Critics of Capitalism: Victorian Reactions to 'Political Economy' (Cambridge English Prose Texts)

276 Pages·1986·4.9 MB·English

by  Elisabeth Jay (editor)

CAMBRIDGE ENGLISH PROSE TEXTS
Critics of Capitalism
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Critics of Capitalism
Victorian Reactions to 'Political Economy3
edited by
ELISABETH JAY
and
RICHARD JAY
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© Cambridge University Press 1986
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permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1986
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Critics of capitalism.
(Cambridge English prose texts)
Bibliography
1. English prose literature — 19th century. 2. Criticism — Great Britain.
3. Socialism — Great Britain — History — 19th century — Sources.
4. Capitalism — Great Britain — History — 19th century — Sources.
5. Great Britain — Politics and government — 1837—1901.
6. Great Britain — Economic conditions — 19th century.
1. Jay, Elisabeth. 11. Jay, Richard. iii. Series.
pr1304.c75 1986 828'.8o8'o8 86-9604
ISBN 978-0-521-26588-6 Hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-31962-1 Paperback
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Contents
Editorial note page vii
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY i
JOHN FRANCIS BRAY (1809-1897) 27
1 Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy; or the Age of Might and
the Age of Right 30
THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) 52
2 Past and Present 55
FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820-1895) and KARL MARX (1818-1883) 81
3 F. Engels The Condition of England: Review of Past and Present
by Thomas Carlyle' 85
4 K. Marx The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof 96
5 F. Engels 'Karl Marx' 105
JOHN STUART MILL (1806-1873) no
6 Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to
Social Philosophy 114
JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900) 137
7 Ad Valorem, Unto This Last, essay rv 140
MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888) 162
8 'Letter V, Friendship's Garland 165
9 Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism 168
THOMAS HILL GREEN (1836-1882) 178
10 Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract 181
WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896) 195
11 How I Became a Socialist 198
12 Dawn of a New Epoch 202
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950) 218
13 The Transition to Social Democracy5 221
Notes 242
Select booklist 262

Editorial note
Where appropriate, the extracts have been taken from the first edition
of the particular work. Authorial footnotes, where retained, have
been included in the endnotes; editorial footnotes are indicated by
letter, and endnotes by number. In bibliographical references, the
place of publication is London unless otherwise stated. As a matter of
convenience we have used the capitalised phrase Political Economy to
refer to the body of economic ideas which the Victorians themselves
categorised under this label, though it should be borne in mind that,
as the introductory essay points out, it was a label which obscured
many differences among the classical economic writers. We are
grateful to Professor R. D. C. Black for commenting upon an earlier
draft of the introduction, though, of course, the responsibility for any
remaining errors lies with us. Laurence and Wishart Ltd have kindly
granted permission to reproduce material from their Marx cmdEngels
Collected, Works.
Vll

Introductory essay
Confronted with Ruskin's Unto This Last, Shaw's Fabian Essays, or
Morris's socialist lectures, a student of literature in the late twentieth
century is inclined to regard them as aberrant from, or merely
marginal to, their more 'imaginative' writings. A cursory glance at
their contents appears to confirm a topicality long-outdated, and a
subject-matter and terminology now considered to be the province
of specialists. Such volumes are once again relegated to the murkier
recesses of the college library or second-hand bookshop.
It is the intention behind this volume to rehabilitate the literature
of the Victorian debate on Political Economy by suggesting that the
individual works selected here are best seen, not as random or
eccentric pronouncements, but as central to their authors' respective
visions of society. Recognising the extent to which manipulation of
the economy was in fact the source of the power to shape society,
present and future, the critics of Political Economy regarded the
subject as far too important to be abandoned to self-proclaimed
specialists. Indeed, the early economists themselves had invariably
turned to the subject either as part of some more wide-ranging
intellectual inquiry, or as the groundwork for some special study.
Adam Smith (1723-90) was a Professor of Moral Philosophy;
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was an Anglican clergyman,
who initially formulated his theory of overpopulation as a challenge
to the radical-democratic optimism of Rousseau, Condorcet and
Godwin, and went on to hold the first designated chair of Political
Economy; David Ricardo (1772-1823) was a successful stockbroker,
whose bent towards theoretical analysis was stimulated by disputes
over banking policy. A comment made in 1833, that Svhoever will
desire to know hereafter the character of our times, must find it in the
philosophy of the Economists' (Edward Bulwer, England, and the
English, 2 vols., 1833, n, 160), illustrates the fact that, up until the
1870s, Political Economy was not conceived of merely as a technical
mathematical discipline, but as a set of hypotheses and conclusions of
analysis derived from a distinct philosophical, political and social
perspective. Working on this volume in a year which has seen
Introductory essay
heightened public debate upon the meaning and contemporary
relevance of 'Victorian values', and Bishops of the Church of
England seeking to familiarise themselves with 'monetarist' theories
in order to offer a convincing challenge to prevailing political
viewpoints, has suggested that we may be in a peculiarly favourable
position to appreciate the origins of the Victorian debate itself, and
the subsequent polarisation of views which took place.
Those whom the Victorians conceived of as 'the' Political Econo-
mists are today described as members of the 'classical school'. Adam
Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) was the generally acknowledged
masterpiece of the school. Its mode of reasoning and powerful
technical apparatus inspired major intellectual advances during the
early decades of the nineteenth century as writers like Malthus and
Ricardo, together with less original figures such as J. B. Say (1767-
1832), James Mill (1773-1836), Nassau Senior (1773-1836), Robert
Torrens (1780-1864) and J. R. McCulloch (1789-1864), attempted to
develop, correct and update Smith's arguments and conclusions. Like
all burgeoning disciplines, economics in these years revealed a great
diversity of viewpoints. Malthus and Ricardo, for instance, though
friends in constant communication with each other, differed funda-
mentally over key methodological and substantive issues. In 1821,
James Mill instigated the foundation of a Political Economy Club to
propagate the new discipline, but it became within a short space of
time a forum for acrimonious dispute among the leading prac-
titioners. The scope and power of classical economics is displayed by
the fact that Victorian writers like John Bray, J. S. Mill and Karl
Marx, represented in this volume, succeeded in using its basic tenets
to further profoundly different social and political conclusions.
'Political Economy1, however, signified for the Victorian general
reading public something rather different from this evolving intel-
lectual discourse. By the early 1830s the concept had, like 'moneta-
rism' in our own day, become something of a catch-phrase, its
adherents identified in the popular mind as advocates of materialism,
wealth accumulation, free trade and unbridled economic compe-
tition, and as exponents of a 'dismal science', in Carlyle's dismissive
phrase, of determinate iron laws impervious to the intervention of
human agency. In large measure a spurious uniformity was imposed
upon the discipline by social critics who lumped together all those
whose study was the wealth, rather than the moral and spiritual
welfare, of nations, and who erroneously identified economic doc-
trines as the source of the social ills they condemned. Such critics
were aided by the fact that, once the writings of the economists left