Enhancing this definition into a process, Bentham presents pleasure and pain as governing forces of human activity, their properties as gauges of and guides to individual, social and collective decisions: the extent, intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, proximity or remoteness, fecundity (the probability of causing the same sensation) and purity (the probability of causing the opposite sensation) of pleasure and pain can be quantified to form qualitative opinions or strategies. Bentham applied his “hedonic calculus” to war, ranking it low on the utility scale as a “mischief” highest on the pain scale, impending “indiscriminately over the whole number of members in the community.”9 While, in countering prevailing notions of natural laws of nations that all must invariably obey, Bentham the legalist coined the term “international law”to convey utility-based consensus, Bentham the economist did not apply his calculus directly to peace. By doing so, distinctive definitional and analytical potentials emerge: in a general sense, peace and peacemaking are always useful because they maximize pleasure and minimize pain; in particular cases, they can always be comparatively evaluated by properties of pain and pleasure to develop optimal, conditional peace plans and learn from their implementations.
Smith’s laissez-faire and Bentham’s utilitarian perspectives on the economics of peace were expanded as well as refined by Bentham’s close companion James Mill (1773–1836) and other members of the “classical school” of British economics, classical insofar as capitalists are concerned. Mill also condemned war for its disastrous economic consequences, and mercantilist imperialism for being an aggressive economic system infused with militarism, arguing for its replacement by mutually beneficial free trade among independent international partners. Only defensive armed forces would then be needed and would in time become unnecessary. Even in economically motivated wars, nations expend wealth accumulations and productive capabilities (capital), decreasing their post-conflict economic capacities; perpetual industrial peace could, in theory and contrast, indefinitely increase nations’ economic capacities. For Mill, capital’s utility thus lies in providing for (a) productive conditions of prosperity in which peace is most likely, and (b) contingencies that may threaten existing peaces within or between nations. The idea that, through free trade and the utility of capital, enrichment without conflict is possible was more fully explored by Mill’s friend, David Ricardo (1772–1823). His innovative analyses of the value of labor led him to the notion that economic competition can diffuse or act as a substitute for war and support peace by a conscious consumerism. Taking others’ needs, resources and means into consideration along with their own, individuals like nations can use “comparative advantages” to produce and trade goods that are in demand:
Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labor to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, by regarding ingenuity, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labor most effectively and most economically. . . by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world.10
Competitiveness, then, need not mean the militaristic mercantilist ability to monopolize or take away, but the pacific capitalistic ability to meet needs and keep customers.
The leading liberal of the times, John Stuart Mill (James’ son, 1806– 73), argued further that free trade and unrestrained economic development can end war and guarantee world peace by the individual liberties and private property they presuppose:
Before, the patriot, unless sufficiently advanced in culture to feel the world his country, wished all countries weak, poor, and ill-governed, but his own: he now sees in their wealth and progress a direct source of wealth and progress to his own country. It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it. And it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race.11
Hence, interdependencies created by specialization lead to reciprocal relationships in diversified, integrated economies, local or global, which act as guarantees of peace. The Mills’ and Ricardo’s unabashed optimism regarding capitalist economics of industrial peace stands in stark contrast to the pessimism of Thomas Malthus (1766–1833). He held that scarcity of resources and national territorial limits combined with unchecked population growth lead to civil and international wars, which by eliminating large numbers of people prevent further ones, but only temporarily. Only when population levels are optimized on an ongoing basis, according to Malthus, will intra- and international peace be assured. The idea that peace could be a result of widespread death or other undue hardships was denounced in a statement by statesman Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) regarding the principle of peace at any price. “That doctrine,” he proclaimed in an 1844 speech, “has done more mischief than any I can well recall. . . It has occasioned more wars than any of the most ruthless conquerors. It has disturbed and nearly destroyed that political equilibrium so necessary to the liberties and the welfare of the world.”12
By the mid nineteenth century, free trade liberalism had become a mainstream in British policy and a defining characteristic of the Pax Britannica, heralded by the Frenchman Michel Chevalier as a practical model applicable worldwide. Still other approaches to improving peace prospects through economics were put forth in France and Germany during the same period. In working out the laws of supply and demand, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) proposed that the science of economics can aid in establishing and maintaining the material conditions of peace. Economists can in this way take up the roles of peacemakers by raising public awareness of, giving shape to, negotiating and implementing such material conditions within and between nations or empires. A science of peace, as a sub-field of economics, could for example aid in exposing the wastefulness of war and provide arguments for eliminating military expenditures, which would decrease the likelihood of invasions by the formation of alliances impossible at current levels of militarism. Say also identified economic war tactics such as sanctions, trade restrictions, embargos, boycotts, as alternatives to armed forces, but renounced them as self-defeating measures: in diversified and integrated economies based on free trade, disrupting chains of supply and demand affects the economically derived peace of all market participants negatively. What Say suggested, arguably for the first time, is that quantifying the conditions, causes and attributes of peace and its absence not only makes peace measureable, but in so facilitating evaluations and continual improvements of policies and their implementations, makes peacemakers into scientists in that they can draw upon the process of trial and error through experimentation.
Along these scientific peacemaking lines, progressive in the dual sense of a necessary series of steps and ongoing betterment, the leading member of the historical school of economics in Germany, Gustav von Schmoller (1838–1917), contended that:
The progress of the nineteenth century beyond the mercantilist policy of the eighteenth depends – keeping to this thought of a succession of ever larger social communities – on the creation of leagues of states, on alliances in the matter of customs and trade, on the moral and legal community of all civilized states, such as modern international law is more and more bringing into existence by means of a network of international treaties. . . The struggle of social bodies with one another, which is at times military, at other times merely economic, has a tendency, with the progress of civilization, to assume a higher character and to abandon its coarsest and most brutal weapons. The instinct becomes stronger of a certain solidarit
y of interests, of a beneficent interaction, of an exchange of goods from which both rivals gain.13
Frédéric Bastiat also argued that competition and conscious consumerism are conducive to peace in Economic Harmonies (1863): “Superficial minds accused Competition of introducing antagonism among men. This is true and inevitable as long as one considers them only as producers; but if one takes the consumption point of view, then Competition itself will bring together individuals, families, classes, nations and races, united by universal brotherhood relations.”14 In his Peace and Freedom, or the Republican Budget of a year later, he proposed an immediate and complete disarmament of France to place the country on a sound economic and political footing which other countries could look to for inspiration. Free trade, for Bastiat, is in everyone’s best interests, especially the working classes whom war affects most, because it ensures peace better than political solution can. Léon Walras, in Peace Through Social Justice and Free Trade (1907), combined Say’s, von Schmoller’s and Bastiat’s views, proposing that economists act as advisors to government, giving politicians “the means to establish absolute free trade and, by this very fact, to ensure universal peace.”15 In the same spirit, Passy predicted that “One day, all barriers will fall; one day the human race, continually united by ceaseless transactions, will constitute a single workshop, a single market, a single family.”16 However, by this time, mercantilism was on the rise again, and a new set of economic principles with old roots was being proposed to make and maintain peace.
Who Owns Peace? Socialist Perspectives
The myriad of movements and plethora of prescriptions that fall under the umbrella term “socialism” share certain characteristics, but each has a distinct perspective on peace. Whereas capitalists from Smith to Say tended to sanctify private property and competition as the optimal peace paradigm, socialists tended to consecrate collective ownership and cooperation as the only conditions in which peace is possible. Ever-enlarging rifts between capitalists and socialists thus had, from the start, as much to do with what peace is as how to achieve it. In hindsight, cenobite monastic practices show strong affinities with socialist ideals, a difference being that the former were based on religious and the latter on economic principles. Further distinctions must be made between agrarian and industrial, and revolutionary and gradualist, positions on socialist peace, which came in either non-violent or violent persuasions.
A forerunner of non-violent, industrial gradualist approaches is that of Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Having experienced firsthand the destruction caused and hope inspired by the American and French Revolutions, he proposed societies be peacefully reorganized on empirical principles by studying the past to inform the present and shape the future. As the “philosophy of the [eighteenth] century was revolutionary; that of the nineteenth century must be organizational,” he argued, geared towards establishing cooperative, productive and stable social orders that secure social peace through individual wellbeing.17 He argued further that “governments will no longer command men” in war if leaders are scientists and industrialists whose functions are “limited to ensuring that useful work is not hindered,” united with working classes by a materialist morality that would gradually become a New Christianity, the title of his last, unfinished book.18 Saint-Simon’s principles and methods developed a cult-like postmortem following. Though none of his plans were immediately implemented, his student Auguste Comte started the “positivist” science of “sociology,” terms he coined, likewise aimed at non-violent, peace-oriented transformations of societies by acting on empirical knowledge. Unlike Saint-Simon and Comte, François Babeuf (1760–97) was a revolutionary agrarian who condoned violence. Executed for founding a secret society called the Conspiracy of Equals, he sought to broaden the French Revolution to include overthrowing economic as well as political systems and institutions so land, wealth and votes alike are equally distributed, the sole way he believed social peace could be sustained. Justifying short-term uses of violence as vehicles of long-term peace prospects became hallmarks of later revolutionary socialists, who taking into consideration the rise of industrialism focused more on the division of labor and ownership of means of production than land and distribution.
Similarly “utopian” schemes, as Karl Marx would later try to discredit them, were put forth by Richard Owen in England, Charles Fourier in France, and their American followers. Owen (1771–1858), a saddler’s son, began working in Manchester’s booming textile industry at the age of ten, by twenty-five was a manufacturer, and by thirty had purchased mills with other investors in Scotland. There, he spearheaded cooperative organizations by reinvesting portions of profits in improving the working conditions, housing, schools, sanitation and non-profit stores for his employees, increasing industrial productivity and peace. His maverick model instigated the social reforms passed by the British Parliament as the Factory Acts (1802–91). At around the same time, German immigrants to the US State of Indiana were running an agrarian collectivist community called Harmony, in which all property was held and all work done in common. They agreed to sell the property to Owen in 1825 to finance other such enterprises. Although New Harmony was under his direction for only three years, the first free kindergarten, free school for boys and girls, and free library in the US were established. Returning to England in 1829, Owen at first sought to combine the growing trade union and cooperative movements, but the unions’ increasingly militant stance was at odds with his lifelong commitment to non-violent change, and he soon broke with them. As working class violence reached epidemic proportions throughout Europe, he spent his remaining years popularizing the idea that as social conditions are formative of individual characters, cooperatives can form peaceful individuals and so peaceful societies.
Like Owen, his contemporary Fourier (1772–1837) belonged to what was now called the bourgeoisie, merchant and entrepreneurial classes between aristocrats and laborers. His proposal for a cooperative community championed channeling people’s interests and passions rather than restricting them, as he condemned the day’s socio-economic systems for doing. Instead, he designed what he ironically named “phalanxes” after Ancient Greek army units: self-sufficient agrarian and manufacturing villages in which work is allotted based on individuals’ inclination and all members live communally. Although unimplemented in his life, Fourier’s followers established phalanxes across the US. The best-known is Brook Farm, Massachusetts, founded as an experimental joint-stock farm by Unitarians in 1841 and converted into a phalanx three years later, visitors of which included Ralph Waldo Emerson. The key similarity between Owen’s and Fourier’s propositions is that the immediate changes they considered necessary to end class struggles were revolutionary in their means and ends, but not in any violent sense; the key difference is that, for Owens, the peace-oriented change he proposed took place within the existing industrial socio-economic system and for Fourier from without it.
Gradualist, in opposition to revolutionary socialists, advocated change through reforms of existing socio-economic systems and their supporting political infrastructures rather than outright rejection, overhaul or overthrow. An early example is the British Chartist movement, named after the People’s Charter published in 1838 by the London Working Men’s Association. Tying fairer political processes to more equitable economic systems, Chartists called for universal male suffrage, annual elections, equalized electorates and payment instead of property qualifications for members of Parliament. Since in this way working classes would be better represented within government, putting them in a position to change laws that regulate industrialism, their economic interests could be politically advanced. Government could thus be an ally of working classes in the cause of industrial peace rather than an instrument of the bourgeoisie and aristocrats, and improvements in the economic conditions of working classes could be made without resorting to violence. But after Parliament twice threw out the Chartists’ motions, riots broke out and their suppressions ended the movemen
t. In response, Christian socialists like Charles Kingsley (1819–79), chaplain to Queen Victoria, tried to peaceably resolve class conflicts by aligning religious aims of churches with the economic aims of trade unions through workshops that would steadily and simultaneously uplift laborers’ spiritual and material wellbeing. However, speculators on the roles secular states could play in balancing class interests soon eclipsed the influence of Christian socialists throughout Europe, such as the Fabian Society, which included prominent intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw and later H. G. Wells, opposed to revolutionary socialism.
Fabians advocated for the gradual permeation of economic equality within existing socio-political infrastructures. They rejected the violent class conflicts that had become part of urban European life by their times and, to help mitigate it, formed the Labor Representation Committee with the many active British labor unions in 1900, which evolved into the extant Labor Party. Along similar lines, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64) cofounded the German Workers’ Association in 1863, which like the Chartists campaigned for universal suffrage but for the implementation of state socialism – the use of national government capital to de-class society by reorganizing industries so that they are owned and run, directly or indirectly through the state, by the workers themselves. Two collaborators, the avowed pacifist Wilhelm Liebknecht and the anti-militarist August Bebel, formed the Social Democratic Party into which the Association was absorbed. For openly opposing Chancellor Bismarck’s war policy in the Reichstag, in their view benefitting the upper classes at the lowers’ expense, they were imprisoned for two years. Their protests did not prevent the Franco-Prussian War, but did galvanize gradualist socialist movements. In the next three decades, dozens of similar parties were founded in Western and Eastern Europe and North America advocating non-violent intra-national reform via existing industrialized states instead of violent international revolutions against them, as advocated by Karl Marx and his followers.
Peace Page 25