not equality, the next best thing would be income according to productiveness; but with a redistribution of property this would of course change, too, some having their services valued more highly, and others less so. Equality, however, had a physical aspect as well as a psychological. Not only was it true that "all members of society (cases of malformation excepted) being similarly constituted in their physical organization, are capable by similar treatment of enjoying equal portions of happiness,” 5 but thought itself had a basis admitting of quantitative measurements. "What is thought but motion produced and felt in the brain?" "What is labor but motion . . . in coöperation with the ever-active engines of nature?" The odious comparison of intellectual and manual labors, it was said, lacked point because all grades of work stood on a level except for differences in degree. Hobbes and the French materialists were once more cited to substantiate this claim. The case for the despised masses was exceedingly strong because science, in a variety of ways, took the ground from under the capitalistic edifice. 6 Hodgskin in his lecture on "Popular Political Economy," delivered in 1826 and published the next year, expanded this argument. He says bluntly: "I can understand how a right to appropriate the produce of other men, under the name of interest or profit, may be a stimulus to cupidity, but I cannot understand how lessening the reward of labor, to add to the wealth of the idle, can increase industry or accelerate the progress of society in wealth." Again: "It is a miserable de 4 Thompson, W. An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness Applied to the Newly Proposed System of a Voluntary Equality of Wealth, 1824, pp. 5, 586, 594. Ibidem, p. 4. For his view on competition see p. 369. 7 Preliminary Observations. Page 254, 998 lusion to call capital something saved. Much of it is not calculated for consumption, and never is made to be enjoyed." And further: "All capital is made and used by man, and by leaving him out of view and ascribing productive power to capital we take that as the active cause which is only the creature of his ingenuity, and the passive servant of his will." That is, the Mercantilists were right in calling labor the father of wealth; Smith did well when he put the emphasis upon it rather than upon the soil as Physiocratism was wont to; but the Utilitarians committed a grievous mistake in adding property rights to the list of producers who were entitled to a share of the social dividend. For things, though rights from a person's standpoint, could not be agents themselves, nor could rights of their own power create what was to be distributed, to wit, wealth. Economics, hence, should be redefined so as to include more than the exchange mechanism,10 lest individualistic norms identified production too much with an exercise of mere legal rights. The possibilities of meliorism were to be studied anew to give everybody a better budget. For, we read in Hodgskin's Lectures: "The distress our people suffer, and the poverty we all complain of is not caused by nature, but by some social institutions which either will not allow the laborer to exert his productive power, or which rob him of its fruits. I can never therefore join those political economists who seem to be fond of calumniating nature in order to uphold our reverence for the institutions of man." 11 Karl Marx knew of these works and used them freely. He quotes them now and then, and acknowledges his in • Page 255. Pages 246-47. 10 Page 23. 11 Pages 267-68. Similarly Gray, J. The Social System, a Treatise on the Principles of Exchange, 1831. debtedness especially to John Bray whose "Labor's Wrongs and Labor's Remedy," 1839, spoke strongly for a productivity wage.12 However, it would be erroneous to suppose that the founders of Utilitarian economics were heartless sophists who cared nothing about public welfare. Their position in truth was simply this: They would admit that their premises caricatured human nature and consequently misled reasoners, but they also showed the essential resemblance between them and man as a type, while furthermore there was no way of making economics a science except by abstracting in a somewhat heroic fashion. What was postulated by the Utilitarians met the facts of the situation by and large; no violence was done to experience if it was sufficiently large. Hence, doubtless, James Mill saw nothing ironical in his statement that "the greatest possible happiness of society is attained by insuring to every man the greatest possible quantity of the produce of his labor," 13 the measure of productiveness being understood to agree with competitive conditions. Yet his son John Stuart as early as 1830, if one may take his words in the "Autobiography" seriously, was impressed with the flaws of "the old political economy which assumes private property and inheritance as indefensible facts, and freedom of production and exchange as the dernier mot of social improvement." 14 We know that he projected a work on socialism and that even in his "Principles" of 1848 he displays deep sympathy in the struggles of the proletariat. His heart spoke against his reason. He was the chief formulator of the Utilitarian logic, but at the same time 12 See, e. g., Marx's Poverty of Philosophy, 1847, translated by Quelch, H., pp. 75-82; and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Philosophy, translated by Stone, N. I., p. 106. These and Marx's Capital, as here quoted, are Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, publications. 13 Essay on Government, in Encyclopedia Britannica, 1820, § 1. 14 Ch. 5. . packed into his economics ideas and advice utterly for eign to its premises. In this respect the later critics were more consistent, for they made tabula rasa of the science, admitting nothing and calling for an entirely new stock of materials. Thus Carlyle penned his essays on Chartism and “Latter Day Pamphlets"; thus Ruskin made his appeal between 1860 and 1873, writing "Unto This Last," "Fors Clavigera," and "Munera Pulveris," and still more. A Christian kind of collectivism was preached that men of literary excellence and reputation sponsored with all their energy. Thus Carlyle writes: "In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel of Supply and Demand, Competition, Laissez Faire, and the Devil take the hindmost begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels preached; or altogether the shabbiest." 15 Economics was to become an art rather than a sci ence. "The final object of political economy... is to get a good method of consumption and a great quantity of consumption; in other words, to use everything and to use it nobly whether it be substance or service or service perfecting substance." 16 Utilitarian economics to Ruskin seemed a mere travesty of science. He wished to expunge it forever from texts and public records. "Observe," he exhorts us, "I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science [economics], if its terms are accepted. I am simply non-interested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeleton." 17 Man was more than a machine for manufacturing pleasure, and pleasure had other sources than those laid bare by eighteenth century hedonists. 15 Past and Present: The Working Aristocracy. A like attitude had been taken before also by a few German thinkers, as may be seen in Fichte's "Closed Commercial State," 1800, Thürnen's "Isolated State," whose terminal proved to be a socialistic régime, and again in Gossen's remarkable "Laws of Human Commerce," published in 1855. However, the force of German collectivism, viewed either as a protest against Utilitarianism or as an independent movement for economic uplift, lay not in the chimeras of a Fichte or Gossen, nor even in the sober analysis of Rodbertus who, for several reasons, respected the rights of business even when he regretted their hardness, but in the indefatigable founders of “scientific" socialism. Rodbertus, while true to Ricardo on many questions, admitted the ruthlessness of Utilitarianism and notably in his "Letters to Kirchmann" defended the cause of labor. But his iron-law of wages, his theory of the exploitation of the masses, his writings on overproduction and crises might not have had permanent effects if it had not been for the socialists. It was Marx and Engels who made capital out of the jeremiads of the Prussian bureaucrat. Socialism. Socialism in the stricter sense of the word was born in 1847, the year of the Communist Manifesto upon which followed closely, though of course not as an effect, the Revolution of 1848. The roots of the new creed, however, must be sought in French naturalism, whose mechanistic and materialistic concepts Marx and Engels both thoroughly understood in spite of their hostility to a static concept; further in British economics; and still more directly in Hegel's metaphysics. English materialism became French during the early eighteenth century. The Encyclopedists especially familiarized people with the idea of a mechanism covering not only the physical, but also the moral world. New |