Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
Page 102
system of practical rules, “owing to the extent to which the construction
of such a system ought reasonably to be influenced by the particular social
and political conditions of the country and time for which it is framed.”
(PPE )
Given this nearly Hegelian sensitivity to the particulars of historical
community, what could The Elements of Politics possibly have to say that
would count as Benthamite? Indeed, for all Sidgwick’s insistence on the
importance of political economy, his Principles ends up being nearly as
subversively inconclusive as his Methods, given his accounts of the heav-
ily qualified claims for maximizing wealth, the limited role of the art of
political economy in the wider range of politics, and the importance of ad-
vancing culture and other goods that the political economist has very little
understanding of and that are intrinsically resistant to calculation. Once
again, private duty (e.g., charity) has disappeared in a haze of empirical
uncertainty.
P: IJD
cA.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Colors
When Mill had objected to Jevons’s marginalism as yielding only a
false precision, and serving only to render technical and obscure a subject
that needed to be made as accessible as possible for the sake of educating
and pacifying the working class, he had sounded the note of the public
intellectual, of the public educator opposed to obfuscating details. Many
of Sidgwick’s writings, particularly his essays, might be thought to heed
this Millian injunction, and of course his wide-ranging efforts to extend
educational resources – for example, the time he devoted to lecturing at
the Cambridge Working Men’s College in the early sixties, and his aid
to Oscar Browning’s University Day Training College for teachers in the
nineties – also suggest that he was struggling to follow the example of
both Mill and Maurice concerning the pacification of the working class
through education. Somehow, though, Sidgwick’s work, even when most
accessible, betrays a kind of ambivalence and equivocation, not to mention
an unfailing regard for the complexities of the subject, that would seem
capable only of stirring doubt – a doubt that, as he well knew, could cut
many different ways.
Thus, for example, another one of the stronger policy stances issuing
from his art of political economy involved an insistence on the virtues of
“bimetallism” – that is, the use of both silver and gold as monetary stan-
dards. In Sidgwick’s mouth, of course, this could never turn into a polemic
about the economy being crucified on a cross of gold, or the depression
being aggravated by a dogmatic adherence to the gold standard. As ever,
he calls only for a “careful and impartial” forecast of the comparative dis-
advantages of bimetallism versus the alternatives, reaching the guarded
conclusion that
It thus appears that the adoption of a double standard will, up to a certain point,
prevent variations in supply from affecting the relative market-value of the two
metals, as it will tend to produce changes in demand sufficient to absorb their
effect. But variations of a certain magnitude cannot be thus counteracted; on the
contrary, such variations will nullify the formal adoption of a double standard,
and render the currency practically monometallic. (PPE )
Still, the patient reader has carried away arguments against all sides.
Notoriously, Sidgwick found that he had a hard time recommending his
political economy to students or friends. He sent Symonds a copy, for the
record, but also wrote to tell him that he should not even think of reading
it.
P: IJD
cA.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
IV. Principles and Elements
What candidate wanted to tell his voters that he considered them too stupid and
ignorant to know what was best in politics, and that their demands were as absurd
as they were dangerous to the future of the country? What statesman, surrounded
by reporters carrying his words to the remotest corner tavern, would actually say
what he meant? Increasingly politicians were obliged to appeal to a mass electorate:
even to speak directly to the masses or indirectly through the megaphone of the
popular press (including their opponents papers). Bismarck had probably never
addressed other than an elite audience. Gladstone introduced mass electioneering
to Britain (and perhaps to Europe) in the campaign of . No longer would the
expected implications of democracy be discussed, except by political outsiders,
with the frankness and realism of the debates which had surrounded the British
Reform Act of . But as the men who governed wrapped themselves in rhetoric,
the serious discussion of politics retreated to the world of the intellectuals and the educated minority public who read them. The era of democratization was also the
golden age of a new political sociology: of Durkheim and Sorel, Ostrogorski and
the Webbs, Mosca, Pareto, Robert Michels and Max Weber. . . . When the men
who governed really wanted to say what they meant, they had henceforth to do so
in the obscurity of the corridors of power, the clubs, the private social evenings, the shooting parties or country-house weekends where the members of the elite met
each other in a very different atmosphere from that of the gladiatorial comedies
of parliamentary debates or public meetings. The age of democratization thus
turned into the era of public political hypocrisy, or rather duplicity, and hence
also into that of political satire. . . . For what intelligent observor could overlook the yawning gap between public discourse and political reality?
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, –
These days at Whittingehame, with Political Economy, Howarth, and other Tories
were instructive but depressing. Their criticism of the present phase of Radicalism
seems to be unanswerable. Am I then becoming a Tory? Perhaps, but a strange
one.
Sidgwick in January , after meeting with members of Arthur
Balfour’s Manchester Conservative Association (M )
In an important passage in the posthumous Philosophy, Its Scope and
Relations, Sidgwick explained:
The distinction between Ethics or Politics and Philosophy is not so clear: still I
think that some distinction is vaguely made in ordinary thought, and might with
advantage be made somewhat more explict. It is vaguely recognised that it is the
P: IJD
cA.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Colors
business
of Ethics to supply an answer to questions as to details of duty or right conduct – so far as they are questions which it is held legitimate, and not idle,
to ask – but that this is not the business of Moral or Ethical Philosophy, which is primarily concerned with the general principles and methods of moral reasoning,
and only with details of conduct so far as the discussion of them affords instructive examples of general principles and method. It is commonly felt that an attempt to
work out a complete system of duties would inevitably lead us out of Philosophy
into Casuistry: and that whether Casuistry is a good thing or a bad thing, it
certainly is not Philosophy. . . . A similar distinction may, I think, be applied to Politics: – accordingly when I had to select a title for a bulky volume in which I
attempted to treat systematically the chief questions for which the statesman has to
find answers, I called the book ‘Elements of Politics,’ not ‘Political Philosophy’ or
‘Political Science.’ I did not call it Political Philosophy, since it aims at determining the rules for governmental action, and for the construction of governmental organs
with more fulness of detail than it belongs to Philosophy to do: nor, again, did I
call it Political Science, since it is primarily concerned with polity as it ought to be, and not with politics as they are, have been, and – so far as we can foresee –
will be. (PSR –)
This statement does appear to be in harmony with the professed aims
of the Elements, which offers the statesman a more comprehensive form
of practical guidance than the Principles, and a more politically oriented
form of argument than the Methods. He was impressed, he allowed, with
the need for a book “which would expound, within a convenient compass,
and in as systematic a form as the subject-matter might admit, the chief
general considerations that enter into the rational discussion of political
questions in modern states” (EP v).
In fact, Sidgwick moves quickly to establish the difference between pol-
itics and ethics. The very first paragraph of the Elements suggests that the citizens of the modern state, in deciding political questions, will typically
arrive at answers “as the result of conscious reasoning from certain general
principles or assumptions,” whereas on moral questions most are “accus-
tomed from comparatively early years to pronounce confident decisions;
sometimes arrived at intuitively, or at least without conscious processes
of reasoning, sometimes the result of rational processes of more or less
length.” Thus, as in economics, the move from principle to policy, or
from virtue to the common good, has nothing like the immediacy of in-
tuitions of rightness. The fourth book of the Methods finds its natural
continuation here. And like the Methods, the Elements disclaims any great originality – the aim is “not to supply any entirely new method of obtaining
P: IJD
cA.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
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.” (EP )
Sidgwick is also at some pains to distinguish this kind of work, which
“treats of political societies regarded in their political aspect: – i.e. as
under government,” from the larger and to some degree different pre-
occupations of sociology. Here, however, his qualms about sociology are
directed at Mill as well as the familiar targets, and he wants to deny that
he is developing the Millian study of ethology, according to which “Theo-
retical Politics can only be scientifically studied as one part or application
of the Science or Philosophy of History.” In a vital passage, he explains: “I
think that, for the purpose of general political reasoning that has a practical
aim, induction from the political experiences which history records can
only be employed in a secondary way.” “But if this is so,” he continues,
“by what other rational method can we deal with the questions of Practical
Politics?” Thus,
The method commonly adopted in political reasoning that appeals to general
principles is the following: we assume certain general characteristics of social
man – characteristics belonging not to mankind universally, but of civilised man
in the most advanced stage of his development; and we consider what laws and
institutions are likely to conduce most to the welfare of an aggregate of such beings living in social relations. The present work is an attempt to render this method
more systematic and precise: the practical principles defined and applied in it
are accordingly based on certain general assumptions as to human motives and
tendencies, which are derived primarily from the ordinary experience of civilised
life, though they find adequate confirmation in the facts of the current and recent
history of our own and other civilised countries. (EP )
A note to this statement observes that despite Mill’s claims for ethology,
the method he employs in such works as Considerations on Representative
Government was closer to this deductive approach, which is in part the
method inherited from the Benthamites.
Now, this insistence on the primary importance of the analytical or
deductive method inherited from the Benthamites may seem to fly in
the face of all the cautious historicizing tendencies of such works as the
Principles, and to make the problem of “difference” loom very large indeed.
How, for example, could it be reconciled with the frank confession, in
“Bentham and Benthamism,” that Macaulay’s rejoinder to James Mill
P: IJD
cA.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Colors
had been very powerful, and that this “spirited criticism of the deductive
politics of James Mill, though it was treated with contempt by its object,
had a powerful effect on the more impartial and impressible mind of the
younger Mill”? (MEA )
In truth, however, Sidgwick’s methodological struggles in the Elements
were largely continuous with those of the Principles, with only a slight
shifting of emphasis to stress the limitations of the historical method. Al-
though he did admit that the question “how far knowledge of the past
is important for a scientific grasp of the present, is one that will primâ
facie receive a different answer in relation to different inquiries,” he did not seek to drive a historicist wedge between politics and the art of political economy. The essence of the deductive method in economics is
that in
all abstract economic reasoning which aims at quantitative precision, there is
necessarily a hypothetical element; the facts to which the reasonings relate are
not contemplated in their actual complexity, but in an artifically simplified form;
if, there
fore, the reasoning is not accompanied and checked by a careful study of
facts, the required simplification may easily go too far or be inappropriate in kind, so that the hypothetical element of the reasoning is increased to an extent which
prevents the result from having any practical value. (PPE –)
It is just this type of limited priority that the analytical or deductive ap-
proach should have in politics as well.
In other words, Sidgwick’s way of deploying the deductive approach
still has very little in common with the universalistic or ahistoricist
Benthamism that Macaulay had so effectively demolished. His “homo
economicus” and “homo politicus” are the products of the social condi-
tions of modern European civilization, and the political policies appro-
priate to them will be, like the economic policies, carefully tailored to the
specifics of their culture and political system. If anything, Sidgwick’s in-
sistence on the priority of the analytical method reflects his acute sense of
historical change, of just how little of political relevance is to be found in
the study of other times and places. Again, he was happy to admit that the
arch-historicists had demonstrated how different the modern world was
from, say, the medieval one: the lesson then to be learned was how little
guidance moderns could take from the medieval situation.
Thus, the Elements resembles the Principles in taking its point of departure from the effort to assimilate the historicizing tendencies of the
P: IJD
cA.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
nineteenth century. And despite Sidgwick’s gestures toward Bentham, this
very different methodological mentality was quite evident to contempo-
rary reviewers. Although some rehearsed the old charge of Benthamism –
the Edinburgh Review predictably charged him with having “discarded
almost throughout his work the teachings of experience,” founding “his
theory of politics on reasoning which is mainly or purely deductive” –
most found his professions of allegiance to Bentham less than persuasive.