by Bart Schultz
lations, but strictly speaking, the principles on which the interference is
based fall outside the competence of the discipline. Indeed, when it comes
to classical political economy, the distinction between giving an account of
how the free market might enhance the production of a nation and assessing
the justice of the resulting distribution of wealth is all-important. Unlike
various French political economists (e.g., Bastiat), the English school has
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never been persuaded that enhancing the production of wealth has much
to do with reward in accordance with desert:
[G]enerally speaking, English political economists, however ‘orthodox,’ have never
thought of denying that the remuneration of workers tends to be very largely
determined by causes independent of their deserts – e.g. by fluctuations in supply
and demand, from the effects of which they are quite unable to protect themselves.
If our economists have opposed – as they doubtless have always opposed – any
suggestion that Government should interfere directly to redress such inequalities
in distribution, their argument has not been that the inequalities were merited;
they have rather urged that any good such interference might do in the way of more
equitable distribution would be more than outweighed by the harm it would do to
production, through impairing the motives to energetic self-help. . . . If, however, we can find a mode of intervention which will reduce inequalities of distribution
without materially diminishing motives to self-help, this kind of intervention
is not, I conceive, essentially opposed to the teaching even of orthodox political
economy – according to the English standard of orthodoxy; for orthodox economy
is quite ready to admit that the poverty and depression of any industrial class is
liable to render its members less productive from want of physical vigour and
restricted industrial opportunities. Now, an important part of the recent, and the
proposed, enlargement of governmental functions, which is vaguely attacked as
socialistic, certainly aims at benefiting the poor in such a way as to make them
more self-helpful instead of less so, and thus seeks to mitigate inequalities in
distribution without giving offence to the orthodox economist. This is the case,
e.g., with the main part of governmental provision for education, and the provision
of instruments of knowledge by libraries etc. for adults. (MEA –)
Furthermore, against the objection that such public goods can be sup-
plied only by taxation, and that it is immoral to tax one class for the benefit
of another, Sidgwick replies that if the thing in question serves the good
of the community as a whole, it is right to tax the community as a whole.
Beyond that, he is keenly aware of the logic of public goods, of cases where
the market will necessarily fail to provide the good in question because
of such problems as nonexclusion. Thus, he describes the case where “a
particular employment of labour or capital may be most useful to the
community, and yet the conditions of its employment may be such that
the labourer or capitalist cannot remunerate himself in the ordinary way,
by free exchange of his commodity, because he cannot appropriate his
beneficial results sufficiently to sell them profitably” (MEA ). Here he
gives the stock example of the lighthouse, whose beacon will shine even
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for shipowners who do not help pay for it. Moreover, he appreciates the
problem of collective action generally:
Take, for instance, the case of certain fisheries, where it is clearly for the general interest that the fish should not be caught at certain times, or in certain places, or with certain instruments; because the increase of actual supply obtained by such
captures is much overbalanced by the detriment it causes to prospective supply.
We may fairly assume that the great majority of possible fishermen would enter
into a voluntary agreement to observe the required rules of abstinence; but it
is obvious that the larger the number that thus voluntarily abstain, the stronger
inducement is offered to the remaining few to pursue their fishing in the objection-
able times, places, and ways, so long as they are under no legal coercion to abstain.
(MEA )
And of course, Sidgwick also lists the familiar examples of market fail-
ure due to monopoly – noting that the advance of civilization seems to
favor combination as much as competition – and what are nowadays re-
ferred to as “negative externalities,” such as pollution, destroying valuable
resources such as rare plants and animals, and so on.
Now, the combined effect of all these counterexamples to the logic of
the market was undoubtedly to dampen the fervor of those dogmatically
attached to the doctrine of laissez-faire. Sidgwick admits that he has not
shown that in all such cases government interference would be best, since it
may be, in any given case, impossible to effect a correction in a worthwhile
fashion. But what he has done, of course, is to show how much rides on
empirical evidence that could go one way or another. His only real concern
about socialism is the quite modern one that it might, barring a change in
human motivation, mean splendidly equal destitution.
Naturally, as a “mere empirical utilitarian,” Sidgwick has very little
patience for doctrines of “natural rights,” in this department as in others.
Any such creed leads to impossible muddles, or to very different conclu-
sions from those suggested by the more doctrinaire advocates. As he shows
at length in the case of Spencer:
For what, according to Mr. Spencer, is the foundation of the right of property?
It rests on the natural right of a man to the free exercise of his faculties, and
therefore to the results of his labour; but this can clearly give no right to exclude others from the use of the bounties of Nature: hence the obvious inference is
that the price which – as Ricardo and his disciples teach – is increasingly paid,
as society progresses, for the use of the ‘natural and original powers of the soil,’
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must belong, by natural right, to the human community as a whole; it can only
be through usurpation that it has fallen into the hands of private individuals.
Mr. Spencer himself . . . has drawn this conclusion in the most emphatic terms.
That ‘equity does not admit property in land’; that ‘the right of mankind at large
to the earth’
s surface is still valid, all deeds, customs, and laws notwithstanding’; that ‘the right of private possession of the soil is no right at all’; that ‘no amount of labour bestowed by an individual upon a part of the earth’s surface can nullify the
title of society to that part’; that, finally, ‘to deprive others of their rights to the use of the earth is a crime inferior only in wickedness to the crime of taking away their lives or personal liberties’; – these conclusions are enforced by Mr. Spencer with
an emphasis that makes Mr. Henry George appear a plagiarist. (MEA –)
But what is more, such conclusions cannot be contained to the case of
land. Clearly, “the original and indefeasible right of all men to the free
exercise of their faculties on their material environment must – if valid
at all – extend to the whole of the environment; property in raw material
of movables must be as much a usurpation as property in land.” By such
arguments, Sidgwick drives the principles of the great social Darwinian
defender of individualism ever further away from the notion of a market
society:
The only way that is left of reconciling the Spencerian doctrine of natural right
with the teachings of orthodox political economy, seems to be just that ‘doctrine
of ransom’ which the semi-socialists have more or less explicitly put forward. Let
the rich, landowners and capitalists alike, keep their property, but let them ransom
the flaw in their titles by compensating the other human beings residing in their
country for that free use of their material environment which has been withdrawn
from them; only let this compensation be given in such a way as not to impair the
mainsprings of energetic and self-helpful industry. We cannot restore to the poor
their original share in the spontaneous bounties of Nature; but we can give them
instead a fuller share than they could acquire unaided of the more communicable
advantages of social progress, and a fairer start in the inevitable race for the less communicable advantages; and ‘reparative justice’ demands that we should give
them this much. (MEA )
Sidgwick is of course aware that the apostle of social Darwinism would
hardly go all the way with this generous reconstruction, even though his
remarks really were departing from Spencer’s views on land, and he also
admits that the semisocialist argument needs a good deal of working out
in legislative details and has often incurred just criticism. In fact, this
line of argument, which Sidgwick repeated in a number of places, drew
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an irate response from Spencer himself, whose (limited) correspondence
with Sidgwick is largely concerned with asking him to alter such mis-
representations in future editions (something Sidgwick apparently chose
not to do). Interestingly, however, Sidgwick also makes it plain enough
that his version of mere empirical utilitarianism has a good deal of sympa-
thy for such semisocialism, and that his chief objections to governmental
interference are not objections to socialism per se.
Thus, it is the remarkable, careful accumulation of the arguments com-
promising or rendering indeterminate the case for the market that makes
Sidgwick appear as much on the side of the socialists as on that of ortho-
dox political economy. What is so often missing in his critical remarks on
ideal socialism or utopianism is this keenly balanced account of the fail-
ings on the other side, the impossibility of believing anything like the old
Benthamite case for laissez-faire. To appreciate his considered opinions,
it is essential to grasp just what he thought of gradual change in a socialist
direction. To be sure, the socialism with which he was most in accord,
owing so much to Mill and Maurice, was in many respects a conservative,
counterrevolutionary alternative. But with the retrospect afforded by the
history of socialism in the twentieth century, his views on the matter often
seem singularly sane.
Much the same line of argument is advanced in one of Sidgwick’s best-
known essays, “The Scope and Method of Economic Science,” which
was his presidential address to the economic and statistics section of the
British Association in . There, too, he makes it quite clear that “the
absolute right of the individual to unlimited industrial freedom is now
only maintained by a scanty and dwindling handful of doctrinaires, whom
the progress of economic science has left stranded on the crude general-
isations of an earlier period.” Under the “more philosophic guidance of
J. S. Mill, English political economy shook off all connection with these
antiquated metaphysics, and during the last generation has been generally
united with a view of political principles more balanced, qualified, and
empirical, and therefore more in harmony with the general tendencies of
modern scientific thought.” (MEA , ) Indeed, Sidgwick is rarely
more emphatic than in his disparagement of that “kind of political econ-
omy which flourishes in proud independence of facts; and undertakes to
settle all practical problems of Governmental interference or private phi-
lanthropy by simple deduction from one or two general assumptions –
of which the chief is the assumption of the universally beneficent and
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harmonious operation of self-interest well let alone.” The “more com-
pletely this survival of the a priori politics of the eighteenth century can be banished to the remotest available planet, the better it will be . . . for the progress of economic science.” (MEA )
Moreover, the “assumption that egoism ought to be universal – that the
prevalence of self-interest leads necessarily to the best possible economic
order – has never been made by leading English writers,” their only con-
cern being “the actual prevalence of self-interest in ordinary exchanges of
products and services.” However, he admits that the political economists
ought to adopt a different tone in their work, one less blandly accepting of
the role of self-interest, and that they ought to stress more clearly the ways
in which their account of self-interested action is circumscribed. Thus,
it should be noted that the ordinary economic man is always understood to be
busily providing for a wife and children; so that his dominant motive to industry
is rather domestic interest than self-interest, strictly so-called. And it has never
been supposed that outside his private business – or even in connection with it if
occasion arises – a man will not spend labour and money for public objects, and
give freely gratuitous services to friends, benefactors, and persons in special need
or distress. (MEA )
These considerations certainly point up, once again, the need for sup-
plementing economic analysis with historical and sociological study. The
problem, for Sidgwick, is that the other forms of knowledge needed to
supplement political economy are in a far more rudimentary state, and
the claims of many of the great founding figures of disciplines such as
sociology border on the ridiculous. Thus, with reference to an issue as
dear to him as any:
Take, for example, the question of the future of religion. No thoughtful person
can overlook the importance of religion as an element of man’s social existence;
nor do the sociologists to whom I have referred fail to recognise it. But if we
inquire after the characteristics of the religion of which their science leads them
to foresee the coming prevalence, they give with nearly equal confidence answers
as divergent as can be conceived. Schäffle cannot comprehend that the place
of the great Christian Churches can be taken by anything but a purified form
of Christianity; Spencer contemplates complacently the reduction of religious
thought and sentiment to a perfectly indefinite consciousness of an Unknowable
and the emotion that accompanies this peculiar intellectual exercise; while Comte
has no doubt that the whole history of religion – which, as he says, ‘should
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resume the entire history of human development’ – has been leading up to the
worship of the Great Being, Humanity, personified domestically for each normal
male individual by his nearest female relatives. It would certainly seem that the
science which allows these discrepancies in its chief expositors must be still in its infancy. . . . when we look closely into their work it becomes only too evident that each philosopher has constructed on the basis of personal feeling and experience
his ideal future in which our present social deficiencies are to be remedied; and
that the process by which history is arranged in steps pointing towards his Utopia
bears not the faintest resemblance to a scientific demonstration. (MEA –)
Thus, when the “statesman” turns to Sidgwick for guidance, he would