That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History

THAT NOBLE SCIENCE OF POLITICS

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THAT NOBLE SCIENCE OF POLITICS A study in nineteenth-century intellectual history D

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STEFAN COLLINI DONALD WINCH JOHNBURROW

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE LONDON NEW YORK NEWROCHELLE MELBOURNE SYDNEY

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www. Cambridge. org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521257626 © Cambridge University Press 1983 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1983 Re-issued in this digitally printed version 2008 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 83-7696 ISBN 978-0-521-25762-6 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-27770-9 paperback

. . . that noble Science of Politics,. . . which, of all sciences, is the most important to the welfare of nations, - which, of all sciences, most tends to expand and invigorate the mind, - which draws nutriment and ornament from every part of philosophy and literature, and dispenses, in return, nutriment and ornament to all. T. B. MACAULAY(l829)

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

PROLOGUE:

The governing science: things political and the intellectual historian i The system of the North: Dugald Stewart and his pupils 11 Higher maxims: happiness versus wealth in Malthus and Ricardo 111 The cause of good government: Philosophic Whigs versus Philosophic Radicals iv The tendencies of things: John Stuart Mill and the philosophic method v Sense and circumstances: Bagehot and the nature of political understanding vi All that glitters: political science and the lessons of history VII The clue to the maze: the appeal of the Comparative Method V I I I Particular polities: political economy and the historical method ix The ordinary experience of civilised life: Sidgwick and the method of reflective analysis x A separate science: polity and society in Marshall's economics

vn

i 23 63 91 127 161 183 207 247 277 309

viii

Contents

xi A place in the syllabus: political science at Cambridge

339

EPILOGUE:

A nebulous province: the science of politics in the early twentieth century

365

Index

379

PREFACE

The intellectually respectable reasons for writing this book are given in our Prologue. Here we should record that our collaboration is the outcome of common tastes and interests, shared teaching duties, and, above all, friendship. Every stage in the planning and execution of the book has involved very close, and often highly convivial, co-operation; both the closeness and the conviviality have made it difficult in some cases to remember who should now be credited with particular ideas or phrases. We have decided, therefore, to accept full collective responsibility for the book as a whole, and to mark this fact by not assigning authorship to the individual essays in the main text. For those - apart from ourselves - who are interested in such matters, the Prologue is the joint effort of all three authors; Essays i, n, and in were written by Winch; Essay iv by Collini; Essays v and vi by Burrow; Essay vn by Burrow and Collini; Essays VIII and ix by Collini; Essay x by Winch and Collini; Essay xi and the Epilogue by Collini. The only exception to our practice of collective responsibility is the following sentence. Donald Winch and John Burrow wish to pay tribute to the qualities of energy and tact, at times much needed, with which Stefan Collini has discharged the dual office of being both the team's captain and its leading scorer: but for his promptings this book would most probably not have been started, and without his coaxing, his reproaches, and his example it would almost certainly never have been finished. All three authors are indebted to the University of Sussex for support and stimulation of various kinds. For assistance and congenial surroundings, Stefan Collini is in addition grateful to the History of Ideas Unit of the Australian National University; Donald Winch to the King's College Research Centre, Cambridge; John Burrow to the Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of California at Berkeley. Collectively we would like to thank Patricia Williams for her encouragement and advice; ix

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Preface

Sheldon Rothblatt for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of Essay xi; and Janice Bowen for her help in preparing the final typescript. We particularly wish to express thanks to our friends Geoffrey Hawthorn, David Lieberman, and John Thompson, but for whose searching and immensely thorough reading of the script as a whole this book would have appeared somewhat sooner.

PROLOGUE a

p

The governing science: things political and the intellectual historian I take this defect among the Brobdingnagians to haverisenfrom their Ignorance; by not having hitherto reduced Politicks into a Science as the more acute Wits of Europe have done. For, I remember very well, in a Discourse one Day with the King; when I happened to say, there were several thousand Books among us written upon the Art of Government; it gave him (directly contrary to my Intention) a very mean Opinion of our Understandings. J O N A T H A N S W I F T , Gulliver's

Travels

(IJ26)

Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls? THOMASMANN, The Magic Mountain (1924)

book deals with some of the forms taken by the aspiration to develop a 'science of polities' in nineteenth-century Britain. By speaking of an 'aspiration' we point to a project which was in some sense perpetually falling short of its realisation; by referring to 'forms' we indicate the diversity of the endeavours which issued from this common aspiration; and by limiting ourselves to 'some' of these forms we signal that we have not attempted a comprehensive survey or continuous narrative. Instead, we have conducted our enquiry by means of a set of linked essays, organised in rough chronological sequence, which consider the fortunes of a variety of intellectual enterprises that may often seem to be united by little more than the persistent invocation of the labels 'science of politics' or 'political science'. For what brings together the figures considered in this book is certainly not best thought of either as their common articulation of a corpus of knowledge, or as their shared allegiance to a single idea whose progressively more sophisticated expression could be traced in a uniform sequence of chapters. Rather, they gain their place by virtue of their interest in pursuing the notion that 'things political' - the vagueness of the traditional phrase is convenient at this stage - could be treated in ways which were at once systematic and concrete, ways which it would be unduly restrictive to describe as 'empirical' but which certainly aspired to a form of knowledge that was objective, explanatory, and useful. This notion is, for reasons to be explored below, only indirectly related to what the twentieth century has come to know as the discipline of political science. Indeed, during the nineteenth century it embraced much of the territory now assigned to the semi-autonomous dominions of economics and sociology, just as it was itself constituted by unspecified areas of the larger continents of history and philosophy. Moreover, we are also concerned with what might be called its external relations, with its place in the larger and scarcely less traditional category of the moral sciences. We are dealing, therefore, with a subject which no longer appears on modern maps of knowledge, at least not as the extensive though vaguely delimited empire it once was. Consequently, although some of the figures who appear in these pages have been the objects of intensive study in other contexts - this is true, in varying degrees, of Malthus, Macaulay, James and John Stuart Mill, Bagehot, Maine, Sidgwick, Marshall and Wallas they are here seen from a distinctive point of view and set alongside other figures whose comparative obscurity has followed from the historiographical neglect of the subject-matter as a whole; the list here would include Dugald Stewart, James Mackintosh, William Stubbs, E. A.

THIS

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Freeman, J. R. Seeley, T. E. Cliffe Leslie, W. J. Ashley and James Bryce. Macaulay's extravagant encomium, from which our title is taken, is sufficient indication that the aspiration with which we are dealing was in its heyday hardly a modest one, just as from this distance the enterprise it describes may now seem a curiously alien one. In our choice of a sub-title we are also making something of a declaration of intent, and it is one which is bound up with what we have already said about our subject-matter's lack of an easily recognisable modern identity. For there is an unfortunately familiar way of simplifying the complexity of the intellectual life of the past into a conveniently unified story, one that is particularly favoured when supposedly tracing the history of a modern academic discipline, especially, perhaps, a discipline drawn from what are now regarded as the social sciences. In essence it consists in writing history backwards. The present theoretical consensus of the discipline, or possibly some polemical version of what that consensus should be, is in effect taken as definitive, and the past is then reconstituted as a teleology leading up to and fully manifested in it. Past authors are inducted into the canon of the discipline as precursors or forebears, and passed in review as though by a general distributing medals - and sometimes reprimands - at the end of a successful campaign, with the useful implied corollary that if medals can be distributed the campaign must have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion and the discipline duly established. The list of canonical precursors, arrayed in chronological order, each wearing a label conveniently summarising his 'contribution', then becomes the history of the discipline in question. As with 'official histories' in recently established republics, rival teams of great predecessors may be assembled in this way, ostensibly to proclaim and honour a tradition of surprising antiquity, but in fact to legitimate the claims of the current protagonists in the struggle for power. The approach exhibited in these essays can be defined by its conscious rejection of this notion of the history of single disciplines - in this case, prima facie, of political science - as a way of writing about the past. However polemically useful or pedagogically suggestive such a practice might be within the discipline itself, possibly as a way of drawing nourishment or some other form of comfort from the past, it can have no claim to adequacy or even interest as intellectual history - our common concern here. By implicitly assuming that the discipline has in some ideal sense long existed, though in ways that were only partially disclosed and understood in the past, the teleological history of disciplines superimposes the intellectual map of the present, or some version of it, on the usually significantly differing ones employed in earlier periods, often to the point of obliterating them entirely. New lines of intellectual division are enforced on those who were quite capable of drawing their own, and connec-

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tions which transgress twentieth-century distinctions are dismissed or obscured. The 'contributions' made by past authors are approvingly sifted from the texts in which they occur, and the residue, along with the contexts which gave these texts their contemporary point and which still give intelligibility to their underlying assumptions, are tacitly ignored. The distortions which arise in pursuing discipline history in this fashion are essentially those classically denounced by Herbert Butterfield as 'The Whig Interpretation of History', and in the extended sense that has since been given to that term the authors of this book would be glad to be described as 'anti-whig'. There are, of course, further, though less immediately pressing, forms of distortion which, in attempting to recover the past in its own terms, we also intend to repudiate; we are not, for example, indulging any of those covert forms of reductionism implicit in studies of 'ideology'. However, even within the work of those who are committed to a genuinely historical re-creation of the past there lurks a subtler kind of distortion, one which we feel a particular wish to disown since it seems to occur most readily in the history of political thought. While we have, we trust, been properly respectful of our authors' intentions and continually alert to their contexts, we have tried to avoid either an overly rationalistic construal of the former or a too mechanical deployment of the latter. For, in recovering the contemporary questions which past authors may have been addressing, the historian may easily lapse into portraying the complex process of thought and feeling involved in, let us say, writing a book, as little more than an automatic response to a few very selectively described outside events. In striving to reconstitute an intention which could intelligibly be embodied in the work in question, the historian may not always avoid the danger of turning its author into an implausibly single-minded and clear-sighted deliberator who unerringly arrived at what has insensibly come to seem the only rational solution to the reconstructed problem. These lapses may arise as much from a failure of art, no doubt, as from any oversimplification in the methodology which the practice claims to be following, but they are exacerbated by a tendency - again, historians of political thought may be particularly prone to this - to confine the intellectual historian's task, with needless austerity, to that of re-assembling a set of arguments which, when bolted together at the appropriate angles, constitute the logical structure of a theory (the restriction of the interesting past to 'theories' is a characteristic accompanying distortion). We take it, by contrast, to be part of the defining vocation of the intellectual historian to be alive to the several dimensions of the thought and feeling of the past. Without in any way scouting the logic of their arguments, we have certainly attempted in these essays also to attend to the

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sensibilities of our authors, to the emotional and aesthetic satisfactions they derived from their views, to the styles and genres in which they chose (and in some cases could not but choose) to express them, and to the constant tensions between, on the one hand, the unevenly experienced pressure towards coherence, and, on the other, the desire, not always articulated or even acknowledged, to hold on to certain deeply felt intuitions, a process of internal negotiation which was itself always subject to the demands of occupying a particular station or of addressing a particular audience. We have, accordingly, not confined ourselves to our authors' formal treatises and dress-suited programmatic pronouncements, but have gratefully accepted the illumination provided by occasional writings, letters, contemporary reminiscence, and similar sources. And while we have generally organised our essays around individuals and groups of individuals, we have tried to make room for the independent operation of the power, at once stimulating and constraining, of intellectual tradition, and to allow for the role of fashion, circumstance, and chance. Just how successfully we have realised these rather grand aspirations is, of course, another matter, but at least the failings of the essays which follow are not attributable to our taking a narrow or one-sided view of the intellectual historian's metier. Before proceeding to a fuller description of our subject-matter, there are two final features of the approach adopted here about which it may be as well to counter possible misapprehensions in advance. The first involves what might be called a variant of the 'fat oxen fallacy', that is, the common assumption that in choosing to write about a particular, and often particularly articulate, past figure the intellectual historian is thereby endorsing thisfigure'sviews or in some other way subscribing to the 'position' which he is taken to represent. Although a scholar's choice of subject may often reveal certain affinities, and although some element of imaginative sympathy with those about whom one writes may be indispensable to good history, we wish to emphasise, what the tenor of parts of the following essays will in any case soon reveal, that in drawing attention to figures who have suffered certain kinds of scholarly neglect or misinterpretation we do not take ourselves to be recommending their views or advocating a return to their methods. Indeed, the diversity of views and methods, some of them mutually contradictory, would make this a pretty unpromising venture anyway. It is certainly true that some of our cast display qualities we find attractive - qualities of historical insight or analytical discrimination, of respect for complexity or sense of proportion, and much else besides. But these positive qualities were very unevenly distributed among the figures discussed here -James Mill is not readily associated with respect for complexity nor Freeman with a sense of proportion - and a list of their

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less attractive traits could be compiled no less easily. At all events, our treatment should make clear that we are hardly offering this book as a celebration of a lost Golden Age of political wisdom. This naturally raises the second matter about which there may be some misapprehension, namely, that we may be thought to be assessing the faltering performances of our cast against the standard of some ideal form of political science, a ghost at the feast, unseen, yet sitting in judgement on all. What we have said about our aversion to discipline-history should already have done something to dampen this expectation, and we hope it is unnecessary to labour the point that we are not conducting an inquisition in which all the victims are bound to be found wanting in a doctrine that is both exacting and esoteric. In individual cases we have certainly not refrained from remarking some of the more obvious limitations and confusions in the ideas discussed, and we have throughout observed the unresolved tension between the claims of inductive and deductive approaches to the kinds of political knowledge thought to be available and desirable. But to make such observations does not require us to be in possession of the political scientist's stone: we remain agnostic on such fundamental and ultimately epistemological problems, content, as perhaps historians should be, to leave their resolution to the philosophers. Having rejected the retrospective teleology of discipline-history, one is, of course, left with the problem of delimiting one's subject-matter in other ways. We certainly believe that our protagonists and their concerns have something in common, something which separates them from other figures and issues in the general field of nineteenth-century social and political thought, and something which by its very nature encourages us to distance ourselves from the main historiographical dispensations that prevail in writing about this field. Put negatively, as is appropriate here, we do not consider our authors - though some, in another context, might warrant such treatment- as political philosophers, chiefly concerned to deduce from general moral ends the nature of the good life for men in society; nor, conversely, are they primarily philosophers of history for whom the category of the political is deprived of all significant autonomy by incorporation in some larger story of the unfolding and mutation of social and economic forms. It is perhaps easier to grasp the demarcation of our subject-matter from the first of these types than from the second. Although all our authors could no doubt be said to have pre-supposed certain fundamental notions about the grounds of moral obligation or the nature of a just polity, and although some of them, notably Mill and Sidgwick, dealt explicitly with such matters in other works, it is clear that our concern with their projects for a science of politics is addressed to a

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different type and level of enquiry. But the boundaries between such projects and what we are here calling philosophies of history may be more difficult to locate, especially where our authors tied their understanding of politics to some more general notion of progress, as in the case, to single out only the best-known examples, of Mill, Macaulay, and Maine. In part, these boundaries must be allowed to emerge in the course of our discussion of the particular figures, especially in Essays iv, vi, and vn. But it may be helpful at this stage to observe that the philosophies of history which we take to fall outside the limits of this book are characteristically distinguished by their claims to universal, even cosmic, purchase, their compression of history into a single teleology, and their specification of both the moral or social goal and the series of stages by which it is to be realised as such functional wholes that instructed political action comes to seem either impossible or irrelevant. Comte, Spencer, and the diverse followers of Hegel provide the most familiar nineteenth-century examples, though as the special case of Hegel's own theory suggests, the grounding of such comprehensive teleologies in a more general metaphysical or evolutionary scheme was not of itself sufficient to displace the political from its traditional centrality. On the other hand, in nineteenth-century Britain the extreme historicist position is represented rather, as in the case of Spencer, by the systematic deduction from a beneficient historical process of a radically individualist, even anarchist consummation. Such decidedly negative conceptions of political action fall outside anything considered here, and while philosophies of history, especially in the form of schemes of social evolutionism, exercised a growing attraction in mid-Victorian Britain, and although several of our authors were clearly responsive to them, it is on account of their engagement with a different set of enterprises that they merit inclusion here. To have a notion, for which there can of course be numerous specific vocabularies, of 'the political' as embodying possibilities of circumscribed initiative, conditioned but not wholly determined by circumstances, was obviously to hold a balance: to believe both that there are external conditions, either perennial or at least of sufficient generality to be worth identifying in more than purely local terms, which effective political activity must respect, and also that political activity of an instructed and considered kind and of potentially far-reaching significance is possible. To press further in the voluntarist or optimistic direction would be to become the adviser to or imaginary embodiment of an all-but-omnipotent legislator, for whom, apart from goodwill, the chief desideratum is clarity of mind and purpose: Rousseau and the early Bentham offer familiar examples. At the outer limit in this direction lies Utopia. Press instead in the opposite direction and there are the familiar features of the historicist as

Things political and the intellectual historian

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obstetrician, or, in another idiom, the advocate of praxis, gambling that next time the machinery of the historical process is bound to deliver the jackpot if banged hard enough. These extremes have an arresting emotional flamboyance which challenges the reader, demanding rejection or conversion; and with the latter, one is immediately rewarded, as converts usually are, with established procedures for finding the world less puzzling, and for becoming articulate and authoritative. This, together with the fact that their coherence and high level of abstraction make them suitable for pedagogical summary, has ensured that when the histories of social and political thought are written it is the extremes, the closed doctrines, that tend to provide the recognised moments of the story, and out of which the 'isms' and 'traditions' are constructed. What we have tried to present here is not a rival 'tradition' or parallel story of transmission and development, so much as a succession of attempts to occupy and explore the role of informed student of the conditions and possibilities of politics, and of the institutional structures through which it works. Our authors showed no close agreement on, or even identical degree of interest in, the extent to which politics was or was not merely a matter of accepting surrounding necessities. None of them held - what few in fact hold, though more proclaim - that politics is so much a matter of time and place and circumstance that all political wisdom is necessarily purely local and essentially inarticulate. But some were more attracted to the study of the historical and institutional frame, others to the possibilities of legislation and foresight - differences that may themselves be susceptible of historical explanation. It is only by contrast with the extremes that we have an identifiable middle ground, and at the margins there was inevitably a good deal of intellectual exchange and flirtation, a mingling of concepts, vocabularies, and beliefs. There are two currently available historiographical categories to which this subject-matter might be assigned, neither of which, in our opinion, would be altogether appropriate. The first is that of the history of political theory, that familiar procession of dignitaries stretching, in England during this period, from Bentham and Burke to Mill and Green, all decked out in their most ambitious philosophical finery, all shorn of distracting involvements in current political affairs, all fixing their gaze on the distant question of the grounds of political obligation, all carrying banners inscribed with the mottoes of the larger 'isms'. An informed nineteenthcentury observer, confronted with the sight of this well-drilled procession, might have some difficulty in identifying his erstwhile contemporaries: Burke, for example, looks distinctly uncomfortable in his tight-fitting philosophical collar, and even Bentham seems more at home with a neighbouring group of Law Lords than in a fitting-room dominated

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by busts of Plato and Aristotle. But our nineteenth-century observer, having more or less inferred the theme, would particularly remark the absentees: where, for instance, was Bagehot, shrewdest analyst of the realities of the constitution; where Maine, whose method dominated a whole generation's reflections on politics; where Seeley, Sidgwick, and half a dozen others? And in so remarking, our hypothetical observer would not so much be pleading for the procession to be enlarged by the inclusion of one or two underrated figures, as challenging the whole notion that the varieties of reflection on things political that were important in nineteenth-century Britain could be represented in this way at all. He might vary his complaint by explaining that two of the most prominent sources of practical political wisdom for him and his contemporaries had been, broadly speaking, history and political economy, yet neither of these seemed to figure in the procession at all. This observation calls up that other historiographical category to which our subject-matter might, at first sight, seem to belong, the history of the social sciences. The procession here is rather more disorderly, partly organised in terms of the alumni associations of the various constituent disciplines, partly in terms of an affiliation to a central conception of the nature of the distinctively 'social'. The fact that it is usually led by such sociological nabobs as Comte, Durkheim and Weber indicates how far it is from providing congenial company for our cast, and the fact that it has often been thought difficult to assemble a respectable British contingent at all may suggest a more radical mis-match still. Indeed, the very category of 'social science' has been construed in ways which make it unreceptive and even hostile to the more traditional notions of the centrality and relative autonomy of politics entertained by our figures. Insofar as social science has been identified with the discovery of essentially self-regulating or historicist models of 'economy' and 'society', it has been taken to undercut any independent treatment of'polity', reducing it, in fact, to something which is necessarily epiphenomehal or subservient to more powerful forces. That the procession of canonical political theorists is generally regarded as petering out at roughly the point at which the social sciences seem to be picking up strength has been interpreted as 'the erosion of the distinctively political' by the rise of the 'sociological perspective'. Interestingly, the timing of this takeover seems very uncertain, some placing it fairly precisely in the 1840s, others more loosely in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,x but in 1

The most arresting and inclusive statement of this thesis can be found in Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision; Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston, i960), chs. 9 and 10: the case for placing the change in the 1840s, on the grounds that it required making a clear distinction between political and social relationships, is rehearsed in W. G. Runciman, Social Science and Political Theory (Cambridge, 1963), ch. 2.

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either case it is hard to accommodate the continued vitality of the idea of a science of politics in nineteenth-century Britain. There is a good deal of irony in all this, as there usually is with teleological and anachronistic readings of history. Thus, many of the figures who appear in our early essays, far from feeling threatened with extinction when writing on politics, acted and wrote as though they were building on foundations for a science of politics that had been well and truly laid in the eighteenth century by some of the very same authors who, according to modern discipline-historians, were in the business of founding social sciences that would fatally undermine the serious study of politics. The best examples here are Montesquieu, who was to be praised, somewhat condescendingly, by Comte and Durkheim for having perceived the importance of 'social laws' and 'social facts'; Adam Smith, whose concept of the 'invisible hand' and of the self-regulating properties of a competitive economic system could be made to seem quintessentially a-political; and those Scottish moral philosophers and historians of civil society, again including Smith, usually in the company of Adam Ferguson and John Millar, who were, without knowing it, creating the preconditions for a materialist form of historicism. 2 Fortunately, as we remark below, more scholarly work has recently done something to rescue these eighteenth-century figures from the grosser forms of misrepresentation, but the nineteenth century has been less well served. Partly this is because the category of 'the political' is then faced with genuine challenges from other, related, and often more comprehensive intellectual projects, especially from the mid-century onwards; and there has been a tendency to extend this insight backwards and sideways to cover a longer period and a larger number of writers than is really legitimate. As we shall see in some of our later essays - most strikingly, perhaps, in that on Sidgwick - devotees of the science of politics in the second half of the nineteenth century increasingly had to come to terms with the cultural hegemony of 'the philosophy of history' and 'the science of society'. To study ideas of a science of politics in the later nineteenth century, in a climate of expansive optimism about the prospects for social science generally, may appear to have some affinities with the business of tagging a species threatened with extinction. To recognise them as still retaining a discernible intellectual identity and family resemblance may often seem to require a rather finicky sense of discrimination. Nevertheless, the recognition that they do have distinctive qualities, and that important elements of nineteenth-century discourse, habits of thought 2

The last of these positions is particularly associated with the work of R. L. Meek on the Scottish historical school: see, for example, his Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976).

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and intellectual aspiration are lost if we lose sight of them in attending to what may now seem the bigger and more portentous battalions of Historicism, Social Evolutionism, and Social Science, is one justification for writing this book. Our cast may not be distinguished by having a numerous twentieth-century progeny, and in this as well as other senses their aspirations may not seem to have reached a satisfactory fulfilment; but we do not consider it a reason for ignoring them that their relationship to their seed was less like Abraham's and more like Onan's. There is one further feature of our subject-matter which calls for comment here, especially since it may seem to be the weakest part of our case for eschewing discipline-history. In several of the following essays, most notably Essays i, n, iv, vm, and x, we deal fairly extensively with political economy. Our reason for this is, of course, that during this period political economy was regarded as, in the phrase used by Adam Smith himself, 'a branch of the science of the statesman or legislator' (a classification which we consider more fully below), and it is this which has dictated our treatment. We have, that is to say, not directly concerned ourselves with the development of a body of economic theory, but rather with the ways in which the conclusions of the subject, which were themselves disputable and, from various quarters, disputed, seemed to contemporaries to bear on the solution of the most general political problems, and also with the ways in which, in its reasoning, it provided something of a model for the other moral sciences, or at least the arena in which methodological battles of wider import could be fought out. Economics has, on the whole, been better served by discipline-history than any of its neighbours, though at the usual cost of losing sight of some of the most important ways in which political economy was woven into the fabric of nineteenth-century intellectual life. If we have only infrequently cited this extensive and, by its lights, excellent secondary literature here, that is because it does not seem to have gone very far towards capturing what is of interest about such figures as Malthus, Mill, Marshall, or the historical economists when considered in relation to the aspiration to develop a science of politics. The final way in which we must clarify the scope of this book is by explaining its chronological limits, and here, too, the existence of established bodies of secondary literature is relevant, if in a different way. It follows from what has already been said about our anti-whig convictions that we have not selected some preferred moment in the academic history of the twentieth century as our telos. Nonetheless, the arrival in the early part of this century of university departments of politics or political science does provide a convenient terminus, though this certainly does not mean that the enterprise we have been considering has at this point grown up or reached fruition. There is both continuity and discontinuity here. It

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is noticeable that the majority of the figures discussed in the second half of the book held university posts of one kind or another at some point in their lives, though rather fewer of them could properly be regarded as professional academics; and, like their twentieth-century counterparts, they were anxious to secure a place in the syllabus for their version of the study of things political. In fact, Essay xi is entirely devoted to an episode in which they achieved a remarkable degree of success in this. At the same time, as we observe in our Epilogue, the familiar processes of specialisation and professionalisation were beginning to work, or at least accompany, a modification in conceptions of 'polities' - and, for that matter, 'science* - the proper discussion of which would require a separate and rather different book; and thereafter much of the story disappears into the archives of university departments and professional associations. From the vantage-point we hope to have established by the time we reach the end of the nineteenth century we cast a very brief glance over later developments, but essentially they do not form part of our subject-matter. Our starting-point requires a fuller justification, for the belief that politics could be made the subject of a systematic body of knowledge, useful to statesman and citizen alike, can, if one is not too fastidious about apparent discontinuities, be traced back to Thucydides and Aristotle. Even for more modern notions of a science of politics as involving a particular kind of ordered knowledge about civic life in units other than the ancient city-state, there are various possible points of departure, each enjoying a certain amount of scholarly endorsement and plausibility: Machiavelli, Harrington, and Montesquieu are obvious, and suitably diverse, examples. There is, we shall argue presently, good reason for regarding the last of these names, and a group of writers on politics who followed in his footsteps in the eighteenth century, as marking some kind of turning-point even when the focus is confined to British authors, as is the case here. On those grounds it might have been appropriate for us to have extended our coverage backwards in time to incorporate that period. But apart from the usual excuses for not extending the scope of a book such as lack of knowledge and the shortness of life - we have been willingly influenced by the fact that in recent years a number of important studies of individual authors and modes of political argument in the eighteenth century have appeared, studies which have no equivalent for the nineteenth century. Moreover, the best of this work - some of which will be noted below - has been distinguished by just that historical sensitivity and attention to context whose absence from so much writing in the history of political theory and the social sciences in the nineteenth century we have already criticised. While our book differs in both range and approach from this literature on the eighteenth century, its existence allows us to feel

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justified in beginning our study with figures who can hardly be seen, and who did not see themselves, as the original founders of a modern science of politics. At all events, this relationship requires us to say something, albeit brief and selective, about the nature of the eighteenth-century legacy, although precisely because this area has been well served by recent studies, we shall not attempt any systematic account of how this 'legacy' was related to and abstracted from the fabric of eighteenth-century social and political thought. The 'acute Wits of Europe' essayed much more than the reduction of politics to a science, but it is to what later generations took to be their particular contributions to this operation alone that we shall confine ourselves here, and since that phrase is so closely associated with Hume's famous essay on the subject, we may let his remarks guide our discussion.3 The sense in which Aristotle had spoken of politics as the 'master-science' was still a current one in the eighteenth century, and it was in this sense that Hume spoke quite simply but comprehensively of politics as dealing with 'men united in society and dependent on each other'. During his lifetime, the project of creating a science of politics, or a science of the legislator as it was also called, acquired renewed vigour and confidence as part of the more general attempt to apply the Newtonian or experimental method to moral subjects. There were - both then and later - two basic approaches to the question of how the reduction to science could best be effected, one emphasising the lessons or maxims that could be drawn, more or less systematically, from historical evidence, the other concentrating on those constant 'springs' of human nature, those psychological propensities that seemed not to vary greatly across time and place. In the eighteenth century a combination of these two approaches was generally thought to be essential, with the action of the enduring passions or motives being called upon as a theory capable of interpreting the historical record. An idea of 'science' which made it interchangeable with 'philosophy' could prize systematic knowledge and objectivity in the assignment of causal influences, but it did not entail anxiety to achieve what a late nineteenth-century generation of social scientists would call 'value-neutrality'. The ultimate purpose of any science of politics remained that of its earliest cultivators, namely to furnish prudential maxims, draw practical inferen3

Any discussion of Hume's science of politics must now begin by reference to the work of Duncan Forbes, whose most recent studies on the subject are as follows: Introduction to Hume's History of Great Britain, The Reigns of James I and Charles I (London, 1970); Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975); 'Sceptical whiggism, commerce and liberty' in A. S. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds.), Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford, 1976), pp. 179-201; and 'Hume's science of politics' in David Hume, Bicentenary Papers, edited by G. P. Morice (Edinburgh, 1977).

Things political and the intellectual historian

15

ces, and formulate clear criteria for judging the fitness of laws and institutions which could guide the conduct of wise legislators and thereby serve, as Macaulay proclaimed, the 'welfare of nations'. In this way, 'science' could easily be extended to embrace the 'art' of government and legislation - as it was by Swift, speaking through Gulliver- provided the usual caveats were registered concerning the obstacles that might impede the journey from theory to practice. The relationship of the natural to the moral sciences remained correspondingly relaxed and non-exclusive. There were good reasons why the experimental method had not been adopted as the appropriate one in morals and politics as early as it had been in studying the physical universe: the opportunities for controlled experimentation were also fewer, making it necessary, as Hume said, to 'glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men's behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures'. 4 By the end of the eighteenth century, however, it was possible to speculate seriously as to which philosopher should be awarded the accolade of Newton of the moral sciences, and which the prior and only slightly less prestigious role of Bacon. Confidence, then, was partly the result of a belief that a post-Newtonian generation was in a better position to assess the regular effects of those constant motives which underlie human behaviour in social settings. But it was equally supported by a realisation of the greatly increased fund of political experience which could now be drawn on in framing maxims and inductive generalisations. Hume was not alone in believing that his generation was in a position to improve greatly on anything that had passed for a science of politics since ancient times. This included, for example, the work of 'a great genius' like Machiavelli, whose knowledge was confined 'to the furious and tyrannical governments of ancient times, or to the little disorderly principalities of Italy'. 5 Machiavelli might be considered 'modern' in his attempts to assign causes impartially, without regard to personal or party dispositions, but generalisations based on such restricted experience could be of little relevance to a world that had witnessed the emergence of civilised monarchies out of the break-up of feudalism. A sense of the new opportunities and requirements was an aspect of that reassessment of the guidance offered by Greek and Roman experience which is associated, in the eighteenth century, with the idea of progress. If the historical experience of modern Europeans was in some respects without precedent, classical notions of history as a succession of closed cycles 4 5

See A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1888), p. xxxiii. 'Of Civil Liberty' in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols. (London, 1875), 1, p. 156.

16

The governing science

were necessarily in some degree undermined as a basis for inferring political maxims. New grounds for political understanding would have to be sought in the nature of the unprecedented historical process in which the nations of modern Europe were currently involved. The older conception of historical lessons as maxims derived from the contemplation of repeated analogous political circumstances, to which Polybius had given classic formulation, and which was revitalised by Machiavelli, remained a powerful intellectual legacy. In nineteenth-century England, as we show in Essay vi, the use of historical analogy, and even the notion of cycles, continued to form part of political discourse. But it was increasingly supplanted by a view which saw modern circumstances as the intelligible consequence of past history, but in significant respects without exact analogies in that history; no cyclical formula was adequate to account for either the range or the uniqueness of modern political experience. The most sustained attempt to grasp its uniqueness through an analysis of the political implications of commercial society will be considered in Essay i, and to a lesser extent in Essays n and in as well. But its variety, too, constituted a pressing intellectual challenge. Post-feudal Europe exhibited a diversity of constitutional forms, from the absolutism epitomised by Louis xiv's France to the English Whig oligarchy and the federalism of the United Provinces, as well as the more archaic varieties represented by the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, and Venice. Compared with Aristotle's Greece and Machiavelli's Italy, it also represented a scene of considerable social and cultural variety. Religious and economic divergences were accompanied by divergences of manners and culture. French observers, like Montesquieu and Voltaire, saw England not merely as another polity, but also as in some respects a quite different kind of society from their own. Spain and the United Provinces, once politically linked, were even more sharply distinct, as were the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands. The steady encroachment of the Ottoman Empire on Europe, culminating in its great effort to take Vienna in the late seventeenth century, brought closer another social and political species, Asiatic Despotism. Further outside Europe, the range of political experiments and social comparison had been vastly expanded by voyages of discovery, the settlement of the New World, missionary zeal, and colonial expansion, to encompass China, India, Persia, Africa and the Americas - powerful and persistent despotic empires as well as small-scale primitive societies, like those of the Hottentots or Iroquois, with apparently only rudimentary systems of law and government, and far 'ruder' customs and manners than were to be found in the polished nations of Europe. The first and most influential author to respond to the challenge of the

Things political and the intellectual historian

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new opportunities for the comparison of law and government across space as well as time was Montesquieu; and in his De ly esprit des lois (1748) he created what Hume described as 'a system of political knowledge which abounds in ingenious and brilliant thoughts, and is not wanting in solidity'.6 The conceptual tools for reducing diversity to system were, as always, partly old, partly new. Thus Montesquieu employed a modified version of the categories established by Aristotle for discussing constitutional forms and their corrupted counterparts - monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy - by treating the last two of these as types of republican government, and by creating a large space for such interesting hybrid varieties as the English form of government, which Montesquieu described as 'a republic disguised as a monarchy'. He also made extensive use of another available vocabulary which dealt with the separation of the powers of government between legislative, executive, and judicial functions. But much of the intellectual vitality and novelty of his 'system of political knowledge' lay elsewhere, appropriately enough in the notion of esprit, and in the comparative survey of manners and morals to which it gave rise. Whereas in the past the content of the science of politics had often been exhausted by its treatment of constitutional forms, their strengths and weaknesses, their characteristic diseases and the tried and trusted remedies for restoring them to health, Montesquieu's work was more broadly cultural and comparative, a veritable museum of moeurs et manieres, encompassing every clime and polity. Apart from its qualities as a monument to the cosmopolitan social curiosity of the Enlightenment, Montesquieu's book demonstrated, in Hume's words, that: cThe laws have, or ought to have, a constant reference to the constitution of governments, the climate, the religion, the commerce, the situation of each society.'7 Hume questioned the durability of Montesquieu's achievement as well as his method of establishing rapports between the various influences. In company with most Scottish and French writers who acknowledged the pioneering qualities of Montesquieu's book, Hume also wished to play down the role accorded to climate in determining the esprit general. Hume's own discussion of these matters laid more stress on pliability, on the part played by custom, imitation, and sympathy, by political institutions and moral as opposed to physical factors, in shaping law and manners. 8 But Montesquieu had shown that the task of a modern science of politics could not be confined to the 6 7 8

Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1902), p. 197. Enquiries, p. 19711. See especially 'Of National Characters' in Essays, 1, pp. 244-58. On the relation between Hume and Montesquieu in general, see P. Chamley, 'The conflict between Montesquieu and Hume', in Skinner and Wilson (eds.), Essays on Adam Smith, pp. 274-305.

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The governing science

taxonomy of legal and constitutional forms, or even to those questions of civic morale, of corruption and virtue among rulers and the populace at large, which Machiavelli had discussed at length. Laws and constitutional practices now had to be firmly connected with the state of society as a whole. Hume's compatriots, chiefly Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar, transformed Montesquieu's states of society into an elaborate sequence of stages in the historical development of civil society in order to account for the process for which a new word had to be coined, namely 'civil-isation'. The stages led from rudeness to refinement, from such archetypal nations of hunter-gatherers as the Iroquois, who provided evidence of the zero point in the scale of civilisation, to the commercial societies of modern Europe, all of which enjoyed a considerable measure of security under the rule of law, regardless of the precise form of government under which they lived. Such histories of civil society conformed to the experimental injunction to consider man where he was always to be found, namely in some form of society rather than in the pre-social state of nature posited by contractarian treatments of the origins and legitimacy of government and the 'first principles' of obedience. Those questions of social subordination and cohesion that were so important in understanding the nature and form assumed by political authority could no longer be treated fruitfully as the outcome of voluntary acts by sovereign individuals. They were more readily explicable in terms of such features of human nature as sympathy, sociability, habits of deference, and a learned sense of the public utility attached to the regular administration of justice. The revolution associated with commerce was not only the most recent, but also the single most important development affecting the study of politics in the eighteenth century. It gave enhanced status to self-interest as a regulating principle in human affairs at the expense of more cyclical and moralistic conceptions of politics based on the dialectic between virtue and corruption9 - though never completely so, as the example of Ferguson shows. It also made such brilliant generalisations as that propounded by Harrington in the seventeenth century, connecting the balance of power in society with the balance of property, seem outmoded, chiefly applicable to an exclusively agrarian society in which landed property was the only form of property with military and political significance. In post-feudal societies, especially those enjoying a measure of 'free government', states of opinion had become at least as important as states of property in 9

The author who has done most to establish the relationship between these two modes of political argument is J. G. A. Pocock; see especially his Politics, Language and Time (London, 1972), and The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975).

Things political and the intellectual historian

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determining the legitimacy and stability of government.10 It was precisely with regard to the connections between property, opinion, manners, and justice that Hume, in company with other Scottish writers on jurisprudence, felt he could extend the reasonings not only of Harrington, but of the seventeenth-century natural lawyers, Grotius and Pufendorf, as well. The shift towards a politics of interest brought with it an increased emphasis on constitutional and other types of institutional machinery as a means of both releasing and restraining an active yet potentially harmful driving force. This concern with machinery that would check and balance interests was, of course, to become the keynote of the deliberations of the American founding fathers when they set about the task of constructing a constitution for a federal republic that had to survive in a continent of 'wide extent' and among a people that could no longer be regarded as Virtuous' in either the ancient or the technical sense defined by Montesquieu. In designing many of the checking and balancing mechanisms Madison and Hamilton drew freely on the work of Montesquieu and Hume as representing, along with other writings, the established conclusions of the eighteenth-century science of politics.11 By the end of the century, however, there was another line of thought, quite different in its idiom, which cast severe doubt on mechanical imagery when applied to the business of framing constitutions. The French Revolution marked a high point of constructive political optimism, with the Abbe Sieyes playing the role dear to the philosophes, of theoretician as constitutional artificer, just as Turgot had earlier been the embodiment of another ideal, that of philosophe as enlightened administrator. Seen from Britain, Turgot's failure evoked more sympathy than that of Sieyes. Under the influence of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, the entire episode was seen as neither distinguished nor reassuring. Throughout the nineteenth century, the insufficiency of 'paper constitutions' - especially after the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 began to make barricades and their concomitant, a newly-drafted constitution, seem an ineradicable French 10 11

See Hume's 'Of the First Principles of Government' and 'Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy or a Republic' in Essays, 1, pp. 110-12, 122-6. The pioneering work on this was done by Douglas Adair, '"That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science"; David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist', Huntington Library Quarterly, 20 (1956-7), 343-60. Since then, studies of the part played by political ideas during the American Revolution and the formation of the new constitution have undergone a major transformation. The following works are merely a selection from a vast modern literature: B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); G. S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969); G. Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, 1970);]. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (London, 1966); and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 15.

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The governing science

disease - became a stock theme of political admonition and self-congratulation in Britain. A distinctively nineteenth-century Romantic distrust of mere constitutional machinery and political rationalism generally, as in the chapter on the French Constituent Assembly's labours in Carlyle's French Revolution, was added to the older English Whig veneration for precedent and the indigenous ancestral constitution, and both seemed to be endorsed by the failures of successive French experiments. Essay vi shows how this theme was woven into the work of nineteenthcentury historians writing on the accumulated deposits of a long run of political experience in England. Burke provided an English admixture to a largely Scottish inheritance, though he did not acquire, in his native heath at least, immediate canonical status as conservative organicist. Many of the early nineteenth-century devotees of the science of politics with whom we shall be concerned in Essay i were not anxious to endorse his writings on France. They smacked too strongly of what one commentator spoke of as 'the undisguised fury of an eloquent advocate', and in this respect were inferior to Hume's capacity to write with 'the well-dissembled partiality of the philosophical judge'. 12 Even those who came to share Burke's views on paper constitutions were not inclined to accept his diagnosis of the causes of the Revolution and especially his wholesale condemnation of philosophical speculation on political matters, though they were forced to recognise that events in France had revealed weaknesses in the eighteenth-century science.13 Nevertheless, a kind of diffused Burkeanism is often a hidden, where not an avowed, presence in the work of some members of our cast, a presence best revealed in the commonplaces which later became part of the intellectual stock of Liberals as well as of Whigs and Tories, with their references to successful political institutions as built up by slow accretions, their favourite image for constitutional change as the repairs and piecemeal additions to an inherited mansion, and their recommendation of respect for tradition as a major part of political wisdom. Such language does not suggest that extravagant hopes should be entertained of the practical benefits likely to be derived from a science of politics, at the constitutional level at least, though how far the Burkean injunctions could coexist with something like a science of politics will be considered in several of the ensuing essays (especially v, vi, and vn). A more immediate effect of the French Revolution of 1789, and indirectly of the writings of Burke and his radical English opponents, was to 12 13

See Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, 2 vols. (London, 3 5) ) » > P P 7 3 See Hedva Ben-Israel, English Historians on the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1968), PP- 33-43-

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make discussions of 'first principles', of the origins and legitimacy of government, even less promising or respectable than they had been after Hume, Smith and others had rejected theories of a social contract as an approach to such matters. The discussion of the British constitution also had to be more overtly respectful to escape suspicion, and a tradition was available to make this possible which drew some inspiration from Montesquieu's admiring portrait of the constitution. It was a tradition that stressed mixture, balance, and separation of powers, and it appeared in varying guises in the writings of Blackstone, De Lolme, and Paley. The discussion of balance within the mixture of elements which was believed to be the main source of strength and stability within the constitution continued to provide a useful way of interpreting the changes that were taking place during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. But by then such well-established ways of discussing things political were confronted with other, more self-consciously novel and iconoclastic idioms, and at this point the Prologue must give way to the first act. However, in looking ahead, the outlines are already discernible. Even in the eighteenth-century contributions we have been discussing, there was, among other things, an unresolved tension between the claims of, on the one hand, proceeding deductively from the laws of human nature, and, on the other, arguing inductively from the evidence of the historical record; and this tension, in different and not always immediately recognisable forms, recurs throughout the following essays as the traditional project is re-interpreted in new ways. One can see it when the legatees of the Scottish inheritance and the spokesmen for the varieties of Whiggism grapple with the challenges provided by Benthamite Utilitarianism and the Ricardian extrapolation from Smith; one observes it again in J. S. Mill's efforts to transmute this divided inheritance into a still more ambitious synthesis, and in Bagehot's deliberately less systematic rendering of some of the elements into a quite different vocabulary; and it is evident in the diverse programmes arising out of the fresh enthusiasm for the historical and comparative approaches from the 1860s onwards, and in the responses, variously hostile or accommodating, of figures like Sidgwick and Marshall. If the story seems to become an increasingly academic one in the second half of the nineteenth century, this does not betoken the triumph of any one conception of the project, nor does it signal any radical discontinuity with the competing versions discussed in our earlier essays. Confidence in the prospects of the science ran scarcely less high in the nineteenth century than it had in the eighteenth; but its proposed content and strategies remained irreducibly diverse, and the acute Wits among Gulliver's countrymen would still have had to impress the Brobdingnagians, if at all, more by the quantity of their productions than by the unanimity of their conclusions.

:D

The system of the North: Dugald Stewart and his pupils He supplied both young and old with philosophical ideas on what they had scarcely been accustomed to think philosophical subjects, unfolded the elements and the ends of that noble science, and so recommended it by the graces of his eloquence that even his idler hearers retained a permanent taste for it. HENRY COCKBURN, Memorials of His Time (1854) . . . as a preparation for the writing of various articles, the system of Edinburgh is enormously superior to that of Cambridge. The particular, compact, exclusive learning of England is inferior in this respect to the general, diversified, omnipresent information of the North; and what is more, the speculative, dubious nature of metaphysical and such like pursuits tends, in a really strong mind, to cultivate habits of independent thought and original discussion. WALTER BAGEHOT, The First Edinburgh Reviewers' (1855)

Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from 1785 to 1810, was the eloquent lecturer being praised by Cockburn in the passage from which the first of our epigraphs is taken, and 'that noble science' was the science of politics as it had been cultivated during the second half of the eighteenth century by an international community of scholars within which the names of Scottish authors were prominent. Adam Smith had significantly enlarged and modified the shape of the science in his Wealth of Nations by giving philosophical status to political economy considered as a branch of the science, but when Cockburn pointed out that as a result of Stewart's teaching 'the liberal young' of Edinburgh lived upon Smith, he added a longer list of authorities: 'With Hume, Robertson, Millar, Montesquieu, Ferguson and De Lolme, he supplied them with most of their mental food.'1 The nourishment came as part of the larger and more varied diet provided by the moral philosophy curriculum, which included metaphysics (or philosophy of mind), ethics, and jurisprudence as well as politics. Bagehot's tribute to 'the general, diversified, omnipresent information of the North' was also, therefore, a tribute to Stewart, the educational source of many of the 'metaphysical and such like pursuits' which helped to form the intellectual habits of the founders of the Edinburgh Review - Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, Francis Horner, and Sydney Smith. Of this group of Stewart's pupils Cockburn said that 'they formed a distinct and marked set, distinguished by their reputations, their Whiggism, and their strong mutual coherence'. This essay will be concerned with those aspects of Stewart's teaching and related writings which bear on the noble science, and on the way in which they were reflected in the intellectual careers of this set of young philosophic Whigs during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. For it was Stewart, more than any other figure, who acted, more or less self-consciously, as the bridge between that late eighteenthcentury generation of Scottish moral philosophers and historians of civil society of whom we spoke in our Prologue, and that new generation of Scottish-educated writers who founded the leading intellectual periodical of the day. For it was through the pages of the Edinburgh Review that this group transmitted to the English world in which they increasingly moved, many, though by no means all, of the ideas on the 'modern' science of politics - its method of enquiry, content, scope, and practical significance - that will feature in the next two essays. D U G A L D STEWART,

1

H. Cockburn, Memorials of His Time (Edinburgh, 1910) (1st edn, 1854), p. 41. 2

5

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The system of the North

As his academic pedigree alone makes clear, it would be hard to better Stewart's general qualifications as an interpreter and intermediary. He was the pupil of Thomas Reid, who had been Adam Smith's successor as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow; and he was himself the successor to Adam Ferguson in the equivalent Chair in Edinburgh. This Chair occupied a crucial role in the curriculum of the university as a whole because moral philosophy provided the medium through which the findings of all sciences, natural and moral, were mediated and assessed. 2 Stewart also became the 'official' memorialist of Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and William Robertson; the foremost contemporary proponent of philosophical (or faculty) psychology of a non-materialist kind in Britain, enjoying considerable influence in France during the first half of the nineteenth century; and the author, after his retirement, of the Dissertation Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical and Political Philosophy since the Revival of Letters in Europe that was published as the introduction to another major Scottish enterprise, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in 1820.

In mounting lectures on politics as a regular part of the moral philosophy curriculum, Stewart was merely following Scottish academic precedent - a precedent endorsed by Ferguson but which could be traced back at least as far as Adam Smith's teacher, Frances Hutcheson, in Glasgow. The formal connections with the other parts of the curriculum were as follows: a study of man's intellectual powers (understanding) was completed by an account of his active or moral powers (will); and these two enquiries into metaphysics and ethics dealt with those questions which related directly to the capacities and duties of the individual. The edifice was completed by a consideration of man as 'a member of a Political Body', of what constituted happiness in a community and the means by which it could best be promoted. Stewart justified this third element in the course by claiming that only by considering those principles of human nature that were brought into play by membership of a political community was it possible to form 'a just idea of our situation in the world, and of the most important duties we owe our fellow creatures'. Politics was intimately connected with metaphysics and ethics because 'it is in the political union, and in the gradual improvement of which it is susceptible, that nature has made a provision for a gradual development of our intellectual and moral powers, and for a proportional enlargement in our 2

A number of studies on the central role of moral philosophy in the Scottish university curriculum have been published since George Davie's pioneering study on the subject; see his Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1961); R. Olson, Scottish Philosophy and British Physics, 1750-1880 (Princeton, 1961); and A. L. Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1975).

Dugald Stewart and bis pupils

ij

capacities for enjoyment; and it is by the particular forms of their political institutions that those opinions and habits which constitute the Manners of nations are chiefly determined'. 3 Much of this justification follows standard lines, and Stewart regarded his lectures on politics partly as a mark of recognition for what had already been established in an essentially revitalised branch of modern knowledge. In addition to the authorities mentioned by Cockburn, decisive contributions had been made in France by Quesnay, Turgot, and Mirabeau, and in Spain and Italy by Campomanes, Beccaria, and Filangieri. Stewart was, therefore, building on a firm European foundation and frequently spoke as though he was merely drawing his students' attention to established findings and methods of enquiry. But the process of transmission and application of accepted principles to new problems also entailed transmutation of the inheritance. Thus even in the formal justification given above, the reference to 'the gradual development in our intellectual and moral powers' signals a novel emphasis within the Scottish tradition which Stewart was to make peculiarly his own. The nature of this transmutation can best be appreciated by returning at the outset to some of the themes touched on in the second part of our Prologue, especially those arising out of the writings of Hume and Smith on related subjects. Although Hume produced no single or systematic treatise on politics, his writings on justice in the Treatise on Human Nature and in the Enquiry into Morals, his History of Great Britain, and, above all, his essays and political discourses were regarded by his contemporaries as notable contributions to the noble science, and consequently as a valuable source of political analyses and maxims. Hume played little part in working out, as Smith, Ferguson, and Millar did, the details of an elaborate 'philosophical' history of civil society couched in terms of a sequence of social stages. But according to Smith, Hume had made one of the most important discoveries relating to the latest of those stages of development, the one crucial to an understanding of how modern European societies differed from their feudal or agrarian predecessors. Smith believed that in his History Hume had been the first to demonstrate how 'commerce and manufacturing gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with 3

See D. Stewart, Outlines of Moral Philosophy for the Use of Students in the University of Edinburgh, 5th edn (Edinburgh, 1829) (1st edn, 1793), pp. 12-13, anc^ Lectures on Political Economy in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, edited by W. Hamilton, 10 vols. (Edinburgh, 1854-60), vn, pp. 16-20.

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The system of the North

their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors'.4 Smith incorporated this insight into Book m of the Wealth of Nations, where it provided the centrepiece of his account of how the spread of commerce had brought the downfall of feudal/military society and thereby established the pre-conditions for liberty defined as the regular administration of justice and the security of individuals under the rule of law. The elimination of 'servile dependency' and the growth of a 'middling rank' offered new safeguards for this system of liberty by diffusing landed property and the arbitrary powers previously associated with it, and by introducing a more gradual descent of fortunes between the rich and powerful at one end of the spectrum, and the mass of society at the other. The result was a science of politics in which the achievement of security by means of the regular administration of justice was seen as the main criterion for assessing the success or failure, and the degree of advancement, of differing forms of government. Hume's treatment of justice as an 'artificial' virtue or social convention, derived from man's experience of living in society, presupposed a historical learning process. But, again, it was Smith who, according to the report on his lectures on jurisprudence given by his pupil John Millar, endeavoured 'to trace the gradual progress of jurisprudence, both public and private, from the rudest to the most refined ages, and to point out the effects of those arts which contribute to subsistence, and to the accumulation of property, in producing correspondent improvements or alterations in law and government'.5 The connections between these lectures and Smith's two main published works, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, were somewhat obscured by Smith's failure to complete the 'account of the general principles of law and government' which he promised at the end of the former of these works. Nevertheless, those students who attended the lectures, such as Millar, were capable of appreciating, in outline at least, the nature of the comprehensive enterprise Smith had planned in the 1750s. Millar's own writings drew heavily on the lectures, and his report on their content reached a larger audience when published as part of Stewart's account of Smith's life and writings in 1793. Moreover, readers of the Theory of Moral Sentiments were aware that Smith regarded justice as the foundation of the social fabric, and that he believed that precise rules of a negative kind could be laid down with regard to justice. Readers of the Wealth ofNations would be equally struck 4

5

See An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner in The Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1976-83), 11, p. 412. As quoted by Dugald Stewart in his Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith reprinted in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, edited by W. P. D. Wightman, J. C. Bryce, and I. S. Ross in Works and Correspondence, in, pp. 274-5.

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by the frequency with which Smith fortified his analysis of the inexpediency of various forms of political intervention by calling on the stronger language of justice and injustice. Although the emergence of commercial society presupposed the existence of a more sophisticated system of justice, and might itself generate the preconditions for liberty, Smith did not commit himself to the view that such a society was necessarily becoming more equal or more just. On the contrary, he often stressed the inequalities and injustices of the existing distribution of social burdens and rewards, and regarded it as one of the main duties of the legislator to go beyond the removal of obstacles to the 'system of natural liberty' to curb those abuses and unjust privileges which were the source of oppression.6 The connections between commerce and liberty and the acceptance that commerce and manufacturing operated in concert with agriculture in producing national opulence gave what was by now commonly known as political economy an enhanced role within the science of politics. Appreciation of the importance of such matters was one of the main factors differentiating modern versions of the science from their ancient and Renaissance predecessors. Hence Hume's decision to deal with economic topics as part of his political essays because they now provided the best examples of the value of 'general reasonings' in politics, and his statement in 'Of Commerce' that: 'The greatness of a state, and the happiness of its subjects, how independent soever they may be supposed in some respects, are commonly allowed to be inseparable with regard to commerce.' The writings of the Economistes had focused on the existence of an underlying 'natural order' in economic affairs, and to this Smith had added an account of the 'natural progress of opulence' which could be contrasted with the actual historical process which had produced present European arrangements, often largely as a result of mercantile theories of statecraft which it was Smith's object to condemn. Hidden mechanisms, involving unintended results, appeared to control the everyday economic life of nations, and the wise regulation of internal and external commerce, taxation, public debt, and the whole range of duties belonging to the sovereign assumed greater importance. Building to some extent on Hume's economic essays, Smith created a major branch of the science of the legislator, extending it to cover the correlative art of legislation in Book v of the Wealth of Nations, where he dealt with the responsibilities of the sovereign with respect to defence, justice, education, and other public works. 6

For a more detailed treatment of the issues raised in this section see Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge, 1978); see also Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, 1981).

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The emphasis on commerce and liberty, and the concern with the administration of justice, deflected attention away from forms of government as the main focus of Hume and Smith's science of politics. The diversity of forms of government to be found in Europe showed that commercial society could flourish under quite different political arrangements. Moreover, if liberty was a modern European phenomenon, shared in some measure by all post-feudal societies, political debates centring on such local political events as that which occurred in England in 1688 could be made to seem insular and parochial. The 'matchless' English constitution and the process by which the English people had come to enjoy a form of monarchy limited by Parliament could now be interpreted as an accidental departure, no matter how fortunate, from a more general European pattern which tended to favour absolute monarchy in large states. Hume stressed the fact that absolute monarchies like that of France, though by no means 'free', nevertheless possessed the more fundamental type of liberty, namely personal and civil liberty, and that France was, in this and other respects, at least as civilised as England. Hume certainly did his best to show that much of the rhetoric of English party contest that centred on the events of 1688 and their aftermath was, in a useful phrase that has been coined to describe it, a form of Vulgar' as opposed to 'scientific' or 'sceptical' Whiggism.7 In his essays on parties, when explaining the necessary role played by 'influence' or 'corruption' in managing the Commons, and in his discussion of the possible fate of the British constitution in absolute monarchy, Hume opened up themes which ran counter to popular political understanding, but which continued to be cited by later political analysts and commentators. In one of these essays Hume gave classic expression to an assumption which he shared with Smith when he said that: Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government and fixing the several checks and balances of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, cooperate to public good.8 The assumption that, by and large, self-interest rules collective behaviour in political as well as economic settings entailed giving greater emphasis to impersonal institutional machinery as a means of checking, balancing, and 7

8

The distinction between Vulgar' and 'scientific' Whiggism was introduced by Duncan Forbes; see especially 'Sceptical whiggism, commerce and liberty* in A. S. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds.), Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford, 1976), pp. 179-201. 'Of the Independency of Parliament' in Essaysy Moraly Political and Literary, edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 volumes (London, 1875), 1, pp. 117-18.

Dugald Stewart and his pupils

31

harnessing self-interest and containing its more destructive results. Smith's version of the same idea can be found in his statement that 'such, it seems, is the natural insolence of man, that he always disdains to use the good instrument, except when he cannot or dare not use the bad one'; 9 and in the Wealth of Nations he displayed considerable ingenuity in proposing novel institutional devices for checking self-interest and turning it 'to public good'. 10 Accompanying this move towards impersonal machinery was a conception of the role of the legislator as an essentially adaptive one, avoiding the 'violence' of ancient statecraft by accommodating measures to 'the common bent of mankind', and even, where necessary, to 'the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people'.11 Within such a conception the prevailing state of opinion occupied an important place among the concerns of legislators, especially those called upon to operate in 'free' governments like that of England. It was in this sense that Hume stated that 'it is . . . on opinion only that government is founded'; and it explains why Smith was so concerned with the responsibilities of the legislator with respect to education as a means of moderating the more pathological states of popular opinion: In free countries, where the safety of government depends very much upon the favourable judgement which the people may form of its conduct, it must surely be of the highest importance that they should not be disposed to judge rashly or capriciously concerning it.12 The ideal legislator to whom Smith's science was addressed was differentiated from the mere politician by virtue of the fact that his deliberations were 'governed by principles which are always the same'. By contrast, 'that insidious and crafty animal', the politician, was guided by the 'momentary fluctuations of affairs', and hence was more at the mercy of clamorous interest groupings.13 Just as Hume expressed several anxieties about developments within the English system of government, notably those connected with public debt and the absence of discretionary powers, so the pressures capable of being exerted on the legislature by mercantile and manufacturing interests were of particular concern to Smith. Hume's treatment of the benefits associated with commerce, however, was far less 9 10 11

12 13

Wealth of Nations in Works and Correspondence; 11, p. 799. See N. Rosenberg, 'Some institutional aspects of the Wealth of Nations', Journal of Political Economy, 68 (i960), 537-70. The first of these expressions can be found in Hume's 'Of Commerce' in Essays, 1, p. 202, and the second in Smith's discussion of the legislator in Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976) in Works and Correspondence, 1, p. 233. Wealth of Nations in Works and Correspondence, n, p. 788. Wealth of Nations in Works and Correspondence, 11, p. 468.

32

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troubled by worries about concomitant drawbacks. Smith, on the other hand, drew attention to the consequences to the mass of society of the narrowing effects of the division of labour. In Smith's account, the dexterity of the manual worker in a particular occupation is often 'acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues'. 14 Here was a major case where the legislator was called upon to remedy, chiefly through education, an undesirable unintended consequence associated with the natural workings of commercial society. This problem was of considerable concern to Ferguson and Millar as well, and having been placed on the agenda of the science of politics was to surface frequently during the early part of the nineteenth century. For reasons mentioned earlier, Stewart's treatment of politics originally formed the culminating part of his course on moral philosophy. In the first of his publications based on this course, the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), he included a chapter on 'Abstraction' in which there was an important section 'On the Use and Abuse of General Principles in Polities'. It served as a statement of Stewart's methodological credo roughly equivalent to Hume's essay on the opportunities for reducing politics to a science, and it was, in effect, a defence of the possibility, indeed necessity, of applying general principles to politics. In advancing this position Stewart drew particular attention to the exemplary qualities of the Economistes and cited Condorcet's life of Turgot. Appearing as it did in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, and not long after the recent Paris massacre, an event in which Condorcet was then thought to be implicated, Stewart's endorsement of speculative ideas in politics, and French ideas to boot, required a measure of moral courage. Stewart's Whig sympathies may have already made him the object of suspicion to the Tory interest that controlled Edinburgh; he had visited France in 1788-9, and he shared fully in the early enthusiasm for the Revolution until 1793, when events took a more violent course. The publication of the Elements provided his Edinburgh opponents with an opportunity to attack him for citing Condorcet with approval: two Lords of Session joined in a request that he should retract 'every sentiment [he] had uttered, in favour of doctrines which had led to so giant a mischief. In a dignified refusal to comply with the request Stewart claimed that he was 'aware of the mischiefs to be apprehended from a spirit of innovation, and from sudden changes in established institutions'; and that being 'impressed with a sense of the importance of my situation' as an instructor of youth, he had always stressed the excellence of the British constitution 14

Wealth of Nations in Works and Correspondence, 11, p. 782.

Dugald Stewart and his pupils

33

and avoided reference to party politics. He admitted, however, that he would 'ever regret that [he] dishonoured some of [his] pages by mentioning with respect the name of Condorcet', though he maintained that the passage he had quoted breathed 'a spirit of moderation'.15 Though trivial in itself, this incident reveals the difficulty experienced by a prominent teacher in lecturing on the science of politics after the French Revolution, and the consequential obligation to vindicate its patriotic or citizenly purposes. The science had to go beyond explanation and description to inculcate attitudes that were favourable to adopting animating, yet non-inflammatory opinions. John Millar had been the object of similar suspicions in Glasgow in 1784-with perhaps greater justification.16 In Stewart's case, the criticism affected his Account of the Life and Writings ofAdam Smith; it led him to withdraw certain passages from his memoir on William Robertson; and it explains numerous hints, asides, and circumlocutions that appear in most of his writings. Stewart opened his defence of general principles in the Elements by taking his stand on the Baconian view that theory and experience could never be opposed whenever principles were drawn inductively from experience. He then set out to show that precisely because it was more difficult to conduct experiments in human affairs, or draw reliable causal inferences from historical evidence, it was necessary to adopt a 'philosophical' approach. What this meant emerged more clearly from Stewart's responses to a number of common objections to political theorising. Philosophy, he stated, was the remedy for a form of narrow political empiricism, which he identified with 'an unenlightened veneration for maxims which are supposed to have the sanction of time in their favour, and a passive acquiescence in received opinions'. As opposed to 'the history of actual establishments', a broader and sounder basis for political reasoning could be derived from 'an examination of the human constitution, and of the general laws which regulate the course of human affairs'. Stewart cited Hume in support of the 'danger of dwelling too much on details and of rendering the mind incapable of those abstract and comprehensive views of human affairs, which can alone furnish the statesman with fixed and certain maxims for the regulation of his conduct'. Theories were essential to successful legislation because the practical difficulties arose out of 'the passions and opinions of men, which are in a state of perpetual change'. Hence the past was a poorer guide than 'the sagacity of our conjectures with respect to the future', especially in an age when the rapid communication and diffusion of knowledge was making modern societies essentially different from those of the past.17 15 16 17

See the letters reprinted in John Veitch's memoir on Stewart in Works, x, pp. lxx-lxxv. See W. C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgowy 1735-1801 (Cambridge, i960), pp. 71-2. Elements, Chapter 4, Section 8, as reprinted in Works, 11, pp. 219-23.

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In the mechanical arts it was possible to test theory by means of experiment, but the complexity of political experience often meant that in 'opposing experience to speculation, we are only opposing one theory to another*. The historical record could not always tell us how apparently unchanging constitutional forms had been modified 'by gradual and undescribable alterations in the ideas, manners, and character of the people'; and since 'the errors of human art are frequently corrected and concealed by the wisdom of nature', there was a tendency to exaggerate the effects of statesmanship. Similarly, where so many 'natural' forces were at work, besides those associated with statesmanship, good legislative practice could not be guided by experience uninterpreted by general principles. The anti-philosophical or 'sceptical disposition' not only led to 'a bigoted attachment to antiquated forms', but was especially dangerous to those modern governments whose stability depends 'on the coincidence between [their] measures and the tide of public opinion' - a tide that was constantly moving in an enlightened direction. Under such circumstances, 'gradual and prudent accommodation of established institutions to the varying opinions, manners, and circumstances of mankind' was the only way to combat a revolutionary 'rage of innovation'. 18 At this point Stewart moved on to one of his favourite perorations on 'enlightened views with respect to the possible attainments of mankind', the fame of which 'cannot fail to increase as the world grows older, by being attached, not to a particular system of variable opinions, but to the general and infallible progress of human reason'. The invention of printing, liberty of the press, the effects of rapid communication and higher standards of education were emancipating man from 'the tyranny of ancient prejudices' and other types of despotism, setting on foot a general 'spirit of reformation'. Such changes were peculiarly favourable to the science of politics and its practical realisation in legislation that would focus on those principles that were most agreeable 'to nature and to justice'. Compared with earlier conceptions of political wisdom, the modern view concentrated on the natural mechanisms governing the everyday life of men in society, rather than on 'the conduct of mankind in their political capacity' alone. By recognising that most political disorders arose out of failure to respect these mechanisms, legislation would in future become far simpler, often chiefly a matter of removing obstacles which prevented the underlying natural order from manifesting itself obstacles that had been erected as a result of earlier and less enlightened ideas of statesmanship. Stewart's main example of modern speculations which embodied these 18

Works, II, pp. 225-30.

Dugald Stewart and his pupils

35

insights was, as we have noted, the work of the Economistes; they had accomplished the first task of any science of politics by describing what would constitute the 'ideal perfection of the social order' and how it could be realised by legislation. This ideal represented a limit, in the mathematical sense, 'towards which governments may be expected to approach nearer and nearer as the triumphs of philosophy extend'. But this limit or ideal should not be confused with earlier 'Utopian plans of government' which depicted political order as a problem for 'human contrivance' and 'skilful management', usually requiring 'a miraculous reformation in the moral character of a people'. It recognised that good morals were the effect of good laws rather than a precondition for them; and by concentrating on 'the whole plan of civil society' it discouraged partial expedients and 'indiscriminate zeal against established institutions'. The imperfect institutions of the present were accommodated to one another and to the existing state of human improvement; they could, therefore, only be improved gradually.19 Finally, Stewart gave reasons why 'the good citizen of the world whatever may be the political aspect of his own times, will never despair of the fortunes of the human race' by giving way to the sceptical interpretation of history as one of cyclical change from advance to degeneration precipitated by accident. The progress of civilisation in modern times was a process of unilinear advance; the ancient experience of cycle, mitigated only temporarily by political contrivance, was no longer relevant. The moral and political sciences had before them the same prospects of improvement as physics had when it was first taken up along systematic lines. And even if such hopes were based on illusion, it would still be important to cultivate them for their conduciveness to the ultimate interests of humanity; they fostered exertion in the public service by overcoming despair and by reinforcing the conviction 'that prejudice, slavery and corruption, must give way to truth, liberty and virtue'. A regard for the principles underlying the general interest was daily gaining at the expense of prejudice, folly, demagoguery, factional intrigue, and caprice - such were the achievements of public spirit based on 'the liberal and manly pursuits of political philosophy'. 20 Although this reads like a recital of the commonplaces we associate with standard accounts of the Enlightenment, notably the French Enlightenment of the philosophes, it contains much that was characteristic of Stewart's position generally, and helps to explain the attraction of his views to the 'liberal young' of Edinburgh during the long period of reaction to events in France. When Stewart published the second edition of the 19 20

Works, 11, p p . 231-40. Works, 11, p p . 2 4 1 - 5 1 .

}6

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Elements in 1802, he retained the section which had given offence and added a number of cryptic footnotes indicating that although it had been the object of 'uncandid misinterpretation', he still felt that it inculcated a doctrine which was 'favourable to the good order and tranquillity of society*. At the same time he took the opportunity to refer his readers to the fourth section of his memoir on Adam Smith.21 According to Stewart, in the Wealth of Nations, Smith had made a major contribution to the study of 'by far the most complicated class of phenomena that can possibly engage our attention, those which result from the intricate and often imperceptible mechanisms of political society'. As a systematic pursuit, this science owed little to classical precedent because ancient philosophers had confined their attention to forms of government and the means of perpetuating them, leaving to modern authors the more significant task of investigating 'those universal principles of justice and of expediency, which ought, under every form of government, to regulate the social order'. One of the main conclusions of the new science, for example, was that 'the happiness of mankind depends, not on the share which the people possess, directly or indirectly, in the enactment of laws, but on the equity and expedience of the laws that are enacted', thereby confirming that the 'general spirit of government' was a prior concern to philosophers when compared with questions of form and legitimacy, the latter being the main focus of those interested in 'first principles'. For if 'the only infallible criterion of the excellence of any constitution is to be found in the detail of its municipal code', the question of what value should be set on political rights and freedoms becomes secondary to 'those legislative improvements which the general interests of the community recommend'.22 Stewart's aim once more was to stress the gradualist implications of a philosophical or scientific view of politics. Such a view proceeded 'not by delineating plans of new constitutions, but by enlightening the policy of actual legislators'. Though capable of bringing enormous benefits to mankind, it could be attractive only to the 'speculative few'; it had 'no tendency to unhinge established institutions, or to inflame the passions of the multitude'. By implication, of course, the reverse was true of discussions of the first principles of obligation and legitimacy. Stewart defended Smith and again by implication himself - from charges of encouraging 'a rash application of political theories' by drawing attention to the passages in the 21 22

Works, 11, pp. 219, 237, 240-1. See his Account as reprinted in Essays of Philosophical Subjects in Works and Correspondence, i n , pp. 309-11. Stewart had cut short this part of the memoir because, as he explained in 1810, 'it was not unusual, even among men of some talents and information, to confound, studiously, the speculative doctrines of Political Economy, with those first principles of Government which happened unfortunately at that time to agitate the public mind'(p. 339).

Dugald Stewart and his pupils

37

Theory of Moral Sentiments in which Smith speaks of the wise legislator as one who, when he 'cannot establish the best system of laws, will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear'. The fact that this passage was added by Smith in 1790, possibly as a response to the French Revolution, made it peculiarly applicable to Stewart's own predicament three years later when the memoir was composed.23 Stewart's memoir on Smith, when taken in conjunction with the defence of the application of general principles to politics given in the Elements, provides a fairly complete basis for the position he was to adopt in 1799 when he decided to mount a separate course on the science of politics. The course was considered to be an important innovation largely because of the amount of attention Stewart devoted to political economy, broadly defined, as well as to the 'theory and forms of government'. The attendance of this course - given annually prior to Stewart's retirement in 1810 - was small when compared with his regular lectures on moral philosophy, but the interest aroused was intense, and the distinctiveness of what was being offered was widely appreciated.24 Stewart's definition of political economy covered all those speculations which have for their object 'the happiness and improvement of political society', and hence not merely those subordinate and instrumental questions suggested by the terms 'wealth' and 'population'. The philosopher tackling such subjects should address himself directly to the legislator in an attempt to delineate the legitimate functions of government, and to enlighten those who are destined either to carry them out or to judge the conduct of legislators. Such aims also dictated a different pedagogic strategy from that employed in earlier treatises, where a discussion of the theory and forms of government preceded political economy on the grounds that law and government were a precondition for regular social and economic existence. Stewart felt, however, that in this case, as elsewhere, 'the most obvious arrangement is not the most natural; and that it would be better to invert the arrangement commonly followed, by beginning, first with the Principles of Political Economy, and afterwards proceeding to the Theory of Government'. 25 His reasons for this inversion were precisely those given in his 23

See Account

in Works and Correspondence,

i n , p p . 3 1 1 - 1 8 . T h e passage added t o t h e 1790

edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments appears in Works and Correspondence, 1, pp. 24

25

23!-3See H . C o c k b u r n , Memorials, p p . 168-70; and J . Veitch in Stewart's Works, x, p p . 1-liii. Francis H o r n e r n o t only attended the course for three successive years, but advised his b r o t h e r in 1803 t o m a k e good use of the comparative advantage they conferred o n E d i n b u r g h as o p p o s e d t o L o n d o n : ' T h e r e are in L o n d o n m o r e than a dozen courses of lectures o n chemistry, t h o u g h n o n e certainly so valuable as those in E d i n b u r g h ; but there are n o lectures whatever o n political science': see Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Hornery M.P., edited b y L. H o r n e r , 2 vols. (Boston, 1853), 1, p . 245. See Lectures on Political Economy in Works, VIII, p p . 2 1 , 2 2 - 5 , 44; ix, p p . 299—300.

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memoir on Smith, namely that constitutions should be judged by 'the detail of [their] municipal code'. The happiness of the people at large depended immediately on wise systems of political economy, whereas the effect of forms of government in producing such systems was more contingent and remote. As a result of 'ignorance and prejudice' on the part of an unimproved populace, even advanced constitutional and administrative agencies could sanction inexpedient laws. On the other hand, the effect of bad forms of government could be mitigated 'by an enlightened system of internal policy'. Once more too, there is a suggestion that a mixture of academic and prudential considerations supported this rearrangement. The establishment of just principles of political economy opened up to students 'distant prospects of general utility . . . which . . . interest the calm benevolence of speculative men'. Theories of government, particularly those inspired by a Lockean concern with the first principles of allegiance, political liberty, and rights, were more likely to attract the attention of the 'ambitious and the turbulent'. Moreover, Stewart stated that the wide diffusion of the principles of political economy was an essential precondition for making other improvements in forms of government possible. Clearly, what Stewart had in mind here was the 'democratical' trend of political and social speculation since the French Revolution. He asserted that 'in the present state of the world' democratical constitutions were likely to be unfavourable to enlightened systems of political economy; and he maintained that only when 'true principles of political economy were completely understood' would it be safe to accelerate the natural processes at work in modern commercial societies by which hereditary rank and power were being undermined. 26 Stewart's main object might be described as an attempt to steer a middle course between enthusiasm for constitutional innovation on one side, and political scepticism on the other. Post-revolutionary circumstances had cast doubt and suspicion on the discussion of forms of government, but pursuit of political economy, broadly conceived, revealed that improvements in legislation could be achieved regardless of constitutional forms. But while these priorities owe something to the atmosphere created by the French Revolution, Stewart was also able to cite the opinions of Hume and Smith in support of his position, and this makes it necessary to consider just where he was merely voicing the opinion of his distinguished predecessors, and where he was developing them in a direction of his own. 26

Lectures in Works, vm, pp. 9-29; and ix, pp. 376, 319-40. With regard to ranks see also Elements in Works, 11, p. 239.

Dugald Stewart and his pupils

39

Despite the diffuse qualities of Stewart's academic prose, as well as the obligations imposed by his role as a public teacher, there are many echoes of positions that are recognisably Humean or Smithian. The most obvious continuity can be found in Stewart's emphasis on universal principles of natural justice, and on personal and civil rather than political liberty - an emphasis which, as was noted earlier, had already shifted attention away from forms of government towards the 'general spirit of government' as judged by its degree of civilisation, the qualities of its judicial system, and the sophistication of its municipal code. From this point of view, Stewart was merely making the presence of an enlightened system of political economy, judged mainly according to the degree to which legislators had heeded the discoveries of Smith and the Economistes, an explicit mark of advance towards a regime in which general rather than particular interests were allowed to determine policies. Stewart's stress on those gradual historical processes by which modern establishments had evolved to their present state, the consequent concern with 'natural' rather than 'violent' or 'artificial' policies, the emphasis on accommodating laws to a given state of society - all these are part of a general inheritance dating back to Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith. Nevertheless, the manner in which Stewart upholds his position, even when purporting merely to describe that of his predecessors, sets him apart from them. And one of the main differentiating factors seems to be his more thoroughgoing adherence to a form of intellectual and moral 'perfectibilism' that may have francophile origins, but also embodies an optimistic teleology centring on the growth of objective knowledge which has a religious and Reidian base.27 Stewart admitted that some exponents of the idea of indefinite progress had given way to 'the exaggerations of a heated fancy', but considered the 'constant susceptibility of improvement [his translation of perfectibilite] as one of the characteristical qualities of the human race' to be the most conclusively established doctrine of modern times. In fact, hisfinalword on this subject in 1820 was merely a fuller and franker restatement of the views he had expressed in 1792, including the long quotation from Condorcet's life of Turgot which had 'dishonoured' his earlier pages.28 Nothing comparable to Stewart's perfectibilist speculations can be found in Hume or Smith. Indeed, one of the remarkable features of Smith's work is what can only be called a principled unwillingness to indulge in political extrapolation; and when he does so, as in the famous case of his 27 28

On this subject we have benefited from reading a chapter of an unpublished work by Knud Haakonssen entitled 'Political Economy and Jurisprudence in Dugald Stewart'. See Dissertation Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy since the Revival of Letters in Europe, in Works, 1, pp. 492-7.

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prediction about the chances of free trade being implemented in Britain, it is to indulge in the kind of scepticism regarding the future that Stewart was anxious to combat: 'To expect. . . that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it.'29 Hume and Smith were occasionally prepared to indulge in Utopian speculations: witness Hume's essay on the 'Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth' and Smith's proposals for a legislative union of Britain and her American colonies. But in both cases they warned their readers that they were, so to speak, operating selfconsciously within quotation marks.30 Stewart had removed these marks by treating speculation about the ideal perfection of the social order as a deduction from the progressive principle of human nature, and therefore as something that should not be confused with 'Utopian plans of government'. Hume maintained that 'the world is still too young to fix many general truths in politics which will remain true to the latest posterity', but he ventured a few predictions with respect to the future of the British constitution in his essays on 'Public Credit' and 'Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic' which were doom-laden, with absolute monarchy, fqr example, being described as 'the easiest death, the true Euthanasia of the British Constitution'.31 Stewart might well have regarded this as another example of debilitating world-weariness; and in the circumstances of the day it probably came too close to a discussion of possible defects in the British constitution for safety. Holding lofty ideas about the human prospect was for Stewart both an antidote to the 'sceptical disposition' and the proper culmination of what might otherwise become mere historical studies. He was anxious to remedy the defects associated with the study of past history, namely passivity and the idea that nations 'contain within themselves the seeds of their decay and dissolution', by invoking future history: hence his stress on those features of the modern world which made it qualitatively different from the past. When discussing the fruitful combination of history, philosophy, and jurisprudence which had been achieved since Montesquieu first laid the ground-plan for such work, Stewart specifically warned against identifying the science of jurisprudence with the historical method 29 30

31

See Wealth of Nations in Works and Correspondence, n, p. 471. See Hume's opening remarks to cIdea of a Perfect Commonwealth* and his statements that a long disquisition on the subject would be 'both useless and chimerical', and, of his own plan, that *I cannot, In theory, discover any considerable objection'; see Essays, 1, pp. 481-2 (emphasis supplied). Smith said of his plan for union that he was not concerned with its practicability, but that it was the kind of Utopian speculation that was not improper in the work of a philosopher; see Wealth of Nations in Works and Correspondence, 11, p. 934. See Essays, 1, p. 126. For his dire predictions on public credit, see pp. 367-74.

Dugald Stewart and his pupils

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entirely. The method was justifiable when studying earlier periods of society, where institutions could properly be attributed to 'circumstances and emergencies'. In enlightened ages, however, there cannot be a doubt, that political wisdom comes in for its share in the administration of human affairs; and there is reasonable ground for hoping, that its influence will continue to increase as the principles of legislation are more generally studied and understood. To suppose the contrary would reduce us to be mere spectators of the progress and decline of society, and put an end to every species of patriotic exertion?1

Another way of approaching this difference of emphasis between generations is to focus on the role of 'opinion' in political affairs. Any theory that defines wisdom as a process of accommodating legislation to the state of manners must set great store by opinion, and by education as a means of forming opinion. Although Smith had a good deal to say about the civic and moral purpose of education, there is no sign that he shared Stewart's confidence that the tide of opinion was necessarily moving in the direction of general 'enlightenment'. Opinion has many dimensions, including superstition, pride, folly, ignorance, and prejudice. Smith suggests ways in which these volatile and frequently destructive human proclivities might be contained or modified, but he does not maintain, as Stewart does, that they are in process of being replaced by their virtuous opposites. Similarly, while Smith attaches importance to 'natural aristocracy' in politics it is not defined in terms of its intellectual qualities.33 For Stewart, on the other hand, the great hope for the future lay in the advanced intellects of the age, those who possessed the capacity to go beyond mere practice to arrive at general or abstract truths. The benefits of the division of labour in such matters were more striking than in any otherfieldof human activity. Philosophical truths always served the cause of public happiness, and since the moral and material world showed every sign of being the result of divine beneficence, Stewart had no difficulty in describing philosophers engaged in revealing the underlying order as 'fellow-workers with God in forwarding the gracious purposes of His government'.34 Neither Hume nor Smith could be accused of underestimating the social import of philosophy, but Hume would have made short work of any argument that defined its task in terms of divine collaboration. Smith, however, employs many images based on the idea of providential design, and this has given rise to considerable disagreement as to how far he 32 33 34

See Dissertation in Works, 1, pp. 191-2 (emphasis supplied); see also pp. 487-520. O n the role of opinion and the natural aristocracy in Smith's work, see Winch, Adam Smith's Politics, pp. 101-2, 120, 155-7, 168-71. See Dissertation in Works, 1, p p . 492, 504-5, 517-20; and Elements in Works, n , p p . 2 0 3 - 1 4 o n the differences between philosophical and Vulgar* m o d e s of understanding.

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personally subscribed to the religious hypothesis, and whether it has an important teleological role in his explanations of the efficient as well as final causes of the social order. 35 Even if we adopt a positive position on both these questions, thereby minimising the gap between him and Stewart on such matters, it would still be possible to discern an important difference. Thus Nature in Smith frequently achieves her design by employing deceit and artifice. The philosopher, therefore, has to accept the task of unravelling unintended consequences, tracing out the differences between the intentions of short-sighted individuals and the resulting social outcomes, without pretending to usurp the role of God, let alone collaborate with Him. Stewart's notion of progress, by virtue of its emphasis on unilinear intellectual advance, leaves less scope for Nature's deceit or unintended consequences, particularly when dealing with future prospects, and his expectations of the philosopher are, in consequence, more confident and ambitious. For the same reason, although Stewart always maintained an appropriate academic caution when dealing with practical applications of science to human affairs, he displays little of Smith's detailed interest in the problems of persuasion and the processes of implementing desirable policies in an imperfect world. This could account for Stewart's tendency, evident from earlier quotations, to conflate improvements in society with improvements in science. Knowledge seems to operate as an exogenous force to produce spontaneous improvement. The Baconian maxim that knowledge is power could hardly be taken further towards a moral-cum-intellectual fusion of the purposes of science with the art of legislation. As we shall see in a later essay, this particular style of reasoning was to re-surface in the work of one of Stewart's more vociferous pupils, and it has, perhaps, earned Stewart the reputation for advancing the posture of the Virtuous expert' at the expense of the Virtuous citizen'. 36 Like Hume and Smith, Stewart wished to rely more on 'imperceptible' or impersonal machinery in politics than on 'political sagacity', but he was also, on the one hand, more concerned about the dangers of adopting a purely spectatorial view of human affairs, and on the other, more optimistic about an imminent future in which legislation would be reduced to a minimum as a result of the diffusion of enlightened views. There is little evidence to suggest that Smith believed, especially on those legislative questions which entailed justice as between individuals and social orders, 35

36

For an interpretation that stresses S m i t h s 'theological functionalism', see T. D . Campbell, Seven Types ofSocial Theory (Oxford, 1982), ch. 5. See, however, the contrary position as upheld by Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator, pp. 74-9, 135-6. See N . Phillipson, 'The Scottish Enlightenment' in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 38-40.

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that there was any prospect of a withering away of the sovereign's responsibilities. In spite of his recommendations for curbing behaviour contrary to the public good, Smith sometimes gave way to exactly the kind of despair against which Stewart warned his students: {The violence and injustice of rulers is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy'. 37 Such remarks appear quite frequently in the Wealth of Nations, and they could account for Stewart's semi-apologetic distinction between this work 'and those speculations of [Smith's] earlier years, in which he aimed more professedly at the advancement of human improvement and happiness'.38 The characterisation of Hume and Smith as Sceptical Whigs' captures a consistent feature of their political stance - a quality of detached realism, a willingness to face up to unpleasant consequences, to advocate changes that would bring improvements in the conduct of human affairs, without expecting perfection to be achieved in this world. 39 In this special sense of the term, it seems possible to speak of Stewart being a far less sceptical Whig than either Hume or Smith; and one reason why this should be the case is Stewart's announcement that European man was becoming emancipated from his past, with the result that attention could be shifted towards future ideal standards that were now within his grasp. As we have noted, Stewart's fusion of a morality concerned with public happiness with the March of Mind was designed to overcome what might otherwise become a passive or contemplative notion of science. He was aware that a stress on 'machinery' and the role of those impersonal causal influences which had been at work in bringing society to its present state could have implications that were at odds with the active or citizenly qualities that a teacher was expected to inculcate, and even with the basic Baconian idea of knowledge as power. Stewart's predecessor in the Chair, Adam Ferguson, had expressed similar worries when faced with the work of Hume and Smith, and he had resolved them by emphasising the dangers to public spirit inherent in modern commercial society.40 Stewart's answer was to rely upon the diffusion of enlightened opinion as a substitute for public virtue; it was valuable precisely because of its self-fulfilling properties: belief in it enjoined 'patriotic exertion' on behalf of the common good. But it is not clear that this resolves Stewart's dilemma. The auto-suggestive qualities of the belief in progress, when widespread in society, seem to reintroduce an impersonal teleology, even determinism. The debilitating effect on the 37 38 39 40

See Wealth of Nations in Works and Correspondence, 11, p . 493. See his Account in Works and Correspondence, 111, p . 314 (emphasis supplied). O n this see especially Forbes, 'Sceptical whiggism', p p . 180-2. See A . Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, edited b y D . Forbes (Edinburgh, 1966), pp. 248-61; and D. Kettler, 'History and theory in the Scottish enlightenment', Political Theory, 5 (1977), 437-60.

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active disposition of concentrating on the past and immediate present reappear as the inevitabilities of the future, leaving the legislator with a mere obstetric role. Nevertheless, although Stewart frequently comes close to replacing history by historicism, it should also be remembered that he felt that a more detailed knowledge of the springs of human nature enabled precise norms of equity and justice to be established, towards which enlightened legislators could now move more purposefully. If it is the fate of teachers to live on through their students, fortune was kinder to Stewart than to most of the breed. He wrote prolifically on many of the subjects that made up the moral philosophy curriculum, but his separate lectures on politics and political economy were not published until the 1850s, by which time, such were the developments in political economy in particular, they had become little more than historical curiosa. But it was in relation to this part of his teaching that it could truly be said that 'his disciples were among his best works'. The list of those who attended his separate course is an impressive one, including as it does the names of several men who were to achieve prominence in public life; but there can be no doubt that his teaching had greatest impact on and through the founders of the Edinburgh Review.*1 Their tributes to his influence gain rather than lose credence from the fact that, alongside expressions of admiration, they recorded reservations on matters of style and doctrine, and, between themselves at least, poked gentle fun at some of his foibles, notably his timidity and abiding fear of being misrepresented. None of the members of the group can be described merely as Stewart's disciples, but they did comprise a distinct coterie. Brougham and, more especially, Horner, later established reputations as experts in political economy, but all of the founders of the Edinburgh Review attended Stewart's lectures on the subject and retained a considerable interest in it. In common with the others, Jeffrey had, of course, worked his way through the Wealth of Nations, andhe took a keen interest in the articles on political economy which passed through his hands as editor. Indeed, the reputation of the Review as the leading periodical for 41

The remark concerning Stewart's disciples can be found in J. Mackintosh, Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1837), p. 345. Apart from the Edinburgh reviewers, Stewart's better-known pupils were Henry Temple (Viscount Palmerston), Lord John Russell, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice (Marquis of Lansdowne), Lord Lauderdale, John Ward (Earl of Dudley), and Alexander Baring (Lord Ashburton). There were two nineteenth-century studies of the Edinburgh reviewers: W. Bagehot, 'The First Edinburgh Reviewers', in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, edited by N. St John Stevas, 9 vols. (London, 1965-78), 1, pp. 308-41; and, under the same title, by L. Stephen in Hours in a Library (London, 1907), in, pp. 88-126. The definitive modern study is J. Clive, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802-1815 (London, 1957).

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expositions of all the new doctrines and applications of political economy could not have been established without Jeffrey's active sympathy, though he relied a good deal on the advice of Horner initially, and on that of J. R. McCulloch later.42 Despite some misgivings about the Scottish propensity to reason abstractly on human affairs, even Sydney Smith was not oblivious to the importance of the subject, though, as befitted a parson, he concentrated on such questions as population and the Poor Law. In other words, they all adopted Stewart's view that political economy was, for their time, a most important branch of the science of the legislator, and they did their best to promote this view in the Edinburgh Review. But first it is necessary to emphasise the broader matrix of studies which originally helped to make sense of political economy. As students, the members of the coterie were distinguished by their precocity, voracious reading habits, and general efforts to master the various branches of knowledge which made up the moral philosophy curriculum of a Scottish university. More remarkable is the way in which they attempted to maintain their academic interests throughout their subsequent careers. Through the pages of the Edinburgh Review, of course, they were to perform a broadly educational role at a fairly high level of sophistication; and their journals and correspondence frequently seem like those of academics manque;, required by the exigencies of life to devote their energies to more worldly and less intellectually satisfying pursuits. They certainly confirm Bagehot's remarks cited at the beginning of this essay concerning the comparative advantage conferred by an Edinburgh education so far as the writing of articles of a speculative kind was concerned. To the original members of the group can be added the name of James Mackintosh, a friend of Stewart's who was closely associated with the review from its inception, and who was also a prominent member of Whig circles centring on Holland House which the other Edinburgh reviewers joined when they shifted their activities to London.43 His career has certain exemplary qualities, and he features persistently in the margins of subsequent essays. Mackintosh achieved early fame for his Vindiciae Gallicae (1791), an answer to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in 42

43

For the importance of the Edinburgh Review in the early history of political economy, see Clive, Scotch Reviewers, ch. 5; and F. W. Fetter, 'The authorship of economic articles in the Edinburgh Review, 1802-47'', Journal ofPolitical Economy, 61 (1953), 232-43, and 'Economic controversy in the British reviews', Economica, 32 (1965), 424-37. The main biographical source is Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, 2 vols. (London, 1835). There is also a comprehensive study by Jane Rendall, 'The Political Ideas and Activities of Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832): A Study in Whiggism between 1789 and 1832', unpublished P h . D . thesis, London University, 1972. See also L. A. Mackenzie, 'The French revolution and English parliamentary reform: James Mackintosh and Vindiciae Gallicae*, Eighteenth Century Studies, 14 (1981), 264-82.

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France from a radical Whig perspective which had strong native roots in Scotland. Like Stewart and other early defenders of the French Revolution, Mackintosh revised his position after the events of 1792. He not only made elaborate apologies to Burke himself, but took the opportunity to retract his opinions publicly in an 'Introductory Discourse' to a popular series of lectures which he gave to lawyers in London on the Law of Nature and Nations in 1799. These lectures devoted to the science of jurisprudence led to the offer of a post as jurist-cum-codifier in Russia, but in 1803 he accepted a knighthood and the post of Recorder in Bombay, where he hoped to make his fortune and bring to fruition various philosophical and literary projects, including a work on morals and politics which he once described as 'the final cause of [his] existence'. During the next eight years of exile in India he spent much of his time reading philosophy and history, attempting to master all the contemporary German metaphysicians, while at the same time berating himself for his failure to begin writing. Upon his return to England, he became a Member of Parliament and resumed his place at the centre of the fashionable Whig society. In 1818 he was appointed to the Chair of Law and Politics at the East India College at Haileybury, which brought with it an opportunity to return to earlier interests in ethics and jurisprudence. When Thomas Brown, Stewart's successor in the Edinburgh Chair, died in 1820, Mackintosh reluctantly turned down the chance of becoming a candidate on the grounds that his political services were needed in Parliament. This meant relinquishing an early dream, and he was heard to 'sigh for the Professorship' on many subsequent occasions.44 Mackintosh did succeed Stewart in one respect when he agreed to complete the latter's unfinished introductory dissertation on the progress of ethical and political philosophy in the eighteenth century for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Even so, he did not have the time or stamina to complete the political side of the undertaking, and was forced to omit the treatment of continental ethical doctrines on which he had done so much work in India. The work was to bring him an inverted kind of posthumous fame when it became the object of a bitter attack from another of Stewart's pupils, James Mill, for its patronising treatment of the Benthamites as a sect. 45 There are some parallels between Mackintosh's career as a Scottisheducated Whig and that of other members of the Edinburgh Review circle. Like Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Brougham, and Horner were lawyers, the last two becoming MPs. But Mackintosh's career also illustrates the way in which scholarly projects, whose origins can clearly be traced back to the Scottish moral philosophy curriculum, remained part of the ideal towards 44 45

Memoirs, 11, pp. 369, 502. See pp. 99, 113, 121 below.

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which a man, otherwise active in public life, should strive. As we shall see, there are definite parallels with Horner's career - even down to the failure to write the great work on morals, metaphysics, and politics which Mackintosh felt was needed to express his life's work. Jeffrey regretted that his friend should have lived under the burden of this self-imposed obligation; his own writings conformed more to the pattern of a professional man of letters than a would-be Professor.46 The same is true of Sydney Smith, who insisted that he wrote solely for money or his own amusement. Even so, and for all Smith's gentle mockery of Scottish intellectual habits, he not only read many of the serious philosophical works of the day, including those published by Stewart, but was once guilty of giving a fashionable course of lectures on moral philosophy which was later to be published by William Whewell.4? Of Horner and Brougham, the youngest members of the coterie, a good deal more can be said about their academic interests. As university students, they became the leading lights in such established debating clubs as the Speculative Society, as well as founding clubs of their own, notably the Juvenile Literary Society and the Academy of Physics. Both of them took considerable interest in natural as well as moral philosophy, and Brougham became an accomplished mathematician and physicist, publishing papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society while still in his teens.48 Horner translated Euler's algebra from French at the age of twenty and added a biographical memoir, both of which were later published. Professors Playfair (mathematics) and Black (chemistry) were, therefore, at least as important as Dugald Stewart at this stage of their careers. But the science of mind and moral philosophy remained at the heart of the curriculum and provided the means by which the enterprise was held together and interpreted. Horner's journal provides the most outstanding evidence of Stewart's influence in this respect. He was certainly the most dutiful and earnest of Stewart's pupils, though this did not prevent him from suspecting Stewart of 'excessive timidity on the subject of political innovation, and the practicability of improvement by 46

47 48

SeeJ. Gross, The Rise and Fall ofthe Man of Letters (London, 1969), pp. 12-19. But it is also worth noting that Jeffrey was encouraged to apply for the Chair of History at Edinburgh in 1801, and in 1803 he was tempted by the Chair of Moral and Political Science at Calcutta; see H . Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey with Selections from his Correspondence, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1852), 1, pp. 117, 152. See Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy, delivered at the Royal Institution in the years 1804, j , and 6 (London, 1850). O n Brougham's natural science and its context see G. N . Cantor, 'Henry Brougham and the Scottish methodological tradition', Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 1 (1971), 69-90; and J. Charles Robertson, 'A Bacon-facing generation; Scottish philosophy in the early nineteenth century', Journal of the History of Philosophy, 14 (1976), 35-45-

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individual exertion'; and from wondering whether cerror and involuntary sophistry might insinuate themselves undetected' when clothed in Stewart's elegant rhetoric. 49 After taking his degree, and as soon as he began his legal training, Horner drew up the first of several plans of self-improvement. He wanted to master the science as well as the practice of law; he had to keep up his knowledge of mathematics and all branches of natural philosophy; and to cap this, he wished to use his knowledge of the philosophy of the human mind as the point of entry to the theory of morals and hence to the 'general science of politics, legislation, and jurisprudence, as systematised by reasonings and illustrated by history'. At about the same time Horner's reading extended towards political economy and the history of government and manners. Scots law was mixed with Hume's History, Montesquieu, Filangieri, and Kames's Sketches. Law, being a necessity, was given three hours a day. Physical science was rationed to attending lectures on anatomy and physiology and pre-breakfast chemical experiments and note-taking. The evenings were to be consecrated to political philosophy, history, and natural jurisprudence. In the course of the next months, however, other pursuits had broken in on the plan geology, mineralogy, chemistry, and philology. No wonder then that in his sketch of his own character, Horner regretted his lack of 7'attention suivie' and of a 'systematising head' like that of Turgot or Bacon: 'Why have I discernment to perceive that the "Opus Magnum" should be written anew every century perhaps, and yet want genius to execute the undertaking myself!'50 The desire to attain a comprehensive perspective on all branches of science could not be suppressed; it was encouraged by a reading of Condorcet's life of Turgot, as well as by Stewart's perorations on the 'love of arrangement' which accompanied the philosophical perspective. By 1799 this desire had hardened into a project for writing a work on the 'General Principles of Philosophical Investigation', or, as it emerged a few months later, a 'View of the Limits of Human Knowledge, and a System of Principles of Philosophical Inquiry'. 51 Horner was fully aware of the audacity of the plan, but he wished to keep the ultimate aim in sight as a means of measuring his rate of advance. Bacon was the model to be followed in order to be superseded by a modern compend; and there is no doubt that Stewart's enthusiasm for Bacon, together with the confidence he instilled with regard to the philosophy of mind as 'the foundation of the great fabric', was crucial to Horner's ambitions. Together with Lord Webb 49 50

51

See Memoirs, 1, p . 136. Memoirs, 1, p . 87. F o r the plans of self-improvement and the record of his studies, see p p . 48-53» 57~9> 6 l ~5> 68 ~9> 102-19, 122-45, I 5 I ~ 7 9 Memoirs, 1, p . 102.

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Seymour, he embarked on a thorough study and translation of Bacon's works; and he continued to follow his ambitious plan right up to the moment he decided to leave Edinburgh permanently to seek his fortune at the English Bar in 1803. Intellectual projects of an academic as well as practical kind remained a feature of his London life; and six days before his premature death in 1817, aged thirty-eight, when faced with enforced leisure, he sketched in another massive project, written, as he admitted, 'under the auspices of opium and returning spring'. It lacks the Baconian ground-plan, but it covers a theory of justice, history, politics, belles lettres, the classics, and 'an introduction to the art of reasoning, for the use of students'.52 Horner's actual accomplishments as a writer were chiefly confined to a few essays on political economy for the Edinburgh Review, but it is clear that his plans embodied a regulatory ideal. Whether or not, granted a longer life, he would have ended up in Mackintosh's predicament seems less important than the nature of the ideal. Indeed, the term academic manque may be subtly distorting if it suggests the modern distinction between amateur and professional scholarship. Horner's Scottish education furnished him with criteria of liberal accomplishment which overrode this distinction. His studies were partly undertaken to mitigate 'the illiberality of professional character', but the effort went so far beyond mere diversion that it deserves to be treated as evidence of an ideal of character formation or Bildung. It was certainly for his integrity and force of character that his contemporaries remembered him; and Bagehot took Horner as proof for his view that 'Whiggism is not a creed, it is a character'.53 Few people then or since would think of Brougham in the same terms. Indeed, Bagehot left him out of his portrait of the early Edinburgh reviewers on the grounds that Brougham's unstable, opportunistic, and 'rushing' qualities would disturb the balance of the picture. He out-lived and out-wrote all his contemporaries by surviving into his nineties as a prodigious author of political, literary, and scientific works. At the outset, however, in addition to the similarities in their Edinburgh education, there were clear parallels between Horner's career and Brougham's, particularly during the early years when they were both making their way at the English Bar, being feted in Whig circles, and later given seats in Parliament. One of the most important things they had in common was a developed interest in political economy. It was one of their main 'Scottish' accomplishments and gave them a distinct air of being modern Whigs when they arrived in London. 52 53

Memoirs, 11, p . 433 and Appendix E. Bagehot, T h e First Edinburgh Reviewers' in Works, 1, p. 326. See also the tributes t o Horner printed in Memoirs, 11, pp. 4 3 9 - 7 1 .

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As a result of attending Stewart's lectures on the subject, and following up the recommended reading, Brougham and Horner were about as well equipped to become experts in political economy as it was possible to be in the early 1800s. Stewart's aims as a lecturer were modest: he did not pretend to be constructing a new system or even closing an old one; he saw himself as supplementing his students' reading of the Wealth of Nations, indicating where Smith's doctrines needed qualification, drawing attention to recent empirical investigations, and illustrating applications to contemporary problems. His main sub-headings were population, national wealth, treatment of the poor, and education of the lower orders a list which suggests a practical orientation, though it allowed him to take up a number of 'speculative' questions en route. Stewart was aware that in following this plan he would 'necessarily deprive [his] speculations of the systematic form affected by those writers who bring every particular question (however complicated by existing or by local peculiarities) to the test of a few abstract principles', but he felt that the additional variety of materials to which his students' attention would be drawn was adequate compensation.54 Stewart's knowledge of the available literature before and after Smith, English and French, is remarkable: a listing of his sources would be a fairly complete guide to the state of the subject as it stood at the beginning of the nineteenth century, prior to the minor explosion which took place after 1815. Stewart's pupils were introduced to the Wealth of Nations via the writings of the Economistes, and they were taught to treat some of Smith's 'metaphysical' distinctions with reserve. Thus Stewart held that Smith had been unjust in his criticisms of the Economistes and had fallen into error in his use of the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. 55 His conclusion on this subject - a faintly damning one - is of some interest as a clue to the attitude later adopted by his pupils to Smith's work. . . . if, on the one hand, the language of the Economists be more precise and definite, and the result of a more accurate metaphysical analysis than that of Mr Smith, and if some of the fundamental principles of the former are of a more scientific nature, and more universal application, the doctrines inculcated in the Wealth of Nations are, on the other hand, with very few exceptions, of greater practical utility to those who are to engage in the general business of the world, especially to those who have a more particular reference to the business of political life.56 Brougham wrote as fluently as Mackintosh is reputed to have spoken, and suffered from none of the inhibiting self-consciousness that was part of Horner's character. In the first five years of the Edinburgh Review he 54 55 56

Lectures in Works, v n , p. 132; see also pp. 44-6, 59, 151. See Lectures in Works, v i n , pp. 253-308. Lectures in Works, vin, p. 306.

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wrote no less than fifty-eight articles on almost every subject imaginable. This may help to put into perspective his willingness to devote the last two years of his stay in Edinburgh to a single project, his two-volume Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers (1803) - a work which Mackintosh regarded as the best to appear on political economy since the Wealth of Nations. From the tone adopted in the book (by a man of twenty-five) and from the author's later reflections, it seems likely that Brougham would have considered such praise to be on the niggardly side. The book has been seen as an attempt to curry favour with those who could further Brougham's political career, but the stated intention was to extend Smith's reasoning on colonies beyond an examination of trade monopoly, the harmful effects of which, Brougham believed, Smith had exaggerated. One of the book's remarkable features is the authoritative, almost patronising, tone adopted towards Smith, who is criticised for being excessively under the influence of the American dispute, and (to take a more surprising example) for ascribing ctoo much to positive institutions and political events, in explaining their effects upon the progress of national wealth' in Book in of the Wealth of Nations - 'the most finished part of the whole book'. 57 In the following year Brougham wrote a withering attack on a work by another of Dugald Stewart's pupils, the Earl of Lauderdale's Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth (1804). Again, since Lauderdale was the leader of the Scottish Whigs, it has been claimed that this too was part of a campaign to gain favour with the Tories. But it is more relevant to notice that most of Brougham's review was taken up with what he described as cthe pure metaphysics of political economy', and with the merits of the distinction between productive and unproductive labour employed by Smith and the Economistes in particular. 58 These were exactly the kinds of issues that preoccupied Stewart in several of his lectures, and it is therefore not surprising to find Brougham (and, incidentally, Lauderdale) adopting the same critical stance towards Smith. Horner's reputation as a political economist was more solidly based; it chiefly derives from his contributions in the Edinburgh Review to the debate on the currency issue, his parliamentary speeches on the subject, and his chairmanship of the Bullion Committee. 59 It was certainly not 57

58

59

See H . Brougham, Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1803), 1, pp. 8, 144. For the biographical background see C. W . N e w , The Life of Henry Brougham (Oxford, 1961); and A . Aspinall, Lord Brougham and the Whig Party (Manchester, 1927). Edinburgh Review, 4 (July 1804), 343-77. O n productive and unproductive labour, see pp. 3 54-8. Half a century later Brougham was still claiming that this review established his credentials as the first person to uphold the correct scientific position o n the subject; see his Lives of the Philosophers of the Time of George III, 4th edn (London, 1862), p. 222. See F. W . Fetter's introduction to The Economic Writings of Francis Homer (London, 1957)-

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fanciful to believe that he would have been a natural candidate for the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in any future Whig ministry. But the details of Horner's later standing as a political economist are less important here than the educational context out of which his interest in the science arose. Education in political economy at this time was of necessity mostly self-education. Stewart's lectures may have been helpful as a stimulus, for their ordering of topics, and for 'the general manner and spirit with which he unfolds his speculations', but they were not well adapted to the task of teaching close economic reasoning of the kind that most of the leading issues of the day seemed to require. Horner's interest in the subject not only pre-dates Stewart's lectures, but most of his learning was done by private reading with other students. It goes without saying that Horner had carefully worked his way through the Wealth of Nations more than once, both by himself and in collaboration with his friend, Lord Webb Seymour. H e was by n o means uncritical; and as early as 1800 he confided to his journal the following doubt: Did not Adam Smith judge amiss, in his premature attempt to form a sort of system upon the wealth of nations, instead of presenting his valuable speculations to the world under the form of separate dissertations? As a system, his work is evidently imperfect; and yet it has so much the air of a system, and a reader becomes so fond of every analogy and arrangement, by which a specious appearance of system is made out, that we are apt to adopt erroneous opinions, because they figure in the same fabric with approved and important truths. That illustrious philosopher might therefore have contributed more powerfully to the progress of political science, had he developed his opinions in detached essays; nor would he have less consulted the real interests of his reputation, which indeed may have been more brilliant at first, by his appearance as the author of a comprehensive theory, but will ultimately be measured by what he shall be found to have actually contributed to the treasures of valuable knowledge. 60 Three years later this doubt had blossomed into a conclusion which is a more confident version of the view adopted by Stewart in his lectures: . . . I should be reluctant to expose Smith's errors before'his work has operated its full effect. We owe much at present to the superstitious worship of Smith's name; and we must not impair that feeling, till the victory is more complete. There are few practical errors in the Wealth of Nations, at least of any great consequence; and, until we can give a correct and precise theory of the nature and origin of wealth, his popular and plausible and loose hypothesis is as good for the vulgar as any other.61 It is significant that Horner's original doubt should have arisen as a result of reading Bacon's warning about 'premature systems'. For, as was noted earlier, everything Horner undertook at this stage had to be 60 61

See Memoirs, 1, pp. 126-7. See Letter to T. Thompson, 15 August 1803 in Memoirs, 1, pp. 237-8.

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measured in terms of where it might be fitted into his project for a new Baconian map of learning, a project which first required investigation of the logic of scientific enquiry. The study of Lord Bacon's writings is still uppermost in my mind, and that with an ultimate and steady view towards the philosophy of legislation . . . It is as a chapter in the great system of logic that I wish to understand the transcendental geometry; and it is with my eyes bent upon the philosophy of politics and law, that I have always been studying that system. Political science can only be prosecuted after the manner of the Baconian logic, and the practice of that must be more effectually learned from good models; it will be of inestimable value indeed, if to those we already possess in some of the physical sciences, may be added existing models of philosophical investigations relative to mind. But farther, political science ought to be erected on the philosophy of mind, as its basis; and the study of what has been ascertained in the latter is the only introduction to discoveries in the former.62 Stewart's influence in stressing the connections between political science, scientific method, and the philosophy of mind was crucial in determining Horner's priorities and pattern of studies. And the same was probably true of his early concentration on the works of Turgot, Quesnay, and other Economistes. As we have seen, Condorcet's life of Turgot was one of Stewart's favourite sources, and Horner not only read Condorcet's eloge carefully, but attempted to mount a collaborative effort among Stewart's pupils to publish a translation of all Turgot's political and philosophical writings. Horner, like Stewart, believed that the best approach to the Wealth of Nations was via the Economistes, and in 1802 he was prepared to place Turgot's works 'at the very head of all works of Economical Philosophy', partly on the grounds of doctrine, partly because 'they represent a model for the style of reasoning in this science'. 63 As in the case of Lauderdale and Brougham, though with less vociferousness, Horner felt it necessary to continue the search for the 'correct and precise theory of the nature and origins of wealth' which he could not find in Adam Smith. There was one subject which Stewart, following Smith and Ferguson, had dealt with at some length in his lectures which appears to have been of considerable concern to Jeffrey, namely the detrimental effect of the division of labour on the labouring classes. In his memoir on Smith, Stewart had noted the possibility 'that the same causes which promote the arts, tend to degrade the mind of the artist; and, of consequence, that the growth of national wealth implies a sacrifice of the character of the 62 63

See Memoirs, 1, p p . 214-16. See Letter to Duke of Somerset, 19 January 1802, Horner Papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science. For other references to Horner's reading of Turgot and the Economistes, set Memoirs, 1, pp. 68, y6, 101, 118-19, I29> I^°» 204-5.

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people'. 64 For someone as committed as Stewart was to opposing the 'sceptical disposition' described earlier, coming to terms with this 'very melancholy conclusion' was a matter of some importance. In his lectures Stewart criticised Smith for exaggerating the benefits of time-saving and manual dexterity when dealing with the effects of the division of labour, and for underestimating the role played by machinery in abridging labour. The substitution of machinery for labour also provided, at the possible cost of short-term unemployment, another long-term solution to the problem of 'living automatons'. By giving a new emphasis to technology, and reiterating the importance of public education, therefore, Stewart was able to keep the March of Mind on the road, and preserve the optimistic view that 'economy of labour' would join the 'action and reaction of manufactures, commerce, and agriculture on each other' in generating a system capable of 'consolidating the social union, and . . . organising the political system, by multiplying the mutual connections and dependencies of the different members of the community'. 65 And here, after all, was the main justification for including politics alongside ethics in the curriculum. Of all the Edinburgh reviewers, Jeffrey was the one who had most difficulty in not giving way to the 'sceptical disposition'; and he was frequently chided for this by his collaborators, and most effectively by Sydney Smith: 'What's the use of Virtue? What's the use of wealth? What's the use of honour? What's a guinea but a damned yellow circle? What's a chamber pot but an infernal hollow sphere? The whole effort of your mind is to destroy.' 66 In one of his earliest discussions of the drawbacks associated with the division of labour - a review of Millar's treatment of the theme -Jeffrey called upon the emergence of the middle classes as a partial antidote: 'The example of the middle classes descends by degrees to the ranks immediately below them; and the general prevalence of just and liberal sentiments, which are thus spread by contagion through every order of society, serves in some degree to correct the debasing influences of mechanical drudgery on the labourer.' 67 This belief in the mediating and ameliorating role, political as well as economic, of the middle classes was to become a major article of faith shared by philosophic Whigs and some of their opponents, but expression of it in this context seems to have been the highest point in Jeffrey's hopes. Subsequently, he had difficulty in avoiding a far more fatalistic conclusion than anything his teacher would have approved. By 1813 Jeffrey had broadened his pessimistic diagnosis to 64 65 66 67

See Account in Works and Correspondence, i n , p. 315. See Lectures in Works, v n , pp. 316-32. See also Dissertation in Works, 1, pp. 510--14 on the education of the lower orders. See Letters of Sydney Smith, edited by N . C. Smith (Oxford, 1953), 1, pp. 95-6 and 121. Edinburgh Review, 5 (October 1803), 175.

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take in the larger 'dream of perfectibility' of which the division of labour, intellectual as well as manual, was part. In direct contrast with Stewart's account of this dream, he drew attention to the persistence of war, faction and intrigue, to the unlikelihood of resolving disagreements on many questions that did not lend themselves to scientific demonstration, and to the effect of wealth and refinement in increasing the vices of sensuality and selfishness while undermining intellectual vigour and originality. Although much of this took the form of a literary exercise, the treatment of the economic dimension has a ring of personal conviction: The effect then which is produced on the lower orders of society, by that increase of industry and refinement, and that multiplication of conveniences which are commonly looked upon as the surest tests of increasing prosperity, is to convert the peasants into manufacturers, and the manufacturers into paupers; while the chances of their ever emerging from this condition become constantly less, the more complete and mature the system is which originally produced i t . . . The state of the operative manufacturers, therefore, seems every day more hopelessly stationary; and that great body of the people, it appears to us, is likely to grow into a fixed and degraded caste, out of which no person can hope to escape, who has once been enrolled among its members. They cannot look up to the ranks of master manufacturers; because, without capital, it will every day be more impossible to engage in that occupation - and back they cannot go to the labours of agriculture, because there is no demand for their services.68

Such conclusions were in marked contrast with those of other members of the Edinburgh Review circle, though they remained united in hoping that a universal system of education would encourage foresight and self-respect among the lower orders. According to Jeffrey's diagnosis, this left a great deal to be done by education, but none of the circle can be accused of leaving this matter to the system of natural liberty. 69 Jeffrey was a far more orthodox student of Stewart when it came to constitutional matters. Stewart's lectures on the theory of government became an addendum that could either be tacked on to his course on ethics or placed at the end of his lectures on political economy. They chiefly rehearsed, in the light of standard eighteenth-century sources, Montesquieu, Ferguson, Hume, Blackstone, and De Lolme, the theoretical advantages and disadvantages of the three simple forms of government. A brief general treatment of the classical theory of mixed government from Polybius to Montesquieu was followed by a longer discussion of the 'excellencies' of the British constitution as the most successful example of that theory in practice. The chief virtues of the British system were seen as the unity of the executive power embodied in the prerogatives of a 68 69

Edinburgh Review, 21 (February 1813), 2 3 - 4 ; see also idem, 11 (January, 1808), 39-40. See Clive, Scotch Reviewers, p p . 136—9, 145, 174 o n this subject.

$6

The system of the North

Monarch with known and limited powers, and a division of the legislative power between King, Lords, and Commons which ensured stability and balance. Stewart's version of the doctrine of balance, however, drew attention to the gap between theory and practice by stressing the regular social gradation of ranks in Britain and the fact that the legislative power was no longer separated between King, Lords, and Commons, each representing a distinct order in society. In practice, all three powers, regal, aristocratic, and popular, were now represented within the House of Commons itself, leaving the King and Lords with an indirect but necessary influence on the nature of the balance struck.70 In a series of articles written between 1805 and 1812 Jeffrey took Stewart's account of the nature of the balance within the British constitution, with its implied defence of influence along Humean lines, as the basis for his own interpretation of the constitution and his views on parliamentary reform. In reply to the claims of Cobbett and the Burdettites on the one side, and of Tory upholders of the royal prerogative on the other, he maintained that as a result of influence, and in order to counteract the growing power of the Commons, the King and Lords no longer functioned as distinct and clashing powers; they now operated 'not against the united Commons of England, but among them'. Although war and high taxation had created too many placemen, influence was still essential to the maintenance of balance, and as long as the composition of the Commons contained 'a sufficient number, and a sufficient variety of persons, to make sure that every class and every part in the country, will there have an advocate', reform of the system of representation designed to increase the power of the popular element was irrelevant.71J effrey's validation of the role of the Whig opposition in the Commons, by claiming that it held the balance between the people outside Parliament and the King and Lords within the Commons, has been described as sanctioning 'the inactivity of uncertain men' on the subject of parliamentary reform.72 As the editor of what had become by then the organ of the Whig party, Jeffrey's use of Stewart's theory of balance was certainly no longer subject to the limitations imposed by academic caution on such matters. But it also shows the flexibility of the eighteenth-century constitutionalist position; it continued to provide a language and a set of themes upon which endless variations could be played. When the Whigs did espouse reform, in the form of Edinburgh Review articles written by Mackintosh in 1818 and 70

71 72

See Lectures in Works, ix, 'Of Politics Proper, or Theory of Government', especially pp. 4I7-5 2 ; See Edinburgh Review, 10 (July 1807), 386-421; idem, 14 (July 1809), 277-304; idem, 20 (November 1812), 315-46. See J. W . A . Gunn, 'Influence, parties and the constitution, 178 3-1832', Historical Journal, 17(1974), 322.

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1820, Jeffrey's arguments about the composition of the Commons could be modified to uphold the benefits of a system of mixed and virtual representation, as opposed to one based on uniform and universal suffrage.73 What conclusions regarding Stewart's teaching on the science of politics can be drawn from these selective and largely biographical reflections on the careers of the Edinburgh reviewers? Stewart clearly played a significant part in stimulating their interest in a modern version of the science, which they in turn passed on to a larger public. He was less successful in convincing them of the promise embodied in the Reidian approach to the philosophy of mind, though there were ample compensations in this respect to be had from the interest shown abroad, particularly in France.74 Horner was reputed to favour Hume's metaphysics over that of Reid; Jeffrey remained unconvinced that anything useful could be derived from an observational (i.e. non-experimental) knowledge of the human mind; and Sydney Smith made it known - in response to Stewart's repeated statement that the philosophy of mind was still in its 'infancy' - that he proposed 'to wait till it comes to years of discretion'.75 Nevertheless, Stewart's treatment of the science of politics as an integral part of a new map of learning which all his students could join in exploring was surely a major part of his attraction as a teacher. Such grand visions of a Baconian compend which united belief in the March of Mind with high moral purpose and a sense of being part of the wave of the future would perhaps be attractive to the 'liberal young' at all times. But the vision came at a price. Looking back, somewhat ruefully, on his Scottish education, Mackintosh said that when so much activity was devoted to uncertain, speculative, and metaphysical subjects: 'Strength was exhausted in vain leaps to catch what is too high for our reach.'76 The grandiose projects left uncompleted by Mackintosh and Horner testify to this exhaustion. Brougham remained indefatigable to the last, and does not appear to have left any unfulfilled projects. In 1843 he produced a massive two-volume treatise on Political Philosophy covering everything from the fundamental principles of government, through a comparative account of existing forms, to the rights and duties of citizens and the functions of the state. The work astounded and amused Jeffrey, and was rumoured to have broken the finances of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, under whose auspices it appeared. The 73 74 75

76

Seep. 98 below. See D . P. D o c k w r e y , 'Dugald Stewart and the Early French Eclectics, 1796-1820', unpublished P h . D . thesis, Cambridge University, 1977. See Letters of Sydney Smith, 1, p. 190. Jeffrey's criticisms of Stewart's experimental claims for the science of mind are discussed by Robertson, 'A Bacon-facing generation', pp. 4 3 - 8 ; and P. Flynn, Francis Jeffrey (Newark, 1978), ch. 2. See Memoirs, 1, p. 29.

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task of reviewing the book for the Edinburgh Review eventually fell to Nassau Senior, an English-educated Whig; he treated it respectfully but a little distantly, concluding that it dealt with 'some of the most important, and, at the same time, most doubtful questions on which the human mind can be employed'. 77 Bagehot was less circumspect; he felt that 'an excitable, ungenial nature . . . incapacitates Lord Brougham for abstract philosophy'. After all, 'he who runs may read, but it does not seem likely that he will think'.78 The system of the North was still better suited to writing articles. Stewart maintained, long after the prevailing style of political economy had departed from the one he employed, that 'it furnishes no objection. . . that some of the best treatises on questions of political economy have proceeded from men who were strangers to metaphysical studies. It is enough for my purpose if it be granted, that it was by habits of metaphysical thinking that the minds of those authors were formed, by whom political economy was first exalted to the dignity of a science.' 79 But the statement is clearly in retrospective mood, and if political economy had not yet fully escaped its moral philosophy integument, Stewart's 'natural' arrangement in giving priority to political economy was soon to become the 'obvious' one, as we shall see in the next essay. Stewart's opinion that political economy had strict bearing on those improvements in the municipal code which were the chief marks of modern civilisation was certainly echoed in the careers of his students. Legal reform and political economy went well together as fields in which professional expertise could be brought to bear on the municipal code by public-spirited men with a modern philosophical training, but lacking independent means. Brougham's 'rushing' qualities, particularly his willingness to become engaged in the more dangerous questions of foreign policy, again make him a partial exception to this or any other generalisation. But even he made his early and most solid reputation in Parliament as a legal reformer, acting in concert with Mackintosh, Romilly, and Horner. Once more though, Horner's career, which advanced more rapidly than Brougham's, provides the best example. Horner was aware that his academic projects, and more especially his mastery of law and political economy, had particular relevance to his prospects in life. To a man of talent who lacked 77 78

79

Edinburgh Review, 81 (January 1845), 46. 'Lord Brougham* in Biographical Studies (London, 1889), p. 79. See also letter from Jeffrey to Brougham, 1842, Brougham Papers, University College, London; and letter from Jeffrey to Napier, 21 October 1843, in Selections from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier, edited b y his son, M. Napier (London, 1879), p. 438: 'The subject is a great one; and though I suspect it will be found to have been but cumbrously treated by our Omniscient, that is n o reason w h y the Edinburgh Review should not treat it better.' See Dissertation in Works, 1, pp. 477-8.

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political connections, Stewart's teaching offered a way of serving the noble cause of human advancement by means that were largely independent of forms of government. By extension, it also held out the prospect of a political career which might not entail loss of independence and excessive embroilment in party politics - what Horner described as the problem of finding 'a happy medium between the prostitution of faction and the selfish coldness of indifference'. Stewart's lecture on the priority of 'the general principles of internal economy and regulation' over 'the comparative advantages of different constitutions' led Horner to make the following comment in his journal: [Stewart's] view of political speculation falls in with the train of reflections on which my mind has lately dwelt a good deal, as to the share which the contagious spirit of party disputation almost insensibly leads most people to take in the parties of the day; a subject on which I ought soon to bring myself to a decision. The plan of sentiment and conduct can scarcely be difficult to form in my situation, and with my views; at too great a distance from the scene of public action for a man of liberal ambition to entertain any desire of political eminence, it can be no arduous task for me to fix myself in uncontrollable independence, and, by the intrenchments of liberal opinion and candid judgement of character, to insulate myself altogether from all forms of faction. My great difficulty is to ascertain the exact degree and tenor to which an interest in the general welfare of the state, ought to be kept up; for a scepticism or cold indifference about these seem to be both criminal and contemptible. Perhaps the remark of Dugald Stewart. . . may help me to a solution of this problem.80 Stewart gave more practical help in advising Horner to move to London in 1803 to practise law, and by furnishing introductions to such valuable contacts as Samuel Romilly. By 1806 Horner was being offered, and accepting, a 'place' on the official commission set up to deal with Nabob of Arcot's finances; and the sequel to this was the offer of a seat in Parliament under the patronage of a Whig magnate, the agonisingly self-conscious decision about which can be followed closely in his correspondence and journal. 81 Despite his own involvement in party politics, it was Horner who seems most to have regretted the increasingly partisan tone of the Edinburgh Review: knowledge of politics as a science should presumably add more distance. 82 80 81 82

Memoirs, 1, pp. 131-2. Memoirs, 1, pp. 266-7, 278-80, 362, 371-81, 386-97, 411-12. Of the famous ' D o n Cevallos' article in 1808 which caused so much trouble H o r n e r said:

'Are all the fruits of a long continued study of politics, great opportunities of seeing both affairs and men very near at hand, and the best talents nature could give, to be thrown away upon slashing declamations to suit a temporary purpose or give vent to the humour and fit of the day'; see letter from Horner to Murray, 9 December 1808, Horner Papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science. See also letter to Jeffrey, 12 June 1809, urging caution before committing the Review to parliamentary reform in Memoirs, 1, pp. 494-5.

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Stewart's teaching may also have been responsible for the declining enthusiasm shown by his students towards that largely Scottish intellectual genre which he had christened as 'theoretical' or 'conjectural' history. The use of such history could best be reserved to earlier stages of society which were more at the mercy of physical and social circumstances than modern forms of polity, where 'political wisdom' and enlightened opinion was increasingly becoming the moving force in history. Hence perhaps the feeling that something had happened to the whole approach if Stewart could blandly announce that in writing conjectural history it was more important 'to ascertain the progress that is most simple, than the progress that is most agreeable to fact'.83 It seems to be the kind of dismissive remark that goes well with his warnings against relying too much on the history of existing political establishments in arriving at conclusions. If the modern science of legislation could now concentrate on 'those universal principles of justice and of expediency, which ought, under every form of government to regulate the social order', future goals rather than past adaptation were the main priority. There was no lack of appreciation for earlier models. Mackintosh could praise Hume as 'one of the earliest cultivators of that philosophy which attempts to reduce the progress of society, the diversities of national character, and the large events of history, to fixed general laws'.84 Jeffrey too maintained that the 'masterly sketches' of Smith and Millar 'unquestionably hold a most important rank among the investigations of moral science'. But the genre had become an academic fashion and fallen into hands that lacked the necessary 'profound skill and delicate management'.85 While the young radical Mackintosh could speak of history as 'a collection of experiments rather than as a series of precedents', a few years later, after the disastrous experiment in France, he spoke rather less urgently of history as 'a vast museum'.86 Homer's brief use of conjectural history was confined to an uncivilised society, namely the Scottish Highlands;87 and in 1813 Jeffrey regretted writing an article which was 'in considerable danger of being attacked and ridiculed, as a caricature of our Scottish manner of running up everything to elements and explaining all sorts of occurrences by a theoretical history of society'.88 Sydney Smith had in fact ridiculed the habit: 'The Scotch, whatever other talents they may have, can never condense; they always 83

84 85 86 87 88

See Account in Works and Correspondence, i n , p. 296. See also the earlier remark that 'when we cannot trace the process by which an event has been produced, it is often of importance to be able to show h o w it may have been produced by natural causes' (p. 293). Memoirs, 11, p. 248. Edinburgh Review, 2 (April 1803), 206-7. See Miscellaneous Writings of Sir James Mackintosh, 3 vols. (London, 1854), 1, pp. 358-9 and in, p. 60. See Economic Writings, pp. 115-32. See Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, 11, p. 139.

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begin a few days before the flood, and come gradually down to the reign of George the third, forgetful of nothing but the shortness of life.'89 Stewart's influence was not confined to the Edinburgh Review coterie. Another figure who will feature prominently in the next two essays could also record that he owed to Stewart 'the taste for the studies which have formed my favourite pursuits, and which will be so till the end of my life'.90 Although Stewart seems not to have remembered him, the faithful student in question was James Mill, later to become the populariser of Ricardian political economy and the vigorous proponent of the Benthamite science of government and legislative reform. In neither of these capacities would it seem that he earns a place alongside those considered in this essay. Proper consideration of this proposition will be given later, but Mill is a useful reminder that when Stewart's pupils shifted their activities to London, they increasingly encountered not merely the personal challenge of matching educational ideals to opportunities and political realities, but also ideas on the science of politics that had a different provenance. 89 90

See Letters of Sydney Smithy i, p. 327. See letter to M. Napier in 1821 cited in A. Bun, James Mill; A Biography (London, 1882), p. 16.

II D

D

Higher maxims: happiness versus wealth in Malthus and Ricardo The truths of political economy form but a class among the principles of administration, and in their practical application must often be limited by higher maxims of state, to which in theory too they are held subordinate, as being less general. FRANCIS HORNER, 'Observations upon the Bounty upon Exported Corn', Edinburgh Review (1804) Wealth, population and power are, after all, only valuable, as they tend to improve, increase, and secure the mass of human virtue and happiness. T. R. MALTHUS, Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws (1814)

could accuse Horner, the most assiduous of Dugald Stewart's pupils, of adopting a constricted view of the map of knowledge, and the first of our epigraphs seems to indicate that in spite of the enlarged and more autonomous status granted to political economy by his teacher, he continued to adhere to the older Smithian definition of its domain, namely as 'a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator'. When applying the principles of political economy to practice, a more general science had to adjudicate in cases of conflict between wealth and indisputably higher objectives of policy. On the occasion in question, Horner was dealing with the problem made familiar by Smith's dictum to the effect that defence was more important than opulence; and this conflict between security and abundance remained an issue in the running debate on the Corn Laws which took place during and after the Napoleonic Wars. But it was Robert Malthus who had, somewhat earlier, widened the arena of potential conflict between policy objectives by speaking in his first Essay on Population (1798) of a more dramatic choice facing legislators, namely between 'wealth' and 'happiness', or, as he also expressed it in a way that brings home its significance for these essays, as a conflict between the concerns of political economy strictly delimited, and those of a more general science of morals and politics. This theme was to become a recurrent one in Malthus's writings; it featured in his work on population, the Corn Laws, the nature of post-war distress, and in the theory of optimal growth which he advanced in his Principles of Political Economy (1820). This work was conceived as an attempt to counter the orthodoxy which had begun to coalesce around the doctrines propounded by his friend, David Ricardo, whose own version of the Principles of Political Economy had appeared three years earlier. Although Ricardo was more inclined to confine his attention to questions which fell within the narrow province of political economy, in correspondence he found himself drawn by controversy into the wider circle of Malthus's speculations concerning the limitation and exceptions to this more constricted branch of knowledge when it was applied to legislative matters. It is with these broader dimensions of a dispute that is normally studied for its doctrinal and methodological consequences as part of the discipline history of economics that this essay will chiefly be concerned.

NOBODY

As a result of Malthus's Essay on Population and such urgent policy topics as the Poor Laws, the Corn Laws, the suspension of cash payments by the Bank of England, and questions of taxation and debt thrown up by the Napoleonic Wars, post-Smithian political economy acquired a 65

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number of new 'laws' and 'principles', chiefly those regulating population, rent, profits, wages, and the causes and consequences of capital accumulation. But how imperative were such laws as guides to the art of legislation? What counted as legitimate 'higher' modifying conditions, what merely as the constraints on action imposed by vested interests and the state of public opinion? At the lowest level such questions counterposed technocracy and political expediency, knowledge and performance; but there was a higher level, rarely confronted explicitly, which concerned the entire relationship of economic laws to political institutions. Malthus was frequently driven to invoke 'higher interests' and 'higher considerations', but he found it more difficult to specify what systematic guidance could be given to legislators when faced by a conflict between lower and higher interests. The laws of political economy might be subject to a court of appeal, but to what body of knowledge worthy of the term 'science', even in its looser contemporary sense, were they subordinate? An appeal to 'higher maxims' could not simply be a euphemism for something as vague, and possibly sinister, as raison d'etat. For, as Horner pointed out when using the expression, it should not be employed as a cloak for deviating from general principles 'whenever a statesman takes fright at a temporary inconvenience, or is captivated with some specious project of a remedy'.1 Malthus was sometimes accused of over-reacting to 'temporary inconvenience' by Ricardo and his followers, but his reputation as an original contributor to postSmithian developments in the science, notably on questions of population and rent, hardly suggests that he underestimated the weight to be attached to the concept of law in economic affairs: his popular opponents certainly did not think this was the case. As the works by Ricardo and Malthus indicate, the first attempts to draw up new conspectuses of the shape of post-Smithian political economy as it had emerged from a quarter of a century of debate, mostly conducted in topical pamphlets, review articles, and parliamentary inquiries, were made after the Napoleonic Wars. But none of these attempts sought to match the Wealth of Nations over the whole territory mapped out in that protean work. Indeed, the first effort to do this did not come until 1848, when John Stuart Mill published his Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy. This movement in a more specialised direction was accompanied by a tendency towards closure of common boundaries with neighbouring disciplines, and both moves were perhaps best symbolised by the substitution of the term 'principles' for Smith's more open-ended 'inquiry'. Dugald Stewart's separate lecture course gave an early indication - in effect if not by design 1

Edinburgh Review (October 1804) as reprinted in The Economic Writings of Francis Horner, edited by F. W. Fetter (London, 1957), p. 108.

Happiness v. wealth in Malthus and Ricardo

6j

and content - of the more specialised direction in which the fledgling science was to move when initiative for its development passed southwards from Scotland to England. Thus Malthus, who had praised Stewart's enterprise in mounting his course, and regretted the backwardness of English universities in this respect, was appointed to a Chair of Modern History and Political Economy at the newly established East India College at Haileybury in 1805, the first of its kind to be created in England. It is also significant, however, that the original title was Professor of General History, Politics, Commerce, and Finance, but that another appointment had to be made to take care of the departmental duties which came under 'General Polity and the Laws of England' - the post which Mackintosh took up in 1818.2 As Malthus's friend and biographer, William Empson, pointed out, once Malthus had transformed his polemical first Essay into the respectable and much-enlarged treatise of 1803, he 'embraced political economy as his intellectual profession'. His appointment at Haileybury was, from the outset, tailored to suit this profession; and his teaching was entirely confined to commentary on the Wealth of Nations and matters connected with his own population theory.3 Ricardo was never encumbered with teaching duties of any kind: by devoting his leisure and retirement fairly single-mindedly to the subject, he was quickly placed 'at the head of Political Economy' - though it took some heavy badgering from James Mill to convince him that the defects of his earlier education did not debar him from assuming this role. 4 With the possible exception of Francis Horner, none of the group of Stewart's pupils who founded the Edinburgh Review specialised in political economy to the same extent as Malthus and Ricardo. But contraction of the scope of the subject was accepted just as readily by all those Scottish-educated political economists who transferred their activities to London as it was by their native English counterparts. As we have seen, it was Horner who criticised Smith for erecting a 'premature system' and favoured 'detached essays' as the best means of developing the subject further. In common with Stewart, Horner also expressed doubts as to whether, despite the continuing practical value of the Wealth of Nations, Smith had discovered the 'correct and precise theory of the nature and origins of wealth'.5 Much of the development of political economy in this period certainly took the form of examinations of the limitations of Smith's theoretical system, with further differences later emerging as to 2 3 4 5

See P. James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times (London, 1979), pp. 172, 178. See J. M. Pullen, 'Notes from Malthus: the Inverarity Manuscript', History of Political Economy, 13 (1981), 794-811. The relevant parts of the Mill-Ricardo correspondence are reprinted in D. Winch (ed.), James Mill: Selected Economic Writings (Edinburgh, 1966), pp. 179-88. Seep. 52above.

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whether Smith had been wise to combine an exposition of the science with questions involving what became known as 'the art of legislation'.6 The introduction of rigid distinctions between science and art belongs more to the 1830s and 40s, when attempts were made, chiefly by Nassau Senior and John Stuart Mill, to codify the scope and method of what had by then become a fairly mature science. But there is much to be said for Senior's retrospective claim that Ricardo was 'the first English writer who produced Political Economy in a purely scientific form'.7 Malthus challenged both the method and the substance of Ricardo's version of the science, and he also advertised what he took to be his greater concern with 'practical applications' in the subtitle of his Principles. Something will have to be said about the merit of these claims in what follows, but initially it seems worth stressing that the relationship between theory and practice is separable (though not always separate) from the larger question posed by 'higher maxims'. A more precise and specialised treatment of the conditions favourable to the growth of material wealth does not have as its corollary a claim that such knowledge has overriding status in legislative affairs. Ricardo was no more likely to make such a claim than Malthus. A clearer distinction between science and art was later to serve as a screen behind which a strategic retreat could be made from earlier and stronger claims to furnish direct guidance in policy matters.8 During this period, however, there was another change which operated in the opposite direction. Once more, the origin of the change can be traced back to Stewart's decision to give priority to political economy within the science of politics on the grounds that its findings could be implemented without regard to different forms of government. Prudential considerations may have originally had something to do with this move, but by 1825 the same conclusion was being supported by J. R. McCulloch on more matter-of-fact grounds: The science of Political Economy was long confounded with that of Politics; and it is undoubtedly true that they are very intimately connected, and that it is frequently impossible to treat those questions which strictly belong to the one without referring 6

7

8

See Nassau Senior's comment that: 'I have often doubted whether we ought not to wish that Adam Smith had published his fifth book as a separate treatise with an appropriate title. It is by far the most amusing and the easiest portion of the "Wealth of Nations", and must have attracted many readers whom the abstractions of the first and second books, if they had formed a separate work, would have repelled. On the other hand, the including by so great an authority, in one treatise, and under one name, many subjects belonging to different arts, has certainly contributed to the indistinct views as the nature and subjects of Political Economy, which appear still to prevail.' Four Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (London, 1852), pp. 44-5. Four Introductory Lectures, p. 54. On the history of the science/art distinction and methodological debate in general, see T. W. Hutchison, 'Positive' Economics and Policy Objectives (London, 1964), ch. 1; and M. Blaug, The Methodology of Economics (Cambridge, 1980), Part 11. See pp. 139-40, 320 below.

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more or less to the principles and conclusions of the other. But, in their leading features, they are sufficiently distinct. The laws which regulate the production and distribution of wealth are the same in every country and stage of society.9 It is not difficult to detect here the basis for that confident universalising tendency of English political economy which was to be the object of so much criticism later in the century.10 The desirability of annulling the long-established marriage between political economy and politics does capture some features of the RicardoMalthus controversy. Ricardo was never as explicit as McCulloch on the subject, but the very fact that he applied to James Mill for guidance on the larger 'science of legislation* makes it clear that he did not regard it as synonymous with political economy.11 Moreover, according to the conventional view, Ricardo was the archetypal economists' economist, the author of the famous 'Ricardian vice' of proceeding to clear-cut theoretical and policy results on the basis of simplified 'strong cases' and deductive reasoning, and who, even as an MP, was described by Brougham as speaking in the House of Commons like a man 'from another planet'.12 Much can be said for this view: Ricardo, more or less self-consciously, and with due regard to the deficiencies of his education, did confine his attention both to and within political economy. Without making explicit claims to universality, but by devoting most of his analysis to the economic problems, habits, and institutions of a modern commercial society remarkably like Britain, he did not seem the best candidate for leading the search for exceptions to general principles. Malthus, on the other hand, sometimes seemed intent on reversing these priorities and deductive procedures; he certainly found it necessary to call on comparative and historical evidence more frequently to support his diagnosis of modern problems, potential or actual. At this point, however, we encounter what appears to be a major paradox. Malthus's Essay on Population, the publication for which he was chiefly revered or reviled by a general public that cared little for doctrinal and methodological refinements in political economy proper, does not seem to be the work of a sensitive relativist concerned to point out the limitations of general laws. It certainly does not seem to be a good example 9

Principles ofPolitical Economy (London, 1825), p. 38. See Essay VIII below. * For Ricardo's use of the education he received from Mill on the larger science see pp. 106-9 below. 12 For Brougham's remark see The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, edited by P. Sraffa, 11 vols. (Cambridge, 1952-73), v, pp. 56 and 85; he gave a politer version of the same sentiment after Ricardo's death, see vol. v, pp. xxxii-iii. The term 'Ricardian Vice' was coined by J. A. Schumpeter; see his History of Economic Analysis (New York, 1954), "7*-

10 1

jo

Higher maxims

of a work dedicated to the idea that economic laws are far from being imperative and must in consequence take account of a variety of political institutions and moral circumstances. Whatever may have been its subsequent career within political economy and the debate on the Poor Laws, the initial contribution of Malthus's first Essay is probably best described as that of a political moralist. By giving dramatic emphasis to the consequences of the uneven race between numbers and subsistence, Malthus intended to advance a decisive argument against the perfectibilist and egalitarian theories of Condorcet and Godwin. The Essay was a powerful anti-utopian tract designed to show that the poverty of the mass of society could be neither attributed to political institutions nor alleviated by changes in the existing structure of property and society. Malthus openly announced his defence of this structure and acknowledged the 'melancholy hue' of the conclusion which he drew from the perpetual dilemma posed by the constant tendency of population growth to outrun subsistence.13 Parson Malthus's answer to the pessimism of Population Malthus - a theodicy in which the creative mental pressure exerted by physical necessity was depicted as part of God's purpose in designing a universe in which men would be forced to exercise their creative energies - merely served to confirm the apologetic features of the Essay.14 Economic laws seem to be equated with God's laws in an effort to deliver the quietus to any prospect of beneficial change in social and political circumstances; human devices of any kind seem puny and helpless in the face of Nature. It is not so much a case of economic laws, but of biological necessity determining social and political arrangements. It is well known that Malthus modified his position in the second Essay by emphasising the preventive check of moral restraint; he also withdrew some of his more heterodox theological speculations.15 Nevertheless, neither the natural theology nor the moral categories of vice and virtue disappeared when the Essay became a more academic treatise on demography.16 Moreover, the fact that Robert Owen was added to the list of 13

14

15

16

See the Royal Economic Society's facsimile reprint of An Essay on the Principles of Population (London, 1798) in a volume entitled First Essay on Population (London, 1926), p. iv and chs. 10 and 15. By 'present structure of society* Malthus meant 'the necessity of a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers' (p. 287), to which he later added 'the system of barter and exchange and the general moving principle of self-love'; see the letter to Godwin in J. Bonar's endnotes to First Essay, p. v. See First Essay, chs. 13 and 14. While 'apologetic' was given a pejorative connotation by some of Malthus's critics, Malthus, as a sincere believer, would have had no difficulty in accepting the term in its straightforward natural theology sense. The background to this withdrawal is described by Bishop Otter in the memoir he wrote for the posthumous 2nd edition of Malthus's Principles of Political Economy (London, 1836), pp. xlvii-liii; see also James, Population Malthus, pp. 116-21. See J. M. Pullen, 'Malthus' theological ideas and their influence on his principle of population', History of Political Economy, 13(1981), 39-54.

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visionaries attacked in later editions shows that the work continued to serve an anti-utopian purpose. 17 It would seem, therefore, that Malthus takes his place in a long tradition of Anglican apologetics for inequality and poverty. With suitable modification, his work could be absorbed into nineteenthcentury versions of this tradition to supply the groundwork for the explicitly Christian political economy of Thomas Chalmers and Archbishop Whately, and give rise to hopes on the part of William Whewell and Richard Jones that he would become an ally in constructing an anti-Ricardian form of inductive political economy. It is certainly worth bearing in mind these features of Malthus's work that differentiate him from more secular-minded devotees of political economy. As an ordained minister of the established Church, Malthus was as much the successor to Abraham Tucker and William Paley as to Adam Smith, and as much the contemporary of someone like Bishop Sumner, who did so much to make his doctrines acceptable in Anglican circles, as of his friend Ricardo.18 But the significance of all this for Malthus's views on politics and the science of political economy should not be exaggerated. When Malthus found himself at odds with Stewart's pupils and with Ricardo and his followers, he conducted his side of the resulting dispute without decisive recourse to theodicy. Malthus's population doctrine proved capable of being absorbed into political economy, with or without its natural theology overtones. Dugald Stewart took it on board, in spite of his own optimistic views on social and intellectual progress,19 and this was characteristic of a later generation as well. As John Stuart Mill said of the Malthusian theory, speaking for a younger generation of students in the 1820s, This great doctrine, originally brought forward as an argument against the indefinite improvability of human affairs, we took up with ardent zeal in the contrary sense, as indicating the sole means of realizing that improvability by securing full employment at high wages to the whole labouring population through a voluntary restriction of the increase of their numbers.20 17 18

19 20

See An Essay on the Principles of Population, 8th edn (London, 1878), pp. 282-6 and Book iv, chapter 12 for the discussions of O w e n added in the 5 th edition published in 1817. See J. B. Sumner, A Treatise on the Records of Creation ... with particular reference... to the Consistency of the Principle of Population with the Wisdom and Goodness of the Deity, 2 vols. (London, 1816), especially 11, chs. 3-5 for an attempt to combine traditional Christian sources with the Malthusian population principle and a wide range of eighteenth-century Scottish social theorising on the question of commerce, progress, the division of labour, and inequality. It is of particular interest because Malthus made changes in the 5 th edition of his Essay to accommodate Sumner's views and endorsed Sumner's w o r k ; see Otter's memoir, Principles, p . lii, and the letter cited in James, Population Malthus, p . 351. F o r the subject in general, see R. Soloway, Prelates and People; Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, 1783-1852 (London, 1969), ch. 3. See Lectures on Political Economy in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, edited by W . Hamilton, 11 vols. (Edinburgh, 1854-60), v m , pp. 68, 86, 104, 203-7. See Autobiography and Literary Essays in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill,

(Toronto, 1981), 1, pp. 107-9.

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It was on this basis that a large measure of agreement among political economists could be established concerning the need for a fundamental reform of the Poor Laws - to which James and John Stuart Mill added the advocacy of a more positive solution than Malthus could contemplate, namely birth control. As on other matters, James Mill coupled the blackest of diagnoses of the present state of the labouring classes with the whitest of hopes about future prospects: 'indefinite improvement' in standards of living could be achieved once the 'superstitions of the nursery were discarded'.21 There was also as much room for positive, not merely dutiful, human agency in Malthus's position as there was in Smith's more secular use of 'invisible hand' arguments. In fact, while both Malthus and Ricardo believed in a 'system of natural liberty' in economic affairs, Malthus's political economy required him to invoke legislative agency more frequently, especially with regard to the Corn Laws and remedies for a general glut. Finally, any interpretation of Malthus that depicts him as an extreme necessitarian, or any other kind of extremist for that matter, has to overcome the evidence of his commitment to moderation and the golden mean as a methodological principle, and deal with an anxious and rather old-fashioned form of Whiggism on the perils faced by the mixed constitution in Britain. From the very beginning of his career as a political moralist Malthus had posited a conflict, actual or potential, between the preconditions for an increase in wealth, the subject-matter of the science of political economy proper, and 'higher considerations' of 'health', 'comfort', 'virtue', and 'happiness', the subject-matter of the science of politics and morals. And while he has often been charged with and convicted of errors of reasoning on these matters, there is a remarkable continuity in his thinking which connects the first Essay with the Principles. He was never again to express the paradox with the same force as he did in the first Essay, but the gradual retreat merely prepared the way for the position he adopted in the final chapter of the Principles, in which he stated the conditions which had to be fulfilled in order to reconcile wealth and happiness, while at the same time keeping the actual rate of growth of wealth within the boundaries set by the potential rate of growth of the economy. In addition to what might fairly be described as the pro-agrarian bias of his economic contributions to the debate on subsistence, there is also a systematic political dimension that can be traced in the fragments of his earliest work, an unpublished pamphlet entitled The Crisis (1796); it informs the anti-utopianism of the Essay in all its editions; and it surfaces frequently in the Principles. 21

See Winch (ed.) James Mill, pp. 196-7, 238-9.

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In the first Essay Malthus questioned Smith's identification of increases in national wealth with improvements in the 'happiness and comfort' of the mass of society. He did so in a chapter devoted to 'a probable error of Dr Adam Smith in representing every increase in the revenue or stock of society as an increase in the funds for the maintenance of labour'.22 This chapter contains the nub of the problem that was to dominate post-Smithian political economy, whether as cultivated by Malthus himself, or by Ricardo later. It was Smith's view that only in 'flourishing' or progressive states, those in which capital accumulation was taking place, could both wages and population be rising and the mass of society obtaining a share in the benefits of economic growth. But Malthus queried whether there were not circumstances in which the wealth of a nation, as conventionally measured, might be growing, while the standard of living of wage-earners remained stationary or fell. Suppose wealth expanded and nominal wages rose as a result of investment in manufacturing, that is without a corresponding increase in investment in agriculture: would this not create a situation in which the price of subsistence goods would rise as fast as, if not faster than, nominal wages, thereby denying benefit to the labouring poor? In other words, were there not circumstances in which economic growth might be incompatible with rising standards of living for the wage-earner under conditions of rising population and increasing costs of domestically produced subsistence goods? Ricardo might be said to have adopted this problem as his own, but to have given a different theoretical answer. Ricardo and his followers also endorsed what seem, in retrospect at least, to have been the forwardlooking solutions to the problem by arguing that with the abolition of restrictions on food imports, a tax system that favoured capital accumulation, and with birth control in the background, it would be possible for Britain to support a growing population at rising standards of living by shifting resources from agriculture into manufacturing, and by relying on foreign trade to provide essential food and raw materials. Malthus contested this orthodoxy across the board by expressing fears about excess capital accumulation, by upholding the need for a landowning class capable of using their rental incomes for 'unproductive' consumption, and by questioning the wisdom of allowing manufacturing to grow rapidly at the expense of agriculture. All these matters were extensively rehearsed in correspondence with Ricardo, and later in Malthus's Principles, where once again Ricardo was able to record his disagreement in extensive notes. Malthus also came to believe that more fundamental methodological 22

See First Essay, ch. 16. The changes in an optimistic direction made to this chapter in successive editions have been charted by G. Gilbert, 'Economic growth and the poor in Malthus' Essay on Population', History of Political Economy, 12 (1980), 83-96.

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differences lay at the heart of his doctrinal divergence from what he now described as 'the new school of political economy'. The economic doubts expressed in the first Essay concerning Smith's reasoning on wealth and capital accumulation reappeared in Malthus's Corn Law pamphlets as arguments in favour of protection as a means of maintaining agricultural prices, encouraging domestic food production, and sustaining a steady demand for home manufactures by those in receipt of rental incomes.23 The case was supported by arguments concerning the likely direction and magnitude of movements in prices, wages, profits, rent, and production, but the ultimate decision facing legislators was still framed as one in which a choice had to be made between 'wealth' and 'happiness'. Protection might entail a slower rate of growth of wealth and population, as well as a redistribution of gains in favour of the agricultural classes, but Malthus argued that the question of the Corn Laws could not be settled by recourse to the principles of political economy alone; it had to be considered in conjunction with higher considerations derived from the science of politics and morals.24 And what makes Malthus's case all the more interesting is the fact that he did not follow the usual polemicist's practice of placing all the moral and political benefits on the side of the scale which he favoured. Thus in depicting the balance that had to be struck, Malthus made use of the contrast between agrarian and commercial societies as refined in eighteenth-century discussions of the history of civil society. In common with the standard versions of these histories, Malthus acknowledged the benefits of commerce and manufactures to be as follows: They infuse fresh life and activity into all classes of the state, afford opportunities for the inferior orders to rise by personal merit and exertion, and stimulate the higher orders to depend for distinction upon other grounds than mere rank and riches. They excite invention, encourage science and the useful arts, spread intelligence and spirit, inspire taste for conveniences and comforts among the labouring classes; and, above all, give a new and happier structure to society by increasing the proportion of the middle classes, that body on which the liberty, public spirit, and good government of every country must mainly depend.25

Against these benefits, however, had to be set the social costs associated with manufacturing towns, where wages and employment fluctuated with fashion, foreign competition, and war; where 'discontent and tumult' were consequential evils; and where, even under the best of conditions, the 23

See Malthus's Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws (London, 1814); and Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn (London, 1815) as reprinted in The Pamphlets of Thomas Robert Malthus ( N e w York, 1970), pp. 120-1,

24

Pamphlets, Pamphlets,

25

130, 139-45* i$i-7h

pp. 117-19. p. 118.

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situation of the town worker was 'unfavourable to health and virtue'. Any purely agricultural state could be shown to be inferior to one in which commerce and manufacturing also existed, but this did not mean that the happiness of 'a country the most manufacturing of any ever recorded in history' would be served by a further relative increase in its manufacturing population. The legislator was called upon to make a decision based on the 'doctrine of proportions' about an optimal state: 'Many of the questions both in morals and politics seem to be of the nature of the problem de maximis et minimis in Fluxions; in which there is always a point where a certain effect is the greatest, while on either side of this point it gradually diminishes.'26 It should now be clear why necessitarian or deterministic interpretations of Malthus, in which political or legislative agency are allowed no part to play, seem wide of the mark. What has been said so far about Malthus's attempt to bring considerations of 'national quiet and happiness' to bear on legislation consorts well with his conservative defence of existing forms of property in the Essay without turning him into the reactionary, not to say corrupt, upholder of aristocratic society and polity of popular legend. Indeed, Malthus seems to have been remarkably consistent in sustaining a particular view of the dangers to the established system of civil liberty posed by the unhappiness and easily exploitable distress of the mass, whether derived from high food prices, a Poor Law which eroded 'independence' by creating paupers, general gluts, or the instability and unhealthiness of life in manufacturing towns. It is a view that is eminently 'political' in the sense that it depends on an interpretation of the virtues of the mixed British constitution, a view of what threatens the balance of the mixture, and of how such threats can best be avoided. If publishers had been willing, the first Essay would have been preceded by a straightforward political pamphlet entitled The Crisis, a View of the Present Interesting State of Great Britain, by A Friend of the Constitution. The surviving extracts show that this attack on Pitt's administration called upon 'the country gentlemen, and middle classes of society' to exercise their traditional restraining influence by 'removing the weight of objections to our constitution by diminishing the truth of them'. 27 In other words, Malthus was employing the standard oppositional language of opponents of executive encroachment, the eighteenth-century language of someone with 'Country' rather than 'Court' sympathies. That this remained the basic framework for Malthus's political views, rather than a 26 27

Pamphlets, p . 119. The extracts can be found in Otter's memoir, reprinted in Principles, pp. xxxvi-vii, and Empson's article o n Malthus for the Edinburgh Review (January 1837), as reprinted in Occasional Papers ofT. R. Malthus, edited by B. Semmel ( N e w York, 1963), pp. 241-4.

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youthful enthusiasm, is confirmed by the chapters added to later editions of his Essay in which he considered whether 'a doctrine which attributes the greatest part of the sufferings of the lower classes of society exclusively to themselves, is unfavourable to the cause of liberty, as affording a tempting opportunity to governments of oppressing their subjects at pleasure, and laying the whole blame on the laws of nature and the imprudence of the poor'.28 Anybody capable of posing the question that way must be about to give a negative answer, though this does not reduce our interest in the supporting arguments. Against the presupposition of the question, Malthus argued that where the distress of the people is attributed to their rulers, the potential despot is furnished with 'the fatal and unanswerable plea of necessity'; it also allows the appointed guardians of society in free governments 'to become daily less jealous of the encroachments of power'. Such doctrines were the main source of revolutionary discontent and the decline of revolutions into military despotism and further revolution once events proved that governments were unable to relieve distress. The conclusion is that the mob recruited from 'a redundant population goaded by resentment for real sufferings, but totally ignorant of the quarter from which they originate, is of all monsters the most fatal to freedom'.29 Malthus wrote the first Essay with the French Revolution in mind, but he was able to add in 1817 that the British government had 'shown no great love of peace and liberty during the last twenty-five years'.30 Visionaries like Paine and Owen could keep Malthus's fears alive, and Peterloo and other civil disturbances confirmed his diagnosis that economic distress among the un-propertied mass undermined respect for free institutions, retarded the prospects for moderate reform, and created conditions favourable to executive tyranny.31 Malthus also revealed himself to be a rather old-fashioned Whig in describing himself as 'an enemy to large standing armies', though chiefly in order to regret that their existence had proved necessary during the food riots of 1800 and 1801.32 As in The Crisis, the appeal is to the English country gentlemen to resist corruption and resume their traditional role as defenders of liberty against executive tyranny. The entire chapter is written in the forthright language of a 'Country' Whig appealing to the intellectual conventions and to the traditional checks and balances of the mixed constitution in a style well established by eighteenth-century popular debate. Even without the references 28 29 30 31 32

Essay on the Principle of Population, Book iv, chs. 6 and 7. Essay, p. 418. Essay, p. 426. See Ricardo's Works, v m , pp. 107-8 for Malthus's reaction to Peterloo. Essay, p. 418.

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to Hume's euthanasia of the constitution in absolute monarchy, there is no doubt that Malthus's reasoning conformed to a style that Hume and Smith would have recognised, though they might have regarded much of it as distinctly 'vulgar* as opposed to 'sceptical Whiggism'. Malthus's advocacy of state-supported education of the poor on the grounds that it would make them 'better able to detect the false declamation of interested and ambitious demagogues', was in fact a direct reference to Smith's opinions.33 Malthus also recognised that the indirect influence of government on the prosperity of its subjects was 'striking and incontestable' - a reference to the effect of security of property and 'good and equal laws' in encouraging prudence, dignity, and respectability among the lower classes.34 That Malthus was, in simple 'party' terms, some kind of moderate Whig can be inferred from his support for such measures as educational reform, religious toleration, and Catholic emancipation.35 And these Whig credentials help to explain his membership of the 'King of Clubs' and his good standing with members of the Edinburgh Review coterie. But they also make it necessary to account for the failure of that journal to take a more sympathetic view of Malthus's views on political economy - a failure of considerable significance to his efforts to mount an alternative to Ricardo and his followers. There were, after all, some grounds for believing that Stewart's pupils might have been well disposed towards a moderately pro-agrarian position. Stewart's own physiocratic tendencies were fairly pronounced; and he acknowledged that the export bounty on corn had found its 'ablest advocate' in Malthus - his pamphlet on The High Price of Provisions (1800) - without accepting Malthus's conclusions.36 Homer's analysis of the corn bounty, like that of Malthus, differed from Smith's in allowing that it would give a temporary stimulus to domestic production, and hence that its removal would be attended by temporary distress. He also accepted on 'higher maxims' grounds that 'an independent supply of subsistence lies at the foundation of the means of defence'. But he went on to leave the reader in no doubt as to his preference for avoiding artificial expedients in this, as in other matters affecting economic life.37 When the Corn Law debate was revived in 1815, Horner conceded that Malthus's espousal of the landowners' cause was disconcerting; and in a letter to Malthus he even spoke of himself 'as one whose conversion from heresy some hopes may be entertained'. But this seems to have been mere 33 34 35 36 37

Essay, p. 439. Essay, p. 424. See James, Population Malthus, pp. 50-1, 94, 140-1, 153-4, 234, 422. See Stewart's Works, v m , pp. 202-7, 247-52, 284-5; Jx> pp. 47—53, 118. See Economic Writings of Francis Horner, pp. 108-14.

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politeness; he offered detailed criticisms of Malthus's pamphlets on the subject, hinting that Malthus's own theories of population and rent could be used, as Ricardo was later to use them, to undermine the case for protection.38 Moreover, Horner's interpretation of the political background to the Bill was similar to the one adopted by Ricardo and fortified by James Mill: It is this audacious and presumptuous spirit of regulating, by the wisdom of country squires, the whole economy and partition of national industry and wealth, that makes me more keenly averse to this Corn Bill of theirs than I should have been in earlier days of our time, when the principles of rational government were more widely understood, and were maintained by stronger hands at the head of affairs.39 Malthus's mild heterodoxy could not be supported on economic or political grounds. Horner's position is not merely revealing but marks an important juncture in Malthus's career. Jeffrey, as we have seen, shared Malthus's doubts about the growth of manufactures, and hoped that Malthus's views would be published in the Edinburgh Review; but he allowed himself to be overruled by Horner's advice on the matter.40 Malthus's Corn La^ pamphlets were reviewed unfavourably by David Buchanan, and from this point on, in spite of the maintenance of friendly relations, Malthus could no longer count on the support of the most influential periodical of the day. Horner's judgement on the unsoundness of Malthus's position was delivered before it was possible to speak of a Ricardian alternative, but when McCulloch began his long reign as the chief economic reviewer in 1818, his discipleship to Ricardo and personal hostility to Malthus ensured that the Edinburgh Review became a vehicle for the Ricardian version of political economy.41 This blow to Malthus's chances of advancing his economic opinions in Whig circles was compounded when another of Stewart's pupils, MacVey Napier, asked McCulloch, James Mill, and Ricardo to write most of the important articles on political economy in the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Malthus found it necessary to resort, therefore, to the pages of the Quarterly Review - the Tory periodical that had published several bitter attacks on his population theory - in order to register his protest against the way in which the 38 39 40 41

See Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Homer, edited by L. Horner, 2 vols. (Boston, 1853), 11, pp. 222,227. Memoirs, 11, p. 226. See also a more strongly worded letter on the same subject to James Brougham, 15 November 1814, Brougham Papers, University College, London. See pp. 54-5 above, and H. Cockburn, Life and Letters of Lord Jeffrey, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1852), 11, pp. 120, 145-6. See F. W. Fetter, 'The authorship of economic articles in the Edinburgh Review, 1802-47', Journal of Political Economy, 61 (1953), 234, 238-41; and D . P. O'Brien, / . R. McCulloch; A Study in Classical Economics (London, 1970), pp. 314-19.

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Encyclopaedia had fallen completely under the spell of the 'new school' led by Ricardo.42 It was in the Quarterly Review, too, that Malthus continued the counter-attack against Ricardo's methods of reasoning which he had begun in his Principles by declaring that 'the science of political economy bears a nearer resemblance to the science of morals and politics than to that of mathematics.43 This echoes in reverse one of Ricardo's complaints that Malthus's great mistake lay in not recognising that political economy was 'a strict science like mathematics'.44 Ricardo also acknowledged his concern with 'strong cases' and the long term or 'permanent state of things' as compared with Malthus's concentration on 'the immediate and temporary effects of particular changes'. Slightly modifying the terms of the contrast, Ricardo said: 'If I am too theoretical, which I really believe is the case - you I think are too practical. There are so many combinations - so many operating causes in Political Economy, that there is great danger in appealing to experience in favour of a particular doctrine, unless we are sure that all the causes of variation are seen and their effects duly estimated.'45 Despite Malthus's misgivings about Ricardo's methods and conclusions, he cannot be treated, either in praise or condemnation, as the embodiment of a pure inductivist position - though this is not meant to deny his great concern with short-run disturbances and attention to limiting circumstances that Ricardo either overlooked or assumed away. It was, after all, Malthus, the Cambridge mathematician, who introduced the misleading precision of the arithmetic and geometrical ratios into political economy, and who employed the algebraic language of a 'given quantity' to describe the effect of the constant passion between the sexes. It was also perhaps characteristic of Malthus that he should use a mathematical image drawn from the theory of fluxions to express his doubts about Ricardo's mathematical approach. It is true that Malthus introduced a large mass of inductive and historical material into the later editions of his Essay, but the simultaneous emphasis on moral restraint gave an air of tautology to the theory, making the empirical evidence seem like purely confirmatory illustrations. When he was not arguing with Ricardo, Malthus was just as capable of defending 'theory' against the reasonings of mere practical men along lines similar to those employed by Hume and Stewart, and repeated by Ricardo and James 42

43 44 45

See Quarterly Review (January 1824) as reprinted in Occasional Papers, pp. 171—208; see also F. W . Fetter, 'The economic articles in the Quarterly Review and their authors, 1809-18 52', Journal of Political Economy, 66 (19 5 8), 4 7 - 6 4 . Principles of Political Economy (London, 1820), p . 1. See Ricardo's Works, v m , p . 331. Works, VII, p . 295.

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Mill.46 We also know that he declined to give whole-hearted support to the efforts of Whewell and Jones in their attempt to discredit Ricardo's deductive methods and his mono-causal conclusions with regard to rent and profits.47 Ricardo must now be brought more firmly into the picture, though it might seem as though this is unlikely to add much to an understanding of 'higher maxims', apart from a few standard concessions to 'gradualness' in legislative affairs. That Ricardo was not quite as implicit in his methodological convictions as is sometimes supposed can be gleaned from the statements quoted so far.48 But it also seems worth rehearsing the grounds of his self-conscious limitation of the science of political economy, and recording some of his reactions to Malthus's speculations about the sources of conflict between happiness and wealth. It must first be acknowledged that a simple but potent source of disagreement on this subject lay in Ricardo's unwillingness to grant the possibility of conflict so far as many of Malthus's main positions were concerned - agricultural protection, capital accumulation, and general gluts. A straightforward implementation of the system of natural liberty would, in Ricardo's opinion, harmonise happiness and wealth; a difference of view within the science, narrowly defined, could determine whether or not higher maxims needed to be invoked. But even ardent supporters of Malthus are likely to have some sympathy with another of Ricardo's complaints against his friend, that: 'He first begins by disputing the position whether certain measures will make corn cheap, but before the end of the argument he is endeavouring to prove that it would not be expedient that it should be cheap, on account of the moral effects it would have on the people. These are two distinct propositions.' And it was on this occasion that he went on to endorse the opinion that the duty of the political economist 'is to tell you how you may become rich, but he is not to advise you to prefer riches to indolence, or indolence to riches'.49 This point was of more than purely formal significance to Malthus's position on the conditions for sustained economic growth - a position that often required as much appeal to Smith's history of the impact of commerce and manufacturing on feudal or agricultural societies as it did to what is now known as a theory of under-consumption. At the heart of 46

47

48

49

Thus a chapter was devoted to the Necessity of general principles' in the later editions of the Essay (Book iv, ch. 13), which began by citing Hume's view 'that of all sciences there is none where first appearances are more deceitful than in polities'. See N . B. de Marchi and R. P. Sturges, 'Malthus and Ricardo's inductivist critics: four letters to William Whewell', Economica, 40 (1973), 379~93For a fuller demonstration see N . B. de Marchi, 'The empirical content and longevity of Ricardian economies', Economica, 37 (1970), 257-76. See Works, 11, pp. 337-8.

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Malthus's alternative system lay his views on the need for the stimulus of 'effectual demand' from some quarter to ensure that actual and potential rates of growth coincided, thereby minimising the chances of cyclical and long-term unemployment and stagnation.50 Within this context Malthus criticised Ricardo for paying insufficient attention to 'so general and important a principle in human nature, as indolence and love of ease'.51 What would happen if, once a people had fully supplied itself with necessaries and conveniences, they preferred indolence to luxuries? Without a demand for luxuries any further attempt to employ revenue as capital could not succeed. To Ricardo, who always approached such problems from the side of production or supply, the answer was simple: yes, indolence might be preferred to luxuries, and there might in consequence be no further motive to increase production. But once goods were produced, this would in itself generate enough income for them to be consumed.52 Malthus furnished a number of illustrations of situations and countries in which the preference for indolence over 'the rewards of industry' had altered the career of prosperity. But again Ricardo had no difficulty in agreeing that poor countries that were content with 'limited wants' and therefore lacked a motive for accumulation would remain poor and underdeveloped. An argument about the effects of accumulation was being shifted in mid-course to the prior but separate question of the motives for accumulation. Faced with evidence of stagnation and slow growth in the European feudal past, in China, in Spanish America, and in Ireland, Ricardo grew impatient with the change of question. How could any of this be relevant to a civilised country like Britain, or, slightly more generally, 'to countries with a dense population abounding in capital, skill, commerce, and manufacturing industry, and with tastes for every enjoyment that nature, art or science will procure'?53 But Ricardo and Malthus were not always to be found speaking across each others' shoulders. There were genuine, if unresolved, doctrinal differences; and Ricardo made some effort to join Malthus in making use of Smith's 'progress of opulence' arguments, though he showed more resistance to using the language of Divine Providence, despite Malthus's wish to put the theory of rent in that light.54 For example, Ricardo con50

51 52 53 54

From a massive modern literature o n Malthus's underconsumptionist challenge, o n e recent reconstruction, with a g o o d bibliography, can be mentioned: see W. Eltis, 'Malthus's theory of effective demand and growth', Oxford Economic Papers, 32(1980), 19-56. See Works, 11, p. 313. Works, 11, pp. 313-15. Works, 11, p. 340. Thus Ricardo denied that his position o n rent was a reproach against the bounty of Nature, but he did n o t agree that 'in a treatise o n Political E c o n o m y it should be so considered. The gift is great or little according as it is more or less, not according as it may

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ceded in fairly devastating fashion that economic development in Spanish America and Ireland might not be accompanied by benefits to the populace at large: Happiness was the object to be desired, and we cannot be quite sure that provided he is equally well fed, a man may not be happier in the enjoyment of the luxuries of a neat cottage and good clothes. And after all we do not know if these would fall to his share. His labour might only increase the enjoyments of his employer.55 On other occasions, however, he gave a more conventional account of the transition from agricultural to manufacturing society. It was possible to imagine an agricultural nation more militarily powerful than any country in which both agriculture and manufacturing took place, but it would never be as wealthy, and Ricardo clearly felt the entire line of speculation was otiose: there were no such nations. Give a country wealth, or let it acquire wealth, and it ceases to be purely agricultural, not because there is any thing which necessarily obliges it to be any thing else, but because with wealth a desire for manufactures is excited, and this desire becomes a powerful stimulus to the accumulation of capital in order that the desire may be gratified.56 The mechanisms of ordinary prudence and pursuit of self-interest might not always operate, or even bring net benefits to the individual beyond a certain point, but they certainly had to apply at the social or aggregate level, otherwise no proposition in the science was secure. It would be no answer to me to say that men were ignorant of the best and cheapest mode of conducting their business and paying their debts, because that is a question of fact not of science, and might be urged against almost every proposition in Political Economy.57 Ricardo had every reason to believe that Malthus accepted these elementary propositions; they were a standard part of the Smithian inheritance. What he could not understand was why, in order to support his views on 'effectual demand', Malthus was willing to abandon the concept of economic man on what seemed like a purely ad hoc basis.

55 56 57

be m o r e o r less morally useful': Works, n , p . 210. This seems blunt enough, b u t see Ricardo's praise for J. B . Sumner (note 18 p . 71 above) as 'the author of a clever b o o k o n the Records of Creation, in which Malthus' system is n o t only defended for its truth, b u t for its affording proofs of the benevolence and goodness of the Creator': Works, v n , p p . 247-8. Works, VII, pp. 184-5. Works, VII, p p . 102-3. Works, vi, p . 64.

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There are parts of Malthus's Principles, particularly those concerned with the effect of commerce and manufacturing in bringing about a more equal distribution of landed property, where he appeals to 'higher interests' of a political rather than moral character. These remind us of his 'Country' style of Whiggising, or what others have described as championing the ideal of aristocratic polity. Following Hume and Smith, he speaks of the benefits due to the break-up of the 'unequal and vicious division of landed property', but appealing once more to the 'doctrine of proportions', he defended primogeniture. By forcing the younger sons of the nobility 'to be the founders of their own fortunes', primogeniture had 'opened the fairest arena for the contests of personal merit in all avenues to wealth and honours'; it had 'infused a greater degree of energy and activity into professional and commercial exertions than would have taken place if property in land had been more equally divided'. In turn, this had favourable economic results in that it produced 'a very large class of effective demanders, who derive their power of purchasing from the various professions, from commerce, from manufactures, from wholesale and retail trade, from salaries of different kinds, and from the interest of public and private debts'. The clinching reason for favouring this deluge of downward social mobility on the part of the younger sons of the aristocracy was political, and it could be reinforced by fears of what was likely to happen in France as a result of laws designed to break up large properties. The fear, of course, was military despotism: a decisive alteration in the delicate balance of the mixed constitution through erosion of that bastion of English liberties, the landed aristocracy. 58 Ricardo did not share these 'fears of the duration of free government', 59 but his remarks on primogeniture are notably vague for someone with a reputation (which he rightly denied) for being the sworn enemy of the rent-receiving classes. He believed that landowners had a permanent interest in desiring protection from grain imports, whereas manufacturers had only a temporary interest in similar protective measures on their goods; 60 but his criticisms of James Mill's scheme for taxing the incremental element in land values suggest that he had a high regard for the expectations generated by existing property rights. 61 Of considerably more interest than primogeniture is the highly signifi58 59 60 61

See Principles of Political Economy ( L o n d o n , 1820), ch. v n , section v u . In the p o s t h u m o u s second edition of 1836, this became a section in B o o k 111. See Works, 11, p . 387. See Works, 1, pp. 312-14; 11, pp. 199-200. See Winch (ed.), James Mill, pp. 198—9, 338-42 for Mill's scheme and Ricardo's criticisms (also in Works, ix, pp. 132-3). See also C. Shoup, Ricardo on Taxation (New York, i960), p. 82. For Ricardo's views on security of property rights see Works, v, pp. 500-1; and vn, p. 370.

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cant note which Malthus added to his discussion of the political benefits of aristocracy after the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832. Imperious circumstances have since brought on a reform of a more sudden and extensive nature than prudence would have perhaps suggested, if time and circumstances could have been commanded. Yet it must be allowed, that all which has been done, is to bring the practical working of the constitution nearer to its theory. And there is every reason to believe, that a great majority of the middle classes of society, among whom the elective franchise has been principally extended, must soon see that their own interests, and the interests and happiness of those who are dependent on them, will be most essentially injured by any proceedings which tend to encourage turbulence and shake the security of property. If they become adequately sensible of this most unquestionable truth, and act accordingly, there is no doubt that the removal of those unsightly blots, of those handles, which, with a fair show of reason, might at any time be laid hold of to excite discontents and to stir up the people, will place the British Constitution upon a much broader and more solid basis than ever.' 62

This lengthy afterthought seems to be quintessentially Malthusian in flavour. For all his special regard for the landed gentry they had been linked with the middle classes as protectors of English liberties in his earliest pamphlet; and in the successive editions of the Essay, the references to these useful classes became steadily warmer, such that by the time Malthus wrote the Principles they were allowed to be a major source of effectual demand as well as a safeguard against executive tyranny. 63 But the statement makes perfectly clear that Malthus would hardly have been a firm supporter before the event of 'a reform of a more sudden and extensive nature than prudence would perhaps have suggested', though he was content to endorse it afterwards. This provides what could be the main clue to an understanding of Malthus's position on legislative matters, but first a word must be said about his consistent claim, partly confirmed by Ricardo himself, that he was more concerned with 'practical applications' than Ricardo. Ricardo's belief that political economy was 'a strict science like mathematics' does not mean that he relinquished practical objectives. For as he said: 'Political Economy, when the simple principles of it are understood, 62 63

Principles of Political Economy, 2nd edn (London, 1836), p. 380. This parallels the increasing emphasis in the Essay on the beneficial effects allowed to manufactured goods in inspiring a taste for comfort among the lower classes: see M. Gilbert, 'Economic growth and the poor', p. 92. Malthus repeated Smith's warning against merchants and manufacturers — 'that the interests of these classes d o n o t always prepare them to give the most salutary advice* on parliamentary matters - in both editions of the Principles (1820 edn, pp. 438-9; 1836 edn, p. 381), but he added the note o n the Reform Act quoted in the text, and strengthened his statements in favour of the middle classes: see pp. 350-1, 371, 374-5 in the 1836 edition. The middle classes were not, of course, identical with merchants and manufacturers.

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is only useful as it directs Government to right measures in taxation.'64 This constitutes a fairly restricted view of the guidance to legislators furnished by the science, but it accurately reflects Ricardo's heavy commitment to the system of natural liberty. It may explain why, apart from the incidental reflections on the Poor Laws, the chapters on taxation are the only concessions to the legislative art in the Principles. Taxation was the one case where 'interference becomes absolutely necessary', and even within this sphere Ricardo had little to say about the controversial questions of tax equity. 65 It goes without saying that there is no Ricardian equivalent to Smith's Book v on the duties of the sovereign with respect to defence, justice, education, and other public works. But it should also be noticed that there is no Malthusian equivalent either. Malthus makes many more remarks on possible remedies for cycles and gluts, but he does not deal with the principles of taxation - something which Ricardo regretted because it was on such topics 'that the most perfect knowledge of the science is required'. For all Malthus's talk about the 'doctrine of proportions' and the laws of de minimis et maximis, he found it difficult to derive specific maxims, high or low, which could be used to guide the legislator in the difficult choices which he constantly posed. What was more damaging - though it is a tribute to his candour - was his admission that the golden mean applicable to any given situation could probably not be ascertained. Thus when faced with Whewell's actual use of the theory of fluxions to express some propositions in political economy, he confessed that: 'The grand difficulty, however, with a view to practical utility, is the getting data to work upon, sufficiently near the truth; and such as can be stated distinctly in mathematical language. In many cases where one should wish to come to definite conclusions I should fear this was quite impracticable.'66 There is clearly a major tension between emphasising 'practical applications' and admitting that the statement of them, let alone their implementation, was 'quite impracticable'. A science of morals and politics so frankly vague must always be close to either accepting what was expedient, or adopting a post hoc ergo propter hoc view of science and art. 67 The only case where Malthus took up a fairly unambiguous policy stance on an issue requiring positive legislative action was in advocating abolition of the Poor Laws. 64 65 66

67

Works, viii, p. 133. See Shoup, Ricardo on Taxation, p. 249. See de Marchi and Sturges, 'Malthus and Ricardo's inductivist critics', p. 387. For an extensive study of the doctrine of proportions and Malthus's views o n its ascertainability see J. M. Pullen, 'Malthus on the doctrine of proportions and the concept of the optimum', Australian Economic Papers, 21 (1982). This feature of Malthus's thinking is well brought out by James, Population Malthus: see, e.g., pp. 256-7.

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On agricultural protection, his position, after rehearsing all the arguments, was one of standing pat. Yet even here he was inclined, in the face of popular opposition to the Corn Laws, 'to yield to the prodigious weight of petitions, and let the people have their way'. 68 He felt that he had discharged his duty in putting the case for the Corn Laws in as fair and unemotional a fashion as possible, but his friend Empson caught the flavour of Malthus's virtuous indecision when he gave this verdict on the episode: This duty he never regretted that he had performed. But his general principles in favour of freedom of trade were so absolute, that, at times, doubts came over him, whether any exception ought to be admitted. It follows, that he was far from continuing always equally satisfied that the necessity of the particular exception, which he had argued, in behalf of restriction upon the importation of corn was sufficiently made out.69 The self-adjusting properties of the system of natural liberty could seem, under these circumstances, to be the least hazardous method for determining the golden mean. Ricardo, who reached similar conclusions by more direct methods, could only see a man arguing with himself. As he commented at the end of one of Malthus's arguments which concluded in favour of leaving matters to the 'uninfluenced operation of individual interest' - cwho has ever proposed to leave it to any other'. 70 Walter Bagehot later joined a small chorus of Malthus's contemporaries in saying that 'there is a mist of speculation over his facts, and a vapour of fact over his theories'; but he added a slightly more generous note in stating that 'he has connected his name with the foundation of a lasting science which he did not plan, and would by no means have agreed in'. 71 For Malthus was also arguing with Ricardo, and much of his contribution to the science must be seen as antithesis to Ricardo's thesis. He cast himself in this role by consistently attempting to keep open questions that seemed to have been excluded or foreclosed by a more remorseless and universalising logic. An equivalent judgement on Ricardo was given by J. L. Mallet when he described him as 'herisse deprincipes\ as a man 'who meets you on every subject he has studied with a mind made up, and opinions in the nature of mathematical truths'. 72 On all the matters which fell within his purview, and this now includes his parliamentary speeches as well as his Principles, he was usually able to deliver unambiguous statements of his short- and long-run priorities, though more especially on the latter. 68 69 70 71 72

See letter t o H o r n e r , 14 M a r c h 1815, cited in J a m e s , Population Malthus, See E m p s o n m e m o i r as reprinted in Occasional Papers, p . 259. Works, 11, p . 450. W . Bagehot, Economic Studies ( L o n d o n , 1908), p p . 193-5. A s cited in Works, VIII, p . 152.

p . 267.

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Mallet also thought that James Mill had 'no doubt contributed to the formation of many of [Ricardo's] opinions', a judgement frequently echoed by later commentators, either in mitigation or as a means of compounding the charge of narrow dogmatism. Ricardo was certainly an apt, but by no means slavish, pupil for Mill's teachings - though his special talent for deductive reasoning, his poor education, and even his modesty could be regarded as 'accidental' features in the larger process of narrowing that accompanied specialisation in political economy. Mill was more confident in following Ricardo's lead in his Elements of Political Economy (1821), a 'Schoolbook' in which he aimed cto detach the essential principles from all extraneous subjects'. 73 But detachment did not imply for Mill any separation of science from art; he considered that to say 'something was true in theory but required correction in practice' was nothing more than 'a vulgar form of speech'. 74 Like his master, Bentham, Mill believed that science and art should be fused together in order to focus on the essential questions of 'what ought and ought not to be done by government'. But this is merely one aspect of what Mill fortified when he united Ricardian economics with the Benthamite science of legislation. The anti-landlord implications of Ricardo's rent doctrine, which were played down by Ricardo himself, were almost tailor-made to support Mill's analysis of the interest-serving properties of Britain's aristocratic system of government — a diagnosis he had formulated on political grounds much earlier. 75 He also gave the rent doctrine a central role in determining the goal of the land revenue system which he and his son attempted to apply to India. 76 But the important point to note about Mill's contribution is that the Benthamite principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number promised to provide this kind of precise forward-looking 'criteria of excellence' or 'standard of perfection' which Malthus's vague and slightly regressive invocations of 'higher interests' lacked. 77 Malthus's timid 'Whiggising' was exactly the kind of thinking on constitutional subjects that Mill set out to discredit in his Essay on Government, and which Macaulay, with some important modifications, set out to defend in his attack on the Benthamites. This forms part of the sequel to the story considered here, but there is room for a final reflection on the reaction of the Edinburgh Review circle to developments in political economy in this period. In the course of his attack on the Utilitarians, Macaulay complained that they 'have already 73 74 75 76 77

See Elements in Winch (ed.), James Mill, p. 204. SeeJ. S. Mill's Autobiography in Works, 1, p. 35. See Winch {td.), James Mill, pp. 8-10, 198-9. See Winch (ed.) James Mill, p p . 391-4; and m o r e especially E . Stokes, The Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959), ch. 2. See p p . 116-19 below for further detail o n Mill's criteria.

English

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maxims

made the science of Political Economy - a science of vast importance to the welfare of nations - an object of disgust to the majority of the community'. 78 Sydney Smith also complained that the science had become too 'metaphysical', by which he probably meant that intellectual refinements were being cultivated at the expense of practical utility; and he was probably speaking for himself as well as Mackintosh when he said of his friend after his death that 'he knew what is commonly agreed upon by political economists, without taking much pleasure in the science'. 79 The connections forged by James Mill between Ricardian economics and Benthamism could not have helped. Nevertheless, it seems significant that these Whig grumbles did not develop further, and that Smith coupled Malthus with Ricardo in assigning blame for what had happened. We have also seen that the Edinburgh reviewers were not inclined to rally to Malthus's methodological banner when they did not accept his substantive conclusions. Despite his antagonism to Malthusian economics, McCulloch was much closer to Malthus on primogeniture and constitutional issues than he was to Mill, whose 'incorrigible' radicalism and abstract style in the Elements he deplored. 80 Moreover, whatever Macaulay might say in the midst of his controversy with Mill, he could come to the defence of Malthus's population doctrines and cite a law of political economy as one of the discoveries of modern times, strictly comparable with earlier discoveries in physics and mathematics; and the doctrine which he cited was that quintessential Malthus-Ricardo contribution to post-Smithian political economy, the law of rent. 81 Mackintosh is reputed to have regretted the declining interest shown in the science of ethics since his youth, and he attributed the decline in part to the fact 'that political economy, more especially, had usurped its credit and interest among the philosophical reasoners of the day'. 82 Yet in founding the Literary Society of Bombay in 1804, he had given a possible reason w h y this should have happened when he said that 'of all kinds of knowledge, Political Economy has the greatest tendency to promote quiet and safe improvement in the general condition of mankind'. The safety was 78 79 80

81

82

See Macaulay's attack o n Mill's Essay on Government as reprinted in J. Lively and J. Rees (eds.), Utilitarian Logic and Politics (Oxford, 1978), p. 177. See Letters of Sydney Smith, edited b y N . C. Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1953), 1, p. 409; and Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh, 2 vols. (London, 1835), 11, p. 502. For his criticisms of Mill's Elements see J. R. McCulloch, The Literature of Political Economy (London, 1938) (1st edn, 1845), P- l 8 - O n primogeniture see D . P. O'Brien, /. R. McCulloch, pp. 288-9. For Macaulay's defence of Malthus see the pair of articles he wrote for the Edinburgh Review attacking Michael Sadler in The Works of Lord Macaulay, edited by his sister Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. (London, 1866), v, pp. 419-44, 470-97. O n the rent doctrine see the essay on 'John Dryden', Works, v, p. 85. See letter from Lord Holland in Memoir, 11, p. 448.

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due to the fact that 'the counsels of this science . . . [were] adapted to all forms of government: they require only a wise and just administration'.83 This was what Stewart and later McCuUoch had in mind when suggesting that political economy could be studied separately from the science of politics. To judge from the reception given to the divergent efforts of Malthus and James Mill to unite them once more by drawing attention to the higher or additional dimensions of problems raised by political economy, few devotees of the subordinate enquiry were willing to forego the safety and convenience of the separation. Alternatively, returning to Adam Smith's original image, one could say that this layered branch of the science of legislation had formed distinct roots of its own. 83

See Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, 3 vols. (London, 1854), 11, p. 567.

Ill D

D

The cause of good government: Philosophic Whigs versus Philosophic Radicals A philosophic Whig is firm to the popular principle of our government, and consequently firm against any encroachment, whether from the monarchical or democratical side. HENRY COCKBURN, Life ofLord Jeffrey (185 2) Those whom . . . we call philosophic radicals, are those who in politics observe the practice of philosophers - that is, who, when they are discussing means, begin by considering the end, and when they desire to produce effects, think of causes. JOHN STUART MILL, 'England under Seven Adminis-

trators', Westminster Review (1837)

the definitions offered here by Cockburn and Mill amount to little more than slogans, they signal an interesting divergence between the two groups who were most anxious to claim philosophical standing for their political diagnoses in the years leading up to, and immediately following, the Reform Act of 1832. Cockburn spoke for that generation of largely Scottish-educated Whigs which figured prominently in the first of these essays; while Mill spoke for a new wave, those younger followers of Bentham's Utilitarianism who took their cue from James Mill, regarded the Essay on Government as 'a masterpiece of political wisdom', and adopted 'enmity to the Aristocratical principle' in government as their motto.1 Rivalry, challenge, and supersession have frequently been taken to be the keynotes of the relationship between philosophic Whigs and Radicals in this period, with the narrower, harder-nosed, 'English' doctrines of the Utilitarians eventually emerging victorious over their more generous 'Scottish' counterparts. Such themes of rise and fall, success and failure, turn on questions of influence and durability which are not the immediate concern here. Rivalry, however, can be amply demonstrated by James Mill's choice of the philosophic Whig position as the one that particularly needed to be discredited, and by the consequential decision of both Mackintosh and Macaulay to attack the Benthamites as sectarian radicals, with Macaulay's assault on the Essay on Government serving as a suitable climax to the dispute, though by no means as the last word on the subject raised. The Mill-Macaulay dispute will feature prominently later in this essay, but it is first necessary to remember that rivalry was not the only, or even the most significant, dimension of the relationship between philosophic Whigs and Radicals.

ALTHOUGH

Once more, the teachings of Dugald Stewart on the science of politics provide a convenient benchmark. For if, as Stewart had maintained, improvements in 'the detail of the municipal code' were now the main items on the agenda of any modern science of politics, Bentham's claims to be addressing himself to that agenda could hardly be bettered. Bentham was, after all, the archetypal legal codifier and legislative machiniste, and lack of attention to detail is not among the charges usually levelled at him. Before his acceptance of the need for radical reform of Parliament in 1808, Bentham's indifference to forms of government consorted well with Stewart's doctrine that 'the happiness of mankind depends, not on the share which people possess, directly or indirectly, in the enactment of 1

See J. S. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays in The Collected Works ofJohn Stuart Mill, edited b y j . M. Robson and J. Stillinger (Toronto, 1981), 1, pp. 105-7.

93

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laws, but on the equity and expediency of the laws that are enacted'.2 Bentham's willingness to cut through the maze of fictions that surrounded the first principles of obligation also matched Stewart's priorities; there was a common dislike for the enthusiasms of more libertarian cases for democracy, American, French, or British; and a shared basic notion that security was perhaps the most important form of freedom.3 It is true that Bentham had rather different continental heroes from the Scots - for example, Helvetius rather than Montesquieu - and that having rejected natural law, along with natural rights, as 'nonsense on stilts', he was apt to be patronising when faced with such performances as Mackintosh's lectures on the Law of Nature and Nations given in 1799-1800: how could such a talented man waste his energies 'in teaching the anatomy and physiology of two chimeras' simultaneously?4 Furthermore, Bentham remained largely indifferent to much that had preoccupied Scottish historians of civil society, the origins and historical development of forms of law and government: he saw some merit in the work of Ferguson and Kames, but history was more often regarded by Bentham not merely as a record of error (which it could also be to Scottish historians), but as a record of uninstructive error, constantly in danger of succumbing to the Chinese or Blackstonian disease of ancestor-worship. De Lolme could be praised for avoiding Blackstone's 'spirit of obsequious quietism9, but Bentham was impatient with all the discussion of the British constitution that ran in terms of 'mixture' and 'balance': 'Talk of balance, never will it do: leave that to Mother Goose and Mother Blackstone.'5 Although Stewart was more appreciative of 'conjectural history' and had paid court to the constitutionalist tradition in his lectures, his gestures in this direction had become pious, if not perfunctory. His lectures, as we have seen, also heralded a shift from the sceptical and explanatory focus of Hume and Smith towards a more explicitly normative concern with future goals of enlightened legislation that could be attained regardless of specific 2

3 4

5

See above, p. 36. For the most complete account of Bentham's 'Transition to radicalism, 1809—10* see the article by J. R. Dinwiddy, Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1975), 683-700. See Douglas G. Long, Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham's idea of liberty in relation to his utilitarianism (Toronto, 1977), especially ch. 3. See letter to Mackintosh in 1808, in The Works ofJeremy Bentham, edited by J. Bowring, 11 vols. (London, 1843), x, pp. 428-9. See also his remark that 'I leave it to Adam Smith, and the champions of the rights of man (for confusion of ideas will jumble together the best subjects and the worst citizens on the same ground) to talk of invasions of natural liberty . . .' in Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings, edited by W. Stark, 3 vols. (London, 1952), in, p. 257. Plan of Parliamentary Reform as reprinted in Bowring (ed.), Works, in, p. 450; and for the remarks on De Lolme and Blackstone, A Comment on the Commentaries and a Fragment on Government in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, edited by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London, 1977), pp. 124, 473, and 498; on Kames see pp. 313-14, 330, 430.

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forms of government. It was precisely this shift that Bentham advocated when he criticised Grotius, Pufendorf, Montesquieu, and, with more contempt, Blackstone, for confusing historical and expository questions with those that were part of the more important province of 'critical' or 'censorial' jurisprudence.6 If Bentham had known more about the content of Smith's lectures on jurisprudence, it is possible that he might have added him to the list. Bentham's science of legislation achieved its novelty by concentrating on the detail of 'what the Legislator ought to do in future'.7 Stewart endorsed Bentham's Defence of Usury as a legitimate extension of Smith's system of natural liberty to an important branch of the art of legislation, and he cited the Panopticon scheme as an example of enlightened thinking on penal law reform.8 The general tenor of Stewart's teaching, therefore, might be said to have prepared the ground for the collaboration that later took place between his pupils and Bentham. Thus when Mackintosh, Horner, and Brougham first took up their careers as lawyer-politicians in London, they joined another Whig lawyer, Samuel Romilly, in collaborating with Bentham on matters of legal reform. Later, in the field of education, Lancasterian schools, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and University College, London, were added to the causes that united Stewart's pupils and Bentham's followers.9 James Mill was one of the prime movers in these educational causes, and rivalry certainly does not describe his relationship to his Scottish upbringing. He rightly claimed that Stewart had been a major influence on his thinking, and was to show throughout his career that his Scottish credentials were every bit as good as Mackintosh's and a good deal more direct than Macaulay's.10 Indeed, they are displayed in unalloyed form in his pre-Benthamite writings and they provided many of the theoretical underpinnings for the work on which his reputation was first founded, his History of British India (1818). There was ample foundation for John Stuart Mill's description of his father to Comte as 'the last survivor' of the Scottish school, even when it is granted that Mill was not the most reliable reporter on his own intellectual biography, especially where his father was 6 7 8

9

10

See Fragment in Works, pp. 397-404, 437, 498. See Fragment in Works, paragraph 13. See The Collected Works ofDugald Stewart, edited by W. Hamilton, 10 vols. (Edinburgh, 1854), ix, pp. 46, 156. See also his qualified agreement with Bentham's criticisms of abstract natural law doctrine, 1, p. 187. E. Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London, 1928) remains a classic study of the activities as well as thinking of Bentham and his followers, but should now be supplemented by William Thomas's account, especially on electoral politics: see W. Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 181J-1841 (Oxford, 1979). See p. 61 above. The main biographical source is still A. Bain, James Mill; A Biography (London, 1882). For additional details see D. Winch (ed.), James Mill, Selected Economic Writings (Edinburgh, 1966) and Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals, ch. 3.

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concerned.11 Bentham found that James Mill's detailed examination of the Superstitions' of the Hindus in the History made him 'melancholy',12 and the fact remains that, unlike Bentham, Mill considered the history of civil society to be an important adjunct - under some circumstances at least - to the Benthamite science of legislation. In view of these points of contact, even convergence, it is hardly surprising that the personal connections between philosophic Whigs and Radicals were often close and survived many sharp disagreements. Thus Etienne Dumont, Bentham's first editor, was a member of those groups in Paris, and more especially Geneva, that did so much to extend the influence of Scottish moral philosophy, and that of Smith, Reid, and Stewart in particular, in France and on the continent generally;13 his role as Bentham's disciple was quite compatible with friendship with Stewart and membership of the London Whig circles in which Stewart's pupils moved. James Mill remained in close touch with Brougham throughout his life; it was Brougham who first inducted Mill as a writer for the Edinburgh Review, and they later had a number of educational projects in common. Indeed, when one bears in mind that MacVey Napier, another pupil of Stewart's, first commissioned Mill to write articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, including the Essay on Government, and later became Jeffrey's successor as editor of the Edinburgh Review when Macaulay's attack on Mill's Essay was published there, it is clear how close the connections between the two groups were, even at the moment when they were seeking to distinguish their respective positions most forcibly. There were, however, early signs of friction. Thus in 1809 we find Jeffrey agreeing with Brougham's criticisms of Mill's contribution to the Edinburgh Review, saying that Mill would have to be kept to 'lower ground' because 'there is a vulgarity in his arrogance and his Jacobinism that not only does us discredit but puts one out of humour with decidedness and love of liberty'.14 By this time Mill had abadoned his earlier eclecticism to become Bentham's disciple and was already inserting into his articles hints of the anti-aristocratic position which was to become a distinguishing characteristic of the philosophic Radicals' stance on parliamentary reform. But Jeffrey's charge of 'Jacobinism' was directed more against a method or style of political argument than against Mill's veiled 11

12 13 14

See J. S. Mill, The Earlier Letters, in Collected Works, xiv, p. 566 and pp. 638-9. On the relationship of son to father on this subject see J. H. Burns, The light of reason: philosophic history in the two Mills' in John M. Robson and Michael Laine (eds.), James and John Stuart Mill: Papers of the Centenary Conference (Toronto, 1976), pp. 1-20. For Bentham's opinion see Bowring (ed.), Works, x, p. 450. See D. P. Dockwrey, 'Dugald Stewart and the Early French Eclectics, 1796-1820', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1977. Letters from Jeffrey to Brougham, 19 and 25 October 1809, Brougham Papers, University College, London.

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proposals for reform; and at this stage Mill's contributions could be censored freely by the editor. After all, before he published his History of British India, and before his articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica had gained some notoriety when circulated in pamphlet form in the 1820s, Mill was simply one of a number of Scots trying to make his living in London as a journalist; he could be treated by the founders of the Edinburgh Review rather like a minor but over-ambitious relative. The same could not be said of Bentham, whose works, particularly on jurisprudence, were always treated seriously by the Edinburgh reviewers. Nevertheless, Jeffrey struck most of the critical chords that were to be echoed later in his first long review of Dumont's edition of Bentham's Principles of Legislation in 1804.15 He granted Bentham many qualities originality, acuteness, impartiality, sagacity, and independence - but he was not inclined to accept Dumont's claims on behalf of his master that he had set an example of 'a new method of philosophising in politics and morality', and that he had created 'a new system of logic, by means of which ethics and legislation are for thefirsttime advanced to the dignity of a science*. According to Jeffrey, there was little that was false in Bentham's system, and little that was novel. The principle of utility itself could not supersede moral feelings or 'common impressions' of right and wrong because it was itself only capable of being organised by an appeal to such feelings and 'acquired perceptions'. Bentham, he held, was guilty of the scholastic vice of believing that classification and catalogues were adequate substitutes for reasoning; he had lost sight of the general problem in the detail, and had pushed 'his metaphysical analysis to a degree of subtlety and minuteness that must prove repulsive to his readers'. Scholasticism, manipulation of self-evident propositions, the derivative status of the utility principle, and a repellent style - all these were to feature later in Macaulay's attack on Mill. Horner's opinion of Bentham, qua judicial reformer at least, was much the same as Jeffrey's.16 In 1804 Mackintosh expressed his gratitude to Bentham and Dumont, 'not only for the instruction I have received from them, but perhaps still more for the bent which they have given to my mind'. It may be more significant, however, that four years later Mackintosh confided to his journal the following view of Bentham on judicial reform in Scotland: 'Profound - original - useless! unintelligible to common readers, and attacks all their prejudices.'17 But these grumbling 15 16 17

Edinburgh Review, 4 (April 1804), 1-26. See Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Homer, edited by L. Horner, 2 vols. (Boston, 1853), 1, pp. 237 and 427. See Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh, edited by R. J. Mackintosh, 2 vols. (London, 1835), 11, pp. 215 and 404.

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differences erupted into open hostility only when Bentham published his Plan of Parliamentary Reform in 1817, in which he announced to the world at large and at great length his support for the full radical programme of 'practical equality of representation or suffrage', annual parliaments, and the secret ballot.18 The task of articulating the Whig alternative in the Edinburgh Review fell to Mackintosh - a task made necessary by the fact that Bentham attacked 'moderate reform', and as part of his diagnosis of the evils of the existing system had said that 'Tories and Whigs, drive the same road to despotism'. Mackintosh believed that Bentham's extreme proposals, dogmatically upheld, would damage the cause of moderate reform by alienating the 'educated and proprietory classes'; and if the 'laborious classes' took up the cry of universal suffrage 'a permanent animosity between opinion and property must be the consequence'. Mackintosh argued that any uniform system that made representation a matter of number alone was incompatible with preserving the liberties of the people, and hence with the long-term interests of society. Such interests could best be served by broadening out from the existing variety of suffrage systems, enabling the various interest groupings within the nation to be 'superadded', as well as giving men of talent - names like Brougham, Horner, Mackintosh and, later, Macaulay would have easily come to mind - an opportunity to enter Parliament who might not otherwise survive a more popular system of election. The case for extending the suffrage to the lower classes did not mean that it should be extended to them all: some such representatives could speak for the rest without overwhelming by number alone the representation of other distinct classes and interests. While acknowledging that if z. uniform system were to be adopted, representation could best be extended to the 'middling classes' as a whole, Mackintosh, in common with Malthus, his future Haileybury colleague, employed a 'Country' defence of the case for maintaining the landowning ascendancy on grounds of the impartiality and independence of landed proprietors. 19 Although George Grote, one of Mill's recent converts to Benthamism, wrote the 'official' reply to Mackintosh, Mill made a covert attack on Mackintosh's scheme of virtual representation in his Essay on Government, and when writing, with the assistance of his son, his analysis of the aristocratical trimming mentality of the Edinburgh Review for the first number of the Westminster Review in 1824. In addition to these public 18

19

See Bowring (ed.), Works, 111, 436-622. In Bentham's Radical Reform Bill with Extracts from the Reasons (London, 1819), he summed up his position as 'secret, universal, equal, and annual suffrage'. Edinburgh Review, 31 (December 1818), 165-205; see also his plan of reform in a later issue, 34 (November 1820), 461-501.

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attacks, Mill ridiculed Mackintosh in private correspondence with Napier and Ricardo as the archetypal representative of Whig apologetics and empty eloquence.20 By way of return, Mackintosh had written to Napier criticising Mill's articles on government and education for the Encyclopaedia Britannica as 'remarkable examples of one of the erroneous modes of philosophising from experience which are condemned by Bacon'.21 He expanded on this theme when he characterised the Benthamites as a sect in his Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy (1830), and this work provoked Mill's Fragment on Mackintosh (1835), a vindication of Bentham and himself that served as a partial response to Macaulay's attack on his Essay on Government. One could say, therefore, that the intellectual battle lines between philosophic Whigs and Radicals, which had been marked out provisionally by Jeffrey before Bentham had declared his support for the radical reform of Parliament, were already clearly drawn up before Mill's Essay was published separately in the 1820s, and before Macaulay, in consequence, decided to make his effort to cut the Utilitarians down to size in 1829. Nevertheless, Macaulay's attack is rightly regarded as the most acute and sustained critique of the Utilitarian science of government. For a number of reasons, however, the nature of the respective claims in this WhigRadical dispute has proved difficult to establish.22 One reason derives from the form and sequence of the publications by which the dispute was conducted, and from the fact that Mill did not respond fully or directly to Macaulay himself. Mill's Essay was written originally as an article for an encyclopaedia edited by a Whig, which could account for what some have regarded as conscious or unconscious equivocation on Mill's part with regard to the specific reform proposals that would satisfy the general criteria for 'good government' he was expounding. In essence, this has amounted to asking whether Mill was really advocating universal 20

21

22

See Selections for the Correspondence of Macvey Napier, edited by M. Napier (London, 1879), p. 25, and The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, edited by P. Sraffa, 11 vols. (Cambridge, 1952-73), v i n , p p . 327-8. See Selections from the Correspondence, p . 34. T h e condemnation was, in Mackintosh's w o r d s , Bacon's charge against the ancient philosophers for 'having consulted experience, but with having consulted it either partially o r superficially'. All of the important articles involved in the dispute can n o w be conveniently studied together with an excellent introduction in J . Lively and J. Rees (eds.), Utilitarian Logic and Politics (Oxford, 1978). T h e dispute has given rise to a modern scholarly one of almost equal proportions, b u t the significant recent items are as follows: J. Hamburger, 'James Mill o n universal suffrage and the middle class', Journal of Politics, 24 (1962), 167—90; W . T h o m a s , 'James Mill's politics: the "Essay o n G o v e r n m e n t " and the movement for reform', Historical Journal, 12 (1969), 249-94; W . R. Carr, 'James Mill's politics reconsidered: parliamentary reform and the triumph of truth', Historical Journal, 14 (1971), 553-80; and the ensuing exchange.

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manhood suffrage or simply an extension of the suffrage to the middle classes. In his reply to Mill, Macaulay made good use of his freedom as the antagonist to keep the onus of proof on his opponents rather than reveal the details of this alternative. Moreover, by adopting the realistic or pragmatic stance, one claiming historical experience as its basis, and by pouring so much scorn on the futility of Mill's claims to be able to deduce a science of government from a single feature of human nature, namely the self-interest principle, Macaulay may have led some modern readers at least to believe that he was denying the possibility of any kind of science of politics. Mill's Essay focused narrowly on the question of 'the best security for good legislation'. It may not have been a 'scientific treatise on politics' in the fullest sense, but it was a good deal more than 'an argument for parliamentary reform' - the defence which John Stuart Mill felt his father should have used after Macaulay's attack. 23 James Mill's opinion - one that was shared by Ricardo - was that the Essay was 'a concise and clear exposition of the Elements of Political Knowledge', which, even according to John Stuart Mill's own testimony, is how it was regarded by the younger Utilitarians. 24 If its tone was as much didactic and hortatory as explanatory, this conformed to the Benthamite preference for a science that was closely adapted to the needs of legislation and to Mill's strongly held conviction that practical conclusions could be derived directly from 'good' theory. Similarly with Macaulay's articles: despite the often playful tone and the appeals to common sense, he was engaged, as Mackintosh had been before him, in the serious business of defending a Whig theory of the British constitution from a dangerous (not merely a pretentious) competitor. The Whig theory was sanctioned by 'that noble Science of Politics, which is equally removed from the barren theories of Utilitarian sophists, and from the petty craft, so often mistaken for statesmanship by minds grown narrow in habits of intrigue, and official etiquette'. 25 The danger was partly a tactical one: the case for moderate reform was being discredited by a more extreme diagnosis and by a set of remedies that lay outside the realm of what was then politically feasible. In addition to fighting the known enemies of reform, the Whigs were being treated as rivals by those who might well have been their natural allies. Beyond such tactical considerations, however, Macaulay perceived a more frightening possibility of an alliance being forged between these disaffected members of the educated middle classes and the populace at large. Thus while Macaulay chose for polemical purposes to treat the philosophic Radicals as impotent philistines, on other occasions he could see them as 'a Republican sect, as 23 24 25

J . S. Mill, Autobiography in Works, i, p p . 164-5. Preface t o separate edition of Essay. Utilitarian Logic, p. 128.

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audacious, as paradoxical, as little inclined to respect antiquity, as enthusiastically attached to its ends, as unscrupulous in the choice of its means, as the French Jacobins themselves - but far superior to the French Jacobins in acuteness and information, in caution, in patience, and in resolution'.26 Much can be, and indeed has been, made of Mill's encomium on the virtues of the 'middle rank' - the only part of the Essay in which he and Macaulay seemed to be in agreement, and where Mill vied with Macaulay in eloquence. It is a subject that will be considered later in this essay. But most of the attention paid to this question has been in the service of establishing whether Mill was less extreme than he sounded, or more extreme than he allowed himself to say. It is clearly a matter of considerable importance to those interested in the movement for parliamentary reform to decide whether or not Mill's ultimate aim, as expressed in the Essay or other writings, implied a commitment to universal manhood suffrage, either in the 1820s or at some future time. It is agreed that extension of the suffrage, shorter Parliaments, and the secret ballot were part of his immediate goals, though there is still some disagreement about his priorities as between these reformist aims.27 But this mine-field will be sidestepped here on the grounds that it was not a matter with which Macaulay chose to be concerned in making his attack: his fears centred on Mill's mode of reasoning on the science of government, a subject on which Mill and his followers prided themselves.28 The dispute will be treated, therefore, as its main parties treated it, namely as a deep divergence between alternative approaches to the science of politics and between the kinds of polity which the different versions of the science appeared to sanction. While Mill had boasted facetiously that his Essay would not alarm 'even a Whig', Macaulay's fear that the Utilitarians were setting themselves up as 'a Republican sect' along the lines of the philosophes before the French Revolution coincided neatly with Mill's hopes for the philosophic Radicals as spokesmen for and leaders of the Many against the Few. 'Republican' was becoming a somewhat outmoded term of art, as Macaulay himself recognised when he said that the Utilitarians would be more amusing if they would take up 'the old republican cant, and declaim about Brutus and Timoleon, the duty of killing tyrants, and the blessedness of dying for liberty'.29 Mill had devoted several paragraphs of his Essay to 26 27 28

29

Edinburgh Review, 46 (1827), 261. See the works cited in n. 22 above. See Macaulay's statement that: 'Our object at present is, not so much to attack or defend any particular system of polity, as to expose the vices of a kind of reasoning utterly unfit for moral and political discussions . . . Our objection to the Essay of Mr Mill is fundamental. We believe that it is utterly impossible to deduce the Science of Government from the principles of human nature* {Utilitarian Logic, p. 124). See Utilitarian Logic, p . 129.

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proving that his views on reform were not necessarily incompatible with retention of the monarchy and the House of Lords; 30 Mackintosh had agreed that the possible destructive effect of universal suffrage con the regal and aristocratical parts of the Constitution need not be debated'; 31 and Macaulay himself was later to employ Mill's arguments in Parliament to deny the republican implications of the Whig reform proposals. 32 But if republicanism was a red-herring, the charge of 'Jacobinism', first made by Jeffrey, was not. 'ylwta-Jacobin' was certainly a term of abuse in the Utilitarian vocabulary, and John Stuart Mill said of the younger members of the group that they sought to imitate the philosophes, hoping 'to accomplish no less results'. 33 Both parties assumed, it should be noted, that results had flowed from the activities of the philosophes. The most descriptive label - one that was proudly adopted by the radicals though intended by Macaulay to describe a menace - was 'democrat'. As John Stuart Mill said, representative government based on a 'democratic suffrage' was 'the principle article of his [father's] political creed'. 34 James Mill had dismissed the ancient conception of 'democratical' government as an unworkable ideal that required the whole community to conduct the business of government. 35 The representative principle for which he was arguing was 'the grand discovery of modern times'; and like Bentham he upheld it on grounds that had nothing to do with other, more popular, cases for democracy based on liberty or the rights of man. A democratic suffrage, together with frequent Parliaments and the secret ballot, was seen as the only 'security' for ensuring that the interests of the community, treated as an aggregation of individuals (the heads of families at least), were identified with the interests of their representatives. Macaulay employed the traditional arguments of any upholder of the theory of mixed constitutions against pure democracy, namely that it could be shown by experience to be an unstable form of government, always declining into anarchy, demagoguery, despotism, and the destruction of property. But his awareness of the novelty of the Utilitarian case is captured in his description of it as 'Mr Mill's Utopian democracy' - a case that denied past experience and set up an ideal plan of government that required a revolution in manners and social circumstances to be successful. That he believed this could be demonstrated by reference to Mill's own 30 31 32 33 34 35

Utilitarian Logic, pp. 87-8. Edinburgh Review, 31 (December 1818), 174. The Works of Lord Macaulay, edited b y his sister, Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. (London, 1866), VIII, pp. 19-20. Autobiography in Works, 1, p. i n . Autobiography in Works, 1, p. 109. See Utilitarian Logic, p. 59.

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description of human motivation and criteria for success was one of the shrewder aspects of his critique. In addition to the ridicule which Macaulay directed against the falsity-cum-self-evident nature of Mill's selfinterest interpretation of motives, he constantly emphasised the need for the Utilitarians to show that under their simple majoritarian system of government the poor would not plunder the rich and thereby destroy the social and economic basis upon which existing civilisation rested.36 Macaulay scored a number of telling logical points in revealing how much of Mill's argument rested on truth-by-definition; and such points were all the more telling in the light of Mill's claim that his science of government was based on experience in the accepted Baconian or Newtonian manner. There might be an enormous gap between Macaulay's doctrine of 'copious induction' as the proper method, and Mill's view that 'good abstract principles are neither more nor less than the accumulated results of experience presented in an exceedingly condensed and concentrated state', but both authors were taking their stand on a science derived from and testable by an appeal to experience.37 It is what makes the argument about the compatibility of democracy with the existing economic system a crucial test of the two positions, even if the disputants failed to agree on the nature of the evidence on this matter. Macaulay knew, of course, that the political economy of the Utilitarians took security of private property for granted: their view of democracy might have what he regarded as Utopian features, but it was not an egalitarian Utopia of the kind, say, attacked by Malthus in his first Essay on Population.™ Mill had fully anticipated the 'economic' objections to majoritarian democracy in his Essay, but did so in such a blindingly simple fashion that it may seem to entail little more than logical sleight of hand. His first answer rested on an asymmetry between rule by an elective minority and rule by an elective majority. In the former case the individuals comprising the minority have a great deal to gain by oppressing the majority, but the larger the minority the less would be the benefits derived from 'misrule' by the individuals comprising the majority. It is all a matter of simple arithmetic: how much is there to be divided among how many. 39 The second answer stated that the majority could be guilty of misconduct only if they either acted against, or failed to understand, their real interests. Again, 36 37

38 39

See Utilitarian Logic, p p . 119-22, 162-3. F o r Macaulay's statement of the correct m e t h o d see Utilitarian Logic, p p . 128, 167-9; f ° r further c o m m e n t see p p . 192-81 below. T h e statement b y Mill can be found in an article for Monthly Review, 70 (April 1813), 412. F o r further discussion of Mill's m e t h o d see p p . 111-19 below. See p . 70 above. F o r Mill's views o n 'inequality of fortunes' see W i n c h (ed.), James Mill, p p . 2 0 0 - 1 . See Utilitarian Logic, pp. 81-2.

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asymmetry was appealed to in calculating the balance of probabilities: the Few 'have a fixed, invariable interest in acting ill', whereas the Many could only do so by mistake. Ergo, since the latter ills were curable through education, whereas the former were not, the balance should always be struck in favour of the Many.40 The third and final answer related to wisdom. Assume as fact that the incidence of wisdom and folly is equal as between the Few and the Many; and that 'the wise and good in any class of men do, to all general purposes govern the rest'. If within the Many there is a numerous class, called the middle rank, 'which is universally described as the most wise and virtuous part of the community', who can doubt that their views would govern the rest in any democracy, and hence that the long-term interests of the community would be acted upon?41 This may not look like an argument from experience, but that is how Mill described it. He admitted that there was more to be said on the subject, but his other writings on education, liberty of the press, and parliamentary reform mainly repeat much the same points. There simply was no danger to property from democracy - no danger that could be compared with the depredations inflicted on the Many under the present system of government. That Mill felt he could score a knock-down victory on the matter can be judged from the gauntlet - a historical one, it should be noted - he threw before his opponents: 'We challenge them to produce an instance, so much as one instance, from the first page of history to the last, of the people of any country showing hostility to the general laws of property, or manifesting a desire for its subversion.'42 Mill did in fact know some people in his own country whose doctrines were hostile to property, but he had no fear that their views would be accepted 'because I have seldom met with a labouring man (and I have tried the experiment upon many of them) whom I could not make to see that the existence of property was not only good for the labouring man, but of infinitely more importance to the labourers as a class than to any other'.43 There was no incompatibility between economics and politics in Mill's version of things; and this was as true of methods of study as of substance - a subject to which we will return later. Macaulay was often guilty of employing 'every-schoolboy-must-know' arguments, but on this question he made more attempt than Mill to marshal social and economic evidence to support his political diagnosis. That he did so is partly a tribute to his fears, but it can also be regarded as integral to the version of Whig theory of the British constitution which he 40 41 42 43

Utilitarian Logic, pp. 88-90. Utilitarian Logic, pp. 93-4. Westminster Review. Letter to Brougham, 3 September 1832, cited in Bain, James Mill, p. 365.

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was expounding. Indeed, it is one of the more interesting ironies of the Mill-Macaulay dispute that Macaulay's version of this theory, as he developed it in the debates on reform and later as historian of England, derived much of its eloquence and force from an idea which he fully shared with Mill, namely the idea of progress or the March of the Mind. But the force of the irony in this common assumption can be appreciated only by recognising the self-conscious way in which the Utilitarians distanced themselves from almost all the established ways of discussing the properties of the British constitution, especially those favoured by philosophic Whigs like Mackintosh, Macaulay, and the Edinburgh reviewers generally. Mackintosh had complained about Bentham's 'profusion of needless and uncouth terms of art', and the distance achieved by substituting new terminology helps to explain Macaulay's charge that Mill spoke as if he was unaware that 'any governments actually existed among men'. 44 The radical name for the British form of government was simply 'Aristocracy' - a government in which two parties, Tory and Whig, competed with one another for the privilege of protecting the sinister interests of the aristocratic Few against the democratic Many, employing the Church and the Law for support. The only difference between the parties was that the Tories were more honest in avowing their interest, whereas the Whigs misled themselves and others by keeping up a 'see-saw' between popular and aristocratic causes, always coming down in favour of the latter on crucial issues. This was the burden of Mill's denunciation of the politics of the Edinburgh Review from its inception - his revenge, perhaps, for the earlier indignities he had suffered at Jeffrey's hands. 45 Revealing the hypocrisy of what he referred to as 'Whiggery' or 'Whiggising' was one of Mill's specialities, and there is no better place to see him at work on this than in his correspondence with Ricardo after he had prevailed on his friend to use his wealth and standing as a political economist to become the spokesman for the radical position in Parliament. Ricardo was no less anxious to learn his lines properly, and to this end prepared several 'discourses' on reform topics and practised his dialectical skills by arguing the case for reform with various Whig friends, and notably with Hutches Trower. The new radical language and diagnosis abandoned or drastically modified every concept in the Whig theory - 'mixed constitution', 'balance', 'interest', 'public good', 'checks', 'party', and 'liberty'. Instead of conducting constitutional debate in terms of whether the balance within 44 45

See Utilitarian Logic', p. 101. See Westminster Review, 1 (January 1824), 206-49; idem, 1 (April 1824), 505-41 (by John Stuart Mill, under his father's direction); and idem, 4 (July 1825), 194—233.

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the mixed constitution had been shifted unduly in a monarchical or popular direction, by the strengthening or weakening either of royal or executive 'influence' on the one hand, or of popular, extra-parliamentary 'opinion' on the other, the Utilitarians made a bid to shift the arena of debate from such 'means' treated as 'ends' towards acceptance of a single end defined as the greatest happiness of the greatest number, according to which the fitness of all institutional means could be assessed without regard to the institutions that actually existed and the traditions which they embodied. 46 There is a good example of how this was accomplished in Ricardo's correspondence with Trower, partly an attempt, to no avail, to convert an old-fashioned Whig to the radical diagnosis, and partly a dress rehearsal for later parliamentary performances, with Mill acting as stage-manager. Since the relevant letters were written before the Essay on Government had appeared, they show how far Ricardo had advanced on the basis of his own convictions and Mill's conversation. Although Trower assumed that Ricardo would be content with a more moderate reform than Mill, he was surprised to find Ricardo giving only conditional acceptance to mixed government: 'I have no objection to it provided it be administered for the happiness of the many, and not for the benefit of the few.'47 Trower clearly found this highly disconcerting: 'You say, you have "no objections" to a mixed Government. What! have you any doubt that that is the form of Government (when properly administered) best calculated to promote the happiness and prosperity of the people: Can there be any question on this point?' 48 Trower believed that the main danger in 1818 was that public opinion was exerting increasing pressure on the House of Commons, thereby endangering the balance between monarchy, aristocracy and the popular element by giving the last of these a prominence that could not be offset by 'influence', thereby initiating a sequence of movements away from an equilibrium position that could only lead to a democratic republic. Ricardo fastened on to Trower's Utilitarian-sounding references to 'happiness and prosperity' to ask why all forms of government, pure and mixed, should not be assessed simply as means to that end. But suppose the mixed form to be best, surely a reasonable person with 'no private interest to serve' must be willing to subject it to the test of whether, in the opinion of 'the reasonable part of mankind in the 46 47 48

F o r a discussion of Bentham's revamping of Whig terminology, particularly with respect to 'influence', see L. J . H u m e , Bentham and Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1981), p p . 181—6. See Works, v n , p . 299. Works, VII, p p . 309-10.

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country', it met the agreed end. If the monarchical and aristocratical parts of the mixture were essential to good government, they would survive such a test. 49 Trower doubted if an expanded electorate would be entirely composed of reasonable, qualified persons with no private interests to serve:'. . . you might as well expect to gather crops from an uncultivated field, as to meet with the qualifications to secure good representatives in an uneducated and dependent people'. 50 Ricardo took a more sanguine view of the people's capacities, but he was prepared to extend the suffrage only 'to that part of them which cannot be supposed to have an interest in overturning the right of property'. 51 But this was not the nub of Trower's case because, unlike Mill and Ricardo, he did not wish to see the popular element gain any strength. Reform had to conform to the 'principle' of the established constitution, and this meant preservation of a balance that was already moving too far in the popular direction. The extent of the suffrage and the qualities of likely representatives were irrelevant if the end in view was preservation of the best form of government, namely mixed government. The controversy had come full circle. Mill was delighted - and not for the first time - with Ricardo's argumentative skills. He had exposed the flaws and hypocrisy of the Whig position by showing how means were promoted above the end of good government because preservation of monarchy and aristocracy, otherwise known as 'balance', was the real end desired by Whigs. In addition to the useful practice provided by such exercises, discussions with 'men of influence' had another virtue: 'If we do not convert, we stagger them, and make them less audacious, and by consequence much less successful preachers of bad doctrines.' 52 The Trower correspondence also shows how the Utilitarians could take such commonplace phrases in the philosophic Whig vocabulary as 'happiness and prosperity', 'public good', or 'public utility' and alter their content by changing the method by which public good was to be arrived at. Thus Mackintosh accepted 'utility as the test of every political institution', but spoke as though it was a process of balancing or 'superadding' collective interests to arrive at a picture of how far the major groupings in society were adequately, though only 'virtually', represented. 53 Representation of interests defined as 'classes, professions, and fraternities' could lead only, Mill said in his Essay, to a 'motley Aristocracy', combining and recombining 49 50 51 52 53

Works, VII, p p . 319-20, 366-7. Works, VII, p p . 341-2; and v m , p p . 15-16. Works, VII, p p . 369-70. Works, VII, p . 375. Edinburgh Review, 31 (December 1818), 175.

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further their interests.54 What Mill was propounding seemed like a simple majoritarian definition of the interests of the Many arrived at by means of a numerical aggregation of the pleasures and pains of Hobbesian individuals. Such a concept of the public good, which made the individual rather than classes or groups the locus of interests, and emphasised numerical criteria for good government, was also calculated 'to stagger' the radicals' opponents; and on this matter the coup cannot be said to depend purely on logicchopping and a renaming of parts.55 It followed that when Mill bowed slightly to 'established and fashionable opinions' in the Essay by saying that good government depended on 'checks', he was not really speaking the same language as the Whigs.56 The check Mill had in mind was not one that prevented one interest group or order from gaining ascendancy over the others, thereby maintaining a kind of equilibrium. The check was direct representation of individuals seen as a device for protecting the interests of a numerical majority from the actions of the few. It was not so much a check within an accepted system of government as a check against government hence perhaps the preferred Utilitarian term, 'security'. Parties, though still not exactly well defined in the 1820s, had long since been distinguished from mere 'factions', just as 'opposition' had earlier been legitimated to become a possible source of pride and duty.57 The Utilitarian definition of public good as the interest of the Many, however, entailed regarding the Tories and Whigs as rival factions whose place under representative government would be taken by an alignment of the Many against the Few.58 Under the existing system, John Stuart Mill claimed, writing under the direction of his father, and with Jeffrey's defence of party as the 54 55

56 57

58

See Utilitarian Logic, pp. 82-6. See also Mill's attack on the Whig theory of 'interests', as advanced by Jeffrey and Mackintosh, in Westminster Review, 4 (July 1825), 210-16. For this reason J. R. Pole speaks of the utilitarian 'injection of vitality* into the contemporary debate on representation; see his Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 479-82. Whether, for Bentham at least, the public good was confined to the simple notion of aggregation, or whether it also included a concept of public interest which could only be assigned to individuals as members of a community, rather than to them simply as individuals, is n o w the subject of debate: see the interesting articles by J. W. A . Gunn, 'Jeremy Bentham and the public interest', Canadian Journal of Political Science, 34 (1968), 398-413; and by M. James, 'Public interest and majority rule in Bentham's democratic theory', Political Theory, 9 (1981), 49-64. Utilitarian Logic, pp. 72-3. For a review of constitutional developments see B. W. Hill, 'Executive monarchy and the challenge of party, 1689-1832: two concepts of government and two historiographical interpretations', Historical Journal, 13 (1970), 379-401. For the 'ideological' developments in this period see J. W. A. Gunn, 'Influence, parties and the constitution: changing attitudes, 1782-1832'', HistoricalJournal, 17(1974), 301-28. The expectation by the Philosophic Radicals that there would be a transformation of the party system after reform of representation, with the Radicals and reformers becoming the spokesmen for the People, and the Tories and Whigs uniting to speak for the 'Aristocratic Few' is well brought out in J. Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (London, 1965), pp. 53-75.

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target, a public man first chose a party and then was forced to compromise his principles by supporting it whether or not he fully approved of its policies. The true representative of the People, on the other hand, would speak out for the public good on each occasion, regardless of party. Indeed, there would be no need for party loyalty under a properly reformed system. Political debate would concentrate entirely on measures not men: 'All would then cooperate, where all were agreed; and the advocate of bold and decisive measures . . . would have the support of every sincere man whom he could convince.' 59 Although this argument - the party speaking for the general interest will be the party to end all parties - seems to be somewhat circular, there can be no doubt that for Mill and Ricardo it served both as a diagnosis and as a guide to conduct. Mill was exceptional in the asperity of his comments on the self-interested morality of public men ('Mean, dirty set' is typical of his descriptions of the Whigs), but even the mild-mannered Ricardo accepted the view that under the existing party system the public interest was subservient to private interests. His simple credo - 'I should neither be Whig nor Tory but should be anxiously desirous of promoting every measure which should give a chance of good government' - shows how much he took the radical diagnosis for granted, though he was perhaps more hopeful than Mill that public men of all parties could be made to serve the public interest by pressure of public opinion. 60 Mill hoped that Ricardo would replace Horner as the spokesman for 'sound' economic principles in Parliament, and a useful contrast can be made between Ricardo's simple credo and the agonising process, noted earlier, by which Horner attempted to reconcile independence and loyalty to principle with 'the prostitution of faction' and the other unpleasant realities arising out of party conflict and alliance. For all the idealism about service to the public good instilled by Stewart, Horner could not have believed that the ideal was, in the long term at least, incompatible with loyalty to 'true' Whig principles and party membership. 61 Finally, John Stuart Mill also attacked the loose use made by Whigs of their favourite term, 'liberty'. Phrases like 'rational liberty' or 'liberty rightly understood' were usually veiled pleas for the retention of major abuses. The Benthamite definition of liberty was a negative or purely instrumental one, namely absence of coercion or restraint. In that sense all government, as Hobbes had argued, entailed the sacrifice of liberty for security. It followed, therefore, that 'a measure of government... is not 59

60 61

See Westminster Reviewr, 1 (April 1824), 527-30; the Jeffrey article being attacked was his review of Leckie o n the British Government, Edinburgh Review, 20 (November 1812), 315-46. See Works, v m , p. 260. O n public opinion see p. 211, and v n , pp. 238-9; see also n. j6 below. See p. 59 above.

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necessarily bad, because it is contrary to liberty; and to blame it for that reason, leads to confusion of ideas'. 62 Yet having noted the genuine gulf that separates the philosophic Radicals from their Whig opponents, and the self-conscious way in which it was widened, largely by the Utilitarians themselves, there is still room for doubts as to how far these differences of opinion extended beyond the nature of the case for parliamentary reform in Britain, and whether, even on this question, there were no shared assumptions. Macaulay's lively performance may have advanced his political career and discomfited the radicals, but it did not please all members of the Edinburgh Review circle. Even Napier, as editor, seems to have had some misgivings about the articles: he certainly toned down parts of them. 63 Sydney Smith regretted the lengths to which the whole business had been carried, and he did not believe that the 'Scotchmen' had come off best in the exchanges by attacking the principle of utility as a basis for morality.64 Brougham actually sprang to Mill's defence in a letter to Jeffrey; he was shocked by the disrespectful tone of the attack on 'one I so greatly esteem and one with whom I really am more connected in "all good works" than almost any body else I could name'. Given the existence of a 'common enemy as well as common principles on many subjects, tho differing in details and degree', such attacks would only give comfort to their adversaries. And in a postscript to the letter he made a declaration that if taken seriously could have put a premature end to much that has since been written: 'Your author is quite wrong in fancying Mr Mill an out and out Benthamite.' 65 More telling perhaps are the well-known facts about Macaulay being recommended by Mill for an important post in India;66 and Macaulay's decision not to reprint his attack on Mill in his collected essays on the grounds that, while still believing that Mill's Essay contained all the serious faults he had criticised, 'a critic, while noticing those faults, should have abstained from using contemptuous language respecting the historian of British India'. 67 By implication Macaulay was drawing attention to what he regarded as an inconsistency in Mill's position. How could Mill as author of the Essay 62 63 64 65 66 67

Westminster Review, i (April 1824), 509. See Selections from the Correspondence, p. 62. See The Letters of Sydney Smith, edited by N . C. Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1953), 11, pp. 511-12.

Letter to Jeffrey, 12 May 1829, Brougham Papers, University College, London. SeeE. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959), pp. 190-3. See Preface to Works, v, p. xii. In Parliament Macaulay went much further in describing Mill's History, 'though certainly not free from faults', as 'on the whole, the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since that of Gibbon'; see Works, VIII, p.

120.

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on Government employ a deductive method when discussing the bearing of the science of government on the political institutions of his own country, while as historian of India 'he used a very different method of investigation with eminent ability and success'? Macaulay's puzzlement on this matter was also expressed in his review of Mackintosh's History of the Revolution in England, where he noted the similarities between Mackintosh and Mill as historians: 'Differing in most things, in this they closely resemble each other. Sir James is lenient. Mr. Mill is severe. But neither of them ever omits, in the apportioning of praise and of censure, to make ample allowance for the state of political science and political morality in former ages.' The history of society was a history of progress, and hence institutions and ideas that were adapted to an earlier stage of society, though they might contain the seeds of later developments, would not be appropriate to a subsequent, more enlightened period of history. Macaulay's conclusion, therefore, as in his attack on Mill's Essay, was that by treating politics 'as a science of which all the difficulties may be resolved by short synthetical argument drawn from truths of the most vulgar notoriety', Mill was denying one of the premises on which his History was based; he was denying the experimental, and hence progressive, nature of political science by arguing in his Essay as though 'the people of one generation . . . have little or no advantage over those of another generation'. 68 Macaulay's dilemma is an interesting one; it can be rephrased most broadly by asking how Mill could combine, without inconsistency, his 'Scottish' interest in conjectural history with his attachment to the deductive method and his use of the assumption that action was motivated by self-interest?69 If we can find those points on which Mill would have agreed with Macaulay, without foregoing his claims on behalf of the deductive approach to British politics, we may come closer to locating the essential differences between philosophic Whigs and Radicals. In fact, Macaulay's question can be extended even further to encompass a problem that arose in the previous essay when considering Ricardo's use of the abstract deductive method in political economy. Mill, of course, did not believe that he was employing 'a very different method' in his History from that used in his Essay on Government. There was no conflict between 'experience' and the abstract deductive method, though there was a difference between basing a theory on 'comprehensive 68 69

'Sir J a m e s M a c k i n t o s h ' (originally published 1835) in Works, vi, p p . 9 4 - 5 . In one form or another this question has been tackled by all serious students of Mill's work. For the most authoritative commentaries see D. Forbes, 'James Mill and India', Cambridge Journal (October 1951), 19-53; Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, pp. 47—80; J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 42-9; W. Thomas, introduction to his abridged version of the History of British India (Chicago, 1975); and Burns, 'The Light of Reason', pp. 10-20.

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and profound* principles and 'narrow and empirical' ones. 70 Nor was the idea of progress or March of Mind in conflict with the deductive approach: it might more properly be regarded as itself a deduction from the known principles of human nature. In neither the Essay nor the History could 'the surface of history' furnish much guidance to those interested in deriving practical lessons from science; the laws of human nature had to be invoked to interpret the historical record, especially when that record provided ambiguous or inadequate answers as to what 'experience' either had been or might be under novel circumstances. Mill was faithful in this respect to Stewart, who defended 'theory' and 'abstraction' in politics and maintained that in the absence of reliable historical records conjecture could be defended on the grounds that it is more important 'to ascertain the progress that is most simple, than the progress that is most agreeable to fact'.71 Nor was there any incompatibility, in Mill's view, between the use of the same deductive method in both political economy and the science of government. Indeed, the obvious parallels between the aims and methods of Mill's Elements of Political Economy and his Essay on Government ('the Elements of Political Knowledge') have led some to speak of Mill advancing an economic theory of democracy.72 In both works he aimed at a concise didactic treatment of the main issues, employing a method which implied that the two fields offered the same opportunity to deduce clear propositions from the same laws of human nature. The self-interest principle is called upon to do the same work, and hence Mill's science of government can be seen as an attempt to create through democratic representation a political analogue of the competitive market process whereby the economic preferences of individuals are ordered, registered, and measured in a way that gives institutional substance to what might otherwise remain a vague, subjective notion, namely Bentham's 'felicific calculus'.7* Mill's application of the self-interest, or pleasure-versus-pain, principle 70 71

72

73

See Monthly Review\ 70 (April 1813), 412. See p. 60 above. The question of Mill's views on method and his practice has been extensively discussed: see Winch (ed.), James Mill, pp. 367-70; T. W . Hutchison, On Revolution and Progress in Economic Knowledge (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 26-57; and the introduction by J. Lively and J. Rees to Utilitarian Logic. But the most recent treatment is in a paper b y N . de Marchi, which also has the great merit of showing Mill's dependence on Dugald Stewart: see 'The case for James Mill'. The most extensive discussion of Mill from this point of view can be found in A . Ryan, 'Two concepts of politics and democracy: James Mill and John Stuart Mill', in M. Fleisher (ed.), Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (London, 1973), pp. 76-113. Ryan does not claim that his interpretation is based o n a study of Mill's intentions, and its plausibility seems to depend on hindsight, namely a knowledge of h o w classical political economy became neo-classical economics b y extending the scope and precision of deductions based o n assumptions of rational self-interest. A n interpretation of this kind was suggested by Burrow, Evolution and Society, pp. 31 and 73-

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to politics lay at the heart of Macaulay's criticisms, and it was one area where John Stuart Mill, as we shall see in the succeeding essay, felt obliged to give way to criticism, while upholding the use of the deductive method in political economy. But the fact that Mill senior treated political and economic behaviour as capable of being brought under a unifying psychological principle does not mean that he intended to assimilate politics to economics. Mill himself saw nothing specifically 'economic' about his method, and he did not cite 'economic* precedents when defending himself from the charges brought by Mackintosh and Macaulay against his science of government: he called on Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, Plato - even Blackstone - to show that he was operating according to well-established political assumptions. Thus in answer to criticisms of the narrowness of his concept of 'interest', Mill gave a response which stresses economic or pecuniary motives no more than any of the predecessors in the political tradition to which he was appealing: [Mr Mill] uses it, neither in the refined sense of a man's best interest; or what is most conducive to his happiness upon the whole; nor to signify every object he desires, though that is a very intelligible meaning too. Mr Mill uses it, in its rough and ready acceptation, to denote the leading objects of human desire; Wealth, Power, Dignity, Ease; including escape from the contrary; Poverty, Impotence, Degradation, Toil. But Mill's most effective debating coup came from citing Hume, one of Mackintosh's favourite authors, on the reason why in politics 'every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest'. On this evidence, Mill asked, should Hume be regarded as a Cartesian, guilty of attempting to deduce a theory of government from a single, self-evident proposition ?74 That material goods provide satisfactions which it is the duty and purpose of government to protect is not an assumption which Mill invented; and his expansion of 'the leading objects of human desire' reduces the shock value of his bleak treatment of motives in the Essay. Mill's language in the Essay and his Elements of Political Economy strongly implied the universality of geometry, but in the reply to Mackintosh in the Fragment there was another move towards a less vulnerable, more innocuous position - one that replaced universality by probability: I suppose nobody . . . will dispute, that taking men generally, the bulk of their actions is determined by consideration of these objects [those defined as 'interest' earlier]. As little, I suppose, will it be disputed, that in deliberating on the best 74

See Fragment on Mackintosh (London, 1835), pp. 277-82. See also his statement that: 'What is political experience, but the experience of human nature in political action? And what is human nature in political action, different from what it is in other action?', Westminster Review, 4 (July 1825), 218—19.

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means for the government of men in society, it is the business of philosophers and legislators . . . to look to the more general laws of their nature than to the exceptions. The bearing of Sir James's talk. . . is to recommend attention principally to the exceptions.75 It may be as well to follow Mill's advice in interpreting his own work, even though the apparent concession to criticism involved in the move does seem to have been an exception to Mill's normal response to polemic, namely to exaggerate the claims made for his original position. There is certainly evidence in Mill's other writings that he took serious account of the consequences for jurisprudence and liberty of the press of the pleasures and pains that flowed from the favourable and unfavourable 'sentiments of mankind'. 76 There are also parts of the Elements, especially on the motives for accumulation, that go well beyond 'interest' in the simple pecuniary sense.77 But all this does is bear out his son's opinion of his father that 'he did injustice to his own opinions by the unconscious exaggeration of an intellect emphatically polemical'. 78 But if the elements of the sciences of political economy and government were legitimate fields for the deductive method, why did Mill devote over ten years to writing his History of British India, a work that was no less serious in its practical and scientific intent? In this work Mill subjected the manners and institutions of Hindu society to minute cross-examination for the purpose of establishing its position on a progressive scale of civilisation with the object of determining the forms of law and government most appropriate to that position. There was no conflict between the idea of progress and the principle of utility in this undertaking because he claimed that the principle provided the sole criterion for assessing the degree of progress made towards perfection and high civilisation. As far as India was concerned, therefore, Mill did not need a mere tyro like Macaulay to point out the importance of 'assiduously studying the history of past ages'. Indeed, if he had not been offered employment by the East India Company, partly as a result of his History, it might have been succeeded by 75

76

77 78

Fragment, pp. 278-9. This move towards probabilism is well noted by Lively and Rees (Utilitarian Logic, p. 33), but their conclusion that it reveals a possible doubt on Mill's part differs from the conclusion suggested here. See, for example, his essays o n these subjects written for t h e Encyclopaedia Britannica, separately circulated as Essays on Government, Jurisprudence, Liberty of the Press and Law of Nations ( L o n d o n , n . d . ) , p p . 21-2 and p p . 6-9 of the respective essays. Macaulay t h o u g h t that the passage o n sentiments in Jurisprudence was at odds with the self-interest principle in Government: see Utilitarian Logic, p . 106. Ricardo also noted this point: 'I dare say y o u had good reasons for n o t explaining the influence of public opinion on government, b u t as it is one of the checks, and a most powerful one in such a government as ours, I should have expected that y o u w o u l d have noticed it' (Works, v m , p . 211). See Winch (cd.), James Mill, p p . 194-6. Autobiography, in Works, 1, p . 211. T h e earlier w o r d i n g spoke of 'a pugnacious and polemical intellect' (p. 210).

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a similar work on English law 'in which I mean to trace . . . the expedients of the several ages to the state of the human mind, and the circumstances of society of those ages, and to show their concord or discord with the standard of perfection'. 79 It may be significant that Mill succeeded in employing detailed historical and other evidence only when considering Indian institutions, but the commitment to the idea of progress along lines that bear comparison with earlier Scottish historians of civil society was a permanent feature of Mill's work. Indeed, it would seem once more that Mill adopted a plus royaliste position when judged by the attitude of Francis Jeffrey and other Edinburgh reviewers to Scottish conjectural history. 80 The very fact that Jeffrey published the articles on India that Mill wrote in preparation for his History shows, of course, that he was not averse to the underlying assumption of this 'Scottish' genre, namely the idea of progress, when applied to non-European societies. 81 But the contrast with Mill can perhaps be seen in their respective attitudes towards Millar. Mill's review of Craig's Life of Millar in 1803 was distinctly warmer towards the subject, if not the biographer, than Jeffrey's review of the same book. Indeed, Jeffrey's portrait of Millar's intellectual character would not need too many changes to fit Mill himself: [it] corresponded pretty nearly with the abstract idea that the learned of England entertain of a Scottish philosopher; z personage, that is, with little or no deference to the authority of great names, and not very apt to be startled at conclusions that seem to run counter to received opinions or existing institutions; acute, sagacious, and systematical, rather indefatigable in argument than patient in investigation, vigilant in the observation of facts, but not so strong in their number, as skilful in their application. 82

Mill's admiration for Millar was less measured, less distant, and longer lasting. He regarded his treatment of the Hindus as a continuation of Millar's work in the Origin of the Distinction of Ranks.,83 The same author's Historical View of the English Government was among the first historical works which his son was expected to read; and it was on the list of books recommended to Ricardo in 1817 when Mill undertook to repair the defects in his friend's education. 84 It served as a prologue to the main work on Ricardo's reading list, Mill's own History, which he described to his pupil as follows: 79 80 81 82 83 84

Letter t o N a p i e r , 5 A u g u s t 1818, as cited in Bain, James Mill, p . 173. See p p . 60-1 above. O n the idea of progress see J. Clive, Scotch Reviewers; The 'Edinburgh Review3, 1802-1815 ( L o n d o n , 1957), ch. 7. Edinburgh Review, 3 (1803), 156. See History of British India, edited b y W . T h o m a s , B o o k 11, ch. 10, p . 229. SeeJ. S. Mill, Autobiography, in Works, 1, p. 11; and Ricardo, Works, vn, p. 197.

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that book of mine, if it answers my expectation . . . will make no bad introduction to the study of civil society in general. The subject afforded an opportunity of laying open the principles and laws of the social order in almost all its more remarkable states, from the most rude to the most perfect with which we are yet acquainted; and if I have been capable of explaining them, will be of some help to you, in exploring what I wish to see you thoroughly acquainted with, the course which human affairs, upon the great scale, have hitherto taken, the causes of their taking these different courses, the degree in which these courses have severally departed from the best course, and by what means they can best be made to approximate to that course.85

This was all part of Mill's campaign to convince Ricardo that having mastered the science of political economy, he would have little difficulty in mastering the larger 'science of legislation'. It was, Mill claimed, 'essentially a science, the effects of which may be computed with an extraordinary degree of certainty'.86 The principle of utility provided a universally applicable criterion both for judging the state of a civilisation and for bringing a society's institutions up to the 'standard of perfection'. Mill brushed aside Ricardo's doubts as to whether 'the laws which are adapted to an improved state of society, would not be adapted to a state of society much behind it' by saying that once we have 'a standard of excellence', and a clear view of the proper ends of government, the choice of means was simple.87 Although Ricardo continued to ask shrewd questions about the possibilities of 'misrule and oppression' in India, and about the problem of 'how to balance one object of utility against another', he clearly endorsed Mill's claims on behalf of his History and took every opportunity to recommend it to his friends for the 'grand picture' it provided of 'Government, Law, Religion, Arts, and Literature', not to mention its excellent application of Ricardian doctrines of political economy to India — though Ricardo was far too modest to put it that way.88 Mill's list of qualifications for the historian and would-be legislator- they amount to the same thingis comprehensive enough to suit the most catholic of tastes: 'the whole field of human nature, the whole field of legislation, the whole field of administration, down to war, commerce, and diplomacy, ought to be familiar to his mind'.89 The History was certainly a good deal more like a 'scientific treatise on politics' than the Essay on Government - which only raises the question: why did Mill not consider that the Essay required a more thorough historical examination of British institutions as a basis for his radical conclusions? 85 86 87 88 89

Works, v n , pp. 195-6. Works, VII, p. 211. Works, v n , pp. 234-5. Works, v n , pp. 204-5, 2 2 2 ~3> 227~9i 23^~9> 2 4O~4Preface to History, ed. Thomas, p. 12.

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Mill's task in the History was to prove that the British government of India could be guilty of fundamental error: 'if they have conceived the Hindus to be a people of high civilization, while they have in reality made but a few of the earliest steps in the progress of civilization, it is impossible that in many of the measures pursued for the government of that people, the mark aimed at should not have been wrong'. 90 The incidental aspersions in the History on the shortcomings of British society and institutions were just that - incidental. The investment of time and effort in a detailed historical investigation dedicated to revealing the main error, in showing its consequences and how they could be remedied, was fully justified. By demonstrating India's 'low state of civilization' Mill justified British rule and showed that good government could not be representative government in such circumstances, though he recognised in correspondence with Ricardo that even in India there might be a case for representative government; the people 'would govern themselves better perhaps in that way than by any other government that would emanate from themselves'.91 But the crucial phrase comes at the end. By the accident of conquest India was fortunate in having a superior alternative to any government 'that would emanate from themselves' - one that could be improved immeasurably by the adoption of Benthamite principles of law and government and Ricardian principles of taxation. Mill also recognised something else that Ricardo had pointed out in good Utilitarian style, namely the possibility that the interests of a dependent or subject people might clash with, and hence be made subservient to, the interests of the more advanced or ruling nation. 92 Fortunately, India was not ruled directly. The East India Company provided the perfect instrument whereby impartial, far-sighted experts with no vested interests in misrule could apply their knowledge to Indian affairs. Whatever doubts John Stuart Mill may have later had about his father's science of politics, it should be remembered that as far as India was concerned he considered him to be 'the originator of all sound statesmanship'. 93 The defence of enlightened despotism and of the East India Company's powers of government were two family concerns that were started in Mill's History. Another implication of Mill's proof by means of historical argument that India enjoyed only a 'low state of civilization' was that minimal priority should be given to native participation in government. It was by means of economic pursuits that the natives should be encouraged to acquire independence, foresight, and a knowledge of their real interests. 90 91 92 93

Mill, History, ed. Thomas, pp. 225-6. Ricardo, Works, v m , pp. 52-3. Works, VII, p. 239. Autobiography in Works, 1, p. 213.

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The right thing in my opinion, is, to teach people to look for their elevation to their own resources, their industry and economy. Let the means of accumulation be afforded to our Indian subjects; let them grow rich as cultivators, merchants, manufacturers; and not accustom themselves to look for wealth and dignity to successful intriguing for places under government; the benefit from which, whatever it may be, can never extend beyond a very insignificant portion of the whole population.94 The 'Scottish' credentials of all this seem obvious enough. A philosophy of history is required to establish the stage of civilisation. An examination of the manners and institutions comprising the state of Indian society provides the information for establishing both the level of civilisation attained and the method of government most appropriate to that level. However, since the exercise is not one designed simply to explain on a comparative basis how forms of government are adapted to states of society, but rather is a practical tool for the guidance of enlightened European legislators to help them raise India in the scale of civilisation, future goals rather than passive adaptation must be stressed. A beneficial reciprocal relationship has to be created involving the interaction of government and economy. The role of the European, preferably Utilitarian, legislator is to create and maintain a form of government and a system for administering justice and collecting taxes that will enable the subject people to obtain the immediate benefits of improved economic conditions as well as enjoy the educative advances that come from independence and the exercise of foresight in managing their own economic affairs. The silent revolution described by Adam Smith in his account of the downfall of feudalism in Europe in Book in of the Wealth of Nations has to be an arranged event in India, but commerce and manufactures are still the agents of revolution. Lest there should be any doubt as to the Smithian provenance of Mill's position, consider the following comparison. The mode of increasing the riches of the body of the people, is a discovery no less easy than sure. Take little from them in the way of taxes; prevent them from injuring one another; and make no absurd laws to restrain them in the harmless disposal of their property and labour. Light taxes and good laws; nothing more is wanted for national and individual prosperity all over the globe.95 The next programmatic statement comes from an early document that is known only by virtue of Stewart's citation of it in his memoir on Smith, Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.96 94 95 96

See the extracts from Mill's evidence to the Select Committee o n the Affairs of the East India C o m p a n y , 1831, as reprinted in Winch (ed.), James Mill, p p . 441-3. Mill, History, ed. Thomas, p . 578. See D. Stewart's Account of the Life and Writings ofAdam Smith in Essays on Philosophical Subjects in The Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1980), p. 322.

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Moreover, there is a further possible link with Smith through the point made earlier about unfavourable 'moral sentiments'. Mill's account of the effect of extreme poverty in India in reducing the bonds of sympathy and destroying that 'love of esteem', or regard for the opinion of others, when forming one's own conduct is similar to Smith's treatment of the effect of the division of labour on the habits of the urban poor in the Wealth of Nations.,97 Its corollary, that 'only in a state of some ease and comfort' can the 'salutory feeling' of mutual, and hence self-regard have any effect, is also relevant, as we shall see, to Mill's ideas on the 'middle rank'. One could say that this view of society and philosophy of history makes Mill a gradualist in India, but of a rather impatient kind. Adapting institutions to the 'dispositions' of the people means little more than abolishing existing legal and political arrangements in favour of Benthamite ones, and encouraging the natives to adopt English economic habits. The programme is gradualist only by virtue of recognition that administrative complexities and 'imperfect instruments' prevent rapid attainment of standards of perfection. Macaulay, Mackintosh, and the Edinburgh reviewers generally had no difficulty in accepting Mill's diagnosis and priorities as far as India was concerned, though Macaulay was more optimistic about what could be done through more direct methods of education.98 The disagreement centred on the application of the idea of progress to British institutions. Mill and Macaulay both claimed to be able to tell the political time by the clock of history, to read clear messages from the milestones passed during the March of Mind. The fact that, like Mill, Macaulay's enthusiasm for such ideas was nurtured by his admiration for Scottish authors and his reading of Edinburgh Review articles, including, possibly, Mill's own, adds another ironic twist to their divergent exercises in telling the time in Britain. In the articles which Macaulay wrote in the period leading up to the passage of the Reform Bill, and prior to his decision to write his History of England, where the same ideas were developed on a much larger canvas, he based much of his case for 'judicious and timely reformations' on the historical message that constitutional innovation was actually renovation for the purposes of preservation.99 The popular demand for the reform of Parliament, though capable of being diverted temporarily, was a growing force fed by social and intellectual changes that were irreversible. Moderate reform was needed to broaden the representative base of government by enfranchising 'the whole of the middle class, that brave, honest, 97 98 99

See Mill, History, ed. W . T h o m a s , p p . 574-8, and A d a m Smith, Wealth of Nations in Works, edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, 1976), 11, pp. 795-6. See Stokes, The English Utilitarians, p p . 4 5 - 7 , 57. For Macaulay's mature position see pp. 192-81 below.

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and sound-hearted class, which is as anxious for the maintenance of order and the security of property, as it is hostile to corruption and oppression'. The Whigs stood between those who were for demolition and those who wished to stand pat by ignoring progress and social change; they were capable of seeing that a crisis similar to that which had occurred in the seventeenth century was about to break; they were the descendants of earlier moderates who acted according to the spirit of their times - the men 'for whom history has not recorded a long series of human crimes and follies in vain'.100 It was to such notions that Macaulay was appealing when he spoke of the science of politics as an experimental science because it was a progressive science. The 'natural tendency of the human intellect to truth', together with 'the natural tendency of society to improvement', supported Burkean gradualism. What was good enough for our ancestors was no longer good enough for a more advanced people. Yet we must do what the best of them did, namely recognise the signs of change and act so as to eliminate the dangers created by a widening gap between the existing 'political' order and the progressive 'natural' order.101 Avoiding mere antiquarianism, while retaining a proper attitude of reverence for one's constitutional ancestors, was the essence of the compromise underlying Whig history the canon which Macaulay later did so much to define and revitalise.102 Judgement on the errors of past statesmen was part of the duty of the historian, but once progress was recognised as the underlying theme of history it was possible for those living in more enlightened ages to moderate such judgements by relating them to the prevailing social climate. Macaulay could see how Mill as historian of India, though inclined to be 'severe', had fulfilled this obligation, but Mill's use of history when applied to Britain, like his claim that his assumptions were based on experience, was so schematic that it was hardly visible. Yet Mill's dogmatism sprang from the same source as Macaulay's confidence and optimism, as can be illustrated by two characteristic statements taken from Mill's correspondence with Ricardo. Do you think, prepared for it, as this country is, that [parliamentary reform] would be difficult? It appears to me that the population in this country with regard to some important improvement in their government may be compared to a vessel of water exposed to a temperature at 3 2°. Leave it perfectly still, and the water will remain uncongealed; shake it a little, and it shoots into ice immediately. All great 100 101 102

'Hallam' (originally published 1828), in Works, v, pp. 237-8. For further comment on this aspect of Macaulay's thinking see p. 192-8 below. See Works, v, pp. 235-7. See J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 3.

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changes in society are easily effected, when the time is c o m e . . . . the cause itself is now, by the progress of the human mind, brought into such a situation, that very moderate exertions will produce great results, that every operation will tell, because it falls in with the current in which things are running of their own accord. 103 If this was Mill's diagnosis of the stage reached by Britain in the March of Mind it is possible to see why he believed that only boldness and clear-sightedness were needed, and why all those who refused to accept the logic of the Utilitarian position must be protecting a selfish interest. How else could they be standing in the path of progress, fearing that even small changes would presage cataclysm? It is also clear why Mill felt it unnecessary to divert energy from unmasking the self-serving morality of Whig temporisers into a search for historical parallels and precedents, or even into the kind of catalogue of 'natural' changes in British society that Macaulay employed to demonstrate both the legitimacy and need for moderate reform. It was necessary to show what stage India had reached, but Britain stood on the brink of realising the 'cause of causes, the cause of good government*.104 If history, given a little shake, will usher in the millennium, you do not need assurances that what you are urging conforms to ancestral wisdom. Why waste time on the history of means unless it clarifies the ends by which all means must be assessed? Thus when Mackintosh accused the Benthamites of seeking sudden reformation, and hence of ignoring the need to adapt reform 'to the peculiar interests of a people, but engrafted on their previous usages, and brought into harmony with those national dispositions on which the execution of laws depends', Mill could only see Whig cant behind 'peculiar interests', 'usages', and 'dispositions'. It amounted to saying: 'Your reform is a good reform, a code is a good thing; but the "sudden establishment" of it is bad; therefore wait a while; and as the argument is equally good at all succeeding times, it is an argument for everlasting postponement.'105 Mill may have been slightly closer to the truth in levelling such charges at Mackintosh than against Macaulay: 'timely' reform is not 'everlasting postponement'. Mackintosh's reconciliation with Burke after withdrawing from the position expressed in Vindiciae Gallicae turned him into what Bulwer Lytton described as a 'violent moderate'; and even Jeffrey felt it necessary to ask whether his friend had succumbed to conservatism in old age.106 There was also, as we noted, a larger 'Country' element in Mackintosh's defence of the Whig approach to parliamentary reform: the 'country gentlemen' 103 104 105 106

Ricardo, Works, v n , pp. 198, 301. Ricardo, Works, v n , p . 301. Fragment on Mackintosh, p. 147. See H . L. Bulwer Lytton, Historical Characters (London, 1870), p. 270; and Jeffrey's review of Mackintosh's Life in Edinburgh Review, 62 (1835), 215-17.

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are called upon to do work that for both Macaulay and Mill is quite adequately performed by the middle classes alone. Macaulay could not match Mill's denunciation of the aristocracy as a class, but Mill certainly matched Macaulay in his praise for the 'wisdom and virtue' of the middle classes. Once more, the source is a common one. Both men were expanding on a theme that was noted earlier when dealing with Jeffrey and Malthus, but which can be traced back through Millar to Hume - the theme of commerce and liberty, with the attendant growth in size of the middling rank becoming a guarantee for liberty. 107 The idea of progress when applied to European societies convinced both men that the middle classes were 'a creature of civilisation' itself. Here is Mill on the subject as early as 1811: It had no existence in the rude state of society; and it increases as the benefits of civilization increase. It has always been our faith and trust, that in this class, and the circumstances connected with it, a power is really provided sufficient to prevent the passive or active principles of despotism in other classes from finally consummating their deplorable consequences . . . , 108 Even in what many would regard as the most abstract, spare, and ahistorical of his works, the Elements of Political Economy, Mill introduced visions of a society that would progress to the point where, though 'natural' forms of inequality - that is, those not based on the accidents of birth and legislative privilege - would persist, a leisured and independent middle class would dominate. It is by this class of men that knowledge is cultivated and enlarged; it is also by this class that it is diffused; it is this class of men whose children receive the best education, and are prepared for all the higher and more delicate functions of society, as legislators, judges, administrators, teachers, inventors in all the arts, and superintendents in all the more important works, by which the dominion of the human species is extended over the powers of nature . . . the men of middling fortunes, in short, the men to whom society is generally indebted for its greatest improvements, are the men, who having their time at their own disposal, freed from the necessity of manual labour, subject to no man's authority, and engaged in the most delightful occupations, obtain, as a class, the greatest sum of human enjoyment. For the happiness, therefore, as well as the ornament of our nature, it is peculiarly desirable that a class of this description should form as large a proportion of each community as possible.109 As seems to fit the respective characters, this was a more intellectualised picture of the middle classes than the one endorsed by Macaulay, despite the idealised qualities of both portraits. It could support the interpretation 107 108 109

For Jeffrey, seep. 54, and Malthus, pp. 74,84 above.

Edinburgh Review, 17(1811), 4147. See Elements in Winch (ed.), James Mill, pp. 241-2.

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that Mill gave a more puritanical and paternalist dimension to Bentham's hedonism;110 but the source of the intellectualism, while undoubtedly 'Scottish', seems not so much to be the Kirk which Mill abandoned, but the teacher he so often praised. It derives, surely, from Dugald Stewart's missionary belief in the benefits of the social division of labour in matters of science; his faith in those philosophic intellects who were in the van of progress, those who were capable of surmounting the limitations of practical men, of formulating general principles, and hence of serving the general good.111 It was this fusion of intellect and public morality that was characteristic of Mill's position on the capacity to take the most comprehensive view of experience and encapsulate it into a few succinct principles that could be made the basis of sweeping practical conclusions for the benefit of mankind. This view of theorising certainly informs the associationist psychology of Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind and his article on the relationship of theory and practice.112 And it was with this aspect of his father's work in mind that his son underlined the contrast with Bentham. His father retained the interest in the philosophy of mind which he had acquired from his Scottish education, and this encouraged the search for psychological explanations of all feelings and motives. In this respect, 'Mr Mill is eminently a metaphysician; Bentham as little a metaphysician as any one can be who ever attained equal success in the science of philosophy.' On the same occasion John Stuart Mill also said that one of the 'most strongly marked peculiarities' of his father was 'impatience of detail', another byproduct perhaps of the high priority given to conjecture and the capacity to theorise by Stewart.113 The same ideas carry the burden of James Mill's position in his article on Education for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where they are further supported by a 'Scottish' or sociological diagnosis of those conditions that were most conducive to education in all its forms, domestic, social and political. If aristocracy bred subservience, intrigue, and flattery, and poverty gave rise to all those moral and mental limitations which Adam Smith had diagnosed in drawing attention to the effects of the division of labour on the mass of society, only between those extremes could the juste milieu be found on which all education and hence progress depended.114 Mill's 110 111 112

113 114

See W. Thomas, Philosophic Radicals, pp. 132-3, and his introduction to Mill's History, pp. xxii-iii. Seep. 41 above. See Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, edited by J. S. Mill, 2 vols. (London, 1869), especially, 11, pp. 402-3; and 'Theory and Practice', London Review, 3 (April 1836), 223-34. See 'A Few Observations on Mr Mill' (1833) as reprinted with Autobiography in Works, 1, pp. 590-3; and J. S. Mill's introduction to Analysis, pp. xix—xx. See the article on Education as reprinted in W. Burston (ed.), James Mill on Education (Cambridge, 1969), especially pp. 89-91, 118-19.

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confidence that progress was creating a class that would increasingly have both the motive and the leisure lacking in other classes to devote themselves to the public good has this kind of foundation. Whether or not his son's later so-called 'elitism' could have been fed from such a source is quite another story. Since Mill and Macaulay shared many assumptions in their respective diagnoses of the state of British society, it becomes necessary to re-open the question of Macaulay's shock when faced by Mill's drastic abridgement of history when dealing with British institutions. Mackintosh had boasted when he went to India that he had 'not an atom of Jonesian superstition about the East', an attitude that coincided with that of Mill, who devoted a good deal of effort in his History to attacking Sir William Jones's pro-orientalist findings.115 One might say of Mill that he had not an atom of Blackstonian (Burkean?) superstition about Britain, a serious source of disagreement with Whig historians and politicians, as both Mackintosh and Macaulay were. Mill could never join Macaulay in saying of the British constitution that while 'vile abuses cluster thick round every glorious event . . . the proper course is to abate the nuisance without defacing the shrine'.116 Macaulay was also right to sense that Mill's dismissal of eloquence was more than an attack on one of his personal talents. Mill appreciated the part played by logic, rhetoric, and elocution in argument, but the dismissal of eloquence was part of the self-conscious distancing process whereby the Utilitarians invented a new terminology to discuss politics - one that they claimed was more precise and less likely to contain vague sentiments and resonances of mere feeling. Macaulay saw himself occupying a middle position between the declaiming and picturepainting of the Romantic poets and the Euclidian lines and angles of the Utilitarian alternative.117 But since he believed that he belonged to a noble Whig tradition, a certain warmth, piety and eloquence was necessary to celebrate as well as signify that membership. The two men could speak the same language on Indian institutions because reverence had no political value there. Neither Mill nor Macaulay had much of Hume's or Smith's scepticism with regard to historical outcomes; the doctrine of unintended consequences does not figure prominently in their work as historians, and Macaulay was perhaps too much the English patriot to emphasise, as Hume and Smith did, the role played by accident in the development of England's peculiar constitutional arrangements. Macaulay was far closer 115 116 117

See Memoirs of the Life of Mackintosh, 1, p. 233; and W. Thomas's introduction to Mill's History, pp. xxx-xxxiv for Mill's antagonism to Jones. See Works, vi, p. 94. See especially 'Southey's Colloquies' (originally published 1830) in Works, v, p. 342.

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in spirit to Hume, Smith, and Stewart in stressing the need for gradual adaptation of institutions to the existing state of manners, but Mill could claim to be acting more in accord with Stewart's demotion of history in favour of future-oriented standards of excellence when dealing with societies that were already far advanced in the March of Mind. Yet strangely enough, it was with regard to attitudes towards the future that further differences between the two men emerge. Towards the past Mill played irreverent Jacobin to Macaulay's Burkean. Towards the future Mill apparently adopted the stance of a visionary, holding out hopes of indefinite improvement the moment good government was achieved. On each of the many causes he espoused, whether it was liberty of the press, education, birth control, or reform of Parliament, Mill made extravagant claims for the speed with which benefits would flow. It also enabled him, as we have seen, to dismiss the fears of more timid men on the question of whether the poor would plunder the rich under democracy. But his son judged that the Stoic side of his father's character predominated, and that he had 'scarcely any belief in pleasure'. Indeed, he thought human life 'a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth has gone by'. More telling, however, is his son's conclusion that his father thought that 'if life were made what it might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth having: but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility'.118 The remark is significant because it was the same lack of enthusiasm that led to the son's own mental breakdown and subsequent attempt to reconstruct his position after Macaulay's attack. By contrast, Macaulay might have taken a pragmatic view of the future, restraining the expression of larger hopes than the known state of human nature allowed - the kind of position which underlies the scepticism of Hume and Smith. He did entertain genuine fears of revolution and the overthrow of property and civilisation if moderate reform was not adopted, or if democracy along Mill's lines was immediately implemented, whereas Mill and Ricardo could dismiss the fears of their Whig friends when faced with incidents like Peterloo by treating them either as 'the occasional turbulence of a manufacturing district, peculiarly unhappy from a very great deficiency of a middle rank', or as something that would disappear once the demands of the people for good government, education, and a free press were met.119 Macaulay might also have adopted the scepticism which marked out Jeffrey from most of Stewart's other pupils and earned him grudging praise as 'Mr Much-Afraid' from Leslie 118 119

Autobiography in Works, 1, pp. 49-51. See Utilitarian Logic, p. 94 and Ricardo, Works, vm, pp. 58-9, 62, 80.

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Stephen.120 Macaulay's admiration for Jeffrey was boundless, but far from agreeing that Jeffrey's misgivings about such matters as the effect of the shift towards manufacturing and the introduction of machinery on the condition of the labouring classes, Macaulay projected the advance of civilisation in the past into the distant future with optimistic speculations about the standards of living and the mechanical marvels that would be available to the average British citizen in 1930.121 Macaulay might be more cautious than Mill about the prospects for sudden changes in the immediate future, but the positions were well and truly reversed when it came to the joys of material progress in the long term. It is not a matter of Macaulay being oblivious to Malthusian and (less aptly) Ricardian pessimism. It is more a case of Mill's Stoicism with regard to material pleasures versus Macaulay's willingness to celebrate the material progress that had been made and would be made in future. To judge from the work of both James and John Stuart Mill, Macaulay would need to have been more of a political economist in order to have adopted their more sombre and ascetic views on the purely instrumental importance of material enjoyments. Macaulay would not have derived much pleasure from contemplating John Stuart Mill's vision of a stationary state, which was in some ways John's version of James's stoicism. 120 121

For Stephen's comment see Hours in a Library, 4 vols. (London, 1907), i n , pp. 113-14. See Works, 1, pp. 120-1.

IV D

The tendencies of things: John Stuart Mill and the philosophic method There can be no separate Science of Government; that being the fact which, of all others, is most mixed up, both as cause and effect, with the qualities of the particular people or of the particular age. All questions respecting the tendencies of forms of government must stand part of the general science of society, not of any separate branch of it. JOHN STUART MILL, A System ofLogic (1843)

All true political science is, in one sense of the phrase, a priori, being deduced from the tendencies of things, tendencies known either through our general experience of human nature, or as the result of an analysis of the course of history, considered as a progressive evolution. JOHN STUART MILL, An Inaugural Address to the

University of St Andrewys (1867)

ANY doubts which may reasonably be entertained about the propriety of John Stuart Mill's inclusion in a book on nineteenth-century conceptions of the science of politics may well be reinforced by reflection on the passage from which our first epigraph is taken. Written, with calculated force, by the son of the author of the Essay on Government, it may seem to be announcing the closure of the old family business, and to be asking that all future enquiries be directed to the Head Office of the new sociology group responsible for the take-over. Certainly, Mill's work, above all Book vi of his Logic, has often enough been taken as the point at which that distinctive nineteenth-century ambition to develop a science of society based on laws of historical development starts to smother the independent study of 'things political' in any of the forms in which it had been cultivated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Much of the language of Book vi, written when Mill's enthusiasm for this new science was at its height, certainly licenses and perhaps even encourages this reading. Some of it suggests, for example, that the effective capacity of the political agent is, as in most comparable versions of the science, reduced to that of the pianola-player, that is, to 'determining what artificial means may be used, and to what extent, to accelerate natural progress as far as it is beneficial'.1 The contrast between the 'natural' order of social development and the 'artificial' character of deliberate human intervention was certainly the trademark of nineteenth-century evolutionary sociology, and Mill invested heavily at one time in importing the fashionable French prototypes. And yet it is arguable that his failure ever to get the new line into production betokened more than just the natural running-down of an over-charged enthusiasm. Reports of inconsistencies in Mill's work are as common, and as reliable, as those of the first Spring cuckoo, but the contrast between our epigraphs does point to certain tensions in his thought that are particularly relevant to understanding his relation to the aspiration to develop a science of politics, a relation which turns out not to have been one simply of hostility or indifference. Our epigraphs are separated by a quarter of a century, yet it is the later of them which strikes the more traditional note: though it still refers to 'the course of history considered as a progressive evolution', it now allows the science to retain its venerable adjective and it restores 'deduction' from 'human nature' to its former primacy. The contrast does not all tell in one direction: the shift 1

John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843), in The Collected

Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by J. M. Robson etal. (Toronto, 1963-), vn, p. 929. 129

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from speaking of 'government' to speaking of 'polities', for example, might be taken as one not altogether trivial index of Mill's self-conscious modernity. More interestingly, the uncharacteristically Aristoteliansounding 'tendencies of things' could, as we shall see, cover a multitude of ideas whose relation to the procedures appropriate to 'true political science' will repay scrutiny. Moreover, Mill is, by any standards, a pivotal figure in the development of the themes considered in these essays. His systematic account of the nature and methods of 'science', in the broadest sense, attained an authority in England that was positively papal, and Mill himself had made clear, what the concerns of the bulk of his extraordinarily large number of readers could only have accentuated, namely, that the account of the nature of reasoning and inference in the first five books of the Logic was a necessary preliminary to answering the question 'how far the methods, by which so many of the laws of the physical world have been numbered among truths irrevocably acquired and universally assented to, can be made instrumental to the formation of a similar body of received doctrine in moral and political science'.2 That his famous map of the moral sciences, the Mercator's projection of nineteenth-century thought in this area, should have given no place to the science of government as traditionally understood was, therefore, of some consequence, quite apart from the connection - or, more teasingly, the lack of it - between that map and his own later writings. And, of course, some of these later writings furnished inescapable points of reference for all subsequent cultivators of the science of politics: his Principles of Political Economy (1848) virtually constituted the subject for a generation or more, while his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), though its conclusions never found general favour, immediately acquired the standing of a classic. Mill himself believed that 'systematic differences of opinion in the moral and mental sciences' were fundamentally due to different 'conceptions of the philosophic method of the science',3 and perhaps only Sidgwick among the other figures discussed in this book matched him in the attention he devoted to questions of method. His views on the philosophic method appropriate to the study of politics are deserving, therefore, of fuller consideration than we would, in other cases, feel at all tempted to bestow on such matters. And, in fact, methodological and substantive issues are, as so often, closely intertwined, with the question of the formation of 'character', both individual and national, providing the main common motif. 2 3

Logic, Works, vn, p. cxiii. John Stuart Mill, 'On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to it' (1836), Works, iv, p. 324.

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One way of indicating Mill's distance from most of the other figures considered in this book, especially the later ones, is to recall his Francophilia. This was in part simply the concomitant of his partisan radicalism: where the July revolution of 1830 was greeted with cautiously qualified approval in the pages of the respectable reviews in England, it led Mill, politically on heat and eager to admire Le Peuple when aroused, to go to Paris to make contact with 'the extreme popular party', just as after 1848 he defended the revolutionary experiments against the almost uniform condemnation of the English educated classes, led by the aged Brougham. 4 Throughout the century, the history of modern France provided Englishmen, as we shall see in the following essay, with ample occasions upon which to congratulate themselves on their superior political wisdom and good fortune; for Mill, by contrast, 'the struggle for freedom' had known its most glorious moments in France, albeit moments which had a tendency to give way only to more despotic governments whose triumph was always a matter of 'painful regret'. 5 But it was that 'new era of the French intellect' 6 which Mill particularly celebrated, and this, too, distinguishes him, for it is noticeable how almost all the subsequent figures in this book looked, insofar as they looked abroad at all for intellectual sustenance, rather to Germany than to France. Moreover, though they conceded the superiority of German scholarship, they did not on the whole - Seeley may be a partial exception - see themselves as importing ideas which would be subversive of the most cherished features of the indigenous wisdom, especially in politics. It was, by contrast, constitutive of Mill's identity as a political and cultural commentator to parade his scorn for the backwardness and complacency of the English mind and for the 'merely empirical' character of English politics: like some other self-styled radicals then, and many since, he certainly felt they did these things better in France. 'If we open an English book of history, jurisprudence or any similar subject, we seldom find in it the real foundations, the ultimate reason of things. In all matters, and especially in politics, pure doctrine and philosophy - science properly so called - have prospered far more on the Continent than in England.' 7 In citing Guizot's remark he was, unavoidably, feeding his own self-esteem, but he was also pointing to an ideal of what he took, in the 1830s and early 1840s at least, a science 'properly so called' of politics to be like. 4

5 6 7

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), Works, 1, pp. 179, 264; Brougham was singled out for criticism by Mill in his 'The French Revolution of 1848 and its Assailants', Westminster Review, 51 (1849), I~47John Stuart Mill, 'Centralization' (1862), Works, xix, p. 583. John Stuart Mill, 'Armand Carrel' (1837), Dissertations and Discussions, 2 vols. (London, 1859), 1, pp. 233-7 (hereafter DandD). John Stuart Mill, 'Guizot's Essays and Lectures' (1845), D andD, 11, p. 282.

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Two features of this ideal stand out: first that it was informed by 'certain conceptions of history considered as a whole, some notions of a progressive unfolding of the capabilities of humanity—of a tendency of man and society towards some distant result - of a destination, as it were, of humanity' ;8 and second, that it had grasped that 'underneath all political philosophy there must be a social philosophy - a study of agencies lying deeper than forms of government, which, working through forms of government, produce in the long run most of what these seem to produce, and which sap and destroy all forms of government which lie across their path'. 9 Regarding this ideal, which was 'greatly in advance of all other political philosophies which have yet existed', as the property of a school, 'rather scattered among many minds than concentrated in one', Mill took Comte to have given it systematic expression, and Book vi of the Logic represents an attempt to render its methodological essence. There, the fundamental task for 'the social science' (as he was then fond of calling it) was to establish the relationship between all the phenomena of 'a state of society', the key catch-phrase of the new science, and 'to find the laws according to which any state of society produces the state which succeeds it and takes its place'. 10 One minor oddity about Mill's characterisation of the French school concerns his claim that in the study of politics it found its 'highest expression' in the work of Tocqueville. That Mill took Democracy in America to mark 'the beginning of a new era in the scientific study of politics' may be seen simply as a generous puff; that he should have reserved his most fulsome praise for the book's methodological innovations, praising the method as 'that of a philosopher . . . a combination of deduction with induction', 11 may be put down to the tendency of Mill the reviewer to recruit authors to his own current enthusiasms, for there Tocqueville seemed on the whole as uninterested in purely methodological questions as it was possible for a French author to be. Still, given this emphasis in Mill's assessment, and given that he began the final draft of the Logic shortly afterwards, it is surely remarkable that Tocqueville is never mentioned in that long book. Comte, of course, provided a far more obliging spokesman for the French school, but the omission may also owe something to the fact that, as we shall see below, part of what Mill found so congenial in Tocqueville's views was precisely that concern with diversity and individuality which sat least comfortably with the project of a social science described in Book vi. At all events, what this approach promised, at the time, was to supersede 8 9 10 11

'Guizot's Essays and Lectures', p. 221. 'Armand Carrel', pp. 234-5. Logic, Works, vin, pp. 911-12. John Stuart Mill, 'De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [n]' (1840), Works, xvm, pp. 156-7.

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all those half-instructed quacks - including therein, in a moment of particular excess, all 'philosophical speculators on forms of government, from Plato to Bentham' - who had 'attempted to study the pathology and therapeutics of the social body before they had laid the necessary foundations in its physiology'.12 Clearly, what animated Mill's more blustering remarks here was his desire to demonstrate the width of the gulf between the thought on this subject of his generation (of which he almost invariably turns out to be the only representative in England) and that of his predecessors. Understandably, the picture painted in the 1830s by Mill, still flushed with oedipal struggle, contained a strong element of caricature. For example, in a brief review published in 1840 of an anonymous work entitled, evocatively, Essays on Government, Mill commended the author's two fundamental principles and remarked: 'It may truly be said, that whoever knows these two principles, possesses more of the science of politics than was known even to eminent thinkers fifty years ago.' Now, certainly this remark is above all expressive of Mill's own involvement with 'the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth'; 1840 was, after all, also the year of his essay on Coleridge. But even allowing for this, one cannot help wondering what 'eminent thinkers' he had in mind, if indeed the phrase was anything more than a way of gesturing towards the Enlightenment generally. The features of this convenient straw-philosophe no doubt bore an observable resemblance to those of Bentham or James Mill; most authors keep one or two favourite moulds for such purposes, stored in the attic of semi-consciousness, and Mill was always willing to take a fresh impression of this particular theoretical countenance. Still, 'fifty years ago' was the age not only of Burke as well as Bentham, but also of Smith, Millar and the Scottish historical school of whom Mill was by no means ignorant. What makes his sweeping dismissal the odder is that the two principles which together constitute this Copernican revolution turn out to be no more than, first, that changes in the human no less than in the physical world are to be regarded as instances of the operation of general laws, and second, 'that the changes in political institutions are the effects of previous changes in the conditions of society and of the human mind'.13 This points to an enterprise which would perhaps be slightly more determinist than Smith's, and considerably more intellectualist than Millar's, but these are fine discriminations; in essence these two principles would surely have seemed rather trite to many of the 'eminent thinkers' of 1790. More generally, in sketching some of the ways in which Mill might seem (as he wished to do) at some distance from the rest of our cast, we should 12 13

Logic, Works, v i n , p. 876. John Stuart Mill, 'Essays on Government* (1840), Works, x v m , p. 151.

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not let his own penchant for hyperbole lead us into exaggeration. We must be careful, for example, not to impose upon him a too modern, and perhaps too significant, distinction between the 'political' and the 'social'. The focus of his interest was, in practice, always upon public affairs broadly understood, so that any implication that the conceptual purity of the new science was his chief priority would be misleading. Of course, something similar might be said of many of those now regarded as the Founding Persons of sociology, but in at least some of their cases - Spencer and Durkheim are obvious examples - there was a highly developed, even aggressive, self-consciousness about the way in which the articulation of 'society' as an object of knowledge engrossed their theoretical energies. In Mill's case, by contrast, the terms of the questions which held his attention, and even the categories under which he arranged the evidence relevant to their solution, remained, we wish to suggest, obstinately political. For example, even the section of the Logic from which several of our quotations have been taken begins as a reflection upon 'the condition of politics as a branch of knowledge', and thereafter the vocabulary of 'citizens' and 'states' mingles with that of 'individuals' and 'societies'.14 The overlap, or perhaps the unimportance of the distinction, is nicely brought out by the passage in which he claims that the chief benefit of the study of social statics would be 'to ascertain the requisites of stable political union'; he then went on, at least in the first two editions, to argue that 'there are some circumstances which, being found in all societies without exception, and in the greatest degree where the union is most complete, may be considered . . . as conditions of the existence of society'. Quite what he meant by 'society' at the end of this sentence is not altogether clear - any form of human sociability? a certain kind of self-maintaining group? an ethnic, linguistic, or political unit, or what? One intriguing answer is suggested by the fact that from the third edition onwards he replaced 'society' with the phrase 'the complex phenomenon called a State', without altering any of the rest of the sentence. This accorded better with the gist of the long self-quotation from the essay on Coleridge which follows (in all editions), in that he there begins by citing 'obedience to a government of some sort' as 'the very first element of the social union', and then goes on to list 'the second condition of permanent political society', and so on. 15 Moreover, as his intellectual affair with Comte cooled, and as he matured beyond the felt need to distance himself from the a-historical simplicities of vulgar Benthamism, he toned down some of his more extravagant proclamations of novelty, and relaxed into a more judicious, less tendentious, assessment of his predecessors. The passage cited earlier con14 15

Logic, Works, VIII, p. 875. Logic, Works, VIII, pp. 920-4.

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taining the aggressive reference to Plato and Bentham, for example, was deleted from the third edition of the Logic, and this was representative of the many minor modifications he made to his earlier works when his popularity allowed for their re-publication. In fact, as we shall argue below, in some of the works written during the last two decades of his life Mill might be said to have moved closer - or, more accurately, to have reverted - to some of those traditional ways of approaching the study of politics which he had most seemed to scorn when writing en sociologue. There had, of course, always been some matters on which Mill had dissented from Comte's summa even on purely methodological grounds. One which requires only a brief mention here was his conviction that the laws of the human mind, understood in Associationist terms, remained the basis for all the moral sciences. Indeed, without this conviction his pet project of Ethology, 'the science of the formation of character', becomes unintelligible, since its laws are 'derivative laws, resulting from the general laws of mind; and are to be obtained by deducing them from those general laws; by supposing any given set of circumstances, and then considering what, according to the laws of mind, will be the influence of those circumstances on the formation of character'. 16 To Comte, this smacked of eighteenth-century individualism, and he allowed psychology no place in his classification of the sciences. This was one of the places where Mill remained loyal to the faith of his fathers, and when, only four years before he died, he edited a revised version of James Mill's classic, An Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, bringing it up to date by incorporating the latest findings of Bain and Spencer, he announced that in essentials its account of the nature of man still seemed to him 'unassailable'.17 But a more important divergence from Comte was his continued endorsement of a separate science of political economy, and before returning to Mill's engagement with the science of politics in its more general form we need to examine his arguments here rather more fully. For even apart from the extraordinary hegemony of his Principles, his earlier essay 'On the Definition of Political Economy' was recognised (as Mill had intended) as the classic statement of the methodology of 'English' political economy, and its thesis was expanded in Cairnes's The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy, which was first published in 1857 and remained the recommended text well into 16 17

Logic, Works, vm, p. 869. James Mill, An Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, ed. John Stuart Mill, 2 vols. (London, 1869), pp. xii-xvii.

i}6

The tendencies of things

the 1880s.18 Mill thus not only produced the single most influential nineteenth-century contribution to the independent science of political economy: more than anyone else he was responsible for developing the arguments by which this independence was defended by others. And the significance of this is underlined by the fact that the passage from which our first epigraph is taken, denying the possibility of a separate science of government, was immediately preceded by one containing precisely the opposite argument in the case of political economy. 19 The avowed purpose of his early essay was to demonstrate the hypothetical nature of the reasoning involved in political economy considered as a science, and to distinguish this from the vulgar claims, frequently to be met with in more popular literature in the 1820s and 1830s, that its propositions were descriptive of the universal behaviour of concrete economic phenomena. He argued that political economy abstracted one from among man's many actual motives - the desire for wealth - and then worked out deductively what the consequences would be for men in society were this their only motive. In thus restricting his calculations to the operation of this single motive, 'no political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really thus constituted'. Men are in fact moved by many motives, and political economy does not pretend to deal with 'those parts of human conduct of which wealth is not even the principal object'; furthermore, even in those cases where it is 'the main and acknowledged end' of action, political economy reasons 'as if it were the sole end'. Of course, this account assumes that the initial premise possesses some prior plausibility and significance. After all, hypothetical reasoning could proceed from any premise: since no one set of deductions will ever, except in very extreme cases, correspond to actual behaviour, the method itself does not rule out any particular starting-point. Mill clearly agreed with the political economists' convictions about which premises would turn out to be fruitful: he spoke of the assumption that the desire for wealth was the sole end of economic activity as the one 'which, of all hypotheses equally simple, is nearest to the truth' (and again, that by reasoning from this premise, 'a nearer approximation is obtained than otherwise would be practicable, to the real order of human affairs in those departments').20 There were, in fact, deeper complications here, since certain minimal circumstances must also be assumed before any calculations can be com18

19 20

For evidence of the success of the Principles, see N. B. de Marchi, 'The success of Mill's Principles', History of Political Economy, 6 (1974), 119-57. Mill intended his essay to be 'classical and of authority'; Mill to J. P. Nichol, 17 Jan 1834, Works, x n , p. 211. For Cairnes's acknowledgement of it, see his The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy (1857) (London, 1965), Preface and ch. 1. Logic, Works, v m , pp. 905-6. 'Definition of Political Economy', Works, iv, pp. 322-3.

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menced, and, as Mill recognised, political economy would be 'mere trifling if the assumed circumstances bear no sort of relationship to any real ones'. 21 Just how far Mill thought such circumstances did obtain in the world at present - as well as, scarcely ever less important in his case, the future - is a question we may leave on one side here. Even if the universal status of the deductions of political economy is granted, it is striking how austere and spare a conception of the science this essay presented. Not only does it exclude any policy recommendations, but it accepts, indeed insists, that the explanation of any actual sequence of events will always involve the findings of a combination of sciences. Thus restricted, the science consists purely of a set of hypothetical statements of the necessary relations between assumed variables, statements declaring what would be the case were the assumed variables the actual ones (of which there can be no guarantee) and were they the only operative ones (which in almost all cases there is good reason to doubt). Thus defined, political economy would be an unlikely candidate for popular respect or political prestige, and it hardly needs to be said that Mill's own Principles by no means remained within the ambit of this refined conception of the subject. More disturbingly, Mill elsewhere even raised doubts about the operation of the 'familiar psychological law . . . that a greater gain is preferred to a smaller' upon which all the reasonings of political economy were held to rest. For example, when reproaching 'English thinkers' (again, the insistent dissociation) for tacitly assuming as 'empirical laws of human nature' characteristics of a merely local incidence, he went on: An English political economist, like his countrymen in general, has seldom learned that it is possible that men, in conducting the business of selling their goods over the counter, should care more about their ease or their vanity than about their pecuniary gain. Yet those who know the habits of the continent of Europe are aware how apparently small a motive often outweighs the desire of money-getting, even in the operations which have money-getting for their direct object. The more highly the science of ethology is cultivated, and the better the diversities of individual and national character are understood, the smaller, probably, will the number of propositions become, which it will be considered safe to build on as universal principles of human nature.22 It was hardly surprising that later critics like Cliffe Leslie, in retrospectively recruiting Mill (and Smith) to the cause of the 'historical method', should have argued that since in practice Mill's subsequent work was full of such 'corrections of the crude generalizations of the school in which he was taught', it pointed away from the a priorism of his early essays and 21 22

'Definition of Political Economy', Works, iv, p. 329. Logic, Works, v m , p. 906.

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towards a 'systematic application of historical and inductive investigation'. 23 Such a conclusion, if warranted, would be of some moment: it might seem to signal even political economy's capitulation to the charges brought by Macaulay against the elder Mill. In fact, this conclusion rests upon the neglect or over-simplification of at least three aspects of Mill's argument. To begin with, Mill's case does not require that economic phenomena be exclusively determined by a single cause. In defending the use of the direct deductive method in general, he cautioned that 'this mode of enquiry, considered as a means of obtaining general propositions, must, therefore, on pain of frivolity, be limited to those classes of social facts which, though influenced like the rest by all sociological agents, are under the immediate influence, principally at least, of a few only'. The qualifications introduced by 'immediate' and 'principally' recur throughout his argument: he only ever says that the phenomena which comprise political economy's subject-matter are 'in the main dependent, immediately and in the first resort' on the single cause. Furthermore, when emphasising the pervasiveness of ethological variation, he insists that 'those portions alone of the social phenomena can with advantage be made the subjects, even provisionally, of distinct branches of science, into which the diversities of character between different nations or different times enter as influencing causes only in a secondary degree'.24 Thus, his position can accommodate evidence of economic agents acting from motives other than the desire for wealth so long as it is plausible to claim that the greater part of the economic behaviour of the majority of them, and some of that behaviour in all of them, is primarily determined by it. In this sense, the model of 'economic man' is surely fundamental to Mill's conception of the autonomy of political economy, but it is a model, constructed at a very high level of abstraction, to which no actual behaviour need ever entirely correspond. 25 The second aspect of his argument which must not be overlooked is that for all his declarations of the variability of human character, he never abandoned the belief in universal laws of human nature. Indeed, as we remarked above, the very project of an 'Ethology' presupposes this. Equally, the historical or inverse deductive method is dependent upon 23 24 25

T . E . Cliffe Leslie, Essays on Moral and Political Philosophy (Dublin, 1879), p . 2 2 1 ; cf. pp. 225-6, 239, 246, 389. See also below, Essay VIII, p p . 2 6 2 - 5 . Logic, Works, VIII, p p . 900, 906. T h e importance of 'economic m a n ' for Mill's position is disputed in J . K. Whitaker's careful study, c J o n n Stuart Mill's methodology 3 ', Journal of Political Economy, 83 (1975)5 esp. 1044. Mill's successors certainly regarded it as an essential postulate of his w o r k : see, for example, J . N . Keynes, The Scope and Method of Political Economy ( L o n d o n , 1891), pp. 11-19. F o r Marshall's rejection of it see below, p . 314 and n. 5.

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these psychological truths, since it involves establishing a consilience in any given case between historical generalisation and deductions from 'the known laws of human nature'. Moreover, the latter are to some extent given methodological priority, for he announces that cif a sociological theory, collected from historical evidence, contradicts the established general laws of human nature', then 'we may know that history has been misinterpreted, and that the theory is false'.26 And again, if we return to the notorious passage about those vain and slothful continental merchants, we notice that although he thinks that the progress of ethology will reduce 'the number of propositions . . . which it will be considered safe to build on as universal principles of human nature', it will not eliminate them; rather will it enable such building to take place on securer foundations. Finally, we need to pay special attention to the very strict limitations which Mill imposes upon the scope of the pure science of political economy, since many of the features of his work alleged to indicate the incoherence of his conception of the subject were not in fact considered by him to fall within its boundaries. For instance, even the 'vain and slothful merchants' passage is preceded by the remark that 'the most imperfect of those branches of social enquiry which have been cultivated as separate sciences, is the theory of the manner in which their conclusions are affected by ethological considerations. The omission is no defect in them as abstract or hypothetical sciences, but it vitiates them in their practical application as branches of a comprehensive social science.'27 Those tiresome continental merchants are thus not a rebuke to the narrowness of the axioms of political economy, but rather a reminder of the distance between hypothetical reasoning and actual behaviour. 28 Again, when making his much-cited remark about the science of political economy's dependence upon the presupposition of competition, he went on: So far as rents, profits, wages, prices are determined by competition, laws may be assigned for them. Assume competition to be their exclusive regulator, and principles of broad generality and scientific precision may be laid down, according to which they will be regulated. The political economist justly deems this his proper business: and as an abstract or hypothetical science political economy cannot be required to do, and indeed cannot do, anything more. But it would be a great 26 27 28

J o h n Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), Works, x, p . 307. Logic, Works, v m , p p . 905-6. H a d Mill been willing t o make 'utility-maximisation' the central category of his economics, then the necessary unity of motive could easily have been restored: vanity o r ease could take their place in a schedule of revealed preferences. There is an excellent analysis of Mill's unwillingness to generalise consumer demand in this w a y in N . B. de Marchi, 'Mill and Cairnes and the emergence of marginalism in England', History of Political Economy, 4 (1972), 344-63.

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misconception of the actual course of human affairs, to suppose that competition exercises in fact this unlimited sway.29 The implication surely is that the examination of those forms of distribution not determined by competition (the subject-matter of the next four chapters of the Principles) is not part of the science of political economy strictly conceived. Indeed, the consequence of Mill's tight characterisation of the science is that much of the second and third, and all of the last two, books of his Principles do not fall within its boundaries. Mill himself recognised this, declaring in the Preface that an up-jto-date statement of 'the theory of the subject' was 'not the sole, or even the principal, object' of the book. Rather, he took The Wealth of Nations as his model, a work which he saw as characterised by the fact that it invariably associates the principles with their applications. This of itself implies a much wider range of ideas and of topics than are included in Political Economy, considered as a branch of abstract speculation. For practical purposes, Political Economy is inseparably intertwined with many other branches of social philosophy. Except on matters of mere detail, there are perhaps no practical questions, even among those which approach nearest to the character of purely economical questions, which admit of being decided upon economical premises alone.30 In his correspondence, Mill was frank about the limits of his theoretical ambitions: 'I doubt if there will be a single opinion (on pure political economy) in the book which may not be exhibited as a corollary from his [Ricardo's] doctrines.' Its value in Mill's eyes lay in the fact that it was 'essentially a book of applications exhibiting the principles of the science in the concrete', and as such served as a vehicle for 'a great number of opinions on incidental matters, moral and social'. 31 To some extent, Mill may be said to have exonerated classical political economy from the charges of narrowness and internal incoherence at the cost of reducing the significance and practical bearing of its conclusions. As he remarked four years after the publication of the work which immediately identified him as the leading spokesman for political economy in his generation: I confess that I regard the purely abstract speculations of political economy (beyond those elementary ones which are necessary for the correction of mischievous prejudices) as of very minor importance compared with the great practical questions which the progress of democracy and the spread of Socialist opinions are 29

30 31

John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy, with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848), Works, 11, p. 239; his remark that 'only through the principle of competition has political economy any pretension to the character of a science' occurs immediately before the passage cited. Principles, Works, 11, p. xci; cf. above, p. 66. Mill to John Austin, 22 February 1848, and Mill to Henry Chapman, 9 March 1847; Works, XIII, pp. 731, 708-9.

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pressing on, and for which both the governing and the governed classes are very far from being in a fit state of mental preparation . . . There is therefore abundance of occupation for moral and political teachers such as we aspire to be.32 The last sentence is a timely reminder of Mill's priorities. Far from enabling political economy to 'supplant' its parent discipline, his elaborate defence of its methodological autonomy only served to reinforce its practical subject to the more general 'science of the statesman or legislator'. It would be misleading to suggest that when, in his more casual and polemical writings, Mill referred to political economy he always had in mind this somewhat fastidiously limited conception of the abstract science. When he was considering 'Socialist objections to the present order of society', for example, he cautioned that 'though much of their allegation is unanswerable, not a little is the result of errors in political economy; by which, let me say once for all, I do not mean the rejection of any practical rules of policy which have been laid down by political economists, I mean ignorance of economic facts, and of the causes by which the economic phenomena of society as it is, are actually determined'.33 This suggests a notion of a theoretically informed economic sociology more akin to that which his 'historical' or 'inductive' critics were by this date demanding. Or, more revealingly still, when outlining his ideal educational syllabus in his St Andrew's Address, he recommended that studies bearing on 'the great interests of mankind as moral and social beings - ethics and politics in the largest sense' should be included in university curricula where there exists a collection of facts or thoughts sufficiently sifted and methodised to form the beginning of a science. . . Among the chief of these is Political Economy; the sources and conditions of wealth and material prosperity for aggregate bodies of human beings. This study approaches nearer to the rank of a science, in the sense in which we apply that name to the physical sciences, than anything else connected with politics yet does. I need not enlarge on the important lessons which it affords for the guidance of life, and for the estimation of laws and institutions, or on the necessity of knowing all that it can teach in order to have a true view of the course of human affairs, or form plans for their improvement which will stand actual trial.34 This is the voice of Mill the public sage and spokesman for a more popular conception of political economy as a developed science with important practical lessons to teach (though even here its place as a subordinate branch of 'ethics and politics' is kept in view). He was not, after all, called as an expert witness before five Parliamentary Select Committees on 32 33 34

Mill to Karl Heinrich Rau, 20 March 1852; Works, xiv, p. 87. John Stuart Mill, 'Chapters on Socialism' (1879), Works, v, p. 727. John Stuart Mill, An Inaugural Address to the University of St Andrew's (London, 1867), pp. 66^-7, 69-70.

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economic questions between 1850 and 1861 because he had made clear the purely hypothetical character of the conclusions of political economy. There is, however, one further implication of his defence of the autonomy of political economy which needs to be considered here, and that is its bearing on his qualified rejection of the Benthamite science of politics. For that project, as exemplified (though perhaps unrepresentatively) by his father's Essay on Government, is often portrayed as the extension to politics of both the method and the assumptions of economic reasoning, Benthamite man being seen merely as the more aggressive and more ambitious younger brother of economic man. 35 Mill's rejection of this project in his chapter on 'The Geometrical Method' is one of the better-known cases of intellectual parricide, but what still needs to be established is why he thought there could not be a hypothetical science of political phenomena comparable to that of economic phenomena. 36 After all, his objection to his father's contention that 'the actions of average rulers are determined solely by self-interest' depends upon regarding it as a concrete and not a hypothetical statement: their actions in fact, he rejoins, are 'largely influenced' by various other 'feelings, habits and modes of thought'. But he himself said the same of the actions of economic agents: they, too, are influenced by such 'ethological' considerations, but he still regarded it as a proper and valuable exercise to reason as if they were moved by the desire for wealth alone. He also conceded that the Benthamite proposition was sufficiently close to the truth to be valuable, and that its authors had been willing to make 'innumerable allowances' in its application. Still he objected that 'it is unphilosophical to construct a science out of a few of the agencies by which the phenomena are determined and leave the rest to the routine of practice or the sagacity of conjecture. We either ought not to pretend to scientific forms, or we ought to study all the determining agencies equally, and endeavour, so far as it can be done, to include all of them within the pale of the science.' 37 But again, he did not consider it a fatal objection to political economy that it 35

36

37

See, for example, Alan R y a n , ' T w o concepts of politics a n d d e m o c r a c y : J a m e s Mill and John Stuart Mill', in M. Fleisher (ed.), Macbiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought ( L o n d o n , 1973), p p . 7 6 - 1 1 3 ; for o u r reservations about this view, see above, p . 112 and n. 72. A version of this question was raised b y one of Mill's Positivist critics: 'Whilst in his Logic he criticized with just severity w h a t he, n o t very happily, calls the geometrical m o d e of philosophizing practiced b y t h e Benthamites in political research, h e approves what is essentially t h e same course of proceeding in economic e n q u i r y ; a n d , whilst protesting against t h e attempt t o construct a special science of the political p h e n o m e n a of society apart from general sociology, he y e t , with whatever restrictions a n d qualifications, accepts the separate construction of a science of its economic p h e n o m e n a . ' J . K. Ingram, ' T h e present position a n d prospects of political e c o n o m y ' (1878), in R. L. Smyth (ed.), Essays in Economic Method 1860-1913 Logic, Works, v m , p p . 891, 893.

(London, 1962), p. 65.

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did not include 'all the determining agencies' of actual behaviour cwithin the pale of the science'. To see why he nonetheless did not extend his arguments to the justification of the comparable study of political phenomena is, paradoxically, to indicate from a different point of view his acceptance of the ambitious scope of the traditional science of politics. Mill's contrasting accounts of political economy and of 'the interest philosophy of the Bentham School' suggest that he saw two chief methodological differences between them. First, the Benthamites did not recognise the extent to which their reasoning was necessarily hypothetical, and as such dependent upon some more general historical analysis before it could issue in practical truths (this was, as we have seen, a rather ungenerous simplification of his father's position). Second, the logical status of the subject-matter of the two enterprises is different. On Mill's account, political economy deals with one class of actions (or, more strictly, a range of actions classified in terms of a common aspect) which was so largely determined by a single cause operating on a very small set of assumed circumstances that it could with advantage be studied separately. But he did not in fact consider the Benthamite science of politics to be an attempt to deal with a comparable class of actions at all, but, quite rightly, as a theory of much more ambitious dimensions. After all, what he berated the 'Bentham School' for was their attempt to deduce 'the phenomena of society', no less, from their basic axiom.38 A deductive political economy was acceptable so long as it exhibited a properly deferential awareness of its limited and subordinate role; but the swagger of the Benthamee was an embarrassment, all too likely to give the science of politics a bad name. Notoriously, having made, with Macaulay's assistance, his emotionally charged discovery that there was something 'fundamentally erroneous in my father's conception of philosophical Method, as applicable to polities', Mill swung round to the conviction that 'all questions of political institutions are relative' ;39 and this conviction - expressed in our first epigraph on the dependence of government on 'the qualities of the particular people and the particular age' - may suggest that however successfully Mill upheld the deductive method in political economy, he thereafter embraced the study of history as the royal road to wisdom in the larger science of politics. Yet here, too, he resists easy categorisation. It had always been a recognisable part of his carefully nurtured identity as a 'philosophic' writer to deride that 'vulgar mode of using history' which consisted of drawing lessons and maxims from a few of the betterknown episodes of European, and especially ancient, history. 'Not only is 38 39

Logic, Works, VIII, p . 894. Autobiography, Works, 1, pp. 167, 169.

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history not the foundation of political philosophy, but the profoundest political philosophy is requisite to explain history.'40 His scorn during the 1820s and 1830s for 'the puerile notion that political wisdom can be founded upon [history]'41 was particularly fuelled by those celebratory narratives of English constitutional progress which provided the carbohydrate of the educated classes' reading diet. He never missed an opportunity, and he had many, for complaining of 'that Cimmerian darkness still prevailing in England . . . concerning the very existence of the views of general history, which have been received throughout the Continent of Europe for the last twenty or thirty years'.42 One is again led to reflect on his - but by this time not only his - disregard of the Scottish conjectural historians. The fact that his favoured French historians organised their accounts around an explicitly intellectualist theory of social change may partly account for his exclusive concentration on their achievements, just as his anxiety to dissociate himself from the reproach of sectarian Benthamism may have inhibited him from giving his father's History of British India its due at this time. By 1869 when he wrote his glowing estimate of his father for the new edition of his Analysis, he could allow that the History formed 'an important chapter in the history and philosophy of civilization', though he continued to press the point that it was 'a subject which had not then been so scientifically studied as it has since'.43 Even before Comte enabled him to assign history its proper place among the methods of the moral sciences, Mill had been willing to acknowledge the more modest functions which its study might perform. Only by comparison with the Comtean vision were they 'modest', since they essentially amounted to the related benefits of the enlargement of the range of experience and the acquaintance with the operation of causality in human affairs.44 As ever for Mill, these benefits had a way of proving politically congenial: as a prophylactic against parochialism and a refutation of doctrines of fixed and innate human characteristics, history properly studied - the qualification was all - could undermine two of the most common supports of conservatism. In itself, the past held few charms for the mature Mill, certainly few by comparison with the future, and his interest in the richness of its detail was correspondingly limited and 40 41 42 43

John Stuart Mill, 'Sedgwick's Discourse' (1835), Works, x, p. 44; for further strictures on 'the vulgar mode of using history', see Comte and Positivism, Works, x, p. 308. John Stuart Mill, 'Civilization' (1836), Works, x v m , p. 145; this phrase was omitted when Mill reprinted the essay in 1859. John Stuart Mill, 'Coleridge' (1840), Works, x, p. 140. Analysis, p. xiv. His relation to his father's History is discussed in a splendid essay by J. H. Burns, 'The light of reason: philosophic history in the two Mills', in J. M. Robson and M. Laine (eds.), James and John Stuart Mill: Papers of the Centenary Conference (Toronto, l

44

976\ PP- i-*o-

Seeesp. 'Civilization', Works, x v m , pp. 144-6.

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schematic; a bleakly positivist note is struck in his definition of it as 'the science of causes'.45 The historians whom he particularly singled out for praise among his contemporaries in England were, revealingly, Grote and Buckle: the one credited with being the first to write 'a philosophical history of Greece' (the adjective was withheld even from the scholarly Thirwall, despite his congenial demolition of Mitford, since he did not sufficiently relate his findings to 'general principles');46 the other applauded for attempting 'to apply general principles to the explanation and prediction of social facts'. By contrast, Mill concurred in a correspondent's view that Macaulay's volumes were 'pleasant reading, but not exactly history'.47 The ambivalence which was always latent in Mill's attitudes to the place of history in political reasoning surfaced most obviously in his response to that great vogue for the Comparative and Historical Method which began in the last decade of his life (and which is discussed in Essay vn below). In fact, of course, there was no single method, nor were the various fashions loosely grouped under this label always as novel as their proponents liked to claim; but what helped to generate an exaggerated sense of a coherent approach was a common contrast with the method of deductive Utilitarianism, supposedly, though never actually, dominant in the previous generation. The two subjects in which this contrast initially gained greatest purchase were political economy and jurisprudence, Ricardo and Austin frequently being paired off as the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the a priori method. Though Mill's place in this story was recognised by some of his more discerning readers to be uncertain, in retrospect he was usually assigned to the pre-'historicaP era. Leslie Stephen spoke, influentially, of his 'indifference to history', and Pollock was merely expressing the received end-of-century view when he casually referred to Mill as 'perhaps the last considerable writer on politics who ignored [the] importance' of the historical approach.48 The work which, more than any other, was taken by contemporaries to mark the inauguration of the new historical approach, a work which was particularly aimed at Austinian conceptions of law, was Maine's Ancient Law, published in 1861. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, to find that Mill was one of Maine's earliest admirers. He read Ancient Law soon after its publication, and his reference to it in the 1862 edition of his Principles as 45 46 47 48

St Andrew's Address, pp. 67-$. John Stuart Mill, 'Grote's History of Greece [1]' (1846), Works, xi, p. 275. Mill to Arthur Hardy, 29 September 1856; Works, xv, p. 511. For his public praise of Buckle, see Logic, Works, v m , pp. 931-2. Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 3 vols. (London, 1900), i n , pp. 241, 317; Frederick Pollock, An Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics (London, 1890; revised edn, 1911), p. 126.

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a 'profound work' set the tone for all future citations, of which there were several in the next decade, culminating in a glowing review of Maine's second book, Village Communities in the East and West, in 1871.49 It must be said that Mill had already discovered common ground with Maine in their views about India, where both had been opposed to the winding-up of the East India Company, and critical of the land and revenue policies of the new Imperial government. 'I share your fears as to the tendency of things in India', strikes the note of their correspondence.50 Still, there is surely something a little curious in Mill's regard for a writer whose work was informed by a fundamental and sharply expressed hostility to Utilitarianism, and whose domestic political views were markedly conservative. The resolution of this minor puzzle is already implicit in the first reference of 1862, and is indicative of Mill's very limited engagement with these new trends of thought. For Ancient Law is cited in the second chapter of the Principles on 'Property' as authoritative support for the point that forms of property and the accompanying rights of inheritance and bequest were 'in a primitive state of society . . . conceived in a manner totally different from the conception of it in the present time'. Mill's interest here was not in a pattern of social evolution as such, still less in some irreversible law of progress from Status to Contract from which many subsequent readers were to extract a justification of legislative individualism. For Mill the value of such historical evidence is once again as a solvent of all those views which tended to identify existing social arrangements as constituting the necessary or natural state of affairs. Thus the paragraph which ends with the footnote reference to Ancient Law begins: 'No presumption in favour of existing ideas on this subject is to be derived from their antiquity.' The clearest indication that Mill was adapting Maine's findings to his own purposes is provided by the fact that this sentence, and indeed the whole paragraph, were included from the first edition fourteen years before;51 the reference to Ancient Law was added merely to give weight to a long-held conviction without its bringing with it any further addition or alteration to his views, and certainly not to his methodological views. Similarly, he drew a radical political moral about property from his review of Village Communities (much to its author's irritation), and when he here commends Maine's talents for that 'department of philosophical history 49

50

51

Mill to Cliffe Leslie, 20 December 1861, Works, xv, p . 757; Principles, Works, 11, p . 219; J o h n Stuart Mill, 'Austin o n Jurisprudence', Edinburgh Review, 118 (1863), 457; St Andrew's Address, p p . 7 2 - 3 ; 'Chapters on Socialism', Works, v, p . 751; J o h n Stuart Mill, 'Maine o n Village Communities', Fortnightly Review, 9 (1871), 543-56. Mill to Maine, 30 March 1871, Works, x v n , p . 1813. It is possible that Maine m a y first have attracted Mill's attention b y his defence of the East India C o m p a n y in the Saturday Review in 1857—8; see George Feaver, From Status to Contract: The Life of Sir Henry Maine 1822-1888 (London, 1968), pp. 65-6. Principles, Works, 11, pp. 218-19.

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which he has made his especial domain', 52 one cannot help feeling that the conception of 'philosophical history' which animates the review is very much that of The History of British India. In using the findings of the new historical school for his own purposes, Mill was not altogether blind to the fundamental methodological challenge which it potentially involved. He reproved Maine, for example, for his criticisms of Bentham and Austin and his extension of them to political economy. And in fact in several passages in his late writings he remarked the limited and even obstructive character of such historical approaches. He complained that 'political thinkers, who at one time may have been over-confident in their power of deducing systems of social truth from abstract human nature, have now for some time shown a tendency to the far worse extreme, of postponing the universal exigencies of man as man, to the beliefs and tendencies of particular portions of mankind as manifested in their history'. 53 (It is interesting that he is insistent that this is 'the far worse extreme': he had affected greater even-handedness in 1843.) His fear of course was that the new fashion for historical research would be at the expense of, or at least would divert attention from, the immediate tasks of reform. Even his regard for a fellow Liberal like Freeman was moderated by his reservations on this matter: he allowed that Freeman shared the general insight of 'the historical school in politics and jurisprudence' into the roots of successful political institutions, but he objected, revealingly, that 'this truth is continually perverted into an attack on the use of reason in matters of politics and social arrangements; and Freeman does not sufficiently guard himself against this perversion'. 54 Of course, it is open to writers of any persuasion to invoke 'the use of reason in matters of politics and social arrangements': it is the kind of phrase which best exemplifies the Humpty-Dumpty theory of meaning. Some indication of what it stood for in Mill's mind may be gleaned from his sympathetic appreciation of Maine's chief target, the jurisprudence of Austin. There is certainly precious little evidence here of any fondness for the potentially relativising influence of a historical or sociological approach (there had, interestingly, been no mention of jurisprudence or of its place in the moral sciences in Mill's map-making in Book vi). It is true that to his statement of the task of jurisprudence - 'that of clearing up and defining the notions which the human mind is compelled to form, and the distinctions which it is necessitated to make, by the mere existence of a body of law of any kind' - he did add the rider 'or of a body of law taking 52 53 54

'Maine on Village Communities', 556; for Maine's irritation, see Feaver, Status to Contract, pp. 119-21. 'Maine o n Village C o m m u n i t i e s ' , 543. Mill to J. E. Cairnes, 2 August 1872, Works, xvn, pp. 1903-4.

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cognizance of the concerns of a civilized and complicated state of society'. But this rider was not, apparently, an obstacle to arriving deductively at a universal set of legal categories. Epistemologically, this seems to rest on the belief that 'there are certain combinations of facts and ideas which every system of law must recognize'. But what these fundamental elements are is not to be established by induction, since actual legal systems exhibit a great variety of principles, 'having grown by mere aggregation' and subject to 'no authoritative arrangement but the chronological one'. So the very unhistorical task of jurisprudence is to 'free from confusion and set in a clear light those necessary resemblances and differences, which, if not brought into distinct apprehension by all systems of law, are latent in all, and do not depend on the accidental history of any'. This task of 'stripping off what belongs to the accidental or historical peculiarities' of the given system seems to be an irreducibly philosophical one, and to involve at least some of the difficulties of the time-honoured project of separating essences from accidents. Mill may have been relatively untroubled about this enterprise partly because he was confident that legal systems must have certain features in common since they are 'designed. . . for the same world, and for the same human nature'; and partly because of an almost Viennese positivism about the relation between words and things - to have 'apprehended the full meaning of these terms' would be to 'perfectly understand the facts and combinations of thoughts which they denote'. Thus he arrives at the comfortable (and surely recognisably Benthamite) conclusion that 'the same terminology, nomenclature, and principle of arrangement, which would render one system of law definite, clear, and (in Bentham's language) cognoscible, would serve, with additions and variations in minor details, to render the same office for another'. Apart from the immediate practical value of such analysis, Mill also maintained that it would provide a basis 'without which the scientific study of politics can scarcely be pursued with profit, since juristical ideas meet, and, if ill understood, confuse the student at every turning and winding in that intricate subject'.55 The reader may be pardoned for feeling that by this point Mill should not still be making ostentatiously respectful references to 'that intricate subject': if jurisprudence is an indispensable preliminary to it, if political economy is practically subordinate to it, if even 'the science of history' does not pre-empt it, then surely it is time for the bridesmaids to give way to the bride. But, despite his frequent allusions to it, 'a treatise . . . on political science at large'56 was among the many volumes even Mill did not write. We 55 56

'Austin on Jurisprudence', 441, 445-6, 443, 480. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative p. 396.

Government

(1861), Works, xix,

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do, however, have at least one very substantial systematic work on politics which may to some extent stand in its stead, his Considerations on Representative Government. This has generally been regarded as one of his less successful books: even some of his most faithful contemporary readers found it too 'doctrinaire', and Leslie Stephen's judgement that it 'is hardly on a level with his best work' set the tone for subsequent commentary. 57 That commentary has concentrated overwhelmingly on the book's contribution to democratic theory, especially, it seems, on the alleged 'elitism' of its various devices for moderating the consequences of majority rule. These are among the features of the book we shall ignore, as we look instead at the conceptions of the nature and methods of a science of politics which it may be said to exhibit. In regarding it from this point of view, we do not mean to minimise the extent to which Mill intended it to be a very practical contribution to the reform movement in England;58 in terms of the distinction drawn in the last chapter of the Logic, the book was at least as much a contribution to the 'art' as to the 'science' of the subject. Still, we must also bear in mind the further declaration in the Logic that the 'reasons of a maxim of policy, or any other rule of art' can be no other than 'the theorems of the corresponding science',59 and it is the nature of this science that interests us here. The most immediately striking (though generally unremarked) fact about the organisation of Representative Government is the disjunction between, on the one hand, the detailed discussion of legislative and administrative arrangements which constitutes three-quarters of the book, and, on the other, the rather general remarks about an extraordinarily heterogeneous range of questions which make up the first four chapters.60 An author must no doubt be allowed his own manner of coping with the problems of introduction, but Mill addresses himself to so many potential objectors in such a short space that one begins to suspect a certain defensiveness about proceeding to his main theme. The best way of characterising what he is doing in these opening chapters, and a way which helps to place the book in relation to those aspects of his other work already discussed, might be to say that he is trying to make the necessary 57

58 59 60

Stephen, English Utilitarians, 111, p p . 273—4. Some contemporary responses are briefly discussed in Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy 1860-1886 (London, 1976), ch. 7; the best recent assessment is Dennis F. T h o m p s o n , John Stuart Mill and Representative Government (Princeton, 1976). Mill t o H e n r y Taylor, 5 July 1861, Works, xv, p. 731; cf. Representative Government, Works, xix, p . 373. Logic, Works, v m , p . 944; cf. Representative Government, Works, xix, p . 373. A m o n g contemporaries, Bagehot praised the earlier parts of the b o o k at the expense of its later chapters, though without remarking the disjunction w e are pointing to here: ' C o n siderations o n Representative Government', Works, vi, p. 336.

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theoretical 'space' within which a discussion of the merits of different forms of government could legitimately be carried on, and, moreover, that he is doing so in part (though never explicitly) as a reply to the very arguments for the supersession of traditional political theory which he himself had presented in some of his earlier writings. Clearly, he did not feel that this called for any major recantation on his part (he was, after all, still issuing substantially unrevised editions of some of these earlier writings); but in such cases a certain note of defensive priggishness is perhaps the homage conviction pays to consistency. His celebrated contrast in the opening chapter between the 'mechanical' and 'organic' conceptions of the nature of political institutions looks at first sight like a replay of the familiar fixture between Utilitarians and Whigs, with Mill in his preferred role of the judicious umpire. In fact, as so often when assuming that role, he was decidedly partisan, for, having made all due allowances, he comes out strongly for the view that 'institutions and forms of government are a matter of choice. To enquire into the best form of government in the abstract (as it is called) is not a chimerical, but a highly practical employment of scientific intellect.' The crucial premise for deriving this strikingly voluntarist conclusion is provided by his intellectualist account of historical change. He argues, rather against the spirit of some of his own more sociologistic pronouncements, that the contention that 'social forces' more powerful than individual belief ultimately determine the possibilities of action is in danger of forgetting 'that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces'. A few tendentiously analysed historical cases are then cited to buttress the claim that 'one person with a belief, is a social power equal to ninety nine who have only interests'. (This passage is a splendid display of how to stack the cards by judicious selection of historical illustrations, since his chosen examples of such strongly believing individuals just happen for the most part to be the 'enlightened despots' of eighteenth-century Europe, whose 'social power', one might feel, was not altogether unconnected with certain common properties other than the intensity of their convictions.) This is, of course, a recurring theme in Mill's writings, and we shall return to it at the end of this essay. Squeezing harder, Mill goes on to argue that in the last resort 'it is what men think, which determines how they act', and so 'no little power is exercised over them by the persuasions and convictions of those whose personal position is different, and by the united authority of the instructed'. In a sense, this is just the development of the Humean insight that 'all government rests upon opinion' in a Comtean direction. But in Mill's hands, it becomes a way of avoiding the anti-political implications of the latter's sociology, enabling him to conclude that 'the maxim that the government of a country is what the social forces in existence

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compel it to be, is true only in the sense in which it favours, instead of discouraging, the attempt to exercise, among all forms of government practicable in the existing condition of society, a rational choice 5.61 It is true, of course, that after his 'mental crisis' Mill was not willing to adhere to a purely intellectualist view of collective any more than of individual action; he strove to make room - the connotation of effort seems apt - for the power of the emotions, and for the play of custom and habit in determining the cultural variability of the objects of desire. And yet in his political writings this issued only in the highly conventional practice of making 'character' and, on the larger plane, 'national character' his central explanatory concepts. By contrast to the universalist prescriptions of deductive Utilitarianism this does have a certain relativising tendency, but unless it is resolved into some more fundamental set of determinants (which Mill never saw his way to doing), it remains within a strongly traditional moral-political vocabulary. For unlike, say, 'social structure' or 'modes of production', the explanatory framework provided by 'national character' maintains the focus on political affairs, partly by emphasising the importance of the political events which shaped the unique course of each national history, partly simply by taking the 'nation' (and most often the 'nation-state') as the primary analytical unit and its politics and state-craft as the essential expression of its identity. It is this reciprocal relation between 'character' and political institutions which really engages Mill's interest. For all that the portmanteau term 'state of society' had been used as an ambitiously inclusive category when defining the scope of the social science, in practice in Representative Government it always turns out to be confined to 'the qualities of the human beings composing the society over which the government is exercised'. And although Mill addresses 'the question of the adaptation of forms of government to states of society', the terms of which might seem to assign some causal or functional priority to states of society, his discussion concentrates almost entirely upon the effect of different forms of government on the progress of a people, government being 'the most powerful of the influences, except their religious belief, which make them what they are, and enable them to become what they may be'. 62 All this still leaves unmet the objection that any discussion of forms of government in abstraction from particular historical circumstances is, as Mill had dismissively remarked in Book vi, 'fruitless'. And yet Chapter Two of Representative Government is titled 'The Criterion of a Good Form of Government', and Chapter Three 'That the Ideally Best Form of Government is Representative Government'. In effect, Mill makes two 61 62

Representative Representative

Government, Government,

Works, xix, pp. 380, 381, 382. Works, xix, pp. 389, 394.

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moves to counter an 'historicist' objection of this kind, though he does not explicitly present them as such. To begin with, he distinguished the 'educative' and the 'administrative' functions of government: 'Government is at once a great influence acting on the human mind, and a set of organized arrangements for public business.' He asserts (rather than argues) that the successful fulfilment of the latter function is not significantly affected by historically variable circumstances: 'The mode of conducting the practical business of government, which is best under a free constitution, would generally be best also in an absolute monarchy: only, an absolute monarchy is not so likely to practice it. The laws of property, for example; the principles of evidence and judicial procedure; the system of taxation and financial administration, need not necessarily be different in different forms of government.' This is, perhaps, an unacknowledgedly 'Scottish' point, as is his supporting claim that each of these matters has principles and rules of its own, which are a subject of separate study. General jurisprudence, civil and penal legislation, financial and commercial policy, are sciences in themselves, or rather, separate members of the comprehensive science or art of government: and the most enlightened doctrines on all these subjects, though not equally likely to be understood or acted on under all forms of government, yet, if understood and acted on, would in general be equally beneficial under them all.63 Needless to say, he regarded the 'educative' functions as standing in a much more intimate relation to stages of civilisation, but his second move was the even more agile one of claiming that for this very reason it was essential to arrive at a prior formulation of a prescriptive political ideal. The nub of the trick was his assertion that the whole question of the 'fit' between the 'educative' functions of government and the state of society could not be considered 'without taking into account not only the next step, but all the steps which society has yet to make; both those which can be foreseen, and the far wider indefinite range which is at present out of sight'. At first glance, this invokes a very Comtean picture of a determinate, unilinear path of social progress; but Mill reads a quite different lesson from it: 'It follows, that to judge of the merits of forms of government, an ideal must be constructed of the form of government most eligible in itself, that is, which, if the necessary conditions existed for giving effect to its beneficial tendencies, would, more than all others, favour and promote not some one improvement, but all forms and degrees of it.>64 With this flourish, Mill is able to shrug off the restraining clutches of the last of his imagined opponents, and to stride forward into the Promised Land of prescriptive political theory. 63 64

Representative Government, Works, xix, p p . 392, 393. Representative Government, Works, xix, pp. 397, 397-8.

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Ironically, this means that the old question concerning the logical status of the premises about human behaviour from which at various points thereafter he deduces the need for certain kinds of institutions then comes back to haunt him. There is a pervasive ambiguity in the book on this point: it purports to consider the arguments for the various features of representative government sub specie aeternitatis, and yet one has a nagging feeling that a society bearing an alarming resemblance to Britain circa 1860 is being assumed throughout. In fact, the fourth chapter explicitly excludes most known historical societies as unsuitable for the proper operation of representative government, various forms of monarchy or oligarchy being prescribed for all but the most 'civilized' nations. And beyond this, he considers characteristics which 'without absolutely rendering a people unfit for representative government seriously incapacitates them from reaping the full benefit of it'. Here, his chief example is where a people exhibits an overwhelming concern for 'status' and 'place' at the expense of liberty, characteristics which had led to the failure of representative government in France. (Mill always felt called upon to explain away the triumph of Napoleon in, largely in order to deprive those who argued that democracy necessarily resulted in despotism of their most telling example, in which task the peculiarities of the French national character were his chief resource.) By contrast to this and the other deplorable failings which sustained 'the bureaucracy-ridden nations of the continent' - and here a note of positively Whiggish smugness enters the account - 'the point of character which, beyond any other, fits the people of this country for representative government, is, that they have almost universally the contrary characteristic', that is, 'they are very jealous of any attempt to exercise power over them, not sanctioned by long usage and their own opinion of right; but they in general care very little for the exercise of power over others'. 65 It is hard to resist the conclusion that the operation of the system of government detailed in the following chapters presupposes this idealised version of an historically unique set of political attitudes. By contrast, Mill's manner of argument in some other passages seems designed to satisfy the universalist cravings of even the most ardent deductivist. For example, he announces that the superiority of representative government over 'any other polity whatsoever' in matters of 'present wellbeing' (as distinct from the promotion of 'a better and higher form of national character') rests upon two principles, of as universal truth and applicability as any general propositions which can be laid down respecting human affairs. The first is, that the rights and interests of every or any person are only secure from being disregarded, 65

Representative Government, Works, xix, pp. 420, 421.

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when the person interested is himself able, and habitually disposed, to stand up for them. The second is, that the general prosperity attains a greater height, and is more widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the personal energies enlisted in promoting it.66 But he betrays some uncertainty about the epistemological status of these 'truths', and thus of how they may best be secured. By way of establishing its indubitability, he observed of the former principle - reworded in the familiar form that 'each is the only safe guardian of his own rights and interests' — that it is in fact the principle which 'every person capable of conducting his own affairs, implicitly acts upon, wherever he himself is interested'. Characteristically, Mill does not wish to deny that a future is conceivable wherein men will spontaneously pursue the interests of others above their own self-interest, but only to assert that at present the common belief \s that 'mankind, as a rule, prefer themselves to others', an appeal to established opinion which has potentially parochialising consequences for the principle in question - the beliefs shared by Mill's readers might, after all, be regarded as an exceptionally contingent foundation upon which to rest a 'law of human nature'. The only supporting argument which he provides is the dubiously circular one that a Parliament containing no representatives of the working classes - he makes the obvious contemporary reference explicit here - does not, despite its protestations to the contrary, 'look at any question with the eyes of a working-man', a statement which totters uncertainly between trite tautology and entirely questionable empirical assertion. Indeed, in referring to the general principle as 'an inherent condition of human affairs', Mill seems to invite the riposte which, when made to his father by Macaulay, he had himself recognised to be a telling objection to this mode of political argument.67 The second principle, he claims, is 'still more obviously true', and again his language suggests that it borders on being an analytical truth (only by people's own efforts 'can any positive and durable improvement of their circumstances of life be worked out'), though again he attempts the superfluous task of establishing its truth by means of a somewhat promiscuous exploitation of European history, contrasting the presumed prosperity of a motley collection of 'free communities', ranging from the Greek city-states to the Dutch Republic, with the presumed lack of prosperity of an equally heterogeneous assembly of monarchical or oligarchical despotisms.68 In fact, throughout the book his use of historical argument, far from displaying the 'controlling laws of social development', seems to 66 67 68

Representative Government, Works, xix, p . 404. Representative Government, Works, xix, p . 405. Representative Government, Works, xix, pp. 405-6.

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exemplify that Vulgar mode' of citing presumed parallels or isolated and under-analysed illustrations which he had elsewhere so cogently condemned. In part, it must be said, this was dictated by a desire to spike the enemy's guns: certain more-or-less garbled historical episodes were so much the stock-in-trade of conservative critics of democracy that Mill felt bound to show that, even within their own terms, they fell some way short of establishing their case. Thus, he always challenged the contention that history showed an hereditary aristocracy to be essential to the sustained conduct of good government, by pointing out that the only two continuously successful examples, the governments of Rome and Venice, were in fact not aristocracies of birth, but essentially professional bureaucracies. 69 At the same time, Mill was certainly not above using such historical examples to support positive conclusions of his own. His account of the strengths and weaknesses of bureaucracy, for instance, owed more to his selective contrast between Rome and Russia than it did to any systematic sociological analysis. In general, indeed, it can hardly be said that Representative Government shows much evidence of being part of that 'general science of society' heralded in Book vi. When he comes to analyse the dangers to representative government of 'sinister interest', for example, the method as well as the language is recognisably Benthamite. It is true that he cautions against the over-simple view that ruling groups always act in their own real longterm interests, but only in order to emphasise their short-term pursuit of their perceived interests (a somewhat brisk narrative of the establishment of the Roman Empire is apparently intended to lend support to this point). And the foundation of this generalisation in the tendency for the possession of power to accentuate the pursuit of selfish interest, he simply presents as 'a universally observed fact' - or, more insistently still, as 'the universal tradition, grounded on universal experience, of men's being corrupted by power'. Again, there is no amplification of whose experience is in question, nor any mention of the limitations of such unsystematic induction. His repetition of 'universal' possibly indicates an anxiety to put the status of the propositions beyond question, and in fact in the following sentence he falls back upon the traditional authority-citation of the intellectual bully: 'Every one knows . . .' 70 In dealing with a writer of more modest methodological ambition, there might be something unnecessarily fastidious about subjecting a casual 69

70

Representative Government, Works, xix, pp. 437-8. Mill repeated this point frequently: e.g. John Stuart Mill, 'De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [1]' (1835), Works, xvm, p. 79; 'De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [11]', Works, xvm, p. 175; John Stuart Mill, 'Recent Writers on Reform' (1859), Works, xix, pp. 347-8; 'Centralization', Works, xix, p. 604. Representative Government, Works, xix, pp. 443-5.

15 6

The tendencies of things

common-sense maxim to such critical scrutiny; but Mill invites it, and the outcome is surely an endorsement of Sidgwick's perceptive aside thirty years later in referring to the use of the deductive method: Such, I may observe, is the method actually employed, not only by Bentham and James Mill, but even by J. S. Mill in his treatise on Representative Government notwithstanding the views expressed in his Logic of the Moral Sciences... I have no right to suggest that Mill had consciously abandoned the general conception of the relation of Politics to History which we find in his Logic, but when he came to treat with a view to practical conclusions the question of the best form of government, he certainly dealt with it by a method not primarily historical: a method in which history seems only to be used either to confirm practical conclusions otherwise arrived at, or to suggest the limits of their applicability.71 The contrast between the oddly diminishing effect of Sidgwick's mild reproof and the confident ambition of Mill's own programmatic declaration which stands at the head of this essay is almost poignant. One is struck again by just how utter was Mill's failure to implement the programme of Book vi. His inability to make any progress with the Ethology was the fatal stumbling-block.71 There are several places in his later works - the Subjection of Women is one - where what he needs if his case is to rise above mere assertion is some systematic demonstration of the ways in which circumstances have moulded and can mould certain types of character. Ethology is there referred to as 'the only means by which any partial insight can be obtained' into the central question of the differences between the sexes, but, as he has to admit, that means is unavailable 'for there is hardly any subject which, in proportion to its importance, has been so little studied'. 73 In its absence, Mill's science of politics wore a decidedly traditional look. His concern with, for example, the relationship between types of political institution and types of national and individual character is one of the more important of the features which separates his mature work from that of vulgar Benthamism, but in practice it issued in reflections which, as we shall see, were not so very different from those of a much less methodologically ambitious contemporary like Bagehot.74 But to conclude with Mill's methodological failure here would be misleading, in part, perhaps, just because the ethology was only to be an 71 72

73 74

Henry Sidgwick, The Elements of Politics (London, 1891), p. 8n. For Sidgwick's own development of this method, see Essay ix below. This w a s remarked b y t h e canny Bain: ' H i s failure with " E t h o l o g y " fatally interfered with the larger project, which I have n o d o u b t he entertained, of executing a w o r k on Sociology as a w h o l e ' (upon which enterprise Bain allowed himself t o c o m m e n t 'I do not believe that there was anything to be got in the direction he was looking'). Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill. A Criticism, with Personal Recollections (London, 1882), pp. 78-9. J o h n Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), edited b y W . R. C a r r (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p p . 23-4. F o r Bagehot, see below, Essay v, esp. p p . 173-4.

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attempt to translate into a more systematic language the insights which informed and enriched his political understanding as exercised at a less abstract level. After all, the formation of character was ethology's subjectmatter, diversity its presupposition: it was intended to explain the differences between individuals, just as Political Ethology, 'the science of national character',75 was to account for the variety of nations. And in recalling the ways in which these themes formed the central motifs of Mill's political thinking we also re-establish important points of contact with other nineteenth-century proponents of a science of politics. For in addressing himself to the great question which so fascinated his age, the question of the origins and conditions of progress, Mill did not habitually turn to laws of social development: he spoke, rather, of the role of variety and accident in European history. In his second (1853) review of Grote, Mill's hymn to the critical and inventive genius of the ancient Greeks, he credited the Classical age with having 'decided for an indefinite period the question, whether the human race was to be stationary or progressive. That the former condition is more congenial to ordinary human nature than the latter, experience unfortunately places beyond doubt; and history points to no other people in the ancient world who had any spring of unborrowed progress within themselves.'76 (Versions of this particular claim were, of course, not uncommon in nineteenth-century speculations about progress: Maine's influential rendering of it in Aryan terms, for example, is discussed in Essay vn below.) But even the Greeks contributed only one, albeit necessary, element, and one element could never, by definition for Mill, have been sufficient to sustain the course of human improvement. As he put it in his review of the historian who did most to put this perception at the heart of his historical understanding: 'No one of the ancient forms of society contained in itself that systematic antagonism, which we believe to be the only condition under which stability and progressiveness can be permanently reconciled to one another. ' 77 Following Guizot, Mill located the sources of European progressiveness in the melange of elements present in the post-Roman world, where the legacy of Greek thought and Roman law, provincial institutions and imperial tradition, combined with that separation of spiritual and temporal powers introduced by Christianity, the whole infused with that barbarian spirit of individual liberty allegedly unknown in the ancient world (another unlooked-for point of contact with later Teutonising Whig historians). And even thereafter, historical peculiarities were decisive: England owed its escape from absolutism to, 75 76 77

Logic, Works, vm, p. 904. John Stuart Mill, 'Grote's History of Greece [11]' (1853), Works, xi, p. 313. 'Guizot's Essays and Lectures', p. 236; on Guizot, see also below, p. 204.

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paradoxically, the greater strength, by comparison to the situation in Europe, of the monarchy after the Conquest, since this forced the barons to combine in opposition, and eventually to call the representatives of the people to their aid.78 Thus, that variety which was always preserved by the conflict of contending powers and which was everywhere the mainspring of progress, was, for peculiar local reasons, strongest in England. And the sediment which that unique historical experience has deposited in the English character is just what, as we have seen, so fits it for the conduct of self-government, participation in which, in turn, becomes the chief force shaping the nation's future political responses. It is with his contemplation of the future that Mill's preoccupation with this theme is seen at its most intense. Having rehearsed the story of European progress in his second review of Tocqueville, he contrasted it with that 'Chinese stationariness' which had proved endemic in all other civilisations, adding the warning: 'It would be an error to suppose that such could not possibly be our fate.' 79 The tendency to uniformity which both he and Tocqueville diagnosed as the chief ailment of modern commercial societies might, if unchecked, strangle even the vitality of Europe. 80 Here, again, vigour and independence of view - 'character', in fact, in its colloquial Victorian sense - was the antidote. It was precisely the cultivation of character in this sense which was the ultimate justification for Mill's muchcriticised constitutional devices; as so often in his case, what looks like a politics of machinery is in fact the means to a politics of virtue. And here the science of society had only a limited purchase. 'Human affairs are not entirely governed by mechanical laws, nor men's characters wholly and irrevocably formed by their situation in life.' 81 His historical analysis and his political ideal reinforce each other at this point: when one remembers that his second review of Grote was written at about the time he was meditating the first draft of On Liberty, one immediately sees how he treats Pericles' funeral oration as a prefiguring of his own most famous rhetorical set-piece.82 Mill's fondness for the prospect of an economically stationary state, in which the roar of the great engine of industrial growth might be stilled, set him apart (as we saw at the conclusion of our last essay) from a more robust spokesman for nineteenth-century optimism like Macaulay. But in his 78

79 80 81 82

'Guizot's Essays and Lectures', pp. 244-5, 276-7. This view of English history was already becoming something of a commonplace: see the references cited in Essay vi below, esp. pp. 200-1. ' D e Tocqueville o n D e m o c r a c y in America [11]', Works, x v m , p . 197. This anxiety was expressed even m o r e forcibly in J o h n Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), Works, xvm, pp. 273-4. 'De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [11]', Works, xvm, p. 197. See, particularly, ' G r o t e ' s H i s t o r y of Greece [11]', Works, xi, p - 3 1 9 .

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yearning for a moral transformation of selfish man and his dallying with the charms of consensus, he might still seem to belong with the pedlars of those grand secular theodicies which promised to reconcile the ways of history to man by guaranteeing the arrival of some more or less terrestrial heaven from which the chief sources of that kind of conflict traditionally regarded as political would have been eliminated. Yet these were yearnings and flirtations which never reached their consummation in his mature work, and that was surely partly because they were restrained by even stronger attachments, inhibited by even deeper anxieties. Diversity and individuality were the most constant features of Mill's dreams; uniformity and stagnation stalked his nightmares. In Mill's ideal, the clash of contending powers and the conflict of opinions, the pursuit of principles and the exercise of judgement, the actions of individuals and the mastering of circumstances - politics, in short - were ineliminable.

V D

D

Sense and circumstances: Bagehot and the nature of political understanding Burke first taught the world at large. . . that politics are made of time and place - that institutions are shifting things, to be tried by and adjusted to the shifting conditions of a mutable world that, in fact, politics are but a piece of business - to be determined in every case by the exact exigencies of that case: in plain English - by sense and circumstances. WALTER BAGEHOT, Tetters on the French coup d'etat" (1852) It is, indeed, a peculiarity of our times that we must instruct so many persons . . . Even if we had a profound and far-seeing statesman, his deep ideas and long-reaching vision would be useless to us, unless we could impart a confidence in them to the mass of influential persons, to the unelected Commons, the unchosen Council, who assist at the deliberations of the nation . . . It is of no use addressing him with the forms of science, or the rigour of accuracy, or the tedium of exhaustive discussion. The multitude are impatient of system, desirous of brevity, puzzled by formality. They agree with Sydney Smith: 'Political economy has become, in the hands of Malthus and Ricardo, a school of metaphysics. All seem agreed what is to be done: the contention is, how the subject is to be divided and defined. Meddle with no such matters'1. . . Such is the taste of mankind. WALTER BAGEHOT, T h e First Edinburgh

Reviewers' (1855).

' T H E difficulty about Bagehot', it has been said, 'seems to be not his merits but his role.' 1 There is an elusiveness about his writing which resists attempts to categorise it. He was an intensely self-conscious writer, but his was not a philosophical or academic self-consciousness, and it was an essential part of it to know that it was not. The majority of the authors discussed in this book derived, in varying degrees, some sense of obligation to self-definition from the requirements of scholarly or scientific exposition or from a consciousness of their place in an intellectual continuum. The Scots of the earlier part of the century were aware of being heirs to a tradition. J. S. Mill derived a more than academic sense of obligation, without even the escape-clause of academic specialisation, from his early role as Utilitarian spokesman, while his partial revolt made it even more, not less, necessary that he should be armed intellectually at all points, with an opinion for everything, a category for every opinion and a niche in his philosophical economy for every category. The university teachers who, from the 1860s onwards, increasingly dominated the search for a 'science of polities', and who will be discussed in later essays, were understandably concerned with preliminary surveying, with conceptual boundary disputes, and with advertising the attractions of the building plot on which the science was to be erected. Bagehot generally meddled with no such matters. In medias res was his natural element. This, however, needs some qualification. His unfinished Postulates of Political Economy was certainly intended to be a systematic work, though one that was, characteristically, to be balanced by biographical studies of the leading contributors to 'English political economy'. 2 His best known work, The English Constitution, was a study organised under the categories of structure and function, and was presented as an attempt to take a particular political phenomenon out of the hands of the constitutional lawyers. 3 His most general work on politics, the one that came nearest to being a treatise, was the collection of essays under the title Physics and Politics, published between 1867 and 1872 in the Fortnightly Review and subsequently reprinted. It was, he said, an attempt to apply the results of 'late thought' to political understanding, and the most relevant aspects of that thought were the physiology of Huxley and Maudsley, the 1 2 3

Jacques Barzun, 'Bagehot as Historian', in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, edited by Norman St John Stevas, 9 vols. (London, 1965-78), in, p. 23. On this, see below p. 256. For a critical discussion of the originality of Bagehot's view of the constitution, see M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford, 1967), pp. 214-20.

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concept of natural selection, the new 'anthropology' of Edward Tylor and Sir John Lubbock, the work on Greek and Teutonic constitutions by Grote and Edward Freeman, and above all, the historical jurisprudence of Henry Maine.4 It belongs, in fact, with the exercises in what was coming to be called 'the Comparative Method', to be discussed in Essay vn. We would be wrong to think of it as peripheral to his thinking, a late essay in quasi-academic speculation. To read his first political writings, his letters on the French coup d'etat of 1851,5 in conjunction with Physics and Politics, is to be made aware of how persistent are his central intellectual concerns across the whole of his career: above all, with determining the conditions for reconciling freedom and progress with stability. The basis of stability, in both sets of essays, is 'national character', which in the earlier ones figures as a datum and a problem, locally manifested by the apparent incapacity of the French for a free government through excessive volatility: the decisive importance of national character in politics is here offered by Bagehot as the chief lesson of the recent revolutions of 1848, though England and the rest seem to afford the only significant contrast.6 Physics and Politics, while still admitting an element of mysteriousness in its origin analogous to random variation in Darwinian biology, purports to give an account of what national character is and how it is formed, through imitation and natural selection. But though Physics and Politics attempts something like a systematic exposition of Bagehot's guiding concepts, it is, for that reason, untypical. Bagehot's writings are in their provenance journalism, and no one would claim that the treatise was his natural or characteristic mode of expression. Even Physics and Politics was hardly an exercise in methodological definition; it kept close to questions of substance, even if at a more abstract level than was usual with Bagehot. And in relation to the substance of modern public life, with which the bulk of his writing is concerned, Bagehot's lack of academic inhibition is marked: he was free to see politics, in an older fashion, as theatre and performance, material for connoisseurship and appraisal as well as analysis, rather than as grist to the categorical mills. It is hard to think of any of the professional advocates of 'political science' in the last quarter of the century, who would have spoken as he did of 'that vast accumulation of ideas and sentiments and hopes, of love and hatred, which we call a "political life" '. 7 To speak in this way embodies a different conception, with a licence to 4

5 6 7

Huxley, Freeman and Grote are mentioned twice each, Tylor and Grote three times, Lubbock five and Maine, from whom there are also unattributed quotations, six times. This is a fair reflection of the balance of Bagehot's intellectual debts here. Published in The Inquirer; January-March 1852, and reprinted in Works, iv, pp. 29-84. Works, iv, pp. 49-50. 'The American Constitution at the Present Crisis', Works, iv, p. 289.

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other kinds of insight, from a concern with definition and typology. Bagehot's self-consciousness about his own role is omnipresent, but it is most unmistakably if obliquely set out in his essay on 'The First Edinburgh Reviewers', and it is characterised essentially by an acute sensitivity to the importance of tone and manner, expressing the relation of the writer to his readers: it is the role of the reviewer, in the grand nineteenth-century sense initiated by the Edinburgh Review. Bagehot neither claimed nor wanted, nor, as a free-lance, had forced upon him, either the obligations or the freedoms of academic purity and system; at most he claimed, and manifestly managed to do all he wanted with, the freedom to tease. There is, he says, a characteristically modern kind of writing which, compared with the writing of the past, is like the talk of the man of the world compared with 'the lecture of a professor'; it is the talk of the manifold talker, glancing lightly from topic to topic, suggesting deep things in jest, unfolding unanswerable arguments in an absurd illustration, expounding nothing, completing nothing, exhausting nothing yet really suggesting the lessons of a wider experience, embodying the results of a more finely tested philosophy, passing with a more Shakespearian transition, connecting topics with a more subtle link, refining on them with an acuter perception, and what is more to the purpose, pleasing all that hear him,... fragmentary yet imparting what he says, allusive yet explaining what he intends, disconnected yet impressing what he maintains . . . The man of the modern world is used to speak what the modern world will hear.8 The self-identification is patent to any reader of Bagehot; clearly he not only was a reviewer but had a conception of himself as one. It is a little ironic perhaps that he identifies his role so emphatically with a conception of modernity; the balance between informality and instruction he celebrates was, as he saw, at least partially bound up with the fortunes of the nineteenth-century reviews, whose greatest days in fact were about to end, just as the number of university teachers was about to expand; to place Bagehot alongside the works of the latter is to be poignantly reminded of older virtues in the writing of political commentaries. Bagehot is closer in many ways to the Edinburgh Review. Of course, there are differences; he does not identify the Edinburgh Reviewer outright as modern in his sense, but significantly only as 'a material step in the change'.9 The latter was, after all, rather stiffer than the character in Bagehot's self-portrait, more didactic, more overtly polemical, more on his high horse. The teasing equability Bagehot instantiated was a mid-Victorian equability. He was a didactic, even anxious instructor of his contemporaries - 'we must speak 8 9

'The First Edinburgh Reviewers', Works, 1, p. 312. Works, 1, p. 313.

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to the many so that they will listen' 10 - but the didacticism was sweetened and masked for a less polemical age than the one the first Edinburgh reviewers had enlightened. The differences are worth attending to because the resemblances are in some ways close. Bagehot recognises, as we saw in our opening essay, the relevance of the polymathic, self-confident character of the Edinburgh education to the role of reviewer and political educator. 11 Bagehot himself seems to have cherished no grandiose project for a Novum Organon, like Horner or Mackintosh, 12 but it is probably not irrelevant that he was a product not of the narrower curricula of Oxford or Cambridge, but of University College, London, into which so much of the Scottish tradition had been infused by its founders, one of whom, Brougham, was also one of the four founders of the Edinburgh Review. But he sits more loosely to any conception of academic tradition and comprehensiveness than they do, though his model candidate for the role of seminal academic treatise seems to have been the one they too would have chosen, the Wealth of Nations.13 And though he tried, unsuccessfully, to enter Parliament as a Liberal, and had no inclinations towards Toryism, he sits more loosely to party also. The role he described required such freedom; essentially, in a different medium, it was the same as the role, which always fascinated him, of the successful innovative statesman, neither simply expressing the prejudices of his followers nor futilely defying them, but managing and cajoling them into collaboration with a creative adaptation. The resemblance of statesman and reviewer in Bagehot's formulations is almost an isomorphism. Both are the educators of their contemporaries, and the condition of success is the same, the sensitivity and tact of their understanding of them; successful writing is a paradigm for political action. Hence, with Bagehot methodology is a tone of voice; qualifications and reservations occur as irony; the balancing of complementary but antithetical intellectual and political qualities as paradox. In his educative role, Bagehot plays with them and with the reader; the latter is politically educated in his attempts to avoid being outwitted, to guess which way the ironist is going to jump. The intellectual root of Bagehot's paradoxes is almost invariably the same, though they are variegated and nuanced; it is the concern with the relation of thought and action, or the social conditions of action, which pervades almost all his writings, and which is most explicitly expressed in the dichotomies which underlie his two most substantial works, The English Constitution and Physics and Politics: permanence and variability, 10 11 12 13

Works, i, p. 311. Works, 1, p. 328. See above, pp. 46-9. See below, p. 179.

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stability and progress, security and freedom, 'the cake of custom' and rational discussion, the Signified' and 'efficient' parts of the constitution represented by the monarchy and the House of Lords, and the Cabinet, respectively. Liberal politics, and the possibility of political action in a free state, rest on a tacit collaboration between purposeful political agents and the state of public opinion. An understanding of the perennial but locally varied conditions of political action is the central theme of Bagehot's writings, and he clearly sees it as embodied in, rather than compromised by, his characteristic manner, with its deliberate informality, its darts and paradoxes, its wry acceptances and sly celebrations: compromise is the condition of political man. The medium conveyed the message, because the message was essentially about complexity, and also about the management of it, through flexibility and poise, through shrewdness and judgement and above all a cultivated sensitivity to what would take, to what the average of one's colleagues, followers, readers, constituencies would bear and wear. It is clearly not a conception which can at all adequately be expressed as an abstracted system of political truths; an anthology of aphorisms and illustrations would be nearer the mark, and that is what Bagehot's writings would readily provide. It is not what one thinks of as 'science', and Bagehot's attempts at science or 'physics' in Physics and Politics, the cribbings from Huxley on the nervous system to explain the acquisition of social habit and hence the formation of national character and public opinion, are jejune if portentous. 14 But it requires a certain coolness or detachment which we may or may not - the point needs discussion - want to call 'scientific', as well as imaginative sympathy and didactic purpose. One, at least, of the chief elements in the literary personality revealed in 'the wit and wisdom of Walter Bagehot' would be the disposition to unmask, the refusal to be gulled by illusion, even when it is perceived as useful, and it is from this bifocal vision that the paradoxes spring. It was, of course, only the illusions of sentiment and imagination which were sometimes useful; the illusions generated by an overconfidence in reason itself, the overestimate of paper schemes and deduction divorced from experience,15 Bagehot seems to have seen simply as crude excess and pernicious naivete, a source of disturbance without creativity. But between the hubris of logic and the timidity that shunned all thought as dangerous 16 there lay 14

15 16

On Bagehot as a social psychologist, see C. H. Driver, 'Walter Bagehot and the Social Psychologists', in F. J. C. Hearnshaw (ed.), The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Victorian Age (London, 1933). See particularly 'On the New Constitution of France' and 'On the Aptitude of the French National Character for National Self-Government', Works, iv. E.g. his remarks on Lord Eldon in 'The First Edinburgh Reviewers', Works, 1, pp. 316-18.

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effective political wisdom, a temperately confident sanity and poise, and the possibility of intelligent innovation and progress. It is, of course, a Whig position that we are describing, and appropriately so; Bagehot clearly warmed to the first Edinburgh reviewers not only as reviewers but as Whigs. But it was characteristic that for him even within the general, approved range of mature political judgement and intelligent, temperate activity there were nuances, fine shades of complementary but various virtues - and their allied vices - whose partiality and limitations continued to afford material for the ironist. It was scarcely possible, in Bagehot's view, to monopolise all political virtue. His definition of Whiggism, characteristically a definition not of a creed but of a type, reads initially like unqualified endorsement: A great deal of philosophy has been expended in endeavouring to fix and express theoretically the creed of that party: various forms of abstract doctrine have been drawn out, in which elaborate sentence follows hard on elaborate sentence, to be set aside, or at least vigorously questioned by the next or succeeding inquirers. In truth Whiggism is not a creed, it is a character. Perhaps as long as there has been a political history in this country there have been certain men of a cool, moderate, resolute firmness, not gifted with high imagination, little prone to enthusiastic sentiment, heedless of large theories and speculations, careless of dreamy scepticism; with a clear view of the next step, and a wise intention to take it; a strong conviction that the elements of knowledge are true, and a steady belief that the present world can, and should, be quietly improved. But then the undercutting: 'A tinge of simplicity still clings to the character; of old it was the Country Party. The limitation of their imagination is in some sort an advantage to such men . . ,' 17 Rapport, the reviewer's and politician's prerequisite, is by definition for an age only, and shares its limitations, exemplified by the limitations of Francis Jeffrey, the Review's first editor, as a literary critic. The contrast here is naturally his most famous target, the Lake poets, and 'the lonely rapture of lonely minds'. Each has had their reward. For Jeffrey, 'the laughter of men, the applause of drawing-rooms, the concurrence of the crowd'. 18 c He had his day, and was entitled to his day; but a gentle oblivion must now cover his already subsiding reputation.' 19 On the other hand 'all cultivated men speak differently because of the existence of Wordsworth and Coleridge'. Nevertheless, if they 'did ever imagine that the world was to pause because of their verses . . . it was well for them to be told at once that this was not so. "This won't do!" And so in all time will the lovers of polished Liberalism speak concerning the intense and lonely prophet. ' 20 17 18 19 20

Works, Works, Works, Works,

i, p p . 318-19. 1, p . 331. 1, p . 333. 1, p p . 331-2.

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The contrast is more than literary. The endorsement of the Whig temperament is not cancelled, but it is qualified and placed: cIt may strike some that this equable kind of character is not the most interesting' yet 'If France had more men of firm will, quiet composure, with a suspicion of enormous principle and a taste for moderate improvement: if a Whig party, in a word, were possible in France, France would be free.'21 For Bagehot the complementary tension between the prophet and the conversationalist, the latter the wooer and manager of his age, is perennial: Burke, for example, with his 'great visions . . . which he could but very rarely induce anyone to hear'.22 He employs it as a formula with many instances; essentially it is the formula of progress and its conditions. It is worth pointing out that Bagehot's calculated ironic elusiveness, which sets up a barrier to attempts to place him, rests in fact on a nineteenth-century commonplace, which plays a key role in his thought: the idea of progress: In truth, one of the dispensations of nature is the opacity of the average man. Nature has provided against the restlessness of genius by the obstinacy of stupidity. The man of genius is an age or two in advance. By incessant industry, subtle argument, or a penetrating eloquence, he impresses his new ideas, first on the highest minds - next, on the next highest- and it is only after his death that they descend to the inferior strata and become the property of the world. This exactly disqualifies him from agreeing with those about him, from forming a party on a basis of common sympathy, from carrying out what the people wish - from administering, as a statesman must, the creed of his time.23 Bagehot's tone, in presenting this contrast, varies from instance to instance: sometimes impatient of timid conformity and sluggish mentalities, sometimes condescending to ineffectual angels. But pervasively he uses it as a recipe for irony, enjoying, perhaps a little too visibly, its opportunities for rhetorical exploitation. It allows him always to have one foot on a step to higher or lower ground. The Whigs are diminished when seen from the wider perspective of the lonely Cumberland peaks. French newspaper eloquence and republican zeal, on the other hand, are punctured from below with brass tacks: 'Legislative assemblies, leading articles, essay eloquence, - such are good, very good, - useful - very useful. Yet they can be done without. We can want them. Not so with all things. The selling of figs, the cobbling of shoes, the manufacturing of nails - these are the essence of life. ' 24 Bagehot uses these moves up and down the scale of abstraction and sublimity, with the additional disconcerting option, as here, of investing the humdrum with suggestions of the 21 22 23 24

Works, 1, p . 321. 'William Pitt', Works, 111, p . 150. 'Average G o v e r n m e n t ' , Works, vi, p . 88. Trench coup d'etat', Works, iv, p. 84.

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elementally sublime, to provoke and unsettle the reader, to shake up the categories of political thinking. The 'Shakespearian transitions' are a deliberate rejection of monochrome notions of scientific or philosophical decorum. It seems to have been more than a matter of art with him; he had a humorous perception of human life as a kind of category mistake: T h e soul ties its shoe; the mind washes its hand in a basin. All is incongruous.' 25 The closest nineteenth-century analogy is with an author not usually compared with Bagehot, though the latter sometimes refers to him - Carlyle, who also presents problems of classification to neat notions of intellectual history. The point is important, because it is the deliberate violations of the decorum of learned discourse which set Bagehot's well-known discussions of the 'non-rational' in politics at some distance from both of what we may call the chief possible ways of talking about it: Burkean traditionalism and the conscious neutrality of the twentieth-century social scientist - though how far the latter was available when Bagehot was writing is disputable. We can even, without falsification, temporalise his relation to these two models, and speak of it as transitional. To see how, we need to look at cases. Consider, for example, his famous encomia on 'stupidity': 'I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale; it is much stupidity.>26 The trouble with the French as a political nation was their inability to be stupid: 'nations, just as individuals, may be too clever to be practical, and not dull enough to be free'.27 On the other hand 'I need not say that, in real sound stupidity, the English are unrivalled.'28 The paradox is unravelled, in the terms which were to be elaborated more decorously fifteen years later in Physics and Politics: 'In fact, what we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favourite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.' 29 The paradox in the earlier essays, of course, relies on the preference for the pejorative term 'stupidity' instead of some more neutral alternative. But it is not just a personal preference: it is characteristic of what happens when a perception of a gap between the politically functional and the generally approved is expressed in the language of common speech, in a way that typifies social scientific insights before they are self-consciously dressed as 'social science'. There are obvious parallels in Machiavelli and 25 26 27 28 29

'First E d i n b u r g h Reviewers', Works, 1, p . 338. T r e n c h coup d'etat', Works, iv, pp. 50-1. Works, iv, p . 53. Works, iv, p . 51. Works, iv, p . 52.

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Mandeville, though there is an interesting difference between the apparent advocacy of cruelty or 'vice' and of 'stupidity'; the advocate of the former himself incurs the charge of wickedness, but the advocate of stupidity is not self-convicted of it; he could be said to be self-exonerated from it, and this rather obviously mattered to Bagehot. If calling things by their common names is what sets him apart from the social scientist, the obvious enjoyment of superiority is what sets him apart from the Burkean. Deliberately, he lacks reverence, and this introduces a knowingness and with it a utilitarian (in a loose sense) bluntness in his references to the non-rational, which reverence would soften and blur. Again, there is more to this than just temperament, and it needs some attention. It is not surprising that Bagehot has been claimed as a Burkean; there is much to support such a claim. Repudiating the notion 'that politics are simply a subdivision of immutable ethics', Bagehot, in the passage on Burke which provided our first epigraph to this essay, uses the verb 'taught' with its full weight of endorsement: 'Burke first taught the world at large... that politics are made of time and place... ' 30 Bagehot's modern editor ranks him with Burke as 'one of the leading expositors of the English Conservative mind'. 31 G. M. Young claimed that in his distrust of the closed and dogmatic, Bagehot picked up 'the true English tradition, which the Radicals had done their best to sever, the tradition of Burke'. 32 We may want to raise an eyebrow at the notion that there is a single 'true English tradition', but the claim that Bagehot may be placed at least loosely in a Burkean tradition need not be contested, provided we realise that in deciding just how loosely, and perhaps in seeing what is happening to the tradition, questions of tone and diction are crucial. Burke in Bagehot's 'plain English' becomes someone rather different, a mid-Victorian Saturday Reviewer. One begins to ask oneself whether Burke did or could, as Bagehot says, see politics as 'but a piece of business', and what it means. What Bagehot means is spelt out in the essay entitled 'Dull Government': The English people have never yet forgotten what some nations have scarcely ever remembered - that politics are a kind of business - that they bear the characteristics, and obey the laws, inevitably incident to that kind of human action. Steady labour and dull material - wrinkles on the forehead and figures on the tongue these are the English admiration. We may prize more splendid qualities on uncommon occasions, but these are for daily wear . . . Woe to the English people if they ever forget that, all through their history, heavy topics and tedious talents have 30 31

32

Works, iv, p. 48. Norman St John Stevas, 'The Political Genius of Walter Bagehot', in Bagehot, Works, v, P- 39G. M. Young, 'The Greatest Victorian', Victorian Essays (Oxford, 1962), p. 128.

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awakened the admiration and engrossed the time of their Parliament and their country.33 Bagehot was fond of saying, to underline its contrast with the art of practical persuasion, that Burke's was 'the oratory of principle'.34 But in his early account of Burke's ideas quoted in our epigraph he seems to have mislaid the distinction and a sense of its possible significance. There is more ironic distance in Bagehot's account of 'Dull Government' than in anything in Burke, just as there is in the difference between Burke's 'prejudice' and Bagehot's 'stupidity'. There is more at stake here than merely a matter of rhetorical decorum, a contrast between gravitas and feet-on-theground. It is a matter of time and political culture, and the advent of a potentially uneasy self-consciousness and disjunction. Consider two superficially analogous passages, both considering the social order as the transmitted heritage of mankind. Burke's is famous, but it has to be quoted to underline the contrast: Society is indeed a contract. . . but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world.35 Bagehot echoes this, but flatly and condescendingly. For Bagehot there is no 'but', no 'other reverence': The first duty of society is the preservation of society. By the sound work of old-fashioned generations - by the singular painstaking of the slumberers in the churchyard - by dull care - by stupid industry, a certain social fabric somehow exists; people contrive to go out to their work, and to find work to employ them until the evening, body and soul are kept together, and this is what mankind have to show for their six thousand years of toil and trouble.36 'A certain social fabric somehow exists'; the suggestion of shrugging je ne sais quoi is a world away from Burkean pieties. Underlying Burkean political pragmatism there was a metaphysics of order; political order was 33 34 35 36

Works, iv, p . 85. See the contrasts with Gladstone and with Pitt, Works, i n , p p . 424, 150. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Everyman, p. 93. Trench coup d'etat', Works, iv, p. 36.

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a microcosm of, and in harmony with, the order of the world. The local manifestation of that order was the English constitution, transmitted as a heritage from our forefathers. Bagehot - it sets him apart from other nineteenth-century candidates for inclusion in the Burkean canon, such as Stubbs, Freeman and Macaulay - had no reverence for the historicity of English institutions. His definition of Whiggism, quoted above, contrasts with Macaulay's famous historical definition. Bagehot too finds Whigs 'as long as there has been a political history in this country', but Whiggism is a character, not a heritage. There is nothing like Macaulay's 'when I look back on our history, I can discern a great party which has, through many generations, preserved its identity'. 37 And so with the English constitution. Bagehot admits, as a mere fact, that 'no difficulty can be greater than that of founding a deferential nation. Respect is traditional.'38 But in the discourse of educated men he has the strongest objection to 'historic twaddle about the rise of liberty'. 39 English history is not a source of prescriptive wisdom. Instead, 'We have made, or rather stumbled on' 40 - again the shrug - a constitution which is both efficient and imposingly august. In any case, the enduring part of any society is not the traditional institutions it may or may not possess, but its distinctive national character, the origins of which are presented, in Physics and Politics, as random mutations, a 'chance predominance'. 41 The shift from national tradition to 'national character' as the enduring substratum of political life is more significant than it may seem. 'National character', especially as the product of a chance mutation, lacks the providential aura and venerability of English history; to recognise its importance was to take account of a crucial fact, not to join in a fellowship in what Hallam had aptly called the 'communion' of the English constitution.42 Its employment registers a subtle move from participation to detached observation. It was natural to think that one could learn from a tradition; national character more typically seems something one would learn about. The same is even more clearly true of 'public opinion', especially when, in the age of the second Reform Act, it was spoken of, by Bagehot as by J. S. Mill, with a sense of constriction, and no longer, as earlier in Dugald Stewart or James Mill, as the embodiment of advancing civilisation.43 Burke, able to draw both on late eighteenth-century ideas of 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

'Speech to the Electors of Edinburgh' (1839), in The Works of Lord Macaulay, edited by his sister, Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. (London, 1897), VIII, p. 158. The English Constitution, Works, v, p. 381. 'Responsible Government', Works, vi, p. 99. The English Constitution, Works, v, p. 210. Physics and Politics, Works, vn, p. 37. Henry Hallam, Constitutional History of England from the Accession of Henry VIII to the Death of George II, 3 vols. (London, 1927), 11, p. 126. See above, pp. 41-3, 122-4.

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'feeling' and on old-established classical notions of the consensus gentium, in what he calls 'the ancient, permanent sense of mankind', 44 could speak of prejudice and sentiment as sources of a kind of knowledge, of right reason. For Bagehot the only relevant consensus, the modern consensus civium, was a necessarily more local and less impressive authority: 'Public opinion . . . is the opinion of the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus.' 45 It was to be taken account of, collaborated with, cajoled, but it was hardly a supreme court of appeal. The place of that was taken, if by anything, by the concept of progress. It is this which pulls apart the concept of human nature and makes different sections of society strange to each other. The conditions of political or intellectual advance are set by 'the unequal development of the human race'. Hence 'Great communities are like great mountains - they have in them the primary, secondary, and tertiary strata of human progress; the characteristics of the lower regions represent the old times rather than the present life of the higher regions.' 46 The possibilities of progress lie in the mediations between these, in the tactful management of his contemporaries by the reflective statesman, in 'The daily play of the higher mind upon the lower' 47 in a free political society, and in the paradoxically fortunate incongruities in the English constitution, which adapt it to the needs of both the higher and lower regions of society, and which allow government by discussion and by the educated to proceed in a sense by stealth, while the dignified elements exercise their 'imaginative attraction upon an uncultured and rude population'. 48 Bagehot shared with other Liberals of the period an acute anxiety lest the diversity necessary to progress might not be sustained. The element of fortunate accidental imposture - Bagehot's language hardly allows us to call it anything else - in the English constitution is a necessary shield, and it is necessary because of the heterogeneity of population produced by unequal progress. It is here that the concept of progress, replacing that of tradition, marks a decisive shift. Tradition could be thought of as unifying; progress is here seen as inherently divisive. Because of this, Bagehot's demonstrations of the role of the non-rational in politics, and of ways of coping with it, take on the character of unmasking. Part of Bagehot's immediate motive, in The English Constitution, was to point out that a too crudely utilitarian approach to the constitution might fail to recognise the more recondite functions of its apparently purely ornamental and useless features. 49 This 44 45 46 47 48 49

Burke, Reflections, p . 160. The English Constitution, Works, v, p . 378. Works, v, p . 208. 'Caesarism as it n o w exists', Works, iv, p . 114. The English Constitution, Works, v, p . 114. Works, v, p . 206.

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can pass as a Burkean argument, but there is a crucial difference. Only a vehemently Paineite conspiracy-theory would see Burke's recognition of the usefulness of forms and historic continuities as celebrating a successful imposture, and concealing, like Gibbon's Roman aristocrat, 'the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robes'. In Bagehot, on the other hand, one feels that some passages should be asterisked, marked/7^5 devant les domestiques. He could, of course, retort with another reflection of Gibbon's, that to employ the weapons of civilisation against itself, barbarians must first have become civilised. The footman and the housemaid are several times invoked by Bagehot as types of political incomprehension;50 the housemaid who could understand Bagehot would have ceased to be, at least representatively, a housemaid, and been inducted into the circle of initiates, where the condition of entry was an explicit acknowledgement of the absolute distinction between appearance and reality, the show and the substance. Earlier it had not been so. The Burkean participates in the rites whose utility he consciously acknowledges. Macaulay's attitude to the historic constitution, for example, though more self-consciously distanced and utilitarian than Burke's, was still flecked with piety. 51 But in Bagehot's awareness of the functions of the august, historic parts of the constitution, and the sharpness of their conceptual divorce from the efficient unacknowledged ones, celebration has turned into knowing, condescending, approval of a necessary deceit. Burke's 'decent drapery of life' is now 'the theatrical show of society';52 Hallam's fellowship in the communion of the constitution has become a kind of progressives' conspiracy between Bagehot and his educated readers: 'it is necessary to keep the ancient show while we secretly interpolate the new reality.'53 For all the Liberal-progressive anxieties and motives here, this is in fact Bagehot at his closest to the political scientist, in a late nineteenth-century sense: with his general theory of history (in Physics and Politics), his rigid categorisation of the layers of society as 'strata', and an interest in the problems of comparative government. The sharp distinction between outward form and real essence in the description of the English constitution was intended to make available to other countries the real excellences of the English form of polity, centred on cabinet government, divested of their inimitable but in a sense extraneous accidental, historic trappings: 'If the practical part of the English Constitution could only be made out of a 50 51

52 53

E.g. Works, v, p. 208. On this issue, and for the comparison of Burke and Macaulay, see J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 52-4, 293-4. The English Constitution, Works, v, p. 378. Works, v, p. 392.

i j6

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curious accumulation of medieval materials, its interest would be half historical and its imitability very confined.' 54 But to leave matters there, with Bagehot's work at its most systematic and explicitly conceptualised, would be misleading. For, as we saw earlier, there is another side of Bagehot's writing, which needs further illustration: less schematic, more subtle and more characteristic, in which, in the nature of his interests, and of what he approves of, and in his manner of writing about them, he can look more like a mid-Victorian version of the philosophic Whig. His underlying categories, progress and public opinion, are the same as those we have just considered, but in writing about them as the relation between the personality of the statesman and his immediate political milieu, Bagehot, instead of deploying them in classifications, plays with them in a series of delighted variations. Within the governing circle, heterogeneity, instead of being an obstacle and a source of anxiety, comes to seem necessary, desirable and exhilarating - an extension of the old Whig notion of balance. In writing, in his essays on English statesmen, about the fine grain of English political life without losing sight of an instructive generality, Bagehot wrote with more finesse and zest than any of his contemporaries about the possibilities and constraints of political action in the ever-shifting network of local historical circumstances. As a genre, of course, the appreciation of the qualities of past and present statesmen was a highly traditional one. The most obvious recent model was Macaulay's essays, and it is no surprise to learn that the young Bagehot and his friend Hutton eagerly discussed them as they came out, or that Bagehot 'moderately defended the glorification of compromise which marks all Macaulay's writings'. 55 Macaulay is a frequently cited authority in Bagehot's work. But he also, in giving his sense of Macaulay's limitations, came close to defining, as usual, what he himself aspired to; it hardly matters that the comment is on Macaulay as politician rather than writer, because, as we have seen, for Bagehot the requirements of the two roles were very similar. Macaulay, he said, 'had not that quick and ready appreciation of transient symptoms, that half-instinctive, half-empirical tact, which is needed in the constitution of a party leader or a great statesman'. 56 Much of political knowledge was necessarily transient and local. For that reason it was necessarily insider's knowledge. There is the wistfulness of the thwarted parliamentary candidate in Bagehot's account of the 54 55

56

Works, v, p . 205; cf. p p . 245, 267-8. Also, Bagehot's critique of the American Presidential system in 'The Practical Operation of the American Constitution', Works, iv. R. H . H u t t o n , 'Walter Bagehot', Fortnightly Review, 22 (1877), 456. There are a good m a n y parallels between Macaulay's ideas a n d Bagehot's. See, e.g., Macaulay o n theory and practice, above p p . 119-20; also Macaulay o n Cabinet G o v e r n m e n t in his History of England, in Works, iv, pp. 4 3 - 4 . 'Lord Macaulay', Works, 1, p. 431.

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knowledge accessible only to first-hand experience, but it is even more the wistfulness of the journalist on the wrong side of the door: The working of the great machine of Parliament can be far better investigated by persons in Parliament than by anyone else . . . There is a vast mass of political knowledge which is at all times most important, and which no reading, no newspapers can supply . . . The knowledge of public men, so freely given by newspapers, is a knowledge of masks rather than realities - of actors as they seem on the stage, rather than of those actors as they really are.

The members of Parliament know better than anyone what is practicable 'for they can better know the feeling of the House of Commons, which is the immediate authority, and of the constituencies, which is the ultimate authority'. 57 In his political journalism Bagehot not merely proclaimed that politics was made of time and place and personality, he exhibited it as such and tried to show the extent of the constrained initiatives it could nevertheless contain. The frame for his portraits of statesmen was the transition from aristocratic to middle-class politics, with the first Reform Act as the dividing line. It was a commonplace observation, but Bagehot, in his treatment of it, had what was rare in an age much given to the schematic postulation of periods', a refined sense of period, and a perception of the drastic foreshortening produced by the perspectives of history. To live in a later time is another form of exclusion from first-hand knowledge: The accusations which are brought against a public man in his own age are rarely those echoed in after times. Posterity sees less or sees more. A few points stand out in distinct rigidity; there is no idea of the countless accumulation, the collision of action, the web of human feeling, with which, in the day of their life, they were encompassed. Time changes much. The points of controversy seem clear; the assumed premises uncertain. The difficulty is to comprehend cthe difficulty'.58 Contemporaries judge differently, 'and though posterity is going to be born, in the meantime there are the contemporaries of the great statesman, sitting in tedium, discussing the affairs of the nation. The condition of a free government is that you must persuade the present generation.' 59 'There is no idea of the countless accumulation' - like other midVictorians, Stubbs, George Eliot, Darwin, 60 Bagehot had a feeling for the imperceptible processes of accretion: it was a subtle aspect of the idea of progress; what Bagehot called understanding 'the tedium of history and 57 58 59 60

'The Advantages and Disadvantages of Becoming a Member of Parliament', Works, vi, pp. 56-7. 'The Character of Sir Robert Peel', Works, 111, p. 241. 'Average Government', Works, vi, p. 88. On this see Burrow, Liberal Descent, pp. 107-8.

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the painfulness of results'. 61 Geology, a source of gross and rigid categorisation when it offered the metaphor of strata, became suggestive when it offered that of sedimentation: 'Peel's opinions . . . resembled the daily accumulating insensible deposits of a rich alluvial soil. The great stream of time flows on with all things on its surface; and slowly, grain by grain, a mould of wise experience is unconsciously left on the still extended intellect.'62 The 'scientific' generalisations of Physics and Politics about the drilling of the nervous system into habit, and the importance of imitation, are embodied in the picture of a decorous, well-meaning man like Peel making his way. After 1832 the average of the nation and the House of Commons has varied, and Peel with it. He becomes Bagehot's ironic archetype of the constitutional statesman - 'converted at the conversion of the average man'. 63 His oratory suits the new business-like conditions. The pre-eminent speaker of the unreformed House of Commons, Canning, the master of the oratory of light, easy charm, is now an extinct species.64 In an earlier age still, there were other conditions and other arts to manage them. The politician as courtier is another distinct species (Bagehot does not use the word in this context, but Hutton spoke aptly of him as 'a social naturalist'): 65 To be able to manage men, to know with whom to be silent, to know with whom to say how much, to be able to drop casual observations, to have a sense of that which others mean, though they do not say . . . in a word, to understand, to feel, to be unable to help feeling, the by-play of life, is the principal necessity for a success in courts. It is the instinct of management which is not to be shown even in conversation, far less in writing or speculation, but yet which rules all small societies.66 Statesmen, dependent on a congruence of sympathy and address with those they lead, are necessarily horses for courses. But together with a sense of the diversity of milieux, Bagehot has a connoisseur's appreciation of the variety of political temperaments, so that each of his portraits, without losing individuality, becomes something like a perennial archetype, whose career consists of the modes of adaptation and influence his peculiar temperament receives and exerts. There is, it is true, one who figures almost as an ideal, who embodies most perfectly the normally conflicting requirements of practical leadership and profound innovative thought and energy. This is Bagehot's portrait of the younger Pitt. He is the ideal type of the relation between ideas and action, combining, in Bagehot's account, qualities normally divided among opposed types of 61 62 63 64 65 66

The English Constitution, Works, v, p . 207. 'The Character of Sir Robert Peel', Works, 111, p . 252. Works, i n , p . 245. Works, in, pp. 268-9. H u t t o n , 'Walter Bagehot', Fortnightly Review, 459. 'Bolingbroke as a Statesman', Works, 111, p . 61.

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men: 'It is not easy to manage any age; it is not easy to be on a level with the highest thought of any age: but to manage that age according to that highest thought is among the most insuperable and arduous difficulties of the world.' 67 Pitt was a practical man, a dextrous manager of the House of Commons, but 'he attended also to the substance of political science. He was the first Englishman who read, understood, and valued the Wealth of Nations.'68 Bagehot's scepticism has decisive limits; he believes, though it is not in his most common manner to say so, in truth, and in progress as its discovery and gradual embodiment in the fabric of practical life. The definition - it is scarcely less - of greatness in a statesman offered in the essay on Pitt involves a profound respect for thought as the motive power of human progress, and his paradigm for it is 'a great original work on political science, - such a work, for example, as the Wealth of Nations'.69 But though Pitt figures as a rare, ideal combination, Bagehot's essays on statesmen taken as a whole offer something rather different: a sense of the indispensability to a vigorous political life of the diversity of types of political men. Politics is a drama with many parts. To each of his portraits there is an assignable archetype: the politician as man of business (Peel); the man of reassuring character and sluggish intellect (Althorp); the man of the world - 'he did not at all despise . . . the common part of his mind' (Palmerston);70 the fluent, easy, conversational man (Canning); the agitator, with 'the faculty of easy anger' (Brougham); 71 the outsider with ideas (Cobden). Diverse qualities are mutually corrective: 'There is much in Mr Cobden which he might beneficially impart to our governing class . . . There is much too which they might teach him.' 72 Political merits sometimes merits only for a season, as Brougham's fitted him for the 'rage for reform' of the 1820s and 30s, or as Palmerston's made him 'a statesman for the moment' - are the positive aspect of men's limitations and defects, and inseparable from them: the same facets caught in a different light. Brougham's role, for example - a limited but not in its time valueless one — called for a versatile, 'rushing' man, 'an excitable ungenial nature', with 'enough of misanthropy to be a philanthropist'; superficiality, harshness and volatility are the inevitable concomitants. 73 Public opinion needs to be educated into discrimination; to know how its leaders should be used, suspected, trusted, listened to. In a polity disablingly devoid of intellectual 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

'William Pitt1, Works, in, p. 126. Works, in, p. 130. 'The Character of Sir Robert Peel', Works, in, p. 258; elsewhere (p. 289) Bagehot offers this as a quotation from Macaulay. Works, in, p. 276. Works, in, p. 172. 'Mr Cobden', Works, in, pp. 289-90. 'Lord Brougham', Works, 111, pp. 190, 172.

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ferment, Cobden is 'a man to hear but not a man to follow'. 74 And, more importantly, 'It is necessary that England should understand Mr Gladstone. If the country have not a true conception of a great statesman, his popularity will be capricious, his power irregular, and his usefulness insecure.'75 In the gallery of archetypes Gladstone is, above all, the Orator, who 'half-guides, half-follows the moods of his audience'. 76 It is an indispensable and brilliant mediation, but of course the dark side of the orator is, though Bagehot does not use the word, the demagogue. Gladstone's powers are also his temptations: excitement, mutability, excess. 'He wants the warning instincts.' Bagehot's conclusion was anxious: Gladstone must 'guide himself by the mature, settled and cultured reflection of his time, and not by its loud and noisy organs'. 77 Judged from the standpoint of Bagehot's kind of Liberalism - the intellectual Liberalism of the 18 50s, and '60s, of the university men and the Saturday Review - the anxiety, in i860, was prophetic. Bagehot's peering into the future was often gloomily apprehensive; like J. S. Mill and Henry Maine, he feared the smothering of the diversity on which continued progress depended, in an age of mass opinion and mass electorates.78 In his writings on parliamentary reform he stood by the old Whig principle that Parliament should represent interests, not numbers. 79 The heterogeneity of the old franchise had ensured this in some degree; under universal suffrage all speciality of representation would disappear under the preponderance of the working class.80 But in his writings as a whole, and particularly in his essays on political figures, Bagehot's kind of concern for diversity and belief in balance transcends the Whig range, and, for that matter, the normal Liberal one. In his sense of the complementary variousness of human qualities in politics, he took Liberalism beyond questions of argument and opinion. WhatJ. S. Mill advocated - diversityBagehot managed to appreciate and enjoy. His conception of life was polyphonic. And for that reason it was no accident that it was expressed as a conception of politics, as the incessant interplay of diverse human character and mind. As was pointed out in our Prologue, nineteenth-century theories of human history, in Comte, Spencer, Marx, characteristically culminate in a supersession of politics; its antagonisms and uncertainties are marks of imperfection to be overcome. Bagehot's is the only notable 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

'Mr Cobden', Works, 111, p. 290. 'Mr Gladstone' (i860), Works, m, p. 423, italics original. Works, in, p. 440. W o r k s , i n , p . 439. Cf. above, p . 158, and b e l o w , p . 218. See Essays 1 and 111, above, p p . 56-7 and p . 98. See Bagehot's essays o n Parliamentary Reform, in Works, vi, p . 181. Also The English Constitution, Works, v, p p . 298—9 and ' L o r d Althorp and the Reform Act of 1832', p p . 223-5.

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one which, in Physics and Politics, actually culminates in the emergence of full political life, in the Age of Discussion, and sets nothing beyond it.81 There was no supersession of politics' by 'society', because politics was society in the aspect of its vitality; it was the meeting place of innovation and structured habit, or what another idiom than Bagehot's would call spirit and concreteness, and of the various forms of mediation between them. The task of the student of politics was derived accordingly. It was neither to extrapolate from historical laws to large predictions - random variation was the crucial factor in progress, and it consisted essentially in novel ideas for which there could be no recipes - nor to supersede the statesman's partly intuitive, partly empirical knowledge of his craft, but to educate public opinion, to emancipate it discreetly from shams, and to instruct it in the necessarily complex ways in which novelty was assimilable. Good political writing, in terms of Bagehot's own categories, was the educative function of the politics of discussion separated from its executive and representative ones. 81

Cf. J. S. Mill, Essay iv above, pp. 158-9.

VI

All that glitters: political science and the lessons of history If history has no truths to teach, its facts are but little worth, and the truths of political science belong as much to an historian as those of theology to a professor of divinity. THOMAS ARNOLD, in A. P. Stanley, The Life and

Correspondence of Thomas Arnold (1844) The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the stream of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to the making of the future. LORD ACTON, Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History, delivered at Cambridge, June 1895

T H E belief that history provides examples and warnings to statesmen is as ancient, at least, as Thucydides, and the passage quoted above from Lord Acton's inaugural lecture may well have been intended and taken as little more than a reassuring and timeless platitude. Nevertheless, the thought of the nineteenth century had been, as Acton went on to say, imbued to an extraordinary extent with a sense of the importance of the historical perspective. It was an influence which left its stamp on attempts to confront the requirements of a science of politics in various ways, some of which we have already seen in considering Macaulay, J. S. Mill and Bagehot. So important was historical understanding taken to be for political reasoning that the alleged relation between them demands more than merely incidental treatment. In Essay vn an attempt will be made to consider the more elaborate and in some sense collaborative attempts by a number of scholars from the 1860s onwards to ground the science of politics in a version of history provided by what came to be called the Comparative Method. The proponents of this were, as we shall see, strongly impressed with a sense of its novelty. The twentieth-century reader is more likely, perhaps, to be impressed by the persistence in it, under the parade of modernity, of traditional themes in the English Whig interpretation of history, and it is to these, in their bearing on the science of politics, as expressed in particular in the work of Stubbs and Macaulay, that we shall therefore turn in the latter part of the present essay. First, however, as a setting for this discussion, we need some brief consideration of the variety of different kinds of guidance that history could be thought, especially in the early and middle years of the century, to provide. If we return, initially, to Acton's promising declaration, we find that its blandness is achieved only by an unwillingness, at that point at least, to unpack possible ambiguities, obscurities and disagreements. We might begin to foster a sense of discouragement by attending to the simile itself; gold dust is slowly and randomly laid, and its surrounding medium is a great deal of sludge. In choosing, too, to speak of 'a science of polities', Acton was clearly guided by the necessary piety which on such occasions usually, as in this case, precedes a declaration of intellectual independence; it was his significantly terse tribute to his predecessor in the chair of History at Cambridge, Sir John Seeley, whose devotion to the science will be discussed in Essay vn. l But most appositely of all, we can observe that the quotation Acton selected, in a note, to endorse his claim for the relation 1

Acton's Inaugural is reprinted in his Lectures on Modern History (London, 1906) pp. 1-28. See pp. 1—2.

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between history and political science was a good deal more complex and qualified than he chose to notice.2 It was in fact precisely the remark by J. S. Mill which has already provided the title and epigraph of one of our earlier essays (Essay iv): CA11 true political science is, in one sense of the phrase, a priori, being deduced from the tendencies of things, tendencies known either through our general experience of human nature, or as the result of an analysis of the course of history, considered as a progressive evolution.' Acton's citation of Mill here clearly owed more to the eminence of the authority cited than to any particular concern with the reservations which, as we have seen in Essay iv, complicated Mill's relation to the use of history in thinking about politics. What Acton's own pronouncement testifies to is something profound, certainly, but vague and polymorphous, and less methodologically discriminating: simply the deep nineteenth-century conviction of the importance of history, which he made a major theme of his lecture and attempted to explain. He traced it, initially, to the French Revolution, to the reaction against mechanical schemes for political reconstruction in the manner of Sieyes, and secondly to the desire to understand the deep-lying causes of the Revolution itself.3 In this sense, what Acton called 'historicism or historical-mindedness' could claim kinship, or in very general terms identity, with Mill's 'analysis of the course of history considered as a progressive evolution'. Acton, though he made no use of Mill's daintier methodological scruples, could no doubt have disowned with a clear conscience what the latter had stigmatised as the Vulgar mode of using history', 4 that is as a source of more or less randomly chosen examples. That was not, surely, what 'historical-mindedness' meant. But before going on to consider some mid-nineteenth-century uses of 'history as a progressive evolution' and their assimilation to older Whig notions, which Mill despised, of the exemplary character of English history, we may begin by reminding ourselves, tautologically, of the prevalence of vulgarity: of the currency of casual historical analogy as a mode of political wisdom. The intellectual presuppositions of such wisdom, though no doubt often well below the surface of consciousness, are presumably two: assumptions of a perennial human nature and, more relevantly for our purpose, a notion of historical recapitulation; historical situations can be exemplary because they are in a sense repetitive, and such repetitions provide the grounds of both political typology and political prediction. Both these presuppositions consort only uneasily, if at all, with prevailing nineteenth-century notions of history-as-progress. Nevertheless, their instant accessibility and con2 3 4

Acton, Lectures, p. 319 n i . Acton, Lectures, p. 14. See above, p. 143.

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venience continued, inevitably, to ensure a certain currency for casual historical analogy. Historical examples, and the maxims drawn from them, constituted a kind of proverbial wisdom which either could provide a stock of commonplaces for the hard-pressed orator - that Athens showed that popular governments destroyed themselves, that Rome proved that a city could not govern an empire, or America that colonies dropped from the parent tree when ripe - or could be given more idiosyncratic or far-fetched interpretations, as when the Carolingians' assumption of the imperial title was complimented in the language of English Whiggism, as a wise respect for continuity,5 or in Disraeli's extravagant analogy for the English Whig oligarchy in the constitution of Venice. 6 Contemporary events naturally threw up new parallels. The French during the Napoleonic wars, preoccupied by the Roman imagery to which the Revolution had given currency and which had been readily adapted to the emergence of the Empire, had naturally identified their great commercial and maritime opponent with Carthage. Arnold, in his History of Romey reversed the analogy, identifying Hannibal with Napoleon (both, after all, had memorably crossed the Alps).7 But the political generalisations and random historical analogies, the statesmanlike drawing of lessons from the ambition of Alcibiades or the caution of Fabius, by what Sir George Cornewall Lewis called 'insulated apophthegms extracted from the writings of historians, or current among the people in the shape of proverbs', 8 though the very stuff of post-prandial wisdom, are clearly at best - and the best might be infrequently met - the scattered glinting particles amid the sludge, isolated prospective raw materials of an historically grounded science of politics, lacking all its important logical connectives or any systematic principles of discrimination.9 Not all appeals to analogy were casual, however. In the earlier part of the century, in particular, the idea of historical recapitulation continued to underlie strenuous attempts to read the lessons of history as the foundation of political wisdom. Such wisdom was, of course, thought of primarily, as in earlier centuries, as the fruit of a classical education, whose curriculum 5

6 7 8

9

Sir Francis Palgrave, The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth, in Sir R. H. Inglis Palgrave (ed.), The Collected Historical Works of Sir Francis Palgrave (Cambridge, 1921), vi, p. 7. E.g. B. Disraeli, Sybil, or the Two Nations (London, 1845), Book 1, ch. 3. Thomas Arnold, History of Rome, 3 vols. (1857 edn), in, pp. 53, 191. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, A Treatise on the Methods of Observation and Reasoning in Politics, 2 vols. (London, 1852), 1, p. 59. This intriguingly titled but turgid work is heavily dependent on J. S. Mill's System of Logic for its notions of method. There were protests against the loose use of analogy. E.g. W. E. H. Lecky, The Political Value of History (London, 1892), p. 16, and J. R. Seeley, 'History and Polities', Macmillanys Magazine, 40 (1879), 372. Cf. Bryce, below, p. 238.

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was to some extent deliberately broadened to include closer attention to the ancient historians, and particularly to the history of Greece. 10 The histories of both Greece and Rome offered to the political analyst the attractions of a closed life-cycle seen in its entirety. They had risen, flourished, fallen. Moreover, the ancient historians themselves had tended to think in cyclical terms, with Polybius providing the most influential model. But compared with the interest taken in ancient history in the immediately preceding periods, the nineteenth-century preoccupation with Greece gave a certain relative novelty to a well-established method. For though Sparta had sometimes, as in the case of Rousseau, attracted would-be political artificers, the predominant attention, since the Renaissance and Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, had been given to the exemplary history of Rome. n In the first half of the eighteenth century, until the rise of the Scottish histories of civil society, the notion of a cycle of corruption, based on the rise and fall of Rome, provided the chief historical tool for the critique of contemporary politics. Later, in Gibbon's Decline and Fall it is, of course, exemplified successively by Romans, Goths, Vandals and Arabs: civic virtue or barbarian hardihood brings conquest, conquest brings luxury which undermines civic and military spirit, which in turn incurs the nemesis of a professional army, despotic government and finally conquest at the hands of some hardier or more virtuous people. Byron, the most Augustan of nineteenth-century poets, put it neatly, as an established maxim or law: Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom, and then Glory - when that fails Wealth, vice, corruption; - barbarism at last.12 It would be too much to claim that the classical 'cycle of corruption 5 was extinct in nineteenth-century English thought, but it was not dominant, despite a continuing, no doubt proper, sense of the mortality of all human works. With the decline of 'corruption' as the means of managing the House of Commons and making executive government possible, and the growth of optimistic notions of the efficacy of public opinion and a wider franchise as checks, the eighteenth-century critique of 'luxury' and its corruption of public virtue lost much of its relevance. Insofar as corrup10

11 12

On the rising interest in ancient, and particularly Greek, history in the nineteenth century see R. M. Ogilvie, Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918 (London, 1964), pp. 9iff.; also M. L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England, 1700-1830 (Cambridge, 1945), pp. 39, 101, and Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980), p. 62. As J. G. A. Pocock has magisterially shown in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' (London, 1818), iv, cviii.

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tion was still feared it was increasingly as a concomitant of an extended franchise: the corruption of representatives into demagogues by the temptations and pressures represented by a mass electorate, rather than the encroachment of executive despotism by bribery and stealth: Cleon rather than Augustus. With the promotion of democracy and its dangers to the centre of political argument, Athens rather than Rome became the focus of attention in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Mitford's attempt to treat Greek history as a political demonstration of the evils of democracy, in his History of Greece (1784-1810), eighteenth-century Country Party doctrines of an ideal, balanced English constitution, and of the representation of 'interests' rather than individuals, were still crucial. Athens showed how such a constitution had been destroyed by the advent of democracy, falling victim to faction and demagogy.13 George Grote's rejoinder {History of Greece, 1846-56) made Athens acceptable and even exemplary for mid-Victorian liberalism. Arguing from the Utilitarian doctrine of individual representation and treating 'interests' in Benthamite fashion as pernicious and necessarily hostile to the public weal, Grote read the Athenian experience as a lesson in the benefits of democracy and of electoral reforms like that of Cleisthenes, which dissolved established local and corporate ties. Grote's Athens offered an historical demonstration of a successful evolution from absolutism through oligarchy to democracy, culminating in something approaching an ideal Benthamite polity, an aggregate of emancipated individual citizens.14 The detection of parallels between ancient and modern history was also a central inspiration, in the 1830s and 40s, for Thomas Arnold and his followers.15 Arnold, who introduced the study of ancient history alongside classical literature into the curriculum at Rugby, and produced an admired History of Rome (1834-42), reinforced the use of analogy by a Romantic, organicist theory of historical cycles. Greek history was more relevant to the present than later periods because fifth-century Greece and modern Europe stood at the same point of a recurrent cyclical development, at which conflicts based on divisions between the propertied and property-less replaced the rule of an aristocracy.16 Later nineteenth-century views of Greece and in particular of Athenian history reflected, it seems, something of the recession of the tide of Victorian liberal self-confidence,17 while the characteristic anxieties of the last 13 14 15 16 17

On Mitford and Grote we are greatly indebted to Frank Miller Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981), pp. 192-234. Turner, Greek Heritage, pp. 220-3, 226-34. On this see Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952). Turner, Greek Heritage, p. 209. Turner, Greek Heritage, pp. 248-55.

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years of the century often focused again on the old cautionary tale of Rome. Fears that an excitable mass electorate could be manipulated or bribed by public doles, and a sense that the standards of public life were in danger of being debauched by money, gave a renewed relevance to pessimistic or admonitory parallels. And of course the significance of the Roman analogy spoke loudly to a nation anxiously and self-consciously aware of its possession of a vast empire. The early twentieth century produced a crop of works drawing the imperial parallels: James Bryce's essay on 'The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India', Sir Charles Lucas's Greater Rome and Greater Britain, and Lord Cromer's Ancient and Modern Imperialism.™ One of the earliest of the publicists of imperialism, J. A. Froude, had brooded much, in the 1870s and 80s, on the example of Rome, with all the pessimism of, and almost in identical terms to, the eighteenth-century neo-Harringtonians, and he entitled his most popular work, in imitation of Harrington, Oceana (1886). He subscribed, more explicitly than any other nineteenth-century English historian, to the 'cycle of corruption' in its classic eighteenth-century form: 'Virtue and truth produced strength, strength dominion, dominion riches, riches luxury, and luxury weakness and collapse - fatal sequence repeated so often.'19 Froude mourned for an agricultural England and the independent smallholder - an echo of the Harringtonian notion of the freeholder as the nation's shield and security. The ultimate cause of the decline of Rome was the decline of the independent cultivator: 'The armies which made the strength of the Roman republic were composed of the small freeholders of Latium and afterwards of Italy', 20 and 'the fate of Rome seemed to me likely to be the fate of England if she became what the political economists desired her to be'. 21 Historical examples of the transitoriness of a merely commercial greatness added their own quota of discouragement: Tyre, Carthage, Venice, Genoa, Florence and the Low Countries. 22 Thus ancient history, whether in the form of Rome's traditional warning or in the more distinctively nineteenth-century interest in fifthcentury Athens, continued to offer not only inspiration and admonition but even perhaps, because of its closed, apparently cyclical character, something like laboratory demonstrations for the scientific student of politics. But there was an obvious incompatibility between classical formulae of historical change and the optimistic belief in progress which 18

19 20 21 22

See J e n k y n s , Victorians and Ancient Greece, ch. 13, and for a study of the use of Roman parallels in the context of Empire, see R. F . Betts, ' T h e allusion t o R o m e in British imperialist thought', Victorian Studies, 15 (1971), 149-59. J . A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4 v o l s . (London, 1898), 11, p . 30. 'England and H e r Colonies' (1870), repr. in Short Studies, 11, p . 202. Froude, Oceana, or England and her Colonies (London, 1886), p . 10; cf. p . 28. Short Studies, 11, p. 202.

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laid its mark on so much nineteenth-century historical thinking. The question, as J. S. Mill put it, was what progressive improvement lay next in order: ripeness was all. Differences between modern European polities became explicable in terms of lag or arrested development. Not public virtue but the capacity for judicious adjustment became the chief political desideratum. In nineteenth-century England this smoothly accommodated the central and recurrent question of the extension of the franchise. Once the breach in the ancient constitution had been made by the Reform Act of 1832, it became difficult to argue even the vital question of the franchise as a matter of principle; it became a question not so much of the ordained components of society (though that argument could still be invoked: society would always need brute labour and the poor would be always with us) as of timing. In this there was not only optimism but an implied determinism or something like it. As J. S. Mill said, 'government is always in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society',23 or as Macaulay put it in the Reform Bill debates, 'The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onwards, constitutions stand still.'24 This might be taken as implying a conception of politics as merely the surface turbulence created by the deeper current of irresistible historical change. But insofar as the immediate implication was taken to be the necessity of reform rather than the inevitability of revolutionary transformation, political action retained a vital role as the mediator between an evolving history and inherited institutions; revolution was the penalty of an ill-judged political intransigence. As one of the contributors to Essays on Reform (1867) wrote, 'the violent convulsion of 1789-93 was itself the result of prolonged neglect to accommodate institutions to an altered state of opinion and an altered distribution of social forces'.25 James Bryce's essay 'The Historical Aspect of Democracy', in the same collection, as well as rejecting alleged historical demonstrations of the inherent vices of democracy,26 put the same argument in general terms: 'If there is anything which history declares to be dangerous, it is the failure to recognise a new phase of political growth. 27 Bryce appealed to the authority of Tocqueville, in claiming that 'the social progress of democracy' - the extension of knowledge, self-respect, and the capacity for converted 23 24 25 26 27

J. S. Mill, Autobiography (1873), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by J. M. Robson etal. (Toronto, 1963-), 1, p. 169. 'Speeches', The Works of Lord Macaulay, edited by his sister, Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. (London, 1897), vin, p. 30. Also see above, pp. 119—20. A. O. Rutson, 'Opportunities and Shortcomings of Government in England', Essays on Reform (London, 1867), p. 283. See Essay vn below, p. 239. Essays on Reform, p. 277.

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political action - had outrun political progress: 'This is dangerous, because it makes the organs of our political life no longer an adequate expression of the national will.' The opponents of democracy were attempting to dam the course of history itself. 'The tendency of the last seven centuries of European history', Bryce wrote with the amplitude and authority of an historian of the middle ages, 'has been to an equalisation of the conditions of men.' 28 To make political wisdom dependent on reading in time the signals emitted by the historical process might seem to abolish any notion of an independent 'science of polities' in favour of the more comprehensive intellectual project then beginning to be represented by sociology. 29 Yet there were some for whom a belief in the lessons of history still fell significantly short of a sociological determinism, and for whom therefore the category of politics, as distinct from society, retained its fascination and its importance, while the lessons of history could still be thought of as in some measure a source of applicable maxims rather than simply as injunctions to recognise the inevitable; history had more than one course, and political knowledge and decision might influence which it took. To see how this could be so, we may return to one of the most celebrated of nineteenth-century exponents of the ideas of progress and of political adjustment to it, Macaulay. Few nineteenth-century authors were, as we have seen earlier, and above in Essay in, more insistent on the political importance of watching the historical clock than Macaulay, yet he has not, despite his belief in the progress of society, usually been classed with nineteenth-century determinists like Comte or Spencer. And in fact it is among historians that we can see most clearly how a sense of the political importance of an understanding of the course of European history can coexist with circumspection about the extensive claims of the philosophy of history, because it is in them that the qualifications are likely to be most subtle and most fully exhibited. That dedicated practitioner of the craft of history, Stubbs, for example, exhibited a robust scepticism which the consensus of the craft guild has usually endorsed: 'I do not believe in the Philosophy of History, and so do not believe in Buckle.' 30 But Stubbs, like Macaulay, has his own general conception of European history from which it is clear he thought political wisdom was to be derived. Macaulay and Stubbs, in fact, offer the most interesting attempts, at least before the closing years of the century, by practising historians, as distinct from philosophers of history deducing 28 29 30

Essays on Reform, p. 272. See Prologue, above, p. 10. Letters of William Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford, 182$-1901, edited by W. H. Hutton (London, 1904), p. 42.

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necessities from some metaphysic or conception of human nature, to systematise and make articulate their general understanding of European history and its political implications. But historians, if they tend to endorse with some enthusiasm the view that politicians need to learn from history - and hence from historians - have seldom been comfortable with the deterministic restraints of historicism. Vicissitude, mistakes, conscious action and luck are seen as ineliminable and sometimes, even in the long perspective, crucial features of historical processes. Progress is real but full of hazard; opportunities lost may not recur. In systematic historical accounts constructed on these principles, even if contained within a general historicist or Whig framework (at the highest level of abstraction, of course, the two conflate into the simple conception of one single meaningful historical story), much interest may attach to what the extreme historicist will tend to speak of only in terms of differential rates of advance: the differences between the various European polities and their historical fortunes. An interest in such comparisons is not of course in itself sufficient to reinstate politics. Buckle's History of Civilisation in England is based on the tripartite comparison between France, England and Scotland, but his is an extreme case of the nineteenth-century tendency to reduce politics to a residual appendage of 'civilisation' (more usually 'society') and to tell it, essentially, to keep out of the way. Macaulay's view, of course, is a good deal more complex. We have already seen in an earlier essay (Essay 111) in connection with his attack on James Mill's Essay on Government, that from the outset of his career he treated ideas of progress and adjustment as basic constituents of political understanding; here we have to consider his mature development of these views through his general conception of English history. The latter is decisively shaped by the categories of the eighteenth-century Scottish history of civil society, but it is not simply subsumed into it, any more, of course, than it had been in Hume or John Millar.31 Stubbs too has a general conception of European history since the fall of the Roman empire, though by the time he wrote, the characteristic diction and conceptions of Scottish Enlightenment history lay in a forgotten past, and his own immediate influences were German. European society since the fall of Rome had developed from tribalism through feudalism to modernity. But the political management and consequences of these transitions had been very different in the different European countries, and it was in these discrepancies that the political lessons of history essentially resided. 31

On this see J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981). For Macaulay and the conception of the history of civil society, see John Clive, Thomas Bahington Macaulay: the Shaping of the Historian (London, 1975), pp. 105-7.

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Both Macaulay and Stubbs, of course, write their European history not only under Scottish and German influence respectively, but in the line of an English Whig historiographical tradition. By the mid-nineteenth century that tradition, largely because of the intellectual infusions mentioned above, had become a good deal more than vulgar incantations of the virtues of the matchless English constitution. But for both of them, one of the things which places them so emphatically in the Whig tradition is that the chief foil to English political development, the cautionary tale which in modern history replaces Rome as history's greatest warning, is France. The force of the warning was not mitigated by the fact that for Macaulay and for Stubbs, as for David Hume before them, France represented in some sense the 'normal' course of European development, while English history was a fortunate aberration. History did not solve political problems, it posed them; in England, with some assistance from good fortune, they had been solved; in France the process had run its course. It would not be hard, by selective quotations, either to make Macaulay into a naive historicist, lacking the more formidable apparatus of 'laws', 'periods' and technical terms by which nineteenth-century philosophers of history tended to try to establish their scientific credentials, or alternatively to make him into a 'mere' empiricist in J. S. Mill's sense, the proponent of what Mill wants to call the 'chemical method' in political science. Macaulay tells us, for example, that 'the only way to learn civil prudence from history is to examine and compare a great number of cases'.32 But we - or rather the House of Commons - are also warned against the use of isolated examples, which can prove anything. We must study 'the whole life-time of great societies', and 'the law which regulates the growth of communities'. 33 But both interpretations are misleading. Certainly Macaulay as trumpeter of progress was not always subtle, and certainly in his attacks on James Mill's Essay on Government, after his telling - and, it has to be said, primarily purely logical - criticisms, what he offers as the 'Baconian' method of experience seems strikingly naive, justifying J. S. Mill's strictures on it: 'We ought to examine the constitution of all those communities in which, under whatever form, the blessings of good government are enjoyed; and to discover, if possible, in what they resemble each other, and in what they all differ from those societies in which the object of government is not attained.' 34 Macaulay had subtler, though also more strictly historical, answers than that, and the way he himself uses history is in no way adequately represented by such proposed 32 33

34

History of England in Works, i, p. 569. Works, VIII, p . 72.

Utilitarian Logic and Politics. James Mill's Essay on Government, Macaulay's and the ensuing debate, edited by J. Lively and J. Rees (Oxford, 1978), p. 197.

Critique,

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exercises in - to use Mill's metaphor - political chemistry. Essentially Macaulay approached European history in the manner of Hume and Millar, qualified by a nineteenth-century Burkean sense of the lessons provided by the French Revolution. There is a central story, but there are also pregnant and instructive moments, partings of the ways, above all in the seventeenth century. It was the English Revolution of that time which had made England politically unique - a matter for strenuous self-congratulation in 1848 while he was writing the history of 1688 - but that uniqueness was thrown into relief and given its meaning as a creative deviation within a pattern. Macaulay's general conception of the greatest crisis of English political liberty was of course inherited, not original; it has marked similarities to Hume's, which in turn owes something to the older Harringtonian notion of the breakdown of a feudal balance, in which the power of the Crown had been held in check by the barons and their private armies. There was a dangerous tension between the progress of society and inherited political liberty. By the seventeenth century, the growth of commercial society and a money economy had eroded the military power of the feudal magnates and made war into a trade; the professional army gave a new preponderance to the executive power. In France and Spain, the liberties and representative assemblies inherited from the middle ages succumbed. England, thanks to the resistance of the Long Parliament, preserved her representative institutions and escaped the despotism whose model was the France of Richelieu and Louis XIV. 35 A noteworthy emphasis - it would perhaps be too much to call it a modification - in Macaulay's acceptance of this formula, compared with his predecessors, is the stress he lays on conscious, intelligent apprehension and political observation. There had been many reasons offered for the success of the English resistance: the strength of English medieval institutions, and even the power of the English medieval monarchy which had taught barons and commons to act in concert to contain it, aided by the fortunate legal accident that in England nobility was inherited only by eldest sons, assisting the mingling of classes;36 England's insular position which made standing armies less necessary; the vitality and self-confidence derived from commercial wealth; the fierce intolerance of the Puritans; even the outstanding public virtue of the leaders of the Long Parliament. Not all of this was congenial to Macaulay; as a nineteenth-century Whig, proud of his party's commitment to Catholic emancipation, he emphasised the secularity of the resistance to James II. 37 And though he could laud the 35 36 37

See Burrow, Liberal Descent, ch. 3. Cf. Malthus, above, p. 83; also cf. Essay iv, above, p. 158. 'Milton', Works, v, p. 26.

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parlimentary leaders and damn their opponents when he had a mind to, his account was moralistic only in detail. He was strongly hostile, for example, to the eighteenth-century classical republican and Country Party denunciations of standing armies and of the corruption by which Walpole managed the Commons; 38 his own retort was a relativist one: standing armies and parliamentary corruption were at the time necessary features of the state of society and the constitution.39 The remedy for the latter was not the revival of public virtue - that would be a consequence - but improved machinery; an enlargement of the franchise and greater parliamentary accountability. Macaulay did not underestimate the importance of civic virtue, but he tended to treat it as a symptom rather than a cause: it was typical of him to reproach the French for neglecting Thucydides for Plutarch.40 And in his summaries of the crisis of the seventeenth century he lays a characteristic stress on intelligent understanding, presenting the preservation of English liberties almost as a triumph for Baconian induction: 'At the commencement of the seventeenth century political science had made considerable progress. The fate of the Spanish Cortes and of the French States General had given solemn warning to our parliaments.'41 Liberty, threatened by civilisation, is saved by intellect rather than virtue or fanaticism. The merit of timely constitutional adjustment is that it is essentially an accommodation to historical circumstances, not a defiance of them (the characteristic vice of Toryism): 'Over the great changes of the moral world we possess as little power as over the great changes of the physical world.' 42 But though in one sense the politician's problems are always posed by an autonomous 'great march of society'43 he is more than simply a midwife; at best he is more like a sensible and honest valet, manipulating his master's dispositions to bring him through difficulties without disaster. Again France provides the example, for of course by the nineteenth century the traditional Whig gratitude for deliverance from despotism, Popery, and wooden shoes, was supplemented, notably in 1848, by selfsatisfaction at an escape from the obviously related fate of revolution. Macaulay, though shaken by the revolutions of 1848, was not unmitigatedly hostile to the first French Revolution; he was prepared to be optimistic about long-term results. But the Revolution's inevitability, and the disastrous political inexperience of its leaders, were the nemesis of the seventeenth-century failure to preserve representative institutions. Faced 38 39 40 41 42 43

B u r r o w , Liberal Descent, p p . 55-8. History, Works, 11, p . 434; 111, p p . 226H.; vi, p . 18. Works, v, p . 637. History, Works, 1, p . 34. 'Speeches', Works, v m , p . 73. 'Speeches', Works, v m , p . 73.

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by a general crisis in the relations between political liberty and the march of society the French had failed to learn in time. The lesson for the English Parliament in 1832 - that revolutions are caused by nations moving onward while constitutions stand still - was an obvious, even trite one, but it was also an endorsement of seventeenth-century Whiggism. Macaulay invites the readers of the History to imagine absolute monarchy triumphant in seventeenth-century England as in France, followed ultimately by the inevitable consequences, violent revolution: 'How many years of blood and confusion would it have cost us to learn the very rudiments of political science.'44 Political science is in part an intellectual function of advancing civilisation; before the seventeenth century the English constitution was inevitably imperfect and imprecise, having been founded in a 'rude age' of society.45 Here 'political science' stands for precision, clarity of fundamental principles, a systematic matching of means to ends. But political science is also a function of the political experience which despotism precludes. The other face of paternalism is naturally puerility; learning civil prudence by historical induction - and possibly, like the French revolutionary Plutarchians, learning the wrong lessons from the wrong, anachronistic examples (in this instance those of city-states) - is only one aspect of tutelage by history. The violence of the French Revolution was the consequence of the political inexperience of its leaders, which left them no better resources than theory, strained historical analogy and inappropriate moralism.46 In Macaulay's references to political science, Baconian and Burkean lessons are blended, and his language blurs the possible distinction: 'The science of government is an experimental science.'47 Macaulay's estimate of English political pragmatism was sometimes ironical, but in the last resort approving. The Toleration Act of 1689 became the occasion of a homily on the relation of theory and practice. 'To a jurist versed in the theory of legislation, but not intimately acquainted with the temper of the sects and parties into which the nation was divided at the time of the Revolution, that Act would seem to be a mere chaos of absurdities and contradictions.' But The science of Politics bears in one respect a close analogy to the science of Mechanics . . . What the engineer is to the mathematician, the active statesman is to the contemplative statesman. It is indeed most important that legislators and administrators should be versed in the philosophy of government. . . But as he who has actually to build must bear in mind many things never noticed by D'Alembert 44 45 46 47

History, History, Works, Works,

Works, 1, p. 393. Works, 1, p. 23. v, pp. 40, 137-9, 619, 635. v, p. 677.

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and Euler, so must he who has actually to govern be perpetually guided by considerations to which no allusion can be found in the writings of Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham. The perfect lawgiver is a just temper between the mere man of theory, who can see nothing but general principles, and the mere man of business, who can see nothing but particular circumstances. Of lawgivers in whom the speculative element has prevailed to the exclusion of the practical, the world has during the last eighty years been singularly fruitful. To their wisdom Europe and America have owed scores of abortive constitutions . . . But in English legislation the practical element has always predominated, and not seldom unduly predominated, over the speculative . . . Our national distaste for whatever is abstract in political science amounts undoubtedly to a fault. Yet it is, perhaps, a fault on the right side.48 If the English Revolution was in some sense the result of an intelligent induction, its actual conduct was a triumph of useful habit over an intellectual myopia which failed to understand the grounds of its own utility. The English devotion to precedent was carried to almost ridiculous lengths, but its intellectual absurdity was outweighed by the value of its function in preserving the relevance of political experience and satisfying the contending requirements of innovation and continuity; it was the misfortune of France to lose the possibility of the latter in losing the opportunity for the former. The penalty of a revolution of the inexperienced was the triumph of the mere men of theory and - this was seen also in seventeenth-century England - the loss of almost all possibility of public virtue in the elasticity of conscience necessary to survive violent changes of regime and policy.49 Macaulay's suggested - it would perhaps be too much to say achieved fusion of utilitarian clarity and rigour with Burkean pragmatism and the endorsement of continuity, on the basis of an historical story essentially derived from Hume and Scottish Enlightenment, issues therefore in what may seem a Victorian Whig platitude about the reconciliation of progress and stability. But there is also a sense in which Macaulay is not so much a representative Victorian as the last great effort of an expiring tradition. In turning to the 1860s and 70s we find that although a Burkean insistence on experience and continuity is maintained to the point of repetitiousness, the version of European history itself is presented in a different accent and vocabulary, not Scottish but German. In its most comprehensive and ambitious form, as the excited proclamation of a new method or even a new science, this constituted a decisive change and will therefore form the subject of a subsequent essay (Essay vn). There is one figure, however, who calls for extended attention and who occupies in some respects a transitional position and is better considered 48 49

History, Works, 11, p p . 463-4. 'Hallam', Works, v, p p . 217-19.

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here, though the decision is admittedly to some extent arbitrary. The profoundest affinities of Stubbs's scholarship were of course German and Romantic, Jacob Grimm and G. L. von Maurer, not Millar or Hume. But his version of comparative European constitutional history was more limited and circumspect than some of the more ambitious enterprises we shall have to consider in our next essay. 'Science' was not part of Stubbs's habitual vocabulary. This abstention, in the older, looser usage, would not have been particularly significant, though the increasingly positivistic connotations make it mildly so, compared with the eagerness with which they were to be embraced by Seeley, for example. But though Stubbs made none of Macaulay's concessions to 'the man of theory', his interpretation of comparative European political history was no less general. It is true that when his friend Edward Freeman told him of his own proposed Comparative Politics Stubbs characteristically remarked that the subject, which he himself called 'Comparative Constitutional History', was 'largish', but he went on to say, correctly, that he had been lecturing on it, with reference to Spain, Germany, France and England, for several years.50 Freeman's attempt was to be more ambitious, however, if only because it incorporated what Stubbs called 'the dead world of Greece and Rome'. 51 Stubbs's insistence on a sharp disjunction between ancient and modern which in this context meant Teutonic - history was a major point of disagreement between himself and Freeman, and it aligns him, though for different reasons, in this respect with Macaulay, for whom the world of the ancient city-state was essentially distinct and hence a source of misleading analogies, notably to the eighteenth-century classical republicans. Stubbs shared with him a mistrust of ancient history as the resort of the theoretician. There were parallels between ancient and modern, no doubtmen are subject to 'limited sets and series of influences' - but 'there is all the difference in the world between a casual coincidence or parallel, such as might be traced, for example, between Carthage and Venice, for instance, however close the analogy, and a real case of recorded cause and effect'.52 Historical induction is rebuked - Macaulay would not altogether have agreed, and nor would Freeman-in the name of historical process. And that process, or continuity, controlled, or sometimes rejected outright, the effects of conscious innovation: 'A national polity is not the creation of a single brain or of a royal commission of brains, but grows with the growth and strengthens with the strength of the nation; cannot be changed without changing much of the spirit of the people, and is strong in proportion to 50 51 52

Letters of William Stubbs, p. 164. William Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History (Oxford, 1887), p. 16. For Freeman's Comparative Politics see below, pp. 219-25. Stubbs, Lectures on Early English History, edited by A. Hassall (London, 1906), p. 197.

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the distinctness of its continuity' 53 - and there follows the familiar analogy of acceptable constitutional change to house repairs and improvements. Stubbs's Burkeanism is particularly uncompromising, and in his lectures often little more than incantatory, but it derives substantial support from the weighty sense he conveys of the way in which not merely the lessons of history but the practice of the historian offer an education in the exercise of judgement on complex and delicate matters, 54 a claim which needs to be exemplified rather than merely asserted, and which Stubbs notably did in his Constitutional History of England, where a rich sense of the constant, almost imperceptible tremors of unplanned, piecemeal social and institutional change is subtly conveyed. But for Stubbs, as for Macaulay, the lessons of the substance of English constitutional change are thrown into sharp relief by the comparative history of the European family of nations, and particularly by the example of France, though Stubbs's emphasis was institutional rather than political. In Stubbs's case there is no reason to suspect any direct connection with eighteenth-century intellectual roots, but the old dialectic between civilisation and liberty, and the threat the former poses to the latter,55 is still very much alive for him: 'In general the chances are greatly in favour of tyranny, resulting from the forcible destruction of the old bases; England alone has a history in which ancient freedom made its way through, and utilized all that is good in feudalism, widening from precedent to precedent into perfect political liberty.' 56 The parable is essentially the same as Macaulay's, but it begins much earlier: the great crisis of constitutional liberty is not the decline of feudalism but its establishment. 1792 and 1848 in France are foreshadowed not, as in Macaulay, in the seventeenth century but in the early middle ages. The English entered England as colonists and, slaughtering or expelling the previous inhabitants, planted their free allodial institutions and their mode of local self-government. The history of France, however, is given the inevitability of Greek tragedy from the moment of the Frankish conquest: 'In France feudal government runs its logical career.' Feudalism was 'a single adaptation of the old German polity to the government of a conquered race'. The French 'retained and developed the idea of feudal subordination in the organisation of government unmodified by any tendencies towards popular freedom'.57 Thus when feudalism declines, the resurgent monarchy gathers all power to itself: 'law and order were 53 54 55 56 57

Stubbs, Early English History, p. 332. Seventeen Lectures, pp. 19-21. See above, p . 195. Early English History, p. 265. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England,

3 vols. (2nd edn, O x f o r d , 1875), 1, p . 3.

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restored not by the workings of the nation, but by the increase of the power of the king, and they ended as the royal power must ever end when the needful checks are wanting and the deeper forces depressed and bound down in despotism, resulting in an explosion, a revolution, anarchy, and, as action and reaction are correlative, a series of such phenomena, which has never in this world's history been summed up except in national exhaustion. It remains to be seen whether the experience of the ages and the development of political knowledge has anything better in store for France in our own time.' 58 The case of France, doomed not from the seventeenth century but from the seventh, and thus abandoned now to the dubious resources of 'political knowledge' and a political experience only of discontinuity, is clearly dire. The lesson for the English may, however, seem to be merely to give thanks in the proper quarter for their historical luck. Macaulay had made the English Parliamentarians of the seventeenth century into prototypes of the Whigs of 1832: cautious innovators, wise in their generation and instructed by awful continental example. But in Stubbs's account there was no question, in the crisis of English freedom, of conscious political induction: the happy establishment of Teutonic institutions in their free popular form during the English Settlement, and their preservation through the feudal ordeal of the Norman Conquest, was hardly a triumph of 'political science'. Stubbs in fact constantly insists - it is part of his general providential view of history, and it incorporates much subtlety in detail - on the unplanned, fortuitous nature of the survival of the germs of subsequent English freedom through the period of the Norman Conquest; men in history do better than they know or intend, and 'the world owes some of its greatest debts to men from whose memory it shrinks'. 59 Stubbs had no need to learn from the eighteenth-century Scots the sociological doctrine of unintended consequences or the Mandevillian maxim of 'private vices, public benefits'; with him the unseen hand took its proper name: Divine Providence. But there are political lessons from the English story nonetheless, even though our exemplary precursors may, even more than Macaulay's precedent-bound seventeenth-century lawyers, have lacked conscious awareness of the political value they exemplified. They are not, in this case, lessons in the avoidance of revolution by timely concession; they are lessons much more directly anti-utilitarian than anti-revolutionary. The good fortune of England lay in the mixture of elements, feudal and prefeudal, which survived into the later middle ages to become the foundation of the English polity. The Norman lawyers had attempted to impose 58 59

Early English History, p. 328. Constitutional History, 1, p. iv.

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feudalism as a system on England because it was all they knew. They had failed, partly through ignorance of indigenous English custom, partly because the king saw merit in retaining direct links with his subjects outside the mediations of the feudal pyramid. 60 But what in Stubbs's account in the Constitutional History seems most baleful in the lawyers' attempt was not so much the kind of system it was as the fact that it was a system at all; lawyers, for Stubbs - most of all, of course, civilians - always figured as the antitype of the kind of sensitive historical understanding and tolerance of heterogeneity to which his own allegiance was given. Lawyers (the close relations between Law and History at Oxford at the time need to be remembered) were culpably devoted to system, logic and sharp, unrealistic, insensitive definition.61 It was a marked reversal, in which Freeman shared, of the traditional complaints made by Hallam and Macaulay of English lawyers' distaste for system and addiction to precedent - a complaint echoed later by Maitland. Macaulay, in the narrower jurisprudential context, often seemed to give a blessing to Benthamite rigour as an example of the progress of Science', just as he spoke of the indefiniteness of the medieval constitution as evincing its 'rudeness'. Stubbs was a better Burkean with, as a Tory, no weakness at all for Benthamite flirtations. He is more eloquent and less qualified than Macaulay on the saving graces of anomaly. In the Norman period the apparently archaic 'survivals' of Germanic practice, shrivelled to the humblest institutions of local self-organisation, were portentous with future constitutional liberty. The lesson is, of course, profoundly Burkean: institutions may serve more purposes than we are aware of or than anyone at any given moment may be capable of seeing; historically given heterogeneity and the existence of anomaly preserves options; it is both the sign and the promise of spontaneous institutional vitality. In the narrower sense, as a celebration of the virtues of responsible local self-government, a constant theme of the 'Germanist' historians Stubbs, Freeman and John Richard Green, we should no doubt be prepared to see it as a Tocquevillian lesson as well as a Burkean one. The base on which 'Angle-Saxon' freedom rests is the self-governing township distinguishing it, for the English historians, from the continental oscillations of revolution and despotism or the detestable Bonapartist fusion of plebiscitary democracy and bureaucratic centralisation. As a message to the English, purveyed by Stubbs, Freeman and Green, it is a warning above all against the esprit de systeme in government, a defence of historic speciality even when apparently archaic or anomalous, and of local independence and pride against the Whig-Benthamite addiction to Commissions, paid 60 61

Constitutional History, i. For a fuller account, see Burrow, Liberal Descent, ch. 6. Burrow, Liberal Descent, pp. 133—5.

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officials, rationalisation at the expense of continuity. Even Maitland, who had no tolerance for archaism as such, and admired at least the German adeptness at theory and systematisation, took France, as usual, as the awful warning, where 'we may see the pulverizing, macadamizing tendency in all its glory, working from century to century reducing to impotence and then to nullity, all that interferes between Man and State'.62 In its extreme form, as in Stubbs, we have here something like an institutional laissez-faire presented as a Burkean endorsement of the historically given, though it does not preclude inventiveness, as the later volumes of Stubbs's Constitutional History make clear, provided it is tentative and pragmatic. It has, of course, very different intellectual roots from the more familiar nineteenth-century individualistic and nonconformist version of laissez-faire as in John Bright or Herbert Spencer. But their moral worlds had affinities for all that. Stubbs, though he had a Tory feeling for order and government as positive goods, also cherished what he called 'independent thought and character', and saw it as a function of historical continuity; it was nourished, not as in Mill's On Liberty, by the freedom of the market in ideas and styles of self-presentation, but by almost the opposite, the security of men rooted in their institutions and traditions. 63 Stubbs seems the better Tocquevillian here. But if the remedies were opposed, the anxieties were similar: in Stubbs's horror of the sterilisation of institutional creativity by the imposition of a system, and Mill's notorious fear of a 'Chinese stationariness', discussed in an earlier essay, we see the intersection of Burkean and liberal concerns. Anxieties about 'stagnation' were a stressed note in the three decades or so after 1850; Maine, for example, was to make it one of the lessons of comparative history which told against democracy and socialism,64 and his historical contrast, like Mill's, was between occidental progress and oriental immobility. The eighteenth-century conception of a static 'oriental despotism', devoid of history, had various nineteenth-century mutations. One of them, for example, formed an element in Freeman's well-known hatred of the Turk: the Ottoman empire represented the rule of an alien bureaucracy imposed on an enslaved people - the opposite of free western institutions with their capacity for spontaneous development. J. S. Mill was not the only one to invoke the curse of Confucius: Macaulay also had spoken of Rome in the third century A.D. before the rise of Christianity as 62

63 64

F . W . Maitland, ' M o r a l Personality and Legal Personality', Collected Papers, edited by H . A . L. Fisher, 3 vols ( C a m b r i d g e , 1911), 111, p . 311. F o r a discussion of Maitland's ideas in this context, see B u r r o w , ' " T h e village c o m m u n i t y " 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 ] . H. Plumb (London, 1974), pp. 275-84. Early English History, p. 2. Sir H e n r y Maine, Popular Government (London, 1885).

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All that glitters

threatened by 'a Chinese civilization'. 65 Byzantium naturally offered another historical representative of the ominous category. 66 But its most influential embodiment, as Macaulay's example shows, was not an almost unknown China but the example always closest to western men's anxieties, namely Rome itself. Rome certainly figured for Stubbs, like France, as an antitype of Teutonic liberty; it was her freedom from 'the curse of the imperial system' that made England the purest type of the free Germanic polity. 67 In the mid-nineteenth-century accentuation of the long-standing enthusiasm for institutions of local government, one major influence was obviously Tocqueville, but a more indirect one may also have been Guizot, who, in his History of Civilisation in Europe had identified variety, the contest of countervailing powers, Church, State, national polities, as the hallmark of medieval and modern Europe and the chief source of its progress. But behind Guizot there lay, of course, the greater historian whose editor and translator he was, Gibbon; and it was Gibbon who had memorably declared that: 'This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated.' 68 If this line of thought is something like the true one, then at the end of a discussion of Whig and Burkean nineteenth-century ideas of the lessons of history, primarily focused on the example of France, we have come back to the ominous recollections of imperial Rome which had haunted the Augustans. Nineteenth-century opinion was not so uniformly partisan for the republic against the empire as the eighteenth century, including Gibbon, had been; as Seeley noted, Caesar sometimes appeared as the champion of the subject nationalities against the restrictive civic oligarchy of the Republic69 - a view taken by Freeman. 70 But Gibbon's reference to uniformity was surely a portentous one, giving a broader emphasis than the traditional constitutional or moral stress on corruption to the well65 66

67 68 69 70

'History 1 , Works, v, p . 149. 'It cost Europe a thousand years of barbarism to escape the fate of China': p . 151. E.g. Charles H. Pearson, History of England During the Early and Middle Ages, 2 vols. (London, 1867), 1, p p . 158-9. Charlemagne's ideas, according to Pearson, were essentially Byzantine, and had he succeeded completely, 'the m o n o t o n o u s unity of the R o m a n world would have been reproduced at a lower level of civilisation'. Constitutional History, 1, p. 6. Edward G i b b o n , The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited b y W. Smith, 8 vols. (London, 1854), 1, p . 194. Seeley, Lectures and Essays, pp. 1-2. E. A. Freeman, ' M o m m s e n ' s History of R o m e ' , Historical Essays, 2nd series (London, 1873), P- 2 ^ 4 - M o m m s e n ' s w o r k was clearly a major influence in determining the later nineteenth-century view of Caesar; Freeman himself came to feel that he had made too many concessions in his review: see Historical Essays, 2nd series, p . 234 n. and p . 268.

Political science and the lessons of history

20 5

established notion of the Romans' Enervation'. By the nineteenth century the vocabulary had changed too; public virtue is more typically rendered in the more ostensibly private, even Smilesian-sounding guise of Mill's or Stubbs's 'independence of character' than in the eighteenth century's 'patriotism' or Virtue'. The penalty for the loss of that quality is not so much literally despotism, which now is more likely to figure as its cause, but stagnation: the effect not of opulence and corruption but of the levelling of democracy or the forfeiture to bureaucratic centralisation of a fruitful historically given variety, whose benefits it is the function of the Whig historian to celebrate and defend.

VII

The clue to the maze: the appeal of the Comparative Method On us a new light has come. I do not for a moment hesitate to say that the discovery of the Comparative Method in philology, in mythology - let me add in politics and history and the whole range of human thought - marks a stage in the progress of the human mind at least as great and memorable as the revival of Greek and Latin learning. E. A. FREEMAN, T h e Unity of History'(1872) Political science . . . coordinates the most interesting facts of history; it gives method to investigations; it appeals at once to the statesman and to the antiquarian; it is equally interesting to the politician, to the student of the most ancient races, and to the explorers of the existing rudimentary societies. It is really a great thing to have discovered that this is the best clue to the maze of annalistic facts; the best assistance to historical study both at school and at the University. The merit of this discovery belongs jointly to Professor Seeley and to Professor Freeman. OSCAR B R O W N I N G , T h e Historical Tripos', The

Cambridge Review (1885)

TO recapture the importance for contemporaries of the intellectual episode we shall consider in this essay requires the cultivation of a mood of vicarious euphoria. In the 1860s and 70s the map of learning seemed, to many members of the educated class in England, about to be re-drawn in an exhilaratingly comprehensive and coherent way. It is this new map, and especially the area of it referred to as 'Comparative Politics' or 'Political Science', which we have to reconstruct, even though at times it may seem to us to have been freely embellished with mermaids, tritons, and a hopefully if vaguely indicated El Dorado. There were from the outset disagreements on details, of course, and disputed points of scope and method, but there was also to an unusual degree, for a generation or more, a sense of common purpose, shared method, and overlapping concerns among scholars working in such apparently divergent fields as the study of philology, law, history, political economy, and what was increasingly referred to as 'anthropology' or 'sociology'. It was an episode which has left remarkably little direct legacy, even in academic folk-memory; the bandwagon ran into the sand and even the ruts have been almost covered by oblivion. Anthropology, perhaps, has testified best to its sense of continuity; Maine and Tylor are still occasionally invoked, and ritual slayings of Sir James Frazer were still in order up to a few years ago. In other disciplines, figures such as Max Miiller, Pollock, Vinogradoff, Cliffe Leslie, or Freeman have not within living memory been keepers of an academic golden bough worth even the least ambitious aspirant's acquisition. But it is impossible to venture far in the late nineteenth century without encountering them and the clues to their proximity. The effusion of references to 'the Comparative Method' (sometimes but not always to be distinguished from 'the Historical Method') pointed to a self-conscious, excited sense of direction and common purpose at work in fields of enquiry hitherto very disparate. Inevitably, politics, too, was welcomed into the methodological embrace, and 'comparative politics' enjoyed its hour upon the stage, occupying, indeed, a more prominent, if less well-defined, place than several of the projects from which it derived its initial impetus. Quite what was denoted by 'polities', and quite how far it could be distinguished from the study of law, history, or even 'society', remained, as we shall see, undetermined: the excitement lay, initially, in the adjective 'comparative', and the noun was often left to make its own way to whatever lucidity it might be able to attain. Eventually, when the formative impulse had spent itself, a concentration upon the classification of types of political institution remained as its most obvious and most durable legacy. 209

210

The clue to the maze

The acknowledged mentor of the generation dominated by the promise of the comparative method - a generation whose major works belong, for the most part, to the last three decades of the nineteenth century - was Sir Henry Maine.1 The extent and profundity of Maine's influence among the intellectual class would be hard to exaggerate: he set the terms of debate not only for legal historians but for a generation of writers on the place of custom in the development of political institutions or the growth of forms of property, whether in medieval Europe or nineteenth-century India; writers who could not easily or exclusively be classified as historians, political theorists or economists. Both Pollock and Vinogradoff virtually lived off his intellectual capital, and the list of those whose work was, in varying degrees of discipleship or criticism, directly addressed to Maine's ideas could begin with Maitland as well as Pollock, with Kovalevsky as well as Vinogradoff, and could include Cliffe Leslie and Seebohm among historians of social and economic forms as well as Seeley and Sidgwick among students of political forms - and the list might easily be made longer still. It would, as we have seen, also include the author of Physics and Politics. Moreover, all this leaves out of account what Maine and his contemporaries would probably have regarded as the field of his most immediate and tangible influence, namely Indian policy and administration. Nor does it mention the status he has often subsequently been accorded, though he laid no claim to the name, as an early anthropologist. Ancient Law, which went through eleven editions within twenty-five years of its publication in 1861, earned respectful attention for all Maine's subsequent writing, and when in his Rede lecture for 1875 n e l^d out the prospectus for 'a new science' which would extend the method already used in the successful reconstruction of the development of language and myth to the investigation of 'laws, institutions, customs, ideas and social forces', he was addressing an audience which had by then been primed to a state of receptive enthusiasm.2 For behind Maine himself, as he would have acknowledged, stood the German historical impulse of the age of Romanticism, subdued to the 1

2

T h e whole of my generation of students of law and history', observed Vinogradoff, 'have had to deal directly or indirectly with the ideas propagated by him or similar to his.' Paul Vinogradoff, 'The Teaching of Sir Henry Maine', Law Quarterly Review, 20 (1904), 119. For comparable testimonials see also Maxime Kovalevsky, Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia (London, 1891), 'Dedication', and Frederic Seebohm, The English Village Community (London, 1884), p. xi; Cliffe Leslie's similar acknowledgement is discussed at p. 262 below. Tonnies even devoted a substantial part of his survey of the history of German sociology to Maine's work: Ferdinand Tonnies, 'Entwicklung der Soziologie in Deutschland im 19 Jahrhundert', in his Soziologische Studien und Kritiken, 11 (Jena, 1926). H. S. Maine, 'The Effects of the Observation of India on Modern European Thought', reprinted in his Village Communities in the East and West (3rd edn, London, 1876), p. 230. Maine's lecture was immediately printed in The Times in its entirety.

The appeal of the Comparative Method

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exacting disciplines of positivistic scholarly enquiry: the exploration of comparative philology, whose ambassador in England in the 1850s and 60s was Maine's Oxford colleague, the Professor of Sanscrit Max Miiller; the historical jurisprudence of the school of Savigny; and the history of institutions inspired by Jacob Grimm, prompting the work on early European land law to which the English medievalists led by Stubbs owed a heavy debt and whose foremost German representative, crucial to Maine, was Konrad von Maurer.3 But Maine shaped this intellectual inheritance to his own distinctive purposes. He made of historical jurisprudence the perfect stick with which to beat the Utilitarians for the widely sensed failure of their 'abstract' method, and he used the intellectual licence provided by the Comparative Method to connect his own knowledge of Indian tenurial relations with the work of von Maurer and others on early Teutonic communal land-tenure, to produce, by analogy with the place of Sanscrit in the presumed development of language, the powerful notion of a common original or primitive 'stage' of 'Aryan' social organisation. Resting his method on the fact that 'modern philology has suggested a grouping of peoples quite unlike anything that had been thought of before', Maine treated India as 'the great repository of ancient usage and ancient juridical thought', insisting that it 'includes a whole world of Aryan institutions, Aryan customs, Aryan laws, Aryan ideas, Aryan beliefs, in a far earlier stage of growth and development than any which survive beyond its borders', a repository upon which he drew to great scholarly and polemical effect in several of his later writings, most notably his Village Communities in the East and West of 1871.4 In fact, the original German work on legal history was itself already in some degree comparative; Teutonic rather than merely German in focus. In the reconstruction of an earlier stage from fragmentary surviving custom, the licence to fill gaps and produce a composite picture through judicious comparison was crucial. By extension, as Stubbs, not one of the more incautious comparativists, observed, it was 'quite lawful to work back, through obvious generalisations and comparisons with the early phenomena of society in other nations, to the primitive civilisations of the Aryan or the Indo-Germanic family'.5 But it had needed Britain's imperial experience, as well as the model provided by Sanscrit in comparative 3

4 5

Maine, Village Communities (3rd edn), Appendix 11. For useful surveys of the German school of historians of institutions which culminated in von Maurer, see Paul Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England (Oxford, 1892), Preface; and Alfons Dopsch, The Economic and Social Foundations of European History (New York, 1969), ch. 1. Maine, 'Observation of India', pp. 209, 211; Village Communities, p. 22. Cf. F. Max Miiller, Lectures on the Science of Language (London, 1861), p. 161. William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1874-8), 1, p. 32. Cf. F. W. Maitland, Collected Papers, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1911), in, p. 457.

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The clue to the maze

philology, and the notion of an early common Germanische Rechtsgeschichte, to prompt to the further idea of a common stock of Aryan institutions, whose historical development could be taken, with wide-ranging social and political implications which Maine was far from scouting, as the story of the progressive nations of mankind. 'Civilization is nothing more than a name for the old order of the Aryan world, dissolved but perpetually reconstituting itself, under a vast variety of solvent influences.' 6 Though sufficiently grandiose, the scope of Maine's proposed new science, which 'I hesitate to call Comparative Jurisprudence because, if it ever exists, its area will be so much wider than the field of law', 7 was not usually regarded as limitless in the range of its comparisons. The point is of some methodological importance because it helps to mark a boundary, sometimes consciously acknowledged though sometimes transgressed, between the kind of induction thought to be on offer from the Comparative Method and 'Science' in the full sense, represented above all, of course, in the late nineteenth century by the theory of evolution. It also serves as a point of convenient demarcation from that wider and looser employment of ethnographic comparison which was increasingly identified as 'Anthropology'. With the latter, which came largely to be dominated, in the hands of Tylor at Oxford and Frazer at Cambridge, by the conjectural history of 'magic and religion', we are not here concerned, though inevitably the line must sometimes be drawn rather arbitrarily. Freeman, for example, though indisputably a central figure in any account of the application of the comparative method to political institutions, acknowledged in his Comparative Politics that alongside his debt to the philologists (chiefly Max Miiller) he found his other major precedent in 'Mr. Tylor's subject', and there seemed willing to enrol himself under its banner. 8 But although there were occasional, mostly ineffectual, protests against the equation of linguistic connection and social or racial continuity, 9 the restriction of the scope of the Comparative Method, at least in its early applications, derived essentially from the philological model, with its conception of a single Aryan family. Vinogradoff, for example, whose Custom and Right of 1925 is a very late example of the genre, deplored 'haphazard analogies', and recommended that 'in order to avoid this reproach, a basis for comparative study may be sought in common descent. It is superfluous to insist on the use of this feature in comparative philology, comparative religion and folklore.' 10 This, together with the scholarly, legal and his6 7 8 9 10

Maine, 'Observation of India', p. 230. Maine, 'Observation of India', pp. 210, 230-2. E. A. Freeman, Comparative Politics (London, 1873), p. 12. E.g. Max Miiller, Lectures, p. 314. Paul Vinogradoff, Custom and Right (Oslo, 1925), pp. 1-2, 16-17.

The appeal of the Comparative Method

213

torical bent of its adherents, set a perceptible distance between them and the anthropologists who proudly took all mankind for their province. Of course, the connection, even in its vulgar and parasitic form, with evolutionary science was too valuable to be foregone altogether. Pollock, for example, in expansive vein: 'The doctrine of evolution is nothing else than the historical method applied to the facts of nature; the historical method is nothing else than the doctrine of evolution applied to human societies and institutions.' Equally, an enthusiastic academic imperialism could lead to the overstepping of other boundaries, too; Pollock again: 'Jurisprudence itself has become a study of human society through all its stages.' 11 But under pressure a scholarly circumspection could be useful. Maine, confronting the antagonist of his theory of original patriarchy, J. F. Maclennan, refused to recognise him as a practitioner of the Comparative Method (he compared him rather to the biologist), deploring the promiscuous nature and geographical range of his examples - between which 'there may be no real connection' - and rebuking him for ignorance of 'ancient recorded law'. 12 Max Miiller, too, resisted objections to his mythological theories by a plaintive contrast of 'Melanesian tattle' with solidly based philological scholarship. 13 Insofar as these disclaimers were not merely tactical, they represented a genuine, if snobbish, commitment to a conception of respectable scholarship. The adherence to 'history' was deep, the language of 'science' usually perfunctory. Though alert outsiders like Bagehot and Seebohm took it up, and though continental professors touched by Socialism or Populism, like Laveleye in France, Letourneau in Belgium, and Kovalevsky and Kropotkin in Russia, welcomed the apparent economic implications of notions of an original co-proprietorship, in England the cultivation of the Comparative Method was largely an Oxbridge pursuit, even when applied to political institutions; one which flourished particularly in the common ground of law and history as studied at the ancient universities from the 1860s onwards. Maine, Pollock, Bryce and Vinogradoff all at one time held Chairs of law there, Seeley and, more briefly, Freeman the two Regius Chairs of history. Their world was one of scholarship, of learned languages, of documents, of critical historical methods and legal technicalities, far removed from the Spencerian theories of social evolution or 'sociology' which Oxford and Cambridge so successfully held at punt pole's length, or even from the 'anthropology' they gradually and gingerly 11 12

13

Frederick Pollock, Oxford Lectures (London, 1890), pp. 41, 159. Cf. Vinogradoff, 'Teaching of Maine', 126. H. S. Maine, 'The Patriarchal Theory', Quarterly Review, 162 (1886), 199-201, 209; M. E. Grant Duff, Sir Henry Maine, A Memoir (London, 1892), p. 67. Cf. Vinogradoff, Custom and Right, pp. 17-18. F. Max Miiller, Last Essays, 1st series (London, 1901), p. 55.

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The clue to the maze

admitted. There was no resistance to generalisation as such, no supposed historian's cult of the idiographic; what made the difference between respectability and untouchability depended more upon the nature of the subject-matter and whether traditional scholarly methods could be applied to it. Maine brought in the Indian village-community, it is true, but both on the imperial ticket and by careful analogy with the scholarly evidence on the Teutonic mark. It is also true that, scholarly caution being infinitely regressive, Maine and to some extent Freeman soon became known for the excessive freedom of their comparisons, but at the time they too shared the chastening sense of being the self-conscious heirs to more than half a century of Germanic documentary research. The Comparative Method represented a flexing of academic muscles in danger perhaps of pedantic cramp or antiquarian irrelevance, but there was no thought of repudiating the academic heritage or losing caste. In maintaining their allegiance to scholarship and history, however, the proponents of the new science did not intend in any way to forfeit their claims to contemporary relevance and utility. Of course, living up to the demands of 'science' required the cultivation of a detached and superior tone: the passions and prejudices of 'party feeling' had to be visibly eschewed, as in Freeman's insistence that the subject-matter of his Comparative Politics was far removed from 'modern or party polities', or in Seeley's repeated call for 'the impartial study of politics'. 14 At the same time, the Comparative Method promised a privileged access to much that was most pressing and vexing in contemporary affairs. The vast importance assumed by historical understanding in the second half of the nineteenth century was crucial here. As Seeley, in characteristically programmatic mood, had put it in 1863: 'It is the special work of the present age to give an historical or inductive basis, in other words a basis of fact, to moral science. And therefore in the present age history', considered as the possible basis of a science, begins to wear a new aspect and to assume a new importance.' 15 Forty years later, Dicey's no less characteristic grumbling confirmed Seeley's prediction: 'It were far better, as things now stand, to be charged with heresy, than to fall under the suspicion of lacking historical-mindedness, or of questioning the universal validity of the historical method.' 16 This gave even ostensibly arcane and remote historical research a potential contemporary purchase. Referring to 'the influence of 14

15

16

Freeman to E. B. Tylor, 20 July 1872; W. R. W. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, 2 vols. (London, 1895), 11, p. 57; J. R. Seeley, 'The Impartial Study of Polities', Contemporary Review, 54(1888). J. R. Seeley, Classical Studies as an Introduction to the Moral Sciences (London, 1864), p. 19. A. V. Dicey, Introduction

London, 1908), p. 14.

to the Study of the Law of the Constitution

(1885) (7th edn,

The appeal of the Comparative Method

215

historical speculation on polities', Vinogradoff observed, in the preface to his study of villeinage in early medieval England, that 'even the most devoted disciples of particular creeds, the most ardent advocates of reform or reaction, dare not simply take up the high standing ground of abstract theory from which all political questions were discussed less than a hundred years ago: the Socialist as well as the partisan of democracy is called upon to make good his contention by historical arguments'. 17 The declarations of political significance liberally strewn through the prefaces to historical works in this period amply bear out the point. 18 Of course, to refer contested political-theoretical issues to the arbitrament of history was, in a sense, an attempt to render them empirical. Maine had led the way here, too; throughout his career he saw his chief target as 'unhistorical abstraction', particularly in the form of the theory of natural rights, which he always treated as an empirical falsehood to be refuted historically - 'ancient law knows next to nothing of individuals'.19 Such refutations became part of the function of an empirical science of politics. As Pollock argued in his tendentious history, the statements made in the Declaration of the Rights of Man 'purport to be propositions of political science', and 'it is scientific criticism that must establish or refute them'. 20 But though Maine's most profound and abiding distaste was for a priori, potentially revolutionary and democratic, theories of natural rights, his more frequent objects of denunciation, qualified this time by a measure of respect, were the Utilitarians, analytical jurists, and political economists, epitomised in Bentham, Austin and Ricardo. Even in his early Saturday Review articles he had shown a markedly Burkean distrust of administrative rationalisation, and a preference for the judgement of sound men on the spot, convictions which his subsequent experience only confirmed.21 His period in India (1862-9), m t n e aftermath of the Mutiny, coincided with the recession from the Whig confidence in political economy and English remedies, in favour of a cautiously gradualist 17 18

19 20 21

Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, p. 3. Consider, for example, Seebohm's declaration that his' o w n interest was 'directly political': { T o learn the meaning of the old order of things, with its " c o m m u n i t y " and "equality", as a key t o a right understanding of the new order of things, with its contrasting individual independence and inequality, this was the object which in the first instance tempted m e t o poach u p o n antiquarian m a n o r s . ' Seebohm, English Village Community, p . viii. Maine, Ancient Law (1861) (16th edn, L o n d o n , 1897), p . 258. Frederick Pollock, An Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics (1890) (rev. edn, London, 1911), pp. 3-4. See in particular his defence of the East India Company and his attacks on the Administrative Reform Association, Saturday Review, 1 (1855), 75-7; 2 (1856), 42; and the series of articles on India, 4 (1857), 3 August, 1 and 24 October, 7 November, 5 and 16 December. These articles are attributed to Maine in M. M. Bevington, The Saturday Review 1855—1868 (New York, 1941), pp. 358—60.

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The clue to the maze

approach, at most, to Westernisation.22 The lessons supplied by history and the complexities of governing India, bound together into a single story by the Comparative Method, provided Maine with his invariable resource for beating down Philosophic Radical cocksureness. Equally, Austin's analysis of sovereignty and the command theory of law became 'absurdly artificial' when confronted with Indian customary law, just as Ricardian notions of rent and property were hardly suited to the traditional and co-proprietorial arrangements of Indian village agriculture.23 Maine's resort to history, however, was not conducted in a spirit of simple traditionalism. Although willing enough to use Indian complexities to refute English radical simplicities, he, unlike the paternalists of the 'Punjab school', had no great liking for tradition as such.24 Essentially he saw the problem of governing India in the same terms in which Macaulay had seen the task of parliamentary reform in 1832 - or, for that matter, as the Liberal intellectuals saw it in 1867 (though Macaulay had notoriously seen India's needs very differently): as adjustment to inevitable change whose direction could in some respects be calculated. As Sir Alfred Lyall put it, speaking of Maine's influence on British thinking about India: 'The problem . . . is the adjustment of the mechanism of a modern state to the habits and feelings of a vast mixed multitude in various stages of what we have decided to call Progress.' 25 It was, as with the reform of Parliament, a matter of not mistaking the clock, though for Maine India had many clocks and their pace was of geological slowness. The chief principle of motion was imparted willy-nilly by the British by their mere presence and rule and by the partly unwitting impact of English legal and administrative practice. The lesson, as Maine read it, was to admit the impact, to acknowledge its potential benefits if applied with caution, but also to cushion the shock.26 And the indispensable intellectual tool for understanding the needs of a society containing elements in every stage of progress was the historical sense as given coherence by the Comparative Method. For Maine was unrepentantly a nineteenth-century believer in progress - defined largely in terms of the growth of individualism - but history was, as it were, the medium in which this belief was suspended, and history 22

23

24 25 26

O n this see Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959); for Maine's role see George Feaver, From Status to Contract: A Biography of Sir Henry Maine 1822-1888 (London, 1969). His most comprehensive indictment was in Lecture x n of his Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (London, 1875), but similar remarks are common in all his writings. Even before going to India he had chastised political economists for regarding their generalisations as universally applicable: Ancient Law, p. 305. O n this see Stokes, Utilitarians and India, ch. 4. A . C. Lyall, 'Sir Henry Maine', Law Quarterly Review, 4 (1888), 130. See especially his 'Minutes and Speeches' reprinted in Grant Duff, Sir Henry Maine; there is some discussion of these in Feaver, Status to Contract, ch. 8.

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enjoined gradualism. Though adept at Burkean rhetoric when required, Maine also responded to intellectual system, precision, and criticism, provided it was in the right experienced hands, as well as to the claims of science. There is, for example, a significant difference - an exact inversion, in fact - in the way he and Stubbs handled rather similar legal episodes in their respective historical stories. Attempting in Ancient Law to analyse the origin of progressive movement in society, Maine identified it, in early Rome, as the era of legal codification in the Twelve Tables. Early law was fluid, moulding itself to needs; in due course, however, ritualised legal memory and misplaced analogy, without the solvent of systematic criticism, became a curse. 'Usage which is reasonable generates usage which is unreasonable.' 27 (There is an analogy here, which may have been influential on Maine, with Max Miiller's notion of mythology as a 'disease of language', by which metaphors turn into personifications of superhuman agencies.)28 From the ensuing stagnation the Romans uniquely - at least in Ancient Law - were saved by their codes. Codification took place at the critical moment, before their law lost touch with reality; law became accessible to critical scrutiny. The lesson later drawn by Stubbs, a more thoroughgoing traditionalist, from the Norman episode in English history was, as we have seen in Essay vi, the exact opposite. English law escaped being petrified into a system by the Norman feudal lawyers, and retained the creative potential of diversity and the vital institutional survivals of an earlier barbarian freedom.29 The fact that the Normans were foreigners was important, but, as Stubbs admitted, feudalism was already making inroads before the Conquest; the point was not really one about foreign systems but about system as such. The lessons Maine drew from the text of Aryan history constructed by the Comparative Method were only in part those of a Burkean caution. More directly it provided, just as in a more emphatically social-evolutionist conjectural history such as Spencer's, an inductive demonstration of the conditions of progress and an assurance that laissez-faire individualism was the goal of the historical process, so that any recession from it, which Maine saw in the growth of 'collectivist' tendencies, was literally putting progress into reverse. The story of the progressive nations of the Aryan family, as Maine told it in Early Law and Custom and The Early History of Institutions, was only a fortunate deviation from the stagnant immobility which was the normal condition of mankind; the conception of Oriental stagnation was still exercising its influence, and not 27 28 29

Ancient Law, p. 19. See F . M a x Miiller, ' C o m p a r a t i v e M y t h o l o g y ' , Oxford Essays ( L o n d o n , 1856); Maine had contributed to the companion Cambridge volume. Stubbs, Constitutional History, 1, p . 168. See also the discussion at p . 202 above.

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as an aberration but as the all too pressing norm: cthe tone of thought common among us, all our hopes, fears and speculations would be materially affected, if we had vividly before us the relation of the progressive races to the totality of human life'. 30 Maine believed, as did so many of his contemporaries in various ways, that the ground of political wisdom lay in 'a little better knowledge of the true lines of movement which the political affairs of mankind have followed'31 (and the moderation introduced by 'little', while a kind of false modesty with Maine, also marks a significant difference of vocabulary from the typically exaggerated promises held out by the pedlars of 'sociology'). But the notion of movement acquired an acute pathos from the intensity of his own fears of the immobilising silt of rigid custom and ascribed status pressing in on every side. By 1885, in Popular Government, these fears were explicitly aroused not only by the backward societies that bent to the forces of European progress, but by the mass electorates of Europe itself. Progress, after all, had always been the work of minorities. Maine's version of the history of the progressive nations was an emergence out of tribalism, customary law, and co-proprietorship, in which the individual's ascribed status as a member of the kin group was all-important. 'The unit of an ancient society was the family, of a modern society the individual'; or as he put it in his most famous epigram: 'the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract'. 32 The crucial stage was the gradual conversion of the village agricultural community into the feudal manor, and with it the emergence of the conception of private ownership (the transition the Westernisers in India had attempted to bring about with their zemindar policy, in fact).33 Feudalism, so often regarded with hostility, either as political anarchy or as the enslavement of a free people, was the first decisive crack in the mould of oppressive communal custom. Usurpation there may have been, but 'nobody is at liberty to attack several property and to say at the same time that he values civilization'. 34 There is, of course, a profound irony in this when one comes to look at the influence of these conceptions of Maine among those economic historians who took their inspiration from his work. The chief polemical uses of the idea of a primitive stage of communal tenure were those of which Maine intensely disapproved: denunciations of private property as usurpation, or a profit-and-loss comparison of communal and individual 30 31 32 33 34

Ancient Law, p . 22; cf. H . S. Maine, Popular Government Maine, Popular Government, p. 78. Ancient Law, p. 120. See Stokes, Utilitarians and India, pp. 5-8. Maine, 'Observation of India', p. 230.

( L o n d o n , 1885), p . 170.

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property arrangements with a considerable weight of sentiment in favour of the former, as well as attacks on the alleged a priorism of orthodox political economy to which Maine had given a lead. 35 One of his earliest disciples in this field, T. E. Cliffe Leslie, noted that Maine's story admitted of two interpretations: 'A study of the course followed by the development of property from the infancy of society has led to two opposite lines of inference and thought - represented respectively by Sir Henry Maine and M. de Laveleye - with regard to its present forms in most civilized countries.' Though Cliffe Leslie accepted that 'the early usages of mankind are not models for our imitation', he spoke freely of 'usurpation' and of the errors of political economy arising from 'reasoning from the desires of the individual instead of from the history of the community'. 36 Laveleye himself held a delicate balance, combining disclaimers of the notion that past usages were per se prescriptive for the present with an obvious nostalgia for communal values and a sense that collectivity in some form was the shape of the future. 37 Vinogradoff accepted the same implication when he added 'collectivist tendencies in modern society', as a fourth stage in the development of the law of property, to the sequence from tribal and communal through feudal to individual property - Maine's nightmare blandly adopted as a category of historical jurisprudence established by the Comparative Method. 38 One writer who considerably outdid Laveleye in his enthusiasm for early communes managed to avoid any collectivist-economic implications altogether: Freeman drew neither Maine's nor Laveleye's inferences for the present. In his frequent reverent accounts of the archaic village or tribal moot, given universal Aryan significance by the Comparative Method, they are always presented as political assemblies of freemen rather than shareholders' meetings of co-proprietors. It is this which, if only by default, gives his attempted application of the Comparative Method a more restrictedly political character than those which concentrated on drawing up the social and economic balance-sheet of co-ownership. Yet one may as accurately speak of the expansion of the category of the 'political' as of contraction of subject-matter. Freeman only hit upon 'Comparative Politics' as the title for his 1873 lectures faute de mieux, and even in the published text he acknowledged that for the 'science' he was outlining 'we 35

36 37 38

This is discussed more fully in Essay vm below; see also 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, 1974). T . E . Cliffe Leslie, ' I n t r o d u c t i o n ' t o Emile de Laveleye, Primitive Property ( L o n d o n , 1878), p p . vi, xix, xxi. Laveleye, Primitive Property', p p . xiii, 58, 63. Vinogradoff, Custom and Right, p . 90.

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need a name' (adding, with a characteristic eye to philological purity, 'let the science rather go nameless than bear the burden of such a name as, for instance, Sociology').39 In a later series of lectures he defined history itself as 'the science of man in his character as a political being', and insisted that the establishment of what he now called 'Political Science' was 'the highest aim of our researches'.40 These statements require a certain latitude of interpretation, however, not least in determining the scope of the adjective: his famous quip that 'history is past politics and politics are present history' signified not so much how narrowly political was his conception of history, as Seeley's comparable remarks did in his case, but rather how lushly historical was his engagement with politics. Freeman's enthusiasm for the Comparative Method - 'the greatest intellectual achievement of our time' - pervades and structures his celebration of the common Aryan descent of political institutions in his 1873 lectures.41 But he was already an acknowledged adept in the empirical science of politics of ten years standing, on the strength of his History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy (1863) which was intended as a study of federalism 'in its actual working', and was to have been completed by a second volume, never written, on federalism in the modern period. 42 But Freeman's relation to the study of politics and his notions of classification and comparison are considerably more complicated than these apparently straightforward declarations of adherence to the Comparative Method and to empirical investigation would suggest. It is true that he accepted the former unreservedly, and spoke of a common original stock of Aryan institutions as an established fact; it is also true that he was an empiricist in the sense of being crudely hostile to all deductive or philosophical theories of politics. But his own dedication to - obsession with historical comparison was a good deal more old-fashioned and even mystical than in any positivist sense 'scientific'.43 Freeman may be said to have been an intuitive adherent of the Comparative Method even before he articulated its rationale. He was an inveterate classifier and lover of parallels and analogies, and was always drawn to 39

40 41 42 43

In his letter to Tylor, cited in n. 14 above, Freeman explained that his lectures were to be on 'what, till I can find a better name, I call Comparative Politics. I should however, much like to get a better name, as C. P. may suggest modern or party politics, which I certainly do not mean to talk about'; see Comparative Politics, pp. 15, 343n. E. A . Freeman, Methods of Historical Study (London, 1886), pp. 117-19. Freeman, Comparative Politics, p. 1; in his Preface he gives due acknowledgement to Max Miiller, Maine and Tylor. E. A . Freeman, A History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy (1865) (2nd edn, London, 1893), P- *• For a fuller treatment of these complexities in Freeman's ideas, and especially the notion of historical cycles, see J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), chs. 6 and 7.

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n i

grandiose schemes of universal history. Both found their initial justification in Thomas Arnold's belief, proclaimed in his Oxford lectures, which Freeman attended, in 'the unity of history' (which for Arnold was, of course, frankly a unity provided by the designs of Providence), and in the old notion, for which again Arnold is his most likely proximate source, of historical cycles - 'the wonderful cycles of history' — about which Freeman frequently rhapsodised. 44 Arnoldian cyclic and universal history and the Comparative Method were the Old and New Testaments of Freeman's political science. It would no doubt be possible to work out in some detail how he approached the new dispensation through the 1850s and 60s, by the route of pan-Teutonic, pan-Aryan philological and racial notions which always fascinated him. He had, for example, been a contributor to the volume of Oxford Essays in 1856 in which Max Miiller's seminal article on comparative mythology had appeared. It is clear that he was already a believer before reading Maine's Village Communities, though the latter may have sharpened his sense of the opportunities. As he wrote to a friend in 1869:'I am more and more convinced of the absolute identity of all the old Teutonic constitutions (aye, and the oldest Greek constitutions, too).' 45 But in the 1860s his love of amalgamation and comparison had expressed itself in two different directions. He was already a strong proponent of the conception of the primitive Teutonic mrfr&-community which the historian J. M. Kemble had brought to England from his studies in Germany under Jacob Grimm; and he had seen that through the conception of the Aryan race a connection could be made with Athenian democracy and the Homeric assemblies. 46 But for the moment, intellectually if not emotionally, it was his other interest in the relevance of ancient history, justified by the notion of cycles, and in inductive political science, focussed particularly by the concept of federalism, which were to the fore. It was only in Comparative Politics that the two were to come together under the aegis of the Comparative Method. Freeman's interest in federalism seems initially to have been partly historical, partly practical and contemporary, though it is significant that the projected second, modern, volume was never written. For him, federalism was avowedly a compromise, a mediation between what seemed to be the irrevocable commitment of the modern world to large political units, and the vitality of political participation exhibited by the ancient 44

45 46

Stephens, Life and Letters of Freeman, 1, p. 66; E. A . Freeman, 'Historical Cycles', in his Historical Essays, 4th series (London, 1892). For Arnold see above, pp. 187-9; c^Freeman's o w n Rede Lecture on 'The U n i t y of History', printed in Comparative Politics, pp. 192-219. Freeman to G. Finlay, 8 February 1869; Stephens, Life and Letters of Freeman, 1, p. 417. J. M. Kemble, The Saxons in England, 2 volumes (London, 1849), 1, ch. 2; E. A . Freeman, 'The Landesgemeinden of Uri and Appenzell', Saturday Review, 17 (1864), 623.

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city-states. 47 Freeman was in many ways openly nostalgic for the latter. There is an echo, in his democratic radicalism, of the old civic humanist conviction that the life of the active citizen is the highest available to man.48 But the city-state is brittle and it cannot survive in an age of professional armies. He was, of course, unreservedly hostile to the obvious antithesis, the uniform, centralised, despotic and bureaucratic state, represented for him in its usual Asiatic incarnation by the Turk and in Europe by the French Second Empire: 'no pseudo democratic despot, no Caesar or Dionysios ruling by the national will of half a million of bayonets, will ever quite bring back Europe to the state of a land of Pharoahs and Nabuchodonosors, until the History of Thucydides, the Politics of Aristotle, and the Orations of Demosthenes are wholly forgotten among men'. 49 One of the inspirations of his work on federalism was the second lecture of Guizot's History of Civilization in Europe, with its stress on the contrast between the uniformity of the Roman empire and the variety of modern Europe, where the latter is presented as the key to progress. 50 In Freeman's cult of diversity-in-unity, which inclined him to federal solutions, there was not only a philhellene devotion to Athenian democracy, grounded, in his case, in Grote's and Thirlwall's histories of Greece and Gladstone's vision of Homer's Achaeans, but also a more distinctively modern and English (though with acknowledgements to Tocqueville) enthusiasm for local self-government, which he shared with his fellow Whig historians, Stubbs and J. R. Green. 51 Where such situations existed they should be cherished. But Europe in the nineteenth century also contained new states, or rather, as Freeman would have stressed, old nations newly awakened to statehood or about to be; liberal nationalism was Freeman's political creed. As he saw it, the constitutions of the new states should generally be federal, reconciling as much as possible of long-established particularity with nation-statehood: 'No lover of Italy could bear to see Milan and Venice and Florence and the Eternal City itself sink into provincial dependencies of the Savoyard', he wrote in 1857.52 As always in Freeman, the democrat and the political antiquarian were closely allied. Freeman's chief historical sources for his book on federal government were Grote's treatment of the Achaean league, in the last period of classical Greece, and Sismondi on the Lombard communes. The chief inspiration of the modern volume, it seems, would have been Johannes von Miiller's 47 48 49 50 51 52

Freeman, Federal Government, pp. 13, 64, 69. Freeman, Federal Government, p p . 29, 38, 40, 49. Freeman, Federal Government, p. 68. Stephens, Life and Letters of Freeman, 1, p . 165; on G u i z o t ' s History see above, p p . 157,204. E . A . Freeman, Historical Essays, 2nd series ( L o n d o n , 1873); Federal Government, p . 82. Freeman, Historical Essays, 2nd series, p . 50.

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Histoire de la confederation suisse.53 Switzerland appealed to Freeman both as a model confederation and as a home of archaic Teutonic democracy and medieval particularity. But it is ironical and characteristic that the journey he made to Switzerland in the early 1860s, ostensibly in the service of empirical political investigation, in fact helped to arouse, more than anything else, the excitement of the antiquary. While the complex details of a federal constitution seem, understandably, to have become arid to him, in the annual open-air assemblies of the Cantons he found a living survival of the ancient Teutonic world of Tacitus' Germania whose memory enthralled him for the rest of his life.54 And when in Comparative Politics Freeman took up again some of the themes of the volume on federal government and explicitly enclosed them in the larger envelope of the Comparative Method, it was his Teutonic rather than his philhellenic enthusiasms which predominated. The Aryan historical story culminates not in federalism but in Teutonic tribalism brought to political coherence in the nation-state and the national assemblies made possible by the invention of representative government. In Federal Government the view of modern electorates had been decidedly disparaging. 55 Conversely, where in Federal Government the virtues of the city-state, which were in some measure to be re-created through federalism, were enthusiastically proclaimed, and the ultimate preference given to the modern state with obvious reluctance and regret, in Comparative Politics the city-state appears more as a political cul-de-sac, an ultimately sterile political deviation on the path from tribe to nation-state which it was the good fortune of the Teutonic nations to have escaped.56 The keynote of the later book is not the possibilities of an historically guided creative constitutional ingenuity, but a German, Romantic and Burkean celebration of organic continuity. Its central story is that of a gradual cellular adhesion by which the small group of families constitutes the mark or township, the group of townships forms the hundred, gau orpagus, which in turn combines with its peers in the nation. Not Grote or Sismondi, but the German historians of institutions, Waitz, von Maurer, and their English representative, Kemble, are the mentors here. 57 It is, further, a special commendation that in England the process has been subject to least interruption and fully carried through, that it is 'in our land that the old Teutonic institutions have really had the freest play, that they have grown and developed with unbroken continuity down to our own day'. The voice of the new science, 53 54 55 56 57

Freeman, Federal Government, p p . 30, 9 2 - 3 . See B u r r o w , A Liberal Descent, ch. 7. Freeman, Federal Government, p p . 64—7. Freeman , Comparative Politics, pp. 65, 81. Freeman, Comparative Politics, pp. 270-1.

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it seems, speaks in the familiar accents of the Burkean Whig, even though he has learnt Greek and German. Freeman wanted his readers to see 'the earlier forms of the institutions of our own people . . . as a heritage which has descended to us from unrecorded times, as the still abiding work of the fathers and elder brethren of our common blood'. 58 It is entirely characteristic of him that he deplored the new electoral districts established by the 1885 Redistribution Act because they preserved less than their predecessors of the old tribal and local boundaries.59 It is possible to exaggerate the differences between Federal Government and Comparative Politics. They were to some extent applied to different circumstances: it may be well to celebrate continuity if one possesses it, but if not? Freeman never recommended federalism irrespective of circumstances, and in a sense the process of tribal amalgamation by which the nation had been created could be thought of as a kind of spontaneous federation. He always insisted that federalism should amalgamate what was separate, not sunder what was already united, and this was consistent with his hostility to the pet political project of the 1880s, Imperial Federation.60 But the different emphases of the two books - one culminating in federalism as the consummation, if also the adulteration, of the highest political experience; the other by-passing the city-state and embracing national representative government - do reveal an unresolved tension in Freeman's own political attitudes, which complicates his notion of the relation of historical induction to political wisdom and political action. It is again - we saw a version of it in Macaulay - a tension between Burkean empiricism which takes the continuity of English history as its political paradigm, and analytic or inductive political reason. Freeman's use of the Comparative Method made the Burkean Whig version of English history not merely a fortunate aberration from the history of continental Europe, but something like the culmination of universal history. But what then of Freeman's other, more specific, political enthusiasms, for republicanism and face-to-face democracy? The discovery of the representative principle, and the preservation of a measure of local autonomy and continuity in local government, was something. Freeman also attempted to reconcile his Whig traditionalism and his nostalgic radicalism in the manner usual among eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century English radicals: since England's institutions were originally 'free', modern democratic legislation was essentially restora58 59 60

F r e e m a n , Comparative Politics, p p . 86-7, 190-1. Stephens, Life and Letters of Freeman, 11, p. 3 i 4 n . Freeman, Federal Government, p . 70; E. A . Freeman, ' T h e Physical and Political Bases of National Unity', in A. S. White (ed.), Britannic Confederation (London, 1892). See also his letter on the subject to James Bryce, 16 December 1886; Stephens, Life and Letters of Freeman, 11, p. 356.

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tive.61 But the contradiction, for Freeman, was never entirely resolvable. What of a republic? What of reform of the House of Lords? In Comparative Politics, under the influence of Grote, he had praised the constitution of Cleisthenes for creative innovation: 'the substitution of a new local division for one purely genealogical marks a great revolution in men's ideas, and shows how far real statesmanship could prevail over mere traditional memories'. 62 But in England? Now? 'The House of Lords must be reformed somehow', but 'if we make any change we must enact, and anything in mere constitutional matters beyond mere details that is enacted has a weakness about it; Kings, Lords, Commons, everything else, were never enacted. They came of themselves; they took a certain shape by force of circumstances . . . This cannot happen again, the more's the pity.' 63 The conflict between Burkean organicist political wisdom and constructive constitutional innovation could scarcely be more poignant; the tensions in Freeman's historically grounded science of politics could hardly be more starkly revealed. Neither antiquarian reverence nor much perceptible radicalism of any kind distinguished the other of Oscar Browning's two evangelists of political science, Sir John Seeley, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge as Freeman was, in his last years, at Oxford. Seeley, who employed a far more positivistic vocabulary than Freeman, had no apparent doubts either about the necessity of the science nor its utility. The science of politics was to be the residue of generalisations deposited by history when the 'literary' - always, when applied to history, a term of abuse for Seeley and picturesque qualities of the latter had been put away with childish things, and narrative given place to analysis and induction. 64 The contrast with Freeman could scarcely be more marked. Nor could there be any doubting the urgency of Seeley's concern with the present and the future. To make history practical and to make it yield a science of politics was for him the same thing. 'We study history that we may be wise before the event', and what was required for this prevision was 'an inductive science of states'. 65 The ambitious conception of 'science' constantly invoked by Seeley suggests an early reading of Mill and of Mill's account of Comte. This was 61 62 63 64

65

See, for example, E. A . Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution from the Earliest Times (1872) (3rd edn, London, 1876), pp. 2 0 - 1 . Freeman, Comparative Politics, p. 69; for Grote, see above, p. 189. Freeman to James Bryce, 10 July 1884, and to E. Strachey, 17 August 1884; Stephens, Life and Letters of Freeman, 11, pp. 324, 326-7 (italics original). J. R. Seeley, Introduction to Political Science (London, 1896), p. 12; cf. 'The Teaching of Polities', his 1869 Cambridge Inaugural lecture, printed in his Lectures and Essays (London, 1870), pp. 296, 302, 317. J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883) (2nd edn, London, 1895), p. 198; Seeley, Political Science, p. 24.

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evident in his two inaugural lectures where, on both occasions, he had the distinction of proselytising on behalf of a subject other than that which he had been appointed to profess. In taking up the Chair of Latin at University College, London, in 1863, he pressed the claims of history, especially when 'considered as a collection of observations intended to serve as data for general propositions concerning the nature of man . . . These general propositions, when we get them, will form that philosophy of history of which so much has lately been said, and which is, in fact, moral, social and political science arrived at inductively.'66 In the course of the 1860s he came to focus these hopes specifically upon what he called 'political science', and so in his 1869 Inaugural as Professor of History at Cambridge (a lecture which J. R. Green called, with some justice, 'a half-ignorant half-contemptuous fling at his own Chair') 67 he argued that 'if history were taken to have for its subject-matter all that has happened in the world, it would not be a single science, but the inductive basis of all sciences whatever'. Now, however, he could confidently announce that the phenomena which formed the subject-matter of history were in fact political phenomena, and, neatly reversing this, he unashamedly told his no doubt rather startled audience that 'every one, therefore, who studies political institutions, whether in the past or in the present, studies history', and he concluded, with an inappropriately tactless frankness, that if he managed to make the History Tripos the 'school of statesmanship' which he aspired to, it would be by the method of 'giving due precedence in the teaching of History to the present over the past'. 68 The past was interesting only as the explanation of the present and as the grounds for an inductive science of politics: 'The conviction that history may be useful is based more or less immediately upon the principle that what has occurred may occur again.'69 And we learned its lessons not primarily that we might imitate, but that we might avoid doing so. The central anxiety of that very anxious book, his immensely popular The Expansion of England, first published in 1883, was that the fate of the present British empire should not be the same as that of the first, that 'the secession of our first colonies was not a mere normal result of expansion, like the bursting of a bubble, but the result of temporary conditions, removable, and which have been removed'.70 At first sight, the intellectual differences between Freeman and Seeley, epitomised in the latter's annexation of all the perquisites and duties 66 67 68 69 70

Seeley, Classical Studies, p. 22. The Letters of John Richard Green, edited b y Leslie Stephen ( L o n d o n , 1901), p . 248. Seeley, 'The Teaching of Polities', p p . 299, 302. Seeley, Political Science, p. 5. Seeley, Expansion, p . 19.

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ny

implied, in the later nineteenth century, by the word 'science', are far more marked than any similarities, and not only in the contrast between the Gladstonian Liberal Freeman and Seeley the imperial publicist. Though Seeley was born only eleven years after Freeman, in 1834, they seem divided by a whole generation. The contrast is caught, for example, in the different influences they respectively derived from Germany. Freeman was a stepchild of German Romanticism, at least in some of his aspects, and a liberal nationalist (and racialist) who adored Garibaldi and hated Austria. Seeley belongs, rather, to the age of Bismarck, to the generation which had begun to see Germany not as the genial land of impractical, passionate scholars, but as the epitome of both scientific rigour and ruthless efficiency. His German mentors were not von Maurer and the line of historical students of institutions leading back to the Romantic volkisch patriotism of Jacob Grimm, but the Prussian statesman Stein, whose biography he wrote, and the geographer Ritter from whom he took a kind of geographical determinism reminiscent of Montesquieu and eighteenth-century environmentalism. 71 He thought always not in terms of Rechtsgeschichte> but of Realpolitik. Seeley's approach to the task of political science was correspondingly clinical and hard-headed. Matching his dislike of the literary and picturesque treatment of history was his frequently expressed distaste for gaudy political rhetoric - 'loose talk about liberty' - and political partisanship carried back into the past: all marked characteristics of Freeman. Political science was to be the antidote, 'so that in time we may possess a body of doctrine similar to that which has been already formed in political economy' in order that 'definite principles generally acknowledged may take the place of rhetorical commonplaces recklessly flung about by party orators'. 72 Where Freeman's language always seemed designed to raise temperatures, Seeley's usually sought to lower them. A large part of the function of the discipline was to be a judicious distribution of cold water, moderating expectations in the politically inexperienced; it was to point, above all, to the necessary limitations of political action. The message may have been fundamentally similar to the Whig caution enjoined by a celebration of English political continuity, but the intellectual route was different and the tone rather resembled Maine's in its appeal to expert knowledge: The importance of adopting the inductive method in politics is much greater than in other sciences. Not only will it make all the difference to the science itself but it will have a vast effect on the course of affairs by changing the whole character of public 71 72

For his relation to Stein, see Deborah Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge, 1980), ch. 3; for his use of Ritter, see, for example, Seeley, Expansion, p. 102. J. R. Seeley, 'History and Polities', Macmillan's Magazine, 40 (1879), 295-6; cf. also his revealing remark that 'in the schools the historical has supplemented the a priori method, whereas the party world still lives in the dregs of 18th-century Liberalism': Seeley, 'Impartial Study of Polities', 63.

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opinion, for public opinion will gradually conform itself to scientific opinion. That political fanaticism which is so rife on the Continent, the Red Spectre, is nothing but a public opinion dominated by a bad method. Socialism, Communism, everything of the kind, are simply a bastard political science divorced from history.73 But here, too, there are significant differences, both in intellectual source and the precise direction taken by their respective political fears. Seeley had none of Maine's ultimate belief in a kind of laissez-faire individualism, though he certainly believed in the vital importance of an elite.74 And although he counted in contemporary terms as a Liberal, Seeley's Liberalism was qualified by his yearning for a national consensus - *a body of doctrine' - and by his belief that it would be provided by scientific experts, notions which in his case derived most obviously from his early engagement with Comtean Positivism. Indeed, with Seeley we reach the point at which even the Comparative Method in its strict form becomes somewhat diluted: the concern with the classification and sequential arrangement of political institutions and forms of government remains, but the original underpinning provided by the notion of an Aryan family of nations drops away, a process which Bryce was to take a stage further. Seeley exhibited no attachment to the philological and legal forms so dear to true devots of the Comparative Method, and he was always too much of an environmentalist to allow race much of a role in historical explanation. In his scheme of things, England owed her maritime predominance, for example, not to Saxon or Viking blood (why had it only manifested itself from the sixteenth century onwards?), but to the shift in the early modern period from a Mediterranean to an Atlantic civilisation, or, in the technical terms borrowed from Ritter, from thalassic to oceanic.75 Similarly, English constitutional liberty was owed not to the heritage of Teutonic freedom, but to England's insular position. This was something the eighteenth-century Scots - Millar, for example - had stressed, but Seeley typically subsumed the explanation under a law: 'Intense government is the reaction against intense pressure . . . liberty, or relaxed government, is the effect of relaxed pressure.'76 Although in these ways Seeley shared few of the characteristic interests and shibboleths of the proponents of the Comparative Method whom we have already discussed, when we come to look at his most general academic 73 74 75 76

From notes by Seeley for an unpublished lecture, quoted in Wormell, Seeley, pp. 128-9. See especially, ' T h e English Revolution of the N i n e t e e n t h C e n t u r y ' , Macmillan's Magazine, 22 (1870), 2 4 1 - 5 1 , 347-58, 4 4 1 - 5 1 . Seeley, Expansion, p . 102. Seeley, Political Science, p. 154. For Millar see his An Historical View of the English Government from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688 (1787), 4 vols. (London, 1812), 11, p. 471.

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treatise, the lectures posthumously published as his Introduction to Political Science, we find that, as in the very similar work by its editor, Sidgwick, on The Development of European Polity (which is discussed more fully in Essay ix below), the fundamental categories of the work and the story told are essentially those we have become familiar with in the earlier part of this essay. The book is in detail, it is true, something of an intellectual catch-all, in which Maine, Montesquieu, Ritter, Bagehot, Aristotle, Fustel de Coulanges, and T. H. Green rub shoulders. Seeley was, after all, setting himself to supply the absence of any entirely suitable modern textbook (an aim somewhat modestly expressed by him in pointing out the insufficiency to nineteenth-century needs of Aristotle's Politics),77 and this naturally led to a certain eclecticism. But it would, apart from the absence of Max Miiller and philology, be hard to tell from internal evidence that Seeley's work was not conceived in much the same terms as those employed by Maine, Vinogradoff or Freeman. The chief substantive addition, a section which seems clearly derived from the French ancient historian Fustel de Coulanges' La cite antique, could be regarded as a desirable incorporation entirely congruous with the spirit of the overall enterprise; from the time of the latter's simultaneous publication with Maine's Ancient Law, commentators had noted the close similarities of theme and treatment in the two works. And so, in Seeley's book, we find the familiar story of the emergence of the modern state out of tribalism, topped off by a discussion of the form of the British constitution, the categories of which are derived more or less equally from Aristotle and Bagehot. Indeed, the similarity to earlier works in the genre was made a point of criticism by some reviewers: the Saturday Review complained in characteristically knowing and weary tones that 'the evolution of the state from the family through the tribe is a topic with which the writings of Sir Henry Maine and Mr Bagehot have long made us familiar and Sir John Seeley does little more than save his class the trouble of reading the works of those eminent writers, a very dubious benefit'.78 States are the declared subject-matter of the book, and these, Seeley announced, again echoing Montesquieu as much as Comte, can be classified in terms of their predominant principle of cohesion, of which there turn out to be four: force ('inorganic'), kinship, religion, and 'the conception of a common good', which looks like a wave to the fashionable Idealism of T. H. Green, Seeley's equivalent to Maine's 'age of contract' as a specification of modernity. But what, in the present context, is more striking about Seeley's taxonomy (which is also, of course, a sequence) is the way in which he strains the category of 'state' or 'polity' to embrace cases where 77 78

Seeley, Political Science, p . 2. Anon., 'Seeley's Introduction to Political Science', Saturday Review, 81 (1896), 630-1.

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'society' might seem the more natural term. Everywhere, he observes, 'we find that men have another bond of union beyond that of the family, and another higher organisation', which is the state. He concedes that in so speaking, I stretch considerably the meaning commonly given to the word state. In the Greek or Roman, or in the European sense of the word, the state has been and is by no means universal; on the contrary, it is somewhat rare among mankind. But we want some one word to denote the large corporation, larger than the family yet usually connected with the family, whatever form it may assume, and the word state is the only word which can be made to serve this purpose. Sometimes it would be better called a tribe or clan, sometimes a church or religion, but whatever we call it the phenomenon is very universal. Almost everywhere men conceive themselves as belonging to some large corporation.79 It may be worth remarking in passing that what gave some additional plausibility, here as elsewhere, to talking about 'states' in this way was the almost casual concentration upon the historical agents' own sense of identification; had some structural or material feature of societies been made the focus of attention, this political vocabulary would have seemed less appropriate. In the present case, as in that of several of his predecessors, the expanded use of the category licensed a wide-ranging discussion which went well beyond 'government' in any formal sense, as, for example, in his treatment of 'tribal' polities or even of 'theocratic' states under which he subsumed most of the European Middle Ages. The interpolation of religion, rather than feudalism, in the characterisation of the intermediate stage makes his account more like a Comtean story of secularisation than the others we have considered, and is the place where Seeley clearly relies on Fustel de Coulanges. Leagues of tribes are formed on the basis of common religion; these in turn are converted into modern states by secularisation, the emancipation from theocracy. But Seeley's Comteanism was strictly limited, and his distance from anything like orthodox Positivism was marked by, among many other things, his belief that history deals with states rather than with 'civilizations', his overriding concern with the nation-state, his preoccupation with foreign affairs and his imperialism.80 A more rounded picture of Seeley's political science emerges if the account given in his textbook is supplemented by the argument of The Expansion of England. In an era of large states - and Seeley shared the belief of many imperialists, nervously eyeing the United States and Russia, that 79

80

Seeley, Political Science, pp. 14, 16-17. Consider here his earlier remark that history studied in this way becomes ' n o t . . . mere anthropology or sociology, b u t . . . a science of states': Seeley, 'History and Polities', 298. The adjective says a lot. Seeley's flirtation with Comtean Positivism in his years at University College, London, is well discussed in Wormell, Seeley, ch. 1.

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the coming age would be one of large states - federation seemed to offer the solution to an eighteenth-century dilemma, the preservation of liberty in the large-scale political units which geography seemed otherwise to doom to despotic government or breakdown. Freeman had rejected the federal solution for the British empire, chiefly, whatever the arguments, because he found his sense of identity not in empire but in England. Seeley, though he was ready to take the leap Freeman refused, also recognised that it was a matter of sentiment and identity as well as constitutional mechanics: 'When we have accustomed ourselves to contemplate the whole empire together and call it England, we shall see that here too we have a United States.'81 This was a theoretical as well as practical conviction of Seeley's, and one close to the centre of his own profoundest feelings. Recognition of it enters Seeley's political science, typically, as a point about classification and impartiality. The state has not altogether ceased to be a tribe. 'The English state may be held together in some degree by a common interest, still it is not a mere company composed of voluntary shareholders, but a union which has its root in the family, and which has grown, and not merely been arranged to be what it is.' 82 What is so characteristic of Seeley is that the Burkean moral and prescriptive resonances ('not a mere company . . . has grown and not merely. . .') are put at the service of an argument for scientific detachment: inductive political science 'begins by putting aside as irrelevant the distinction of barbarous and civilized, and by admitting to an impartial consideration all political aggregates'.83 This balance or equivocation between cultivated scientific impartiality and earnest patriotic commitment is seen again, more subtly, in his uses of the popular organic metaphor. Clearly, the implication of being invited, in The Expansion of England, to 'begin to think of England as a living organism* is not quite the same as the injunction in the Introduction to Political Science to classify states as though they were insects or molluscs.84 The second diminishes its object in the name of scientific procedure; the first, though it can invoke the same warrant, personifies and magnifies it and invites individuals to think of themselves as parts of the great whole. But though he was prepared, obviously, to milk the concept of 'science' to the utmost, Seeley was certainly not consciously masking the seriousness of his patriotic concern. To say this is not to make a crudely redundant point about some putative 'failure' to be 'objective': the nature of Seeley's commitment and the organicism which linked it to his conception of inductive science matter because they determined what he thought political science was - and so, by default, was not - about. 81 82 83 84

Seeley, Expansion, p . 184. Seeley, Political Science, p. 35. Seeley, Political Science, p. 37. Seeley, Expansion, p. 142; Seeley, Political Science, p. 53.

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Seeley, not unusually among proponents of Realpolitik, had an exalted, numinous conception of the state as the highest expression of man's communal and moral life: 'The smallest individual life belongs to a national life which is great.' It was a conception which conferred solemnity on the studies which dealt with it: 'These are studies which show a man the whole of which he is a part, and which throw light upon the great process of which his own life is a moment.' 85 Seeley's exalted conception of the state does not seem to have been derived from the obvious Idealist sources, though it may well have owed something in its historical dimension to Hegel's Philosophy of History (a work which also made use of Ritter's theories) and had obvious similarities to the ideas of someone like Bosanquet. 86 Rather, its primary inspiration was from another source, the Anglican Broad Churchmanship of the days of Thomas Arnold and F. D. Maurice, which also stemmed ultimately, through Coleridge, from Germany. 87 (Freeman's and Seeley's intellectual careers intersected at one point, though they never ran parallel: they were both, in their quite different ways, of the confession of Dr Arnold.) Seeley's Broad Churchmanship coincided with his Comteanism in a common longing for co-operation and consensus, a common abhorrence of unfettered competition and factional strife; indeed, with a proper understanding of the nature of the state as a community that form of 'petty struggle' traditionally thought to be the essence of domestic politics would come to an end. He patronised the Social and Political Education League to promote this theme, aiming to do in society at large something of what he hoped to achieve in his 'school of statesmanship' at Cambridge.88 This longing for consensus may also have helped to produce what could be considered a striking limitation in Seeley's conception of a science of politics, namely its concentration on political or constitutional taxonomy and on telling stories of the evolution of political forms, at the expense of a sense of the dynamic process of political life within the nation, as the 85 86

87

88

Seeley, ' T e a c h i n g of Polities', p p . 2 9 7 - 8 . W o r m e l l observes, q u i t e justly, t h a t Seeley ' w a s n o t a close s t u d e n t of the Philosophy of Right' (Seeley, p . 145), b u t the m o r e p o p u l a r lectures o n t h e Philosophy of History (the English translation of w h i c h in 18 57 attracted s o m e attention), in w h i c h H e g e l m a d e use of R i t t e r ' s categories, seems t o have left m o r e of an i m p r e s s i o n o n Seeley; see, for example, his discussion of w o r l d h i s t o r y as t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of the spirit of freedom, a n d his placing of the U n i t e d States at the forefront of that development, in Expansion, p p . 173-4. Ironically, Bosanquet, in criticising 'negative' conceptions of liberty, placed Seeley a m o n g the followers of H e r b e r t Spencer: Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899) (4th edn, L o n d o n , 1923), p p . 6j, 126. O n this, see particularly R. T. Shannon, ' J o h n Robert Seeley and the Idea of a National C h u r c h ' , in R. R o b s o n (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain ( L o n d o n , 1967). O n Seeley's role in the Social and Political Education League, see Wormell, Seeley, p p . 6 1 - 2 ; his characteristic plea for 'the impartial study of polities', cited at n. 14 above, was first given as an address to the League.

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interaction of factions, interests, and divergent political purposes. The contrast suggested here cannot be said to correspond to a distinction between an interest in the past and an interest in the present. Seeley had no interest in the past as such, while Stubbs's Constitutional History, for example, though it deals with the Middle Ages, displays an immensely lively sense of the expansion, warping, contraction, and adaptation of institutions under the pressures of contending, often inarticulate, sectional purposes, fears and greed. Conversely, when Seeley, in his Cambridge Inaugural, made his suggestions for turning history 'away from the past to the p r e s e n t . . . to give it the interest of an experimental study' by keeping one's eyes open and browsing in foreign newspapers and magazines, he compared this to the activities of the amateur geologist and naturalist, the nineteenth century's exemplars of the merits of classification as a scientific procedure. 89 Stubbs, it is worth noting, drew many of his metaphors, unfashionably, from mechanics: here the movement produced by the interaction of forces was, as it were, built in. Seeley's justification of his interest both in taxonomy and in the sequence of political forms relied upon the organicist slang of the day. 90 He also offered a defence of his deliberate neglect of party-political scuffling, a defence which marks his distance from the pieties of traditional Whig history but which at the same time reveals his attachment to similarly teleological assumptions. He deplored the tendency to see English history as a perennial battleground of Whigs and Tories, standing, in all ages, for much the same political interests and principles; his shrewd criticism of this myth partly anticipated the Namierite revolution in English historiography.91 Historians of England, he complained, were in general wont to 'make too much of the mere parliamentary wrangle and the agitations about liberty', in all of which matters, he asserted, not unreasonably, 'the eighteenth century of England was but a pale reflection of the seventeenth'. 92 In their place, he put forward the neglected protagonist in English history, the English state; not the constitution, but the state, considered primarily as an agent in European and world affairs. Within the state, consensus was the thing needful; between states, though Seeley in his own day was no warmonger, he was prepared to consider the rough-andtumble of competition and war as educative: 'it is healthy for a nation to live in society' — to mix, or mix it, in international company.93 It was the nation-state whose emergence to self-realisation in foreign policy in the 89 90 91 92 93

Seeley, Teaching of Polities', p. 314. O n occasion he could compare states both to organisms and to machines (e.g., Political Science, p. 20), but there is no doubt which metaphor predominated in his o w n writings. Seeley, 'History and Polities', esp. pp. 371-5, 452-4. Seeley, Expansion, p. 10. J. R. Seeley, 'Our Insular Ignorance', The Nineteenth Century, 18 (1885), 869.

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seventeenth and eighteenth centuries he traced in The Growth of British Policy and whose future he tried anxiously to make out in the crystal-ball of inductive political science in The Expansion of England, which was, as Sidgwick pointed out in his Preface to the Political Science, intended as 'a case-study'. 94 But the inheritance of the Whig interpretation of history, in its general sense, was still very much alive in Seeley's attempts to render down history into an inductive science of states. It still seemed sensible to him to ask 'what is the general drift or goal of English history?' and 'the English state . . . in what direction and towards what goal has that been moving?', the answer, it seemed, being chiefly provided by Imperial Federation.95 And the disposition to see this as the right question was, if not produced, then certainly fostered by the organic metaphor; this was what 'learning to see England as a living organism' meant. Seeley occasionally also spoke of the model of the organism as a complex of interacting organs,96 in terms perhaps borrowed from Herbert Spencer, but for the most part, like so many late nineteenth-century writers on social and political matters, he seems to have assumed that what you did with organisms was to classify them and trace their characteristic life-cycle or development, not to dissect them to understand, in other than the broadest terms, their physiology.97 And even if physiology had provided more clues than it was allowed to do, we can obviously still ask whether the model of organic coherence is the only one needed for understanding the contentious political lives of human beings in society. But arguably the bias towards classification and away from process had been built into the employment of the Comparative Method from the beginning; certainly it becomes no less evident as the historical unity initially provided by the Aryan story becomes more attenuated. 'He attaches an altogether excessive and unscientific importance to form.' The charge was laid by John Morley, and it is perhaps suggestive of the limits of the appeal of the Comparative Method that it needed someone who was a professional journalist, an 'advanced' radical, and a Positivist fellow-traveller to declare, iconoclastically, that 'even the Historical Method has its own clap-trap'. 98 But what is more revealing still is that the 94 95 96 97

98

J . R. Seeley, The Growth of British Policy, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1895), esp. 'Introduction'; Seeley, Political Science, p. xi. Seeley, Expansion, p . 8. F o r Seeley's enthusiasm for Imperial Federation, see Wormell, Seeley, ch. 6. Seeley, Political Science, p p . 43-4. Wormell instances, as something of an exception in Seeley's w o r k , his articles o n ' T h e English Revolution of the Nineteenth Century* cited in n. 74 above, suggesting that had he continued in this vein 'he might have been able t o anticipate an Ostrogorski o r a Michels' (Seeley,?. 153). J o h n Morley, 'Maine o n Popular G o v e r n m e n t ' , Fortnightly Review (1886) reprinted in his Studies in Literature ( L o n d o n , 1890), p p . 149, 111.

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target of Morley's attack was none other than the mentor of the whole movement, Maine himself. The occasion for this confrontation was the publication in 1885 of Popular Government, in the Preface to which Maine had somewhat disingenuously announced that though he had previously confined himself primarily to the study of legal institutions, 'it had always been my desire and hope to apply the Historical Method to the political institutions of men', 99 the disingenuousness lying in the rather transparent attempt to harness the prestige of his scholarly achievements to what was essentially a conservative polemic against democracy. The heart of Morley's criticism was that the value of Maine's discussion of the drawbacks of democracy as revealed by its history was 'impaired by the absence of anything like a philosophy of society as a whole', and in amplifying this criticism, in a very revealing passage, he showed that he was adding his name to that long list of critics who complained that the political science of their day had neglected the insight, attributed, according to taste, to a variety of revered predecessors, that political forms were always to be understood in relation to a particular state of society: Nobody who has studied Burke, or Comte, or Mill - I am not sure whether we should not add even de Maistre - can imagine any of them as setting to work on a general political speculation without reference to particular social conditions. They would have conducted the enquiry in strict relation to the stage at which a community happened to be, in matters lying outside of the direct scope of political government. So, before all other living thinkers, should we have expected Sir Henry Maine to do. It is obvious that systems of government, called by the same name, bearing the same superficial marks, founded and maintained on the same nominal principles, framed in the same verbal forms, may yet work with infinite diversity of operation, according to the variety of social circumstances around them. Yet it is here inferred that democracy in England must be fragile, difficult, and sundry other evil things, because out of fourteen presidents of the Bolivian Republic thirteen have died assassinated or in exile.100

Though Morley obviously wrote as a partisan of popular government, the invocation of Burke and de Maistre reveals that there was what might now be called a methodological as well as political point at issue here. He challenged Maine's tactic of considering democracy primarily as the fruit of the speculative theorising of writers like Rousseau and Bentham, and, indeed, his general tendency, as Morley expressed it, 'to impute an unreal influence to writers and books altogether'. In its place, Morley recommended a more realistic and discriminating attention to 'the conditions . . . in a given society at a given time', and in doing so Morley, like his master, the Mill of the Logic, was repudiating the very conception of an 'inductive 99 100

Maine, Popular Government, p. vi. Morley, 'Maine on Popular Government', pp. 145-6.

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science of states': 'You cannot isolate government, and judge it apart from the other and deeper forces of the time.' 101 If the whirligig of time seems at work when 'the jealous votary of the historic method' can be upbraided for 'attaching an excessive and altogether unscientific importance to form', there is a no less nice irony in seeing the radical berate the conservative for exaggerating the power of abstract political theory. Interestingly, both these charges were to be laid against the political science of his day by Graham Wallas in a more celebrated attack (on which see the Epilogue, below). Wallas, of course, was writing a generation later, but to get a proper sense of the longevity of the residue of 'Comparative Politics' we have to consider the figure who, but for the intellectualism he was alleged to share with Wallas's other victims, could, according to his critic, have made 'that constructive contribution to general political science for which he is better equipped than any other man of his time'. 102 Reading this encomium three-quarters of a century later, one's mind is not immediately filled with the jostle of possible candidates, but in 1908 one name would have occurred to most informed readers even had Wallas not supplied it. In the same year he had been hailed in Lowell's The Government of England as 'the master and guide of all students of modern political systems', 103 and in fact in the January of that year he had been the first Englishman to give the Presidential address to the recently founded American Political Science Association, speaking on 'The relations of political science to history and to practice'. 104 Since James Bryce, the figure in question, had first secured a reputation as the author of the best-selling The Holy Roman Empire and was currently British Ambassador to the United States, the title of his address was apt. The lecture itself was, inevitably, full of confident, programmatic recommendations, indicating a conception of the science of politics to which we shall return, as it provides an excellent illustration of the persistence and re-combination of several of the styles of thought dealt with in this and earlier essays. But first we must briefly consider Bryce's qualifications for being so widely regarded at that time as the chief representative of the established tradition of studying things political. The first - an undeniably necessary, if minimal, one - was that he was still alive. His prominence in 1908 (when he was seventy) had as much to do with good health as with any more intellectual achievements. He was of the generation of Sidgwick and Seeley, and only fifteen years younger than 101 102 103 104

Morley, 'Maine o n Popular Government', pp. 118, 153. Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (1908) (3rd edn, London, 1920), p. 129. A . Lawrence Lowell, The Government of England, 2 vols. ( N e w York, 1908), p. vii. James Bryce, 'The Relations of Political Science to History and to Practice', American Political Science Review, 3 (1909), 1-19.

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his immediate masters, Maine and Freeman; yet Maine had died in 1888, Freeman in 1892, Seeley in 1895, and Sidgwick in 1900. Longevity, however, can be a source of embarrassment as well as distinction, and by the time his two-volume Modern Democracies appeared in 1921 the most flattering thing that anyone could think to say was that it was a very large book to have been written by an eighty-three-year-old.105 But by then Bryce's distinction could simply be taken for granted: six years earlier a fellow political scientist with some experience of the exercise of power had endorsed the view that Bryce was 'the greatest living Englishman' (although as A. G. Gardiner, the author of the original eulogy, had to admit, 'regretfully', Bryce was a Scotsman born in Ireland).106 When Wallas detected signs of the intellectualist fallacy 'even in the mind of the author of The American Commonwealth', Bryce's three-volume study of the working of the American political system first published in 1888, he was acknowledging that it was no insignificant place in which to find it.107 The fact that Bryce's last book was on democracy - or, more precisely, on democratic institutions - was a fitting close, since the nature and prospects of popular government had been the central and enduring preoccupation of his writing life. Nor was this a disinterested or merely academic preoccupation: he had been an ardent democrat at a time when to be a democrat of any kind could still be considered almost seditious, and he shared his friend Freeman's passionate, Romantic, yearning for a Europe of self-governing nation states. It is a mark of his enthusiasm, as well as of cannier characteristics, that while an undergraduate he contemplated joining Garibaldi, and 'was only deterred . . . by learning from his tutor that military service in a foreign country would be regarded as incompatible with a Trinity scholarship'.108 One of the ironies of his longevity was that whereas some of his earliest political writing had been a defence of democracy against charges that it was untried and dangerous, Modern Democracies was partly written in response to what he saw as 'the decline in the reputation of representative assemblies'.109 Demonstrating or denying the possibility of successful popular government had, of course, been one of the most important practical spurs to the development of a science of politics from at least the middle of the century. The subject has a particular significance for the themes of these essays in that it was a question which, by its very nature, could be satisfactorily dealt with neither by the abstractions 105 106 107 108 109

Charles O m a n , ' M o d e r n Democracies', Quarterly Review, 236 (1921), 129-48; Frederick Pollock, 'James Bryce', Quarterly Review, 237(1922), 407. W o o d r o w Wilson, cited in E d m u n d Ions, James Bryce and American Democracy 1870-1922 ( L o n d o n , 1968), p . 16. Wallas, Human Nature, p. 126. H . A . L . Fisher, James Bryce, 2 vols. ( L o n d o n , 1927), 1, p . 5 1 . Fisher, Bryce, 11, p . 2 7 1 .

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of political philosophy - there was, after all, no shortage of moral and philosophical arguments for the desirability of some form of democracy nor by the grandiose speculations of schemes of social evolution; apart from a hair-raising vagueness about the timing of any particular development in such schemes, they generally described each stage as such a functional totality that it seemed wilful to try to change one's political arrangements before the arrival of the positive stage or social state or whatever, and superfluous to think about doing so afterwards. Certainly, if the teachings of a science of politics were to have any standing in the debates over the extension of the franchise, for example, they needed to be couched in an idiom which was at once more practical and more parochial than either of these. But although the story of English history, properly told, could yield suitably encouraging lessons about the blessings of continuity and gradualism and so on, the argument over whether democracy was in itself an unstable form of government necessarily embraced the analysis of comparative evidence. That they did not do these things better in France was hardly in dispute, but what about Athens or Venice or the United States - or, for that matter, Bolivia - for as the century advanced the contemporary world furnished more of the disputed examples. This was Bryce's special province, and most of his considered political writing was, implicitly, an attempt to disarm the critics of popular government with a massive show of scholarly force. As usual in his case, this can be illustrated from works separated by more than fifty years: if this involves trespassing in territory belonging, chronologically, to other essays, the excuse must be that although Bryce survived to become a living monument in the twentieth century, the intellectual foundation was clearly laid in the 1860s and 70s. 'There is nothing so misleading as an historical analogy.' The bouquet of sour grapes nearly always attends these prim rebukes, and in this case the quotation is taken from Bryce's contribution to the Essays on Reform of 1867 where he, typically, had chosen 'The Historical Aspect of Democracy' as his subject — Bryce was faced with the fact that the political lessons most easily drawn from those historical episodes with which the Victorian educated classes were usually familiar told almost uniformly against democracy. 'The so-called argument from history', he continued, 'has been very rife among us of late years, and has been unsparingly employed by public writers and speakers to discredit, not democracy alone, but in reality all free institutions.' Such writers, he alleged, constructed a composite caricature of popular government, drawn from the least attractive features of each historical example - 'the instability of Athens, the corruption of Rome, the ferocity of the French Revolution, the lobbyists, caucuses and wire-pullers of America' — and his essay was devoted to

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showing why each of these supposed parallels to a democratic constitution in nineteenth-century England was either invalid or irrelevant. The decay of Rome, for example, was due not to democratic institutions, but to 'the canker of slavery, the separation of her citizens into millionaires and beggars, to a moral corruption which increased with every increase in wealth and civilisation', and so on. 110 Bryce was taking issue, however, not only with the interpretation of each historical case, but with the whole practice of assuming that any such instance ever constituted a true analogy. In the same head-prefect manner he announced that by the canons of 'modern historical scholarship . . . we are forbidden to argue loosely and hastily from the circumstances of one state or nation to those of another, or from those of a nation at one period of its growth to the same nation at some other period'. 111 The adverbs, of course, turn what would otherwise be an extraordinarily stern prohibition into a mere platitude, yet they could also be construed as calling for a principle that would license comparison of a more systematic sort. But though in the late 1860s and early 1870s he was a friend of Freeman's and a colleague of Maine's (and though, as his biographer remarked, he never doubted that 'the Teuton was superior to the Latin or the Celt'), 112 Bryce does not seem to have felt the pull of the Comparative Method in its original form. He was, for a late-Victorian, surprisingly indifferent to the charms of grand evolutionary syntheses, despite his obvious fascination with large historical themes like the rise and fall of empires. It is true that, later, in Modern Democracies, he announced that he was pursuing 'the mode of investigation... known as the Comparative Method', but by then the term was being used to denote the bare comparison and classification of political institutions, without any developmental framework, still less an Aryan one. 113 Insofar as Bryce acknowledged a methodological allegiance, it was not to Maine but to Tocqueville. He had in fact opened his 1867 essay with a quotation from Democracy in America about why the American case could not profitably be compared with the democracies of the ancient world, and then he went on: 'These words of the founder of modern political science express the principle upon which that science may be said to rest. . . that a political system or form of government by itself is nothing, and acquires a meaning only when it is regarded as the result and efflux of national life.*114 110

111 112 113 114

James Bryce, 'The Historical Aspect of Democracy', in G. Brodrick et al., Essays on Reform (London, 1867), pp. 239-42, 257. For further discussion of such contemporary uses of historical examples, see Essay vi above. Bryce, 'Historical Aspect', pp. 240-1. Fisher, Bryce, p. 309. James Bryce, Modern Democracies, 2 vols. (London, 1921), p. 20. Bryce, 'Historical Aspect', p. 239.

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As with Mill's announcement of the same Copernican revolution, the sentiment depends for its significance upon an impoverished sense of the political thought of the previous three or four generations; why Tocqueville, rather than, say, Burke - or even Smith or Millar - is credited with originating this principle is not immediately obvious. At all events, again as with Mill, concentrating on 'the adaptation of forms of government to states of society' did not necessarily correspond to insisting on a distinction between the 'political' and the 'social', and certainly not to the reduction of political questions to the language of socio-economic development. 115 'National character' remained the prime analytical concept in Bryce's work, and, like so many of his contemporaries, he tended to see a shared political history as its chief determinant. Particular Tocquevillian insights could easily be accommodated within this general approach, as, for example, in Bryce's explanation of the recurrent political failure of successive regimes in France: 'The want of free local institutions has, on every occasion, restored to the central authority that overwhelming power which the dethroned ruler had abused and forfeited; the people have gained no practical knowledge of politics; and whether under king, republic, or emperor, the country has never ruled itself, but has always been ruled by its centralized administration.' 116 While France remained the chief historical bogey with which to frighten those tottering on the edge of enlarging the franchise, in the second half of the century the prospects for popular government came to seem increasingly bound up with the contemporary fate of the country which Tocqueville had identified as the most thoroughly democratic. Ancient history, as we have seen, provided one kind of political laboratory, but on subjects like the mediocrity of popular representatives or the corruption of large-scale party politics, even more than on the difficulties of federal government or the merits of a written constitution, the United States offered a more obviously relevant field for research. One difference was that, by and large, educated Englishmen knew much more about the political life of ancient Athens than of modern Washington, a situation which the socially unfashionable Unionist victory did little to alter. Attracted, like so many young men from outside the traditional governing class, by what he experienced as the openness of social life in the United States, eager on principle to vindicate the 'great democratic experiment', and endowed with limitless energy and considerable naivete, Bryce set out to remedy this ignorance, and, in the process, to make America safe for democracy's supporters. This necessarily involved, after the publication of Popular Government 115 116

For Mill's treatment of this theme, see Essay iv above, esp. pp. 134, 151, 15 5-9. Bryce, 'Historical Aspect', p. 260.

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in 188$, a direct confrontation with Maine, as well, of course, as a more general settling of accounts with Tocqueville. When Sidgwick, in correspondence with Bryce in 1885 about the issues which the latter should deal with in his projected work, broke off to say 'the situation is somewhat altered by Maine's Quarterly articles', he was, in his Sidgwickian way, registering the immense impact of Maine's polemic. 117 In the course of composing The American Commonwealth Bryce returned to Maine's book with ever-increasing irritation: 'I must say that a re-perusal of his book leaves me with a low opinion of everything in it but its style . . . He does not seem to me to come near understanding America: he does not even quite understand the U.S. constitution; and his charges against democracy are generally as self-contradictory as his historical instances are one-sided and flimsy.'118 Although Maine's name does not, in fact, occur in the book itself, his criticisms of American democracy clearly influenced its selection and discussion of disputed topics, and in the process, no doubt, drove Bryce further away from any explicit endorsement of the 'historical method'. Thirty-five years later, he was still correcting the misrepresentations of Maine's 'ingenious but elusive book'. 119 Tocqueville, needless to say, exerted an altogether more tantalising fascination. Bryce, in common with many of Tocqueville's British admirers from Mill onwards, had never felt properly at ease with the larger speculations of the second volume of Democracy in America: his own mind had none of the suppleness of Tocqueville's, and he regretted the Frenchman's ambivalence and pessimism about the general social consequences of democracy which made his book available as an authority for conservative sceptics.120 Bryce was very concerned, therefore, to provide a reliable account of the working of the American political system which could be considered apart from the broader questions about democracy's tendency to 'equality of conditions'. In practice, this involved something of a retreat from that 'principle' enunciated by the 'founder of modern political science' which he had earlier celebrated, and a corresponding restriction of the scope of his work. 'Democratic government seems to me, with all due deference to his high authority, as a cause not so potent in the moral and social sphere as he deemed it.'121 And yet, not altogether paradoxically, this drove Bryce to an account which was, in one important respect, very 117 118 119 120 121

Sidgwick to Bryce, 22 January 1885; Bryce MSS 15. 22, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Maine's Popular Government was first published in articles in the Quarterly Review. Bryce to Sidgwick, 2 September 1887; Bryce MSS 15. 117. Bryce, Modern Democracies, pp. 209-10. See esp. James Bryce, T h e Predictions of Hamilton and de Tocqueville', Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, 5th series, 9 (1887). James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 3 vols. (London, 1888) (3rd edn, 2 vols., 1893), p. 4.

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similar to Maine's, though they drew rather different political lessons from it. Instead of stressing the revolutionary origins and increasingly egalitarian social conditions of the United States, Bryce directed attention to the essentially conservative nature of its constitution; 1776, it seemed, ought to be classed not with 1789, as English critics had tended to do throughout the intervening century, but with 1688: the Founding Fathers had been Whigs not Jacobins. This also involved Bryce, following Freeman, in detecting survivals of older English institutions in the New World: the New England town-meeting, he suggested, had descended via the English vestry from the Teutonic folk-moot. And, in keeping with the Comparative Method's transposition of assumptions about 'national character' into quasi-racial terms, he argued that the exclusive carriers of the spirit of freedom and self-government needed for the successful working of these institutions were the Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock.122 The genius of this character was manifest above all in the shared common law tradition, which further distanced the United States from the dreaded French combination of reckless innovation and Vesprit de systeme.125 As Acton, more appreciative than many of his English contemporaries of the creative achievements of the young republic, observed in reviewing The American Commonwealth, its manner of vindicating the Great Democracy was to assimilate it to the heritage of English liberties; its author, for all his democratic enthusiasm (it is a combination, or tension, which we have already seen in Freeman), appeared as 'a bewildered Whig emerging from the third volume with a reverent appreciation of ancestral wisdom'. 124 However, where Freeman or Seeley had, when it suited them, worked with a generously inclusive category of 'polities', especially when dealing with the more remote periods of history, Bryce for the most part confined himself to a description of contemporary institutions which were 'political' in a fairly narrow sense. He was, it is true, one of the first to pay systematic attention to parties, recognising that they had become a key institution in the process of modern representative government whatever the formal-legal characteristics of its structure, and he grasped, perhaps to a greater extent than Wallas allowed, the mixture of rational and nonrational elements in the formation and influence of public opinion. But even when one has allowed for the complexity of Bryce's purposes, it has to be said that The American Commonwealth (and this was even truer of 122 123

124

E.g., Bryce, American Commonwealth, 1, chs. 1 and 3; 11, ch. 92. This shift in t h e political lesson d r a w n from the example of t h e U n i t e d States is well discussed in H u g h Tulloch, 'Changing British attitudes towards the U n i t e d States in the 1880s', Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 825-40. L o r d A c t o n , 'Bryce's American C o m m o n w e a l t h ' , English Historical Review, 4 (1889), 388-96.

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Modern Democracies), with its remorseless cataloguing of the details of local and federal government, marked an important step away from the historical speculations of 'comparative politics' towards what one might call the 'how-many-chambers-had-Lady-Macbeth' school of 'comparative government' which figured so prominently in the political science syllabuses of the first half of the twentieth century. Bryce's falsely modest self-description was that, by contrast with Tocqueville, he had avoided 'the temptations of the deductive method', and in 1921 he was still intoning the same creed: 'It is Facts that are needed: Facts, Facts, Facts.' 125 The chief remedy which he urged upon students as a prophylactic against the perils of mere speculation was, unhelpfully, personal participation in politics (Bryce himself, of course, had been a Cabinet minister). Energetic empiricism was his hallmark. His books depended heavily on his love of travel and his talent for quizzing everyone he met (he estimated that five-sixths of the information in The American Commonwealth was obtained in this way); 126 as a political scientist his genius largely consisted in an infinite capacity for taking trains. A closer inspection, however, reveals that Bryce's ostensibly pure empiricism was fleshed out with some very familiar assumptions about how to study 'things political'. 'It is not current politics but democracy as a form of government that I seek to describe. ' 127 It is a distinction which Maine and Freeman and Seeley all wished to draw even when (perhaps especially when) they intended the ensuing description to have an immediate political purpose. But for Bryce, eschewing evolutionary sequences of types of government and confining himself to contemporary states, the distinction was often particularly difficult to maintain. Attempting to avoid 'current politics' he was led in a curiously essentialist direction: his justification for undertaking a wide survey of different states was that 'only when this has been done can we distinguish that which in each of them is accidental from what seems essential, characteristic of the nature and normal tendencies of democracy as a particular form of government'. Here, a definitional purism is yoked to Mill's 'method of difference', tracing, as Bryce put it, 'similar results to similar causes'.128 'Causes' would be an odd category for a classificatory science to employ in this way; what makes it less odd in Bryce's work is not that he attempts to identify recurring social conditions of the political varieties he classifies, but rather that the ostensible, if, inevitably, never fulfilled, ambition is to relate the political forms to their 'causes' in human nature. 125 126 127 128

Bryce, American Commonwealth, p. 4; Modern Democracies, Fisher, Bryce, 1, p . 238. Bryce, Modern Democracies, p. viii. Bryce, Modern Democracies, pp. 7, 20.

p. 13.

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He made this explicit in his 1908 address: 'the materials of political science', he announced, echoing Seeley and Sidgwick, are 'such parts of history as relate to the structure and government of communities', its distinctive contribution being to 're-arrange them under their proper heads'. Yet in Bryce's case, these 'heads' derived not so much from an evolutionary scheme - not from Ur-forms, racial types or whatever - but from 'the laws that govern human nature in political communities'. 129 As he put it in Modern Democracies: 'The tendencies of human nature are the permanent basis of study which gives to the subject called Political Science whatever scientific quality it possesses.'130 As ever, the force of the claim depended upon a pretty strong epistemological assumption that 'the tendencies of human nature' could be isolated from among the very diverse and variable examples of human conduct: here Bryce was uncharacteristically silent, and never seems to have been attracted to, say, Associationism or any of its more biologistic late nineteenth-century successors. Nevertheless, he confidently maintained that there were 'permanent' truths about human behaviour upon which the political scientist could build, adding (sounding for all the world like an untroubled Benthamite), 'considered as general and as permanent they are few and can be briefly stated', though he did not, as it happened, get round to stating them. 131 Moreover, as in Mill's case, 'human nature' is ultimately taken to be a more reliable basis for political knowledge than mere 'history'. This was nicely confirmed in 1921 by his consideration of the prospects for Socialism: What history tells us of the relation which the permanent tendencies of human nature bear to political institutions is not sufficient for guidance in this unexplored field of governmental action. We are driven to speculation and conjecture. Now the materials for conjecture will have to be drawn not from a study of institutions which were formed with a view to other aims, but mainly from a study of human nature itself, i.e. from psychology and ethics as well as from economics.132 This last phase is one of those passing remarks which are offered as almost a self-evident or purely definitional truth, but which reveal so much about enduring assumptions. Bryce, temperamentally uninclined to any kind of philosophical reflection or doubt, was content to accept the hegemony of the traditional categories of the moral sciences. Less of a lawyer as well as less of a theorist than Maine, less of an antiquarian as well as less of a racialist than Freeman, less of an historian as well as less of a positivist than Seeley, Bryce nonetheless shared enough of the common preoccupations and enthusiasms of this group to act as their 129 130

131

Bryce,'Relations of Political Science', pp. 1—3. Bryce, Modern Democracies, p . 11. Bryce, 'Relations of Political Science', p. 6. Bryce, Modern Democracies, p. 12.

The appeal of the Comparative Method

24 5

representative in the early twentieth century, and to act from a genuine and lively conviction, not simply from a sense of piety or obligation. Consider, for example, the lecture he gave to mark the founding of the Sir George Watson Chair of American History, Literature, and Institutions in 1921. It might have seemed an occasion, in a world which had now seen the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the beginnings of the rise of Fascism, to ponder the lessons which students of the science of politics could draw from the unique experience of the United States. Bryce had done his formative pondering half a century earlier. American history, he asserted, meant the history of a 'people' not a land', and this in turn meant 'primarily their character; that is to say, the distinctive quality of their habits of thinking, feeling, and acting, and secondarily, the institutions, social and political, in which those habits found expression'. But where, from this point of view, could American history be said to begin? Not, for Bryce, in 1776, or even in 1607: American history 'began in the forests and shores of Holstein and East Frisia', and the most important sources for early American history, therefore, were Tacitus and Beowulf, The peculiar strength of this character was, unsurprisingly, love of liberty; the route from the German forests to the American plains was assumed to run through Westminster. 133 The author of the famous indictment of the politics of Tammany Hall was overlain by the celebrant of a kind of 'Whiggism for the Dominions' which enjoyed a certain currency after the First World War.134 After his death, the Dictionary of National Biography was to remark, somewhat bathetically, that the publication of his first book sixty years earlier 'secured for Bryce a European reputation and the friendship of Freeman'. In the end, it was the affinity with Freeman which wore better, and in an evocative phrase which would have delighted his fellow Teutonist, he concluded: 'Thus, the intellectual, moral and religious history of England for 13 centuries, from the landing of the Jutish keels at Ebbsfleet in Kent in the middle of the fifth century A.D., is a part of American history.' 135 By the 1920s, however, even Bryce had had to recognise that his political and historical enthusiasms were not exactly le dernier cri. A mournful passage in the introduction to Modern Democracies signalled this with some poignancy: 133 134

135

James Bryce, The Study of American History (Cambridge, 1921), pp. 3-4. For his account of the 'politics of Tammany* see Bryce, American Commonwealth, 11, pp. 377-403. By 1921 he was more optimistic about the assimilation of the immigrant, referring, in an English version of the well-known sociological metaphor for the process, to how 'he seems to melt in America as a lump of sugar melts in a cup of tea*: Bryce, Study of American History, p. 22. Bryce, Study ofAmerican History, p. 7.

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The absorption of men's minds with ideas and schemes of social reconstruction has diverted attention from those problems of free government which occupied men's minds when the flood-tide of democracy was rising 70 or 80 years ago; and it has sometimes seemed to me in writing this book that it was being addressed to the last rather than the present generation. That generation busied itself with institutions; this generation is bent rather upon the purposes which institutions may be made to serve. Nevertheless, the study of institutions has not lost its importance.136 'Schemes of social reconstruction' had never formed a part of a science of politics as Bryce and his colleagues had conceived of it; that in 1906 he should, in the face of the rise of the Labour Party, lament that 'sound economics have been sadly forgotten in England', is a reminder of how a whole range of issues in domestic politics had been assumed to be settled by the conclusions of orthodox political economy. 137 Moreover, it was of the essence of that 'national' version of the Whig interpretation of English history which was second nature to a man like Bryce that politics was not to be, did not need to be, given over to 'schemes'. That 'diffused Burkeanism' of nineteenth-century political thought referred to in our Prologue still continued to find a voice in Bryce as he contemplated the politics of Socialism, Suffragettes, and Syndicalism: 'there is nothing more pernicious in politics than abstract doctrine'. 138 His political experience itself came increasingly to be suspended in a solution of familiar historical parallels: the form taken, for example, by his anxiety about Britain's colonial future was, characteristically, an essay meditating on the differences between the British and Roman empires.139 One of the final ironies of longevity is that one starts, unknowingly, to write one's own epitaph, which in Bryce's case was also the epitaph for a whole intellectual episode. Seen thus, there is an entirely appropriate diminution of confidence, ambition, and excitement from Maine's announcement of the birth of a 'new science' with which this essay began, to Bryce's plaintive protest in 1921 that 'nevertheless, the study of institutions has not lost its importance'. 136 137 138 139

Bryce, Modern Democracies, p. xi. Bryce to Goldwin Smith, 16 June 1906; quoted in Elisabeth Wallace, Goldwin Smith, Victorian Liberal (Toronto, 1957), p. 174. Q u o t e d in Fisher, Bryce, 1, p . 285. James Bryce, 'The Roman Empire and the British Empire in India', in his Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1901), 1, pp. 1-84. This essay and a similar one comparing the impact of English and Roman law were reprinted separately in 1914 expressly for the use of Indian Civil Service candidates: see Essay xi below.

VIII D

= D

Particular polities: political economy and the historical method Every branch of the philosophy of society, morals and political economy not excepted, needs investigation and development by historical induction; and . . . not only the moral and economic condition of society, but its moral and economic theories and ideas, are the results of the course of national history and the state of national culture. T. E. CLIFFE LESLIE, Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy (1879) If we are to have a body of doctrine which lays down maxims in regard to the pursuit of wealth, this body of doctrine can only be a Political Economy, not a cosmopolitan Economic Science, for it must devote its attention to the particular needs and ambitions of a particular polity, and can only indicate the means to procure wealth-as-conceived and wealth-as-desired by that nation at that time, not wealth in general. WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM, Politics and Economics

(1885)

(

WE Englishmen pass on the continent as masters of the art of government; yet it may be doubted whether, even among us, the science, which corresponds to that art, is not very much in the condition of political economy before Adam Smith took it in hand.' This remark, in which we may seem to detect the familiar cadences of John Stuart Mill reproaching his countrymen, epitomises one aspect of the orthodox mid-nineteenthcentury view of the relation between the science of politics and political economy, the weary and somewhat irritated tone of the reference to the former contrasting with the complacent, almost final, note struck by the 'taking in hand' of the latter. For all the opposition which political economy provoked from various quarters in the half century after Waterloo, it was generally acknowledged in mid-century as by far the most 'developed' of the moral sciences, and as the source of a uniquely systematic and sophisticated vocabulary for the discussion of a wide range of political issues. Notoriously, this privileged standing of political economy was comprehensively called into doubt in the 1870s and 80s as a result of several intellectual as well as practical developments. One indication of the kind of methodological challenge which it then had to face is to be found in Cliffe Leslie's righteous admonition in 1879 that 'the English economist of the future must study in the schools of both Mr Stubbs and Sir Henry Maine, as well as in that of Mr Mill'.1 Before exploring some of the implications of this challenge, with its apparent reversal or at least modification of political economy's paradigmatic status, we want to contrast a further pair of quotations. 'We shall never have a supply of competent politicians until political science - that is, roughly, political economy and history together - are made a prominent part of the higher education.' 2 Whatever other reservations the audience for Seeley's Cambridge Inaugural may have felt at his brazen exploitation of the occasion, the almost casual reference to the political bearing of political economy would, one can be sure, have excited little comment. But even the unreflective assumptions of Cambridge audiences are not immune to change, and in little more than twenty years' time they could have been confronted with the quieter but no less authoritative assertion that 'from whatever point of view we look at it, political economy is best described as a social science; and if a distinction is drawn between social and political sciences, it must, notwithstanding its name, be regarded as belonging to the former, and not to the latter, category. For 1 2

T. E. Cliffe Leslie, Essays in Moral and Political Philosophy (London, 1879), p. vi. J. R. Seeley, 'The Teaching of Polities', in Lectures and Essays (London, 1870), p. 305. 249

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while the science has sometimes to take account of political and legal conditions, it is essentially concerned with man in his social as distinguished from his political relations.' Advocates of the claims of social science were not wanting even before the 1890s, though the academic precision, and punctuation, of this passage hardly suggest one of its crankier evangelists; but the brisk dismissal of political economy from the category of the 'political' sciences strikes a note which would have sounded distinctly eccentric earlier in the century. The significance of this kind of classificatory diktat should not be exaggerated, but it may seem to support the case for saying that by the time political economy lost its adjective, its practitioners had willingly surrendered their right to it. If these quotations did no more than illustrate that in the last three decades of the century orthodox deductive political economy was confronted with damaging challenges to both the scientific status of its method and the practical purchase of its conclusions, then their interest would soon be exhausted: that is a story which has been well and frequently told by historians of economic thought. 3 But our four quotations do, in addition, suggest some of the complexities that arise from considering the relation of political economy to the various forms of the aspiration for a science of politics during this period. That relation was neither simple nor arbitrary, and the authorship of our two unattributed quotations may begin to suggest some of the complications involved. For our opening sentence comes not in fact from Mill but rather from the figure whom Cliffe Leslie credited with paternity of the rival and superior method - Sir Henry Maine;4 while the passage classing political economy as a social science is taken not from some Spencerian or Comtean proponent of sociology, but from the sober pages of J. N. Keynes's The Scope and Method of Political Economy, in which, it has long been agreed, 'he managed to sum up the methodological thinking of a whole generation of economists'. 5 Of course, the clear outlines of any story can be muddied if one's juggling with quotations is sufficiently unscrupulous, but in the present case the quotations are by no means obscure or taken out of context, and the rest of this essay will attempt to show that the exploration of the themes they raise is not unrewarding. 3

4 5

The classic discussion is T. W. Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines 18/0-1929 (Oxford, 1953); for a survey of the recent literature, see the helpful article by Gerard M. Koot, 'English historical economics and the emergence of economic history in England', History of Political Economy, 12(1980), 174—205. H. S. Maine, Popular Government (London, 1885), p. 58. J. N . Keynes, The Scope and Method of Political Economy (London, 1891), p. 89; Mark Blaug, The Methodology of Economics, or How Economists Explain (Cambridge, 1980), p. xii.

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Stated baldly, those themes reduce to two, both prominent in the controversies of what, even by the standards of economists, was a controversy-ridden period. The first concerns the extent to which political economy remained, methodologically speaking, the paradigmatic moral science, as opposed to becoming merely one application of a far broader historical approach which was now coming to pervade the whole range of these studies; the second involves the ways in which these methodological disputes themselves turned on wider differences about the political nature and practical bearings of the subject. These questions are, at best, touched on only obliquely by those standard, rather narrowly conceived, histories of economic theory which recount how the Ricardian orthodoxy of Mill and Cairnes, the last classical economists, was challenged, first, by Comtist or German-inspired rejections of its deductive method and, second, and ultimately far more damagingly, by the re-casting of its theorems in the mathematical language of marginalism. In effect, it is with the first of these challenges, albeit differently characterised, that the present essay is concerned, while the second, and more particularly Marshall's response to it, re-surfaces in Essay x below. But the different characterisation is crucial, for more than method was at issue in the English Methodenstreit, an episode whose significance was by no means confined to the history of economic theory. Indeed, that comes to seem an impoverishing and even downright misleading context when one discovers that of the leading participants in this episode Cliffe Leslie regarded himself primarily as a disciple of Maine, Ashley of Stubbs, and Cunningham of, in more or less equal measure, F. D. Maurice, T. H. Green, and Seeley. But this is to anticipate, and however selective a story one is willing to tell to reach that point, there is no doubt about where one must begin. All students . . . see the whole subject with Mill's eyes. They see in Ricardo and Adam Smith what he told them to see, and it is not easy to induce them to see anything else. Whether it has been altogether good for political economy that a single writer should have so monarchial an influence may be argued, but no testimony can be greater to the ability of that writer and his pre-eminence over his contemporaries.6

The familiarity of Bagehot's obituary encomium is a tribute to the qualities of his writing rather than to anything original in the judgement itself. Even before Mill died in 1873, it had become a commonplace that the economists of that generation were 'men of one book', Jevons's protest only 6

Walter Bagehot, 'John Stuart Mill', first published in the Economist (1873), reprinted in his Economic Studies, edited by R. H. Hutton (London, 1880), quotation at p. 215.

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confirming a situation which the obituarists celebrated.7 And yet it soon became clear that the extraordinary hegemony of Mill's Principles had obscured many of the central questions about the scope and method of the subject rather than resolving them: as the waves of criticism broke over the great edifice in the 1870s, cracks appeared so abundantly as to cause wonder that it had ever stood at all. Open season was declared for the hunting down of inconsistencies in Mill's economic writings. In particular, the change from the austere conception of an abstract and hypothetical science worked out in his famous methodological essay of 1836, to the embrace of all sorts of historical and political issues within the capacious limits of his treatise twelve years later, was taken by unsympathetic critics to be fatal to the continued existence of political economy as anything resembling an autonomous discipline.8 Cairnes's more judicious and better-illustrated exposition of the classical position helped to smooth over some of these difficulties, and his remained the recommended text well into the 1880s until superseded by Keynes's. 9 But in effect the 1870s had already seen the unseating of Mill from the throne of political economy, with rival factions contending for the succession, a group of loyalists attempting a restoration, and a few zealots pressing for something altogether more republican and even federal. One, not particularly original, way to characterise part of this process would be to say that Maine was being called in to remedy the defects of Ricardo. Invocations of Maine's name (if not always of much else) by political economists certainly abounded - further indication, were any needed, of the immense prestige and unimpeachable respectability of his achievement which we remarked in Essay vn above. Cliffe Leslie, to choose an obvious example, memorably credited Maine with inspiring his 7

8

9

Foxwell's remark about 'men of one book' occurs in his Preface to the 1889 edition of Menger's Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, quoted in A. W. Coats, T h e historist reaction in English political economy 1870-1890', Economical 21 (1954), 144; for Jevons's protest against 'the noxious influence of authority' see the concluding pages of his The Theory of Political Economy (London, 1871); and on the whole question of the remarkable success of Mill's Principles, see N . B. de Marchi, 'The success of Mill's Principles', History of Political Economy, 6(1974), 119-57. The importance of this widely remarked change led to a more careful scrutiny of the development of Mill's thinking on this subject, the results of which were summarised by F. Y. Edgeworth in his entry on Mill in the second volume of Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy (London, 1896), and in Ashley's long introduction to his edition of Mill's Principles (London, 1909). J. E. Cairnes, The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy (London, 1857); a second, and very extensively revised, edition was published in 1875, and this edition was reprinted in 1888. The 1965 reprint makes for confusion because it calls the 1875 version the 'first edition' and the 1888 version the 'second edition', though the prefaces it reprints as belonging to those editions are in fact the prefaces of 1857 and 1875 respectively. The standing, and some of the difficulties, of Cairnes's book are well dealt with in S. G. Checkland, 'Economic opinion in England as Jevons found it', Manchester School, 19 (1951), esp. 161-6.

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own assault on deductive political economy;10 but it is instructive to see that even Jevons, not generally regarded as a champion of the historical method, allowed that 'in the fascinating works of Sir Henry Maine . . . there is much historical enquiry bearing upon economic science', and he conceded that historical investigation 'may very properly do for political economy what Sir Henry Maine has done for jurisprudence'.11 Citing Maine, Ashley later summed up what he, with partisan optimism, saw as the permanent transformation of the subject: 'from the lawyers the historical method passed to the economists'.12 At the same time it became newly fashionable to single out Ricardo as chiefly responsible for the defects of orthodox political economy. This was partly a consequence of the emphasis upon its inadequate method: though very diverse portraits of both Smith and Mill were painted to suit the polemical convenience of the moment, it was difficult to present either the Wealth of Nations or the Principles of Political Economy as the work of a thoroughgoing deductivist. Ricardo prompted no such inhibitions. Indeed, those, like Cliffe Leslie and even Marshall, who wanted to rescue an 'historical' Mill from the debris of the break-up of classical political economy were always willing to blame the inescapably a priori elements in his work upon the legacy he inherited from Ricardo. It also became common, again partly as a result of Maine's example, to account for Ricardo's method in terms of the influence of Utilitarian moral and political philosophy, especially in the austere and extreme form given to it by James Mill. (This was one of the important ways in which the controversies of this period coloured later attempts, such as Stephen's and Halevy's, to tell the story of the development of a single Utilitarian 'school'.) Not that all attacks on Ricardo had to involve attacks on Utilitarianism: the clearsighted Jevons objected on quite different grounds, and while insisting that 'Bentham's ideas' were the starting point for his own theory, he could still blame Ricardo for having 'shunted the car of Economic science on to a wrong line'.13 But in general the Ricardian vice was equated with excessive deductivism. The reductio of the whole procedure was reached with Marshall's attempt to show that the 'true' line of succession of English political economy (of which he wished to be seen as the rightful heir) had never in fact been given over to such unalloyed deductivism: 'the faults and 10

11 12 13

On Cliffe Leslie, see the passage quoted below, p. 262; cf. also his remark 'my line was taken ten years before I ever saw a German book on economics. So far as my method is taken from anyone, it is taken from Sir Henry Maine.' Quoted in Anon., 'Political and economical heterodoxy: Cliffe Leslie', Westminster Review, 64 (1883), 492. W. S. Jevons, 'The Future of Political Economy* (1876), reprinted in his The Principles of Economics, edited by Henry Higgs (London, 1905), quotations at pp. 193—5. W. J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, Part 1 (London, 1888), p. ix. Jevons, Theory (2nd edn, London, 1879), pp. xvii, lvii.

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virtues of Ricardo's mind are traceable to his Semitic origin; no English economist has had a mind similar to his'. 14 However, it would be too simple to infer from this constant contrasting of Maine and Ricardo that in reality the choice for political economy in this period lay between subsumption into the general application of the comparative method or attachment to the model of deductive Utilitarianism. One complication which, recalling the opening quotation of this essay, must be registered immediately is that Maine himself by no means endorsed a complete rejection of either the method or the practical purchase of orthodox political economy. In fact in 1875 he complained, possibly irritated by the frequent citations of his work, that 'all kinds of irrelevant charges, or charges weak to puerility, have been brought against political economy'. From these he dissociated himself with characteristic firmness: T h e science consists of deductions from the assumption that certain motives act on human nature without check or clog. There can be no question of the scientific propriety of its method, or of the greatness of some of its practical achievements.' 15 Moreover, he did not flinch from regarding attempts to fix wages and prices in earlier periods of English history as 'false political economy', 16 an endorsement of its transhistorical truth which indicates his distance from, say, Cunningham or Ashley. Maine was perhaps too prone to disclaim responsibility for the uses to which others put his ideas: increasingly alarmed at the course of English domestic politics, he was loath to countenance any ideas which might be taken to undermine the intellectual basis of Individualism. The core of his criticism of political economy was the practical and fairly precise one that some of the conditions assumed in its reasoning were not to be found in primitive societies. Here, as elsewhere, he was partly animated by the practical administrator's irritation with the attempts to apply doctrinaire 'Manchesterism' in the government of India. 17 Strictly speaking, he did not altogether deny the applicability of economic reasoning even to India. His chapter in Village Communities on 'The early history of price and rent', though primarily concerned to show that a society still based on kinship and other communal groups knew not the idea of rent as Ricardo understood it, did not deny that a primitive form of market, together with the appropriate form of economic behaviour, was 14 15

16 17

Alfred Marshall, 'The Present Position of Economies' (1885), reprinted in A. C. Pigou (ed.), Memorials ofAlfred Marshall (London, 1925), quotation at p. 153. H. S. Maine, 'The Effects of the Observation of India upon European Thought' (1875), reprinted in the 2nd edition of his Village Communities in the East and West (London, i875)(istedn, 1871), quotation at p. 232. Maine, Village Communities, p. 191. For details, see George Feaver, From Status to Contract: A Biography of Sir Henry Maine 1822-1888 (London, 1969).

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discernible there; understandably, the chapter became a favourite source for later figures like Keynes and Marshall who wanted to insist that custom was often 'a disguised form of slow-moving competition'. 18 And even the well-known passage in his Rede lecture reproaching political economists for underrating the power of 'that great body of custom and inherited ideas which . . . they throw aside as "friction"', ended with the affirmation that 'the best corrective which could be given to this disposition would be a demonstration that this "friction" is capable of scientific analysis and scientific measurement; and that it will be shown to be capable of it I myself firmly believe*.19 Above all, Maine still regarded the 'great deductive science of political economy' as an important repository of truths in domestic politics. His own account of social evolution made the conditions assumed by political economy the hallmarks of a progressive society, and he was always willing to draw upon this to point an Individualist moral. In attacking Gladstone's proposed Irish legislation in 1880, for example, he testily asserted that 'appeals to the land systems of other countries, and demonstrations of the points in which they differ from our own, are absolutely irrelevant'. In a nicely reversible statement of the connection between political economy and his account of progress, he first argued that 'liberty of contract and sacredness of ownership are the starting point of the science of political economy and of the science of legislation', so that to attack them was to attack 'the very basis of all scientific enquiry into human action'; and then, with a splendidly disingenuous piece of self-citation (the article was unsigned), that 'learned men have given reasons' for thinking that the development and security of private property in land provides 'a standard by which advance in civilization can be measured'. 20 As ever, the attempt to frame a sociological generalisation of this sort can have the effect of both seeming to relativise a phenomenon hitherto assumed to be universal, and at the same time making it impossible to see how an alteration of present circumstances could be anything but a retrogression. When thinking of fresh-faced Indian officials equipped with little more than a dogmatic understanding of Austin and Ricardo, Maine tended to favour the first effect; but when confronted by Gladstone's attack on property and contractual relations, he naturally allowed the second to seem the conclusion of impartial science. Another example of the way in which an influential circumscription of 18

19 20

Alfred Marshall, The Principles of Economics ( L o n d o n , 1890), p. 14; Keynes, Scope and Method, p p . 2 9 1 - 2 . For a fuller discussion of Marshall's views o n this subject, see b e l o w , p. 325. Maine, 'Effects of the Observation of India', p . 233. 'Property, Contract, and the Prosperity of England', St James' Gazette, 2 August 1880, 867.

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the universality of the axioms of political economy could be undercut by an account of the direction of social progress is provided by a figure whose cast of mind was not as dissimilar to Maine's as their subsequent reputations might suggest. Bagehot's The Postulates of English Political Economyy first published in article form in 1876, is one of those texts which have had significance conferred on them far more by their timing and authorship than by any startling originality in their content. That Bagehot, author of Lombard Street and editor of The Economist, should declare that even the most distinguished writers on the subject 'do not understand that the world which our political economists treat of is a very limited and peculiar world' seemed a significant retraction of the traditional claims of the enterprise, and his essays were widely quoted as such in the next decade. 21 What Bagehot had actually argued, casting a characteristically canny eye on the possible consequences of a general loss of public confidence in political economy, was that the science 'has often been put forward, not as a theory of the principal causes affecting wealth in certain societies, but as a theory of the principal, and sometimes even of all, the causes affecting wealth in every society'. As a corrective to this, he insisted that it dealt only with the main causes of wealth 'in a single kind of society - a society of grown-up competitive commerce such as we have in England'. (This led him to his cumbrously positivistic definition of the subject as 'the science of business, such as business is in large and productive trading communities'.) He then went on to argue, in an account which was obviously indebted to his own Physics and Politics, that the greater part of mankind lived in societies which were so guided by custom and habit as to count as what, in a not very happy phrase, he called '^-economical societies'. However, he also made clear that once the cake of custom had crumbled, other forms of cultural variety were no obstacle to the applicability of the reasonings of political economy (we shall return to the presumptively exhaustive character of this distinction between 'customary' and 'economic' behaviour below, since it was by no means confined to Bagehot). For thereafter 'local peculiarities and ancient modifying circumstances fall away' as commerce increasingly assumes the same shape in all 'economical societies'. At this point, Bagehot's robust horse-sense set pretty close limits on his relativism: 'As "men of the world" are the same everywhere, so the great commerce is the same everywhere.' In analysing such a society, he affirmed, the concepts of political economy are 'certain and useful', and his unfinished book was precisely an attempt to show how, within these not very stringent limits, the teachings of English 21

Walter Bagehot, 'The Postulates of English Political Economy' (1876), reprinted in Economic Studies, quotation at p. 6.

Political economy and the historical method

25 7

political economy did indeed deserve their traditional status. 22 The enthusiastic terms in which he celebrated political economy's hundredth birthday hardly suggest that Bagehot wanted to see its role in public affairs significantly diminished by the 'new sciences' which he recognised were threatening its standing in the 1870s: In that time it has had a wonderful effect: the life of almost everyone in England perhaps of every one - is different and better in consequence of it; the whole commercial policy of the country is not so much founded on it as instinct with it; ideas which are paradoxes elsewhere in the world are accepted axioms here as results of it. N o other form of political philosophy has ever had one-thousandth part of the influence on us; its teachings have settled down into the common-sense of the nation and become irreversible.23

It is this note of satisfaction with the established political role of political economy which is so strikingly absent from the writings of the 'historical economists' (in continuing to use this label, bestowed by contemporaries, we do not mean to suggest that they in fact constituted a 'school', nor that they were united in adhering to any single and unambiguously historical method, still less that they ought unequivocally to be classed as economists). Their own political allegiances were diverse: Toynbee, for example, was an old-fashioned radical moralist, Cunningham a Tory Anglican nationalist, Ashley an 'evolutionary Socialist' (who, in a quite intelligible development, later became a Unionist tariff-reformer). But what they did have in common was a rejection of the traditional pieties of Liberal individualism, sometimes expressed as criticism of specific maxims such as laissez-faire or free trade, more often as a general antipathy to any attitude which appeared to view society as nothing more than the arena in which rational individuals pursued their (largely economic) selfinterest. With understandable exaggeration, they presented this as the prevailing 'orthodoxy': in contesting what they saw as its theoretical basis they were led into denying any notion of the overriding agency of 'natural' economic laws, and hence into challenging the autonomy and paradigmatic status of political economy itself. For present purposes, the chief interest of the historical school lies not so much in their well-known attack on the deductive method as in what may be seen as a reassertion of the primacy of political categories. In challenging the claims of political economy, whether in its Ricardian form or, increasingly, in its 'marginalist' guise, the first and most obvious step was to document the historical variety of forms of economic life and to exhibit the sequences in which they had developed. This enterprise, which drew upon some of the most fashionable intellectual preoccupations of the 22 23

Bagehot, 'Postulates', pp. 16, 17, 5, 20. Bagehot, 'Postulates', p. 1 (note that he calls it a form of 'political philosophy').

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1870s and 80s, not only suggested how narrowly applicable were the concepts of English political economy; it could also be used to relativise those features of present arrangements which had hitherto appeared the most 'natural' and immutable. As Foxwell, no extreme historicist, put it: 'It is competition which is transitional; and monopoly presents itself, not as something accidental, a stage through which we pass in a backward age, but as something more permanent, more fundamental, than competition itself.'24 Secondly, they devoted considerable scholarship to the history of economic thought, especially of remoter periods, in order to show that far from being simply a repository of error, judged by the standards of postSmithian truth, the economic doctrines of earlier periods had been appropriate to the conditions of their times. This could have a more than historical force: just as the doctrines of medieval canonists or Tudor commonwealthmen were accorded a relative truth, so were the teachings of classical political economy, which were presented as no less appropriate to the circumstances of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They had performed valuable service in their day, but their day was now over. The studied casualness of Ashley's reference to them in 1893 as 'an interesting chapter of modern thought' made the point clearly enough. 25 Thirdly, they explored the close, reciprocal relationship between economic theory and economic policy, often taking their cue from the achievements of the new generation of constitutional historians. One conclusion with immediate polemical purchase which they derived from this history was that laissez-faire did not constitute a non-political deduction from an analysis of natural economic forces: it was revealed as no less a policy, a decision about the national interest and how best to further it by political means, than, say, Elizabethan Settlement Laws or seventeenthcentury Navigation Acts. To a surprising extent - surprising, that is, given the view of the historical economists which sees them purely as an episode in the history of economic methodology - this argument was largely conducted through re-interpretations of episodes of the nation's history. It is surely significant that the founding works of the group confine themselves to English economic history - Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, Thorold Rogers's A History ofAgriculture and Prices in England, Cunningham's The Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Ashley's An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory (even Cliffe Leslie's major work was to have been on 'English economic and legal 24 25

H . S. Foxwell, 'The G r o w t h of M o n o p o l y and its Bearing o n the Functions of the State' (1888), reprinted in Papers on Current Finance (London, 1919), quotation at p . 264. W . J . Ashley, ' O n the Study of Economic History', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 7 (1893), I 2 4 -

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history'). 26 This constituted a significant recession from the comparatist sociological ambition of Maine, and in terms of the remark by Cliffe Leslie cited at the opening of this essay, it indicates that the model provided by Stubbs may need to be distinguished from that provided by Maine. As economic questions became more prominent in contemporary politics, so economic history, a beneficiary of this increased interest, became freighted with the kind of significance which had always made writing political history a delicate matter. Understandably, the national history offered the richest vein for such partisan quarrying. Thorold Rogers was in several ways an intellectually eccentric figure, and his kind of belligerent populist radicalism did not endear him to the educated classes; but with only slight changes of emphasis, all the historical economists concurred in his aspiration to rescue the nation's economic history from what he regarded as tendentious neglect: 'The knowledge of what a nation's industry and economy have been, the discovery of the processes by which the facts and purposes of the past have been developed into the habits, the traditions, the pursuits, and the energies of the present, is the true history of the race.' 27 Insofar as any general account of English economic history had been pre-supposed in classical political economy, it had amounted to little more than the local chapter in that universal social evolutionary story of the emergence of economic rationality and a free market from the murky confines of custom, privilege, and mistaken ideas about the nature of wealth. Seen thus, the turning-point, after the immobility of the Middle Ages and the misguided fumblings of Tudor and Stuart Parliaments, came with the triumph of economic liberty in the late eighteenth century, a triumph in which the teachings of Adam Smith were taken to have played an effective and entirely laudable causal role. As usual, this popular account involved a considerable simplification of the handling of history, such as it was, in the works of the leading classical political economists, but by the middle of the century an account of this sort formed a counterpart to the Whig interpretation of English constitutional history, with the parts of liberty and Parliament being played by enterprise and the market. The historical economists modified this account in several ways. Perhaps the most fundamental, though least explicit, was that they effectively took it out of its evolutionary frame. The analytical enterprise of Ricardian 26 27

J . K. Ingram, 'Biographical Sketch', prefixed t o Cliffe Leslie, Essays, 2nd edn, p . xi; see text t o n. 35 below. J . E. T h o r o l d Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages ( L o n d o n , 1884), p . 301. F o r brief discussions of T h o r o l d Rogers, see Koot, 'English historical economies', and N . B . de Marchi, ' O n the early dangers of being t o o political an economist: T h o r o l d Rogers and the 1868 election t o the D r u m m o n d Professorship', Oxford Economic Papers, 28 (1976), 364-80.

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political economy depended upon drawing a very sharp distinction between the model of economically rational action and the 'checking' or 'clogging' power of habit and custom. This could easily be transposed into the idiom of social evolution in its simplest form: as, in Bagehot's phrase, 'local peculiarities and ancient modifying circumstances fall away', market relations increasingly hold sway, and it was certainly not difficult to see English economic history from the Middle Ages to the repeal of the Corn Laws in terms of such a scheme. But at the heart of the historical school's criticism was a denial that this distinction could be made, at least in anything like its straightforward form: all economic activity was, to a greater or lesser extent, customary and, within the limits of these customs, rational, its forms varying with the variety of historical circumstances in which it was found and had to be studied. Moreover, although not unresponsive to the charms of large-scale historical patterns, the members of this group deliberately tended, as we remarked earlier, to concentrate on English history alone. Even Ashley, the least insular, could remark tartly when contesting the dominant view, which leaned heavily on comparative evidence, that common ownership by free village-communities had been the original form of property-holding in England: 'We see then that there is no very adequate reason, either in German, Indian, Russian, or any other supposed analogies, why we should not suffer ourselves to be guided in our judgement as to England by English evidence.' 28 Within the confines of the national history, they then provided a rather different assessment of its crucial episodes. They rehabilitated the Middle Ages - a period whose stock had, for quite other reasons, already been rising in the markets of moral and aesthetic appreciation - extolling the virtues of security, communal responsibility, and the moral regulation of economic activity. They painted an unfashionably favourable portrait of the Mercantilist era, which had naturally been held in low esteem since the triumph of Smithianismus, arguing that a far-sighted appreciation of the national interest in the period of commercial rivalry with the Dutch and French underlay the much-derided economic legislation of the time, and that it was thanks to this policy that Britain had initally been able to build up that economic strength which later allowed her to benefit from the much-lauded introduction of free trade. Most dramatically of all, they attempted to reverse the historical reputation of the very period which saw the triumph of free trade and laissez-faire. Toynbee, who led the way in both christening and condemning the Industrial Revolution, explicitly linked his damning account to a denunciation of 'the old political 28

Fustel de Coulanges, The Origin of Property in Land, with an introductory chapter on the English Manor by W. J. Ashley (London, 1891), p. xxi.

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economy', to which he assigned an important share of the responsibility, 29 and Cunningham, Ashley and others followed suit. Although their accounts differed in all sorts of ways, not least in the degree of blame they attached to the various social classes, they all identified the period as one in which the traditional restraints on dealings between economic unequals were swept away as the state abdicated its proper regulatory role. A preoccupation with the state - the term itself having acquired a new prominence in late nineteenth-century political thought - pervaded their economic history, emerging particularly clearly in their contrasting evaluations of the Mercantilist and free trade eras. It was one of the ways in which their historical interests overlapped with, for example, Seeley's - in both cases an identification of external policy as the prime expression of the life of the state owing something to an intimacy with German historiography. 30 And just as their retrospective condemnation of laissez-faire as an all-sufficient guide to domestic policy was not without its implication for the decades in which Individualism went on to the defensive, so, too, their appreciative account of earlier attempts to defend and promote the national interest carried its lesson in the economically and militarily increasingly competitive world of the late nineteenth century. In fact, the political conclusions to be drawn from this re-working of English history were various, and we have already done violence to the heterogeneity of the views involved by presenting them as the common doctrine of a school. But for present purposes, the interest of this episode of historical criticism lies not so much in the detail of the political allegiances of the various protagonists, as in the general tendency of their work to re-assert the primacy of political categories. From this distance, it is too easily assumed that the advocacy of a method which seemed to concentrate on the 'underlying* patterns of historical change would always tend to circumscribe the area in which political agency could be presumed to have an effective role. With the historical economists, on the contrary, it was precisely the a-historical universalism of classical political economy which they regarded as threatening the exercise of political judgement and crippling the action of governments. In terms of the second pair of quotations contrasted at the opening of this essay, they stood closer to Seeley than to Keynes in their estimation of the political character of political economy. At the same time, it was economic history to which they devoted their attention, indicating their sense of the inadequacy, especially as an 29 30

Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1884), pp. 1-26. For Seeley, see above, pp. 225—34 and the references cited there. Significantly, his o w n work dealt primarily with the high mercantilist period; see especially the introduction to his The Growth of British Policy (London, 1895), where he justified the importance of his chosen period in terms of a history of 'policy*.

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education for the political needs of the present, of those historical analyses which remained within the confines of kings, constitutions, and national characters. Any selection of examples to illustrate these points must be somewhat arbitrary; to make this quite explicit, we shall confine ourselves within the obviously artificial limits provided by one preface, two editions, and three lectures. The figure generally considered to have inaugurated the attempt to draw upon the method of Maine to remedy the defects of that of Ricardo was Cliffe Leslie. His best-known announcement of this programme occurred in the Preface to the collection of essays which he published in 1879 under the revealing title of Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy', and what we have to say about him here can almost take the form of a commentary on this passage, which merits quotation in full. The author desires gratefully to acknowledge that Mr Mill, though not concurring in all his views, always warmly encouraged his endeavours to bring the light of inductive research to bear upon the problems of political and moral philosophy. Whatever differences exist between Mr Mill's treatment of some of those problems and his own - for example, in relation to the Utilitarian theory of morals, and the economic theories of profits and prices - are, he believes, in a great measure attributable to the fact, that whereas Mr Mill in his youth attended the lectures of Mr Austin, the author had the good fortune to attend those of Sir Henry Maine at the Middle Temple, and to learn first from them the historical method of investigation, followed with such brilliant success in Ancient Law, Village Communities in the East and West, and the Early History of Institutions. Holding a Professorship of

both Jurisprudence and Political Economy, he was led to apply that method to the examination of economic questions, and to look at the present economic structure and state of society from Sir Henry Maine's point of view, as the result of a long evolution. Further investigation has convinced him that the English economist of the future must study in the schools of both Mr Stubbs and Sir Henry Maine, as well as in that of Mr Mill.31 The passage nicely pulls off the delicate task of parading Mill's imprimatur whilst at the same time making clear that the pupil, alert to more modern ideas, has improved upon the master. In the essays themselves, Cliffe Leslie is constantly, almost apologetically, explaining away Mill's regrettable attachment to the deductive method: hanging around with a disreputable crowd at an early age is, as usual, seen as the cause of later bad habits. It is perhaps a sign of the times that the method of classical political economy is, at least in Mill's cases, seen to derive from the influence of jurisprudence rather than the other way around. Equally, as we have already remarked, it suggests a certain crudity of categorising that 31

Cliffe Leslie, Essays, p. vi.

Political economy and the historical method

26}

Maine and Stubbs should be bracketed together: to suggest that Maine's method amounted to nothing more than looking upon social arrangements as 'the result of a long evolution' was surely to impoverish it, and in fact most of Cliffe Leslie's own work only really employed the comparative method in the literal sense of comparing, for example, different systems of land-holding in different countries of Europe at present. 32 One source of the appeal of Maine's work for Cliffe Leslie emerges in his enthusiastic review of Early History of Institutions, reprinted in this collection, where, as Mill had done with Maine's earlier volume on village communities, Cliffe Leslie reads a radical message about contemporary Irish land-holding into Maine's account of the mutability of concepts of property (by which its author was predictably irritated). 33 The other noteworthy feature of the passage, also reproduced in the essays themselves, is the way in which it mingles economic and political categories. Having already presented 'morals and political economy' as 'branches of the philosophy of society', he could here casually refer to 'the Utilitarian theory of morals' and 'economic theories of profits and prices' as among the 'problems of political and moral philosophy'. 34 Too much can be made of this, yet it is the sort of detail that helps us to place the essays in the appropriate tradition of discourse, and to remind us that they were, after all, originally contributions to those periodicals of general culture which flourished in the mid-Victorian years. Moreover, it suggests - some of his other writings certainly bear this out - that he was stirred as much by the consequences in contemporary political controversy of a generally Utilitarian style of arguing as by the failings of the deductive method of political economy narrowly considered. Still, it was his criticisms of the scope and method of political economy which brought Cliffe Leslie his brief hour of celebrity in the 1870s. At their most sweeping, they amounted to a denial of the possibility of any autonomous economic theory: he was willing to grant neither the uniformity of the motives and circumstances which it took as its axioms, nor the degree of abstraction from actual conditions which its subsequent 32 33

34

See, particularly, his Land Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England and Continental Countries (London, 1870). Leslie's review first appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1875; for Maine's response to such interpretations of his w o r k, see Feaver, Status to Contract, pp. 1 1 9 - 2 1 , 145-6; for Mill's similar use of Maine's work, see above, pp. 145-7. For a brief discussion of Cliffe Leslie's relation t o the politics of agrarian reform in Ireland, see Gerard M. K o o t , T . E. Cliffe Leslie, Irish social reform, and the origins of the English historical school of economies', History of Political Economy, 7 (1975), 312-36. It is interesting that w h e n Ingram and Bastable issued a second edition of the b o o k after Cliffe Leslie's death, they changed its title and substituted s o m e of his later essays o n e c o n o m i c subjects for s o m e of the more general pieces included in the first edition, among them his review of Maine, t o make it 'more suitable for students of economies'. T. E . Cliffe Leslie, Essays in Political Economy, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1888), Preface.

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reasoning involved. Since he never completed (or at least published - he claimed to have lost an entire manuscript) a systematic work, we can only infer from his substantive essays what kind of enquiry he would put in its place.35 Specified abstractly, it would seem to amount to a rather vaguely conceived historical sociology in which economic arrangements were related to shifts in taste, religious and moral values, political and legal arrangements, and so on. (As the first of our epigraphs illustrates, the unit remained, interestingly, the nation.) In practice it was more reminiscent of Tocqueville - and, of course, more immediately though less exactly of Mill - than of either Maine or Stubbs, especially in his analysis of the political benefits of la petite culture.^ For example, in his Cobden Club essay on T h e Land System of France', first published in 1870 and republished, at Gladstone's request, in 1881, he contrasted the immense concentration of landowning in England with the system of peasant proprietorship in France, taking care to point out that this was not, as had generally been assumed in England, the result of the break-up of the aristocratic estates after 1789, but had in fact long pre-dated the revolution. In what amounted to a warning to the English governing classes, he dwelt upon the contribution this made to political stability: 'One thing, at least, is established by it, that property in land is in France a national possession; that the territory of the nation belongs to the nation, and that no national revolution can take place for the destruction of private property.' 37 French political experience, as we saw in Essay vi above, constituted the chief modern sources for illustration of the disastrous consequences of allowing the polity to slide into a system of autocracy tempered by revolution. Self-consciously displaying the richer texture of analysis which embraced both economic and political conditions, Leslie neatly redirected this tradition of commentary into an argument in favour of la petite culture: Whoever reflects what the French rural population would be, on the one hand, under a land system like that of Ireland, or even England, and what its town population would be, on the other, if instead of being a third it were more than a half of the whole nation, and if instead of having a political counterpoise in the country it found there only a greater political ferment and discontent than its own, must surely pronounce that the land system of France is not only the salvation of 35 36

37

See Ingram, 'Biographical Sketch' prefixed to Cliffe Leslie, Essays, 2nd edn, p. xi; and text

to n. 16 above. Cf. the remark of Laveleye, Cliffe Leslie's Belgian counterpart: 'Tocqueville, in his b o o k o n D e m o c r a c y , has admirably s h o w n the effect of the equalitarian principle in politics; but he has n o t pointed o u t with equal clearness the economic consequences it is likely to entail; and these precisely absorb at the present day the attention of all those w h o can see and understand.' Emile de Laveleye, 'The Land System of Belgium and H o l l a n d ' , in J . W . Probyn (ed.), Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries. A Series of Essays Published

under the Sanction of the Cobden Club ( L o n d o n , 1881) (1st edn, 1870), p p . 4 8 4 - 5 . T. E. Cliffe Leslie, T h e Land System of France', Systems of Land Tenure, p . 293.

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that country itself, but one of the principal securities for the tranquility and economic progress of Europe.38 The bearings of this on English politics needed no emphasis in 1870 or, still less, in 1881. Even Cliffe Leslie's case, however, was more gradualist than radical. He saw orthodox political economy - Robert Lowe was the target here far more than Mill - as an obstacle to effecting the kinds of economic changes, especially in landholding, which were necessary in both England and Ireland as the balance of political power shifted. 'Great changes in English ideas with respect to the devolution and distribution of landed property will doubtless follow sooner or later a great change in the distribution of political power.' 39 Part of the force of his historical enquiries was an attempt to dispossess his political opponents of arguments derived either from some variant of natural right or from any unduly indulgent notion of the way in which all existing property arrangements were sanctioned by their functional role in social development. In his introduction to the English translation of Laveleye's Primitive Property, which signalled a revealing intellectual kinship, he particularly endorsed the Belgian's demonstration that 'the unequal distribution of landed property in the British Islands especially has been the result, in no small degree, not of social development or natural evolution in that sense, but of violence or usurpations in past times, and the maintenance down to our own time of a system of law derived from them'. 40 It was a point he was fond of repeating when justifying state 'interference' with existing property rights.41 It was as much because historical arguments still had such a coercive and sometimes even prescriptive force as because political economy, 'by lending the sanction of "science" to all established institutions and customs', 42 preempted certain kinds of proposals for change, that Cliffe Leslie became an 'historical economist'. He is a reminder that the forms of organised knowledge relevant to the consideration of political questions were not always to be found in studies of an explicitly political character. The two editions which provide the peg for our second example were those of William Cunningham's The Growth of English Industry and Commerce, probably the most widely used text of economic history in the forty years after its first publication in 1882. In the 1903 edition its author remarked that he had begun to devote himself to English economic history 38 39 40 41 42

Cliffe Leslie, 'Land System of France', p. 312. T. E. Cliffe Leslie, 'Introduction* to Emile de Laveleye, Primitive Property (London, 1878), p. xii. Cliffe Leslie, 'Introduction* to Laveleye, Primitive Property, p. xx. E.g., Cliffe Leslie, Land Systems, p. 122. Cliffe Leslie, Land Systems, p. 89.

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twenty-five years ago 'almost accidentally'.43 In fact, the subsequent lines of his career may well have been determined by the slightly weary realism of Sidgwick's reply to Foxwell's suggestion that the young Cunningham might teach for the Moral Sciences Tripos: 'I certainly would not encourage any promising young man to try to find an opening in Cambridge in this department. But C being here already, I should like to find him something to do if possible: and though your suggestion as to his proper function is not hastily to be rejected, I suppose there is even less demand, commercially speaking, for neo-Hegelian theology than for anti-Ricardian economics.'44 At all events, in 1878 Cunningham began to lecture on economic history; the field was in such a rudimentary state that the only way to provide students with the necessary textbook seemed, to the energetic and ambitious lecturer, to be to write one. The result was published in one volume in 1882 and grew to two rather different volumes in the second edition of 1890-2. This work, together with several controversial articles (including his celebrated attack on the historical portion of Marshall's Principles)^5 earned Cunningham a reputation as one of the most prominent spokesmen for historical economics in England; but while it is certainly true that he polemicised with vigour and tireless productivity against what he saw as the pretensions of classical and neoclassical economic theory, looking at his career as a whole one cannot help feeling that, intellectually if not practically, 'anti-Ricardian economics' always took second place to 'neo-Hegelian theology'. Nor can one fail to feel sympathy with Marshall's irritated conviction that analytical rigour and fine discriminations were not Cunningham's forte. In the 1870s, while still drawn to philosophy above all other pursuits, he was a devot of the sect of Green, though without, interestingly, even a vestigial allegiance to Liberal Individualism: as an Edinburgh undergraduate he had already been a supporter of Governor Eyre in 1867.46 Thereafter, the theology and the economics were mixed with generous measures of Maurice's Coleridgean moralism and even with a dash of Seeley's Staatstbeorie. The resulting amalgam was short on systematic theory but long on nationalist sentiment and moral uplift, a proportion which was maintained in his history. In the first edition of his book, Cunningham adopted a position which was similar to that of Maine and Bagehot discussed above: while denying 43 44 45 46

William C u n n i n g h a m , The Growth

of English Industry

bridge, 1903 (istedn, one vol., 1882)), 11, p. ix.

and Commerce,

2 vols. ( C a m -

H e n r y Sidgwick t o H . S. Foxwell, 2 September 1878: Foxwell Papers in the possession of M r R. D . Freeman. O n which see below p p . 324-5. See A u d r e y C u n n i n g h a m , William Cunningham, Teacher and Priest ( L o n d o n , 1950), chs. 1 and 2, esp. p . 50 for his relation to Green, 'the man w h o m I looked o n as m y master in all

that I care about in philosophy'.

Political economy and the historical method

i6y

the theorems of political economy any purchase on earlier periods, he accepted that from the late eighteenth century onwards they were a reliable guide to English economic history. 47 However, his antagonism to the presumptions of its theorists, and his overriding concern with the question of national interest were already hinted at, views which were spelt out more fully in his little book on Politics and Economics published three years later. This work, dedicated to Seeley, was intended to show that the historical method could be 'fruitful in results of practical value', something which he came to insist increasingly strongly a purely hypothetical science could never be. 48 In his self-consciously old-fashioned view, the subject was a practical study aimed at maximising national wealth, in which 'pure theory' could only play a very limited role: the requirements of a 'particular polity' would always be paramount. And, as we have already observed, the authority of political economy in the present was undermined the more it was presented as intimately tied to the conditions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 'If it worked well, relatively to very different social and political institutions, there must be a strong presumption that it would be unsuitable to the present condition of society.' In fact, the chief polemical thrust of the work was in a sense historiographical: it contained one chapter on the period when 'methods of pursuing wealth' were premised on allowing 'free play to individuals to pursue the course they preferred', and a quite separate chapter on 'economic principles for the present day', where the assumption that the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest automatically maximised the nation's wealth was said to be no longer tenable.49 In the course of the 1880s, partly no doubt as a consequence of his academic confrontation with Marshall, Cunningham became more aggressive still in his criticisms of political economy. He realised that one possible implication of post-Jevonian marginalism was a broadening of the scope of the subject; no longer confined to industrial societies or even to a competitive market, it could arrogate to itself the study of all measurable motives. Cunningham wanted to insist that the price of this increase in theoretical ambition was to reduce even further its purchase on practical problems. 'Political economy in its new-fashioned form gets beyond the old limitations, but only by becoming more and more of a formal science, 47 48

49

Cunningham, Growth, istedn, p. 8. William Cunningham, Politics and Economics: An Essay on the Nature of the Principles of Political Economy, together with a Survey of Recent Legislation (London, 1885), p. viii. F o r a representative attack o n h o w , in dealing with great national problems, 'we get n o direct help from current economic science with its elaborate discussion of the mechanism of exchange and the measurement of individual motives', see William C u n n i n g h a m , 'The Relativity of Economic D o c t r i n e ' , Economic Journal, 2 (1892), 13. C u n n i n g h a m , Politics and Economics, p p . 14, 16; chs. 4 and 5 passim.

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the relations of which with actual life are more vague and indefinite than ever.' He accordingly confined the science to the purely logical enterprise of deducing a series of timeless relations between axioms, denying altogether that it was appropriate to speak of 'causes' in political economy any more than it was in geometry. Thus gelded, the pure science could be put out to pasture, stripped of its authority to pronounce even upon problems of economic policy.50 The second edition of the Growth of English Industry, entirely re-cast and now in two volumes, reflected this more aggressive posture, and not only in its caustic remarks about the overweening ambitions of 'doctrinaire economists'. In his accompanying attack on Marshall he explicitly recanted his earlier view that economic theory could guide analysis of the modern period of English history, 51 and the organisation of the second edition now reflected more thoroughly his belief that 'the economic history of a nation cannot be clearly followed unless it is habitually regarded as a subordinate aspect of the life of the people. As a matter of fact, the economic development has been consciously and deliberately controlled in the supposed interest of the polity.' Accordingly, he made 'the national polity' more clearly the focus of the book and reigns its units of division, and his announced 'method' was now to begin each section by examining the political conditions of the age.52 Far from endorsing anything like an economic interpretation of history, his book became a vehicle for reminding his countrymen of the decisive role of politics: 'Our national polity is not the direct outcome of our economic conditions; whereas time after time, our industrial life has been directly and permanently affected by political affairs, and politics are more important than economics in English history.' 53 Predictably, Cunningham was most in-

50

51 52 53

William Cunningham, 'Why Had Roscher so Little Influence in England?', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 5 (1894), 7; William Cunningham, 'A Plea for Pure Theory', Economic Review, 2 (1892), 25-41, and the ensuing exchange with D . G. Ritchie, 359-77 and 538-44. William Cunningham, 'The Perversion of Economic History', Economic Journal, 2 (1892), 492. Cunningham, Growth, 2nd edn in two vols., 1890-2,11, pp. 4ft. Cunningham, Growth, 1, p. 8. Cf. also his contribution on 'The Teaching of Economic History', in F. W. Maitland et aL, Essays on the Teaching of History (Cambridge, 1901), esp. pp. 4 2 - 3 : 'There is doubtless the closest connection and interrelation between the institutional or religious development of a people and its material progress; but after all, the Body Politic with the institutions by which free men govern themselves, is a more admirable creation of Reason than the Economic Organism in which men cater for each other's needs. The development of the State is the final object of research; but the more thoroughly w e apply ourselves to political and constitutional history, the more necessary will it be at every point to take account of the results obtained by the study of Economic History. We may devote ourselves to this branch of work not as an end in itself, but because w e regard it as a necessary means for getting a clearer view of the actual develop-

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dulgent towards the policy-makers of the mercantilist period, most severe on the advocates of laissez-faire; after 1903 he became, no less predictably, a rabid Tariff Reformer.54 But although keen to topple political economy from its public and educational pedestal, and although insistent on the subordination of economic to political considerations, he was not in fact a supporter of the teaching of 'political science' to undergraduates - 'this so-called science' as he referred to it. (It is consonant with our earlier observation about the historical economists' focus on the national story that Cunningham proposed in 1897 to replace political science in the Tripos with further papers on English history.) This was partly a function of his never entirely successful struggle for academic Lebensraum, but partly also a suspicion of the educational value of the abstracting and classifying involved in such 'theoretical subjects'.55 For Cunningham's turn of mind was far from sociological. If, for all his invocations of Maine, Cliffe Leslie's affinities seem to lie rather with a figure like Tocqueville, so Cunningham, though obviously indebted to Roscher and the German historical school, appears more like a lesser Macaulay, evoking for his readers a sense of national greatness and collective destiny. While it had been the dubious achievement of Seeley to give two Inaugural lectures in which he proselytised for subjects other than those which he had been elected to profess, Ashley, the third of the historical economists to be touched on here, managed the rather more flexible feat of giving three lectures in the space of fourteen years each earnestly recommending the virtues of three apparently quite different subjects. Appointed the first Professor of Political Science at Toronto in 1888, he devoted his lecture to the very good question 'What is Political Science?'; passing to the newly created chair of Economic History at Harvard in 1893, n e nefcl forth on the merits of 'The Study of Economic History'; and on taking up the first Chair of Political Economy and Commerce at Birmingham in 1901 he addressed himself to the benefits of 'Commercial Education'. As might be expected, these variations owed more to the need to adapt to turns of fortune in his career than to any dramatic changes in his

54

55

ment of the State. We may recognize its real importance without regarding it as supreme; w e may take account of economic forces, while w e decline to admit that the pressure of physical needs has been the main factor in determining the course of human affairs.' There is a brief discussion of Cunningham and Tariff Reform in Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895-1914 (London, i960), ch. 10. See his contribution to a discussion of the Historical Tripos in the Cambridge University Reporter, 16 April 1909. See also Cunningham, William Cunningham, pp. 66-8; Jean O . McLachlan, 'The origin and early development of the Cambridge Historical Tripos', Cambridge Historical Journal, 9 (1947), esp. p. 93; John Maloney, 'Marshall, C u n ningham, and the emerging economics profession', Economic History Review, 29 (1976), 440-51.

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convictions, though it casts an interesting light on the academic categories of the time that one man could be thought suitable to occupy these diversely labelled posts. That two of them were overseas is also a reminder that Ashley was the least parochial of scholars, and although, like the other historical economists, he did not owe his initial impulse to economic history directly to German influence, by the 1890s he became by far the best-informed amongst them about the work of the German school, not only that of its founders, Roscher and Knies, but also that of the second generation under the leadership of Schmoller (to whom he dedicated a collection of essays published in 1900).56 But it was Oxford that left the strongest stamp on him, and English history that stirred his deepest responses, scholarly and political alike. Given his later activities as an evangelist for the benefits, in an increasingly complex and competitive economic world, of commercial education, it may seem somewhat incongruous that Ashley should have attributed the dominant role in his early intellectual formation to Stubbs (and only thereafter to Toynbee). 57 Yet in the decade before he left for Toronto Ashley had been a student, coach, and tutor in the Oxford History School, and he had at first particularly devoted himself to expounding and extending Stubbs's Constitutional History of England, which was then setting the scholarly pace in the most fashionable area of historical research. The social and economic bias of Ashley's contemporary interests - here he shared Toynbee's enthusiasms - led him to a slightly unorthodox approach to constitutional history: it was characteristic that his contribution to a volume of essays by young Oxford tutors intended to make Stubbs's findings more accessible should have been on 'Feudalism' (and that in it he should make the un-Stubbsian remark that a danger of such history was that 'we are only too apt to think of "constitutional development" and to forget the condition of the people'). 58 The deeper attractions of these studies were touched upon in a letter written in the same year: Perhaps I can't clearly explain why in particular I am drawn to Constitutional History', although after all 'constitutional' is only another side of 'social' and is meaningless without i t . . . In 'constitutional' history, one is bound constantly to generalize, to try to discover the meaning of institutions, their growth and decay, their relation to one another. And thus one gets into the way of regarding the whole of human history as having a meaning, as not being purposeless, as moving to some 56

57

58

W . J. Ashley, Surveys Historic and Economic (London, 1900), p.v; see also his article on T h e Historical School of Economists' in Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, 11 (London, 1896). Ashley, Ashley, p p . 18, 21; for a statement of his indebtedness to Toynbee, see H . W. McCready, 'Sir William Ashley: some imprinted letters', Journal of Economic History, 15 (95S)>35 () Henry Offley Wakeman and Arthur Hassall (eds.), Essays Introductory to the Study of English Constitutional History (London, 1887), quotation at p. i n .

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goal. To see that this is true in such little bits of history as one knows, makes one hope that it is true in those facts nearer our own times - where we are too near the events and have too little information to be able to judge.59 Calling himself an 'evolutionary Socialist', Ashley had a decided view upon the 'way' human history was 'moving' in the present, which gave a particular political resonance to his work on English medieval history, a theme which recurred in each of his department-founding lectures. The connection was clearest in his contribution to the long-drawn-out dispute over the original form of property in land in England. The theory of the mark or village community of freemen who owned land in common had, as we have seen, become the received view in the 1880s through the work of Maine, Freeman, Stubbs and other 'Germanists', a theory deriving in part from reliance upon the comparative method in using German and Indian evidence.60 In the 1880s this view was strongly challenged as far as the interpretation of the English sources was concerned, above all by Seebohm and Fustel de Coulanges who argued that in England, at least, the great estate or manor had been the primary form. Far from subsequent history marking a decline from some primitive state of pristine freedom, 'English economic history', Seebohm roundly declared, 'begins with the serfdom of the masses under Saxon rule.' 61 It was this interpretation which Ashley endorsed in the first chapter of his Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, and he continued to snipe at the 'dogma' of the mark theory in his essays and reviews of the next decade. Alert to its political resonances, he anticipated a time when 'the theory of the mark and of the Free Village Community will be looked back upon as a curious aberration in historical scholarship, due to the unexpected influence of contemporary political liberalism';62 much of the zest with which he espoused Seebohm's revisionist view may, as his daughter surmised, have been due 'to the fact that the alternative picture of a free corporate farming community which had degenerated was not in accordance 59

60 61

62

Quoted in Ashley, Ashley', p. 33. Interestingly, in his Harvard Inaugural seven years later he justified economic history on the grounds of its contribution to 'a more satisfying and intelligible conception of the evolution of human society. . . . How far we still are from any such unifying conception of history I need hardly say, least of all to those who have tried in vain to satisfy their hunger with the husks of "Sociology".' Ashley, 'Study of Economic History', 135-6. See above, p p . 218—19, and the references there cited. Frederic Seebohm, The English Village Community (1884), quoted in Ashley, English Economic Historyp, p . 5; see also Ashley's introduction to Fustel de Coulanges' Origin of Property in Land, cited at n. 28, above; and his survey of the historiography in ' T h e H i s t o r y of English Serfdom', Economic Review (1893), reprinted in Surveys, esp. p p . 39-43Ashley, Surveys, p . viii; he made this point again in his essay o n Freeman, reprinted in the same volume, p p . 432—9.

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with his philosophy of history'. 63 This made the national story again the prime focus: he hoped that some of his later studies might 'help to correct the mischief wrought by the "comparative method"'. 64 The tenor of his work during this period was nicely caught in the conjunction of the two questions whose solution, he suggested in his Toronto lecture, would go far towards justifying the work of the economic historian: the first was this problem of ascertaining 'whether English history begins with a population of serfs or of freemen', and the second was the difficulty of getting 'a true and not a rose-coloured view of the conditions of industry which preceded the advent of the factory'.65 In both cases, the shoulder of historical scholarship could be put to the wheel of social progress by helping to dissolve obstructive myths of a 'golden age'. He was no less explicit in his Harvard Inaugural: Economic history is intimately bound up with modern discussions. This is a consequence of that peculiarly English and American trait, the love of precedent. To what is called the 'Anglo-Saxon' mind the fact that such and such conditions existed in the past is itself a strong reason why they should be made to exist in the present. It is very noticeable to anyone who has come into contact with popular socialistic or revolutionary movements that an alleged historical fact has often more hold upon men's minds than any theoretic argument.66 As this last sentence may suggest, Ashley largely kept his distance from organised Socialism, and in time 'evolutionary Socialist' came to be a misleading description, though one which he clung to even when he had become a prominent polemicist for Tory policies. In part this was because he always retained a Toynbeean commitment to improving 'the condition of the people', in part because of that deep hostility to Individualism common among the historical economists. One of the things that drew him to the German 'national economists' was, as he put it in his Toronto lecture, that they had 'by no means the prejudice against Government action which was natural to an English or French Liberal'. All the studies of the course over which he was there to preside, he announced, 'are concerned ultimately with society in its organized form as the State: and in all of them, accordingly, the final test in any matter must be the welfare of the State'. 67 Moreover, here, too, the economic historian (his professional identity at Harvard) could contribute in some unobvious ways: his demonstration of 'The Tory origins of free trade', for example, was a particularly congenial labour insofar as, by showing how in the late seven63 64 65 66 67

Ashley, Ashley, p . 40. Ashley, Surveys, p . viii. Q u o t e d in Ashley, Ashley, p . 40. Ashley, 'Study of Economic History', 135. Q u o t e d in Ashley, Ashley, p p . 5 0 - 1 .

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teenth and early eighteenth centuries free trade was consistently advocated by Tories and denounced by Whigs, he undermined that complacent Liberal orthodoxy which presented it as always having been the 'natural' policy of the 'popular* party and opposed only by 'sinister interests'. 68 Convinced of the need for a 'constructive' economic policy in a century in which he believed the greatest international rivalries were 'likely to be altogether economic', 69 Ashley was a particularly appropriate occupant of the country's first chair of Commerce set up in Chamberlain's own fief at Birmingham. His championing of the cause of moderate Protection distanced him even further from the Liberals, with some of whom he was otherwise in fairly close agreement on issues of social reform, and in the course of his first decade at Birmingham he became 'the leading academic defender' of Tariff Reform, and thereby a spokesman for Unionism. 70 His enthusiasm for 'commercial education' was the natural counterpart of his nationalist political allegiances. He shared with Marshall an anxiety about reviving and modernising Britain's entrepreneurial tradition, though in characteristically more practical ways: his syllabus at Birmingham concentrated on the more utilitarian subjects like accountancy and management and gave only a modest role to economic theory (the one course on this he characterised as 'covering] the ground usually included in courses on elementary "Political Economy", but avoiding a too great abstraction'). His hand was also evident in the description of the compulsory introductory course in 'commerce' as dealing with 'the modern development and the present structure of industry and trade in the British Empire'. For his announced purpose was 'the education . . . of the officers of the industrial and commercial army, . . . of those who . . . will ultimately guide the business activity of the Empire', and to this end he aimed 'to put the man who proposes to engage in a business career into possession, not only of systematic information as to contemporary conditions, but also of a body of principles of policy deduced from current practice'. 71 As his daughter reported, once immersed in these practical and public duties he had little time for further original research, but in his periodic state-of-the-art surveys he still took every opportunity to run up the flag of the 'historical method'. 72 68

69 70 71

72

W . J . Ashley, ' T h e T o r y Origins of Free Trade', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 11 (i«97)» 335-71Ashley, Surveys, p . v. J . H . Clapham, 'Sir William Ashley', Economic Journal, 37 (1927), 6 8 1 ; see also Ashley, Ashley, pp. 118-29, and Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, ch. 11. See the explanatory pamphlet by Ashley, The Faculty of Commerce in the University of Birmingham. Its Purpose and Programme (Birmingham, n.d. [1906]), p p . 1, 2, 9; also The Calendar of the University of Birmingham, 1902—3, p. 285. Ashley, Ashley, p . 133; for one example of his continued championship of the historical m e t h o d , see ' T h e Enlargement of Economies', Economic Journal, 18 (1908), 181-204,

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By the 1900s, however, such advocacy had come to seem almost antiquated. It was not so much that the historical method had gained a complete victory - it is a controversy in which there are only ever temporary truces - as that other intellectual campaigns now absorbed the enthusiasm of the next generation. Indeed, within economics itself it had scarcely won any enduring victory: despite Marshall's fang-drawing assimilation of so much of the historians' work (which is discussed in Essay x below), the direction taken by the newly professionalised discipline in the twentieth century was hardly that called for by Cliffe Leslie in the 1870s. Surveying the developments of the intervening decades, Ashley, giving the Presidential Address to Section F of the British Association in 1907, had to concede that in Britain 'the criticisms of the historical school have not led, so far, to the creation of a new political economy on historical lines'. 73 Sidgwick's disparaging observation, made while discharging the same office over twenty years earlier, remained true to the end: The proof of the pudding, as the proverb says, is in the eating; but our historical friends make no attempt to set before us the new economic pudding which their large phrases seemed to promise. It is only the old pudding, with a little more ethical sauce and a little more garnish of historical illustrations.74 Surviving into the 1920s, Ashley ruefully acknowledged that the historical economists' attack had been peacefully diverted into the creation of the separate field of economic history, 75 leaving the central fortress of economic theory perhaps a little reduced in the extent of its domain and a little more wary of encroaching onto the common lands of history, but fundamentally intact. Yet concentration on this meagre outcome clearly goes very little way towards capturing the significance or interest of this episode. The dispute was conducted in these methodological terms in part because political economy, as the most 'advanced' moral science, had become the arena in which questions of method having a more general application were fought over; much of the early skirmishing about the claims of 'sociology', for example, also took place within the ranks of those who were seeking to supplant deductive political economy.76 But it was, above all, its cornwhere he defined political economy as 'a science which looks at the interest of the whole 73

74 75 76

society as organised in the state'. W. J. Ashley, 'A Survey of the Past History and Present Position of Political Economy' (1907), reprinted in R. L. Smyth (ed.), Essays in Economic Method (London, 1962), quotation at p. 237. (Note that he characteristically persisted in referring to the subject as 'political economy'.) H e n r y Sidgwick, ' T h e Scope and M e t h o d s of E c o n o m i c Science' (1885), in Smyth, Essays in Economic Method, p. 88. K o o t , ' H i s t o r i c a l economies', 192. See, for example, Philip A b r a m s , The Origins of British Sociology 1834-1914 (Chicago, 1968), esp. p p . 7 7 - 8 3 ; Paul Adelman, 'Frederic Harrison and the Positivist attack on o r t h o d o x political e c o n o m y ' , History of Political Economy, 3 (1971), 170-89.

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manding role in the discussion of public affairs that made political economy a prize so clearly worth fighting for, and it was the established understanding of this role which the historical economists were primarily trying to alter. When none of the leading members of the historical school signed the 'manifesto of the fourteen professors' attacking Chamberlain's Tariff Reform proposals in 1903, Foxwell claimed that this fact itself 'goes far to justify the position they hold as to the importance of historical study in economics'. 77 The alternative, he was implying, was to be the prisoner of a set of dogmas of presumptively universal application purporting to settle historically conditioned and inherently contentious political questions with the authority of impartial science. The Tariff Reform controversy provided the occasion for the display of force by the 'historical school militant' which has won them most scholarly attention, but in fact they had always been primarily animated by the conviction - which the younger Keynes ascribed to Foxwell but which applied to the others no less well - that 'economics is not a branch of logic or mathematics, but belongs to the art of managing public affairs by the application of sound reasoning to the whole corpus of experience'. 78 77 78

H. S. Foxwell, letter to The Times, 20 August 1903. J. M. Keynes, *H. S. Foxwell', Economic Journal, 46 (1936), 593; 'the historical school militant' was Ashley's description of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik, in his entry on 'the Socialists of the Chair' in vol. in of Palgrave's Dictionary.

IX

The ordinary experience of civilised life: Sidgwick and the method of reflective analysis Politics is not based primarily upon History but on Psychology: the fundamental assumptions in our political reasonings consist of certain propositions as to human motives and tendencies, which are derived primarily from the ordinary experience of civilized life, though they find adequate confirmation in the facts of the current and recent history of our own and other civilized countries. HENRY SIDGWICK, The Elements of Politics (1891)

The only general criticism that occurs to me is that the discussion in these chapters tends to be rather a discussion of English methods of government, with occasional references to American methods. If it be possible to generalize the treatment rather more, not making it seem to flow from or follow the arrangements of England, this would better accord with the scientific character of the book as a general treatise on politics. But perhaps it is impossible . . . perhaps there is no writing profitably on ra TTOX.ITLK6L except on the basis of experiments of concrete irokiTeCa. JAMES BRYCE (1889) 1

1

Bryce to Sidgwick, while reading the proofs of The Elements of Politics, 15 February 1889. Bryce MSS. 15 139, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

IN writing in 1887 to a friend living abroad, Sidgwick followed his characteristic survey of the state of national politics - 'the outlook is not promising; the sky full of clouds, though none very black just at present' with this report on his own activities: Personally, I am trying to absorb myself in my Opus Magnum on Politics. My position is that I seem to myself now to have grasped and analyzed adequately the only possible method of dealing systematically with political problems; but my deep conviction is that it can yield as yet little fruit of practical utility - so doubt whether it is worth while to work it out in a book. Still man must work - and a Professor must write books.2 There is much quintessential Sidgwick here - the sense of duty, the emphasis on analysis and method, the concern with utility, the inhibiting doubt, the conception of a role, the resolutely cheerful conclusion. Even those who know nothing of Sidgwick other than that he lost his faith, hunted ghosts, and wrote The Methods of Ethics, may find this revelation of a prospective author's state of mind reassuringly familiar. Yet this comfortable response is, at one level, disturbed when one confronts the work which issued from this absorption almost four years later, the '632 rather closely printed octavo pages' of The Elements of Politics, which even its author conceded was 'a heavy book'. 3 The chief difficulty, apart from a pardonable sagging of the spirits, lies in deciding what kind of book it is. For although it goes into great detail, with chapters on such subjects as 'inheritance', 'compensation', 'relation of judiciary to other organs', and so on, it is clearly not a work of empirical description: it contains practically no proper names, few references to contemporary political events, and no attempt systematically to identify the political institutions and procedures of different states, let alone to produce a comparative survey of them. Even less is it a work of history: dates are as conspicuously absent as names, there is no account of the growth and development of institutions, and the whole texture of the work is unyieldingly spare and abstract. Yet, on the other hand, neither is it, in any obvious sense of the word, a work of philosophy: there is practically no argued discussion of conceptions of man, the nature of society, the ideal state, and so on, and, as one reviewer noted, 'the author avoids raising philosophical questions which might seem to lie at the basis of political 2 3

Sidgwick to J. A. Symonds, 1 December 1887; reprinted in A. and E. M. Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir (London, 1906), p. 481 (hereafter Memoir). D. G. Ritchie, 'Review of Elements of Polities', International Journal of Ethics, 2 (1891), 254-7; Sidgwick to Symonds, 2 November 1887; Memoir, p. 480.

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discussions'.4 Sidgwick himself later explained that he had chosen its methodologically neutral title because the book constituted a contribution neither to 'Political Philosophy' nor to 'Political Science' in the increasingly strict senses given to those terms by the late nineteenth century. 5 Perhaps baffled by its unclassifiability, historians have largely passed by this formidable monument, though even those contemporaries who were critical agreed it to be 'the most comprehensive book on politics by any English writer since Bentham - we might truthfully say by any English writer whatever'. 6 Without falling into this sort of guide-book hyperbole, we would suggest that the work vaut le detour, in that it was a distinctive, and in some quarters influential, attempt to arrive at a systematic and practical body of political knowledge. Sidgwick does, moreover, provide a salutary corrective to any tendency to arrange the intellectual developments of the second half of the nineteenth century into overly neat patterns. In particular, his was the most sustained and penetrating criticism of the pretensions of the fashion for the evolutionary and historical treatment of moral and political questions at a time when that vocabulary was at its most coercive; his engagement with the claims of 'sociology' in the 1880s and 1890s was an especially important assertion of the incapacity of any putative science of society to encompass the territory of politics. 7 At the same time, his Development of European Polity was one of the most distinguished examples of the genre of 'Comparative Politics' discussed in Essay vn above. He also produced a highly traditional treatise on political economy when even the continued existence of that enterprise itself was in doubt, treating it, as the younger Keynes later remarked, as 'one of a number of subjects which a Moral Philosopher would take in his stride, one Moral Science out of several'. 8 And, finally, he (in alliance with Seeley), played the crucial part in obtaining and preserving such a prominent place in the Cambridge curriculum for courses in political science. 9 He is, without doubt, the only figure who can compare with Mill in his command of the whole field of the moral sciences, yet at the same time in his unfashionable, almost idiosyncratic relation to some of the strongest intellectual currents of the day he invites comparison rather with such figures as Malthus or Bagehot. 4 5 6 7 8 9

Ritchie, 'Review oi Elements of Polities', 254. Henry Sidgwick, Philosophy: Its Scope and Relations (London, 1902), p. 26 (hereafter Philosophy). Ritchie, 'Review of Elements of Polities', 257; cf. Hastings Rashdall, 'Review of Elements of Polities', Economic Review, 2 (1892), 275-8. On this, see pp. 295-302, below, and the references cited there; for the general theme, see the Prologue, pp. 10-11 above. J. M. Keynes in A. C. Pigou(ed-), Memorials of Alfred Marshall (London, 1925), p. 57; the passage is quoted in full on p. 309, below. This is discussed in detail in Essay xi, below.

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One way of placing him - one might even call it the 'orthodox 5 way did that not suggest that scholarship on Sidgwick was sufficiently voluminous to admit of division - is to see him as a late, perhaps the last, representative of Utilitarianism, committed to re-stating the doctrines of that creed (in the form in which he is presumed to have inherited them from Mill) in an increasingly desperate rearguard action against the various anti-Utilitarian strands of thought which gathered strength in the second half of the century. 10 The preceding essays should already have called into doubt both the identification of a unitary, homogenous Utilitarianism and any easy assumption of its later disappearance: apart from the various forms which a roughly Benthamite political theory assumed, Hartleian psychology, Austinian jurisprudence, and Ricardian political economy all followed somewhat different trajectories. Still, it was partly as a result of a series of attacks on what was seen as their common deductive method that these theories came to be treated as sharing a common history and a common fate, and when surveying the terms of criticism from the 1860s onwards one can readily see why the verdict on Utilitarianism has generally been 'death at the hands of the later nineteenth century's obsession with history'. But this verdict itself raises difficulties for the attempt to characterise Sidgwick's position. Was he a kind of intellectual Jacobite, refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the new regime and obstinately affirming his old allegiances? Or was he a zealous Whig, proud of the adaptability of his inheritance, eagerly carrying out Mill's unrealised aspirations for the reform of the moral sciences? The answer, it seems to us, is that he was neither- or rather, to maintain the terms of the question, he was an Independent with Tory sympathies who found new and more subtle arguments to justify his traditional loyalties. Translating the metaphor, the most concise description, with all the attendant dangers of that form, would be to say that his work remained broadly in the Utilitarian mode but shifted its basis from 'science' to 'philosophy'. Less elliptically one could say that he conceded the legitimacy of much of the critique of the axioms and methods of classical Utilitarianism which had been made in the name of historical and cultural diversity, and he abandoned the attempt to deduce universally valid precepts from the 'laws of human nature' on the overworked model of Newtonian mechanics. Instead, he argued that the essential method of the moral sciences, at least where the drawing of practical conclusions was concerned, was the method of philosophical analysis - 'i.e., the method of reflection on the thought we all share, by the aid of the symbolism we all share, language'11 - but that such reflective 10 11

E.g., William C. Havard, Henry Sidgwick and Later Utilitarian Political Philosophy (Gainesville, Florida, 1959), passim. Philosophy, p. 49.

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analysis, when combined with a few empirical generalisations indisputably true of the behaviour of members of advanced or 'civilised5 societies, yielded conclusions of a roughly Utilitarian character. It was this conception of philosophy and its role - arguably, a conception of considerable general cultural significance - which underlay Sidgwick's dealings with those branches of the science of politics to which he devoted the greater part of his intellectual energy in the 1880s and 1890s. That he, moral philosopher and university teacher, should in his forties and fifties have invested so much effort in writing on political topics (and his correspondence abounds with evidence of the extent to which it was duty-driven effort rather than the spontaneous promptings of intellectual creativity), is in itself an indication not only of the primacy of cthe theory of practice' for Sidgwick, but also of the seriousness with which he regarded the political agency available to an occupant of those traditional stations. The decision to write a treatise on political economy provides a telling example of these concerns. Convinced, as a pillar of the local Charity Organization Society and its precursors, of the utility of the Individualist precepts usually associated with classical political economy, irritated, as a thinker who valued clarity and exactness above all, by the simplistic and dismissive criticisms made by critics like Ingram and Cliffe Leslie, and disturbed, as a cautious and pessimistic political observer, by the possible practical consequences of a public loss of confidence in the subject, Sidgwick turned in the late 1870s from lecturing and writing on metaphysics and moral philosophy to address himself to political economy. The entrepreneurial Morley, ever alert to the value of a good controversy for a journal's circulation, snapped up his first efforts for the Fortnightly in 1879, since, despite a few polite concessions to Cliffe Leslie's criticisms, Sidgwick's articles were bound to be taken as a more or less intransigent defence of the methods of classical political economy: as his editor smugly pointed out to him, 'opinion will regard you as distinctly adverse to Leslie, if not distinctly in accord with Lowe'. 12 Although this polemical note was muffled by the incrustation of qualifying clauses in his Principles of Political Economy which appeared four years later (after the effort to finish it, even while on holiday, had made him ill: it was a task that mattered to him), as a political economist Sidgwick certainly represented a tradition on the defensive. The very conception of the work was intellectually conservative, as he acknowledged, and this in two ways: first, because he adhered to 'the older 12

John Morley to Sidgwick, 8 November 1878 and 15 January 1879; Sidgwick Papers, Add. MSS. c. 94. 144-7, Trinity College, Cambridge. The article in question, entitled 'Economic Method', appeared in the Fortnightly Review, 31 (1879), 301-18.

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and more popular view of my subject' by including the 'art' of political economy, 'considered as a department of the general theory of practice', as well as the 'science'; and second, because he for the most part upheld 'the traditional method of English political economy' rather than adopting either a more historical or a more mathematical approach. In both respects, the model remained Mill's Principles, upon which, as Sidgwick rather proudly testified, his own work was 'primarily founded', though it was Mill modified in the light of Jevons's marginalist theory of value.13 Such ecumenism was an important feature of the work: in his view, the theoretical contributions made since Mill 'generally admit of being stated in a form less hostile to the older doctrines than their authors suppose' (a rebuke aimed primarily at the iconoclastic Jevons), and he characteristically represented his own purpose as the elimination of 'unnecessary controversy'. 14 But by including, as part of the same work, a detailed account of the very limited role for state action in economic matters which was derivable from the premises of classical political economy, Sidgwick was deliberately attempting to confer (or rather restore) the authority of science on a view of politics which remained, for all the qualifications, essentially Individualistic. Similarly, much of his animus against 'sociology' surely stemmed from a well-founded fear that the kind of intellectual compote with which its proponents often aimed to replace political economy would appear, to less analytical and less cautious minds, to remove what he and many of his contemporaries took to be the chief arguments against the various forms of Socialism which were attracting some notice in the 1880s. At first sight, Sidgwick appears content to replicate the classic discussions by Mill and Cairnes on the abstract nature of political economy's axioms and the consequently hypothetical character of its conclusions. He endorsed the orthodox view that 'the human being that political economy assumes to be normal. . . always prefers a greater apparent gain to a less, and prefers to attain any desired result with the least apparent expenditure'. (Interestingly, he did not think that this necessarily involved treating labour as a 'cost' or 'sacrifice'; here was one of the places where he 13

14

Henry Sidgwick, The Principles of Political Economy (London, 1883), pp. 26, 40, v (hereafter Principles). In correspondence, Sidgwick put his position very simply: 'I accept Jevons' doctrine as in the main true and as an important addition to the older theory; but I am not prepared to say that the modifications thus introduced into the theory of value as propounded[?] e.g. by Mill is enough to make me regard Jevons' doctrine as a new basis. But I am quite content to be described in general terms as a follower of Jevons.' Sidgwick to H. S. Foxwell, 21 November 1886; Foxwell Papers, in the possession of Mr R. D. Freeman. The first chapter of the Principles, 'The Present State of Economic Controversy in England and the Special Aim of the Present Work', contains a judicious account of the English Methodenstreit and of Sidgwick's relation to it.

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thought that the axioms of classical political economy had been stated in a needlessly unrealistic form, ignoring, for example, the satisfactions of work. However, his own conviction, important as a source of scepticism about the prospects of Socialist schemes, was still that 'no important part of the labour required for the production of wealth is likely to be carried on to an adequate e x t e n t . . . by such beings as men now are, except under the influence of some motive more powerful than the average man's liking for work'.) From such premises he went on to deduce, subject to the usual carefully phrased qualifications, cthe chief theorems of English deductive political economy', such as that 'where there is open competition, two prices cannot be permanently maintained in one market for the same commodity', and so on. The ceteris paribus clause was duly wheeled into place, with its consequence that 'we can draw no positive inference from these theorems without ascertaining how far other things are equal', and thus that, taken alone, they could never provide answers to 'particular economic questions of a concrete character'. In the by now standard chapter on 'custom and habit' he allowed that 'we can only learn by a careful study of facts the force of the other motives of which all economists admit the importance and existence; especially of the powerful but unobtrusive impulses which lead a man to do what other people do, and what he has done before'. Like Maine before him and Marshall after, he chiefly devoted himself to showing that these other motives did not necessarily operate to counteract or undermine competition, but he did have to concede that there were 'moral or quasi-moral sentiments' which on occasion led groups or individuals to sacrifice the greater gain. The only form in which Sidgwick really considered the operation of these 'sentiments' was where individuals are led to modify the economic rationality of their actions (assumed as the basic model) out of attachment to an 'ideal' - for which his main example was, revealingly, charity. But this, of course, reduced the potential theoretical difficulties which would be raised by the recognition of the pervasiveness of such motives; having relegated them to this peripheral category, he could plausibly conclude: 'I do not, however, think that the effects of these elevated sentiments in modifying the action of economic forces are of fundamental importance in modern societies as they actually exist.' 15 The reference to 'modern societies' is a reminder that Sidgwick had absorbed enough of the historical school's criticism not to claim that political economy was of all times and all places. But this concession as to the scope of the subject - made commonplace by Bagehot in the late 1870s was in his case related to a somewhat more interesting departure from the 15

Principles, pp. 37, 44-7, 50; Book 11, ch. 12, passim; 392.

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classical account of its method, a departure which had important implications for his later work on politics. For in his view, the chief method of orthodox political economy was not in fact strictly speaking deductive, but 'analytical'. By this he meant that 'it chiefly consists of getting a clearer and more systematic view, through reflective analysis, of general facts which common experience has already made familiar'. In his Principles, he accordingly gave particular prominence to 'the task of defining the cardinal terms of political economy', a task, he defensively remarked, which he had performed 'with rather unusual elaborateness'. (This was the aspect of the work which its admirers particularly praised: those less sympathetic dismissed the book as 'reine philologie'.)16 Apart from the obvious scientific importance of the consistent and systematic use of terms, Sidgwick argued that the process of seeking such definitions, whether successfully completed or not, was the best way to get to grips with the relevant 'distinctions and relations of fact'. For 'in subjects where we cannot present them to the mind in orderly fulness by the exercise of the organs of sense, there is no way of surveying them so convenient as that of reflecting on our use of common terms'. This would not involve merely endorsing everyday speech on these matters, for while he thought there were good reasons why, in framing definitions, 'we should keep as closely as we can to the common use of language', he recognised that 'common usage may be inconsistent' and in other ways inadequate to the task. He emphasised, therefore, that 'we should keep carefully distinct the two very different questions, (1) what do we commonly mean by the terms Value, Wealth, Money Capital, etc., and (2) what ought we to mean by them - what meaning is it, for scientific purposes, convenient to attach to them?' Sidgwick skirted the somewhat tricky philosophical issues raised by this second question in its general form, content, within the confines of a treatise on economics, to point to the role of such analysis in helping us 'to know, contemplate, and as far as possible arrange and systematize' the 'familiar facts of our ordinary experience'. 17 It had, of course, been part of the historical school's complaint, in its subtler form, that the 'general facts' and 'ordinary experience' upon the basis of which the economist formed his concepts were themselves peculiar 16

17

For the first response, see, for example, J. N . Keynes, 'Henry Sidgwick', Economic Journal, 10 (1900), 588, and W. R. Sorley, 'Review of Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economies', Mind, O.S. 16 (1891), 113. For the second response, see Sidgwick to Lady Welby, 11 August 1891: 'It is a difficult matter to persuade a plain man to go through the process necessary to attain precision of thought: it requires great literary skill in presenting the process. I tried to do something of this sort in my Principles of Political Economy but I fear I bored the reader horribly. A German student of political economy told Mr Ashley... that he tried to read my book but found it "reinephilologie".' Sidgwick Papers, Add. MS. 98. 64. Principles, pp. 36, 40, 48, 51, 59-62.

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to certain societies at a particular stage of their development. Sidgwick did not dispute this - indeed, he may even have thought it a necessary truth: but he did not, whether for that or other reasons, regard it as a damaging criticism of the claims of political economy properly understood. As we have already seen, classical political economy relied not only on 'an artificially simplified type of human action', but also on the assumption of the prevalence of certain social conditions: what these conditions actually amounted to, Sidgwick argued, was 'a state of things taken as the type to which modern civilized society generally approximates', and that this assumption was 'incontrovertibly legitimate as corresponding broadly to the facts of modern societies'. The method of reflective analysis applied to political economy was to that extent inherently parochial and content to be so. It sacrificed the universalist aspirations of the older theory in order to gain the persuasiveness that attaches to showing how a particular structure of reasoning is implicit in the accepted distinctions of a shared language. Sidgwick, not surprisingly, also drew attention to the educative value of this procedure, that is, its 'indirect utility as a means of training the intellect in the kind of reasoning required for dealing with concrete economic problems'. The extreme historical view, he argued - it was a point he was fond of making against the sociologists also - was from this point of view self-defeating: the more the economic historian insisted that the past was radically different from the present, and hence not to be understood in terms of concepts derived from the present, 'the more, prima facie, he tends to establish the corresponding independence of the economic science which, pursued with a view to practice, is primarily concerned to understand the present'. 18 It was, in the end, this focus upon practice which licensed, and even demanded, the introduction of local circumstances into the premises of the theory itself. These features of the method of reflective analysis stand out in still clearer relief in his attempt to write 'a great book on Politics',19 the germination of which reveals something of Sidgwick's unfashionable intellectual development away from Mill's Book vi and towards Bentham's Constitutional Code. In a well-known passage of reminiscence, Sidgwick later recalled how in the early 1860s he and his contemporaries, under the spell of Mill and of 'Comte seen through Mill's spectacles', aimed, with youthful ardour, at 'a complete revision of human relations, political, moral, and economic, in the light of science', and how they took for granted that 'this social science must of course have historical knowledge 18 19

Principles, pp. 36, 40, 48. 'I want to write a great book on Politics during the next ten years, and am afraid it will be too academic if I do not somehow go into the actual struggle. But how?' Journal entry, 4 April 1885; Memoir, p. 407.

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as its basis'. 20 His casual report to a correspondent in 1861 that he had 'read through Mill's Representative Government in one morning' and found it 'extremely good' captures this mood of discipular enthusiasm. 21 But though Sidgwick always revered Mill and his memory, time soon brought distance from his theories: a catalogue of the points on which he came to disagree with his master, often sharply and fundamentally, would make a pretty study in intellectual parricide, and we shall return to some of the more general contrasts between them at the end of this essay. Here we must content ourselves with the judgement that Sidgwick seems to have arrived at his own distinctive views on the study of politics, as on ethics and philosophical method generally, by the late 1860s;22 the decade between graduating in 1859 and resigning his Fellowship in 1869 marked his Sturmjahre, and thereafter his fundamental views changed very little. As early as 1865, he reported 'designing a treatise on Polities', remarking loftily: 'It is very much wanted: G. C. Lewis is miserable; - in fact, everybody has been studying constitutional history lately and ignored Politics. Mill, with characteristic caution, has confined himself to a portion of the subject.' (One change which time did bring to Sidgwick's views was that he became a good deal less ready to reproach Mill for his caution.) He was already convinced that 'history will have in the future less and less influence on Politics in the most advanced countries. Principles will soon be everything and tradition nothing: except as regards its influence on the form.' 23 Such views were, of course, far from being the conventional wisdom of the late 1860s, and they mark the beginning of Sidgwick's protracted and rather lonely battle with the Zeitgeist in this area. That they also distanced him even from some of his own earliest admirers is well brought out in a long letter to Alfred Marshall written in 1871, which is particularly rich in matter for the themes of these essays. As for Evolution, I quite understood the view you expressed last term, but I do not think I agree with you, and I am quite sure I do not agree with Karl Marx. The Spiessburger is after all only our old friend the 'Bourgeois' for whose wicked selfishness Political Economy is supposed to have been invented: when I firstread Socialistic tracts I was much impressed with the breadth of view implied in this contemptuous term: but on reflection the Bourgeois after all appeared to me the 20 21 22

23

Memoir, p p . 39-40 (written in 1897). Sidgwick t o H . G . D a k y n s , M a y 1861; Memoir, p . 66. ' T h o u g h ' he added, 'I cannot get over m y scepticism as t o the elaborate Hare-ian scheme.' T h e best, and indeed the only, discussion o n the development of Sidgwick's thinking o n ethics and philosophy generally is the excellent study b y J . B . Schneewind, Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Oxford, 1977); see esp. pp. 40-62. Sidgwick t o O s c a r Browning, 27 September 1865; Memoir, p p . 131-2. Cf. his remarks in the previous year about h o w 'history will always be subsidiary t o Politik', and the following year his announcement: 'Take notice that I have finally parted from Mill and C o m t e - n o t w i t h o u t tears and wailings and cutting of the hair'; Memoir, p p . 124 and 158.

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heir of the ages, as far as he went: and so of Bentham's Normal Man. I say I do not quite know whether I agree with you: for I do not know whether you mean more than to insist on the limitations of Benthamism and the need of supplementing it with some historical sociology. But I certainly do not think it the special function of the Philosophy of Jurisprudence to develop dynamical conceptions. On the contrary I feel as if a grasp of the Utilitarian method of determining rules had been of the greatest value to myself, and how few M.P.'s have really got it any critical debate will indicate. It seems to me that the tendency just now, owing to the Positivists, is rather over-historical than otherwise. However, I do not really know if we should disagree: I think I told you that I had worked out principles of constitutional jus - for Bentham's Normal-Mensch - in two or three lectures: so much to my own satisfaction that I am perhaps biassed in favour of the method. 24 This polite and disarming confession of bias masked, as so often, a deep conviction on Sidgwick's part, a conviction which sustained his struggle over the next two decades to work out the detail of a polity appropriate to Bentham's 'Normal-Mensch'. Struggle it certainly was: as the labour neared its end, he resolved 'never again to attempt to comprehend Politics in a single octavo volume of moderate thickness'. 25 The sense in which he was attempting to 'comprehend Polities', and the source of some of his difficulties with the task, was nicely captured in a despairing reply to some well-meant suggestions from Bryce: I am partly influenced by the fact that in this chapter I have little to say of concrete interest. For instance, at the very end I have to say something as to Rights of Revolution and Disruption. But I do not find any really useful cmedia axiomata* on these questions: the generalities I shall utter will amount to little more than that you ought to rebel and disrupt when it is on the whole expedient to do so. Accordingly, to conceal my barrenness of practical wisdom, I take refuge in analysis.26 Even making allowances for the exaggerations of an author deep in the toils of composition, this suggests a certain limitation in the 'Utilitarian method', and 'taking refuge in analysis' may prove a helpful description to keep in mind when considering The Elements of Politics itself. The primary aim of the political theory that is here to be expounded is not to supply any entirely new method of obtaining reasoned answers to political questions; but rather, by careful reflection, to introduce greater clearness and consistency into the kind of thought and reasoning with which we are all more or less familiar. 24

25 26

Sidgwick t o Alfred Marshall, J u l y o r August 1871; Sidgwick Papers, A d d . MS. c. 100. 96. F o r Mill's similar b u t interestingly different complaint made in the following year about the fashion for the historical approach, see above p . 147. Sidgwick t o Bryce, 19 April 1891; Bryce MSS. 15. 70. Sidgwick t o Bryce, 28 April 1891; Bryce MSS. 15. 76. C o m p a r e Mill's admission while writing B o o k v of t h e Principles o n 'the province of government': ' I have felt t h e same difficulty y o u d o about the axiomata media. I suspect there are none which d o n o t vary with time, place, and circumstance. I d o u b t if m u c h m o r e can be done in a scientific treatment of the question than t o point o u t a certain n u m b e r oipro's and a certain n u m b e r

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Hardly the pitch of the natural salesman, yet, as we know from other, more celebrated, historical examples, modest applicants for the post of under-labourer often harbour practically imperial ambitions. For his part, Sidgwick certainly believed that his favoured procedure had its political as well as - or even, to some extent, as a result of- its educative value: though it did not 'constitute anything like a complete protection against erroneous practical conclusions', the 'systematic effort' to pursue it is 'of considerable practical value'. 27 And the same marks of this procedure recur in the book itself as in his Principles of Political Economy: eliciting 'the characteristics that are essentially implied in the commonly received notions' of political discourse, establishing 'what we mean or ought to mean' by them, and rendering 'somewhat more precise in conception the principles that I find commonly recognized'.28 At first sight, he may also seem to be pursuing a quite different method, which, with unusual insistence, he lays down (in the passage from which our first epigraph is taken) as the only 'rational method' for dealing with 'the question of practical polities'. According to my view, it must be a method mainly deductive: we must assume certain general characteristics of man and his circumstances - characteristics belonging not to mankind universally, but to civilized man in the most advanced stage of his development: and we must consider what laws and institutions are most likely to conduce to the well-being of an aggregate of such beings living in social relations. 29

As in our epigraph, the tone is again one of unassuming confidence and circumspect ambition; while gently coaxing agreement by appealing to lowest common denominators, it makes no attempt, in the manner of more coercive political vocabularies, to go for broke epistemologically. Much, no doubt, is taken for granted. There is the untroubled assumption that 'the ordinary experience of civilized life' is in no way opaque, that the identification of the 'human motives and tendencies' to be reasoned about is unproblematic, and that 'well-being' can be specified in some way that is both uncontentious and non-vacuous. But then, when proposing a method for discussing the solution of 'the problems of practical politics' to the educated classes of late nineteenth-century England, it may have been not altogether unreasonable to take these assumptions for granted. What, in proposing this procedure, Sidgwick is offering amounts to a

27 28 29

of con's of a m o r e o r less general application, and with some attempt at an estimation of the comparative importance of each, leaving the balance to be struck in each particular case as it arises.' Mill to J o h n Austin, 13 April 1847; Works, x m , p . 712. H e n r y Sidgwick, The Elements of Politics ( L o n d o n , 1891), p p . 1-2 (hereafter Elements). This passage is quoted in full o n p . 339 below; see also the discussion at p p . 362-3. Elements, p p . 13, 62, 33-4. Elements, pp. 8-9.

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demure Utilitarianism which has quietly forsaken any claims to be based on a new 'science of man'. Its pedigree manifests itself most obviously in the examples he cites of the relevant psychological assumptions Bentham's dicta that 'of two individuals with equal fortunes, he that has the most wealth has the greatest chance of happiness', and that cthe excess in happiness of the richer will not be so great as the excess of his wealth', and Mill's proposition that 'each person is the only safe guardian of his own rights and interests'. They were not, Sidgwick urged, 'put forward as exactly or universally true, even of contemporary civilized man; but only as sufficiently near the truth for practical purposes'. Indeed, far from their standing being exaggerated, he thought that 'at the present time the more prevalent and dangerous mistake' was to neglect their value entirely, a reference not only to the fashion for insisting on historical variation, but also to the, sometimes related, Socialistic optimism about human nature which he and like-minded mid-Victorian Liberals feared was undermining the basis of sound Individualist politics. He acknowledged that 'besides the general characteristics just mentioned', there were the 'sentiments and habits of thought and action, formed by the previous history of the nation': the model, once again, turns out to be Utilitarian man as modified - and modified the less, perhaps the more advanced his society - by national character. So, displaying the same confidence as in the classic accounts of political economy, Sidgwick re-iterated that though 'no particular nation is composed of individuals having only the few and simple characteristics' thus isolated, they nonetheless remain 'all we can include in our conception of the civilized man to whom our abstract political reasoning relates'. 30 It may help us to understand why Sidgwick felt that the selection of these particular characteristics needed no elaborate justification when we recognise that he was not in fact pursuing two entirely different methods. For, in his view, a kind of deductive reasoning from such premises was, implicitly, the basis of everyday political argument: practical measures were, he pointed out, always partly supported by arguments of an implicitly Utilitarian character even where their advocates explicitly appealed to some other theory. A favourite example was provided by those Individualists - Spencer being only the best-known - who held that freedom (or mutual non-interference) was an end in itself: 'I cannot directly refute this opinion', he wrote in a passage revealing of both his accommodating approach and his gentle tutorial irony, 'any more than any other opinion, as to ultimate ends or principles of right conduct; but I think it may be shown to be inconsistent not only with the common sense 30

Elements, pp. 10-11.

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of mankind, as expressed in actual legislation, but with the practical doctrines - when they descend to particulars - even of the very thinkers who profess to hold it.' 31 It was, therefore, a crucial premise of the book that an analysis of the conclusions to be reached by deduction from Utilitarian axioms would roughly coincide with a systematisation of the political views held by 'the majority of instructed persons in England at the present day', always the relevant constituency. 32 These views themselves, moreover, aspired to derive from more than merely parochial foundations: 'Indeed, the least reflection will show that in ordinary political discussions reference is continually made to propositions laid down as true of civilized men generally, not merely of the English species of civilized man.' Hence the value of a training in such reasoning will always transcend the purely local, since 'considerations of the general kind with which we shall be concerned must always form an important part of the discussion of any question of practical politics'. 33 In Sidgwick's hands, the status of the Utilitarian axioms is revised: no longer presented as the lemmas of a science of man, they figure more modestly as principles implicit in the common political reasoning which it is the task of reflective analysis to systematise. But the scale of the whole enterprise being thus reduced, the apparent modesty of his own contribution assumes a different aspect. And this, surely, is what our opening quotation should have prepared us for: there is nothing very modest, after all, in the conviction that one has arrived at 'the only possible method of dealing systematically with political problems'. In the course of a generally perceptive review of The Elements of Politics, D. G. Ritchie remarked that although the book was Benthamite in approach, 'there is none of Bentham's strong critical antagonism to the institutions of his time . . . If this is Benthamism, it is Benthamism grown tame and sleek.' Tameness and sleekness are, of course, often alleged to be functional adaptions for any intellectual creature which finds itself transplanted into the cosy environs of an academic syllabus, and we always need to remember that Sidgwick was writing with more than half an eye to the needs of students for a reliable text. Still, as Ritchie drily observed, it is a striking fact that though Sidgwick was arguing deductively from general propositions, 'yet, somehow, the conclusion again and again turns out to 31 32

Elements) p . 40. T h i s was b r o u g h t o u t even m o r e clearly in a series of small modifications of the text w h i c h he m a d e for the second edition of 1897: for example, he o m i t t e d the phrases a b o u t the m e t h o d being ' d e d u c t i v e ' and based o n ' p s y c h o l o g y ' , and replaced t h e m w i t h references t o 'the m e t h o d c o m m o n l y a d o p t e d in political reasoning' and the assumptions w h i c h ' w e ' m a k e , adding ' t h e present w o r k is an a t t e m p t to render this m e t h o d m o r e systematic and

precise'(pp. n-14).

33

Elements,])]).

11-12.

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be just what we have in the present British constitution'. 34 For all his careful discriminations, Ritchie concluded, Sidgwick 'nowhere arrives at any conclusion which would differ very widely from that of the average man of the professional and commercial middle-classes at the present day'. Though no author relishes being the butt of a reviewer's irony, Sidgwick must have considered this comment - which would have seemed a feeble joke to Bentham, and to Mill a culpable slur - more as an endorsement of his method than as a criticism of it. However, more was involved here than Ritchie's sneer allowed for. To put it in a way which exaggerates the point but brings out its significance, one could say that, as re-fashioned by Sidgwick, Utilitarianism had become almost inherently conservative in its political bearing. In an obvious sense - so obvious as to amount almost to a tautology - working from the received opinion of the day had a necessary tendency to exclude radically challenging considerations. An example of this is provided by his amplification of Mill's maxim that 'each person is the only safe guardian of his own rights and interests'. He pointed out that not only is the maxim intended to apply only to sane adults, but that 'to avoid controversy' he will further restrict it to male adults, 'since it is not clear that the common sense of mankind considers women generally to be the safest guardians of their own pecuniary interests'. This, he added defensively, 'I need hardly say, was not Mill's view'; but nor should such statements be taken as always expressing Sidgwick's own opinion either.35 Particularly contentious or eccentric views (in the limited sense in which Sidgwick held such) were set aside in the interests of securing as wide an area of agreement as possible. Since existing views may be (and no doubt usually are) confused and inconsistent, the theorist is not confined merely to repeating current prejudices, but unless some germ of criticism is already present in those views, he has no licence for introducing a novel set of criteria. Moreover, at the level of detail, Sidgwick displayed a Burkean respect for the historically formed shape of existing institutions: such 'particular characteristics', he warned, 'may modify to an indefinite extent the conclusions arrived at by general deductive reasoning'. His examples, if not the rather clinical detachment with which he presented them, would have warmed the heart of the least Utilitarian of Whig historians. 34

35

Ritchie, 'Review of Elements of Polities', 254-7. Hastings Rashdall made a similar complaint: ' W e d o feel that in this bulky treatise a little m o r e might have been done to express the idea that the ultimate end of government is n o t served b y just maintaining the status q u o - carrying o n the business, so t o speak, which it has inherited, in a respectable and dignified m a n n e r . ' Rashdall, 'Review of Elements of Politics3, 278. Elements, p p . 9-10; in the present case, given Sidgwick's efforts o n behalf of the education of w o m e n and similar causes, this almost certainly did n o t represent his o w n considered

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Thus I may conclude from the point of view of abstract theory, that by taking twelve plain men and shutting them up in a room till they are unanimous, I am likely to get but a blunt and clumsy instrument for the administration of criminal justice: but this defect may be more than compensated by the peculiar confidence placed in this instrument by a people whom the unbroken tradition of centuries has taught to regard trial by jury as the 'palladium of its liberties'. So again, no one constructing a legislative organ, composed of two chambers, for a newly-founded community of modern civilized men, would propose that membership of the second or revising chamber should be handed down from father to son, like a piece of private property: but in a country that has long been led by a hereditary aristocracy, a chamber so appointed may have a valuable power of resistance to dangerous popular impulses which it may be difficult to obtain by any other mode of appointment.

36

Complacency about these particular institutions was hardly a rare commodity in late nineteenth-century England (and one notes again the essentially defensive role assigned to political wisdom). However, Sidgwick, as one might expect, essayed a reasoned justification for a kind of conservatism in matters of detail, though to appreciate its Utilitarian character one has to extrapolate from an argument developed in his much better known work on ethics. In the course of his examination there of the 'method of Utilitarianism' he indicated that although common-sense morality is already to a large extent implicitly Utilitarian, and can in fact be made a coherent body of moral rules only by being systematised on an explicitly Utilitarian basis, still it cannot, as it stands, be taken as an entirely reliable guide to the maximisation of happiness in the details of conduct. 37 Utilitarians have therefore supposed, he went on, that they need to frame an ideal morality against which the deficiencies of the existing rules could be charted. But to do this, he objected - it is a mark of his distance from his predecessors - it would be necessary to know what kind of human being one was legislating for, since, 'whether we consider the intellect of man or his feelings, or his physical condition and circumstances, we find them so different in different ages and countries, that it seems prima facie absurd to lay down a set of ideal Utilitarian rules for mankind generally'. A few rather general characteristics could, of course, be assumed, issuing in the kind of hypothetical propositions worked out in his treatise on politics and political economy; but these could only yield very broad imperatives, and it is already established that at this level of generality common-sense morality corresponds roughly with Utilitarian principles. What is at issue is the 36 37

Elements, p. 11. H e n r y Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics ( L o n d o n , 1874 (7th edn, 1907)), B o o k iv, chs. 3-5 (hereafter Methods). T h e general argument of this section of the b o o k is carefully discussed in Schneewind, Sidgwick's Ethics, esp. chs. 9 and 12, though Schneewind does n o t deal with its political implications.

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attempt to bring them into closer correspondence, to improve 'the delicacy and precision' with which our moral rules are adapted to 'the actual needs and conditions of human life'. Nor is the difficulty overcome by confining ourselves to the evidence of cmen as we know them, in our own age and country', for such creatures are already in part constituted by their experience of and adherence to the existing moral code. An empty and useless abstraction - Sidgwick is here very reminiscent of his fiercest antagonist in moral philosophy, F. H. Bradley - is all that could be produced by attempting to imagine them without the formative power of that experience. In short, 'we have to take the moral habits, impulses and tastes of men as a material given us to work upon no less than the rest of their nature, and as something which, as it only partly results from reasoning in the past, so can only be partially modified by any reasoning which we can now apply to it'. 38 If, in his views about method, Sidgwick can be seen as representing something of a move from Mill back to Bentham, one could similarly say that in the attitude he wishes to inculcate towards existing institutions and mores, he uses the method of Bentham to arrive at the conclusion of Burke. He urged the Utilitarian to 'repudiate altogether that temper of rebellion against the established morality, as something purely external and conventional, into which the reflective mind is always apt to fall when it is first convinced that the established rules are not intrinsically reasonable'. Instead, he should 'contemplate it with reverence and wonder, as a marvellous product of nature, the result of long centuries of growth', and recognise it as 'a mechanism which no "politicians or philosophers" could create, yet without which the harder and coarser machinery of Positive Law could not be permanently maintained'. 39 This hint of fatalism - it would seem like anti-intellectualism in a less fastidious author - is in fact uncharacteristic; Sidgwick himself felt the philosophical urge too strongly - and respected its office, properly understood, too much - to join in the stock denunciations of the 'man of theory' which were, as we have seen, so often the accompaniment of these views when expressed in a coarser idiom. But he was eloquent that realism in moral and political matters is itself a moral obligation: he became uncharacteristically warm in exposing the self-indulgence and self-deception involved in irresponsible utopianism. The passage with which, in The Methods of Ethics, he concludes his discussion of the Utilitarian's relation to existing morality can stand, mutatis mutandis, as a summary of his sense of the agency available to the responsible realist in politics also. 38 39

Methods, Methods,

p p . 467-9. p p . 475-6.

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29 5

I hold that the Utilitarian, in the existing state of our knowledge, cannot possibly construct a morality de novo either for man as he is (abstracting his morality), or for man as ought to be and will be. He must start, speaking broadly, with the existing social order, and the existing morality as part of that order: and in deciding the question whether any divergence from this code is to be recommended, must consider chiefly the immediate consequences of such divergence, upon a society in which such a code is conceived generally to subsist. No doubt a thoughtful and well-instructed Utilitarian may see dimly a certain way ahead, and his attitude towards existing morality may be to some extent modified by what he sees. He may discern in the future certain evils impending, which can only be effectually warded off by the adoption of new and more stringent views of duty in certain departments: while, on the other hand, he may see a prospect of social changes which will render a relaxation of other parts of the moral code expedient or inevitable. But if he keeps within the limits that separate scientific prevision from fanciful Utopian conjecture, the form of society to which his practical conclusions relate will be one varying but little from the actual, with its actually established code of moral rules and customary judgements concerning virtue and vice. 40

Remarking on the intellectual and political conservatism of The Elements of Politics, several reviewers identified its neglect of the historical and evolutionist approaches as one of its most 'old-fashioned' features. On Sidgwick's part the omission was, of course, a deliberate, even polemical, one; in a series of addresses and lectures in the 18 80s and 1890s (some of the latter of which were posthumously published in Philosophy: Its Scope and Relations), he explained at some length why he thought the expectations commonly held at the time of the guidance' to be derived from such approaches were greatly exaggerated.41 He briefly rehearsed these arguments in The Elements of Politics, taking care to point out (as quoted in the essay on Mill above) that Mill, despite his announcement in Book vi of the primacy of the pursuit of cthe laws according to which any state of society produces the state which succeeds it and takes its place', had, 'when he came to treat with a view to practical conclusions the question of the best form of government, . . . certainly dealt with it by a method not primarily historical: a method in which history seems to be only used either to confirm practical conclusions otherwise arrived at, or to suggest the limits of their applicability'. 42 Sidgwick's affirmation of the essentially secondary or peripheral value of the historical study of politics raises a question which would, were there any substantial body of Sidgwick scholarship, be recognised as Das Henry Sidgwick Problem, namely, the difficulty of 40 41

42

Methods, p p . 473-4. These criticisms, and the contemporary expectations t o which they were addressed, are briefly discussed in Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880-1914 (Cambridge, 1979), p p . 193-6, where full references are also given. Elements, p . 8; for its application t o Mill, see above, p . 156.

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reconciling the fierce anti-historicism of The Elements of Politics with the whole enterprise of tracing the historical evolution of the modern state which he undertook in The Development of European Polity. After all, complaints about the Comparative uselessness of history' form a recurring motif in his writings, 43 and he certainly did not, in his later years, want for employment of his time. Nor can the problem be explained away by regarding the work as a necessary part of his academic duties: the subject was not, in this form, an essential element of the Moral Sciences Tripos, and it was, anyway, already covered by Seeley's not altogether dissimilar lectures and classes for the Historical Tripos, as well as by several others. 44 Even after editing Seeley's lectures following the latter's death in 1895, he still proposed to publish his own, a task eventually executed by his wife three years after he died. One can well imagine that Sidgwick's more discriminating intelligence found the blunt assertiveness of Seeley's book somewhat unsatisfactory, especially since the latter included a certain amount of what, by Sidgwick's standards, must have seemed rather homely political philosophy; Sidgwick does also seem to have felt - it was a feeling shared by several of his contemporaries - that, notwithstanding the work of Freeman, Seeley and others, there still existed no usable connected narrative of the development of specifically European forms of polity from ancient times up to the present. Nonetheless, what he hoped to gain from such a purely historical exercise still needs to be explained. To observe that its author classified The Development of European Polity not as a work of history, but as a treatment of 'an important part of the history of political societies from the point of view of Inductive Political Science' may seem only to re-describe the question, and yet an explanation must begin with the realisation that Sidgwick, too, was responsive to the charms of a 'political science'. What, according to him, distinguished this enterprise from 'ordinary political history' was 'the generality of the object of science'. That is, the political scientist is not, like the historian, aiming 'primarily at presenting facts in their chronological order', but at 'ascertaining (1) the classes to which [polities] belong, or the general types which they exemplify, and (2) the causes which have led to the prevalence of this or that general type in different regions at different times'. And since political science 'aims at bringing together for comparison societies similar in their political characteristics, however widely separated in time', it necessarily involved the use of the comparative method; it 43

44

The phrase is taken, in this instance, from his journal entry for 1 J a n u a r y 1886; Memoir, P-435O n the place of 'Inductive Political Science' in the Cambridge curriculum, see Essay xi, below; o n Seeley's lectures, see above, p p . 225-34; Sidgwick acknowledged the use of Seeley's (then unpublished) lectures in Elements, p . vii.

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'aims like other sciences at ascertaining relations of resemblance among the objects that it studies; it seeks to arrange them in classes, or to exhibit them as examples of types'. And as Sidgwick, like any other advocate of the comparative method, acknowledged, the main interest of this morphology was not classification as such, but the discovery of 'the order of development of political societies'.45 As we have seen in the discussions of both Mill and Maine, the category of 'political societies' - the adjective excluded those primitive groups which possessed no discernible government embraced more than simply the structure and functions of government: even Sidgwick's book included discussion of the development of patriarchal communities out of primitive kinship groups, of the origin and economic foundation of medieval cities, of the nature of theocratic authority, and so on. In other words, as an organising concept, it had a constant tendency to expand beyond the limits of the conventionally political and to become a way of organising miscellaneous information about types of societies.46 The fact that Sidgwick could contemplate this conception of political science so benignly renders more puzzling, in turn, his hostility to the at least superficially similar enterprise of 'sociology'. As one might expect, the puzzle is partly to be resolved by bringing out the considerable differences, at various levels, between the two enterprises as they were then envisaged.47 One particularly important difference was that political science, strikingly unlike late nineteenth-century sociology, was not primarily constituted by elaborate and implausible articulations of the organic analogy. Seeley, it is true, was given, as one who had been early and lastingly impressed by Comte, to speaking of the state as an organism, but compared to, for example, the rococo variations which Spencer played upon this theme, Seeley's language of 'development' and 'growth' exhibited positively classical restraint. Moreover, political science stuck, for the most part, to the period of recorded history: the comparative method licensed a limited amount of disciplined conjecture, but did not encompass the wilder shores of speculation characteristic of contemporary sociology, and was scornful of the value of inferences from the behaviour of lower animals. Partly related to this, and partly because its exponents tended to be drawn from the university-educated class, the scholarship exhibited in works of political science was not open to immediate and dismissive 45 46

H e n r y Sidgwick, The Development of European Polity ( L o n d o n , 1903), p p . 1-4 (hereafter Development). F o r Mill, see above, p p . 133—4; for Maine, p p . 215-18; these observations apply with particular force to Seeley - see, esp., his Introduction to Political Science: Two Series of

47

Lectures ( L o n d o n , 1896), p p . 1-39, and the discussion at p p . 228-30 above. For a discussion of 'sociology' as understood in late nineteenth-century Britain, see Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, pp. 187-206.

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criticism. As Sidgwick remarked in 1894, it was hardly surprising that 'professional students of history' were 'likely to distrust the generalisations of the professional sociologist' given that the latter's 'knowledge is apt to be distinguished rather by range than by depth or accuracy'. Having indicted Benjamin Kidd for a variety of historical errors and misrepresentations in his best-selling Social Evolution, Sidgwick clearly lined up alongside the professional historians who, 'after reading Mr Kidd, will be more than ever inclined to draw a sharp line between [their] own methods and those of the would-be sociologist; and will hardly take much interest in any prediction of the future founded on such knowledge of the past as the specimens above-quoted exemplify'.48 And finally, the scope and ambitiousness of the claims made by so many of the late nineteenthcentury advocates of sociology, presuming at times to settle the perennial problems of epistemology and moral philosophy, were not matched even by political science's most enthusiastic supporters. There are, in fact, subtler complications here, since one must consider the kind of guidance which its more moderate exponents like Sidgwick expected from a science of politics during this period, especially the extent to which it authorised any predictions. One must also recognise that political science promised a different and relatively more accessible kind of practical benefit, above all educationally, which is a topic which will be taken up in a subsequent essay. Overall, the tenor of Sidgwick's response to sociology - a representative and influential response - is well caught in his severe judgement on Franklin Giddings's college textbook: 'The analysis is too loose, the generalisations too hasty, there is too much disposition to propound doubtful conjectures as established truths; and, here and there, I find what seem to me curious misrepresentations of familiar historical facts.'49 Of course, one man's 'doubtful conjecture' is another's brilliant hypothesis, and Sidgwick's propensity for remorseless scepticism and his temperamental aversion to bold construction are personal elements in his response which cannot be overlooked. Like many not themselves given to easy generalisations, he was all the more incensed by popular acceptance of the ambitious and confident conclusions of fashionable theorists. He displayed a characteristic mixture of self-knowledge and self-doubt about this tendency. For example, in 1885 while writing the British Association 48

49

Henry Sidgwick, 'Political Prophecy and Sociology' (1894), reprinted in Henry Sidgwick, Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses (London, 1904), quotation at pp. 226-7 (hereafter Miscellaneous Essays). Henry Sidgwick, 'Review of The Elements of Sociology', Economic Journal (1899), 411. On the influence of his criticisms, see Abrams's remark: 'Sidgwick's argument... became the orthodox basis for resistance to sociology - above all for academic resistance.' Philip Abrams, The Origins of British Sociology 1834-1914 (Chicago, 1968), p. 82. Seventy years later, the first Professor of Sociology at Cambridge could still take Sidgwick's criticisms as his reference-point: J. A. Barnes, Sociology in Cambridge (Cambridge, 1970), passim.

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address in which he most authoritatively dissected the claims of sociology, he confided to his journal: 'really, in this as in other departments, my tendency is to scepticism', and then went on to the following revealing reflection: Have been reading Comte and Spencer with all my old admiration for their intellectual force and industry and more than my old amazement at their fatuous self-confidence. It does not seem to me that either of them knows what selfcriticism means. I wonder if this is a defect inseparable from their excellences. Certainly I find my own self-criticism an obstacle to energetic and spirited work, but on the other hand I feel that whatever value my work has is due to it. After delivering the address, his self-reproach was: 'it is poor stuff, this sterile criticism, and I am rather ashamed of it: only the pretensions of these people irritate me into the belief that it is a public duty to repress them'. 50 There is, of course, a touch of self-irony in this - the 'belief, we are allowed to infer, is part rationalisation - but also the expression of a genuine if rarefied sense of duty. After his attack on Kidd, he similarly excused what he feared would be seen as the 'undue animosity' of his review: 'The truth is that I have no ill-will towards Kidd, who is certainly a vigorous and stimulating writer, but I do think that the reviewers are to blame for not having found out how little he knows. I do not mean "little" compared with most men, but little compared with the pretensions of his book.' 51 His own gifts were, need one say, pre-eminently critical and analytical, and even his major constructive achievement, The Methods of Ethics, ends with a frank admission of its inconclusiveness, at least as far as providing any rational proof of the superiority of Utilitarianism to consistent Egoism is concerned. A greater than average suspicion of the aspirations of sociology was perhaps to be expected from a man who, after a four-hundred-page account of the development of the modern state, could muster no more positive conclusion than 'I therefore think it not beyond the limits of a sober forecast to conjecture that some further integration may take place in the West European states.' 52 It is also the case, as this last quotation may suggest, that in execution Sidgwick's contribution to this genre was rather more limited and methodologically temperate than his programmatic endorsement of the general project might have seemed to promise. Although The Development of European Polity covered a very long span of time, it stuck closely to the conventional sources for recorded European history, and its taste in explanation and comparison was typically austere; indeed, apart from the first three chapters, there is not all that much to distinguish the book from 50 51 52

J o u r n a l entries, 15 July, n and 22 August 1885; Memoir, p p . 417, 421, 422. Sidgwick to Miss Cannan, 1 January 1895; Memoir, p . 533. Development, p . 439.

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some of the brisker narratives of orthodox political history. 53 It is still true that the classification of types of states and a concern with structural rather than chronological connections make their appearance, and there is certainly much less about actual political events than in most nineteenthcentury works of history; but for all that, the book, the first three chapters aside, hardly constitutes a triumphant fulfilment of the promise of 'a new science' as heralded by Maine and Freeman. Sidgwick's own cautious reservations about the more exuberant hopes entertained for the application of the comparative method may well have been reinforced by criticisms which he evidently received in the 1890s from his former pupil and present colleague, F. W. Maitland. Some interesting exchanges, for example, must have lain behind Maitland's remark to the historian H. A. L. Fisher about a point 'I tried to make in a discussion with Sidgwick in which I endeavoured to convince him that "inductive political science" is rubbish, and I had far more success than I expected', adding, in a phrase which no doubt provides a model for relations with a revered teacher, 'I don't despair of him.' 54 The aspect of the topic on which, to judge at least from their published writings, Sidgwick and Maitland disagreed most sharply was the question of the possibility of making any sound induction about the 'natural' sequence of political development from the historical record of a variety of unique instances. Maitland denied, and indeed derided, such an enterprise with delightfully informal elegance in his paper on 'The Body Politic', which was clearly aimed at the very conception of 'inductive political science' endorsed, at the insistence, above all, of Seeley and Sidgwick, by the Cambridge Historical Tripos. Sidgwick himself had been no less severe on comparable fallacies when demolishing the grand evolutionary schemes of sociology, and had in fact, as Maitland reported, distinguished 'laws' from 'trends' and spoken of 'the means, the very inadequate means, that we have of foretelling the future of bodies politic' at the meeting of the discussion club immediately preceding that at which 53

54

The text as it n o w stands has a complicated history, and was not, of course, revised for publication b y Sidgwick himself. A m o n g the relevant facts of this history are that the first three chapters were written and printed as early as 1889, that the bulk of the rest of the text derives from lectures given in the 1890s, that Sidgwick had not worked on these lectures for several years before his death, and that the section on 'imitation', in which he considers objectives which, if accepted, would be fatal to the Comparative Method, was interpolated in ch. 1 by his wife, drawing upon an undated but clearly later note by Sidgwick himself. There is, therefore, some reason for thinking that, had he lived to complete the b o o k himself, Sidgwick might have modified the optimism about what could be inferred from 'Inductive Political Science' which characterises the first three chapters of the book as it n o w stands. The material cited in the next t w o footnotes would certainly have given him every reason for such modification. F. W . Maitland to H . A. L. Fisher, 16 December 1894; C. H . S. Fifoot (ed.), The Letters of Frederic William Maitland (Cambridge, 1965), p . 128. The 'point', a criticism of the possibility of inference from the materials of political science, had been made by Fisher in his article 'Modern Historians and Their Methods', Fortnightly Review, 56 (1894), 810.

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Maitland delivered his own paper. 55 And yet, in defending the claims of political science, Sidgwick refused to surrender entirely the hope that it might eventually yield 'guidance' for the statesman. Re-iterating that such historical inductions could only ever be of secondary importance for politics, he nonetheless affirmed that 'the laws of political evolution' which 'it must always be the aim and aspiration of Political Science to attain' could at least indicate which political options, given our future development, would be practicable, even if they alone could not determine which of them we should choose. 56 A phrase like 'the laws of political evolution' seems so much a standard part of the conceptual furniture of late nineteenth-century thought that we are prone simply to let it pass without remark; yet that Sidgwick, of all people, should use it points not only to the coercive power of this vocabulary, but also to the implicit model of a science to which the study of politics was now expected to conform. The limited extent to which 'the elements and characteristics of our own political society' might be foretold did not, however, exhaust the appeal of such a study. For whereas only very limited inductions could be made about the future of such states precisely because they were seen as being in the van of progress, when 'dealing with societies other than our own' (the shift in usage here from 'states' to 'societies' illustrates the encompassing scope of the central categories of 'comparative polities') one could find 'instructive analogies . . . in the past condition of societies better known to us'. 'Analogies' strikes a more modest note than 'laws', and, thanks primarily to Maine, the notion that the contemporary condition of, say, India could be illuminated by an investigation of medieval European history had become a commonplace by the 1880s and 90s. The special interest of these particular comparisons lay, of course, in the fact that these 'less advanced' societies were mostly subject to European government, and their futures could thus be affected by the actions of the instructed statesman and administrator. This emerges very clearly from an example which recurs several times in Sidgwick's treatment of this theme, where he argued (again following Maine) that 'it might have prevented serious mistakes in our government of India, if the governing statesmen had had before their minds the historical development of land-tenure, as we now conceive it to 55

56

F. W. Maitland, 'The Body Politic', in The Collected Papers of Frederic William

Maitland,

edited by H . A. L. Fisher, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1911), i n , p p . 285-303. It is not known when Maitland's paper was delivered - Fifoot's guess is May 1900 (Letters, p . 213), though it may have been earlier — but he had obviously been making its essential point to Sidgwick for some time: consider, for example, Maitland to Sidgwick, 28 February 1896 (Letters, p . 148), criticising Freeman and, by implication, the whole enterprise of comparative politics. Development, pp. 5—6, 1-2.

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have taken place in European countries'. 57 Where The Elements of Politics analysed the principles raised by 'the rational discussion of political questions in modern states', it could be said with pardonable exaggeration that The Development of European Polity provided part of the necessary equipment for dealing with the affairs of 'non-modern' societies. Once again, we are reminded of the centrality of 'the theory of practice' for Sidgwick, and thereby of his conception of his role and of his audience. After all, he and his colleagues were, to some extent, educating future members of a governing class: this gave added point to a treatment of history in terms of politics, of politics in terms of government, and of government in terms of principles. Sidgwick had at one point characterised his 'opus magnum on politics' as an attempt 'to treat systematically the chief questions for which the statesman has to find answers', and at another, in the passage just cited, as the analysis of 'the chief general considerations that enter into the rational discussion of political questions in modern states': 58 that he could have treated these as equivalent descriptions is revealing. If his work was not a reflection on the problems of politics sub specie aeternitatis, not a piece of 'political philosophy' in the classical sense, this was in part because it aspired to a more immediate utility, in part because, with that end in mind, it was not unreasonable to take a substantial level of agreement on first principles for granted. The 'rational discussion' it was addressed to was that carried on, at its best, equally in parliamentary debates and in the pages of the great reviews: it presumed an elite with some access to power, given to the discussion of current issues as matters of principle and, potentially, of precedent, confronted ultimately with the necessity of making decisions. In these ways it reflected a style of political life to which more than one late-Victorian academic was happy to become accustomed. 59 Sidgwick had become accustomed to it early, and he could not help lamenting its approaching decline which he was far-sighted enough to regard as inevitable and fair-minded enough to recognise as not, from one point of view, altogether undesirable. 60 It was a world to which he was 57 58 59

60

Development, p. 6; cf. Principles, p. 48. Philosophy, p. 26; Elements, p. v. T h e r e is a helpful t r e a t m e n t of Sidgwick as an 'academic liberal' in C h r i s t o p h e r H a r v i e , The Lights of Liberalism: Academic Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy 1860-1886 ( L o n d o n , 1976), on which see also Stefan Collini, 'Political T h e o r y and the "Science of Society" in Victorian Britain', Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 203-31. Consider, in particular, his reflections in his journal for 17 March 1886: 'I have a certain alarm in respect of the m o v e m e n t of m o d e r n society towards Socialism, i.e. the m o r e and m o r e extensive intervention of G o v e r n m e n t with a view to palliate the inequalities in the distribution of wealth. A t the same time I regard this m o v e m e n t as on the whole desirable and beneficent - the expectation of it belongs to the cheerful side of m y forecast of the future; if duly moderated it might, I conceive, be purely beneficent, and bring improvem e n t at every stage. But - judging from past experience - one must expect that so vast a

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particularly intimately related in every sense: a man is hardly to be classed as an outsider when one of his brothers-in-law is Archbishop of Canterbury and another well on his way to becoming Prime Minister.61 Since he was in a position to discuss current legislation with cabinet ministers, sit on Royal Commissions on fiscal policy, and help to devise schemes for the education of future imperial administrators, it is hardly surprising if Sidgwick discovered that working out the best method for dealing with c the problems of practical polities' overrode the claims upon him exercised by his natural bent towards more speculative and more scholarly pursuits.62 Nor was this concentration of his intellectual energies at odds with his mature political inclinations. Although he had been, as far as his temperament allowed, a Liberal idealist in his twenties, by the 1880s he had, like so many of his generation, become disenchanted with the demagoguery of Gladstonian Liberalism, and soon took the opportunity to board the ferry of Liberal Unionism, bound, eventually and under protest, to be beached on the Conservative shore: in the second 1886 election he voted Tory for the first time, returning from holiday to do so though the seat was a safe one. 63 After spending some days in the previous year at the Balfour family home, surrounded by Tory politicians, he had conceded that 'their criticism of the present phase of Radicalism seems to me unanswerable', and he went on to muse on the implications of this concession for his own political identity: 'Am I then becoming a Tory? Perhaps, but a strange one. Whoever saw a Tory dressed (symbolically) in sackcloth and ashes, and bewailing the necessity of conserving our glorious constitution pro tern}'64 For this kind of half willing, half reluctant perception of the rational in the real, Sidgwick was characterised by one contemporary as can English

61 62

63

64

change will not be realised without violent shocks and oscillations, great blunders followed by great disasters and consequent reactions; that the march of progress, perturbed by the selfish ambitions of leaders and the blind appetites of followers, will suffer many spasmodic deviations into paths which it will have painfully to retrace.' He went on to express his anxiety about 'the force of the resistance which [the] machine of party government presents to the influence of enlightened and rational opinion', and concluded, self-mockingly, that 'considering all the chances of misfortune that life offers, the chance of having one's railway shares confiscated is not prominent'. Memoir, pp. 441-2. His sister was married to E. W. Benson; Arthur Balfour was his wife's brother. T h e Memoir a b o u n d s with evidence of his intimacy with cabinet ministers of b o t h parties: aside from the Balfour circle, Bryce and Trevelyan were a m o n g his leading informants. H e was a contributor t o the Report of the Royal Commission o n the Financial Relations of Great Britain and Ireland in 1895, anc^ played an important part in designing the n e w scheme of entrance examinations which came into effect for both the Indian Civil Service and then the H o m e Civil Service in the 1890s (on which see below, p p . 353-7). J o u r n a l entry, 3 J u l y 1886; Memoir, p . 449. T h e evolution of Sidgwick's political allegiances requires m o r e careful analysis than can be given here; there is some useful material in Harvie, Lights of Liberalism. Journal entry, 26 January 1885; Memoir, pp. 398-9.

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Hegel'. 65 A sense of incongruity and bathos inevitably attends the comparison, though it catches a genuine similarity in some respects: without referring to the source, one could not immediately be sure whether the aphorism that reading the newspaper was 'the morning prayer of the realist' should be attributed to Hegel or to Sidgwick.66 In the eyes of the latter, it hardly needs to be said, the Hegelian system exhibited too much of that 'wonderful earnestness with which most incomplete solutions of the universe are thrust upon us as complete and satisfying' ever to engage his deeply sceptical sympathies. 67 He had delivered his characteristic and irreversible verdict after an extended bout of wrestling with Hegel (in German) in 1870: 'The method seems to me a mistake, and therefore the system a ruin.' 68 It is noticeable how, in attempting to assess Sidgwick's influence, his pupils always returned to this question of method. It was the note upon which Sorley, his successor as Professor of Moral Philosophy, chose to conclude his encomium: 'Sidgwick exerted a powerful influence, both intellectual and moral, upon his pupils. But his temperament was too critical, his intellect too evenly balanced, to admit of his teaching a dogmatic system . . . What he taught was much more a method, an attitude of mind.' And Maitland, surely his most distinguished pupil, spoke for those, always the vast majority, who attended Sidgwick's lectures without thereafter pursuing a philosophical career: 'We turned away to other studies or pursuits, but the memories of Sidgwick's lectures lived on. The matter of the lectures, the theories and arguments, might be forgotten; but the method remained.' 69 That these obituary tributes should have been delivered by those who were, literally, his pupils and that they should have concentrated on his teaching was entirely appropriate, for Sidgwick was the most undeviatingly academic of our authors. His literary manner was correspondingly self-effacing, always conscious of the obligations of the textbook writer - of thoroughness and clarity, of balanced summary and judicious resolution of controversy. Textbooks are, inevitably, boring, and so, sometimes, is Sidgwick. Certainly, in his treatises he is deliberately, ponderously, self-denyingly dull; the playfulness and variety of reflection which animate his letters and journals are not allowed beyond the gates of the academy. He felt too intensely the importance of a professor's being seen to be earnest. There is art, of a kind, in his books, but it is employed to make his conclusions seem uncontentious: to pour oil, 65 66 67 68 69

Ritchie, 'Review of Elements of Polities', 255. T h e remark is quoted in Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State ( C a m bridge, 1972). J o u r n a l entry, 22 December 1884; Memoir, p . 395. Sidgwick to Roden N o e l , 8 September 1870; Memoir, p . 238 (emphasis in original). Memoir, p p . 306, 308.

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gently, never to stir. His prose can seem suffocating, not so much because of the weight of qualifying clauses, but (partly a consequence of that) because it comes to seem impossible, or at least ill-advised, to disagree with him. There is such an ostentatiously conscientious effort on his part to get it right, just right, that the prose comes to seem utterly impersonal, as if transcribed by the Jeevesian amanuensis of some academic Committee of All the Talents. And in this it was the perfect medium for the method of reflective analysis, which was intended, after all, to get our shared intuitions straightened out, properly stated, systematised. In matters of both style and doctrine, Sidgwick is invariably set alongside, and usually a little below, Mill, and in some ways this is obviously right. Sidgwick himself clearly felt the weight of the shadow: 'Whenever I have by accident tried to say something that he has said before, without knowing, his way of saying it always seems indefinitely better.' 70 We might expect Sidgwick to be the more consistent Utilitarian because it would not surprise us if he proved to be more consistent in his exposition of any philosophical doctrine, but that only points to the importance of deeper differences of temperament and role. If it is true to say that Mill was intellectually and politically the more red-blooded of the two, we must recognise what that tells us about Sidgwick's tendency to anaemia. Mill was far more of a polemicist and a preacher; if he yearned for consensus, he was not above relishing a victory. He was always partisan, always, despite - or perhaps as a cause of - his fondness for altruism and cooperation, a good hater. Sidgwick, by contrast, shunned conflict and regarded no man as an enemy; nuggets of truth could always be extracted from the shale of exaggeration, given good will and a cool head. It is characteristic that in one of his earliest articles the twenty-three-year-old Sidgwick should observe that 'what has most hampered political thinkers in all ages is the little free play that has been allowed to their intellects by passion, prejudice, and interest'.71 Mill was by nature the more political animal. Compared to a skilful manager of the Commons or an experienced constituency agent, he was no doubt a naive doctrinaire; but compared to Sidgwick, he was a bonny fighter, even a good party man. Mill was instinctively drawn to politics - oftener to crusades, perhaps, and certainly to manifestos, but to conflict, argument, action of a sort. Sidgwick, like many academics, naturally took the part of the civil servant: that his books often read like committee reports is among their chief drawbacks as books; as a series of minutes they would be outstanding. As this suggests, the two authors also stood at different heights above the ground, with Mill, perhaps surprisingly, the more elevated. It is true that 70 71

Journal entry, 9 August 1885; Memoir, pp. 420-1; cf. pp. 133-4. Henry Sidgwick, 'Alexis de Tocqueville' (1861), in Miscellaneous Essays, p. 368.

}o6

The ordinary experience of civilised life

where Mill was strident in declaring his commitment, Sidgwick spoke from the higher ground of disinterested analysis. But, more generally, Mill's vision was limited only by the limits of human progress; he always managed to give the impression that the subject under discussion was but a passing local phase in some much larger development, the outlines of which he, and sometimes only he, could glimpse from his intellectually off-shore vantagepoint. Sidgwick, on the other hand, was a far more apprehensive political traveller, nervously rehearsing the potential mishaps of any journey and made edgy by the uncertainty of the destination; the longer he studied the brochures for Utopia, the more he warmed to the idea of staying at home. Nor was this simply timidity or unimaginativeness, though Sidgwick had his share of those qualities; it sprang, rather, from a kind of unshowy moral seriousness about the temptations to self-deception offered by political excitement, and an intellectual conviction that only immediate consequences could be calculated with any reasonable reliability. 'Bewailing the necessity of conserving our glorious constitution pro tern': he bewailed because he saw its defects, but pro tern - the present having imperatives where the future could only hold out promises - its conservation was a duty. And this marks not only a personal contrast with Mill, but also the distance between the roles and opportunities available in early and late Victorian political life. We remarked above on how Bagehot stood at a yet further remove from actual veneration of the pieties of Whiggism than Macaulay, even though the latter was already able to regard the glorious constitution with a certain pragmatic detachment. But even Bagehot's identity as a political commentator depended upon those pieties still having some resonance for his audience: describing politics as 'but a piece of business' only acquires its force by contrast with a more sonorous description, and Bagehot relished his role of rug-puller because there were still people standing on the rug. Sidgwick was writing for a different audience, a later as well as a more academic one, and it called for a different voice; where Macaulay seemed to be addressing the House and Bagehot chatting in the club, Sidgwick was always lecturing in the class-room. This also means that none of the earlier political labels are now appropriate. Though a Utilitarian, he was hardly a Philosophic Radical, in part because he was, temperamentally, so little of any kind of radical, just as his lack of any felt emotional continuity with the shibboleths of Whiggism meant that he was not really a philosophic Whig, either. Even the more clearly mid-Victorian political identities are inexact: too much of a sceptic to be a Liberal enthusiast, too much of a realist to be a Tory diehard, he could perhaps best be classed, in this vocabulary, as an intellectual Peelite, intent on getting on with the business in hand, while maintaining a principled aloofness.

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Party labels, however, are necessarily inappropriate to capture the character of someone with so little sectarian feeling. One reviewer slyly remarked that his work exhibited 'good sense intensified almost to the point of genius'. 72 Sidgwick presumably approved of, even savoured, the 'almost'; certainly he must have been pleased that he had managed to make the divisive problems of politics appear amenable to 'good sense'. He realised, of course, that there was more to politics, potentially, than 'the ordinary experience of civilized life' allowed for, but it was part of his conception of his role to insist upon that experience as the only practical starting-point for responsible scientific treatment. 72

Rashdall, 'Review of Elements of Polities', iyy

X

A separate science: polity and society in Marshall's economics Marshall was the first great economist pur sang that there ever was; the first who devoted his life to building up the subject as a separate science, standing on its own foundations with as high standards of scientific accuracy as the physical or biological sciences. It was Marshall who finally saw to it that 'never again will Mrs Trimmer, a Mrs Marcet, or a Miss Martineau earn a goodly reputation by throwing economic principles into the form of a catechism or of simple tales, by aid of which any intelligent governess might make clear to the children nestling around her where lies economic truth'. But - much more than this - after his time Economics could never be again one of a number of subjects which a Moral Philosopher would take in his stride, one Moral Science out of several, as Mill, Jevons, and Sidgwick took it. He was the first to take up this professional scientific attitude to the subject, as something above and outside current controversy, as far from politics as physiology is from the general practitioner. J O H N MAYNARD KEYNES, 'Alfred Marshall 1842-1924',

Memorials of Alfred Marshall (1925)

ANY exploration of the various nineteenth-century projects for gaining access to systematic knowledge of 'things political' would be bound to encounter the privileged position accorded to political economy, and several of these essays have already, in their different ways, touched upon this topic. Put schematically, the questions which have recurred have concerned the scope, method, and political bearings of successive conceptions of political economy: how was its subject matter separated from the study of other aspects of man's public life;' in what sense was it taken to possess a distinctive method, and how far was this seen as providing a model for the development of other moral sciences; and, above all, to what extent was it assumed to provide independent and self-contained guidance in political matters, as opposed to being subordinate to some more general form of political wisdom, whether in the form of, say, Malthus's 'higher interests', Mill's 'social philosophy', or Sidgwick's 'art of practice'? And what, speaking very generally, one finds in pursuing these questions is that a remarkably continuous and almost autonomous tradition of methodological statement, most commonly confining the science to a narrow range of deduction from a set of hypothetical premises, seems to have existed alongside a practice whereby the leading treatises on the subject continually 'engrossed' a much wider area than this, embracing the discussion of historical, comparative, and political matters as a legitimate part of the province of the political economist. The most striking and influential nineteenth-century example of this expansive handling of the category was provided by Mill's Principles, where, as we have seen, he not only deliberately used the work as a vehicle for a variety of what he himself called 'incidental' opinions on 'moral and social' matters, but where, in pursuing the 'applications to social philosophy', he included two whole books - one chiefly devoted to discussing past and possible future forms of property, one entirely concerned with analysing the functions of government - which were not, according to his own definition, part of the science at all. Clearly, political economy remained throughout this period, despite an almost equally continuous tradition of criticism, the most prestigious and highly developed vocabulary for the discussion of a very large set of political issues - only rivalled, usually in relation to rather different issues, by law and history - and there was thus a corresponding incentive to exploit its scientific standing when airing more general or more controversial political views. The familiar passage from Keynes which serves as our epigraph might seem to suggest that these themes cease to be a profitable line of enquiry

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when we reach the work of Alfred Marshall. There is undoubtedly a sense, by now carefully defined and well established in a copious secondary literature, in which Marshall can be seen as the first 'professional economist', with better claims to this title than, to take the most obvious comparison, Stanley Jevons. 1 Certainly, Jevons had done much to make marginal utility and the application of differential calculus to economic quantities the foundation for the revolution which economic theorising underwent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; he had also thought 'it would be well to discard, as quickly as possible, the old troublesome double-worded name of our Science'.2 But it was Marshall while denying that anything revolutionary had occurred - who actually constructed what he characteristically referred to as an 'economic organon' based on a thoroughgoing application of the marginal principle and the mathematics of mutual determination to economic analysis. Similarly, it was Marshall rather than Jevons who took the step of substituting 'Economics' for 'Political Economy' in the title of his major works, and who, unlike Jevons, confined his efforts exclusively to the renamed discipline. Keynes's comment, therefore, seems accurate enough as a description of the development in the early twentieth century of a more austere conception of professional identity and a more modest sense of the political role to be played by those who now saw themselves solely as 'economists'. Yet Marshall's part in bringing about this change must be recognised to have been a complex and ambiguous one. As the quotation embedded in the passage from Keynes implies, he certainly intended to make economics a highly elaborated science for which a special and lengthy training was required; and he equally certainly disowned any of the simple maxims of policy which were supposed to have been derived from it in the heyday of its public standing. And yet, and again unlike Jevons, he did not entertain a straightforwardly 'narrower' or 'purer' conception of his subject than his classical predecessors had done: on the contrary, he harboured a vision of economics that was positively imperialist in its potential scope, and one which promised to give economics unique standing as the source of relevant expertise in contributing to the resolution of a strikingly wide range of public issues. The very comprehensiveness of Marshall's vision introduces further complications and subtleties; for if developed systematically 1

2

In addition to J. M. Keynes's memoir, reprinted in Essays in Biography and now included in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes edited by D. Moggridge (London, 1972), x, pp. 161-231, see H. S. Foxwell, 'The Economic Movement in England', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2 (1887), 84-103; A. W. Coats, 'Sociological aspects of British economic thought (Ca. 1880-1930)', Journal of Political Economy, 75 (1967), 706-29; and J. Maloney, 'Marshall, Cunningham, and the emerging economics profession', Economic History Review, 29 (1976), 440-51. W. S. Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (2nd edn, London, 1879 (1st edn 1871)), p. xiv.

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it would have made economics the most general of the social sciences, perhaps even the only social science, thoroughly pre-empting in the process the conceptual space occupied by both sociology and political science. But this grandiose vision proved embarrassing to Marshall's successors and was largely shunned by them in their pursuit of professional respectability; and this means that if his work does provide a natural terminus for one set of our themes, the reasons are not exactly those adduced by Keynes, nor are the implications altogether ones that Marshall himself would have welcomed. Marshall was rightly irritated by descriptions of his contribution to the innovations made in economic analysis after 1870 as one that entailed reconciliation of the newer ideas on marginal utility and demand with older classical notions which emphasised cost-of-production or supply considerations in determining relative prices. The irritation was partly due to his independent claims to have rediscovered the significance of the marginal principle at much the same time as Jevons, but he also resented the implication that he had achieved reconciliation by compromising on a matter of science: 'Truth is the only thing worth having; not peace. I have never compromised on any doctrine of any kind.' He added, however, that choosing terminology that would express the truth was a 'matter of mere opportunism', in which it was necessary to compromise whenever this seemed likely 'to facilitate mutual understandings'. 3 Much the same might be said of Marshall's 'reconciliation' of the older claims on behalf of the deductive methods of Ricardo and Mill with the newer respect for historical, comparative, and inductive enquiries. His concern to re-establish the continuity of the English theoretical tradition in economics by defending it against the variety of charges brought by Jevons, the Comtists, and the economic historians was quite compatible with a profound knowledge of, and equal pride in, those other intellectual and moral achievements that belonged more especially to his own generation, whether represented by German and English historical scholarship, biological models for social evolution, the comparative method, or by claims to a more developed sense of collective conscience such as those expressed in the writings of Idealists and Socialists. Attempting to achieve balance over such a wide spectrum of positions suggests either an extreme form of eclecticism or an over-enlarged desire for compromise. Marshall's cautiousness, his intense dislike of public controversy, and his belief that on methodological matters 'a man is nearly sure to be right when affirming the usefulness of his own procedure, and wrong when denying that of 3

See his letter to J. B. Clark, 24 March 1908, reprinted in A. C. Pigou (ed.), Memorials of Alfred Marshall (London, 1925), p. 418.

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others', all conform to this portrait. But many of his acknowledgements of what was positive in rival points of view were made in the interests of 'mutual understandings', and his apparent modesty should not always be taken at face value. When Marshall appeared to be making defensive concessions to rival disciplines and methodological perspectives, he was often diluting the claims to knowledge made by their devotees, engaging in a covert process of annexing existing territory to economics, and suggesting ways in which economics, as he redefined it, provided unique access to undiscovered lands. It hardly needs to be said that Marshall's views on the nature of economics resist neat characterisation; perhaps one so adept at stealing his opponents' clothes is bound to appear in many-layered and not always well-co-ordinated outfits. Without aiming at a thorough inventory of his views, it may be worth briefly reconsidering some of the better-known features and implications of his re-definition of the subject-matter of economics as the 'study of mankind in the ordinary business of life'. 4 This innocuous yet inclusive definition signalled a good deal more than a practical concern with everyday realities. It marked a decisive break with the postulate of 'economic man', and hence with all the restrictive, abstract, selfish, and overly materialistic connotations of this postulate. Marshall resisted the idea that the subject was confined to dealing with self-regarding individuals whose actions, whether in earning income or spending it, could be regarded as free from ethical and altruistic influences and consequences, as though driven solely by pecuniary gain to satisfy the material wants of man's 'lower' nature. 5 But in addition to stressing 'the bearing of economics on the higher wellbeing of man', Marshall can be seen as attempting to remove those limiting or relativising concessions made by Mill and Bagehot when they spoke of political economy as a 'hypothetical science' chiefly of use in understanding 'a society of grown-up competitive commerce, such as we have in England'. 6 Marshall believed that 'deliberateness' rather than competition or selfishness was the chief characteristic of modern economic life. This allowed room for deliberate co-operation and deliberate unselfishness, where the former could encompass monopoly or other types of collective ownership and action, the good and evil of 4

5

6

See Principles of Economics, Ninth (Variorum) Edition with Annotations by C. W. Guillebaud, 2 vols. (London, 1961 (1st edn 1890)), 1, Book 1; see also Appendices B, C and D for further developments of Marshall's views on the scope and method of economics. There were also less high-flown reasons for abandoning economic man, as Marshall made clear in a comment on J. N . Keynes's Scope and Method of Political Economy: 'economic man does so little good service and causes so much trouble that on practical and tactical (not theoretical) grounds, it is best to do without him'. Letter to Keynes, 17 November 1889, as quoted in J. K. Whitaker, 'John Stuart Mill's methodology', Journal of Political Economy, 83 (I975)» I0 4SFor Mill and Bagehot, see pp. 136-8 and 255-7 above.

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which would need to be assessed, while the latter involved charity, or what Marshall later called 'economic chivalry', whereby material wealth was sacrificed for the sake of improvements in 'the quality of life'.7 Although much of this belongs to the moralising Marshall, the man whom Keynes criticised for being 'too anxious to do good', there was also an important methodological principle at stake, namely 'the Principle of Continuity' which Marshall epitomised in the motto he chose for his Principles of Economics - (Natura non facit saltum\ The principle was powerfully reinforced in Marshall's case by the confluence of his mathematical knowledge and biological enthusiasms. Thus it acquired support from the continuous functions and infinitesimal variations of differential calculus as well as from the idea of continuous processes of biological evolution. Although Marshall came to believe that the mathematical expression of problems of equilibrium, mutual determination, and frictionless adjustment was merely the first step on a path towards a study of the more complex forces underlying the life cycle of economic organisms, he drew on both mathematical and biological language when stressing continuity. 8 And if continuity was at work in economic life, as elsewhere, it followed that ways of earning income and spending them, selfish and altruistic motives, calculation and custom, could not be rigidly separated from one another. But clearly some form of separation was required if economics was to be a distinct enquiry that was not all things to all men. Marshall based this distinctiveness on the claim that the motives with which economics dealt were more powerful and steady in their operation than those considered by other branches of social science; and the fact that the strength of motives, if not their quality and character, could often be measured by means of a money yardstick: [Economists] deal with man as he is: but being concerned chiefly with those aspects of life in which the action of motive is so regular that it can be predicted, and the estimate of the motor-forces can be verified by results, they have established their work on a scientific basis.9 There was undoubtedly some tension between Marshall's inclusive definition of the nature of the activities covered by the economist and his stress on money measurement as the main advantage enjoyed by economics as a social science. The motives brought into play by 'those aspects of life', the 7 8

9

See 'Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry' (1907), reprinted in Memorials, pp. 323-46; and Principles, 1, pp. 5-10. On the distinction between mechanical and biological analogies, see Principles, 1, pp. xiv-xv, 323, 461, 771-2; n, pp. 44, 47-50, 57-8; and 'Mechanical and Biological Analogies in Economies' (1898), reprinted in Memorials, pp. 312-19. Principles, 1, p. 27.

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strength of which could be readily measured by money or price, looked suspiciously like the ordinary material aspects of life. Marshall countered this by arguing that material wealth did not have to be sought by ignoble means for ignoble ends: economists had always been willing to acknowledge the influence of uncalculating and non-pecuniary motives, including the notion that an activity might be its own reward.10 However, in dealing, as they usually did, with the conduct of groups and classes of people, 'personal peculiarities of temper and character' could be set aside in favour of the rough but ready measurement provided by market transactions. Indeed, Marshall displayed considerable ingenuity and tenacity (some have thought it recklessness) in advancing novel methods, based on appeals to 'common usage', for measuring the costs and benefits to different groups of specific economic events and policy measures.11 He did not even believe that money was absolutely essential as a measure of motives; for example, it was possible to envisage a world in which a graduated and transferable system of honours acted as an adequate inducement to action, and hence as a system of measurement of the force of motives. At one point he even suggested that 'a sort of economic pathology' might be built up to deal with bribery and wrong-doing, the negative side of the account.12 In these ways Marshall attempted to show that in cases where other than strictly pecuniary motives were important to the outcome of action by groups and classes, it was 'not the want of will but the want of power that prevents economists from reckoning in the action of motives such as these'. 13 Mrs Marshall reported that in his teaching at Newnham Hall in the 1870s her future husband had stated 'that Bentham had more influence on Economics than any other non-economist, his contribution being the stress laid on measurement. "When you have found a means of measurement you have found a ground for controversy, and so it is a means of progress." >14 Marshall's optimism concerning measurement consorts well with this early enthusiasm for Bentham, even if the taste for 'controversy' seems to have waned. But he was also consistent in his denial that economics was inherently tied to Utilitarianism, whether considered as an account of the operation of self-interest in economic affairs or as an ethical theory. The rejection of 'economic man' illustrates the former, as does his 10 11 12 13 14

Principles, 1, pp. 22-4. SeeD. Winch, Economics and Policy (London, 1969), pp. 38-43. See Principles, 1, p. 782; 11, p. 144. Principles, 1, p. 24. See M. P. Marshall, What I Remember (Cambridge, 1947), p. 19. For other evidence of Marshall's knowledge of and interest in Bentham see The Early Economic Writings of Alfred Marshall, 1867-1890, edited and introduced by J. K. Whitaker, 2 vols. (London, 1975), i,p. 46; 11, pp. 316-19, 379-81.

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criticism of Jevons's confusion of 'hedonics' and economics: whereas Jevons had been prepared to move from marginal utility to discuss the total utility derived from economic transactions, Marshall preferred to speak only of a 'rough money measure' of consumers' rent or surplus under restricted conditions, notably where the class of beneficiaries/losers from an event or policy enjoyed roughly equal incomes. 15 Limited and indirect measures of incentives to action could be found through the marginal principle, but this did not justify inferences concerning the quality or amount of pleasure enjoyed by different people; and to mark the distance from Utilitarianism Marshall increasingly substituted 'satisfaction' or 'benefit' for 'pleasure' in successive editions of the Principles. Marshall's misgivings about Utilitarianism as 'a bridge by which to pass from individualistic Hedonism to a complete ethical creed' also seem to have an early origin. 16 In the 1870s, he had seen himself as contributing to the working out, in deliberate antagonism to both Intuitionism and Utilitarianism, of an 'ethical creed which is according to the Doctrine of Evolution'. 17 There are numerous hints of this creed in his published as well as unpublished writings, but the first note struck was one of professional caution. Economists did not attempt 'to fathom the mental and spiritual characteristics of individuals'; they did not pretend 'to weigh the real value of the higher affections of our nature against the lower'; and he conceded that 'it will. . . probably be always true that the great part of those actions, which are due to a feeling of duty and love of one's neighbour, cannot be classed, reduced to law and measured'. 18 Ethics was separate from economics; the economist sacrificed certainty and exactness when he strayed into realms where 'the general machinery of economic analysis and reasoning cannot get any grip'. There was a distinct range of questions that lent themselves to a positive investigation of causes by the tools of economics. By pursuing them diligently the economist might 'get gradually nearer to those fundamental unities which are called nature's laws'. And yet with almost equal insistence Marshall struck the ethical note. The varying practical issues which he listed as 'lying for the greater part outside the range of economic science, yet supply a chief motive in the background to the work of the economist' were largely ethical in character; and when addressing himself to such questions the economist could never 'ignore the mental and spiritual side of life' or fail to ask 'whether the desires which prevail are such as will help to build up a strong and righteous character'. 19 15 16 17 18 19

See Principles, 1, pp. 20, 130-1; and 11, pp. 260-1. Principles, 1, p. ijn. See Early Economic Writings, 11, p. 377; see also the editor's comments in 1, pp. 6-9; 11, pp. 352—5. For Marshall's disagreement with Sidgwick on this issue, see pp. 287-8 above. See Principles, 1, pp. 16-17, 24. Principles, 1, pp. 28, 40, 41-2; 11, 17.

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In the passage about duty and love of one's neighbour quoted above, it is hard to know whether one should be impressed by the professional modesty or by the wistful hope contained in probably'. It seems to epitomise Marshall's desire to retain a hold on all possibilities simultaneously to claim that there was a well-delimited area for economic science, one that could be expanded indefinitely by the cumulative efforts of dedicated students, while at the same time maintaining intimate contact with all the important ethical questions of the present and future, without claiming to solve them by its own methods or losing its qualities as science in the process. Although ethics remained the 'mistress' of economics, and separate establishments were, as usual with such relationships, the wisest arrangement, Marshall continued to speak as though economics enjoyed privileged access to that establishment. 20 But the route was not to be found solely by extending measurable motives to the limit and then making the final leap by means of 'common sense' and 'ethical instincts'. Economics was only partly 'a study of wealth'; its more important side was as 'part of the study of man' based on the notion that economic activities, the way in which men earn their daily livelihood, was, together with religion, the most important influence on the evolution of man's character and hence ideals, and far more regular and extensive in its effects than religion. 21 Marshall held that this insight, partly derived from the example of Darwinian biology, separated the new generation of economists from their predecessors,22 but in making it so much a part of the agenda and method of economics, he also separated himself from those contemporaries, chiefly Jevons, Sidgwick and Edgeworth, who preserved a closer relationship between economics and Utilitarianism. Once more, by distancing economics from Utilitarianism Marshall was able to expand its scope, and by so doing construct a scientific bridge leading towards an evolutionary creed of ethics. Before noting how this construction was achieved, it may be worth taking a retrospective view of the effect of Marshall's move on themes considered in earlier essays. In the Utilitarian tradition the reliance upon the common assumption of rational action in the pursuit of self-interest had bound politics and economics closely together. The accumulation of the perceived limitations of this model then provided much of the impetus for attempts to develop a more historically sensitive and practically adequate science of politics, some of which have been explored in earlier essays: John Stuart Mill's unrealised 20 21 22

Marshall's reference t o ethics as the 'mistress' of economics comes from his 'Speech at the Meeting of the British Economic Association', Economic Journal, 3 (1893), }%7~9°Principles, 1, p p . 28, 1. See T h e O l d Generation of Economists and the N e w ' (1897), reprinted in Memorials, p p . 295-318; see also p p . 154-5.

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project of 'political ethology', for example, can be seen as a more sophisticated attempt to provide the kind of additional analytical dimension which notions of esprit had furnished for Montesquieu and Tocqueville, and which 'national character' had often supplied at a less conceptually ambitious level.23 But such attempts to supplement or displace the Utilitarian assumptions had left political economy largely unaffected: the attempt by the historical economists to effect a similar modification to the core of the subject itself only resulted in an inconclusive form of relativism in economics proper and the growth of economic history as a separate academic enterprise. What makes Marshall's move so distinctive is that his efforts to accommodate these diverse strands took place within the framework of a re-modelled economic theory which laid claim to universal analytical purchase. In effect, he developed an 'economic ethology' to fulfil the functions Mill had assigned to 'political ethology', and the change of adjective is, as we shall see, the most significant point in the comparison. The implication of Marshall's move can also be brought out by comparing his conception of the task of economics with the positions occupied by Jevons and Sidgwick. Jevons's response to criticisms of political economy in the 1870s had been to concede that the subject ought in future 'to be looked upon as an aggregate of sciences', with separate departments concerned with 'the development of economic forms' or with 'applied economics' standing alongside the pure theory of economics. In fact, he allowed these other studies separate existence partly because his view of economic theory was so starkly abstract and deductive: 'The laws of political economy . . . are so simple in their foundation that they would apply, more or less completely, to all human beings of whom we have any knowledge . . . The theory of economy proves to be, in fact, the mechanics of utility and self-interest.'24 As we have seen, this was precisely the narrow box from which Marshall sought to free economics; he had no time for 'hedonics'; he disliked even the term 'theory' (preferring 'analysis'); and he repudiated the equation of 'economics proper' with 'theory' alone, maintaining that 'a thorough study of facts is equally essential and that a combination of the two sides of the work is alone economics proper'.25 As a result, he could not countenance the fragmentation Jevons had condoned: it would have entailed the dissolution of the imperial vision he was 23 24

25

F o r o u r earlier discussion of these points in relation t o J . S. Mill and Sidgwick, see p p . 151, 156-8, and 287 above. Jevons, Theory, pp. xvi-xvii; 'The Future of Political Economy' (1876), reprinted in W. S. Jevons, The Principles of Economics, edited by Henry Higgs (London, 1905), pp. 196-9. See the letter t o F . Y. E d g e w o r t h , 28 August 1902, reprinted in Memorials, p . 437, and the letter t o J . N . Keynes cited in R. H . Coase, 'Marshall o n m e t h o d ' , Journal of Law and Economics, 18 (1975), 26-7.

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able to entertain as a result of replacing economic man with a concrete study of all the facets of 'normal' economic behaviour, and by pinning his hopes on the even more ambitious project of economic ethology. Where Jevons had, on his own account, used the calculus to bring Benthamism up to date, Sidgwick, as we have seen, preferred to deal with Utilitarian man in his more familiar guise. As part of his deliberately old-fashioned conception of political economy, he had also distinguished the 'science' and the 'art', but had, following Mill, chosen to 'grant the study of both a place within the pale of political economy'. 26 Marshall was far from indifferent to the practical role of economics, and even projected a volume on 'Wirtschaftspolitik, or the economic functions of government', 27 but he found the idea of an 'art' of political economy too redolent of the easy answers purveyed by the likes of Mrs Marcet and Mrs Trimmer. In justifying his own avoidance of 'art', he inserted the following implicit rebuke to Sidgwick in the third edition of the Principles: 'It seems better to regard the science as pursuing its enquiries with more or less direct reference to certain practical issues, and as pointing the way towards solutions of them, than to make pretension to the authority of an Art, complete and self-contained, and responsible for the entire direction of conduct in certain matters.' 28 But his discontent with Utilitarianism was also brought into play here, too, in that Sidgwick had been able to bring together and adjudicate between different courses of action on the part of government because he was willing to regard the maximisation of happiness not merely as an analytical device for measuring individual utility preferences, but as a tolerably acceptable description of the desirable end of government. Marshall could advance various devices for indicating the gains and losses to various consuming and producing interest groups of specific measures, but he was careful to avoid a Utilitarian interpretation of these devices, and would not commit himself to an overarching conception of the public interest, especially one that required him to abandon an evolutionary perspective on character that promised predictive knowledge of those improvements in 'the average level of human nature' that might make future social expedients quite different from those suitable for the present. Talcott Parsons was the first to show how Marshall employed the distinction between 'wants' (the subject-matter of a 'science of wealth') and 'activities' (where economics became 'part of the Social Science of man's 26

27 28

Henry Sidgwick, 'Political Economy, Scope', in Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, 3 volumes (1894—9), i n , p. 131; for fuller discussion of Sidgwick's views, see pp. 282-6 above. See Principles, 11, p. 45. Principles, 11, p. 154.

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action in society') to depart from the mainstream of Utilitarian thought and embark on the construction of a highly ambitious form of economic ethology or sociology along evolutionary lines.29 Wants may rule economic activities in the lower stages of social evolution, but in the higher stages activities not only mould wants but the whole character and motives of men as they exist in organised groups, classes, and societies. By confining itself to the study of the satisfaction of given wants, 'the material requisites of wellbeing', a Utilitarian conception of economics would cut the subject off from 'the high theme of economic progress'. By making activities and their dominant influence on the formation of character-type and ideals the central concern of economics, it could become the guiding discipline in any 'study of man', past, present or future. If, in all this, it seems hard to discern the creator of a 'separate science' or the 'professional scientific attitude', it appears almost equally difficult to reconcile such sentiments with Marshall's rejection of Comtist pretensions to be in the process of creating a science of sociology which would subsume the subject-matter hitherto assigned to the economists. For had he not declared in his Inaugural lecture, in terms reminiscent of Mill and Sidgwick: 'It is vain to speak of the higher authority of a unified social science. No doubt if that existed, Economics would gladly shelter under its wing. But it does not exist; it shows no sign of coming into existence. There is no use waiting idly by for it; we must do what we can with our present resources.' 30 But what Marshall seems to have thought could be done with 'present resources' was far more ambitious than anything Mill achieved, and more extensive than anything Sidgwick contemplated or is likely to have approved. Although Marshall made a further anti-Comtist remark to the effect that 'the whole range of man's actions is too wide and various to be analysed by a single intellectual effort', he also offered a statement of the ultimate goal of social scientific endeavour which is every bit as grand as anything to be found in Comte: Social science or the reasoned history of man, for the two things are the same, is working its way towards a fundamental unity just as is being done by physical science, or, which is the same thing, by the reasoned history of natural phenomena. Physical science is seeking her hidden unity in the forces that govern molecular movement: social science is seeking her unity in the forces of human character. To 29

30

See T . Parsons, 'Wants and activities in Marshall', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 46 (1931-2), 101-40; and 'Economics and sociology: Marshall in relation to the thought of his time', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 46 (1931-2), 316-47; and the chapter o n Marshall in his Structure of Social Action ( N e w York, 1937). O n the broader aspects of Marshall's thinking, especially its evolutionary strain, the best general treatment can be found in J. K. Whitaker, 'Some neglected aspects of Alfred Marshall's economic and social thought', History of Political Economy, 9 (1977), 161-97. 'The Present Position of Economics' (1885), reprinted in Memorials, p p . 163-4; see also Principles, 1, p p . 770-1.

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that all history tends; from that proceeds all prediction, all guidance for the future.31 The reference here is to Social science' and ca reasoned history of man' rather than to economics, but there are clear grounds, which must now be rehearsed, for believing that Marshall considered economic reasoning, as he had generously redefined it, as capable of serving as the basis for 'a reasoned history of man'. But first the question of Marshall's attitude to history, and to the work of the German and English historical economists in particular, must be considered. On the basis of Marshall's knowledge and use of this branch of historical scholarship, there can be little doubt about his conviction that it was 'one of the great achievements of our age'.32 For, taken as a whole, his writings contain more historical material of one kind or another - the vagueness of the description is necessary at this stage - than those of any orthodox economist before or since, Adam Smith always excepted. A quick comparison with J. S. Mill's Principles makes this clear: Mill managed to compress all he wanted to say about both the pre-history of modern economic life and the history of economic thought into some brief 'Preliminary Remarks'; Marshall originally devoted three long chapters in Book i of the Principles to 'The Growth of Free Industry and Enterprise' and 'The Growth of Economic Science', and a great deal of his Industry and Trade (1919) was concerned with the comparative economic history of industrial technology and business organisation in Britain, France, Germany and the United States. Moreover, whereas Mill proceeded along eighteenth-century stadial lines to tell a brusque story about the emancipation of economic life from fixed custom and feudal servility, treating pre-Smithian economic thinking as 'the crude fancies of childhood', Marshall's treatment of the same themes is far more scholarly and respectful, being based on all the subsequent work done by economic historians on medieval economic institutions, the mercantile state, and the Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, Marshall wore his historical learning in a style that differed markedly from that of the economic historians considered in an earlier essay (VIII) - a difference that is not really explained simply by his increasing sensitivity to criticisms, especially from his Cambridge colleague, William Cunningham, to the effect that he had trespassed across academic trade-union demarcation lines. It is true that after that attack he relegated much of the early historical material in the Principles to appendices; and that he went out of his way in Industry and Trade to stress that his work made 'no claim whatever to be a contribution to economic 31 32

See Memorials, p p . 299—300. Principles, 1, p. 768.

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history'. 33 But this merely prompts the question: what was Marshall's purpose in deploying so much evidence of a historical kind, and how does that purpose differ from that of the economic historians? That Marshall genuinely shared so many of the enthusiasms for the historical and comparative methods championed by the critics of the old political economy helps to establish more clearly just where he parted company with them. The differences were partly methodological in character, but they also led Marshall to deflate precisely those general claims to political significance, the legitimation of which, as we have seen, was often sought in the newer historical and comparative approaches to economic habits and institutions. Marshall's reasons for so doing were based on standard methodological arguments that again recall Mill's answers to Comte, and Sidgwick's objections to historical sociology. The facts furnished by observation and history are silent; they cannot establish causes without recourse to 'analysis' and 'general reasoning'. Hidden and countervailing causal influences may be concealed beneath temporal sequences of events; there is always the danger of implicit theorising ('inconsequent reasoning') along post hoc ergopropter hoc lines. In the absence of causal knowledge, no guidance for future conduct can be derived from historical and comparative evidence alone. From history we can learn only the 'tactics' of past times, 'those outward forms and accidents of economic organisation which depend on temporary or local attitudes, customs and relations of classes'. Such knowledge, like that bearing on the economic facts of modern life, is essential in arriving at the common-sense judgements on which most everyday conduct is based, where 'elaborate scientific methods' are unnecessary. But when we are dealing with questions of more than 'merely local and temporary interest', especially when we are 'seeking guidance in the construction of a far-reaching policy for the public good', tactics need to be supplemented by a knowledge of 'strategy', a deductive knowledge of the 'cause of causes' which only 'systematic scientific reasoning' can supply. 34 Marshall showed considerable skill in turning the lessons of the evolutionary and comparative approaches into arguments in favour of his conception of the modern economic organon. The earlier economists may have been guilty of mechanistic thinking, of treating man as a 'constant quantity', and of paying insufficient attention to the variability of economic customs and institutions across time and space, but since 'biology itself teaches us that the vertebrate organisms are the most highly developed', any science that dealt with the higher forms of economic organisms must also have 'a firm backbone of careful reasoning and 33 34

Industry and Trade (London, 1919), p p . vi and 11. Principles, 1, p p . 774-9; and Memorials, p p . 165-71.

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analysis'.35 Furthermore, if Darwin's biology teaches that the later developments in the evolutionary chain provide the best evidence of adaptation to circumstances, the study of remote periods of economic history is unlikely to shed much light on the modern economic organism, especially when, as a result of rapid progress, present economic conditions are quite unlike any that have existed before'. 36 Marshall's suggestion that the economic history of remoter periods, when not supplemented by analysis, was merely of antiquarian interest extended to the more politically sensitive question of the history of land tenure and Maine's comparative writings on the role of custom in Indian tenurial arrangements. It was this subject that provided the occasion, in 1892, for one of Cunningham's attacks, the one that forced Marshall to break his rule of not replying to critics. 37 The point at issue was a crucial one, not simply because Cunningham was challenging Marshall's knowledge of medieval economic history, but because, as both parties realised, Marshall's treatment of custom in the context of land tenure formed an essential part of his views on 'strategy' and hence on the causal claims of his 'economic organon'. 38 Cunningham, who anyway rejected the causal purchase of economic theory, which he regarded as a purely formal science akin to logic, accused Marshall of upholding the Ricardian view that universal laws based on assumptions of constant motivation could be applied to the past and to societies like modern India that were at a different stage of development from more advanced societies. Marshall had no difficulty in showing that he accepted that 'the laws of one stage will seldom apply without modification to others', and that he was fully cognisant of the work of Maine, Vinogradoff, and others on communal land tenure in India and medieval Europe. 39 Nevertheless, in keeping with his belief in the continuity of all social phenomena, he refused to accept a radical caesura between custom and competition, between past and present. Instead of merely chronicling the reported facts about medieval and Indian land tenure, these facts should be cross-examined by means of economic science. This might show that customary behaviour and institutions were neither so fixed nor so opaque to modern analysis as had been supposed. Marshall invoked impeccable comparativist authorities to support his 35 36 37 38

39

Principles, 1, p. J69. See Memorials, p . 169; and Principles, 1, p p . 2 4 0 - 5 . O n t h e details of this dispute see t h e article b y J . M a l o n e y cited in n. 1, and p p . 266-9 above. A s early as 188 5, in his Inaugural lecture, Marshall had claimed that economic science 'will break u p and explain w h a t are called economic customs, very m u c h as the telescope breaks u p a nebula'; see Memorials, p . 169. See Marshall's reply t o C u n n i n g h a m as reprinted in Principles, 11, p p . 735-50. I n the 5th edition (1907) Marshall altered his statement that: ' T h e history of Land T e n u r e is a most important study' to read 'is full of antiquarian interest': see 11, p. JJ6.

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views: 'My starting point was in the teaching of Sir Henry Maine and others that, since people brought up under the influence of custom have habits of mind not like ours, they are, for that very reason, able to persuade themselves that they are adhering to custom, when they are really modifying it.'40 By posing the right question it might be possible to show that custom is more or less plastic, and therefore that such modern analytical resources as that provided by Ricardo's theory of rent could uncover the 'subterranean channels of change'; for, after all, 'they tell quaint stories of sly devices for getting the best of one's neighbour even in the quietist corners of the world'. 41 The errors which underlay policies towards the Indian and Irish peasant were errors of jurisprudence not economics, and unlike Mill, and some of Maine's readers among the economic historians, Marshall had no desire to use historical evidence to bolster a case against existing patterns of English land-ownership. 42 Behind the more obvious personal features of the Cunningham-Marshall exchanges, therefore, was a larger substantive issue. Marshall was carrying the dispute into the heartland of the economic historians' territory by suggesting that even where they seemed to be on the strongest ground in resisting the universality of economic reasoning, they were perhaps guilty of taking historical evidence at face value and thereby ignoring hidden causal factors. As far as India was concerned, Marshall was prepared, in giving evidence to the 1898 Committee on Indian Currency, to go more directly on to the offensive in a manner that was not in essence different from James Mill's use of Ricardian theorems to deal with Indian economic arrangements. He believed that under Maine's influence there had been a tendency to exaggerate the role of custom and hence to underestimate the rapidity of India's advance towards an economic system in which money prices dominated. What was now needed was an injection of economic expertise in the form of some young men capable of separating 'the apparent from the real in the action of economic forces', men with 'a good grounding in economics who have already got to understand the main bearings of those modern economic forces which are revolutionising the West, and are making great changes in the East'. 43 Marshall's lengthy forays into territory covered by the economic historians enabled him to do more than show what a knowledge of 'strategy' could do for their 'tactics'; he was able to offer his own interpretations of specific episodes in England's past to reveal that he shared the higher social 40 41 42 43

Principles, 11, p. 738. Principles, 11, p. 741. O n this see pp. 262—5 above. Alfred Marshall, Official Papers, edited by J. M. Keynes (London, 1926), pp. 274-5 and 325-6; he had expressed similar views in 1888, see p. 181.

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conscience of his generation on many issues, and to engage in some explanatory apologetics when dealing with the older school of political economists. But he was still able to disclaim making any contribution to economic history, not so much out of academic modesty, but because he had larger goals in sight. Thus, in explaining his decision to remove the chapters in his Principles on 'The Growth of Free Industry and Enterprise' and 'The Growth of Economic Science' to appendices, he said that their purpose was 'to emphasise, as the keynote of the treatise, the notion that economic problems are not mechanical, but concerned with organic life and growth'. He wished 'to show that the past can afford just guidance for the present and future only when full account is taken of the changes in man himself, and of his modes of life and thought and work'. This biological treatment of history required only that 'strategical lessons' be carried over from one age to another. While 'tactics' served only to provide a knowledge of 'outward forms', 'strategy' addressed itself to 'inner character'.44 . . . to strategy corresponds that more fundamental substance of economic organisation, which depends mainly on such wants and activities, such preferences and aversions as are found in man everywhere; they are not indeed always the same in form, nor even quite the same in substance; but yet they have a sufficient element of permanence and universality to enable them to be brought in some measure under general statements, whereby the experiences of one time and one age may throw light on the difficulties of another.45 Thus if the organon of social science was to be constructed by establishing the evolutionary relations of 'manifold mutual action' between 'the inner character and outward institutions of man', the economic organon provided the best point of departure because it dealt with those measurable motives arising out of 'such wants and activities, such preferences and aversions as are found in man everywhere'. By such standards economic history was rather small beer, a subordinate branch of the larger enquiry, the terms of which were set by Marshall's broad definition of economics: in economics we deal with the whole of man's nature, though we lay chief stress on certain special aspects of it. From this it follows that, insofar as we base ourselves upon the history of past times at all, it must be history as a whole. We need more than economic history, more than a history of economic institutions and customs, wages and prices, of trade and finance: we want a history of man himself, and economic history as contributing to that.46 44 45 46

Principles, n , p. 63. Principles, 1, p. jyy. See Memorials, p . 299. In refusing Lord Acton's invitation t o contribute an economic history of England t o the Cambridge M o d e r n H i s t o r y , Marshall described his o w n w o r k s o n the subject 'as n o t properly histories, that is ordered records of facts. I read history to distil from it leading ideas suitable for m y main p r o b l e m s : then I reread t o select the facts

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Political history had a similar contributory role to play, though Marshall considered it to be more advanced than other branches o£ history 'because it is important on its own account; because it is definite, picturesque, of general interest, and richly supplied with records specially belonging to it'.4? Referring back to an earlier essay, Marshall can be described as attempting to restore the evolutionary frame to history which had been broken by the economic historians.48 For only when placed within such a frame could historical evidence serve 'the chief purpose of every study of human action [which] should be to suggest the probable outcome of present tendencies'. A study of the past supplemented the study of the present by adding a sense of 'the rate of increase of movement' to that of the 'rate of movement' - a prime example of the conflation of mathematical and biological images of continuity. 49 But the main reward lay in explanations of the past and present that would support prediction, 'for explanation is simply prediction written backwards'. Or, as he put it elsewhere, 'from das Sein we have to learn das Werden'.50 On many matters Marshall became more cautious with age, difficult though that may be to conceive, but with regard to 'a reasoned history of man', and the idea that 'the Mecca of the economist lies in economic biology rather than economic dynamics', his commitment grew.51 He became more apologetic about the amount of attention devoted to mechanical analogies in the Principles, and he devoted the last twenty years of his life to drawing up routes to a Mecca that seemed to recede as he approached it. The most ambitious attempt to get there came in 1919, when the author was seventy-seven, with the long-delayed publication of Industry and Trade; and yet, despite its bulk, the book was billed merely as the prologue to a sequence of works that would culminate in one on 'the influence of the conditions of man's life and work' on 'social endeavour', provisionally entitled 'Progress; its Economic Conditions'. 52 Industry and Trade did, however, provide Marshall with a sufficiently large canvas on which to display a remarkable range of material, the fruit of more than fifty years of assiduous collecting, bearing on historical and contemporary

47 48 49 50 51

52

which bear specially o n those ideas; and then suppress every fact which is not essential for m y special p u r p o s e ' : see letter t o Acton, 13 N o v e m b e r 1897, Acton Papers, Cambridge University Library, A d d . 6443(205). Memorials, p. 300. See p p . 258-62 above. Industry and Trade, p. 7. Industry and Trade, p. 7; and Principles, 1, p. 773; and Memorials, p. 300. T h e latter expression concerning Mecca first appeared in the preface to the 5 th edition of the Principles in 1907, and was retained until the 8th edition of 1920, the last t o appear in Marshall's lifetime. See Money, Credit and Commerce ( L o n d o n , 1923), p . vii.

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developments in industrial technology and business organisation, and his reflections on the influence these had exerted on the evolving 'character' and institutions of the leading contenders for world industrial leadership, Britain, France, Germany and the United States. The 'broad reasonings' on which the book was based were those of the Principles; and it dealt with 'the influences which still make for sectional and class selfishness: with the limited tendencies of self-interest to direct each individual's actions on those lines, in which it will be most beneficial to others'. 53 A major feature of the book was its assessment of the harmony and discord produced by modern forms of collective action, such as monopolies and trade unions, and this provided Marshall with an opportunity to consider how far Individualism was likely to be replaced in the future by Socialism, collective provision, and the 'sacrifice of material wealth for the purpose of raising the quality of life'. 54 But the fundamental key to these future possibilities lay not so much in economic reasoning as in 'strength of character' and the degree to which 'the average level of human nature' had risen - and on such matters evolutionary history furnished the main guide. In the chapters and appendices devoted to Marshall's version of Our Island Story, as in the earlier versions given in the Principles, the hero is the sturdy character of the English race, gradually overcoming the 'yoke of custom' and adopting 'more self-reliant habits, more forethought, more deliberateness and free choice'. It is very much a Whig version of economic history in which the original intermixture of war-like races, invigorated by the climate, acquired through sea-roving and the use of the long-bow those characteristics that were to contribute to England's pre-eminence as an industrial and trading power- 'that deep-set firm resolve to concentrate energy on things that make for solid and enduring results, which is the chief foundation of the place that England has won for herself in the world'. 55 It is a story of the formation of 'the spirit of economic nationality' and free enterprise, but one that easily encompasses political events along the way: 'The same qualities which gave political freedom gave them also free enterprise in industry and commerce.' 56 And while the journey of the race has been steadily upward, though with some recent signs of flagging, Marshall does not pass over such dark passages as the Industrial Revolution, 'when the growth of factories made prominent the evils inherent in crude capitalistic control'. 57 Marx's theory of exploitation is rejected in a reasoned footnote, 58 but the possible effect of mass produc53 54 55 56 57 58

Industry and Trade, p. viii. Industry and Trade, p. 5. Industry and Trade, p . 704; see also p p . 35-6, 55-6; and Principles, Principles, 1, p. 744. Industry and Trade, pp. 7 1 - 7 ; and Principles, 1, pp. 749—51. Industry and Trade, pp. 7i-2n; see also pp. 176-j, 657.

1, p p . 723-5, 740-4.

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tion in increasing 'man's power over matter' while diminishing 'his power over himself is considered as a corollary of Marshall's stress on the influence of activities on character: 'when we say a man belongs to the working classes we are thinking of the effect that his work produces on him rather than on the effect that he produces on his work'. 59 Economic freedom had been seriously abused and mismanaged in some important respects, but Marshall, like Macaulay, clearly felt that it was the task of the historian, when viewing these defects from a higher stage of enlightenment, to exercise leniency: 'many a well-navigated ship has missed her course in a cyclone'. 60 There is obviously some truth in Talcott Parsons's accusation that Marshall introduced a 'surreptitious teleology' of a unilinear kind to suggest that the process of evolution, working through natural selection, would lead to a character-type remarkably like the British captain of industry, for whom Marshall had so much regard.61 Economic man, having been abandoned as an abstraction at the outset, re-emerges triumphant, though more chivalrous, as the product of history. But this interpretation overlooks the comparative dimension of Industry and Trade. Although Marshall's sketches of the different national characters sometimes sound like astrological stereotypes (firm will, some deficiency in graciousness, not very musical), he was anxious to show that, because the experience that had produced German, French, and American institutions and character was different from that of the English, different present expedients, as in the case of German and American protectionism, might be justified. He did believe, as he made clear in his criticisms of List's stages of economic development, that there were powerful synchronising forces at work in modern economies,62 but one of the aims of Industry and Trade was to show how industrial leadership had changed through time. If he had really been confident that British economic institutions, with the British captain of industry at the helm, were destined to inherit the earth, he would not have worried quite so much about the signs of relative 'sluggishness' that had set in;63 and he would not have been quite so open-minded in his examination of the evidence that suggested that German or American institutions and character were perhaps better adapted to the economic conditions of the likely future. Marshall was no more committed to a unilinear view - 'economic evolution is gradual and continuous on each of its numberless routes' - than he was to laissez-faire or the idea that what was 59 60 61 62 63

'The F u t u r e of the W o r k i n g Classes' (1873), reprinted in Memorials, Trade, p . 699. Industry and Trade, p. 79. See Parsons, 'Economics and sociology', 344. Industry and Trade, pp. 697—9. Industry and Trade, pp. 96-106.

p . 103; Industry

and

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natural had, perforce, to be beneficial: 'subordination to natural tendencies, when pushed to its logical extreme, is blind fatalism'.64 Marshall's interest in the comparative method had led him back beyond Maine to Montesquieu, the acknowledged grandfather of this approach; but it was the common emphasis on climatological and physical influences on character that probably accounts for his interest. These subjects exercised Marshall considerably, both abroad and at home. In the case of hot climates like India, for example, he looked forward to the day when the 'ruling race' would be 'able to sustain their constitutional vigour unimpaired for many generations by a liberal use of artificial ice, or the cooling effects of the forcible expansion of compressed air'.65 And given his emphasis on the effect of 'open-air rural life' in releasing English energies, it is hardly surprising that he should point to public parks and recreational facilities as legitimate spheres for municipal enterprise in British industrial towns; urban man needed to be kept up to scratch.66 But it was to Montesquieu's intellectual descendant, Tocqueville, that Marshall naturally turned when he reported on his own investigations of American 'genius' upon his return from a four-month trip to America in 1875. Although Tocqueville's 'insight was tremendous', he had 'professed to pay but little attention to those conditions of American life which were not directly connected either as cause or effect with political institutions'. If he had 'regarded it as within his province to examine minutely the influence which the daily occupations of men exert on their character', as Marshall had, he would not have reached the same conclusions regarding the tendencies towards 'social despotism and even loss of energy' that accompanied over-centralisation in democracies. The restless occupational, and hence geographical, mobility of American society had produced a more intrepid form of self-reliance, more independent of social opinion than its English counterpart, but by the same token less fitted for cooperative enterprises.67 Marshall expanded on these comments in Industry and Trade, making what can perhaps best be described as a number of excursions into 'political sociology'. Political liberty had gone hand in hand with economic enterprise in the past, and there was an affinity in modern times between democracy and industrial progress. Germany provided the main contrast to the Anglo-Saxon nations in this respect, and Marshall discussed the formation of cartels in German industry behind tariff barriers against 64 65 66 67

Industry and Trade, p p . v, 174-6; see Principles, 1, p p . 240-9 o n the application of natural selection generally. Principles, 1, p p . 7 2 4 - 5 ^ 762. Industry and Trade, p . 700; Memorials, p p . 344-5; and o n the importance of leisure and relaxation, Principles, 1, p p . 89, 197, 252, 693-4, 720. See 'Some Features of American I n d u s t r y ' in Early Economic Writings, 11, p p . 3 5 5-77.

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the background of 'military autocracy', a disciplined yet less self-reliant population, and an efficient bureaucratic tradition. He saw even this coming under strain, but his main lesson was, of course, that 'policies which are appropriate to a military and partially autocratic Government . . . are likely to be unsuitable for a democratic Anglo-Saxon country'. American politics had been corrupted by the intricacies of administering protective tariffs and, in general, 'bureaucratic methods are alien from the genius of democracy'. 68 Since Marshall regarded most 'socialist schemes', including the latest forms of guild socialism, as bureaucratic, the conclusion had wider import. Marshall's longevity can be distracting: apart from references to Whitley Councils, nationalisation, and the aircraft industry, which might be taken for granted, an effortless comparison of G. D. H. Cole with St Simon, to register the warning that guild socialism could 'drift into chaos, from which relief can be found only in a military despotism', is more disconcerting. 69 Marshall was vigilant in noting the centrality which economic affairs had come to assume in British political life during and after the First World War, and this confirmed the doubts he had expressed about Tocqueville's concentration on political institutions as the clue to the 'genius' of a nation. For if 'progress mainly depends on the extent to which the strongest, and not merely the highest, forces of human nature can be utilised for the increase of social good', economic ethology was better adapted to the task in hand. 70 That Marshall should so often have returned to Hegel's Philosophy of History is indicative of the extent to which he saw history in terms of the development of 'spirit' (for which 'character' was frequently the English equivalent), and of the way in which his treatment of it indulged a notion of teleology. For these and other reasons, Jowett was right to see 'a considerable element of Hegelianism' in the Principles. 71 But there is another revealing dimension of Marshall's attachment to that famous work, though the revelation is of the oblique kind provided by the behaviour of Holmes's taciturn dog. For the central organising category of Hegel's history, and the arena in which man is uniquely able to discover and exercise rational freedom, is, notoriously, the State. Yet this plays very little part in Marshall's vision of progress towards 'our higher social nature', and it is one of the substantive points on which he diverged most sharply from the historical school, while recognising that they organised 68 69 70 71

Industry and Trade, p p . 634, 566-71 and A p p e n d i x O . See also Official Papers, p . 394. Industry and Trade, p . 660. Industry and Trade, p . 664. See letter from J o w e t t t o Marshall, 18 September 1890, quoted in J. K. Whitaker, 'Alfred Marshall: the years 1877-85', History of Political Economy, 4 (1972), 17; for instances of his enthusiasm for Hegel, see Principles, 1, p p . ix, 7 2 4 ^ 73cm, 726n, 733, 743n, 764; and Early Economic Writings, 1, p p . 11, 109; 11, p p . 375-6.

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these things differently under German conditions. Spencer was linked with Hegel in the preface to the first edition of the Principles as an example of the way in which biological as well as philosophical influences supported the notion of continuous development. Marshall found Spencer's work 'over-ambitious', and his own views on laissez-faire were far more circumspect. But whatever he might say about the 'blind fatalism' of allowing social affairs to be determined by natural tendencies, he still maintained that natural selection provided a prima facie reason for believing that such tendencies 'make for the public good'. 72 It does not seem as though his very Millian ideal of a community in which there would be 'no rights but only duties' would be achieved by deliberate political agency. Rather, he seems to have shared Spencer's hope, based on a not dissimilar evolutionary ethics, that the process of evolution itself (which like Spencer, he conceived in Lamarckian terms) would lead man to become adapted to the 'Social State', a form of co-operative life in which 'political' questions would be reduced to a minimum. 73 These moves away from 'things political' - if that is what is really going on - recall the quotation from the elder Keynes cited at the beginning of an earlier essay: in Marshall's hands economics became a distinctly 'social' rather than 'political' science.74 In explaining that the science 'shuns many political issues which the practical man cannot ignore', he argued that for that reason 'it is better described by the broad term "Economics" than by the narrower term "Political Economy"'. That he should be able to represent the latter, without argument, as the 'narrower' term is suggestive of a deeper shift in the balance of forces between 'political' and 'social' categories (in fact in an earlier version of this sentence he had written 'it is better described as Social Economics or as Economics simply'). 75 Moreover, this predominance of the social dimension was practical as well as analytical: he presented the subject as 'a study of the economic aspects and conditions of man's political, social, and private life; but more especially of his social life', and as one capable of providing 'guidance in the practical conduct of life, especially social life'.76 Quite what Marshall had in mind by 'social life' in these two emphatic clauses is not immediately obvious, though he always expressed the conviction that the science could be of service to the wide variety of social groups engaged in economic activity in a modern society. He was fond of comparing economics with the science of 72 73 74 75 76

Industry and Trade, p. 176. Industry and Trade, pp. 163-4; and Principles, 1, pp. 2 4 7 - 8 ; 11, p. 326. See pp. 249-50 above. Principles, 1, p. 43; 11, p. 159. Principles, 1, p. 42.

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navigation: neither always provided exact knowledge, but they both offered the best available way of avoiding the larger disasters. 77 Earlier in the century, it might have been hard to resist rounding off the comparison by some allusion to the ship of state: Marshall contented himself with a reference to 'the economic side of social problems'. In part, this change of focus reflected a change of audience; in part, it reflected what Marshall saw as a shift in the accepted understanding of the place of the 'political 5. In the earliest of his suspiciously frequent and diverse justifications for re-naming the science, he wrote: The nation used to be called 'the Body Politic'. So long as this phrase was in common use, men thought of the interests of the whole nation when they used the word 'Political'; and then 'Political Economy' served well enough as a name for the science. But now 'political interests' generally mean the interests of only some part or parts of the nation; so that it seems best to drop the name 'Political Economy', and to speak simply of Economic Science, or more shortly Economics.78

It is hard to believe that this shift in usage alone was sufficient reason for Marshall, generally so committed to upholding the English tradition in these matters, to abandon the established name of a going concern (especially in favour of a Francophone substitute). But the preferred justification consorted well with his frequently re-iterated view of the economist's public role. Ostensibly, this role was to be an extremely modest one. Economic analysis could only indicate the consequences of possible courses of action so far as they depended on economic causes: 'Having done its work it retires and leaves to common sense the responsibility of the ultimate decision; not standing in the way of, or pushing out any other kind of knowledge, not hampering common sense in the use to which it is able to put any available knowledge, nor in any way hindering; helping where it could help, and for the rest keeping silence.' 79 It is hardly surprising that breaches in both the spirit and letter of such Simon-pure professional sentiments can be found in Marshall's writings, but the caution is in marked contrast to some of the hopes expressed by the economic historians, here aiming to emulate their German models. Cunningham and Ashley, for example, were predictably opposed to the dropping of 'political economy' in favour of 'economic science'. 80 To his subsequent regret, Marshall did not succeed in 'keeping silence' during the long debate on Tariff Reform, but he was far more reticent than those economic historians who entered the lists on Joseph Chamberlain's side, 77 78 79 80

Principles, pp. J76-71 Industry and Trade, pp. 659—60. See Economics of Industry (with M . P . Marshall) (2nd edn, L o n d o n , 1881 (1st edn, 1879)), p . 2. See Memorials, p p . 164-5. See p p . 247 and 274 above.

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and it is not clear that he infringed his own criteria for demarcating the views of the 'economic scientist* from those of the 'citizen' in the process.81 And yet, despite this, there was a sense in which he was casting the economist in a far more ambitious role than many of his classical predecessors had done. To be sure, in Marshall's self-consciously modern view no practitioner of a science could determine which ends men should pursue, individually or collectively, and even on matters of fact each practitioner was confined within the province of his own particular expertise. But he also thought that in the complex world of industrial nations more and more questions were essentially economic in their foundations, certainly 'economic' in the large sense that we have seen he was capable of attaching to that term. For the economist was not only equipped to deal 'with the influences which still make for sectional and class selfishness', and to act as guide and adjudicator on the resulting conflicts between private and public interests; he possessed an important key to those influences on character that would determine how far in future material wealth could be sacrificed for higher ideals, how far individualistic agency could be replaced by collective provision. And in meeting these needs it was no longer necessary to address himself to the leaders of 'the Body Politic'; he could now pursue a more indirect strategy of permeation and education, encouraging 'social responsibility' among businessmen and trade unionists, mobilising 'the moral pressure of social opinion in constraining and directing individual action in those economic relations in which the rigidity and violence of government interference would be likely to do more harm than good'. 82 More than the operation of purely economic causes might be at work in such questions, but that was no reason for the economist to shrink from deploying his uniquely powerful analytical tools and general training. Though he disclaimed any intention to 'push out any other kind of knowledge' when dealing with contemporary problems, in practice it always seemed to turn out that modern industrial development had made the discipline of economics, as Marshall wished to see it cultivated, by far the most important body of 'available knowledge', even in relation to many problems which had traditionally been regarded as primarily political. The institutional embodiment of this conception of the subject was, of 81

82

For Marshall's part in publicly opposing the Tariff Reform proposals of Chamberlain and his followers, see in particular two articles by A. W. Coats, 'The role of authority in the development of British economics'', Journal ofLaw and Economics, 7(1964), 85-106; and 'Political economy and the tariff reform campaign of 1903', Journal of Law and Economics, 11 (1968), 181-229. This theme is well treated, from a rather different point of view, in Whitaker, 'Neglected aspects', esp. p. 42.

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course, the establishment at Cambridge of a separate course in economics in 1903, and the exact title of the new Tripos - 'Economics and associated branches of Political Science' - neatly encapsulates the arguments of the preceding paragraphs. The cuckoo nurtured by Adam Smith had followed the ungrateful habit of the species, and in the arrangement of the curriculum precious little regard was shown for the foster-parental discipline: one paper (among seven) in Part One was on 'The Existing British Constitution', one (from among fourteen options) in Part Two was on 'Modern Political Theories'. 83 The existence of the political science papers in the Historical Tripos could be cited in partial mitigation, but Marshall's accompanying justification for the new curriculum made it clear that the political dimension of the syllabus referred to in its title was of peripheral importance. Such studies were included for their contribution to the education of 'the economist', a wide-ranging figure who 'requires a broad knowledge of the history of his own country and of others which are in close contact with it, especially in recent times; of the structure and functions of the modern state; and of the legal form of those rights and obligations the basis of which lies chiefly in economic conditions'. This was all presented as part of that 'wide training' which the new Tripos would provide, including 'that training of personal character which is offered by life at Oxford and Cambridge . . . On the river and in the football field the student learns to bear and forbear, to obey and to command.' One reason for this emphasis was that the course was partly aimed, as was the publicity accompanying Ashley's at Birmingham, at potential businessmen - a constituency of particular interest to Marshall in the light of his regard for the 'captain of industry' as an ideal character-type, his belief in the possibility of 'economic chivalry', and his concern for the revitalisation of the English spirit of enterprise. Nonetheless, the legislature, the executive, and the diplomatic corps were also mentioned as potential beneficiaries, alongside 'public officials', 'ministers of religion', 'the owners of land or cottage property', and those engaged in 'public or private charity' - indeed, anybody who might need to be prepared to act as 'impartial arbitrators' in a pluralistic world of industrial conflict where the capacity for the misuse of power, whether by 'special interests' or whole classes, had greatly increased.84 Those who had attentively read Marshall's writings up to this date should have had little doubt that all these could, in his view, be met by 83

84

The details, and some interesting supporting arguments, are given in the pamphlet, clearly drafted by Marshall, issued to accompany the new Tripos, The New Cambridge Curriculum in Economics and associated Branches of Political Science; Its Purpose and Plan (London, 1903). Marshall rehearsed these arguments in his pamphlet, A Plea for the Creation of a Curriculum in Economics and Associated Branches of Political Science (Cambridge, n.d. [1903]), which is reprinted in Principles, 11, quotations at pp. 171-2, 168, 170.

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a study of economics that needed little help from the 'associated branches of Political Science'. Although its institutionalisation at Cambridge marked a certain sort of triumph for Marshall's imperial vision of the subject, that vision was one with which even his own pupils thereafter felt uncomfortable and which they ignored in their later work. Despite recording his famous verdict on Marshall as 'the first great economist pur sang\ Keynes still felt obliged to apologise for the fact that instead of being content to build 'an engine for the discovery of concrete truth', his mentor had always hankered after concrete truth itself. In registering this judgement, Keynes was echoing the 'sad complaints' of his father; 'he regretted Marshall's obstinate refusal to understand where his special strengths and weaknesses really lay, and of how his unrealisable ambitions stood in the way of his giving to the world the true treasures of his mind and genius'. 85 The ambitions were certainly unrealised if the subsequent shape of economics as an academic discipline is taken as the test. Marshall's deep commitment to the evolutionary perspective was regarded by most of his successors as an embarrassing Victorian legacy, best consigned to a dusty attic along with the 'pious asides and prim moralisings' that accompanied it. 86 Pigou, his successor in the Cambridge Chair, retained some of the master's missionary ambitions, but the first generation of Marshallians largely concentrated on extending the economic organon in more recognisably orthodox and professional directions. 1903 saw not only the establishment of the Economics Tripos, but also one of the most celebrated interventions by economists in public debate, the 'Manifesto of the Fourteen Professors' against Chamberlain's Tariff Reform proposals. Significance in such matters is always as much symbolic as substantive, but we may let the conjunction of these events provide our terminus. The issue of Free Trade versus Protection had, of course, been one on which political economists had spoken with special authority throughout the century, but in the 1903 engagement straiter limits were being set to that authority; even those economists who took an active part exhibited, by comparison with their predecessors earlier in the century, a far greater self-consciousness about the proper distance to be maintained between their scientific and their political roles. Such delicate sentiments were not confined to those, like Marshall, who were temperamentally averse to controversy: in protesting against the assertion by the Manifesto's signatories that the Tariff Reform proposals were contrary to the principles of economic science, Foxwell, no shrinking violet, complained: 85 86

J . M . Keynes, 'Alfred Marshall', 199. G . F . Shove, ' T h e place of Marshall's Principles in the development of economic t h e o r y ' , EconomicJournal, 52 (1942), 294.

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The vital issues are more political than scientific, [and] I do not think that economists have any right to attempt to prejudge these issues by a pronouncement which assumes scientific authority, though nearly every sentence is obviously and necessarily political.' 87 Those who deigned to reply to this charge denied that the Manifesto had dealt with anything other than the strictly economic arguments: fifty years earlier, their predecessors might well have contested the implication that this boundary, even could it be drawn, was one which the political economist should refrain from crossing. But this change was bound up with other, more general, developments already touched upon briefly in these essays - the fragmentation of the moral sciences, the contraction of the high ambitions once entertained for a science of politics, the cultivation of a more fastidious notion of science itself, the whole process of 'professionalisation'. The study of the health of the Body Politic was henceforth to be in the hands of a team of specialists. So, although misleading as a characterisation of Marshall's own aspirations, Keynes's remark was not so far from the truth in saying that 'after his time' - if not as a result, in any simple way, of his intentions - the economist was to display a more austere attitude to his subject as a science which was 'as far from politics as physiology is from the general practitioner'. 87

H. S. Foxwell, letter to The Times, 20 August 1903.

XI

A place in the syllabus: political science at Cambridge Clearness and precision in our general political conceptions, definiteness and consistency in our fundamental assumptions and methods of reasoning, though they do not constitute anything like a complete protection against erroneous practical conclusions, are yet, I believe, of considerable practical value; and the systematic effort to acquire them deserves an important place in the intellectual training of a thoroughly educated man and citizen. HENRY SIDGWICK, The Elements of Politics (1891) Attempt a description of the merits, and suggest lines on which criticisms might proceed, of the methods of any one of the following contributions to political science: John Austin, Henry Sumner Maine, Walter Bagehot, Henry Sidgwick. Examination question in Tolitical Science', Indian Civil Service Entrance Competition, 1901

any experience of the realities of education is sufficient to produce a pang of recognition at the awful distance which must in practice have separated our two epigraphs despite their chronological, and even apparently substantial, proximity. Sidgwick's sentiment would have been shared, due allowance being made for peculiarities of expression, by most of the proponents of a science of politics considered in these essays: in some of the more confident early nineteenth-century statements the defensive note of the reference to 'protection against erroneous practical conclusions' might have been more muted, and the mention of the 'citizen' and his 'intellectual training' perhaps bespeaks the related later nineteenthcentury developments of both democracy and education; but otherwise the passage is no bad representative of the class of programmatic declarations. Yet the earnest and ambitious hopes which it expresses must surely have met their nemesis annually in the answers hastily scribbled in response to our second epigraph, whose drearily familiar form disturbingly calls up the specimens appended to the chapters of 1066 and All That. If, in pointing to the melancholy gap between ideal and actuality in the process of education, these passages engender a certain scepticism about the intellectual significance of any record of curriculum changes, then that will provide an entirely appropriate frame of mind in which to confront the episode considered in this essay. In fact, our epigraphs evoke a more limited and specific setting than these opening reflections might seem to imply. The passage from Sidgwick not only exhibits his own characteristic concern with method and analysis, but by confining itself to the philosophical or deductive approach to the study of politics, it excludes, or at least fails to mention, those historical and inductive enterprises which have occupied the greater part of this book. Similarly, the examination question, which also concentrates on method, offers a somewhat idiosyncratic team of putative political scientists, and the close association which it implies with analytical and historical jurisprudence owed something, as we shall see, to the special circumstances surrounding the development of this particular paper. These also help to account for Austin's inclusion alongside three recognised masters of the subject, for he had examination greatness thrust upon him retrospectively largely as a result of the growth of legal education and, not altogether paradoxically, as a result of having been taken as the representative of the ancien regime by Maine when launching his methodological revolution. But these features of our epigraphs also serve their turn, for if they draw attention to the disproportionate part played by Sidgwick in placing the

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subject on the syllabus, to the intimate connection between the study of politics and the law, and to the centrality of the task of educating future servants of the state, then these, too, will prove to be useful cues to have in mind while reading this essay. One possible expectation which must be dismissed at the outset, however, is that the episode explored here represents, on the one hand, some kind of 'culmination' of the series of stories considered in the previous essays, or, on the other, the first instalment in some triumphant recounting of 'the growth of political science as an academic subject'. Since, as we have already emphasised, the previous essays do not form anything like a simple continuous narrative in themselves, there is anyway no sense in which they could be seen as 'leading up' to one particular academic epiphany, still less the very peculiar and necessarily parochial one considered here. And since this episode will reveal itself to be, intellectually and institutionally, almost entirely discontinuous with the kind of activity which has gained academic recognition in the last fifty years, one could invoke the canonical disclaimer that any resemblance to enterprises still flourishing under the same name is purely accidental. What is true, however, is that the significance of the bare details of course descriptions and reading-lists given here can be appreciated only in the light of the intellectual developments traced in the immediately preceding essays, especially those on the Comparative Method and on Sidgwick, and so some familiarity with those topics will be assumed in what follows. We have already noted how the figures treated in the earlier essays did not, for the most part, pursue careers within the universities, at least until the 1860s. Many of the leading eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophers were professors of their subjects, of course, but that only points to the exceptional nature of the educational arrangements of eighteenth-century Scotland. The leading English figures in the earlier part of the century were not university teachers, nor was there any expectation that they should have been. That the majority of our cast were to be found in the universities in the latter part of the century points to the profound changes in those institutions and in their place in the national life which took place from the 1860s onwards. The story of the mid-century reforms of Oxford and Cambridge (to confine ourselves to them, as in this context it is proper to do) is now a reasonably familiar one, which we shall not rehearse in any detail.1 It involved, crucially, expansion: matriculations at Cambridge ran at about 450 a year in the 1850s; in the 1870s the figure was approaching 1

Much the best account of these changes can be found in the work of Sheldon Rothblatt: see, particularly, his The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London, 1968), and also his Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education: An Essay in History and Culture (London, 1976).

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700, and in the 1890s nearing a thousand. 2 It involved fundamental internal reorganisation, including, relevantly, the establishment of new courses and the appointment of new staff (it has been calculated that the size of the university as distinct from college teaching staff at Oxford and Cambridge doubled in the decade after 1876).3 And it involved a newly awakened sense of the obligations of the University to society, of its role both in fostering learning and research and in educating the next generation of a governing class. It involved, in short, the transformation of the parochial and peripheral institutions which functioned in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries chiefly as Anglican seminaries and finishing schools for the sons of the landed class, into those socially and intellectually exciting academies which seem to dominate the early pages of the biographies and autobiographies of men of distinction from almost every walk of life in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The academic study of politics shared in and was a beneficiary of these changes, and yet in some respects it stood in an oblique relation to them. The related processes of specialisation and professionalisation obviously capture a very significant part of the development of the late nineteenthcentury university: specialists and disciplines occupy the familiarly puzzling roles of chickens and eggs, but, whatever the cause, university teachers tended to concentrate their intellectual efforts more and more on one field or part of a field, with the frequent consequence of the subdivisions of existing syllabuses, and to found their own journals, form their own professional associations, and so on. Insofar as the study of the science of politics won a place in the curriculum in this period, it did so without really conforming to this pattern. It was designedly synthetic rather than specialised: in substance it drew its material from an eclectic variety of sources, and in method it remained subject, albeit with protests, to the never-resolved tensions between history and philosophy. Its sponsors were, for the most part, already well established within existing disciplines, and it did not issue in any of the paraphernalia of professionalism. It did attract an audience - largely, as we shall see, because it appeared to address a particular conception of the needs of public life - but it did not essentially provide a training for future teachers of political science. Here we shall look in detail at just one strand in this story, the place occupied by a particular conception of the science of politics in the Cambridge curriculum of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of 2

3

These figures are taken from Lawrence Stone's essay cThe size and composition of the Oxford student body', in Lawrence Stone (ed.), The University in Society, 2 vols. (London, i975)> i> P- 9*. Rothblatt, Liberal Education, p. 175.

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course, no-one who has ever taken part in the business would be inclined to minimise the role of accident, prejudice, and desperate expedient in the construction of even the most impressive course descriptions, and it would be implausible to claim that this constitutes a representative episode, if only because the sample is drawn from a category of which there were only two members, and things were, need it be said, different at Oxford. 4 Moreover, this is a tale of quite unusual success in terms of institutionalisation: when faced yet again with laments about the non-development in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain of what are now called the social sciences, it would be well to recall the hundreds of students who attended lectures on 'political science' in late-Victorian Cambridge, but this does not license claims of general significance. The episode is revealing of certain tensions in the prevailing conceptions of a science of politics, especially that between the claims of the historical and the analytical methods, and it illuminates the centrality of traditional political categories in the thinking of the educated classes; but above all it is, like any story worth the name, interesting in its own right. To say that the study of politics hardly figured in the Cambridge curriculum before the 1860s is to say very little, so few were the subjects which appeared there in any form. Such acquaintance with systematic reflection on things political as the early nineteenth-century undergraduate was required to have derived almost entirely from the not very taxing source of Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, a bland statement of the case for a genteel, Christian Utilitarianism, which was first published in 1785. All poll-men were required to read, or at least to attempt to answer examination questions on, the book well into the second half of the century, and even candidates for Mathematical and, from its inception in 1821, Classical Honours- were, until the 1840s, obliged to make its acquaintance in preparation for writing answers in moral philosophy, for which task they were later recommended to draw upon Whewell's statement of the Intuitionist case, The Elements of Morality, including Polity, published 4

For details of the more purely philosophical course of study at Oxford, see D. G. Ritchie, T h e teaching of Political Science at Oxford', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2 (1891), 85-95. For the later period, including the establishment of PPE, see R. B. McCallum, 'The study of politics in Oxford', Oxford Magazine, 50 (1932), 360-1 and 390-1. In anything like a complete survey one would have to take account of the significantly named London School of Economics and Political Science as well as of the newly founded civic universities; for a few details about the study of politics in the latter, see the editor's introduction in Preston King (ed.), The Study of Politics. A Collection of Inaugural Lectures (London, 1977).

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in 1845.5 The Classical Tripos itself (which until 1854 could be taken only by those who had already obtained Honours in Mathematics) was almost entirely literary; a paper in ancient history was added in 1849, but the course as a whole did not encourage that reflection on the issues raised by the political thought of Plato and Aristotle which was to be such a feature of 'Greats' at Oxford. The first obvious home for the study of politics in any serious form was provided by the establishment of the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1851.6 This was something of a portmanteau course, involving papers in mental and moral philosophy, logic, psychology, history and political philosophy, political economy and jurisprudence, the informing idea being that these studies stood in the same relation to man and the human world as the various natural sciences included in the simultaneously established Natural Sciences Tripos did to the physical world. For some time, however, the Moral Sciences Tripos (which could be taken for Honours only after i860) attracted few able candidates, since Cambridge reserved its honours and rewards for those who had distinguished themselves in the Mathematical or Classical Triposes. 7 In the 1860s and 70s, however, Sidgwick and a few like-minded younger dons devoted themselves to teaching for the Moral Sciences Tripos, with the result that its status rapidly improved, though it never attracted a large number of candidates. Nonetheless, the conception of the study of politics which is revealed through successive revisions of its syllabus is of interest here. From i860, when the Moral Sciences Tripos could first be taken for an Honours degree, to 1867, when its syllabus was reformed, all students were required to take a paper in 'History and Political Philosophy'. The extent to which this was an inherited and far from carefully discriminated 5

6

7

Martha McMackin Garland, Cambridge Before Darwin: The Ideal of a Liberal Education 1800-1860 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 56-7, 68. Some useful comparative information on the place of politics in the moral philosophy curriculum inherited from the eighteenth century can be found in Anna Haddow, Political Science in American Colleges and Universities 1636-1900 (New York, 1939). In what follows, the details are mostly drawn from various official University publications, particularly the five editions of the.Guide for students published between 1862 and 1893, and from the Handbook published annually from 1902. Cambridge University Examination Papers contains the relevant papers from 1882 onwards. Discussions are usually given in full in the Cambridge University Reporter; several relevant controversies were pursued in the Cambridge Review. For details of the Historical Tripos we have also drawn on Jean O. McLachlan, 'The origin and early development of the Cambridge History Tripos', Cambridge Historical Journal, 9 (1947), 78-105; G. Kitson Clark, 'A hundred years of the teaching of history at Cambridge 1873-1973', Historical Journal, 16 (1973), 53 5—5 3; and Deborah Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge, 1980), ch. 4. The mediocrity of the Tripos and its teachers was alleged intemperately by C. M. Ingleby, The Revival of Philosophy at Cambridge (Cambridge, 1870); Sidgwick replied, acknowledging that some of these criticisms had been justified of the earlier years of the Tripos, but claiming that recent changes were in the process of remedying this: 'Mr. Ingleby on the Revival of Philosophy in Cambridge', Reporter, 1 (1870), 47-8 and 67-8.

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category was apparent from the splendidly miscellaneous list of texts set for study - Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Montesquieu's De Vesprit des lois, Guizot's Uhistoire de la civilization en Europe and his The History of Republican Government, Hallam's Constitutional History and his The Middle Ages, and Brougham's Political Philosophy - an eclecticism underlined by J. B. Mayor's advice for intending students: 'The most important works here I conceive to be Guizot, Hallam and Aristotle; but Brougham should be consulted for that part of the subject not covered by these writers.' Mayor added that the course formed 'an excellent preparation for the after-business of life, for the bar or the pulpit', and (already) for the Indian Civil Service.8 After 1867, having sloughed off History (soon to be incorporated, following the Oxford example, in a joint Law and History Tripos), the new paper on 'Moral and Political Philosophy' indicated a more purely philosophical inspiration, calling for the study of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Butler, Kant, Stewart, Whewell, and Bentham, a list which was revised in 1874 in a way which clearly bears Sidgwick's imprint by the deletion of Stewart and the inclusion of Hobbes, Clarke, Shaftesbury, Smith, Hume, Paley, Mill and Grote, thus turning it in an even more purely English direction and explicitly concentrating upon the conflict between Intuitionism and Utilitarianism. This remained the bent of the paper through subsequent small changes, but in the revised Tripos which came into effect in 1891 the emphasis was changed in a way which again reflects the shift in the focus of Sidgwick's own interest, away from the first principles of ethics and towards a more practical and historical treatment of politics. The new paper, now called 'Political Philosophy' or sometimes just 'Polities', included not only the usual philosophical questions about the ends of the state and the grounds of political obligation, but also 'a general historical survey of (a) the development of Law and Government; (b) the chief variations in the form and functions of government in European communities; (c) the relation of these variations to other social differences and changes'. The recommended reading was correspondingly heterogeneous, Bluntschli, Bryce, Maine and Spencer now standing alongside Bentham, Austin, Mill and Green; but as Ward judiciously advised in 1893, 'the student will find all aspects of this course most fully dealt with in Dr Sidgwick's Elements of Polities'? Several years later, the quoted section of the rubric was reduced, in even more clearly Sidgwickian terms, to 'a general survey of the development of European polity and political theory'. 10 Only after the formation in 1903 of a separate Tripos in 8 9 10

J. B. Mayor, 'The Moral Sciences Tripos', Student's Guide (Cambridge, 1862), pp. 146-9. James Ward, 'The Moral Sciences Tripos', Student's Guide (Cambridge, 1893), PP- 9~I0> 22.

Student's Handbook (1902), p. 302.

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'Economics and Associated Branches of Political Science' (and, incidentally, after Sidgwick's death) did the separate paper on 'Politics' disappear from the Moral Sciences Tripos. By then, however, its most important base had long been in the Historical Tripos. When in 1872 the brief marriage of Law and History had to be dissolved, Sidgwick, supporting the proposal for separate Triposes, mentioned 'as a not inconsiderable class who would be benefitted by the proposed change, those who intended to take part in politics and were desirous of some special training'. 11 Such a purpose clearly had implications for the content of the proposed course, and in this it proved able to make common cause with the widely voiced scepticism that 'pure history' could of itself provide an adequate intellectual discipline for the student. The Syndicate responsible for the form of the course (of which Sidgwick, Seeley, and Marshall were members) therefore proposed 'that the study of History should be accompanied with the chief theoretical studies which find their illustration in History', which they took to be Political Economy, International and Constitutional Law, and 'The Principles of Political Philosophy and General Jurisprudence'. 12 The recommended reading for this last again revealed an inclusive mixture of legal, historical and political works: Aristotle's Politics, Guizot's Uhistoire de la civilization en Europe, Tocqueville's Ancien Regime, Mill's Representative Government, Freeman's History of Federal Government, chapters of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and, on the jurisprudential side, works by Austin, Blackstone, Maine, and Mackeldy. 13 Increasingly, the teachers of history in Cambridge divided between those, like Seeley and Browning, who regarded the Tripos as essentially a course in Political Science (which, in Seeley's case at least, required rather than precluded a proper grounding in historical scholarship), and those (on the whole younger men), like Creighton, Gwatkin and, later, Maitland, who wanted to see it devoted to more purely historical studies. 14 The 1885 reform of the Tripos was something of a compromise between these views, but Seeley managed to get the existing course on political philosophy converted into 'Political Science', which remained one of the compulsory papers (the reform having introduced the first sign of curricular elephantiasis, a choice of options). The rubric for the paper is surely pretty undiluted Seeley: 11 12 13 14

Reporter, 1 May 1872, pp. 268-9. Reporter, 18 December 1872, pp. 131-6. B. E. Hammond, 'The Historical Tripos', Student's Guide (Cambridge, 1874), pp. 421-38. See McLachlan, 'Cambridge History Tripos', 86-91; and Wormell, Seeley, pp. 114-19.

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Political Science is, for the most part, treated inductively in this paper. It is not, like the previous subjects, confined to England or the British Empire, but a wide survey, for the purpose of scientific comparison, is taken of the political institutions of the ancient, mediaeval and modern world. The attention of the student is directed to the origin and development of political society and government in general, the nature of different forms of government, and the conditions under which they tend to come into being, the mutual relations of the various portions of the state-machine, and similar matters. The point of view is throughout historical rather than theoretical. 15

Prescribing authorities to match this ambitious prospectus was obviously difficult (both Seeley's Introduction to Political Science and Sidgwick's Development of European Polity originated as lectures designed to meet this need), and Bluntschli's far from satisfactory survey, published in English in 1886 as The Theory of the State, was acknowledged to be 'the only book which treats the whole subject mainly from the inductive point of view'. True to the paper's heredity, Maine's Ancient Law was recommended as 'an admirable and suggestive example of the Comparative Method applied to the elucidation of early society'. Spencer's Political Institutions, Freeman's Federal Government, Bryce's Holy Roman Empire (and later his American Commonwealth), and further works by Maine also suggested the comparative and evolutionary inspiration of the course. From 1885 there was also half a paper on 'The General Theory of Law and Government' which would be confined, the rubric unselfconsciously announced, to 'questions on chapters of Austin's Jurisprudence and Mill's Representative Government', and which would differ from Political Science 'in that the point of view is here rather theoretical than historical'. 16 This division between one paper on Comparative or Inductive Political Science and one on Analytical or Deductive Political Theory was, under these or other labels, to remain part of the History Tripos down to 1930. In the reform of 1897 'Political Science' was renamed 'Comparative Polities', which was no longer compulsory (Seeley, always its most powerful sponsor, having died two years earlier), while an optional paper was introduced in Part Two of the now divided Tripos on 'Analytical and Deductive Polities'. The reading for the Comparative Politics paper was brought up to date, with some concessions perhaps being made to the 'pure' historians by the inclusion of more detailed studies of the institutions of particular states, especially of Greece and Rome; but its general character remained the same, the list of recommended general works now being headed by Seeley's Introduction to Political Science and Woodrow Wilson's The State 15 16

G. W. Prothero, 'The Historical Tripos', Student's Guide (1893), pp. 3-6. Prothero, 'Historical Tripos', pp. 15-16.

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(and for the first time, perhaps in deference to the paper's new title, Freeman's Comparative Politics).17 As the record of discussions attending these changes reveals, there remained deep divisions of opinion about the proper place and merits of the 'political' papers. Cunningham characteristically proposed that Political Science be dropped altogether from Part One of the Tripos, and replaced by a further paper on English constitutional history. Browning, no less characteristically, issued an indignant broadside asserting that 'the Tripos ought to some extent . . . to be regarded as a Political Tripos', and proposing that a candidate be allowed to take exclusively theoretical subjects in Part Two. On behalf of the committee responsible for the proposed changes, J. R. Tanner observed that 'Political Science was a subject of great value to men of ability, but it was useless and even harmful to weaker students', which was one reason for making it optional. It was, he went on, 'a subject which in some cases was stimulating and helpful, in other cases encouraged a pernicious taste for vague disquisition'. 18 Maitland, who was well known to think that political science was 'either history or humbug', 19 did not conceal that as far as the retention of the 'political' papers was concerned 'he had been overruled rather than convinced by Dr Sidgwick, Professor Marshall and Mr Browning' (in fact he complained, generally and engagingly, that the new Tripos was 'much too English, much too unhistorical, and much too miscellaneous; it resembled rather the programme of a variety show than the sober programme of an Historical School'). To sum up his objections he declared, in what must always have been one of the strongest tactical moves in any Cambridge discussion of these topics, that 'he might describe his objections to the Report [proposing the new Tripos] shortly by saying that they were objections of diametrically opposite kind to those brought forward by Mr Browning'. 20 In 1909 the two politics papers were ungraciously renamed 'Political Science A' and 'Political Science B', and an attempt to make the former compulsory was defeated. The arguments advanced in support of the idea revealed the same old dissatisfaction with history as an intellectual 17 18 19

20

'Historical Tripos', Student's Handbook (Cambridge, 1902), p. 270. Reporter, 9 February 1897, PP- 5°5~ 11 Referring to 'my friend Maitland's definition of it [Political Science] as "either history or humbug"', Thornely, one of the lecturers on the subject, recalled 'once when Professor Maitland was dining with me at Trinity Hall, the Master was referring contemptuously to the little scraps and snips of useless information which a popular newspaper was in the habit of dishing up for its readers, such as the number of pocket-handkerchiefs which, if stretched diagonally, would reach from the earth to the moon. "That", said Maitland, "is what we call Political Science here."' Thomas Thornely, Cambridge Memories (London, 1936), pp. 79-80. For Maitland's somewhat soberer criticisms of the subject, see above, pp. 300-1. Reporter, 9 February 1897, p . 506.

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discipline, and it was surely this dissatisfaction, as much as any widely shared positive commitment to the merits of political science as an enterprise in itself, which helped to keep the subject afloat in the History Tripos for so long. Noting that the paper on Comparative Politics had not been compulsory since 1897, the Board commented: 'This has sometimes had the effect of encouraging the habit of accumulating facts instead of interpreting them, and of training the memory at the expense of the power of independent thought. In the hope of curing this evil, the Board proposes to make Comparative Politics compulsory instead of optional, and to re-define the subject so as to include a larger element of theory, reverting to the older name of Political Science, which was associated with the Historical Tripos when it was first separated from Law.' 21 Apart from the fact that Sidgwick's Development of European Polity and Elements of Politics now headed the lists of prescribed texts for the respective papers, the chief interest of the changejies in the way in which Seeley's original conception of a purely empirical study of political institutions began to be diluted by the inclusion of a larger element of the history of political thought. The universal scope and ambition of Seeley's notion of the subject was also tangibly contracted, and a more historical treatment of largely European political forms put in its place. In this shape, with occasional revisions of the recommended reading-lists - though without Sidgwick's two works ever being displaced from their pre-eminence - the two political science papers survived until 1930. The final change came with the arrival of Ernest Barker, at whose instigation 'Political Science A' was transformed into T h e History of Political Thought' and 'Political Science B' into 'The Theory of the Modern State'. The rubric for the latter marked little change from that of its predecessor, though the Utilitarian cast of the earlier reading-list was replaced by a markedly Idealist and Pluralist one. But 'The History of Political Thought' neatly reversed the emphasis of the paper it replaced: whereas 'Political Science A' had offered 'a comparative survey of Political Institutions and their development with some reference to the history of political theory and the definition of political terms [which] shall be studied mainly in relation to the ancient city-state and the modern nation-state', its successor was constituted by 'the study of political ideas and theories in their relation to general history and to the development of political institutions', and the set texts were the now familiar canon of political theory from Plato to Burke. 22 It is an irony of the story that some of the same books remained or reappeared in this latest list as had figured in 21

22

Reporter, 4 M a y 1909, p . 821. After hostile criticism of the proposal, particularly from C u n n i n g h a m , 'Political Science A ' was n o t made compulsory; for the discussion and the amended report see Reporter, 16 M a y and 1 J u n e 1909. Student's Handbook (1929), p p . 386-96.

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the earliest ones, but whereas then they had been intended to be taken as authorities on the actual development of the state, now they were merely landmarks in the history of political thought. But there is a nicer irony still in the fact that it was Seeley, the first professor to preside over a History Tripos, who introduced political science into the syllabus, and Barker, the first Professor of Political Science, who killed it. 23 It must be remembered that political economy, too, which held a secure place in the Historical and Moral Sciences Triposes until it obtained a home of its own, was generally regarded as one of the 'political' subjects. Following the popularity of unofficial lectures in the subject early in the century by George Pryme, a Whig barrister and Fellow of Trinity (and drawing, of course, upon the general cultural standing of the subject), a Chair was created in 1828 which Pryme himself occupied - it is the most active verb the situation permits - until 1863.24 Political economy, as we have seen, was among the basic subjects of the Moral Sciences Tripos in its early years, and was certainly not regarded as one of the more technical: when, in his survey of the Moral Sciences curriculum in 1874, J. B. Pearson reached political economy, he remarked shortly 'the study of this branch is comparatively simple'. 25 Mill's Principles virtually defined the syllabus for a quarter of a century. In the 1870s Sidgwick and, above all, Marshall brought an increasing sophistication to the teaching of the subject, and soon their respective volumes were to bulk large in the recommended reading: in his account of the syllabus in 1893 James Ward urged students taking the advanced paper in political economy to 'return again and again to the more difficult parts of Marshall and Sidgwick'.26 After his return to Cambridge to take up the Chair in 1885, Marshall continually agitated for the liberation of political economy from its subordinate position in what was recognised to be an increasingly philosophical Tripos, though it is interesting to see that he suggested - whether for tactical or other reasons is not clear - that the subjects thus liberated should be grouped under a 'Political Sciences Tripos' (an intriguing use of the plural). 27 23

24 25 26 27

T h e story of the establishment of the Chair t o which Barker was elected is an interesting one. It originated with the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial's offer t o e n d o w t w o C h a i r s : after some equivocation the University enthusiastically accepted one in 'the subject. . . familiarly k n o w n to us as Political Science', but were less wholehearted about one in Sociology, the offer for which was eventually withdrawn. The story can be followed in the M i n u t e - B o o k of the Council of the Senate for 1926, in which is included a draft m e m o r a n d u m , dated 28 April, on the state of the relevant subjects at Cambridge; this can be supplemented by extracts from the Rockefeller archives presented in Martin Bulmer, 'Sociology and political science at Cambridge in the 1920s: an o p p o r t u n i t y missed and an o p p o r t u n i t y taken', Cambridge Review, 27 April 1981, 156-9. Garland, Cambridge Before Darwin, p . 19. J. B. Pearson, 'The Moral Sciences Tripos', Student's Guide (Cambridge, 1874), p . 195. W a r d , 'Moral Science Tripos', p . 21. Reporter, 19 March 1889, p . 594.

3 5z

A place in the syllabus

Indeed, although Sidgwick was, as his pupil and colleague J. N. Keynes later put it, 'for all practical purposes the head of the Moral Sciences school', he apparently came to feel that its subdivision might eventually be desirable, and as early as 1889 he was reported as agreeing with Marshall 'in thinking it probable that in the course of a few years they would feel a desire to construct a Political Sciences Tripos' (the clerk clearly had no difficulty catching the Sidgwickian cadence, but no doubt he had had practice).28 From the start, of course, political economy had also been an essential element in the History Tripos, being regarded as one of the 'theoretical' subjects which provided the desired stiffening. In the disputes attending the 1885, 1897, and 1909 revisions of that Tripos notably little hostility was directed against the retention of political economy, which thus survived as an option down to 1930. By then, of course, the separate Tripos which Marshall had created had been in operation for over twenty-five years. Here, the teaching of the different branches of economics was naturally far more specialised, and in practice, as we remarked in an earlier essay (x), what had once been called political economy effectively surrendered any right to the adjective which had for so long testified to its membership of the class of 'political sciences'. For our purposes, some interest attaches to the largely vestigial papers in 'associated branches of political science' which were included in the new Tripos. Bagehot, Dicey, and Seeley headed the list of authorities prescribed for the paper on the British Constitution, while to the initial rubric for the paper on Modern Political Theories ('which shall deal chiefly with the latter half of the eighteenth and with the nineteenth century') was soon added the following interesting amplification: The subject shall comprise a general critical survey of the main currents of political thought during the period indicated; and in particular of (a) the doctrines of the Social Contract and of Natural Right, esp. in their bearings on the French and American revolutions; (b) the political aspect of Utilitarianism; (c) the political tendencies of Idealistic thought; (d) the political aspect of Socialistic ideas (in outline only); (e) the influence of the idea of evolution upon political theories. From 1911, this was replaced with the 'Political Science B' paper from the History Tripos (Lowes Dickinson was by then primarily responsible for both), which survived in a modified form through to the late 1920s, its reading-list always headed by Sidgwick's Elements of Politics. More recent works made up a larger proportion of the recommended reading for the politics papers in the Economics Tripos than in History, though classics like Bagehot and Bryce kept their place.29 However, the number of 28 29

J . N . Keynes, ' H e n r y Sidgwick', Economic Journal, 10 (1900), 590; Reporter, 19 March 1889, p . 595. Student's Handbook (1904), p p . 2 9 0 - 8 ; (1910), p p . 3 4 0 - 8 ; (1925), p p . 359-68.

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students involved was far smaller: in the mid- 1920s an average of 120 out of 180 candidates opted to take the Political Science paper in Part One of the Historical Tripos and 60 out of 130 that in Part Two, whereas only 3 or 4 out of 40 took this option in Part Two of the Economics Tripos, though revisions to the latter Tripos in the course of this period mean the figures may not be strictly comparable. 30 And as one final, though necessarily superficial, indicator of pedagogic activity in this field, we may consider the number of lectures offered which were directly addressed to students taking these papers. Thus, to take a couple of years more or less at random: in 1892-3 we find Sidgwick giving sixteen lectures each on 'Politics Historically Treated' and The History of Political Theory', Browning twenty-four lectures each on 'Elementary Political Science with special reference to the evolution of the family and the state' and 'Elementary Political Science with special reference to the more complex forms of Government, including Federal Government', Thornely sixteen lectures each on 'Theory of Law and Government', 'Modern Constitutions', and 'Maine's Ancient Law and Spencer's Political Institutions', with further series of lectures on 'Elementary Political Science' by Hammond and Collins; and in 1910-11 Lowes Dickinson gave sixteen lectures on 'Modern Political Theories' and thirty-two on 'Analytical and Deductive Polities', Hammond thirty-two on 'Political Science', Webster twenty-four also on 'Political Science', Stobart sixteen on 'Comparative Politics (Ancient)', and Temperley and Green thirty-two apiece on 'Comparative Politics (mediaeval and modern)'. 31 The frequent references in the rubrics of the various courses in politics to the preparation they offered to those 'likely to hold responsible political positions at home and abroad' provide a reminder, were any necessary, that the lecture-halls were assumed to be filled with members of a future governing and administrative class. The very expansion and reorganisation of university teaching which took place from the 1870s can be seen, in part, as a response to the greatly increased demand for public servants consequent upon the tremendous growth of the home and colonial civil services in the second half of the century. In particular, the opening of the upper reaches of these to sentry by competitive examination had the result of tying them more closely to the universities: the concern that, in order to recruit candidates of the right type, the examinations should be such as could be 30 31

These figures are taken from the m e m o r a n d u m o n the teaching of the social sciences, cited in n. 23 above. T h e lecture-lists were printed in special issues of the Reporter, 8 O c t o b e r 1892 and 8 O c t o b e r 1910 respectively. I have omitted lectures o n Political Science offered b y the Special Board for Indian Civil Service Studies, o n which see below.

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A place in the syllabus

taken by a man who had followed a course of 'liberal education', meant that the subjects provided for such examinations reflected~the syllabuses of the ancient universities (and, partly as a result of this, that teachers from those universities provided the bulk of the examiners).32 This provides an interesting example of one of the ways in which Oxford and Cambridge were able to disguise - 'resolve' would be too generous - the recurring tension between the claims of a 'liberal education', however defined, and those of Vocational' training: a university education was unquestionably an immense advantage in competition for entry to the civil service, and to that extent a practical preparation for a career, but this was not because the content of that education was determined by the demands of activities intrinsic to the career, and so to that extent it could claim to retain its 'liberal' character.33 The connection with the Indian Civil Service was particularly intimate, and provides an interesting appendix to the account of political science's place in the Cambridge syllabus. We may pick up the story in 1876 when a new scheme was introduced whereby candidates were selected at the age of eighteen or nineteen, usually after a stint with a specialist crammer, and then spent two years at university, living alongside the undergraduates but pursuing a certain number of specially designed courses.34 This arrangement had been introduced with the powerful support of Sir Henry Maine, and some of his self-styled disciples within the ICS explicitly regarded it as a benefit of the scheme that such students could be well grounded in the Comparative Method as applied to law and politics.35 Several of the figures discussed in earlier essays devoted a substantial part of their time to this class of student: Seeley and Sidgwick were again prominent at Cambridge, while Marshall actually went to Oxford to take Toynbee's place as Tutor to the Indian Probationers at Balliol. Sidgwick attached particular importance to the preparation of future Indian administrators: not only did he serve on the Cambridge Board for ICS studies from 1883 to 1896 and donate £200 per year from his own pocket towards the expenses of 32 33

34

35

See J o h n R o a c h , Public Examinations in England 1850-1900 (Cambridge, 1971), esp. pp. 212-24. F o r some interesting parallel observations on this theme, see Rothblatt, Liberal Education, p p . 200-3. Wormell calculated that of those graduating with H o n o u r s in History between 1875 anc^ ^ 9 5 only eighteen per cent went directly into politics or the civil service, though this figure excludes those w h o pursued other careers, such as the law, which often overlapped with this category; those following the traditional vocations of the Law, the Church, and teaching remained the majority throughout this period. Wormell, Seeley, p . 119 and n. See also Rothblatt, Revolution of the Dons, pp. 248-71. There is some useful general information about these arrangements in Clive Dewey, 'The education of a ruling caste: the Indian Civil Service in the era of competitive examination', English Historical Review, 88 (1973), 262-85. George Feaver, From Status to Contract: A Biography of Sir Henry Maine 1822-1888 (London, 1969), p. 201; Dewey, 'Education of a ruling caste', 276-8.

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required teaching between 1884 and 1888, but when, at one point, it seemed possible that the university might have to discontinue the scheme for want of funds, he declared publicly that though his own 'opinion was well known that research should be much more considered and encouraged in the University than now; still the discredit of abandoning the connection with these students would be so grave that he would rather postpone important research than incur the loss'. 36 Despite such efforts, it became clear by the late 1880s that the scheme was not working satisfactorily, and it was eventually decided to revert to the practice of holding the entry competition after candidates would normally have taken a degree. The universities collaborated closely with the Civil Service Commissioners and the India Office in the design of a new examination, which all parties were keen should 'take account of recent developments in university studies'. 37 Thus, when the Commissioners initially proposed that the prescribed subjects should include papers on 'Analytical Jurisprudence and Roman Law' and on 'English Law', the India Office in reply suggested that 'so important a group of studies' would be better represented by three papers, the third to be 'Political Science (including the Early History of Institutions and the Theory of Legislation)'. The response of the Commissioners was to accept the enlargement, but to separate 'Analytical Jurisprudence' from 'Roman Law' and to include it with 'Political Science', remarking, with perhaps a hint of disdain for the academically fashionable, that 'the study of Roman Law would prove as laborious to the student as the combined study of Bentham, Austin and Maine, whose works, or some of them, are the principal authorities on the Theory of Legislation, Analytical Jurisprudence, and the Early History of Institutions'. 38 Clearly, from the Commissioners' point of view the law remained the overarching category under which these subjects should be treated, an identification which the centrality of Maine's work can only have reinforced. Once established in the schedule of the examination, the two papers set in Political Science came to reflect more of the current academic understanding of the subject than the Commissioners may have intended.39 The range of the examination questions and the reading required to answer 36

37 38

39

A . a n d E . M . Sfidgwick], Henry Sidgwick. A Memoir ( L o n d o n , 1906), p . 373 and n . ; for an example of Sidgwick's behind-the-scenes role, see R o l a n d K. Wilson ( w h o w a s in charge of t h e C a m b r i d g e I C S students in t h e 1880s) t o Sidgwick, 11 J u l y 1884; Sidgwick P a p e r s , T r i n i t y College, C a m b r i d g e , A d d . MSS. c. 95. 196. Roach, Public Examinations, p. 222. Parliamentary Papers, 1890, xxvi: ' C o r r e s p o n d e n c e relating t o t h e Indian Civil Service', pp. 210, 220, 222—3. T h e material in this a n d t h e following p a r a g r a p h is d r a w n from t h e Regulations and Examinations for Open Competition for the Civil Service of India, published annually from 1892.

3 56

A place in the syllabus

them corresponded quite closely to the Political Science papers at Cambridge, with the same mixture of analytical and historical approaches. Indeed, from 1897 the rubric was amended in a way which seemed to mirror the revision of the History Tripos: 'the examination will not be confined to Analytical Jurisprudence, Early Institutions, and Theory of Legislation but may embrace Comparative Politics, the History of Political Theories, etc.'. Once launched in this direction, the papers continued to reflect the conceptions of the subject fashionable at the universities. Thus, among the 1893 questions we find 'What lessons with regard to the principles which should be observed in the government of British India may be learned from the history of the Roman dominions under the Republic and the Empire?'; in 1901, as we saw in our second epigraph, Sidgwick, having died the year before, was added to the recently assembled pantheon of masters of Political Science; by 1912 the paper included questions on the personality of corporations. Moreover, this was not a peripheral subject, taken only by a few exceptionally prepared candidates. In its first year 17 of 32 candidates offered it, by 1896 all but 2 of the top 62 did so, and thereafter its popularity was only matched by, for obvious reasons, Greek, Latin, and English Composition. Furthermore, from 1895 the same examination was prescribed for Class 1 Home Clerkships, and from 1896 for Eastern Cadetships too, so in the ensuing two decades the numbers of those who 'got up' the relevant texts were very substantial: in 1906, for example, the year in which the younger Keynes was placed second, 69 of the 84 successful examinees took the Political Science papers (which included a question hung around a quotation from Sidgwick's Development of European Polity, published only three years earlier). With the outbreak of the First World War the numbers dropped dramatically, of course, and in 1916 the competition was suspended. A new scheme was introduced in 1921 in which the Political Science papers were replaced by separate papers on 'Political Theory' and 'Political Organization', the first of which had far more social thought than an earlier generation would have recognised as germane (including questions on Durkheim), while the second no longer reflected the historical and legal preoccupations of the devotees of the Comparative Method, but was more directly addressed to the analysis of modern political institutions. It is beyond the scope of this essay to attempt to pursue the residue of such instruction in the actual conduct of colonial administration, though the thought of still pink-faced young Assistant Collectors confronting the baffling intractability of Indian society by recalling passages of Sidgwick is an intriguing one. The historian may never be able to establish the extent to which academic analysis of, say, the parallels between the Roman and

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British empires informed the post-prandial wisdom of the verandahs; the fact that Bryce's essay on the subject was reprinted in 1914 expressly for ICS candidates bespeaks a perception of potential demand on someone's part. 40 And such studies, superficial and short-lived as they no doubt were for those who chiefly looked forward to cheap polo-ponies and an early pension, at least equipped the administrative class with a common vocabulary and stock of allusions. When an anonymous revenue officer, proposing in a despatch of 1909 that any future increase in revenue should be sought from levies on trade and industry and not from the land, began his argument with the claim that 'all history teaches that with the development of a country a greater degree of permanence must be given to the taxation of the land . . .', 41 he did not presumably think that he was putting forward a novel historical interpretation or even drawing a particularly tendentious parallel. Some of his superiors, perhaps still influenced by older conceptions of rent, might have been inclined to reject his proposal; it would surely not have occurred to them to reprimand him for appealing to irrelevant considerations. It is by placing such examples as this in the context of the educational arrangements discussed above that we might begin to put some flesh on the teasingly bare assertion of one authority that all those responsible for the administration of British India in the second half of the nineteenth century 'assumed there to be, in some sense, a science of politics'. 42 It would, as we have already remarked, be foolish to infer too neat or coherent a conception of the science of politics from the evidence of syllabuses and reading-lists: the minutes of the various meetings which established and revised these papers tell a story of disagreement and confusion, and we all know how little of the story such records ever tell. And the priorities of pragmatic undergraduates have a way of cutting their elders' elaborate intellectual concerns down to size. We would do well to remember that when Maine took up the Chair in Jurisprudence that had effectively been created for him at Oxford, he gave the lectures which were to become his books, books which were, as we have seen, among the most influential of the day. The result was that few undergraduates attended his lectures: to get a decent audience he had, as he complained to Bryce, to descend to lectures on 'elementary Austinism'. 43 40 41 42 43

See above, p . 246. Q u o t e d in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959), p . 318. Stokes, Utilitarians and India, p . 319. Maine to Bryce, 25 N o v e m b e r 1875; quoted in F. H . Lawson, The Oxford Law School 1850-1965 (Oxford, 1968), p . 49. It was n o t only the undergraduates whose response t o the subject was not quite what its sponsors might have hoped for: Thomas Thornely, w h o regularly lectured on Political Science for the Cambridge History Tripos in the 1880s and

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A place in the syllabus

Yet the prominence of something called 'Political Science' (and its cognates) in the still narrowly circumscribed syllabuses of Cambridge is in itself an index of the importance attached to its study, and the contents of that programme are revealing of what the late nineteenth-century educated classes thought the systematic study of 'things political' should consist of. For example, that rivalry between, broadly speaking, the philosophical and the historical approaches which has been a recurrent theme of earlier essays was thrown into particularly sharp relief by the constraints of syllabus-making. In fact, the demands of the situation brought out one interesting asymmetry. The rubrics and reading-lists of the courses which successively occupied the 'political theory' space varied very little, as is perhaps natural. It is true that once Sidgwick's Elements of Politics was published it was treated as the authoritative guide to a large slice of the subject, but there were obviously good local reasons for this: on the whole, however, it seemed that students could as well be introduced to the fundamental puzzles about the nature of the state and the grounds of political obligation via the works of Aristotle as those of Bentham or Green. By contrast, the various forms of the historical or inductive papers changed more drastically in the wake of shifts of fashion and the fortunes of sponsors. After a while, certain names became well established on the readinglists - Maine, Freeman, Seeley, Sidgwick, Bryce - yet even their contemporaneity suggests a self-consciously 'modern' enterprise. These papers obviously owed much to the enthusiasm for the Comparative Method discussed in an earlier essay, though the initial eclecticism never entirely disappears: Bagehot can always be added as a joker to this as to other packs, and the selection of European and, later, American authors is noticeably erratic. In passing, it is worth remarking the comparatively slight figure which Mill cuts in these particular papers; he was, of course, prominent - even, for a while dominant - in neighbouring courses in philosophy and political economy, yet Representative Government apart (and there was even some uncertainty about where that should be placed), he was not treated as an authority on the science of politics.44 Book vi of his Logic certainly did not become the subject's methodological primer.

44

90s, later confessed: 'I always felt somewhat ashamed of i t . . . Though I had the benefit of many profitable talks on the subject with Professor Henry Sidgwick, and the high honour of being consulted by him when preparing his Elements of Politics, I could never quite overcome my prejudice against it as an academic study. That I could not altogether escape from it - the few other subjects I could, without gross presumption, have lectured upon having been all appropriated by a rapidly growing staff- was my chief reason for my early retirement.' Thornely, Cambridge Memories, pp. 79-80. Questions continued to be set on Representative Government in the 'General Theory of Law and Government' half-paper. Interestingly, when Seeley was meditating on the need for text books in the subject, he confided to Browning: 'What I want to see is more books

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Austin, by contrast, figures prominently: it is, after all, he and not Mill who opens the batting in our second epigraph. This is another reminder of the special intimacy of the connection between law and politics, a connection which could be taken for granted in Victorian England. Even for the academics mentioned in this essay the language of the law constituted something of a lingua franca, linking, say, the very different kinds of history written by Maine and Maitland or the rival political and constitutional commentaries of Bryce and Dicey, and forming a bridge beween them. One notices how the intellectual problems of sovereignty continually cropped up: exorcising the ghost of Austin became something of a rite de passage for aspiring authors on political and legal theory. The study of the law, it hardly needs to be said, commanded a guaranteed audience both within and without the universities, but the teaching of jurisprudence at Oxford and Cambridge was not yet the narrowly professional training it was soon to become; in this period it managed to accommodate the authors of several of the most widely cited works of political science, such as Maine, Bryce, Dicey and Pollock, as Professors of Law. There is an appropriateness in the fact that the standard introduction to the history of the science of politics should have been written by the man who succeeded Maine as Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford (and who was in turn succeeded by Vinogradoff), who collaborated with Maitland on the classic History of English Law, and who became the first editor of The Law Quarterly Review.^ What is, perhaps, most striking of all about the various courses in 'political science' is the extent to which the kind of political knowledge they offered the student was historical. Recent and contemporary political developments, even purely institutional ones, received scant attention by comparison with the care bestowed on mastering the constitutions of Greek city-states. Much could be said about the ways in which the political imagination of nineteenth-century Englishmen dwelt in the past, but more immediately this evidence bespeaks the influence of a generation in the thrall of the Comparative Method, bewitched by the possibility of establishing a structural sequence of types abstracted.from the bewildering variety of actual historical happenings. The literature which this inspired was heavily taxonomic, with popular assemblies and royal vetoes treated like the vertebrae and vestigial fins of comparative anatomy. Of course, it held out the promise, a promise implicit in all evolutionary accounts, of

45

like Mill on Representative Government' (undated letter, quoted in Wormell, Seeley, p. 137), though as we have seen his own Introduction to Political Science could hardly be said to have resembled Mill's work at all (see above, pp. 225-34). Frederick Pollock, An Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics (London, 1890) (revised edn, 1911).

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being able to project the next step in the sequence; even where this was most muted - as, for example, in Sidgwick's contribution - the very notion of an inductive science still implied, after all, the possibility of inference. Establishing that 'the foremost files of time' involved bicameral parliamentary government offered one obvious kind of intellectual and emotional satisfaction; indicating the evolutionary place of systems of property-holding in India promised other, more practical, returns. And beyond that, less tangibly, it could provide, as philosophies of history always do, both a vocabulary in which to discuss the present and a sense of assurance about the immediate future. We should not forget, for instance, how untried and fragile an experiment large-scale democracy still seemed, nor how intriguing and practicable an option federalism appeared at the time. The modern world provided only a very limited fund of experience to draw on for guidance; the 'science of states' that Seeley called for necessarily based its generalisations on experimental evidence drawn from the more familiar past. It is noticeable how many of even those examination questions addressed to modern constitutional issues expected the students' responses to be refracted through the medium of historical parallels. 'Contrast the working of republican institutions in Ancient Rome and Modern France', 'Can you account for the failure of Federalism in the Ancient World and for its success in modern times?', 'Compare the position of the Premier of a self-governing English colony with that of the Governor of a province under the Roman Republic', and many, many more. What, one is tempted to say, the political science taught at Cambridge did not do was to study politics. It did not, that is to say, isolate distinctively political activity for examination, nor did it analyse what might be regarded as the 'process' of politics, as opposed to the governmental and legal structures which that process deposited and animated. It did not, to court anachronism, attempt a sociology of political life, and it devoted little analytical discussion to those non-governmental aspects of current politics which certainly absorbed a good deal of this group's citizenly attention, such as the actual operation of the electoral system, the local organisation of parties, the recruitment of the political class, and so on. There were exceptions - Bryce's American Commonwealth is a notable one - but it remains true that much of the impact of the work of Ostrogorski and, still more, Graham Wallas derived from the fact that comparatively little scholarly attention had been paid to these aspects of the political life of contemporary Britain by the preceding generation. And, on a more abstract level, the proponents of political science evinced remarkably little unease with the problematic category of the 'political', being content, for the most part, to let it be delimited by the magnetic pull of 'government'. This untroubled identification of those features of public

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affairs about which systematic knowledge was most desirable with the actions of government fairly narrowly construed may pefhaps be taken as a late expression of the long-standing aspiration to develop a 'science of the legislator'. And of course in some parts of the world that beguiling role was still available. Regarded as 'forerunners' of the social scientific analysis of political behaviour in modern societies, texts like Ancient Law or The Expansion of England (the latter first given as lectures to ICS students)46 appear as eccentric or irrelevant: but when one considers the task of providing future Indian administrators with some framework for understanding their role in the peculiarly alien society they were to govern, whether from London or from the District Commissioner's bungalow, then discussions of primitive Aryan legal customs or of the historical role of taxation in the decline of empires start to look positively vocational. In all these ways the science of politics reflected the current political agenda and expressed the academics' own sense of their intimate involvement with the business of government, whether seen from the floor of the House or a seat on the Indian Council, or just from the common-rooms and drawing-rooms in which they mingled with current Cabinet Ministers and future Governor-Generals. The major political issues facing this generation still seemed to be essentially constitutional ones - above all, the questions of the forms and limits of the franchise, but also issues like Imperial Federation and Home Rule, issues which they perceived in predominantly legal terms even where these turned out not to be the ultimately decisive ones. There were also issues which accorded their own particular expertise a special relevance, in a way in which the popular and 'sentimental' politics coming to the fore in the 1880s did not. 47 Significantly, many of the figures mentioned here became Liberal Unionists after 1886. Sidgwick called this the party of 'intelligence': presenting a similar perception less indulgently, a modern historian refers to it as 'a political party run by intellectuals for intellectuals';48 however described, it provided a temporary haven for those of more fastidious political sensibilities who were alarmed at the boisterous and untutored energies of the new democracy, and who deplored the absence of those kinds of constitutional restraints which the possessors of political wisdom always 46 47

48

Wormell, Seeley, p. 94. Their perception of the political agenda is well captured in Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy 1860-1886 (London, 1976), and the prominence given to their constitutional writings by the H o m e Rule crisis of 1886 is discussed in the same author's I d e o l o g y and H o m e Rule: James Bryce, A. V. Dicey, and Ireland, 1880-1887', English Historical Review, 91 (1976), Sidgwick to Lady Rayleigh, 10 February 1898, quoted in Memoir, 'Ideology and H o m e Rule', 314.

p. 555; Harvie,

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wish to see built into a system in which they are doomed to be a minority. 49 Given this disposition, it is hardly surprising if the programme of political education they favoured seems often to resemble a course of inoculations designed to make sure that the body politic retained a cool head. That the systematic study of history acted as a prophylactic against the contagion of sudden and unwise political changes became a staple recommendation of inductive political science, a reflection of the conviction that, like second marriages, many of the eagerly advocated schemes of political reconstruction exhibited the triumph of hope over experience. In his celebrated lecture on 'The Political Value of History', Lecky proposed to consider 'the branches and methods of historical study that are most fitted to form a sound political judgement'. Having discounted several uncongenial readings of history which might have seemed to provide arguments in favour of democracy and Home Rule, his particular bug-bears, he concluded in a sentence expressive of the hopes and anxieties of many of those who sponsored the historical study of politics: 'the point . . . on which I would here especially insist is that there has scarcely been a great revolution in the world which might not at some stage of its progress have been arrested, or materially modified, or at least gratefully postponed, by wise statesmanship and timely compromise'. 50 Though the fashionable form of inductive political science aspired to establish a 'natural' sequence of political development, this did not involve any abdication of the responsibility or effective agency of the political actor in the face of putatively more fundamental social changes, even where the part seemed largely to consist in delaying one's exit as long as possible. The same essentially preventive note was struck in Seeley's denunciation of Socialism as 'a bastard political science divorced from history', in Bryce's warning against the pernicious consequences of 'abstract doctrine', even in Sidgwick's justification of the teaching of politics as helping to provide 'protection against erroneous practical conclusions'.51 Yet these concerns were fused with others - with standards of scholarship and ideals of education, with the cultivation of patriotism and the exercise of patronage - in ways which make any one characterisation of this episode and its leading figures' intentions reductively simplistic. 49

50 51

See Sidgwick's journal entry, 29 N o v e m b e r 1884: 'Maine dined with us this evening: seems really concerned that we have n o proper constitution in England . . . T h e genuine alarm that M seems to feel at the existing state of things in England impressed m e much, since his intellect has always seemed to me a very cool and disengaged o n e . ' Memoir, p p . 392-3. W . E. H . Lecky, The Political Value of History (London, 1892), p p . 8, 38. For Seeley's comment see above, p p . 227—8, and for Bryce's see above, p . 246; Sidgwick's is taken from the epigraph to the present essay.

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Seeley was certainly the most aggressive advocate of the practical political benefits of the teaching of political science, but if we allow him the last word we must observe that his rhetorical passage that calls for the study of c the general principles of political science' includes the claim that this would provide 'the education most wanted - and also unfortunately most wanting - in a country which attaches so much value to self-government', and that it 'would become . . . a principal and fundamental instrument of culture'. 52 Sidgwick's 'thoroughly educated man and citizen' was, after all, assumed to be a possible alumnus of Seeley's 'school of statesmanship'. 52

J. R. Seeley, 'History and Polities', Macmillan's Magazine, 40 (1879), 375-6.

EPILOGUE D

D

A nebulous province: the science of politics in the early twentieth century The study of politics is just now in a curiously unsatisfactory condition. GRAHAM WALLAS, Human Nature in Politics (1908)

the opening sentence of Graham Wallas's Human Nature in Politics has been frequently cited, it could hardly be said that those who have used it for their own purposes have displayed any clear sense, or indeed much curiosity, about what its author meant by it. There is, of course, no dispute that what he had in mind, generally speaking, was the need, in attempting to understand the realities of democratic political behaviour, to take account of the non-rational and irrational springs of human action, especially as revealed by post-Darwinian psychology; and it was the failure of his predecessors to attend to this dimension which made their treatment of the subject unsatisfactory. Still, what, in any more precise terms, he thought constituted the study of politics at that date remains to be specified. Again, the answer in general terms might seem too obvious to need stating. His book is notoriously a criticism of the intellectualism of nineteenth-century English political theory, the chief example of which is always taken to be Benthamite Utilitarianism. That this was, for Wallas, the last coherent political theory to have held sway in England and what he intended to be understood by his many references to 'traditional English political philosophy' is certainly true; evidence could be amassed from a variety of sources to show the extent to which Wallas shared - and, indeed, helped to create - the turn-of-the-century consensus about the identity and influence of the Philosophic Radicals in English political life, and, correspondingly, about the widely lamented failure of the second half of the century to come up with a theoretically grounded 'school' which was remotely comparable in either theoretical purchase or practical success.1 This is not, however, the whole answer, and what remains to be said has, from our point of view, a special interest. ALTHOUGH

The famous sentence refers, after all, to the study of politics, and in the body of the book, as in Wallas's many other writings on the subject, 'our traditional course of study in politics' is represented by Oxford, always for him the home of lost courses in political science. It hardly needs to be said, however, that during the period in which Oxford had had any courses on this subject, from the time of his own education there thirty years earlier if not before, that university had not been particularly hospitable to Utilitarian political theory. Instead, what had in that period been 'the Oxford way . . . of approaching the intellectual problems of politics' consisted, on Wallas's account, of two rather different enterprises: the comparative 1

Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London, 1908 (3rd edn, 1920)), pp. 167, 205, 216. See, for further examples, Martin J. Wiener, Between Two Worlds. The Political Thought of Graham Wallas (Oxford, 1971), esp. pp. 41, 60, 76.

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study of political institutions, on the one hand, and, on the other, classical and neo-classical moral philosophy. His characterisation of both of these was, inevitably, somewhat tendentious, but the selection itself was a reasonably accurate identification of the market-leaders, both at Oxford and elsewhere. For what, at its least inspired, had become 'the bare comparison of existing institutions', Wallas had some tolerance, as we saw in his estimation of Bryce, its leading representative, and his complaint here was, self-servingly, that 'at the moment . . . nearly all students of politics analyse institutions and avoid the analysis of man'.2 For the second, 'those informal talks on Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, which, under the name of the Theory of Politics, formed in my time such a pleasant interlude in the Oxford course of Humane Letters', he always evinced undisguised scorn. A few years later, in reviewing a book by a man who must have conducted more such informal talks than most, he mocked that 'Aristotle, the student of morals and politics, has occupied in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Oxford a position nearly as important as that of Aristotle, the logician, in the Oxford of the Middle Ages'. In fact, Wallas, as became a former Greats man, had a high regard for Aristotle, but none at all for what he identified as the Hegelianised Aristotelianism of Green, Bosanquet and their disciples, in whose political philosophy he detected 'a conscious or half-conscious attempt to substitute a satisfying picture of that which does not exist for an unsatisfying picture of that which does exist'.3 That Wallas should so comprehensively indict the existing approaches to the study of politics is one of the properties which make him such a suitable herald for an epilogue, and several of the figures who have been prominent in the preceding pages get rapped over the knuckles by this particular ex-schoolmaster. Although his end-of-term reports cannot be taken altogether at face-value, his sense that, to change the metaphor, the old seams had been worked out and new shafts needed to be sunk seems to have been widely shared. A similar conviction was being expressed by those writers in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century who, like Mill before them, prefaced their own contributions with Tocqueville's remark that 'a new political science is needed for a new world'.4 And yet, of course, the very fact of citing such an authority indicated the extent to which they confronted these new realities with inherited intellectual equipment. Predecessors were freely repudiated, but 2 3 4

Human Nature in Politics, pp. 127, 18, 14. For his assessment of Bryce, see above, pp. 236-7. Human Nature in Politics, p. 17; 'Oxford and English Political Thought', Nation, 15 May 1915, 227-8 (reviewing Ernest Barker's Political thought in England 1848 to the Present). E.g., Mosei Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties, 2 vols. (London, 1902), 1, Epigraph; H. J. Laski, A Grammar of Politics (London, 1925), p. 1.

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even the identification of them as predecessors involved an affirmation of kinship. In surveying the state of play in the early twentieth century, it is hard to know whether to be more struck by the evident and widely remarked discontinuities with the work of the previous generation, or by the less obvious, less advertised, but certainly no less fundamental, indications of continuity. Among many possible illustrations of this duality, consider three responses to Sidgwick's Elements of Politics. In 1904 the young A. D. Lindsay, eager for a spot of father-slaying, remarked with an appropriately patronising loftiness: 'Of course, those nineteenth-century Liberals like J. S. Mill were quite extraordinary in their blindness to the fact that the whole population of the world was not composed of people on the same moral and intellectual plane as themselves. I notice that very much in Sidgwick, on whom I lecture for Political Science. He is better than the rest, but he is still quite ridiculous in that respect.>5 Thirteen years later, the even younger and even more aggressive Harold Laski found the book 'simply six hundred pages of gilded platitudes', adding dogmatically: 'You can't do what he tried to do - create a political system in abstract. It's got to be inductive, and base itself on the actual process of the state, to be functional above everything; but Sidgwick seems to have thought that having read Spencer, Bentham, T. H. Green and The Times he had the material at his fingertips.'6 Laski rarely made a general assertion which he did not turn into a book, and when his Grammar of Politics (one of the books to open with the phrase from Tocqueville) appeared in 1925, Wallas, his predecessor in the Chair of Political Science at London, took the opportunity to do for the teaching of politics at Cambridge what (in the passage quoted earlier) he had already done for Oxford: Mr Laski has written the first full-sized treatise on the general theory of politics that has appeared since the publication in 1891 of Henry Sidgwick's Elements of Politics - which is still set as the main text-book of political science in the Tripos examinations at Cambridge. Sidgwick, when composing his Elements, wrote: 'My deep conviction is that it [political science] can yield as yet little fruit of practical utility. . . still, man must work and a professor must write books'; and again: 'The political results of the coming generation will be determined by considerations very unlike those that come to the pen of a theoretical person writing in his study.' Sidgwick's pessimism as to his own book was justified in 1891, and is much more fully justified in 1925. The keenest Cambridge undergraduate who works his way through Sidgwick's Elementsfindsthat he has learnt nothing on any question 5 6

From a letter by Lindsay to his sister describing his first term of teaching at Manchester in 1904, quoted in Drusilla Scott, A. D. Lindsay, A Biography (Oxford, 1971), pp. 39-40. Laski to Holmes, 21 October 1917, in Mark deWolfe Howe (ed.), The Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr Justice Holmes and Harold ]. Laski 1916-193$ (London, 1953), p. 105.

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about which he cares, and may find that he has been more bored while reading the book than Sidgwick was while writing it. He then went on to praise Laski for 'producing a book on political science which is neither a mere catalogue of facts nor a conventional demonstration that the existing British constitution cannot be improved. The student who starts his thinking from Laski's Grammar of Politics will have the advantage of a couple of centuries over the student who starts from Sidgwick's Elements of Politics.'7 Revolutionaries all, yet in the long run they all seem more concerned with the upkeep of the Winter Palace than with its destruction. Lindsay went on to found the 'Modern Greats' School, self-consciously imitative as its familiar sobriquet suggests, in which the problems of the modern world were to be approached through the venerable portals of 'ethics, economics and polities', and in the 1940s he was still upholding the view that 'the facts of politics are largely what people will, and to discover that needs reflection and history'. 8 Laski, on occupying Wallas's Chair in 1926, announced that he stood for 'the study of politics in terms of history', acknowledged the 'primary importance to . . . English political science' of the traditions both of Bentham and the Utilitarians and of Green and Bosanquet, and urged, unnecessarily, that 'we need to be reminded of what we may still learn from Aristotle and Plato'. 9 And Wallas himself, who in his first publication in the 1880s had enquired, with bland anachronism, 'how far Aristotle's study and criticism of the various forms of society which he knew, led him towards a general science of sociology', hung one of his last lectures in 1930 on a re-examination of Mill on the logic of the moral sciences, and aspired above all to fill the role of 'the new Bentham' whom he had called for in 1908.10 Meanwhile, in 1929, four years after Wallas had docketed it as an antidiluvian survival, Sidgwick's Elements was reprinted for the fifth time. There was, it hardly needs to be said, some justice in these assessments of Sidgwick's book, just as, it should be added, the critics' own enduring preoccupations are not to be dismissed lightly. Moreover, a similar jury 7 8

9 10

Graham Wallas, CA Grammar of Polities', Manchester Guardian, 10 August 1925. For his conception of the 'Modern Greats' School, see Scott, Lindsay, pp. 50, 89-91; 'a broad study of the relations of ethics, economics and polities' was still what he prescribed for Keele in the late 1940s (Scott, Lindsay, pp. 318-19); for the remark about 'facts', see Scott, Lindsay, pp. 268-9, where he also describes Bryce's Modern Democracies as 'a thoroughly bad book'. H. J. Laski, 'On the Study of Polities', reprinted in Preston King (ed.), The Study of Politics. A Collection of Inaugural Lectures (London, 1977), quotations at pp. 1—3. Graham Wallas, 'Aristotle on Wealth and Property', Today (1888), quoted in Terence H. Quaker, Graham Wallas and the Great Society(London, 1980), p. 82; 'Physical and Social Science' (1930), reprinted in Graham Wallas, Men and Ideas, edited by May Wallas (London, 1940), esp. pp. 202-6; Human Nature in Politics, p. 205.

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could be assembled for several other of the heavy volumes of late nineteenth-century political science, returning in each case a^ similar verdict, and the terms of the indictment do suggest a certain shift in aspirations: 'abstract', 'too intellectualist', 'a mere catalogue of facts', 'a conventional demonstration that the existing British constitution cannot be improved'. Although the implied aspirations were rarely realised with any great success - it is one of the most striking things about Wallas, historically speaking, that he had dozens of admiring pupils but practically no imitators - it is noticeable that systematic writing on politics during this period did exhibit a somewhat different set of preoccupations. Social and economic issues received more attention, both as part of the agenda of government and as putative determinants of action; there was a less exclusive concentration on the state, and more discussion of the role of other organisations, partly in the wake of Pluralism;11 and in general the process as opposed to the structure of politics received more scrutiny than had been the case in the work of the previous generation. In these respects, the example of Americans like A. F. Bentley or Charles E. Merriam was beginning to have some impact by the 1930s, one indication of the first stage in the reversal of that client-culture status which the United States had endured in the study of politics, as in so much else.12 Yet this account, too, needs to be balanced by a recognition of the durability of older concerns. Idealist political theory, for example, Wallas's other bete noire, remained a powerful intellectual presence into the 1920s and beyond. Its relationship to any of that series of projects describing themselves as a 'science' of politics had always been ambivalent, of course, in that insofar as the label implied any positivistic ambitions they formed part of an enterprise which a properly Idealist understanding of human experience repudiated in principle. Yet in practice the prominence, especially the educational prominence, of this tradition melded with and reinforced several of the tendencies considered in the preceding essays. Most obviously, it strengthened the ties to classical Greek models, encouraged the focus on the state, and generally endorsed the centrality of 'political' at the expense of 'social' 11 12

For a brief account of Pluralist political thought and its impact, see David Nicholls, The Pluralist State (London, 1970). For Bentley and Merriam, see Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics, Its Origins and Conditions (London, 1959), and Barry E. Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago, 1974); for the earlier dependence on British works see Anna Haddow, Political Science in American Colleges and Universities 1636-1900 (New York, 1939), and, for a particularly striking example (including an examination paper based entirely on Seeley's Introduction to Political Science), see The Papers ofWoodrow Wilson, vn, 1890-2, edited by Arthur S. Link et al. (Princeton, 1967), esp. pp. 279-81; cf. vol. x, pp. 535-6.

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categories.13 In a longer perspective still, the Idealist tradition could be seen as an attempt to restore the discussion of 'things political' to its ancient domain as part of moral philosophy, 'the great subject', as that deutero-Idealist Ernest Barker put it in his Cambridge Inaugural, 'of which I conceive the subject of this Chair to be a province'. 14 Barker conceded, however, that as a subject it was generally considered, in academic circles at least, a 'nebulous' one, an adjective which hits a rather different note from that of Macaulay's proud encomium a century earlier. Among the many changes which contributed to this decline, one of the most important and revealing was surely the loss of confidence in the development and paradigmatic status of the British constitution. Hallam had epitomised this confidence when he compared the 'discovery' of the representative principle to that of the application of steam to machinery. Citing this passage in 1935, Denis Brogan observed, perhaps wistfully: 'In such an atmosphere, the problem of political science was simple enough; there was a science of government which, could it be thoroughly elucidated (and it could) would serve to solve most of the remaining technical problems of government.' Surveying the present, he had to report that 'the teacher of political science today has no such easy confidence in the existence of a science of good government', and he asked, as much (one cannot help feeling) in the hope of a few helpful hints as for rhetorical effect, 'what, then, lacking such a central body of doctrine do most teachers of "political science" and most institutions teaching the subject do?' Brogan had fine sport with the existing syllabus of 'comparative government': This study has several serious pedagogical advantages. It meets the need felt by defenders of new disciplines against the old of being to most students dull and even repulsive. . . Closely connected with this advantage is that of examinability... In the net of exact and, if possible, inherently distasteful knowledge, we hope to catch that enemy of true examiners, the charlatan - for we are all very down on charlatans who are under twenty-three or so. But this knowledge only made sense if informed by a set of principles, or at least assumptions, and this could no longer be taken for granted. There was now, Brogan argued, no accepted 'philosophy of polities', and so he concluded, dismissively: 'as a teaching subject, political science is too involved in mere fact; too barren of fundamental problem-stating to attract many of the best students. As a science it is in the state of botany before, let 13

14

Obviously, in any complete survey the role of Idealism would have to be examined in greater detail; in partial mitigation, we plead that these themes are treated in Stefan Collini, 'Sociology and Idealism in Britain 1880-1920', Archives Europeennes de Sociologies 19 (1978), 3-50. Ernest Barker, The Study of Political Science and its Relation to Cognate Studies (Cambridge, 1928), p. 39.

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us say, Linnaeus; it has plenty of information, but few and vague organising ideas.' 15 Brogan's critique of 'this undefined and possibly non-existent discipline' was sufficiently thoroughgoing for the electors to appoint him to the Cambridge Chair of Political Science four years later, and, on a broader front, his condemnation of it as a 'teaching subject' coincided with the beginning of its institutionalisation in British universities. The absence of any distinctive and agreed-upon 'science' was certainly evident in the familiar heterogeneity of the syllabuses, a mixture usually made up of classical political philosophy and the history of political theory on the one hand, British constitutional history and a selective taxonomy of political institutions on the other. 16 'Theory and institutions' was, and perhaps still is, the most common label for the new departments and chairs of politics, yet perhaps few of those who have passed their professional lives under this rubric have recognised its origins in an alliance between the heirs of Bentham and Green and the legatees of the Comparative Method. However, as we have emphasised already, these essays are not primarily intended as a contribution to the 'pre-history' of the discipline of 'political science', in any of the various forms assumed by that enterprise in the last fifty years, and insofar as one can talk of the 'legacy' of the nineteenthcentury science of politics to the academic study of politics in the first half of the twentieth century, the term is to be understood less as representing a steady accumulation in the family bank balance and more as a collection of heavy, awkward, unfashionable pieces of Victorian furniture bequeathed by several remote and slightly dotty aunts of the same name. Moreover, not only does the story at this point become an almost exclusively academic one, but the ways in which the boundaries of 'politics' as a possible object of knowledge are conceived change once again. From one point of view, this could be represented as a broadening of the scope of the conception of the political, the typical treatment of which, as remarked above, came to embrace much more than the narrow focus on the state characteristic of so much late nineteenth-century writing on the subject. When Bryce had declared that 'the Middle Ages were essentially unpolitical', when Seeley had remarked that Mill's essay on liberty was not a 'properly political work', or when Pollock had omitted Socialism from his survey on the grounds that it 'is the political application of economic tenets and not a theory of politics at all', they had each, in their different 15

16

D. W. Brogan, 'Political Theory and the Social Sciences', in The Social Sciences: Their Relation in Theory and in Teaching, Proceedings of a conference sponsored jointly by the Institute of Sociology and King's College, London (London, 1936), pp. 104-14. For a few details about the early institutionalisation of 'Polities', see the introduction to King, Study of Politics, and Norman Chester, 'Political Studies in Britain: recollections and comments', Political Studies, 23 (1975), 151-64.

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ways, been deploying a highly restrictive concept of politics.17 To be sure, they were doing so with polemical intent, and we are not suggesting that they were unable to recognise any of the phenomena in question as 'political': that would be to make an unnecessarily strong and historically implausible claim. It was rather that the standard range of application of the term was already sufficiently limited for these uses not to seem strained. In the course of the twentieth century, such restrictive definition became less and less persuasive. Yet, from another point of view, the change could be seen as representing something of a contraction. In coming to be classed as but one social science among others, 'polities' ceased to be the comprehensive category under which all that pertained to men's common life was to be assembled. The inclusive ambition of the passage from Macaulay which serves as the epigraph to this book would have seemed very curious barely intelligible, even - as an affirmation of allegiance in a professorial Inaugural lecture a century later. Apart from the purely institutional developments involved in this, it also indicates the way in which the category of 'society' had become both overarching and residual. The prominence - as well, perhaps, as some of the amorphousness - of that enterprise increasingly called 'sociology' owed much to this development. On the whole, however, such synthetic ambitions were increasingly at odds with the tenor of those specialised, self-consciously professional, academic activities which anxiously tried to justify their titles as 'sciences' in a period which understood that honorific in an aggressively positivistic way. To speak of the 'unity of the moral sciences' a la mode Sidgwickienne already seemed old-fashioned by the turn of the century, and its constituent studies went on to become even further estranged from each other and from their immediate neighbours. The study of law became more vocational, economics more technical, history more specialised; even philosophy, traditionally antipathetic to any form of intellectual closed shop, moved towards an austere and excluding concentration on logic and epistemology. In such company, politics, too, had to make its bid for a place at the table by posing as the sovereign of a small but technically advanced and entirely independent territory. And yet - taking a longer view still, and registering one further swing of the pendulum - these developments never entirely prevented a politics department from operating as a kind of intellectual refugee-camp, where those (especially historically inclined philosophers and theoretically 17

James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, quoted in H. A. L. Fisher, James Bryce, 2 vols. (London, 1927), 1, p. 67; J. R. Seeley, Introduction to Political Science (London, 1896), pp. 108-9; Frederick Pollock, An Introduction to The History of the Science of Politics (London, i89o(rev. edn, 1911)), p. 133.

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disposed historians) who did not easily fit into such a highly developed division of labour could practise their ancient trades.18 And here, too, there is continuity, for despite the scholastic vice of assuming that a 'subject' cannot be a respectable enterprise unless it has a distinctive 'method', in practice politics as an academic discipline has always, and quite properly, relied chiefly upon the skills of the philosopher and the historian, and the oscillation between the claims of philosophy and the claims of history, in their various disguises, has been one of the most constant themes of the essays in this book. And this suggests some reflections with which we may appropriately conclude. Although the historian is never, in eo nomine, in a position immodestly to describe ideas as 'perennial', it is certainly part of his office to record those forms of continuity which may escape the notice of more casual visitors to the past. Such visitors, often acting as agents for other interests, are, naturally enough, preoccupied with novelty, with what, at any given moment, was original or different, pregnant or fertile. In intellectual history this usually takes the form of a concentration on the emergence of those figures or ideas which were to have some decisive part in changing the subsequent course of men's intellectual lives: precursors rather than epigoni catch the eye, and ripeness is all but ignored. And yet what, in the fine grain of its everyday texture, the past seems so forcibly to exhibit, here as elsewhere, is the immense, heavy, constraining power of continuity and tradition, the deep-rooted, resisting hold of the familiar and the established, the slow grudging surrender of the habitual. This is, perhaps, especially true when dealing with ideas which were embedded in the institutional structure of a system of education, where one meets, again and again, the play of conservatism, inertia, and vested interest, where one always needs to consider who had taught the teachers, and to appreciate the gravitational pull of the old-established disciplines in which even the intellectual innovators will have been brought up. As the previous essay illustrates, one cannot ignore the role of a subject's perceived suitability for teaching (and, therefore, examining), or of its capacity to attract an audience and to justify itself to sponsors, or even of the mere existence of usable books on some subjects and not on others. And educational practices are themselves informed by cultural traditions of even greater durability. One inescapable example of this in the present case is provided by the pervasive common experience of a certain kind of classical education, 18

This is perhaps a point for which every reader could supply his own illustrations: our own favourite - which also makes clear that this tendency is by no means necessarily to be deplored — is that fifty years after the founding of the first Chair of Politics in a British university, the three premier Chairs in the subject were occupied by Isaiah Berlin, Denis Brogan, and Michael Oakeshott.

$j6

A nebulous province

an experience shared by Stewart and by Macaulay, by Maine and by Sidgwick, as well as by a comparative outsider like Wallas (the authority most often cited in his self-consciously iconoclastic Human Nature in Politics was Aristotle) and by later figures like Lindsay and Barker. This common formative experience - what it gave them and what it denied them as well as what it stood for and what it rested upon - marks them out from many of those who were later to sponsor rival styles of social thought, and is a crucial element in accounting for the nature and appeal of a science of politics. The hypnotic, unshakeable spell cast by Aristotle's Politics is so clearly readable on the face of so much of this literature that one is in danger of failing to remark it at all. And a formidable capacity for continuity also characterised that cluster of categories and concerns which nourished a certain level of reflection on politics throughout the century, whether in the form of the traditional prerogatives of moral philosophy, the effective resilience of political economy, the remarkable longevity of Utilitarianism, the entrenched centrality of jurisprudence, or the sustained fascination with English constitutional history. With such deep roots in the intellectual habits of the educated class, the various programmes for creating a science of politics have a special claim on the attention of the intellectual historian of the period. From this distance there is no need to dwell upon the shortcomings of these programmes, nor can one help but notice how their reach constantly exceeded their grasp. That individual works of distinction made their appearance under this rubric hardly needs to be said, but it should by now be clear that there was no more an achieved science in 1930 than there had been in 1830, and certainly nothing which measured up to some of the more optimistic eighteenth-century pronouncements. Large ambitions invite tart judgements, and it is tempting to conclude that for over a century the category of a 'science of polities' had been as empty as a dressmaker's window, ready to be filled by the latest wave of fashion. Eppur se muove. Despite the fact that as an activity it had at times seemed to amount to little more than a cross between issuing promissory notes on the basis of a talked-up but insubstantial security and whistling to keep one's spirits up, it had provided a home, or rather a series of homes, for the attempt to arrive at some understanding of 'things political' which was both tolerably systematic and not devoid of practical purchase. No doubt its proponents all too often tended to overplay their hand epistemologically, with the usual result that insights of considerable local value appeared parochial when translated into a vocabulary of putatively universal applicability. But although on such occasions their views may seem to have served functions which could properly be described as 'ideological', there is nothing to be gained by treating them collectively as

The science ofpolitics in the early twentieth century

377

an entity which could be reduced to ideology. Nor, though some of the assumptions now appear remote and the ambitions bizarre, is it easy to feel that the intellectual problems involved and the strategies available for coping with them were so purely a matter of time and place that they can confidently be dismissed by a methodologically more sophisticated age. It is not, after all, only the poor and inarticulate who may stand in need of being rescued from the enormous condescension of posterity.

INDEX

Abraham, 12 Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord, 183-6, 242, 326n Alcibiades, 187 Althorp, John Spencer, Viscount, 179 America, United States of, 19 and n, 230, 236, 237, 239-45, 277, 328-31, 371 anthropology, 209-10, 212-13 aristocracy, 93, 105, 107, 154-5 Aristotle, 10, 13, 14, 16-17, 130, 222, 229, 345> 347> 358> 3 6 8, 370, 376 Arnold, Thomas, 183, 187, 189, 221, 232 art of legislation or government, 15, 27, 42, 66y 68, 85, 87, 95, 149, 249 Ashley, William James, 251, 253, 254, 257, 258, 260, 261 as critic of classical political economy, 269-74, 332>335 associationist psychology, 135, 244, 281; see also philosophy of mind Augustus, Caesar, 189 Austin, John, 145-8, 215-16, 255, 281, 339, 341,346,347,348,355,357,359 Bacon, Francis, 15, 33, 42, 43, 48-9, 52-3, 99, 103 Bagehot, Walter, 3, 10, 21, 23, 45, 49, 58, 86, 210, 229, 266, 280, 306, 339, 352, 358 on method, 156, 163 as reviewer, 165-7 andWhiggism, 168-9, I7^> I^° and Burke, 171-5 on progress, 174-5, 181, 212, 255-7 on public opinion, 174-6 use of geological metaphors, 174, 178 on statesmen, 176-80 his liberalism, 180-1 on political economy, 251, 255-7, 260, 284,314 Bain, Alexander, 135 Barker, Ernest, 350-1, 368 and n, 372, 376

Beccaria, Cesare, 27 Bentham, Jeremy, 8-9, 21, 61, 87, 93-9, 105, 112, 123, 133, 142, 147, 156, 198, 215, 235, 253, 280, 286, 288, 290, 291, 292, 294, 316, 346, 355, 358, 369, 370,

373 m Benthamism, 21, 46, 87, 96-7, 133-4, 1423, 155, 207, 244, 281, 291; see also Utilitarianism Bentley, A. F., 371 Berkeley, George, 113 Berlin, Isaiah, 375n Bismarck, Otto von, 227 Black, Joseph, 47 Blackstone, William, 21, 55, 94-5, 113, 124, 347 m Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar, 346, 348 Bolivia, 235, 238 Bosanquet, Bernard, 232, 368, 370 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 294 Bright, John, 203 British constitution, 21, 30, 32-3, 40, 55-7, 75-7, 83-4, 94, 100, 105-7, 124-5, 166-80, 195, 200-1, 291-2, 361-2, 370, 37i> 37*> 376 Brogan, Sir Denis, 372-3, 375n Brougham, Henry, Lord, 25, 44-5, 47, 49-51, 57-8, 95-6, 98, n o , 13m, 179, 346 Browning, Oscar, 207, 225, 347, 349, 353 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 101 Bryce, James, Lord, 4, 190, 191-2, 213, 236,288,346,348,352,357,358,359, 360, 362, 368, 373 on democracy, 237-8 on historical analogies, 238-9 and Tocqueville, 235-41 and Maine, 241 and method, 243-4 and Whig history, 242, 245-6 Buchanan, David, 78 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 145, 192-3

379

380

Index

Burke, Edmund, 9, 19—20, 45, 121, 133, 17175* 235> 294>35° Burkeanism, 19-20, 195, 197, 198, 200, 202, 203, 204, 217, 223-5, 246, 292-3 Butler, Joseph, Bishop, 346 Butterfield, Herbert, 5 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 188 Caesar, Julius, 204 Cairnes, John Elliot, 135, 251-2 and n, 285 Campomanes, Pedro, Count, 27 Canning, George, 178, 179 Carlyle, Thomas, 20, 170 Chalmers, Thomas, 71 Chamberlain, Joseph, 273, 275, 333, 336 character, 35, 49, 130, 135, 137, 151, 157-8,

164, 170-1, 173-4, 205, 317-19, 320-1, 3^6-9,333 national, 130, 151-9, 164, 170-1, 173-4, 240, 242, 245, 290, 317-19, 320-1, 326-9,331 Charity Organisation Society, 282 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 346 civil society, history of, 18, 25, 27-8, 60-1, 94, 96, 115-16, 118, 122, 188, 193 Clarke, Samuel, 346 Cleisthenes, 225 Cobden, Richard, 179, 180 Cockburn, Henry, 23, 25, 27, 91-2 Cole, G . D . H . , 331 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 133, 168, 232 commercial society, 18-19, 28—31, 43, 74-5, 80-3, 118—19; see also civil society, history of Comte, Auguste, 8, 10-11, 95, 132, 134, 135, 144, 150, 180, 192,225,229,235, 251, 286, 297, 299, 321, 323 Condorcet, Marie Jean, Marquis de, 32-3, 39>53>7° Confucius, 203 Corn Laws, 65, 72, 78, 86, 260 Creighton, Mandell, 347 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Lord, 190 Cunningham, William, 247, 251, 254, 257, 258, 261 as critic of classical political economy, 265-9, 322, 324-5 and Historical Tripos, 266,269 and n, 349 D'Alembert, Jean, 197 Darwin, Charles, 177, 324, 367 De Lolme, J ean Louis, 21, 2 5, 5 5, 94 democracy, 102-4, 112, 125, 153-5, I 9 I - 2 > 224, 235, 237-46, 361-2, 367; see also representative government Demosthenes, 222 Dicey, Albert Venn, 214, 352, 359 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 352, 353

Disraeli, Benjamin, 187 division of labour, 31-2, 53-5, 119, 123-4, 126 Dumont, Etienne, 96-7 Durkheim, Emile, 10-11, 134, 356 economic man, assumption of, 82, 112-14, 136, 138, 260, 314, 316,319-20;see also self-interest, principle of Economistes, 39, 50 Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro, 318 Edinburgh Review, 25, 44-5, 49, 50, 55, 56, 59, 61, 77-8, 87-8, 96, 98, 105, n o , 119, 164-5, r ^8 education, 31-2, 41, 55, 95, 96, 104, 119, 123,334 Eldon, John Scott, Lord, 167 Empson, William, 6j, 86 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 26, 78, 96-7, 123 Enlightenment, the, 17, 35, 133, 198 Essays on Reform, 191-2, 238 ethology (science of the formation of character), 135, i37~43> X56» J57> 3 l 8 ~ i9>33 J Euler, Leonhard, 47, 198 Fabius Maximus, Quintus, 187 Fascism, 245 federalism, 220-2, 223—5, 23°~2> 3^i Ferguson, Adam, 11, 18, 25, 26, 27, 43, 53, 55 feudalism, 15, 28, 195, 200-2, 217-18, 230, 270 Filangieri, 27 Fisher, Herbert Albert Laurens, 300 and n Foxwell, Herbert Somerton, 258, 266, 275, 336-7 France, 16, 131, 144, 153, 169, 170, 187, 194-5,196-7, 200-1, 203, 204, 222, 229, 238, 240, 264-5, 328~9> 360;see also French Revolution franchise, the, 180, 189, 191-2, 224, 238, 240, 361; see also parliamentary reform Frazer, Sir James, 209, 212 Freeman, Edward Augustus, 2, 147*, 164, 173, 199, 202, 204, 207, 209, 212, 214, 229, 232, 237, 242, 243, 244,245,271 andn, 300, 347, 348, 358 and the Comparative Method, 219-23, 300, 30m on federalism, 220-1, 224 on city-states, 222-3 his Burkeanism, 224-5 contrasted with Seeley, 226-7 French Revolution: (1789), 19-20, 32-3, 38, 77 (1830), 131 (1848), 131, 153

Index Froude, James Anthony, 190 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 229, 230, 271

Hutcheson, Francis, 26 Hutton, Richard Holt, 176 Huxley, Thomas Henry, i64n, 167

Gardiner, A. G., 237 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 237 Germany (German scholarship), 131, 194,

India, 46, 95-6, 111-12, 114-18, 120, 124, 146-7, 210, 211, 214, 215 andn, 216, 254, 271, 301, 324-5, 354-7, 360-1 Indian Civil Service, 246n, 3O3n, 339, 346, 354-7.36I Ingram, J. K., i42n, 282 Ireland, 81-2, 263 and n, 265

198-9, 202-3, 210-11, 214, 221,223, 227, 232, 251, 261, 269, 270-1, 272, 304,313,322 Gibbon, Edward, 188, 204, 347 Giddings, Franklin, 298 Gladstone, William Ewart, i72n, 180, 222, 255,264,303 Godwin, William, 70 Greece, 15-16, 143, 145, 154, 157, 187-90, 199,217, 220-5, 238> 246,359-60, 371 Green, John Richard, 202, 222, 226 Green, Thomas Hill, 9, 229, 251, 266 and n, 346,358,368,369,370,373 Grimm, Jacob, 199, 211, 221, 227 Grote, George, 98, 145, 157-8, i64n, 189, 222, 223, 225

Grote, John, 346 Grotius, Hugo, 19, 95 Guizot, Francois, 131, 157-8, 204, 222, 346, 347 Gwatkin, Henry Melvill, 347 Haileybury (East India College), 46, 67, 98 Halevy, Elie, 253 Hallam, Henry, i73n, 202, 346, 372 Hamilton, Alexander, 19 Hannibal, 187 Harrington, James, 13, 18-19, 190, 195 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 8, 232, 303-4,331,368 Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 94 historical cycles, 15-16, 33, 188-90, 212, 221 historicism, 7-9, 11-12, 40-1, 43-4, 129, 151-3, 186, 191-3, 238 Hobbes, Thomas, 108-9, JI3> 34^> 368 Holland House, 45 Holmes, Sherlock, 331 Home Rule, 361, 362 Horner, Francis, 25, 44-7, 49, 57-9, 95, 97—8, 109, 166 his plan of studies, 47-8 on political economy, 50-4, 63-4, 66-yy 77-8 Hume, David, 25, 32-3, 55-6, 77, 79, 83, 94, 113, 122, 124-5, l9h J94> 195. *99> 34*.. on politics as a science, 14-19, 27— 31, 38-40 on machinery, 19, 30-1 on opinion, 41-3

James II, 195 Jeeves, Reginald, 305 Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 25, 46-7, 91, 105, n o , 115, 121-2, 168 Jevons, William Stanley, 251-2 and n, 253, 267, 283 andn, 309, 312-13, 317, 318-20 Jones, Richard, 71, 80 Jones, Sir William, 124 Jowett, Benjamin, 331 jurisprudence, 28-9, 40, 46, 48, 94-5, 97, 145-8, 211, 212-13, 219, 253, 341, 347, 357>359>376 Kant, Immanuel, 346 Kemble, John Mitchell, 221, 223 Keynes, John Maynard, 275, 280, 309, 311— 13. 3*5. 336-7, 356 Keynes, John Neville, i38n, 249-50, 252, 253,261,332,336,351-2 Kidd, Benjamin, 298-9 Knies, Karl, 270 Kovalevsky, Maxime, 210, 213 Kropotkin, Peter, Prince, 213 Laski, Harold, 369-70 Lauderdale, James Maitland, Earl of, 51 Laveleye, Emilede, 213, 219, 265 Lecky,W. E. H., 187, 362 Leslie, T. E. Cliffe, 4, 137, 209, 210, 219, 247. 249-5!> 252~3> 2.58-9> 269, 274 as critic of classical political economy, 262-5, 2%z Letourneau, Charles, 213 Lewis, Sir George Cornewall, 187, 287 Lindsay, Alexander Dunlop, 369-70, 376 Linnaeus, Carl, 373 List, Friedrich, 329 Locke, John, 38, 368 Louis XIV, 16, 195 Lowe, Robert, 265, 282 Lowell, A. Lawrence, 236 Lubbock, Sir John, 164 Lucas, Sir Charles, 190 Lyall, Sir Alfred, 216

Index

382

Macaulay, T h o m a s Babington, 3 , 4 , 145,

158, 173, 176, 185, 191, 199, 201, 202, 204, 224, 269, 306, 329, 372, 374, 376 as critic of Benthamism, 87-8, 93, 96, 99-105, i i o - n , 113, 119-26, 138, 154

on lessons of history, 192-8 McCulloch, John Ramsay, 45, 68-9, 78, 88-9 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 13, 15-16, 170, 188 Mackintosh, Sir James, 3, 45-7, 50-1, 58, 60, 67, 88-9, 93-4, i n , 119, 124, 166 on the British constitution, 56-7, 107, 121-2

on Bentham and his followers, 97-100, 105, 113-14 Maclennan, John Ferguson, 213 Madison, James, 19 Maine, Sir Henry Sumner, 3, 8, 10, 145-8, 157, 164, 180, 22on, 227, 229, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243, 244, 246, 249-50, 251, 256, 262, 263, 266, 269, 271, 284, 197, 300> 330, 339> 34L 346-8, 357, .3.S 8 '359>36i, 376 his influence, 210, 262-6, 324-5, 348, 353.354-5 and German scholarship, 211 and Comparative Method, 211-13, 301, 354 opposition to abstraction, 215 and progress, 216-18, 254-5 and political economy, 252-5, 263 Maistre, Joseph de, 235 Maitland, Frederic William, 202, 203, 300-1 and n, 304, 347, 349 and n, 359 Mallet,J.L.,86-7 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 3, 12, 63, 98, 122,126,280,311 on wealth versus happiness, 65-6, 72-5 dispute with Ricardo, 66-9, 78-83 as political moralist, 70—2, 88-9 as 'Country' Whig, 75-7 on Corn Laws, 77-8, 86 Mandeville, Bernard, 171, 201 Mann, Thomas, 1 Marcet, Mrs Jane, 309, 320 Marshall, Alfred, 3, 12, 21, 251, 253, 255, 266-8, 273, 274, 284, 287, 309, 347, 354 on scope and method of economics, 313— 37 on evolutions, 287-8, 317, 323-4, 326-9, 332 on social science, 321-2, 326 on historical and comparative methods, 322-3, 330-1 on 'character', 317-19, 326-32 on Economics Tripos, 334-7, 351-2 Marshall, Mary Paley, 316

Martineau, Harriet, 309 Marx, Karl, 287, 328 Maurer, G. L. von, 199 Maurer, Konradvon, 211, 223, 227 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 232, 251, 266 MaxMiiller, Friedrich, 209, 211, 212, 213, 217, 22on, 221,229 Mayor, J. B., 346 Merriam, Charles E., 371 Method: Comparative, 17, 21, 145, 164, 185, 207-46, 260, 272, 322-5, 330, 342,

354-5,356,358,359,373

Deductive, 7, 80, 87, 100, m - 1 4 , 127, 129, 132, 136-43, 145, 153, 243, 244, 253, 262, 277-307, 311, 313, 319,323, 341, 344, 358, 375 Experimental, 14-15, 33-4, 43, 48-9, 523, 99 and n, 103, 111, 120, 194-5 Historical, 33, 40-1, 60, 145, 147, 150-6, 185-205, 215, 247-75, 295-302, 326n, 330,332-5,341,344,358,375 Inductive, 7, 79, 132, 137-8, 145, 197, 199, 225-6, 227-8, 235-6, 341, 362 Michels, Robert, 234n 'middle rank', 28, 54, 74-5, 84, 98, 100-1, 104, 119-20, 122, 125 Mill, James, 3, 6, 72, 78, 83, 133, 135, 142, 144, 156, 173, 193, 194,253,325 pupil of Stewart, 61, 95-6, 118-19, I2 3~5 mentor to Ricardo, 6j, 87-9, 115-16 opponent of 'Whiggery', 93, 96-9, 105-7, 121-2

science of good government, 99-104, 108-10

and method, 110-15, 117-19 on'middle rank', 122-3 Mill, John Stuart, 3, 8, 9, 12, 21, 66, 68, 71-2, 95-6, 100, 102, 108-10, 113, 117, 123, 126, 163, 173, 180, 185, 186, i87n, 191, 194, 203, 205, 225, 235, 243, 244, 249, 251-4, 262, 292, 297, 311, 313, 314, 322, 346, 358,368,369, 37C 373 and social science, 129-30, 134, 150-3 and France, 131-3, 144, 153 and Utilitarianism, 133-4, 142-3 and political economy, 135-43, 251-3, 318-19,351 and ethology, 135, 137, 138-9, 153, 156— 7 and history, 143-8, 150-6 and jurisprudence, 147-8 and representative government, 148-55, 347,348,358 and diversity, 156-9 and Sidgwick, 156, 280-1, 283, 286-7, 288n, 294, 295, 305-6 Millar, John, 11, 18, 25, 27, 28, 33, 54, 60,

Index 115,122,133,193,195,199,228 Mitford, William, 145, 189 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 11, 13, 16-18, 25, 40, 55, 94-5, 227,229,319,330,346 moral philosophy, 25-6, 32, 44-8, 263, 309, 344, 345n, 346, 368, 376; see also moral sciences moral sciences, 3, 12, 15, 130, 135, 144, 147, 214, 244, 248, 274, 280, 370, 374; see also moral philosophy Moral Sciences Tripos, 266, 296, 345-7, 351-2 Morley, John, 234-5, 282 Miiller, Johannes von, 222-3 Napier, Macvey, 78, <)6y n o Napoleon I, 187 Napoleon III, 153, 222 Oakeshott, Michael, 375n Onan, 12 opinion, 41-3, 66, 106, 109, 150, 170, 1746, 178-80, 227-8 Ostrogorski, Mosei, 234^ 360 Owen, Robert, 70, 76 Paine, Thomas, j6 Paley, William, 21, 71, 344, 346 Palgrave, Sir Francis, i87n Palmerston, Henry Temple, Viscount, 179 parliamentary reform, 56-7, 84, 93, 96-7, 98-102, n o , 119-21, 180, 191-2, 216; see also franchise, the Parsons, Talcott, 320-1, 329 party politics, 30, 59, JJ, 105, 108-9, 2I4> 233, 242, 306-7, 361-2 Pearson, Charles H., 2O4n Pearson, J. B., 351 Peel, Sir Robert, 178, 306 Pericles, 158 Peterloo, j6, 125 philosophy of mind, 26, 32, 48, 53, 57-8, 123; see also associationist psychology Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 336 Pitt, William (the Younger), i72n. 178-9 Plato, 10, 113, 133, 345, 346, 350, 370 Play fair, John, 47 Plutarch, 196, 197 political economy, scope and method, 12, 37-8, 44-5, 49-54, 58, 65-9, 79-80, 85-6, 116-17, 135-43, 247-75, 3 1 1 " 1 2 ' 3 I 4-37>35 I - 2 >376 Pollock, Sir Frederick, 145, 209, 210, 213, 2 *5>359>373 Polybius, 16, 188 Poor Laws, 45, 65, 70, 72, 183 professionalisation, 13, 164-5, 274> 3°9>

383

312, 321, 333-4, 336-7, 343, 374-5 progress, 8, 15-16, 34-5, 39-40, 42, 54-5, 60-1, 111-12, 114-26, 129, 132, 157-8, 167, 174-8, 186, 192-5, 197, 216, 255, 270-1, 331; see also civil society, history of, and historicism Pryme, George, 351 Pufendorf, Samuel, 19, 95 Quarterly Review\ 78-9, 241 andn Quesnay, Francois, 27 Radicalism, Philosophic, 93, 96, 99, n o , 216, 306, 367; see also Benthamism Reid, Thomas, 26, 39, 96 representative government, 148-55, 372; see also democracy Ricardo, David, 21, 61, 120, 125, 140, 145, 215, 251, 252, 253, 262, 281, 313, 325 his disputes with Malthus, 65-6, 68-9, 72-3,78-85 as pupil of James Mill, 87, 100, 105-7, 109,115-17 Richelieu, Armand Duplessis, Cardinal, 195 Ritchie, David George, 291-2 Ritter, Karl, 227, 228, 229, 232 Robertson, William, 25, 26, 33 Rogers, J. E. Thorold, 258, 259 Rome, 115-16, 143, 145, 155, 157, 187-90, 193,194,199,204-5, 2I7> 220-5, 2389,246, 356-7, 360 Romilly, Sir Samuel, 58-9, 95 Roscher, Wilhelm, 268n, 269, 270 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 8, 188, 235, 368 Russia, 155, 230, 245 St Simon, Claude Henri, Comte de, 331 Saturday Review, 171, 215, 229 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 211 Schmoller, Gustav, 270 Seebohm, Frederic, 210, 271 Seeley, Sir John, 4, 10, 185, i87n, 199, 204, 210, 214, 220, 237, 243, 244, 249-50, 251, 261, 266, 267, 269, 280, 352, 354, 358,361,362-3,371^373 and Germany, 131, 227 his positivism, 225—6, 228, 230, 350 and the Comparative Method, 228-9, 347-8 and Sidgwick, 10, 229, 234, 296-7, 300 his taxonomy, 229-30, 232-3, 360 on federalism, 231 his organicism, 231-4 and Historical Tripos, 226, 296, 300, 347-51 self-interest, 30-1, 7on, 82, 100, 103, 109, i n , 112-14, I}°> J42~3» 257> 2^7> 316,

Index

384

self-interest (contd) 318, 3 2 8; see also economic man Senior, Nassau, 58, 68 Seymour, Lord Webb, 48-9, 52 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 346 Sidgwick, Henry, 3, 10-11, 21, 229, 237, 241, 244, 266, 309, 311, 339, 341, 342, 353> 354-5» 356> 36°> 36l> 362-3, 369, 376 and method, 130, 156, 277-307, 339 and Mill, 156, 280-1, 283, 286-7, 2 8 8 n > 294, 295, 305-6 and Moral Sciences Tripos, 266, 296, 345n, 346-7, 351-2 and political economy, 274, 280, 282-6, 318-23,351-2 and sociology, 11, 280, 283, 297-302 and the Comparative Method, 229, 280, 299-302 and Utilitarianism, 281, 289-90, 291, 2

93~5> 346

his Methods of Ethics, 279, 293-5, 299 his Elements of Politics, 277-80, 286-93, 302, 339, 346, 350, 352, 358, 369-70 his Development of European Polity, 229,

295-302,348,350,356 his temperament and style, 279, 298-9,

302-7 andSeeley, 10, 229, 234, 296-7, 300, 347, 354 and Maitland, 300-1 and n, 304 Sieves, Emmanuel Joseph, Abbede, 19, 186 Sismondi, Jean Charles Simonde de, 223 Smith, Adam, 11, 21, 26, 36, 38, 50-4, 60, 65-7, 71, 72-3, 83, 85, 95-6, 123, 133, 137, 140, 198, 249, 251, 253,259,346 on science of the legislator, 12, 25, 29-30, 31-2,37,89 on history of civil society, 18, 27-9, 80-1, 118-19, 124-5 on machinery, 19, 30-1, 42 as 'Sceptical Whig', 39—41, 43 on opinion, 41-2 Smith, Sydney, 25, 47, 54, 57, 88 socialism, 140-1, 213, 215, 228, 244, 246, 271, 283, 287, 3O2n, 313, 328, 362, 373 social science, 10-11, 129, 132, 171, 249-50, 313, 320-2, 326, 344, 361 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 57, 95 sociology, 3, 10, 129, 134, 150, 155, 209, 213, 218, 220, 230 and n, 264, 27m, 274, 280, 283, 295-302, 313, 321, 323, 33O» 37°> 374. Sorley, William Ritchie, 304 Spencer, Herbert, 8, 134, 135, 180, 192, 203, 217, 232n, 234, 290, 297, 299,

332,346,348,355,369 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 183 'stationariness', 157-8, 203-5, 217-18 Stein, Heinrich Friedrich, Baron vom, 227 Stephen, Leslie, 125-6, 145, 149, 253 Stewart, Dugald, 3, 25, 65-7, 71, 77-9, 89, 93-6, 104, 118, 123, 125, 173, 346, 376 lectures on politics, 26-7, 32-8 compared to Hume and Smith, 3 8-44 influence on pupils, 44-61 Stubbs, William, 3, 173, 176, 185, 192, 193, 194, 211, 217, 222, 223, 249, 251, 270-1 on lessons of history, 199-205 Sumner, John Bird, yin Swift, Jonathan, 1,15 Tacitus, 223, 245 Tanner, Joseph Robson, 349 tariff reform, 269, 275, 333, 336-7 1066 and all that, 341 theology, natural, 41-2, 70-1, 81-3 Thirlwall, Connop, 145, 222 Thornely, Thomas, 349n, 353, 357n Thucydides, 13, 185, 196, 222 Timoleon, 101 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 132, 158, 202-4, 222, 239, 241, 264, 269, 319, 330, 347, 368-9 Tonnies, Ferdinand, 2ion Toynbee, Arnold, 257, 258, 260, 270 and n, 354 Trimmer, Mrs Sarah, 309, 320 Trower, Hutches, 105-7 Tucker, Abraham, 70 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 19, 32, 39, 48,53 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 164, 212 universities, 12-13, 2 I 2 ~ I 4> 2^9> 272, 273, 297-8, 304, 339-63, 369, 372-3, 375 Cambridge, 166, 202, 212-13, 22^» 232» 249, 266, 269, 280, 304, 322, 334-6, 339-63, 369-70, 372-3 Oxford, 166, 202, 212-13, 270, 342-3, 344^354,357,359,367-8,369 London, 95, 166, 226, 369 Scottish, 25-6, 32-3, 45-50, 67, 342 Utilitarianism, 21, 61, 87-9, 93-125, 133-4, 142-3, 146, 211, 215, 253, 263, 281, 289-90, 293-5, 3°6> 316-18, 319-21, 344, 346, 350, 367, 370, 376; see also Radicalism, Philosophic Vinogradoff, Paul, 209, 210, 212, 213, 215, 229,324,359 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de, 16

Index Waitz, Georg, 223 Wallas, Graham, 3, 236, 237, 242, 360, 365, 3 6 7"7i> 376 Ward, James, 346, 351 Weber, Max, 10

Westminster Review, 98 Whewell, William, 71, 80, 344, 346 Whig history of England, 157, 186, 205, 224, 233-4, 242, 245-6, 259, 292-3, 328. Whig interpretation of history

385

(Historiographic sense), 4-5, 12 Whigs: 'Country', 75-6, 83, 98, 121, 168, 196 'Philosophic', 25, 49, 54, 93, 96, 99, 176, 306 'Sceptical' or 'Vulgar', 30, 38, 40, 43, yy Wilson, Woodrow, 237 and n, 348, 37m Wordsworth, William, 168 Young, George Malcolm, 171