by Bart Schultz
even beyond the dreams of “the most sanguine socialist.” His point is
simply to suggest how government might take steps toward the socialist
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aim, and to insist that “it is only such mild and gentle steps towards the
realisation of the socialistic ideal that I can regard as at all acceptable, in
the present condition of our knowledge of man and society.” This is his
updating of the Millian call for more socialistic experimentation, albeit
in a very carefully phrased way, so that improving distribution is typi-
cally tied to means that will also improve production. And, cautious as
his statement may be, he makes it absolutely clear that he can “see no
reason to regard unqualified laisser faire as tending to realise the most
economical production any more than the best possible distribution of
wealth: and it seems . . . quite possible that a considerable extension of
the industrial functions of government might be on the whole advanta-
geous, without any Utopian degree of moral or political improvement in
human society.” Such improvements must be gradual, should begin in
the areas where the market conspicuously fails (as in monopoly condi-
tions), and should strive “to maintain as far as possible in the govern-
mental organisation of industry an effective stimulus to individual ex-
ertion, and to allow scope for invention and improvement of methods.”
(PPE )
He also suggests that “if we condemn ‘sweaters,’ slop-shop dealers,
and other small traders who ‘grind the faces’ of the poor by taking full
advantage of competition, it should be rather for want of benevolence
than for want of justice; and the condemnation should be extended to
other persons of wealth and leisure who are aware of this disease of the
social organism and are making no efforts to remove it.” He admits that
such efforts do need to be made, though “the exact form that they will
take if most wisely directed must depend upon the particular conditions
of the labourers in question.” (PPE )
Having said this, Sidgwick is nonetheless about as close as he would
ever come to proposing a substantive theory of distributive justice, as op-
posed to his usual puzzling over the indeterminacy involved in notions
of impartiality, the impossibility of giving each person his or her due,
and so forth. On his view, the “only hope” of effecting anything resem-
bling a distribution according to desert would involve “getting rid of all
removable differences in remuneration that are due to causes other than
the voluntary exertions of the labourers.” And this his scheme might
do to a considerable extent, as long as “the means of training for the
higher kinds of work were effectually brought within the reach of all
classes, by a well organised system of free education, liberally supported by
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exhibitions for the children of the poor.” After all, the inequalities resulting
from
the payment of interest to private capitalists as such, or of profit to employing
capitalists, would, speaking broadly, have ceased to exist; and though it would
be impossible, without intolerable constraint on the freedom of action of indi-
viduals, to prevent the children of persons earning larger incomes or owning
accumulated wealth from having a somewhat better start in life than the rest, still
this advantage might be reduced to a minimum by such an educational system.
(PPE )
And Sidgwick even thinks that his creeping socialistic civilization will
help with population growth and with such matters as sloth and fraud in
public assistance:
If we suppose a community in which the aggregate remuneration of labour is
increased by most of the share that now forms interest on individuals’ capital,
while the emoluments and dignities attached to the higher kinds of labour are
brought within the hopes of all classes by a system of education which at the
same time makes general such a degree of foresight and intelligence as is now
possessed by the higher grade of artisans, – it seems quite possible that in such
a community a minimum of wages might be guaranteed to all who were unable
to find employment for themselves, without drawing an ever increasing crowd of
applicants to claim the guaranteed minimum, and without a serious deficit arising
from the inefficient work of such as did apply. (PPE )
This was a subject very dear to Sidgwick’s heart, of course, and it
is interesting not only that he found the question of population (and
relatedly, sexuality) to be so closely allied to the problems of poor relief,
but also that he had such faith in the possibilities of education for fostering
intelligence and foresight throughout the population. These issues were
also bound up with that of colonization, which provided another possible
form of “poor relief,” though one also requiring considerable educational
development.
Evidently, then, and as unlikely as it may seem, Sidgwick’s Principles
ends up admittedly straining the bounds of political economy in its ef-
fort to come to terms with culture and education, the sources of gradual
semisocialism. Here was a vision of the educating society, one involving
concrete suggestions for both educational institutions narrowly conceived
and the broader advance of culture. As in the Methods, Sidgwick had buried
a subversive account of moral (or social) development within an extensive
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and seemingly respectful treatment of the received wisdom that had no
utopian intentions.
Ironically, it may well be that these more lyrical moments in Sidgwick’s
work were composed in Rome, during the Italian tour when he was busily
studying art with the help of Symonds’s Renaissance volume on the sub-
ject. He had meant to finish the work before departing England, but, as
he wrote to Symonds, “fate ordained” that he would have to continue
working on it while visiting the Eternal City and its monuments (CWC).
However, the Eternal City also made him quite ill, and his digestive disor-
ders made it impossible for him to continue on to Greece as he had hoped
to do.
To be sure, Sidgwick’s claims reflect the socialist legacy of Mill and
Maurice rather than of Marx and Morris, and they do not even approx-
imate the “ideal” utilitarian society sometimes invoked
in the Methods.
Experimental and gradualist, anti- and perhaps even counterrevolution-
ary, and ever celebratory of individual and elite efforts at high-minded
social improving, this was the type of movement that Marx himself had
attacked as hopelessly bourgeois. Indeed, on this score, Marx had fa-
mously attacked not only Mill but also Mill’s chief Cambridge disciple,
Henry Fawcett, the blind political economist who had done much to tutor
Sidgwick in Mill, but who had had the temerity to criticize the principles
of the First International. In this respect, Sidgwick remained altogether
Millian.
Indeed, as Sidgwick heads toward the conclusion of his volume, he re-
turns again to the question of the relation of economics to morality, posing
the question of whether “the whole individualistic organisation of indus-
try, whatever its material advantages may be, is not open to condemnation
as radically demoralising.” Although there is nothing in Sidgwick’s writ-
ings that quite reaches the lyricism of Mill’s laments about the possible
stagnation and loss of solitude in the future, he is nonetheless also keenly
sensitive to the attractions of an alternative ethos, one in which life in
society promises fellowship. He recognizes that the divergences between
private and common interest, and the antisocial temper of individualism,
have led many “thoughtful persons” to sympathize with socialism, and
that even many who are not socialists “yet feel the moral need of some
means of developing in the members of a modern industrial community
a fuller consciousness of their industrial work as a social function, only
rightly performed when done with a cordial regard to the welfare of the
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whole society, – or at least of that part of it to which the work is immediately
useful.” It is of course from this point of view that so much importance
attaches to attempts at increasing the role of cooperatives in economic
activity. But what is more, since “it is always open to any individual who
dislikes the selfish habits of feeling and action naturally engendered by the
individualistic organisation of society, to counteract them in his private
sphere by practising and commending a voluntary redistribution of wealth
for the benefit of others,” the subject of poor relief again comes to the fore.
(PPE –)
Now, it is important not to overestimate the subversiveness of
Sidgwick’s gradualist arguments, particularly on matters such as imme-
diate aid to the poor. Again, the subject of poor relief was a particularly
fraught one for him, given how much time and energy he had invested in it,
and how it was bound up with the other matters of justice and the potential
for socialism. Despite his keen awareness of the long Christian tradition
of almsgiving, Sidgwick finds it impossible to think well of it when the
activity proceeds in ignorance of political economy, and he often expresses
his disgust with “sentimental” politics. Political economy has, on the one
side, tended “to impress powerfully on the mind the great waste of the
material means of happiness that is involved in the customary expendi-
ture even of the most respectable rich persons.” But it has also, on the
other,
tended to make the common view of these dangers [of almsgiving] more clear,
definite, and systematic. It has impressed forcibly on instructed minds the gen-
eral rule that if a man’s wants are supplied by gift when he might have sup-
plied them himself by harder work and greater thrift, his motives to industry
and thrift tend to be so far diminished; and not only his motives, but the mo-
tives of all persons in like circumstances who are thereby led to expect like gifts
themselves.
In sum, “there is reason to hope that, in minds of nobler stamp, the
full perception of the difficulties and risks attending the voluntary re-
distribution of wealth will only act as a spur to the sustained intellec-
tual activity required for the successful accomplishment of this duty.”
(PPE )
The point is that private almsgiving was often seen as a necessary supple-
ment to the work of the English Poor Law – with its infamous workhouses –
but it was “largely impulsive, unenlightened, and unorganised,” so that
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it gave serious encouragement to “unthrift, and even to imposture.”
Conceivably then, the “government might with advantage undertake the
organisation of eleemosynary relief, in order to make its distribution as
economical, effective, and judicious as possible,” although the provision
of the funds for such relief “might be left mainly to voluntary gifts
and bequests, with a certain amount of assistance from government, if
experience shews it to be necessary, but without any legal right to re-
lief.” (PPE ) This would be the model of the French system, which
Sidgwick thinks does work in certain respects, though on the whole he
actually favors the English system, the very object of so much Dickensian
satire.
Thus, like Mill, Sidgwick took a fairly sour view of what the exist-
ing poorer members of society were capable of, by way of advancing the
semisocialistic future. Still, again like Mill, that future also held out the
possibility of a general improvement in education and culture that would
pervade all levels of society – indeed, would help to reduce if not eliminate
the gap between the better-off and the worse-off. And this was, as Maurice
had also urged, quite possibly essential to social harmony.
Fuller discussion of this sensitive topic – on which many would say
Sidgwick sounds more like Mr. Gradgrind than Whitman – must await
the treatment of his magnum opus in politics (which subject, it should
be plain, was constantly on his mind as he was working through his more
purely economic views). But before proceeding to that, it should perhaps
be underscored yet again just how different Sidgwick’s political economy
was from that of the orthodox Benthamites or even the Millians. For
Sidgwick strikes at the very heart of economic analysis. He does not merely
invoke the familiar forms of irrationality due to custom and habit. Rather,
he wonders about the condition even of “a community where the members
generally were as enlightened and alert in the pursuit of their interests as
we can ever expect human beings to become,” in which it still might be
the case that “the defects of private enterprise” needed to be overcome by
“the action of the community in its collective capacity” (PPE ). In a
more abstract consideration of the conditions under which “even where
we do not regard the intervention of government as at present desirable,
we may yet look forward to it, and perhaps prepare the way for it,” he
finds it possible to doubt that social progress “is carrying us towards a
condition in which the assumption, that the consumer is a better judge
than government of the commodities that he requires and of the source
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from which they may be best obtained, will be sufficiently true for all
practical purposes.” Indeed,
[I]n some important respects the tendencies of social development seem to be
rather in an opposite direction. As the appliances of life become more elaborate and
complicated through the progress of invention, it is only according to the general
law of division of labour to suppose that an average man’s ability to judge of the
adaptation of means to ends, even as regards the satisfaction of his everyday needs,
is likely to become continually less. No doubt an ideally intelligent person would
under these circumstances be always duly aware of his own ignorance, and would
take the advice of experts. But it seems not unlikely that the need of such advice,
and the difficulty of finding the right advisers, may increase more markedly than
the average consciousness of such need and difficulty, at any rate where the benefits to be obtained or the evils to be warded off are somewhat remote and uncertain;
especially when we consider that the self-interest of producers will in many cases
lead them to offer commodities that seem rather than are useful, if the difference between seeming and reality is likely to escape notice. (PPE –)
Skepticism about these fundamental comforts of orthodox political
economy would seem, potentially, to throw a rather heavy burden of re-
sponsibility on the “expert” or enlightened guidance that Sidgwick looks
to as the way out, though he admits that how “far government can usefully
attempt to remedy these shortcomings of self-help is a question that does
not admit of a confident general answer.” The “nature and extent of such
collective action” as would correct for such failings is hard to capture in any