Confessions of an Economic Heretic/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
THE RISE OF SOCIOLOGY IN ENGLAND
I have dwelt at so much length upon the conditions of America and other foreign countries which influenced my economic thinking as to obscure the far greater importance of my knowledge of English conditions, It is sometimes urged that a serious student of our economic system ought to obtain direct personal experience in a number of focal situations. He should serve in a textile factory, on a railway, a farm, should hold a post in a bank or a city office, a wholesale and retail store, so as to have real understanding of the business terms and facts he has to handle as economist. Though such varied experience is perhaps impossible, much of the best recent economic thinking undoubtedly has come from men who have served in business or official capacities that have brought them into close contact with detailed realities of economic life. While there is, of course, some danger of such specialism disabling one from seeing the forest as a whole, some direct personal contact with material processes of production is an immense advantage to one who can escape this danger. Though I never had this advantage, my work lying in the teaching and literary world, I seized what opportunities lay in my path for getting glimpses of our national industries, During the nineties, and even later, my lectures on Problems of Poverty and related themes brought me into contact with a good many business men and trade unionists who were willing to show me the works in which they were engaged. Even such fragmentary contacts with industrial realities were of great service in correcting my jejune generalizations. Later on some work of investigation done for the Board of Trade, and service on several public committees, including the important one presided over by Lord Colwyn, helped me a good deal to adjust my ideas to authentic facts and established situations. I am aware how slight and haphazard such personal experience has been, as compared with that of a regular worker or employer. But it did help me to a better understanding of the producer side of the economic problem. On the consumer side everybody with a limited income and many needs is compelled to be a more or less skilled amateur: the only experts are the social workers who study closely working-class expenditure on a sufficient scale. Though my heresies have led me to assign supreme significance to the financial situation of the consumer, I cannot pretend to possess intimate knowledge of anybody else’s standard of consumption, and living, as I have done for the most part upon the least defensible of all forms of unearned income, I have not been driven to the nice calculations of expenditure to which most men with families to keep are driven.
This last consideration, carrying as it does a natural bias in favour of a system retaining opportunities of unearned income, may have influenced my economic thinking in one or more of several ways. With a high value for security I may have been led to a half-conscious defence of “securities” as a mainstay of a sound economic system. Or, conscious of this bias, I may have brought an excessive weight of counter-bias in order to assert my independence of thought. There is also a third possibility open to one who realizes the manifold injustices of the capitalist system, viz. to propound a remedy so drastic that there is little or no danger of its adoption in our lifetime. When George Bernard Shaw argues in favour of an absolute equalization of income, as he does in his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism,[1] he leaves himself open to the retort that he must know quite well that such a condition precludes any effective interference with his own large body of wealth. Fourthly, the fact that unearned income enabled me to devote most of my time and energy to the unremunerative work of writing economic books, though not formally accepted as a justification of such income, must often have presented itself in the light of an extenuating circumstance. It is, indeed, offered by many “intellectuals” as a complete defence of such unearned wealth as provides the requisite freedom to do the best kinds of work. Thus there are so many snares that no man, however reasonable and disinterested he may think himself to be, can be sure he is evading all of them. The psychology of a situation where one’s own personal interests stand in sharp opposition to one’s cherished intellectual code carries possibilities of tragic or of comic error. It is evidently impossible for me to carry further this analysis, though it was necessary in order to present the proper limitations to my “objective” thinking.
This attitude of detachment was strengthened by my virtual abandonment of University Extension work in the beginning of the new century and the devotion of most of my energy towards articles and books developing my welfare economics. Most of the articles written for the Manchester Guardian and the Speaker had a political import such as Free Trade, the Referendum, Imperial Expansion. But, as already indicated, here as in my published books, ethics in the sense of human valuations was continually asserting its sway over economics and politics. This trinity of forces did not, however, imply the acceptance of any absolute conception of “the good life” such as ethical teachers have sometimes seemed to claim. For the substance of “welfare” itself must shift with the changes that take place in economic and political institutions and activities. This dynamic conception of welfare, while precluding a separate monetary or other economic criterion, demands that economic activities shall be brought continually into conformity with the new and more enlightened conceptions of welfare.
This signifies a conception of social evolution, family, tribal, national, cosmopolitan, in which ethics, politics, and economics play their respective inter-related parts. So we seem to pass into the intellectual realm of sociology. Now sociology, connected with the names of Comte and Herbert Spencer, had not yet won in this country, or anywhere save in America, any firm acceptance as a science. When a society of sociology was first founded here in the beginning of this century by the efforts of Patrick Geddes, Victor Branford, and a few other active thinkers, it seemed to many of us a precarious project, partly because it appeared to conflict with the tendency to specialize and subdivide which the conception of “thoroughness” involved. But this was not the only difficulty. The men I have named had committed themselves more closely to the Le Play interpretation of social evolution in terms of Place, Work, and Folk than others, even among those who welcomed the formation of the new organization, were willing to go. This was especially applicable to L. T. Hobhouse who, though rendering active help in forming the Society, regarded as somewhat strained and even fantastic some of the positions and terminology of the Le Play School. Though various scientific studies of social activities and institutions, such as comparative religion, mythology, law, morality, had been emerging in the late nineteenth century, little had been done to link them into what could be termed a social science, a study of society as an evolving unitary system. Hobhouse, setting himself to this task, brought the necessary equipment of a philosopher, with the conception of progressive human values which cannot be got from a purely inductive study of human activities and institutions, but is yet essential to give human meaning to social progress. Professor Ginsberg states the problem in the following lucid terms. “The scientific problem is to correlate the several aspects of social change and to measure the kind and amount of growth in the light of criteria not necessarily ethical but analogous to those that might be employed by the biologist in dealing with organic evolution. The ethical problem is to determine whether the development thus established, if it be established, satisfies ethical standards of value. The former type of investigation leads to a comparative study of culture deriving its data from anthropology and history, and seeks to discover whether there is a thread of continuity running through the tangle of the countless processes convergent and divergent which make up the life of man on earth. The other presupposes an ethical theory and a method of applying ethical criteria to the phases of historical development.”[2]
Progress of personality as a harmonious development of the interplay of individual and social motives was the key to the social thinking of Hobhouse. His stress on personality as the end and object of all social processes carried a denial of any group or social mind other than the orderly interplay of individual minds and reduced such a term as “esprit de corps” to a personal feeling common to the members of a co-operative group. To him there was nothing possible or desirable for man in the communism of a beehive or an anthill where the individual welfare of the several members was subordinated to, controlled by, and consisted of the general welfare of a social organism. In any human society evolving into such an organism, the whole value of free personality would be lost.
Though Hobhouse, of course, fully admitted the effects of social institutions and intercourse in helping to mould the character of a person, nobody in close acquaintance with him could fail to perceive that his will-power for self-determination in all affairs down to the smallest home detail was unusually strong, and that while freely expending his energy for his own conception of the good of others, he did not easily yield to the efforts of others to influence his line of conduct. This supremacy of a personal rational will over all the impulses and emotions which seek their separate expression was the core not only of his thinking but of his feeling. Its validity is not impaired by the special force of his personal psychical make-up, but the latter must certainly be taken into account in regarding his thought. Few personalities were so strong and rigorous in their central rationality, a command which belittles alike the play of the fragmentary selves, so apparent in the lives of ordinary men, and the merging of personalities in easy companionship or close co-operation. One other feature of his social philosophy has sometimes been called in question, his presentation of supreme personal value in terms of harmony. That there must be a measure of harmonious co-operation in all personal or social progress is certain, but the achievement of complete harmony would seem to bring progress to an end and to carry a purely static conception of “the good.” This was, no doubt, not the meaning which Hobhouse intended or would have accepted, but his stress on harmony in personality seems to conflict with the conception of progress as dynamic and unending. Here, as elsewhere, sociology is peculiarly affected by the necessity of using language made for the looser general purposes of communication, not for logical or even descriptive exactitude.
I have dwelt upon the mind of Hobhouse, partly to illustrate my thesis that no worker in any of the human sciences can obtain an objectivity that is unaffected by his private physical and mental make-up and his personal history. But I have also wished to show how strongly my own intellectual life has been affected by long, close, direct personal intercourse with a student and thinker so much better equipped than myself in many lines of knowledge and capacities of thinking. For, entering the sphere of sociology through the portals of economic theory, I found my mind enlarged and enriched by a closer recognition of the various social studies that contribute to an understanding of the term “human welfare” which I had somewhat hastily imported into my presentment of economic value.
In other words, my growing repudiation of the efforts of economists to make of their study an exact quantitative science, with values expressed in purely monetary terms, was fortified by a clearer, fuller conception of the humanist interpretation to which I had been moving.
Another man whose writings and conversations had an influence on my thinking at this time was Graham Wallas. I first knew him at Oxford in the late seventies, but we did not come into close relations until I came to London in the late eighties. His Fabian Essay and his Life of Francis Place[3] were early indications of his later important contribution to the art of politics. He ranks as the most original exponent of the psychology of modern politics both in its individual and social aspects, exhibiting more clearly than any other writer the interactions of rational and irrational elements in the play of political life. Human Nature in Politics and The Great Society exhibit an independence of mind and a practical knowledge of political thinking only attainable by one who has achieved his psychology by a long experience of administrative work. He and Hobhouse rank together in my experience as practical reformers, profoundly interested in the great happenings of their times, but always bringing their judgment on these happenings to a rational criterion of human value. Wallas broke away from the Fabian Society because it failed to denounce the Boer War and because of its early leaning toward Protection. Both he and Hobhouse remained pronounced Free-traders, and Hobhouse, when he left Manchester for London, acted for some time as secretary of the Free Trade Union. Both of them became teachers of politics and sociology in the newly formed London School of Economics, and were chief instruments in keeping alive the broad humanism of social teaching when there was a danger of over-cautious specialization in an institution whose earliest finance was derived from a convert to Socialism in the florid days of the Fabian Society when preaching meant business. If my fellow-townsman, Jonathan Hutchinson, had foreseen that his money would go into paying Professor Foxwell for teaching why not to socialize banking, Mr. Ackworth why not to nationalize the railways, I think he would have “turned in his grave.” But Hobhouse and Wallas, though little concerned with practical socialism, remained firm exponents of human values in social movements and institutions, and stood for justice, equality, and humanity in all vital issues of their time. Though I was not associated with the School of Economics, save as a casual lecturer, my journalism and political-economic interests brought me into continual touch with one or both of these great men.