part of the I Autobiography.was due to a residualfilialreticenceratherthan the nineteenthcentury's lack of Freudianknowingness. What~ clearlylocatedin intellectualhistory,however,is Mill's own a~emptto, as we might say, psychoanalysehimselfin tenns of the only psychologyhe really knows,the post-Lockean,hedonisticpsychologypurveyedin his father's Analysisof the Phenomenaof the HumanMind and in the Benthamiteschoolof utilitarianism.It is that hedonism, both as a theory of humanmotivesand as a basisfor ethics,that I take it made Mill's depression seemto him not merelya personalmisfortunebut actuallyto constitutea kind of critiqueof utilitarianassumptions. As a psychologyutilitarianism proposedan appetitivehumanbeingwho constituteda problemfor practicalethicsonlybecause,in directionor extent, his appetitesand I I those of his fellowsmightnot be fullycompatible.But if appetiteshouldfail - ~d Mill,in later years, in On Liberty.for example,sometimesseemsto havefearedthat the phenomenonmight becomeuniversal- then utilitarianismas a tool of psychologicaland socialanalysisand social engineeringbecomesunworkable.Nothingin Mill's intellectualheritageseemedto provide groundsfor a diagnosisof the failureof desire. For his personaluse, as we know,he was drivento look beyondthe utilitarianaccountof endsto the emotionalhealinghe foundin Wordsworth'spoetry and the new personalidealhe found in a Romantic-cum-Hellenic conceptionof open-endedpersonaldeveloprrtent.But for a subsequentdiagnosisof his conditionhe did,in fact, and with considerableingenuity,findthe conceptualresourcesfrom withinhis own Lockeanand associationistpsychologicaltradition. 3 MilI's account,interestinglyfor our purpose,placesself-consciousness at the core of the explanationand relatesit to the paralysisof will,whilemakingthe essentialground of that selfconsciousnessa piece of theoreticalpsychologicalknowledge. His argument,you mayremember,runs likethis:Ideas of pleasureare formedby association. Onlyrelativelyfew of suchassociationsare directand natural;those betweenthe pleasureof satisfyingan instinctand the objectin whichsatisfactionis found. Most associations, however,are artificialand contingent.In a differentmilieu,with a differentupbringing,they could havebeen different. Once we know this,Mill's argumentruns,and becomeaware that our ends I havebeen contingentlyformedby circumstances,they losetheirvaluefor us becauseof this knowledge. The glue of association,as it were, is dissolvedby our knowledgeof its composition. What, to the modem eye, I take it, is missingin MilI'saccountof his own case, however,is the crucialpresenceof his father. For of courseit was onlyin one sensethat the formationof ends, for :tv1ill, had been contingent. No doubtthe discoveryof the contingentnatureof one's ends mightbe unsettling;ethicalrelativismrelieson this for its capacityto disturb. But in Mill's own case there was a furtherand probablyconsiderablymore disturbingconsideration.Certainlyhis convictionof the worth of certainends was contingentin the sensethat assertionsof their valuewere not necessarytruths, but psychologically one has to suspectthat this was not the root of his problem and that his analysiswas onlyhalf-complete.For thoughperhapscontingentin the logicalsense they were certainlynot randomlyor accidentallyformed;on the contrary,they nad been, and he knew that they had, most carefullyarrangedfor himby the masterof his earlydestiny,his father. We have to infer,I take it, that onceMillrecognisedthis,his existenceseemedto him not his own; there was a truth in the jeer that he was an artificialcreation,a constructedman, and constructed not by himselfbut by another. Programmedto desirecertainends,the most availableform of resistancewas not to desire anythingat all. In the longrun Millcould onlyrestore a sense of 4 worth to his lifethrough the adoptionof a Romanticnotionof autonomousself-development,of innerself-directednessand open-endedness,whichbecameso importantto himthat he cameto identifyit as the preconditionfor healthand continuingvitalitynot onlyin the individualbut in societyas a whole. In his subsequentdarkermomentsMillseemssometimesto view the prospects for modem societyas a whole in terms of morallassitudeand paralysisof will,projectinghis own earlycrisison to the future of civilisedand democraticsociety,shouldthe vital springof individual moralenergyfail. It was not, in fact, an uncommonfear in the middleand late nineteenthcentury,whichis why I have dwelt on it here, becausemy fundamentalconcernis not so much with Millhimselfas with the intellectualhistoryof the nineteenthcentury. I shouldperhapsapologisefor havingspent so-longon such a familiarsubjectas Mill'searlycrisis,but I have done so becauseI want to ask a questionabout it whichis not, I think,veryoftenposed. It is a questionabout its cultural • specificityor topicality. I have alreadydistinguished, perhapstoo strongly,betweenthe psychologicalstate and Mill's renderingofit in termsof his own philosophicalheritage,but I want now to broadenthe questionof its historicity,so to speak,by consideringit as a cultural phenomenonof what we maybroadlycallEuropeanRomanticism,and one to whichother cases, both actualand fictional,of the period,bear at leastsomeresemblances,though few if any derived froml\1ill's own specificutilitarianmatrix. The epigraphto this part of my papermightwellbe what Mill himselfsays of his relationto Byron's poetry,which,consideredas a pieceof culturalhistoryis, I think,rather startling. Every reader ofl\1ill's Autobiographyrememberswhat he saysabout the therapeuticvalue of reading Wordsworth. Much less often rememberedis what he saysabout readingByron,though it is for my presentpurpose more interesting.It had, he says,the reverseeffectto Wordsworth,and his reasonis striking. Byron's state of mind,he says,'was too likemy own ... His Harold and Manfred 5 had the sameburthen on them that I had'. Millperhapshardlyneededto add ' [and] I was not in a frameof mindto deriveany comfortfromthe vehementsensualpassionof his Giaours or the sullennessof his Laras.' It would, admittedly,havebeeninterestingif he had told us whether he had ever been in such a frame of mind. The idea of Mill's imaginationever dressingitself,as Byron in fact did, in the costumeof a Turkishor Albanianbrigandis an arrestingone but remainspurely conjecturaland probablyimplausible.The referenceto ChildeHarold is none the less provoking, though inexact. Byron's hero's malaisewas one of satiety;he is presentedas a man who has exhaustedhis passions. Milldoes not claimso muchfor himself Overworkingon Bentham's Laws of Evidencedoes not seem quitethe samething. Yet Mill's claimto psychologicalkinshipremainsstrikingand I do not want to discountit, but, on the contrary,to take it seriously.Byronismis, and I think in its own time was, recognised as a literaryfashion,a Europeanculturalphenomenon,though one which spilledover from literatureto life,likeWertherismbeforeit. Like the Sturmund Drang. the maladiedu siecleor the Decadence,it is one of the clichesof Europeanculturalhistoryand therefore,when found in life, under suspicionof beinga pose. Yet Mill,at least,was hardlya poseur;that deadlyearnestness was as remote from Byronicplayfulnessas fromByronicpassion. The personalcircumstances were hardlysimilareither. Byron grew up withouta father;Mill's was all-toopresent. Yet perhaps once we beginto invokethe notionof generationalconflict,withoutlayingtoo much stress on its individualpeculiarities,Mill's crisis,and not merelyhis remedyfor it, beginsplausiblyto fall into place as an incidentof the culturalphenomenonof EuropeanRomanticism.Millwas scarcelyalone in rejectingthe faith of his fatherand the creed of his family;what was unusualwas the fact that his father representedprogressiveand enlightenedopinion,or as Millsaid 'the eighteenthcentury'. Even that was not unique;AlexanderHerzen's father,for example,was such an eighteenthcentury rationalistand sceptic. 6 Mill himselfwas in a sensenot averseto, evendetenninedto, placehis revolt in the context of the generalculturalhistoryof his time,evenwhilehe stressedthe uniquenessof his education. He sharedto the fullthat generational,historicalkindof self-consciousness whichled notable contemporarieseach to presenthimselfas a kindof microcosmor epitomeof the cultural tendenciesof the age: an enfantdu siecle. Alfredthe Mussetdid this, in eo nomine,in Confessions d'un Enfant du Siecle;so did Lermontov,vicariously,in A Hero of our Time,so did Herzen, so did MatthewArnold,so did JamesAnthonyFroudein The Nemesisof Faith. Mill himselfdramatises the intellectualconflictbetweenhimselfand his father,thoughas so often the latter playshis role by implication,as the conflictbetweenthe nineteenthcenturyand the eighteenth,just as Carlyle,who not surprisinglyexerciseda considerableinfluenceoverMillafter his crisis,dramatisedin Sartor Resartusthe conflictbetweenthe mechanicalphilosophy,as he calledit, of the Enlightenmentand the pantheisticvitalismhe propoundedthere as a creed. For Carlyle'sfictionalalter ego, as for Mill,the transitionsfrom old to new -though Mill'sversionof'the nineteenthcentury' was somewhatdifferent- was markedby a periodof anguishedintrospectionand a sense of meaninglessness.Teufelsdrokhtoo was presentedby his impresario-authoras an historical microcosm,whose biography,presentedpredominantly in a mode of burlesque,takes himfrom a mock-Rousseauist,childhoodrusticidyll,througha Wertherishand Byronicepisodeof thwarted love and of nature worship,to his encounterwithEnlightenment,materialismand a resolutionin terms ofldealist metaphysicsand Goetheannotionsof work and duty. Diagnosesof the maladiedu sieclevaried,of course,from authorto author, evenfrom countryto country,though all tendedto stressnotionsof moraldislocation,alienationfrom society, lassitude,apathy,restlessnessand a suppressedparalysisor unfocussingof the will. One of the e3!liestto articulatethis, in the eighteentwenties,BenjaminConstant,in his novelAdolphe,spoke of 7 'une des principalesmaladiesmoralesde notre siecle,cette fatigue,_cette incertitude,cet absencede force,cette analyseperpetuellequi place une arriere penseea cote de tous les sentiments.' MatthewArnold's phraseshavebecomecanonical:'the unstrungwillof'Obermann'; 'the languid doubt', and 'the strangedisease[and] palsiedhearts' of modemlife,in contrastto the focused dedicationof the seventeenth-century scholargypsy. In contemporaryattemptsto diagnosethis modemmaladywe find a frequentlyexpressedsenseof belongingto an age of transition,making everyman with the senseof the centuryin his bonesinto, at leastinwardly,a wandererwithout settledconvictionsor an appropriatefieldfor action. Arnold'slinesfrom 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse'are perhapsthe best known: 'Wanderingbetweentwo worlds,one dead The other powerlessto be born. With nowhereyet to rest my head'. But Herzenwrote somethingalmostidenticalin his elegyon the Revolutionof 1848,From the Other Shore, and so did Carlyle,lessepigrammatically, in his own spleneticdenunciationof Europe in 1848and its aftermath,Latter Day Pamphlets.Two decadesearlierAlfredde Musset had writtenin what he clearlytook to be a pregnanttautology,'Tout ce qui etait n'est plus;tout ce que sera n' est pas encore. Ne cherchezpas ailleursle secretde nos maux'. What the past world and the unachievedfuturerepresentedvaried,at least in emphasis, betweenthe spiritualand the political,thoughin somecasesthey haveequalweight. For Arnold the antithesiswas betweenChristianityand science,or perhapstechnology,with the formertreated in terms of tender elegy,the latter withirony. The new worldwas greetedwith a somewhatlimpwristedwave: 'Too late for us your callye blow/ Whosebent was taken long ago.' 8 For Herzen it was predominantlythe transitionfromaristocracyand bourgeoisliberalismto democracyand socialism,though not withoutfearsthat the latter mightprove barbaric,and also with a strong, Feuerbachiansensethat futurehumanfreedomrequiredas he said, freedomfrom everythingreligious,everythingmystical.Nevertheless,he himselffelt acutelythe crisisof his generation,not so much, like Arnold,with a senseof religiouspathos, but as an elitewithout a followingand therefore condemnedto ineffectuality.It was particularlythe malaiseof the Russian intelligentsia,whether revolutionariesor merelyprogressive'Westernizers',estrangedfrom the institutionsof their nativeland,autocracy,orthodoxy,bureaucracy,serfdom,and without the representativeinstitutionsthroughwhichdiscontentcouldexpressitself,and hence condemnedto a fruitlessidealismand endlesstalk. The latterwas characterisedby an extremeself-consciousness and constant,restlessself-questioning, of the kindfamiliarto us in the heroes - or anti-heroes- or Turgenevand Tolstoy, in Levinin AnnaKareninaandPierre in War and Peace, and, most disturbingby far, in the anonymoussupposedauthorof Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. RussianssometimesblamedonlyRussianconditionsrather than the nineteenthcenturyas such,though Dostoevsky's anti-heromakesconstantironicplaywith 'the cultivatedman of the nineteenthcentury'. De Musset,as a Frenchman,born duringthe Napoleonicera, and one of the earliestdiagnosticiansof the 'maladiedu siecle',had anotherversionof the genesisof the malaise, whichis now - sinceMusset's novelConfessionsd'un Enfantdu Siecleis now largelyforgottenmost familiarthrough Stendhal'sJulianSorel. It was, accordingto Musset,the destructionof all culturaland moral certaintiesin the revolutionaryera (whatByron, in ChildeHarold, called'the wreck of old opinions') and the tamenessof the ensuingperiodand the squalidmediocrityof the rolesit offered. We are remindedof JulienwhenMussetsaysthat if his generationutters the word 'gloire' it is told 'Faites vous pretes,faitesvous pretes'. The imageofNapoleon hauntedthe imaginationsof such young men in continentalEuropein the first halfof the century;in England 9 Byronwas perhapsmore of a rarity. But what has thisto do with self-consciousness and the paralysisof will? Simply,I think,that it fostereda baffledmegalomania,a sensethat the lifeof actionrequiredextraordinarycircumstancesandthe exerciseof an extraordinarywill,attainable onlyin fantasyand far-removedfromthe humdrumconditionsof everydayeffectiveness.The Napoleonicimagewas a standingrebuketo modemineffectualityand, by the impossiblestandardit set, it made the latter, or at leastthe senseofit, more or lessinevitable.Byron treated Napoleonas an alter-egopreciselybecausehe had aspired'beyondthe fittingmediumof desire'. Of course, in the Romanticrefusalof commitmenttherewas oftena powerfularroganceand a sense of a world unworthyof one's attentions. The Napoleonicmodelset an impossiblestandard,yet it only epitomiseda centralRomanticdilemmawhosepsychologicalinterest,I take it, transcendsits culturalmatrix. Meeklyto acceptan assignedsocialrole was to be lessthan an individual,much lessthan a Napoleonichero, yet to refuseall availableroleswas to face oneselfwith the existential task of creatingmeaningfor oneselfin a worldconfessedlyemptyof suchmeaning. To accept another's standards,includingthose of a despoticGod, was self-betrayal,but to rejectthem was to livein a moralvoid, in Durkheimiantenns, anomic. It is hardlysurprisingthat the consequence shouldhavebeen experiencedas a paralysisof will,or a searchfor what one reallywas or wished to do, whichseemedonlyto probe an endlesslyelusiveselfwhichcould ask questionsof itselfbut never provideanswers. It is not surprisingthat the questfor identitysometimescameto be focusedon a kind of test, of neive and will,in whichthe selfwoulddefineitselfthroughan act of socialdefianceor even crime,an act unquestionablynot mundaneor sociallyprescribed;what later has come to be called an acte gratuit. For JulienSorel,whoselifeis a seriesof suchself-imposedtests, onlythe action againstthe grain, of societyor evenone's own inclinations,as thoughin a kind of ironicparody of the Kantianmoralimperative,reallycounts. His mistressMathilde,who shareshis addictionto the 10 ethicof the sublimeembodiedas inneror overtrebellion,has anotherversionof the same kind of thought when she saysto herself:with propheticirony,'I can see nothingconferringhonour on a man excepta sentenceof death. It is the onlythingthat cannotbe bought'. Julien,of course,was not the onlyfictionalhero to holdthe exampleofNapoleonbeforehim. Balzacsaid it was the bane of that generation. Nor was it onlyfor the French. The invocationof Napoleon,as a man superior to all ordinarystandardsof humanity,seemsto havebeen commonin Russia. War and Peace beginswith a discussionof Napoleonand crime. He was a modelfor the murdererRaskolmikovin Crimeand Punishmentand his prototype,Hermann,in Pushkin's macabrestory The Queen of Spades,who even tries to look likeNapoleon. It is possibleto distinguishthreemaintypesof suchself-imposedtests in the literatureof the nineteenthcentury,acts of commitmentin a moralvoid,on whichone's lifecouldbe seento be staked and whichthereforecouldhardlybe deniedsomekind of significance.They are, respectively,the crime,the duel and politicalrevolution.I have spokenbrieflyof crime,though a more extendedtreatmentwouldhaveto includeBalzac'sRastignacand Stendhal'sJulien,as well as the usuallynamelesscrimeswhichsupposedlyhauntthe Byronichero. The duel, and its preamble,the insult,are I thinkparticularlypsychologically interestinghere;it seemsto figure particularlyprominentlyin Russianliterature,as also,of coursein life:Pushkinand Lermontovboth diedin duels. Duels figurein the former's EugeneOneginand the latter's A Hero of Our Time.in War and Peace and in a minorclassicof the genredealingwith self-consciousness and ineffectuality,Turgenev's Diaxyof a SuperfluousMan. The duel is interesting,I think,becauseit lies,so to speak, on the interfacebetweensocialrole-playingand the a-socialor anti-socialacte gratuit. It is clearlya test, sinceit involvesstakingone's own lifeand perhapsbeingwillingto take another's. Yet it is also an extremecaseof approvedrole-playing;belongingto a fixed,inherited code of honour, callingon an entirelytraditional,if non-Christian,classethic. 11 For that reason,to hazardone's lifein a duelwas akinto what Durkheimlater categorised as-thealtruisticform of suicide,that of the manwho has lost his honour and offendedagainstthe consciencecollective,whichrequiresfrom himhis lifein expiation. This is the exact opposite of Romanticmoral individualism,whilethe code of honourwas one to whichthe more sensitiveor selfconsciousRomanticindividualistsat most onlyhalfsubscribed.Moreover,because ofits ritualisedcharacterthe duel more or less enforceda disjunction,a time interval,between the emotionwhichpromptedit and the actionwhichinevitablyfollowed. One mightinsultone's man in hot blood but one had to fighthim in cold,with ampleopportunityfor reflection,whether one by then wantedto or not. This made it. fromthe pointof viewwe have been considering,a kind of paradox:an act of pure willthat was also an act of extrememoralconfonnity:supposedlyan act of passion,or at least the consequenceof one, it gavethe agent ampleopportunityto ask himself whetherthe passionwas real, whetherone reallyhated one's opponent,or had merelyacted as seemedexpectedof one or out of pure boredomand casualimpulse. One literaryprotagonist, Pierre in War and Peace, feelsthese paradoxeskeenly. The challengeonce given, he feels·in the grip of an externalpower, whichwillsee to it that mattersproceedto their appointedend. He shoots his man, we gather, more or lessaccidentally,withouthatred, clumsily,because it is expectedof him. In Turgenev's story,the 'superfluousman' of the title, a man unableto imposehimselfon the world in any other way, issuesa challengeout of piqueand grazes his man accidentallywhile tryingto fire noblyin the air. His opponentthen humiliateshimby doingso successfully.The due~ we are madeto see I think, as an entirelyspurioustest of will,and merelyas a piece of self-. advertisement(whichfails). The 'UndergroundMan' in Dostoevsky'sstory (Notes from Underground),fightsno duel but he broods endlesslyon insultsgiven(or not given) and received; he tries to screw himselfup to insultan officerwhomhe thinkshas insultedhimby ignoringhim. 12 He wants, that is, to insult,or evento be consciouslyinsulted,simplyin order to affirmhis existenceand have it recognised,and, by a furthertum of the screw of self-consciousness(sincehe is alwaysa step ahead of the reader in self-awareness) he knowsthat this is his motiveand that his intendedaction is not merelyabortivebut entirelypointlessand futile. The third test is that of Revolution.Perhapsit is wrong to call it a test because,unlikea duel or a specificcrime,it couldbe a pennanentfocusfor idealism,for a dedicatedlife,whilenever reachingits intendedclimax. It allowedone the prospect,or at least the illusion,of significant action,of a kind to satisfyevenNapoleoniccravings,simultaneouslyrepudiatingall existingmoral standardsand mundaneends and apparentlyestablishingan identityand a vocationin a vacuum,yet in most cases obligedone to suspendactionitselfindefinitely.The archetype,in life,was Mikhail Bakunin;his literarycounterpart,at leastpartially,it seems,a portrait, is Turgenev's Rudin, in the novelof that name. Bakuninhas recentlybeenthe subjectof an impressivethough unsympathetic biographyby AileenKelly,who findsthe identificationof him and Rudin persuasive. I shalloutline Rudinfor those who may be unfamiliarwithit, and then considerKelly's interpretationof Bakunin. Rudin is an interestingvariantof the speciesTurgenevidentifiedas the Superfluousor UnwantedMan. Unlikethe protagonistof Turgenev's novelleThe Diruyof a SuperfluousMan, who is essentiallywhat the technicalmoralvocabularyof the late-twentiethcenturywould identify as a wimp,Rudin is a man of eloquenceand socialimpressiveness,even of power, and apparently an idealistas well as an adept in Gennanmetaphysics.He arousesenvy and also love. The story is the unfoldingof our disillusionment withhimand it ends in pity. He is revealedpartlyby his own actions,or rather the lack of them, partlythroughthe reminiscencesof a former studentfriendwho o~ce sharedlodgingswith him(as Turgenevhad donewith Bakunin). He is exposedas empty and ineffectual,a self-absorbedegoistwho attemptsto steela weak willand to fan tepid passionswith an extroverteloquence. He livesonlyby words,subjectinghis friend's passionfor a young woman 13 to such persistent,close analysisthat he destroysit. He is tonnentedby the desireto act and to be useful: "'Yes, I must act ... I mustn'twastemypowerson talk, emptyuselesstalk, on mere words ... " And his wordspouredout likea river. He spoke beautifully, heatedly,convincingly- aboutthe shamefulnessof a faintheart and apathy,about • the need to do what has to be done'. • ..He.is ~ut, not intentionally,to the test - the same,in fact, as Eugene Onegin's. The daughterof the house, simple,candidand encouragedby him,declaresher love for him. His first reactioncannotbe accusedoflackingauthenticity:'Oh my God!' Then, "'I am happy",he pronouncedto himselfin a low voice. "Yes,I reallyam happy'',he repeated.' Reflection,of course,is fatal, and his answeris essentiallyOnegin's, thoughmore prevaricating.He declaresthat they must submitto her mother's prohibition,provokingthe understandableretort, 'so this is how you put into practiceall your talk about freedom'. Here there is no such eventualironicreversalin st9re as for Onegin,but Rudinbecomes,likehim- and ChildeHarold- a wanderer,makingonly abortiveattemptsto make himselfeffectiveand useful. He does, however,come to a kind of selfknowledge,recognisinghis own ineffectuality and prophesyingthat 'I willend by sacrificingmyself for some nonsenseI don't evenbelievein.' Whetherwe are to take his death on the barricadesin Paris in 1848 as fulfillingthis prophecyis perhapsnot entirelycertain,but it is temptingto think so. Now for Bakunin. In Kelly'spersuasive,Rudinesqueversion,the imageofBakunin as a man of titanicrevolutionarypassionsis a self-mademisrepresentation.She sees a consistent trajectoryfromthe earlyFichteanIdealistegoistto the old anarchistrevolutionary.Her versionis a study of a self-absorbedegoisttrappedin his own megalomaniacfantasies,whose highlyselfconsciousdiagnosisof his situationis presentedin the languageof philosophicalIdealism. He is ineffectualbecausethe grandioseand abstractnatureof his projectcompelshimto wait for history 14 to presenthimwith the momentfor its fulfilment,whichnever,despitefalsedawns,anived. Kelly laysstress on his earlyadoptionof the metaphysicsofFichte and Schelling:on the presentationof the predicamentof the alienatedRussianintellectual,deniedany satisfyingoutlet for activity,in tenns of the splitbetweenconsciousnessandthe world,spiritand matter. The dichotomyof subjectand object,that is, was to overcomeby willin a kindof metaphysicalshadow-playor f~tasy, requiringno more than the abilityto endowone's frustrationswith cosmicsignificance. Bakunin,of course, movedawayfromFichteanegoismto a right-wingHegelianism,his famous 'reconciliationwith reality', and subsequentlyto revolutionarypoliticalactivism. But Kellysees his politicalcareer as anotherform of the searchfor personalwholeness,for a reconciliationof the reflectiveconsciousnesswith the externalworldthroughwill and action. The ostensibleobject- a federalisticcommunitarianEurope, is moreor lessaccidental.The centralpoint is the mergingof the selfin revolutionaryactionand the attemptto imposeit on the world through dominationof the revolutionarymovement. This is, of course, a reductionistaccount,seeingBakuninas always·essentiallyconcerned with a personaldilemma,strugglingto unifyhis own personalityand to satisfythe Idealist requirementof absolutefreedomin the worldthroughessentiallynegativemeans,destructionon the largestscale;consciousnessand the worldwouldbe reconcilednot throughthe establishmentof a rationalorderingof the world but in revolutionaryactionand dominationfor its own sake. It is a persuasiveaccount in Bakunin's caseand it is temptingtoo to add sociologicalto psychological reductionismwhen consideringthe wholeculturalphenomenonI havebeen attemptingto depict, and to see it as littlemore than the consequenceof whatthe later twentiethcenturywould call graduateunemployment,the paucityof careeropportunitiesfor educatedyoung•men, exacerbated by the crisisof faithwhichmade a careerin the churchmore problematicor evenunthinkable.In Russiaa careerfor the nobilitymeanteithergarrisonboredomin the armyor the stultifyingroutines 15 of the civilservice. In RestorationFranceJulienSorelstandsas a symbolof the compulsory hypocrisiesand frustrationsenduredby the ambitious,embitteredby historicmemoriesof the meteoriccareersof the Napoleonicperiod. 'Faites-vouspretres'. Easier saidthan done. In Englandand Germany,too, religiousorthodoxyand,as it mightseemhypocrisy,were preconditionsfor a universityas wellas a clericalcareer. Feuerbachwas denieda universitypost. The vacillatinghero or anti-heroof JamesAnthonyFroude's The NemesisofFaith (1848),which his friendCloughsaid spokefor his wholegeneration,saw the narrowingof the selfto a career,a function,as a sacrificeof essentialhumanity,just as his prototypeWertherhad done three quarters of a centuryearlier. Froude's (semi-autobiographical) charactertakes priest's orders with misgivingand renouncesthem amidscandal. Froude,ArthurHugh Clough,Matthew Arnold,after briefperiodsin Fellowships,were deniedby religioustests the obviouscareeropportunities,so successfullyexploitedby Arnold'sfatherThomasin the previousgeneration,for men of their talentsand education. The restlessnessof the eighteenfortiesand fifties,the endlessself-scrutinyto discoverwhat one reallybelievedor mightdo, oweda good dealto this predicament.When one addedto it, in some cases,the retrospectivemourningfor the Napoleonicsublime,the frustrationof its fantasiesand its scorn for mundanecompromises,or, on the other hand,the internalisedFichtean metaphysicaldramaof Selfand Other,one has richmaterialfor culturalintroversion. In conclusion,what lightmay any of thisthrow on our commonconcernhere, the notion of moralcertaintiesdestroyedby self-analysis?Lookingat the examplesI have consideredand trying to generalisefromthem one has to saythat in theircasesthe self-analysislooks more like a consequencethan a cause of suchmoraldislocation,and the agent of the latter it is easiestto summarisesimplyas 'history': the disillusionwiththe optimismof the Enlightenmentengendered by the revolutionaryperiod,the successiveshocksto the Europeanpolitical,socialand moral order sufferedbetweenthe summoningof the EstatesGeneralin 1789and - let us say - the publicationof 16 Strauss'sLeben Jesu in 1835. Even in the caseof Millwithwhom I began,who reallydoes try to explainhis moral disorientationin tenns of his self-consciousness about the psychologicalgrounds of moralconviction,his self-analysis,contraryto whathe tellsus about it, was surelythe consequencerather than the cause of the unsettlingof the convictionsin whichhe had been reared. The partialloss of the willto live,that is, precededthe analysisto whichhe subjectedit; it was not really,pace Mill himsel~its outcome. This,for all the idiosyncrasyof Mill'sown case,mayhave been general. If so there are perhapsexceptions. When Carlylespeaksscornfully,in the person ofTeufelsdrokh,of the view of virtueas 'but some Passion,somebubblein the blood,bubblingin the directionothers profitby' we are inclinedto see some memoryof a realpsychicwoundinflictedby educationin philosophical reductionism.His remedyfor introspectionwas WIihelmMeister's: do what lies nearestto your handto do. Some of his disciplesseemto haveusedthis consciouslyas a cure for paralysing doubts. CharlesKingsley,who advisedhisyoungwifeto 'think little' could uncharitablybe thought sometimesto have overdosedon the prescription.It is temptingto see Tolstoi'sPierre, druggedon uxoriousnessand peasantwisdom,as anothersuchcasualtyof speculation.In Russia in the eighteenthirtiesand fortiesGennanmetaphysicsandFrenchsentimentalhumanismseemto haveflowedmore or less effortlesslyintothe moralvacuumPierre had tried initiallyand unsuccessfullyto :fillwith Freemasoruy,creatingits Rudin-Bakunins,fortunatelyusuallyin pocket editions. And aftetwards- afterRomanticismandIdealism? Post-Romanticismis in fact as identifiablea culturalphenomenonin Europe as Romanticismitself As AlexanderHerzensaidof his contemporariesafter the 1848Revolution, 'we are humanity'sheadachethe next morning', It took differentformsin differentcountries,but alwaysas a kind of reductionor renunciation:in France,for example,characteristically, as an aesthete's controlledself-effacement, withthe Byronicquestingwandererreplacedby the coldly • 17 observantboulevardierwhom nothingcan surprise,all-seeingbut detached,and managingtherefore to be a portentboth of aestheticismand naturalism.Flaubertsaid 'One is no longer a personbut an eye'. In England,in the words of MatthewArnold,the idiomof post-Romanticismis itself Romanticallyelegaic,but in a parasitic,historicallydistanced,ironicmode: 'What helpsit now that Byronbore ThroughEurope to the Aetolianshore The pageantof his bleedingheart?' The messageis resignation,withdrawaland, inevitably,an indulgedintrospection.In Russia,in the sixties,reductiontook anotherform, one halfpredictedby Arnold,amongthe not very ap_propriately namedNihilists,whose prototypeis Bazarovin Turgenev'sFathers and Sons; a renunciationof the role of the questioningintellectualfor the deliberateself-limitationof the scientifically trainedexpert,dedicatedto an unproblematic,practicalend: in Bazarov's case as a doctor. Bazarovmay havebeen a portent;HenryJames'sDr Prance could havegraduatedfrom the same medicalschool. But of coursehisRomanticantitypearrivesin the twentiethcenturytoo, as the unemployedor underemployedarts graduate:StephenDaedalus,Prufrock,Roquetin. Stretchingthe temporalperspectivein thisway begins,of course,to promptagainnotionsof perenniality,of a psychologicaltypologyratherthan of historically-conditioned culturalphenomena. In this mood one findsoneselfthinking,for example,that of coursethe Danishelectorspassed over Hamlet's claimto the throne;they recognisedthe type. But - to changesidesagain - we can then remindourselvesthat Hamlet's earlierbiographer,Saxo-Grammaticus, certainlydid not. So we are inclinedto revert to sayingthat the real Amleth,if therewas one, not merelywas not but for culturalreasonssimplycouldnot havebeeneitherthe irresoluteRenaissanceprinceor - stillless the 'sweet and noblenature' in whichnineteenthcenturyRomanticcriticsof the playlike Schlegel .. 18 and Coleridgeseem rather flatteringlyto haveseen their own reflections. The boundariesbetween psychologyand culturalhistoryremain,it seems,undetermined.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Self-conciousness and the Paralysis of Will Subject The topic of the resource A Theme in Nineteenth-Century European Literature Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource John Burrow Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Undated Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context IHA/Burrow/48 Bakunin Benjamin Constant Burton Carlyle Durkheim Julien Sorel Pushkin Romanticism Tolstoy Utilitarianism