Henry C. Carey on Law and Civilization (Part 2) April 5, 2015
Posted by Christopher Donohue in 20th-Century-Science Historiography, History of Economic Thought, History of the Human Sciences, Natural Philosophy/Anthropo-cosmology, Philosophy of Law.Tags: Adam Smith, Alexander M. Carr-Saunders, Charles Darwin, David Ricardo, Henry Buckle, Henry C. Carey, James Mill, Robin Fox
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In my previous post on the 19th century political economist Henry C. Carey I underscored some of his methodological suppositions (his Newtonianism, his Baconianism and his dependence upon William Whewell). I made two further points: first, that Carey’s system-building and his emphasis on man and nature being under the rule of law was typically of social theory penned during the nineteenth century. One finds the same flavor of contention in the work of John William Draper and Henry Buckle, where both authors attempted to bring diverse sorts of information ranging from facts concerning the course of civilization to the laws and regularities of human psychology under one kind of generality, where facts and the laws which they illustrated were exemplars of a well-ordered universe. This is more or less the purpose too of later sociological reasoning.
Depending upon the writer involved, this mammoth reductionism and systems-building, with its consequent determinism, was to differing degrees rhetorical, heuristic, deadly serious, and inconsistent. As importantly, these efforts at system-building and reduction often obscures digressions and departures which form intriguing sub-arguments and sub-systems.
The Intellectual Worlds of Henry C. Carey, Part 1: Some Methodological Notes and the Scientific Sources of the American School of Political Economy in the United States November 30, 2014
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of Economic Thought, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Adam Smith, Auguste Comte, Daniel Raymond, David Ricardo, Edward Gibbon, Francis Bacon, Henry Buckle, Henry Carey, John William Draper, Thomas Malthus, William Whewell
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Henry C. Carey (December 15, 1793 – October 13, 1879) was an economist from Philadelphia whose The Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial (1851) has attracted considerable attention for his critique of Ricardian and Malthusian economics. Like Daniel Raymond (1786–1849, who was the first sustained critic of Adam Smith, Thomas R. Malthus and David Ricardo), Carey found in particular Malthus and Ricardo’s laissez-faire outlook and quietism concerning class conflicts, and the unequal distribution of wealth between social classes factually incorrect and morally dubious. Instead, according to Jeffrey P. Sklansky in The Soul’s Economy (2002), Carey contended that “capitalist development naturally leads to class harmony rather than strife and that the free growth of market relations would result in the breakdown of class distinctions altogether, whether between master and slave or between employer and employee…” (80).
Book Club: Renwick on British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots July 2, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Auguste Comte, Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, Chris Renwick, Christopher Husbands, David Ricardo, Emile Durkheim, Francis Galton, Frédéric Le Play, Gregory Radick, Herbert Spencer, John Scott, L. T. Hobhouse, Maggie Studholme, Martin White, Max Weber, Patrick Geddes, Steve Fuller, Talcott Parsons, Victor Branford, Victoria Lady Welby, William Whewell
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This blog has previously spotlighted one of Chris Renwick’s articles, and he has written a couple of guest posts* for us. With those interests declared, I’m happy to say that EWP has received a review copy of his new book, British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past (Macmillan: 2012).
A good way of thinking about this book is in terms of what Chris Donohue has referred to as the “nineteenth-century problem” in intellectual-scientific history. The nineteenth-century problem is partly interpretive, in that it deals with the practical problem of sorting out the undisciplinary tangle of intellectual projects and issues and notions to be found in works of that era.
However, the problem is also historiographical, in that it is a struggle against a tide of scholarship fixated on a few select questions (the reception of natural selection, the intellectual validation of racial hierarchies and imperialism, the ascendancy of liberalism and social reformism, etc…), and a few seemingly key thinkers. The scholarship also tends to divvy up the intellectual history arbitrarily, with historians of political philosophy studying certain thinkers, historians of economic thought others, and historians of science still others, even though a thorough and sensitive reading of texts — not to mention widely accepted historiographical wisdom — would indicate the folly in doing so.
By highlighting important historical relations between the projects of political economy, eugenics-biometrics, botany and zoology, Herbert Spencer’s social philosophy, social reformism and journalism, and the longstanding search for a science of sociology, Renwick’s book makes an important contribution to the interpretive aspect of the nineteenth-century problem. It does, perhaps, get somewhat hung up in the historiographical aspect of the nineteenth-century problem.
Henry Buckle and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations May 30, 2012
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of Economic Thought, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Alexis de Tocqueville, Auguste Comte, David Hume, David Landes, David Ricardo, Edward Gibbon, Ellen Semple, Ellsworth Huntington, Emile Durkheim, Francis Bacon, Henry Buckle, J.S. Mill, James Mill, Justus Liebig, Karl Marx, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Max Weber, Montesquieu, W.E.H. Lecky
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Henry Buckle (24 November 1821 – 29 May 1862), much like the semi-acknowledged French sociologist Alfred Espinas, was among the ‘universal citations’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The economist Alfred Marshall makes great use of him. Much like Ellen Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, Buckle had the unfortunate fate of being labeled a “geographical determinist” by historians of geography, sociology, and anthropology.
Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862)
Ted Porter and Ian Hacking have accused him of “historical determinism.” He was neither. He also tragically died far too early for his ideas to be sufficiently clarified. While Buckle in his History of Civilization in England ascribed great power to climate or “physical causes,” he nonetheless did so only with respect to “savage” or “rude” nations.
While leaving a role for climate in civilized nations, Buckle nonetheless argued that progress was indeed possible in Europe as well as in England due largely to the advancement of scepticism. By ‘scepticism,’ Buckle meant the, “spirit of inquiry, which during the last two centuries, has gradually encroached on every possible subject; has reformed every department of practical and speculative knowledge; has weakened the authority of the privileged classes, and thus placed liberty on a surer foundation….” What Buckle says here is actually quite significant when placed in the context of the history of ideas. Buckle was both last in a long line of those who conjoined civilizational progress with the spread of rationalism and the decline of superstition and barbarism in England, beginning with the philosophy of David Hume and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and also within the rising tide of authorial monuments to the progress of philosophy and manners, as exhibited in the early works of Lucien Levy-Bruhl and W.E.H. Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. (more…)
Richard Ely on Industrial Civilization and Socialism August 22, 2011
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of Economic Thought, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Ferdinand Tönnies, Frederic William Maitland, Georg Simmel, Hannah Arendt, Henri Bergson, Henry Maine, John Locke, Max Weber, Richard Ely, Thomas Malthus
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Almost every economist who wrote from the French Revolution to the interwar period (and perhaps even to today) defined the principles of their economics or political economy along with a narrative of the development of civilization. Richard Ely was no exception.
Richard Theodore Ely (1854–1943)
As with Smith and Malthus, in Ely’s economics the reader is treated to several prolonged discussions of why savages made tools, what herdsmen were really like, and how medieval towns came into being. Not only did economists from Adam Smith forward have to address the increasingly complexities of land, labor, and capital, as well as banking and finance, but also the emergence of a new kind of civilization, industrial civilization. Ricardo and Marx’s discussions of technology and machinery alone argue for their continuing relevance.
Ely’s Elementary Principles of Economics (1915), intended for students, began the discussion of the emergence of industrial civilization with the all-too-familiar conceit, the “hunting and fishing stage.” In this initial stage of development, economic activity is “isolated.” Ely considered the earliest stages to be “independent economy” with little exchange of goods or coordination among individuals. Ely also distinguished between two fundamentally differing views towards the natural world in human beings’ march towards civility, namely, “between uncivilized man, who uses what he finds, and civilized man, who makes what he wants.” (more…)
Schabas on Economics and the Engineering Mentality June 15, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: David Ricardo, John Maynard Keynes, Leon Walras, Margaret Schabas, Max Weber, Milton Friedman, Richard M. Goodwin, William Stanley Jevons
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The central argument of Margaret Schabas’s The Natural Origins of Economics (2005) is that, over the course of the 19th century, economic thought abandoned links to natural science and began to concentrate on the object of “the economy” which was perceived as being purely social in character. In a previous post, I observed that Schabas makes the argument well, but that it remained unclear that nature was ever central to economic thought, and thus it was unclear why a shift away from nature should be a key concern in assembling a history of economics.
I think the best case to be made is that Enlightenment-era political economy attempted to establish explanations for a diverse set of perceived phenomena, which would attribute them to the interplay of basic processes. As Chris’s posts on this blog illustrate so nicely, this project continued through the 19th century in literatures spanning political economy, history, ethnography, and biology. However, the analysis of constrained but precisely defined economic phenomena as products of patterns of human thought and choice branched off from this project in a process playing out from David Ricardo (1772-1823), to the analyses of Léon Walras (1834-1910) and William Stanley Jevons* (1842-1924), to the revolt of the social science of Max Weber and others (1864-1920) against the German “Historical School”. What Schabas calls the “denaturalization of the economic order” is certainly a part of that process, but it is far from its defining characteristic.
Schabas does not go into great depth about her reasons for placing the question of nature at the center of her story, but she does offer some brief hints. (more…)
Margaret Schabas on the Concept of Nature in Economic Thought June 6, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Adam Smith, Carl Linnaeus, Christopher Lawrence, David Hume, David Ricardo, Francois Quesnay, John Stuart Mill, Margaret Schabas, Maurice Dobb, Montesquieu, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Victor Mirabeau
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In my first post on the need for historical studies of the relationship between scientific and economic thought, I was greatly remiss in not discussing a scholar who has done a great deal to develop and organize work in exactly this area: Margaret Schabas of the UBC philosophy department. Thankfully, a quick reference by Tiago Mata over at History of Economics Playground set me aright. For a first pass through the existing literature, I’d like to take a look at her book, The Natural Origins of Economics (2005).
The book is a critical-intellectual history. As an intellectual history, it sticks to an analysis of the published works of (mainly) canonical authors. Where a straight intellectual history might recount the arguments that historical authors explicitly made, critical-intellectual histories draw out continuities and breaks over time in authors’ lines and methods of argumentation. Like many intellectual historians, Schabas is mindful of detailed arguments in the secondary literature, and does a good job of acknowledging, consolidating, communicating, and building on the gains of that literature.
Schabas argues that where 18th-century philosophers of political economy understood their subject to connect deeply to nature and natural philosophy, economics began to explicitly frame itself as a science of peculiarly social phenomena following John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), the rise of the idea of “the economy” as an object of study, and the rise of neoclassical economics in the late-19th century.
Primer: Agriculture, the Royal Institution, and the Spirit of Improvement April 7, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Arthur Young, Count Rumford, David Ricardo, Duke of Bedford, Duke of Bridgewater, Earl of Winchilsea, Humphry Davy, Jan Golinski, John Sinclair, Joseph Banks, Joseph Priestley, Justus Liebig, Mary Morgan, Morris Berman, Thomas Malthus
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Since my interest in agricultural research focuses on the activities of the 20th-century British state, I didn’t really expect to return to Britain’s original Board of Agriculture (1793-1820). But then the head of our Centre here at Imperial, Andy Mendelsohn, showed up in my office a couple of weeks ago with Morris Berman’s Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844 (1978), which he thought might interest me. Not only is there some good agriculture-related material, but it intersects a number of different interests on this blog. The book is actually in itself an interesting case to study from a historiographical point of view, which will be the subject of a separate post.
In his 1803 will, Edward Goat referred to the Royal Institution as the “New Society of Husbandry &c lately established in Albermarle Street”
Berman shows quite nicely that the foundation of the Royal Institution (RI) in 1799 was part and parcel of the late 18th-century enthusiasm for estate improvement and philanthropy. As he argues, “It is not customary to see the RI, the SBCP [Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, est. 1796], and the Board of Agriculture as a triad, but it was the same set of social and economic developments that brought them into being and gave them a similar, if not common agenda; and it was roughly the same group of men who sat on their governing boards” (2).
Ether Wave Propaganda 