Confessions of an Economic Heretic/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
CLASS INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH
Some years ago I was foolish enough to write a long book entitled Free Thought in the Social Sciences,[1] setting forth the difficulties that confronted thinkers and teachers in history, politics, economics, ethics, and other studies of human institutions and conduct, because of the refractory nature of the material they handled, the defects of terminology, and in particular the biases of interest and valuation due to their own personal experiences and associations. I ought to have known that any such argument, questioning the objectivity and disinterestedness of these studies, and so damaging their scientific reputation, would be ignored, not refuted. For if my reasoning were correct, it would disturb that intellectual confidence regarding fundamentals which seems essential to maintain the laborious study of the detailed facts. If it be true that the intellectual exponents of the sciences of politics and economics in particular are secretly, perhaps subconsciously, aware of the uncertainty of their main assumptions and of the pressure of their personal or class sentiments and valuations, they will struggle to repress these doubts and questionings and to keep a stiff intellectual upper lip. For the committal to, and the defence of, dubious assumptions arouse a sense of intellectual property which the owners cannot bear to see depreciated, and for the maintenance of which they will fight with every weapon at their disposal. But the best weapon is a refusal to discuss, or to refute, because the issue is already settled and beyond dispute. This dogmatic atmosphere is not, of course, confined to the social sciences. It has always impeded progress in the physical sciences, especially in those organic sciences which, like biology, claim to throw light upon the nature and behaviour of man. But in the more exact sciences, where false or outworn laws or hypotheses can definitely be refuted and replaced by others, there is little of that emotional strain that comes when an economic law or a political principle is challenged. Only so far as beliefs concerning the physical world have been incorporated in religious creeds has an aura of sanctity attached to them which has made their denial an act of wickedness. In modern times this attitude has been so modified in most countries that the revolutionary physics of an Einstein are received with little intellectual or emotional difficulty (outside Hitler’s Germany), and Darwinism, though fiercely denounced in its early days, has, except in Fundamentalist circles, won place in an orthodoxy remodelled for its acceptance.
The case is, however, very different for new controversial issues in the fields of politics and economics. As religious faith and sectarian controversy are weakened, this world displacing the next in most men’s minds, an intensification of passion has entered into the secular movements for reform and the “isms” which they incorporate and endeavour to express. A number of new passionate creeds and movements, appealing to the reason, justice, and welfare of mankind, to the interests of individuals, classes, nations, races, and humanity, are struggling to gain power over human conduct in the arts of economic and political organization. These new appeals and movements have so reacted upon orthodox ideas, interests, and parties, as to infuse a new vigour of resistance into the latter, in which a discreet policy of minor concessions and adaptations to new social circumstances is used to strengthen the buttresses of the nineteenth-century conservatism and liberalism. For the assailant “isms,” Fascism, Socialism, Communism, in their several sorts and qualities, have sprung up with unexpected rapidity in a world where a generation ago peace, progress, security, and general contentment seemed to be the accepted ways of life, and where minor troubles seemed capable of cheap and easy settlement. In politics, popular self- government (under the actual control of ruling groups or families), in economics the growing application of equality of opportunity (within reasonable limits) were, up to the last decade of the nineteenth century, held to be sufficient guarantees for a pacific, prosperous future in all countries which had ranged themselves along self-governing lines.
Now it is no part of my intention here to engage upon the large task of a general explanation of the recent rapid changes in policy and thinking. For holding, as I do, that man is not a very reasonable animal, but is to a larger extent than he likes to admit the servant of his personal short-range interests and passions, it would be of little service to try to argue out the inflammatory issues in politics and economics. This criticism, moreover, applies not only to the mass of mankind, but with some special significance to those who think for them and mould their thinking into principles and policies. It is, indeed, the play of tradition, class feeling, and interests upon the thinkers who regard themselves as disinterested rationalists that here concerns me.
But for my purpose a further narrowing process is required. Since I shall be engaged in work of social criticism, I must myself be exposed to those deflecting influences that operate on others, and though it is not possible to pretend to an impartiality and objectivity which I deny to others, it is possible for me to trace and set forth in my own intellectual career some of the causal and casual occurrences which have determined my own thinking during a period of more than half a century.
While the more formal processes of acquiring knowledge belong to the education of school or college, the elementary facts and feelings related to our family and other social surroundings are drawn almost insensibly into our childish minds from our immediate environment, with such parental suggestions as may be brought into play. The total influence of these early happenings and feelings is now recognized as extremely important in determining the later conscious thinking upon all personal and social problems. Where some great social event, such as a war, pestilence, or famine, breaks in upon the experience of childhood, it leaves a crop of passions, fears, and tumultuous feelings which gravely affect all processes of thinking in matters affecting personal and social conduct. This platitude I repeat because it has a definite bearing on my early years which were cast in the calmest and most self-confident years of the mid-Victorian era, when peace, prosperity, and progress appeared to be the permanent possession of most civilized nations. Born and bred in the middle stratum of the middle class of a middle-sized industrial town of the Midlands, I was favourably situated for a complacent acceptance of the existing social order. There was not stagnation anywhere, but a gradual orderly improvement in the standard of living, the working conditions, and the behaviour of most classes. The social stratification was taken for granted, there was no serious attempt of the working classes to push their economic or social claims upon the upper classes. Energetic or able individuals could use their opportunities to rise, and a few of the wealthiest families had “risen from the ranks.” But in general the social and the economic classification was identical. As a “county” town Derby held among its residents a few remnants of aristocratic families, which mixed somewhat shyly with a small upper middle class composed of the pick of the professions, clergy, doctors, and lawyers, and leading officials of the town. The general run of professional men and the more prosperous manufacturers or wholesale merchants formed a social class, less fixed in personnel, but quite distinct from the retail traders whose name over their shops kept them on a definitely lower social level, though their incomes and education were hardly distinguishable from the professional strata. Clerks in banks and offices had a lower measure of precarious respectability, but were distinguishable from all grades of manual workers. The bulk of these latter were employees of the Midland Railway or of the new manufactures that were springing up to replace the earlier and now decaying textile factories. At the bottom of the social-industrial ladder was a considerable batch of poor, irregular workers, largely of Irish origin, many of whom occupied a street bearing the sinister title “Back Lane.” The poverty of these families was attributed by common consent to their shiftless, thriftless, reckless way of living, and formed a difficult problem not of social management but of charity. I well recollect the ragged, shoeless condition of the children of these “poor.” They stirred in me not so much a sense of pity or of distress as of an incipient feeling that “all was not right” in this best of all possible worlds. But I would not assign this feeling as a definite seed of economic thought. For it was far later that I came to concern myself with “problems of poverty.”
Perhaps a more suggestive feeling of this boyhood was addressed to the other end of the social economic scale as it was exhibited in my native town. I refer to the push and sagacity by which half a dozen men, who had attained considerable wealth in manufacture and commerce, used their generosity to local charities and their political pressure to obtain knighthoods, so rising out of the ruck of their social competitors into a level beyond mere “respectability.”
Politics in this placid epoch had little social or economic significance. Factory legislation and other interference with competitive capitalism did not figure with any prominence, and, though there was a good deal of loose philanthropic talk about “the amelioration of the condition of the working classes,” there was no sincere attempt at amelioration by governmental action. The dominant classes in Derby were pretty equally divided between Conservatism and Liberalism, the latter generally carrying the elections by their larger hold upon the working-class electors. When I first began ‘to take notice’ of such matters as elections, Gladstone and Disraeli were the great protagonists, while conflicts where the extension of the franchise, popular education, Irish land tenure, non-conformist rating, with something called the Eastern question, were the main staple of party politics. The Franco-German War of 1870 was happily kept out of English politics, and though the disestablishment of the English Church and even a spasm of Republicanism under the leadership of Dilke and Bradlaugh began to agitate a handful of “radicals” in most English towns, they did not disturb the main body of respectable Liberals. In my earliest recollection, the two Liberal members for the town were Bass and Beale, both men of means and high social standing. The first breach in high respectability was an intrusion of the semi-radical Samuel Plimsoll, felt by my father and other sober Liberals to be a somewhat dangerous innovation. But the real point of significance is that, though born and bred in an atmosphere of active Liberalism (our livelihood drawn from the conduct of a “liberal” newspaper), I had no idea, as a boy, that politics had anything to do with industry or standards of living. Nor was this merely a failure to understand a really intricate relation. At that time the two-party system was engaged half-consciously in keeping out of politics all deep and drastic issues of “the condition of the people.” Throughout his long career of public service Gladstone kept Liberalism upon issues of franchise, education, public economy, and foreign policy, hardly touching any of the graver economic issues, except when they impinged upon his Irish policy. This laisser-faire attitude of the Liberalism of the sixties and seventies was the accepted basis of my earliest political education. The gulf between politics and workaday life was fixed and complete.
But two other lines of personal experience bearing upon class distinctions had some influence in the early moulding of my social thinking. Derby was a religious community in which the Established Church and leading Nonconformist sects were strongly supported. Church and chapel going was universal and, for the young, compulsory: family prayers were pretty general, and piety played a considerable part in ordinary life. But though in creed there was little divergence, the social cleavage between Church people and Dissenters was clear and strong. A higher grade of respectability attached to the former, and there was a tendency for the younger generation of well-to-do Dissenters to join the Church when they reached “years of discretion.” Church and Dissent upon the whole meant rich and poor, though most dissenting chapels were necessarily financed by fairly well-to-do members. I noticed also a certain favourable social discrimination in favour of Quakers and Unitarians, based, I suppose, upon the fact that in those small sects a larger proportion of the followers were recognized as men and women of good social and financial standing.
Ritualism was slow to enter into our church services even in the late sixties. Though Derby had its Catholic Church, it was an alien body, mainly Irish and with virtually no intercourse, moral or social, with other churches. I was brought up in a moderate puritanism which eschewed all taint of Romanism. One of my earliest clear religious memories is that of being “walked out” of church with the rest of my family because the Vicar for the first time appeared in a white surplice instead of a black gown. My father, who was a churchwarden, on reaching home wrote a strong letter of expostulation, and after a brief interval in a dull little church under a minister of dubious character, we settled down in the church which is now Derby Cathedral, under the ministry of a famous evangelical preacher, the Rev. Sholto Douglas Campbell Douglas, who for some years oversatisfied our religious ardour by sermons of an hour and a quarter. In these years a strain of active piety took me away from this world’s thoughts, engaging me in serious endeavours to realize the meaning of the creeds and prayers placed before my childish mind. The failure to satisfy my elementary sense of reason and of justice in the doctrines of the atonement and of everlasting punishment for unrepentant sinners were, I think, the earliest evidence of a humanism which in early manhood led me to the abandonment of orthodox Christianity. At the time it was a painful process of an intellectual failure to reconcile tenets I was brought up to reverence with the dictates of my personal conscience, By the time I reached Oxford I found myself a religious heretic and in my second year obtained a remission of the duty to attend chapel. It is perhaps worthy of mention that the earliest of my published writings consisted of two articles in the Westminster Review, dealing with religious topics, one entitled “Dr. Temple on Religion and Science” (discussing his heretical paper in Essays and Reviews), the other “Mr. Gladstone and Genesis.”
My education in the local Grammar School under a head master who hastened to shed the low title “Grammar,” and to convert the school into a public school, with a reputable body of boarders to qualify the “local” dependence, helped me to some further understanding of social-economic distinctions. For the head master was a persistent “snob” of the crudest order. A classical scholar with no taste for literature, he devoted his teaching energy into imposing the prestige of the dead languages upon as many boys as possible, irrespective of their tastes or aptitudes. Mathematics was taught with “scholarship” success to a little group of able boys, including my elder brother, afterwards a Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. The natural sciences comprised a little chemistry, less physics, and virtually no biology. History was almost entirely English, stopped dead before modern politics began to emerge, and consisted only of the dramatic activities of kings and the ruling classes. A minimum of ancient history accompanied the classics. There was nowhere any attempt to shed light upon current institutions and events. The notion of citizenship as a subject for education never occurred to any teacher and would have been dismissed as unmeaning. Modern languages consisted of a little French, but no German. Sport was encouraged as a means of bringing us into the company of more reputable public schools on a basis of equality. “Speech days,” presided over by some carefully netted celebrity, conduced to the same end. The head master’s most signal achievement was the presence at the speech day in 1873 of the Prince of Wales, who happened to be a guest of “the Duke” at Chatsworth. My memory of that event is registered in a prize for “Divinity” bestowed by the royal hand. It was long before the full humour of this proceeding came home to me. The great literature of my native land was confined to a linguistic study of a play or two of Shakespeare, forced upon us by the requirements of the Cambridge Junior or Senior Certificate examination, and a bit of Milton, or of Tennyson, set for a “holiday task.” My fairly large private reading of Shakespeare, Milton, and my favourite Pope, with Bacon’s Essays and Boswell’s Johnson, was a blend of genuine appreciation and personal “swank,” how much of each it is difficult to judge, as I look back upon my early “education.”
Not until my later schooldays in the mid-seventies did my mind touch any economic or other social study. Somehow occasional essay-writing was introduced into the sixth form, as serviceable for winning a University scholarship, arid an Oxford Don, chosen for the purpose, set me upon Mill’s Liberty and Utilitarianism, which caught my sympathy as a budding rationalist. How Spencer’s Study of Sociology came into my hands I cannot recollect, though it exercised a profound influence in suggesting that social institutions could rightly come within the ambit of interesting study. Possibly the knowledge that Spencer was himself born and reared in Derby stimulated my curiosity. For, as a boy in my early teens, I used to meet Spencer walking into town with a man named Lott, a bank manager and a close friend of his. But while I had some slight acquaintance with Lott, I never exchanged a word with Spencer, though some quarter of a century later we interchanged letters upon the subject of the Boer War.
My first definite approach to Economics was by way of the Cambridge University Extension Movement of the seventies. One of the earliest of these Courses was in Derby, and in 1875 I attended lectures on political economy, wrote weekly papers, and took the examination. Our text-books were Mill and Mrs. Fawcett, with, I think, a few chapters of Adam Smith. J. S. Mill was the “authority,” for his statement in 1848 that, “Happily there is nothing in the laws of Value, which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up,” still held the academic field, though W. S. Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy had appeared some years ago (in 1871). From this early study I learned that, in the sphere of activity which absorbed most of the thought, interest, and energy of all our population, except a small leisure class, principles and laws governed the production and distribution of wealth which intelligent men and women accepted as belonging to the order of Nature. They established the justice, necessity, and finality of the existing economic system.[2] But, while accepting these principles and laws in the spirit of a true believer, I discovered later on that a seed of doubt had been sown in my mind which was destined to bear perilous fruit. For Mill’s dogma that “A demand for commodities is not a demand for labour,” plausibly supported by the teaching that all wages were paid from a “fund” that represented a portion of past savings, seems even at that early time to have stuck in my gizzard.
It was, however, not until the middle eighties that my economic heterodoxy began to take shape. At Oxford in the late seventies I made no serious attempt at economic study, for Modern Greats did not then exist, and Classical Greats had no room for it. Some part I took in College debates upon Fair Trade which was the first phase in the later campaign of Protectionism, and though attending with regularity the Union debates, where economics occasionally butted into politics, I heard nothing to disturb my complacent acceptance of the beneficent and equitable operation of laws of supply and demand in their laisser-faire environment.
Four years at Oxford, chiefly spent on the literary, historical, and philosophical study of the Latin and Greek civilizations, contributed, however, not a little towards the rationalism and humanism which later on I strove to apply to economics. Some humanity may be got out of the study of Literae Humaniores. Though my failure as an examinee came as a painful shock to my intellectual self-assurance, it did not wholly disable me from receiving the contributions which Plato and Aristotle made to the permanent possessions of the human mind, what to think and feel, how to think and feel, about man’s inner nature and his place in the universe, and the methods of testing and achieving knowledge. Though I never became a profound student of ancient thought and literature, I think that my mind received from these years of study a disposition and a valuation that were of immense service in liberating me from the easy acceptance of the current ideas and feelings of an age rightly designated as materialistic and narrowly utilitarian. Something more I feel that I received from the atmosphere of an Oxford in which Jowett, T. H. Green, and Mark Pattison were leading figures, though my only personal contact, not a close one, was with Pattison, the master of my college, in his declining years.
Notes edit
- ↑ London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.
- ↑ This was not, of course, the personal attitude of J. S. Mill. Even in his Political Economy of 1848 he indulged in speculations of a socialistic future. “The form of association — which, if mankind continues to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves” (Bk. vi, chapter viii, §6).
In his Autobiography (1871) he explains more explicitly his breakaway from Benthamism with its economic doctrines, and expressly adopts the title Socialist. “The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour” (p. 232).
But the academic Political Economy of the day continued to concern itself with the exposition of the laws of current industry, and disregarded these speculative aberrations, just as it had swept into the rubbish heap the early nineteenth-century English works on Socialism, dug out by H. S. Foxwell in his Introduction to Menger’s The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, Not until much later on did I realize how potent was the influence of victorious capitalism to impress the justice and utility of its procedure upon the dawning science of Economics and to exclude from consideration all attempts to challenge its intellectual domination. When the leading nineteenth-century economists are accused of inhumanity and lack of sympathy with working-class aspirations, it is possible in most cases from Ricardo onwards, to cite passages which refute this accusation. But the substance of the accusation remains untouched. For these humanist obiter dicta were never incorporated in the body of their economic teaching which was always directed towards establishing natural laws of price and value in production and distribution aiming more and more at quantitative exactitude.