The Classical Model of Political Economy

An important contribution of economics to the idea of freedom has been the development of the so-called “classical economic model.” Although some writers, such as Mark Blaug, have denied the existence of a comprehensive classical model held by all nineteenth century economists, the general outlines of the theory are clear. The classical model assumes the existence of society in which most resources are privately owned. Individuals bargain with each other, and the principal motivation Edition: current; Page: [37] each participant is self-interest. Out of these economic interactions, an ordered society will emerge.

As is already apparent, the notion of freedom is crucial to this model. The major theorists in this classical tradition, such as Locke, Smith, and Mill, stressed that the preservation of liberty was an indispensable social precondition. For example, in On Liberty (1859), Mill argues that the function of society is to promote individual autonomy. Each person must be encouraged to assume responsibility for his own life, rather than become dependent on the customs favored by public opinion.

The exponents of the classical model viewed freedom as part of the law of nature. They believed that there were laws of the social world in some ways like the laws discovered by the physical sciences. These natural laws, far from being inconsistent with human freedom, demanded it as their precondition. If each person in society freely acted to promote his own interest, an “invisible hand,” as Adam Smith claimed in the Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments, would operate to transform private good into the general welfare of society.

David Ricardo developed the theme of nature even beyond Smith's exposition. In his economic theory, Ricardo allowed virtually no role for the entrepreneur. Economic law acted in an almost mechanical fashion; the correct working out of the economic processes that Ricardo postulated did not depend on particular entrepreneurial decisions.

The view of human nature professed by the proponents of laissez-faire emphasized self-interest. Perhaps the most striking example of one version of this theory was presented by Thomas Hobbes. In Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), men were not only self-interested but also mutually antagonistic, By contrast, John Locke's view of human nature was substantially more optimistic and harmonious, but he also saw man as egoistically motivated. The Scottish Enlightenment thinker, Frances Hutcheson, however, affirmed a social instinct of human benevolence, a natural feeling of personal sympathy for others. Adam Smith also subscribed to this position and believed in a natural harmony of interests.

The supporters of the classical model maintained that prices were determined by the market forces. For example, Adam Smith argued that products tended to gravitate around a “natural price,” which was determined by the costs of production. This could not be determined unless the market were allowed to function freely; furthermore, in the short run, supply and demand might cause prices to differ from the natural price.

Wages, under the classical model, were similarly determined by the market. Many followers of the classical model, beginning with John Locke, assumed that wages would tend toward the level of bare subsistence, owing to pressures of population. Smith, Turgot, and Ricardo, among others, each held versions of this “iron law of wages.”

The legacy of the Enlightenment, as expressed in the classical model, may be seen as a modification of the Greek doctrine of natural law. In the classical model, private property was recognized as an individual right This private and individual perspective of rights contrasted with the ancient Greek stress upon the ends of society as a whole.

Modernization, Ideology, and Economic Freedom

Modernization theory has increasingly come to be seen as a failure. Its basic assumption is that societies develop from traditional to modern through evolutionary stages. Traditional societies, in this approach, tend to stress community while modern socieities place more stress upon individualism, self-development, and economic growth. The basic flaw of the theory is that it does not explain how ideology changes as economic development proceeds.

In point of fact, economic development does not uniquely determine a country's ideology. This may be seen by contrasting social thought in England and America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The development of England during the seventeenth century was characterized by the rise of a stronger central government and at the same time the prevalence of a greater degree of economic freedom. Economists of the time tended to lavish praise on the benefits of trade. The tendency is especially noteworthy in the writings of Nicholas Barbon and, of course, in the far more widely known John Locke.

After 1689, however, the direction of British social thought changed. The Whig oligarchy in power emphasized national unity and economic growth through state direction. As measures such as the establishment of the Bank of England (1694) became law, the earlier emphasis on the benefits of trade and individualism ended. Writers now reverted to the older balance of trade theory, which stressed the need for a country to accumulate as much gold and silver as possible.

In the American colonies, the situation was different. Here centralized direction of the economy did not become the basis of an ideological movement. Government interferences with trade were bitterly resented, and American writers strongly favored individualism. For example Thomas Paine opposed social hierarchy and favored limited government. He viewed order as arising from individualism, not as something to be centrally imposed.

The contrast between Britain and America shows that economic development is consistent with different ideologies. The simple cause-and-effect relation between them assumed by modernization theory must be rejected.

Individualism vs. Collectivism?

The contrast between individualism and collectivism as themes of social reform and economic thought in nineteenth century Britain is a myth. The contrast was formulated by the great Victorian liberal A.V. Dicey in his influential lectures Law and Opinion (1905). He distinguished three stages in attitudes toward social reform: Edition: current; Page: [39] the period of Old Toryism, lasting to 1825 or 1830; the period of Benthamism or Individualism, from 1830 to about 1870; and the post-1870 period of Collectivism. Dicey stressed the role of ideas in accounting for the change from one period to another. Sir William Blackstone was the most influential thinker in the first period, and Jeremy Bentham in the second. Dicey did not single out a singel dominant thinker for the Collectivist period.

Dicey's scheme has been criticized by the so-called Tory or organic school of British institutional history, whose members include Oliver MacDonagh and G. Kitson Clark. They emphasize that reform measures proceeded largely according to the day-to-day activities of persons holding governmental office., not according to the carrying out of ideological aims. Both Dicey and the organic school are wrong: ideology was important, although not all important.

The real mistake of Dicey is to postulate a rigid antithesis between individualism and collectivism. Individualism meant that everyone should be able to pursue his own interests. As such, it was not viewed by most nineteenth-century thinkers as inconsistent with action by the state to protect individuals from exploitation. Specifically, acceptable forms of state intervention included: (1) the prevention of moral nuisances; (2) the enforcement of minimum standards of provision of certain services by some individuals to others (e.g., payment of wages in cash); (3) state financing for the private provision of certain services; (4) direct state provision of a service for part of the population; (5) public provision of a service, on a voluntary basis, for the whole of a population; and (6) the monopoly of essential services by the state (e.g., the telegraph system).

A great gulf stood between these types of collectivism, which most nineteenth-century writers accepted, and the nationalization of the means of production. Few favored this at all. Thus, for all but a few radicals, laissez-fairists, and socialists, there is no real opposition between individualism and collectivism in nineteenth-century Britain.

The Industrial Revolution and Literacy

This article examines the extent and timing of literacy changes in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain and their relationship to economic growth.

Some British historians contend: (1) that literacy deteriorated during the Industrial Revolution; (2) that growth produces literacy rather than that literacy is a prerequisite of growth (Bowman and Anderson, “Concerning the Role of Education in Development,” in Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States, New York, 1963, conclude that a literacy rate of 30–40 per cent was a necessary condition for a country to make a significant breakthrough in per capita income); and (3) that the provision of education by private interests was inadequate.

West begins by showing that the relatively high rates of illiteracy recorded in Lancashire were exceptional and were the result of the very high rate of immigration, especially from Ireland, into that county. He also shows, however, that even Lancashire lay within the 30–40 per cent range.

He then goes on to argue that the male literacy rate was stable from about 1740 to 1790 when it began to rise significantly. Edition: current; Page: [40] Thus, despite unprecedented population increase from 1760 on, the male literacy rate in England was maintained and before half the “revolution” was over it began to increase. The date of upturn, 1790, marked the beginning also of the large-scale factory system and the widespread commercial use of steam power.

The fact that literacy started to increase as early as 1790 indicates that the means of increasing it had begun to grow too. That implies in turn that private schooling was becoming increasingly available to all classes of the population.

Turning to schooling, as distinct from literacy, West rejects the view that the schools which taught only literacy skills were not well patronized and argues that parents invested “widely and voluntarily” in a type of education which had a literary rather than a practical orientation.

He then proceeds to deal with the contention that the working class was precluded from education in the private schools and had to wait until the authorities provided “free” education. He argues that the evidence suggests that a very high proportion of all children were attending school long before schooling became free and compulsory.

The Forster Education Act was passed in 1870 but it was several years before it had any significant effect on the actual provision of schools and schooling because it took a good deal of time to establish school boards, build schools, etc. Hence its effects could not begin to be felt until well into the 1870s. Yet the evidence strongly suggests that before 1879 something of the order of 90 per cent of the population was literate.

Parliamentary Enclosure and Uprooted Labor

Did the British government's parliamentary enclosure acts uproot the rural population and thus create an increased supply of labor for industry in early nineteenth century England? Marxian Maurice Dobb argued in Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) that the parliamentary enclosures did create a new mobile labor force for “capitalist” industry's needs. On the other hand, since J.D. Chamber's seminal article [“Enclosure and Labour Supply.” Economic History Review 5 (1953): 319–343] the orthodox position has held that the government enclosures did not cause a “real flight from the countryside.”

However, on non-Marxian grounds and through empirical economic analysis of population movements in early nineteenth century England, we have substantial reasons for doubting the orthodox view of Chambers. First, Chambers's evidence is inadequate to maintain that the population increases that occurred in parliamentary enclosed villages were used in rural improvement projects associated with the enclosures, Secondly, Chambers erroneously argued that population grew more rapidly in parliamentary enclosed villages than in other villages possessing common land. And thirdly, at the county level, we find a small but positive association between government enclosure of common land and outmigration.

Smith's Critique of Monopoly

Whereas in classical analysis a dominant theme is the importance of promoting free trade and eradicating all forms of monopolies, modern neoclassical analysis shows that the actual cost of monopoly is very small. West argues that the modern approach is “too confined” and has become too “institutionally sterile” because it has ignored important elements in the classical critique that are equally pertinent today. Adam Smith's vigorous attack on monopolies provides the starting point of this comparison between classical and neoclassical views of monopoly.

Neoclassical analysis finds that net welfare loss to monopoly is small because most of the effect of higher monopoly price is a redistribution of income to monopolists. Those who challenge this conclusion have centered on rent-seeking activities of those who wish to capture the gain. Classical analysis is much more encompassing in its assessment of the welfare loss to monopoly. Smith specifically pointed both to rent-seeking and attempts to thwart rent-seeking as monopoly losses and also regarded the income redistribution itself as a major loss to monopoly.

Smith's attack on monopolies condemned the state protectionist system of overseas trading companies. These companies, enjoying exclusive trading rights, were subject to diseconomies of scale which included the inefficiencies of large bureaucratic management. Smith identified both the “excessive shirking” and “inadequate monitoring” that has been noted in the modern literature on bureaucracy, and concluded that bad institutions were responsibile for inappropriate employee behavior. One major diseconomy he noted was the tendency for these trading companies to export bureaucracy to the countries they traded with thereby reducing the potential gains from trade. Smith focused particularly on the losses associated with exclusive trading laws with the colonies. He argued that the cost of the monopoly to the public included not only higher prices both in the colonies and the mother country, but also the costs of policing and maintaining the colonies—defending trade routes and maintaining order—and he believed that the loss exceeded the gain.

Although the modern reader may view Smith's tendency to include all restrictions on supply as monopoly as too general for cogent analysis, West points out that Smith should be congratulated for providing a dynamic analysis which included political, constitutional, and legal factors. He was interested in the costs of “monopolizing” as well as the costs of monopoly, and monopolizing behavior will involve the law and constitution as dependent variables. This greatly increases costs of monopoly.

While many of the historical institutions about which Smith was writing have passed, we can still learn from his analysis. Smith reminds us that people use resources to change the rules of the game in their favor, but the rules are “part of the social fabric:” the system of “collective protection of private property” is vulnerable to attempt to close the market. West concludes by pointing to public education as a perfect example of monopolizing behavior which has eliminated the market to such an extent that it is no longer possible to measure the welfare loss.

Ricardo and the “Dual Development”

Many historians of economic thought have argued that the economics of Ricardo was moribund by the 1830s. As a result, economics after this time developed in a dual fashion, split between the Ricardians and their opponents. Both of these contentions exaggerate the extent to which the dissenters rejected Ricardo.

The basic proposition of Ricardo's economics is the inverse relationship between profits and wages (more profits would mean less wages, and vice versa). The wage-rate is taken to be determined from outside the price-system and is measured in terms of a commodity standard of allegedly constant value, such as gold. Increases in wages, according to this view, cannot be inflationary but react only on the rate of profits. Opponents of this approach argue that to consider the wage-rate as determined outside the system is arbitrarily to reduce the number of variables for analysis.

Ricardo's contemporaries, however, did not advance criticisms of this sort against the doctrine. On the contrary, even alleged dissenters against Ricardo's system such as Mountstuart Longfield, Thomas Malthus, and Samuel Bailey all accepted the basic Ricardian doctrine of an inverse wage-profit ratio.

Furthermore, the Ricardian school was much stronger than often pictured. Recent suggestions that J.R. McCulloch was not a full-fledged Ricardian but was more in the tradition of Adam Smith must be rejected. Similarly, Thomas DeQuincey remained a loyal expositor of his mentor, Ricardo.

The members of the supposed dissenting school of anti-Ricardians did not form a united front but often criticized one another much more than they questioned Ricardo. For example, Malthus strongly dissented from many of the propositions of Samuel Bailey. Furthermore, many of their doctrines were consistent with Ricardianism. This is especially the case as regards the long-run determination of wages by supply and demand.

Those who postulate a dual development of nineteenth-century British economics inaccurately place John Stuart Mill in the non-Ricardian camp. Mill regarded himself as someone continuing to develop the insights of Ricardo; to a large extent this could be said of almost all nineteenth-century British economists prior to Mill.

Ricardo on Money

The importance of monetary questions in David Ricardo's economics has frequently been understated. In particular, much of Ricardo's system developed as a response to the monetary theories of Henry Thorton (1760–1815), the English banker and parliamentarian whose book The Paper Credit of Great Britain studied Edition: current; Page: [43] the link between the quantity of money, prices, and interest rates.

In 1797, the Bank of England suspended specie payments (that is, payments in gold for bank notes). This policy was defended by the London banker and economist Henry Thornton, who argued that doing so had averted a panic. Thornton's analysis, found in his influential Paper Credit, stressed short-run disequilibrium in the financial market. He favored a discretionary monetary policy, since he believed that this was within the capacity of the Bank of England.

Ricardo in The High Price of Bullion (1810) and Reply to Bosanquet (1811) challenged these contentions. He regarded money as neutral and conducted his analysis in real (commodity) terms. An increase in the money supply could raise only the level of prices; it had no long-run effect on the rate of interest.

When the Bullion Committee was established to reconsider the specie payment question, Ricardo was able to influence Horner and Thornton, who were members of the committee, to adopt his own favorable view of specie resumption. Ricardo, although not the author of the committee's report in 1810, still exerted a powerful influence.

Ricardo continued his interest in monetary questions throughout his life. In particular, the Principles (1817) grew out of his controversy with Thornton and was not simply a response to the debates about Corn Laws. In the Principles, Ricardo continued his sharp separation between the goods and money sectors of the economy.

Inflation and Political Crisis: Germany

The massive German inflation of the 1920s was one of the main factors responsible for the weakening of the party structure of the Weimar Republic. While both the onset of the 1929 depression and the rise of National Socialism greatly accelerated the dissolution of Germany's bourgeois parties, they did not begin the process but rather continued to intensify factors of disintegration which had been present since the foundation of the Weimar Republic. The established bourgeois parties, such as the German Democratic Party, the German People's Party, and the German National People's Party, proved unable to come up with effective programs to combat the inflation. Instead they tended to dissolve into their constituent social and economic factions.

The inflation proved particularly onerous for those on fixed incomes such as pensioners and for members of the liberal professions. Political controversy over how to handle the inflation intensified after a Supreme Court decision of November, 1923 rejected the principle that “mark equals mark” applied to fulfillment of contracts. That is to say, debts could not be settled for their nominal monetary amount; the discount in value had to be considered. The Cabinet of Cancellor Wilhelm Marx split over how to respond to this decision. One party, headed by Hans Luther, wished to disregard it on the grounds that attempts to recalculate debts would impede economic recovery. Another group wanted to respect the court's decision.

German society was also polarized by Edition: current; Page: [44] the issue. Various groups sprang up to agitate for measures in line with special economic interests of various sorts. As the inflation progressed, the position of the bourgeoisie worsened and the party structure became irreparably damaged.

Inflation and Unemployment

Keynesian economics has proved unable to deal with the increasing rates of inflation prevalent in the U.S. economy. An approach emphasizing microeconomics is needed if the problem of stagflation is to be controlled.

A common occurrence in the history of science is that a widely accepted theory proves unable to cope with new facts. Instead of revising the theory, proponents of the dominant paradigm often deny that essential changes are needed, refusing to confront the challenge which the new data provide. Keynesian economics fits this pattern. Designed to handle the issues of the 1930s depression, it stressed aggregate spending and largely ignored problems of inflation. When inflation was discussed, Keynesian economists dealt with it only in terms of too much spending rather than with particular prices that were too high.

A major problem Keynesian theory is unable to explain concerns the simultaneous existence of inflation and unemployment, popularly termed stagflation. This is not in its origins a recent development and was in fact present in the 1930s and 1940s. Keynesianism finds this difficult to understand, since according to its view, increased spending should generate employment.

One modified Keynesian discussion of these problems has appeared in a recent book by Edmond Malinvaud. He attempts a mathematical derivation of the Keynesian theorems, but his works in large part

reduce to tautologies that ignore the important policy issues. Sidney Weintraub, the author of another recent discussion, is at least aware of the central issues of today. He points out correctly that Keynesian theory assumes that the consumers can anticipate all the effects of inflation, surely a dubious proposition. Weintraub's Edition: current; Page: [45] analysis emphasizes wage rates as a cause of inflation, but like Keynesian theory, it overemphasizes macroeconomics.

A better way to combat inflation is to cut out the waste in government programs. Since most unemployed workers are unskilled, we should emphasize programs to provide specifically for this type of worker. Price and wage controls should be applied to industries that are the source of the trouble, not to the entire economy indiscriminately.

Government and Inflation: The McCracken Report

An analysis of the problems of inflation made in the report of an influential committee headed by Paul McCracken poses important issues for democratic government. In 1975 the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) sponsored a committee of eight prominent economists to consider “the recent serious deterioration of economic performance” in the advanced capitalist countries. Their report, Towards Full Employment and Price Stability can be viewed in three dimensions: (1) as explanatory theory; (2) as policy science; and (3) as a set of largely implicit recommendations for political arrangements compatible with modern capitalism.

The main defect of the McCracken Report as an explanatory theory is that it attributes the main economic phenomena it considers to causes which it fails to define adequately. Inflation in recent years, it claims, has to a large extent been caused by political factors. Among these are increases in popular expectations, the development of inflationary expectations, increased union militance, and the growing dependence of the U.S. economy on the international situation. Similarly, the causes of recession, such as a diminished level of public confidence, have a political origin. Yet the authors of the McCracken Report fail to analyze these political causes with sufficient care.

The report's approach to policy science is also questionable. It advocates steady growth, on the grounds that a democratic capitalistic economy cannot endure the inflationary pressures of growth at more extensive rates. This recommendation presupposes that the continuation of capitalism is desirable. This, however, is an ideological assumption which the authors of the McCracken Report ought to have defended explicitly. So far as the report's recommendations for policy are concerned, the authors give no reasons for believing that their slow growth policy has a reasonable chance of being adopted.

Liberty and Its Components

In 1955, Harvard scholar Lon L. Fuller observed that “the concept of freedom has been undergoing a progressive deterioration and dissipation of meaning.” Varying definitions of “liberty,” each emphasizing a particular aspect of human experience, have confused and debased this term. We need to revitalize the concept of liberty to solve policy problems.

In formulating his definition, Draughton expressly eliminates the notion of “categorical freedom,” in which a person is either free or not free. Instead, he favors the idea of “comparative freedom” or “degrees of freedom.” This relative view of liberty allows for a large number of interacting components, rather than the single litmus test to determine whether one is free.

One such component is choice. The more alternatives and choices, the more freedom. The notion of “option demand” in urban economics demonstrates that persons are actually willing to pay in order to widen the number of choices to the greatest degree possible. In general, people are more free as the number of acceptable options increases and the number of closed ones diminishes.

Another component in the definition of liberty is utility, which depends directly upon the values of the person who is choosing. In general, a person is more free the greater the positive utility of each open alternative and the smaller the positive utility of each closed alternative. Thus, classic “approach-approach” conflicts are situations of low freedom, since making Edition: current; Page: [47] one choice also involves eliminating another choice of high utility. Degrees of utility can serve as a useful measure of the degree of freedom in a situation. Thus, a person faced with a choice of exile or hanging will feel less free than the same person having to choose between being transferred or fired.

The availability of resources (material and nonmaterial) also affect the level of one's freedom. A person making a decision on the basis of insufficient or inaccurate information experiences a limitation of resources directly relevant to his liberty. Mental and physical abilities, health, and monetary resources, all affect one's capacity to carry out decisions.

Social context is also a strong influence upon one's liberty to choose and to act. The socialization process in a particular culture, the benevolence or hostility of persons in one's environment, a precarious or secure outlook for the future—all these social factors influence the individual's faculty of choice.

Professor Draughton envisions extensive policy implications for his comparative concept of freedom. The question of what constitutes a just distribution of liberty arises since freedom now admits of limits. Thus, future public policy will aim at a general raising of the level of liberty and of the justice of its distribution.

Is the Right to Freedom Vacuuous?

The question of how to justify rights, particularly the right to freedom, has puzzled moral philosophy. An analysis of the views of H. L. A. Hart, an influential recent ethician, holds that natural rights, apart from a particular political context, is a vacuous notion.

Edmund Burke strongly opposed the French Revolution's emphasis upon natural rights. He feared that the notion of natural rights might be used as a means of overthrowing government. His fear was groundless. Natural rights mandate no specific policies of government action.

We may see this if we analyze Hart's claim that the basic natural right is the “right to equal freedom.” As Hart points out, we cannot conclude from this right that specific forms of government action are prohibited: the right is only a claim which may be overriden in particular instances. Rights are a “determinable” rather than a “determinate” policy: that is to say, they advance a general claim which must be filled in, in specific instances.

Furthermore, it is not certain that the right to freedom is the most basic right. One cannot have any rights without the right to life, and the notion of rights also seems to presuppose the right to equality of treatment. All of the basic rights seem interconnected.

But again, we cannot deduce any specific course of conduct from them. Rights are better considered as an elaboration and defense of the prudential maxims expressing the aims of particular societies, not truths of all time. Their use is primarily ideological.

Liberty, Slavery, and Utilitarianism

Questions about liberty and its opposite, slavery, raise important issues in moral philosophy. Specifically, utilitarianism has often been criticized on the grounds that it might lead us to conclude that slavery was justifiable. Since everyone knows that slavery is in fact wrong, anti-utilitarians believe that this criticism refutes utilitarianism.

In reply, the method of appealing to people's rights used in the anti-utilitarian criticism is a poor one. The objection appeals to a supposed right not to be enslaved; but claims to rights, unless supported by a general theory, rest only upon particular individuals' intuitions. As such they are in essence arbitrary. If slavery is wrong, this must be shown by demonstrating that it produces more harm than good, i.e., that it is unacceptable on utilitarian grounds.

To settle the question of the harmfulness of slavery, we must first define what constitutes slavery. Two features are relevant: first, slavery is a particular status in society; and second, it rests upon a particular relation to a master. Slavery should be distinguished from serfdom, imprisonment, and military service.

In most cases; slavery will be prohibited on utilitarian grounds, since it clearly harms the slaves. Anti-utilitarians claim, however, that in some cases this would not be so. For example, suppose the welfare of a large number of people depended upon the existence of a small class of slaves. Might not the happiness of the larger number outweigh the onerous consequences to the slaves?

Utilitarians have available two sorts of reply. Moral principles are supposed to apply to cases likely to occur in practice. Thus, our usual principle that slavery is wrong may not fit odd cases, such as the one suggested by the example. Although in this example slavery is morally right, this need not cause us to abandon our usual principle, since people in society would be unable to operate with a complex principle having the form “slavery is wrong—except in cases a, b, c, etc.” People need an easily remembered maxim, and the side that slavery is always wrong best meets the need.

In addition, it is unlikely that, in the example allegedly justifying slavery, all of the consequences have been taken into account. Slavery has damaging psychological effects on both slave and master. When these are taken into consideration, the only instances in which slavery is likely to be justified on utilitarian grounds are those in which it is a necessary means to prevent social chaos.

Individualism, Freedom, and Society

“In the beginning were individuals, entities sufficient unto themselves, and, later, society, the result of their free association.” This individualist ideology, whereby society represents the willed order of autonomous human beings, has dominated Western social thought (Marxism not excepted) since the eighteenth century. With this new view, Western man effected a radical break with the Edition: current; Page: [49] traditionalist concept of social organization—an organic whole ordained by a god or gods in which the individual (even the sovereign) must humbly fulfill his predestined role.

Some social philosophers have viewed the rise of the individual and of the idea of the social contract as a debasement of the Western view of society, a new view based upon what is essentially a myth— that of the autonomous man, unmolded and uncoerced by the social environment that surrounds him. Prof. Gauchet, on the other hand, sees the development of this myth as having created conditions favorable to a much deeper understanding of social processes.

The traditional vision of social organization offers few mysteries to ponder. God's plan is clear, the roles of persons are fixed, and the State acts to preserve divinely ordained harmony on earth. In the eighteenth century, however, a new view evolved whereby the social order maintains itself spontaneously through the free and self-interested actions of autonomous individuals. Nowhere was this concept more evident than in the newly developed science of economics, where countless profit-motivated transactions maintained a stable and harmonious market.

Far from devaluing the importance of society, the market view introduced the notion of invisible social laws which, while operating through the actions of individuals, had positive effects far beyond their intentions and understanding. In effect, the myth of the individual gave birth to the idea of society as a problematical servo-mechanism, whose operations could only be fathomed by serious and toilsome study. It is therefore not surprising that, along with economics, the science of sociology traces its roots back into the eighteenth century. A seeming paradox, the concept of Society grew immeasurably in depth and importance through the evolving ideal of the autonomous individual.

The new conceptualization of social factors also had an unexpected influence on the political element in Western civilization. Once again, the catalyst for this change was the concept of the individual.

The nation-state, a totally original Western contribution to the field of territorial administration, bases itself upon the notion of autonomous and equal citizenunits. In contrast, the traditional state established its legitimacy upon a metaphysical hierarchy of subordination. Nonetheless, the old hierarchical view often acted as a check on the powers of the State. With its demise, there has arisen a vast governmental bureaucracy with virtually unlimited power, whose stated function is to protect the free market and the freedoms of individuals.

The modern state has carefully nurtured the idea that the individual need not submit to an overweening social order. Indeed, it has allowed him the feeling that he is totally autonomous, no longer a member of a social whole. In doing so, however, the State has acquired an administrative hegemony undreamed of in former centuries. Thus, while seemingly freeing themselves from the constraints of social, power, “individuals” have, in fact, become (more than ever) subject to social coercion.

Liberty and Habeas Corpus

The debates taking place at the time of the adoption of the Petition of Right in 1628 made an important contribution to individual liberty. Specifically, the arguments of a small group of common lawyers, led by Sir Edward Coke, in the Edition: current; Page: [50] House of Commons rested on the assumption that the common law was inviolable. These arguments supporting legally sacrosanct human rights constitute the lasting significance of the 1628 Petition. Although the lawyers' arguments may well have relied on a questionable reading of Magna Carta and other common law precedents, their willingness to stretch the law did not lead them to advance a theory of judicial supremacy in England's government. Rather, they persisted in the traditional view that the rights of subjects and the powers of the Crown were both secured by the common law as reaffirmed by the judiciary.

The immediate occasion for the dispute arose over Darnel's Case, also known as the Five Knight's Case. The knights in question had been imprisoned by special mandate of the king for refusing to consent to a forced loan. Their lawyer, John Selden, claimed that imprisoning them before indictment violated Magna Carta. By such imprisonment, persons might be condemned to “legal death,” languishing in prison indefinitely without ever being brought to trial.

In the parliamentary debates on the bill, Coke and the other common lawyers attempted to tie the privileges, rights, and immunities of Magna Carta to freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment before trial. After the Petition of Right was passed in 1628, the king attempted to circumvent its provisions by requiring high sureties for bail and by refusing defendants the right to be present when their petitions came up for consideration. Although the king imprisoned several members of parliament in 1629, the principles of the Petition of Right were important precedents for later legislation.

Should Britain Have a Bill of Rights?

Many American lawyers find it difficult to understand how the British legal system manages to defend civil liberties without a written constitution or Bill of Rights. How could one possibly reverse executive maneuvers or repressive legislation passed by Parliament? The English system does harbor numerous difficulties in defending civil liberties. Varied arguments exist for and against the adoption of a Bill of Rights in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Levenson begins by cataloguing the strategems employed by the British executive in order to circumvent Parliament's supremacy in government. Such ploys have often endangered civil rights in Great Britain. One such maneuver involves creating a climate of hysteria by which the government can secure the agreement of both the House of Commons and Lords to deal with all stages of a bill in one sitting and with no amendments. In such a climate of panic, repressively inclined laws like the Official Secrets Act (1911), the Prevention of Violence Act (1939), and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (1974) were enacted within hours of being introduced.

Another favorite device of the executive is to issue Departmental Circulars which ostensibly establish mere administrative policy. These Circulars are not subject to debate in Parliament, do not enjoy the force of law, and are not binding in the courts. Nonetheless, such directives constitutes a legal precedent which is not easily overturned. For example, the limits of police power and the rights of suspects have been defined by a Home Office Circular called the Judge's Rules and Administrative Edition: current; Page: [51] Directions to the Police. Following the issuance of this directive, complaints to the Home Office concerning the admission of illegal evidence in court have often received the bland reply that all suspects are protected by the Judge's Rules. No further investigation ensues.

British performance in due-process measure up poorly against Herbert Packer's four standards for adequately rendered criminal justice: (1) the absence of ex post facto laws, (2) the uniform application of criminal law to all segments of the population, (3) specified limits on the powers of the government to investigate and apprehend suspected criminals, and (4) the presentation of adequate proofs of guilt. Levinson cites celebrated and uncorrected violations of each of these standards. In his view, Great Britain's often cavalier attitude toward civil liberties accounts for her very poor showing in cases brought before the European Human Rights Tribunal.

The question then arises whether civil liberties would be better protected if the United Kingdom enacted a Bill of Rights. Such a proposal has been brought forth both by those concerned with due-process freedom of speech, etc. and by those seeking to protect private property against the ravages of further socialist legislation. It has been further suggested that Britain enact either the United States Charter or the European Convention on Human Rights as a symbol of her commitment to civil liberties on a national as well as international level.

Opponents have pointed out that both these documents have proven inadequate to the task of defending freedom in many areas of human activity. A Bill of Rights would, in addition, constitute a broad grant of power to British judges, who would impose their often narrow, class-oriented views on the whole of the nation. Also, the Bill of Rights might be subject to continual and, at times, arbitrary manipulations by Parliament, rendering it worthless as a legal instrument.

Mr. Levenson concludes that, despite the abuses he enumerates, a Bill of Rights would have a minimal impact on civil liberties in the UNITED Kingdom.

Locke, Women, and Freedom

John Locke solved an important problem in the political theory of seventeenth-century English liberalism. The idea of liberty involves the view that human beings are free and equal in the state of nature. This view jostled with the fact that almost all social relationships of the time were hierarchical. Specifically, the analogy between political authority and a husband's authority over his wife posed an important problem which Locke solved by developing a new analysis of marriage.

During the English Civil War, the royalist supporters of Charles I such as Sir Dudley Digges appealed against the parliamentarian's claim that their consent to the king's acts was necessary by citing the marriage contract. Once husband and wife consented to be married, the terms of the contract were alleged to come into force irrevocably. These dictated that the husband possessed absolute rights over his wife. In like manner, the king possessed absolute authority over the people of his realm.

Parliamentarians such as Henry Parker and William Bridge tended to counterclaim that there were inherent restrictions Edition: current; Page: [52] upon the husband's power. For example, Bridge maintained that if a man committed adultery, his wife had the right to separate from him. The great poet, John Milton, used the analogy of marriage and politics to argue that the political bond of loyalty to the king could be dissolved. Most of the Puritans, however, were limited in the use to which they could put divorce arguments by their own conservative views on marriage.

During the reign of Charles II, James Tyrrell, a liberal writer who was a friend of John Locke's, argued against patriarchal justifications for royal power. He defended a view of marriage based on mutual consent but was ambivalent in his attitude toward women. At times he accepted the conventional view that they were the natural inferiors of men.

A more consistent position on the marriage question was taken by the great theorist John Locke. He denied that there was an analogy between political and familial authority. So far as the latter was concerned, marriage was based on consent, and the parties might agree to virtually any terms they chose. Although there are a few remnants of male supremacy beliefs left in his work, he strikingly anticipated the opinions of later writers favoring female emancipation. This is especially so in his denial of the idea that a woman surrendered control of her property to her husband upon marriage, and in his sympathy for divorce.

Locke, Women, Freedom, and Individualism

An aspect of freedom neglected by political theorists concerns the place of married women. Individualist political theory, as exemplified in the work of Hobbes and Locke, developed along with the rise of capitalism. Since the position of women worsened during this period, it was relatively easy for Locke (and to a lesser extent Hobbes) to reconcile their individualist premises with a denial of married women's rights.

The problem posed for individualism by the status of married women is clear. Individualist political theory assumes that everyone is free and equal in the state of nature. There is no reason why we should restrict this principle to men. Hobbes, indeed, seems at first sight to accept this consequence. He asserts that the family is an artificial, not a natural, institution, and denies that men are so much more powerful than women in the state of nature that Edition: current; Page: [53] they could automatically dominate them. He goes so far as to declare that mothers, not fathers, are the natural lords over babies to whom they have given birth. As Hobbes's theory develops, however, we notice “the problem of the disappearing women.” Hobbes takes for granted that men will be in charge and says almost nothing more about women.

Locke treats the issue much more explicitly. Some have taken him to be an anti-patriarchalist not only toward governmental authority but also toward the husband's authority but also toward the husband's authority in marriage. He states that marriage is founded on consent and at one place grants the wife the right to leave her husband. These appearances are deceiving, because Locke assumed that virtually all women would consent to marriages in which they were subjugated to their husbands. When one considers Locke's very extended notion of tacit consent, it is apparent that his political theory is in practice not very far from the patriarchalist doctrine he is generally taken to be combating.

This aspect of individualism accompanied, and is partially explained by, the worsened position of women under capitalism. Before the 1650s, women had frequently exercised real economic independence and participated in occupations such as brewing on equal terms to men. As capitalist industry grew, it is argued, women fell under the domination of men and their legal position worsened. Although political theory cannot be completely explained by economic trends, it is to a large extent a response to them.

Locke, Property, and Individualism

Locke's individualism is clarified by exploring his attitude toward work and property. C.B. Macpherson, one of Locke's most influential recent expositors, is correct to stress that Locke favored the accumulation of property. Although a possessive individualist, Locke did not favor unlimited accumulation, however, as Macpherson asserts. Neither did he believe that the poor are irrational. Another important author on Locke, John Dunn, rightly emphasizes Locke's use of the notion of a “calling.” He interprets it in an overly theological way which ignores Locke's secularization of the idea.

Critics of Macpherson have claimed that he ignores Locke's limits to property accumulation. Locke himself withdraws most of these once money has been introduced into an economy. Furthermore, Locke believed that, although natural law was still in effect once society had been instituted, people might voluntarily surrender some of their natural rights in order to promote their prosperity. Thus Macpherson is correct to point out that Locke favored accumulation. He did not believe in unlimited accumulation and in fact condemns it in his writings on education. Macpherson's claim that Locke thought the poor were necessarily irrational is also incorrect. Macpherson tends to dismiss Lock's views on religion, regarding them as having been advanced for the purpose of keeping the poor in check. In point of fact Locke devoted extensive time to his religious works and took them seriously.

John Dunn has strongly emphasized Locke's use of “calling,” According to this idea, people had a particular vocation to pursue their economic tasts as a means of Edition: current; Page: [54] advancing their salvation. Dunn tends to ignore the development of a “calling” among the Puritans and understands it in a very strict theological Way. Many of the Puritans themselves secularized the concept of “calling,” placing emphasis on the occupation being pursued more than the mental state of the laborer following the calling. Locke changed this idea even further. He tended to stress worldly success to a great extent, and relegated religion to the realm of a “general calling.” That is to say, Locke tended to distinguish sharply between religious and secular matters. In his concern with both, he can be seen as a transitional figure.

Children, Freedom, and Individualism

Defining the status of children is a major stumbling block for social systems based on free choice. How does one foster independent judgment on the part of the child? And, to what extent can the choices of the young be termed “free” or “independent?”

Utopian religious communities, like those of the Amish or Shakers, pose special problems in the thorny area of the child's right to choose. Freedom-oriented thinkers value the flourishing of these diverse “experiments of living.” Yet, such groups survive through the strict isolation of all members, including children, from the influences of the larger, pluralistic society. How does one safeguard the child's right to choose his own values, if the social (and particularly educational) setting shields him from alternative ways of living?

John Stuart Mill's responded to this dilemma by exempting children of Utopian communities from compulsory public education, while, at the same time, providing for compulsory state examinations, for which parents would have to prepare their children. The imposition of uniform standards of education upon nonpluralistic groups posed no problems for Mill, since his system provides no room for social experiments which seek coerced adherence to illiberal principles.

A prominent libertarian thinker of our own day, Robert Nozick, does recognize the right of utopian communities to seek intellectual isolation. In his Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick admits that such isolation would limit the child's freedom to know and to choose. However, this difficulty is put aside to be dealt with at a later time.

According to Prof. Henley, both Mill and Nozick ignore the basic question of how socialization effects the person's ability to choose. Every human beingis born as a helpless infant in a society which molds him to have desires appropriate to his place in the community. Education within a certain community exercises profound influence upon the person's character and disposition. The more closed the community, the more profound the influence exercised. Even when presented with a full range of alternatives, a person thus formed would be disposed to make a certain limited number of choices. An Amish girl, raised with the view of women's radical subordination to men, would most likely regard news of her equal rights in the larger society as the erroneous notions of people “out there.”

In Prof. Henley's mind, the basic flaw of the individualist position is its blindness to man's social nature. Individualism Edition: current; Page: [55] presupposes a kind of Cartesian consciousness which freely expresses its preferences—unswayed by ingrained social values. This view arises from a fictitious notion of human development.

How then does the individualist reconcile the survival of nonpluralist groups with the child's need for early exposure to alternate values before the community closes his mind to them? To this dilemma, Prof. Henley proposes an admittedly imperfect solution. In Henley's view, the state would have to require pluralistic schools (public or private) whose faculties and student bodies would reflect the diversity of the larger society. In the child of the closed community, such an environment would foster an openness to the possibility of alternatives, while other children could benefit from contact with the utopian child. Socialization in the closed community would, of course, continue but it would be balanced to some extent by these pluralistic contacts.

To implement this solution and to expand the child's ability to choose, more would be needed than Nozick's minimal state or Mill's limited state. Nevertheless, this compromise is necessary in Henley's view, if the individualist is to reconcile freedom of choice (which he values) with the facts of human sociality (which he often ignores).

Liberty and Mental Illness

A difficult problem in the study of liberty concerns the rights of the mentally ill. Specifically, may persons suffering from treatable mental illnesses be hospitalized against their will? The claim that they can be committed has been challenged on two grounds, especially by Thomas Szasz. First, Szasz contends that the concept of mental illness is a myth. If true, this would rule out involuntary commitment. Second, Szasz argues that to hospitalize someone against his will is incompatible with the ethics of a free society. The authors contend that neither of these arguments can be accepted, and the practice of involuntary commitment is in fact a means of advancing “the vitality of the principle of liberty.”

An objective criterion for mental illness exists if it is defined as a lack of a capacity for rational behavior. The irrationality in question must be gross, i.e., markedly below even minimum standards. Furthermore, the determining factor is not occasional irrational behavior, but the lack of any ability to act rationally. Szasz has objected to this approach on the grounds that there are no objective standards of rationality. To allege that someone is irrational is, on this view, simply to express disapproval of his conduct. Szasz's argument is inconsistent with his practice as a psychiatirst, even if he treats patients only on a voluntary basis. If there are no objective standards, he can be guided by nothing more than his personal preferences. Szasz's objection has nihilistic consequences for psychiatry.

The objective nature of mental illness does not by itself justify voluntary commitment. The practice might be objected to on the grounds that it is inconsistent with liberty to prevent a mentally ill person from acting as he desires, so long as he does not harm others. To this the authors reply that political theory has tended to value liberty as a means to promote human welfare: everyone should be free to pursue the good life as he sees fit. This, however, does not mean that they are unable to act rationally. Edition: current; Page: [56] The same answer applies to the claim that liberty cannot be infringed because free inquiry is essential to discover the truth. The process of discussion presupposes rationality. One may, in summary, distinguish between the mentally ill person's desires at the moment and his long-term interests. It is the role of the psychiatrist to help secure the latter, even at the expense of the former.

Sismondi and Liberty

The cosmopolitan Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi (1773–1842) is a key transitional thinker between the ancien régime of the eighteenth century and the turbulent social, political, and economic forces of the nineteenth century. As an important late Enlightenment figure, Sismondi sought to preserve and extend human liberty, while correcting its abuses in an era of increasingly mass collective society and growing state intervention against individual initiative. Sismondi's own writings anticipated such reactions to the Enlightenment as romanticism, Historismus, and socialism.

A true cosmopolitan, Sismondi traveled widely from his native Geneva (where he imbibed his ambivalence towards popular sovereignty), and became familiar with French, Italian, Spanish, and British contemporary thought. He was especially influenced by William Robertson and Edward Gibbon. His work on constitutionalism was indebted to Blackstone's Commentaries and Jean Louis Delolme's Constitution de l'Angleterre (1771). Sismondi was lover to Madame de Stael, uncle to Charles Darwin, and teacher of Gian Petro Vieusseux, who was eminent in the Italian risorgimento.

Through his own personal experience with both liberalism and democracy, Sismondi rejected Rousseau's egalitarianism. He believed that such democratic liberty aimed at the sovereignty of an enlightened elite. This needed to be balanced by civic or negative liberty, the area permitting individual freedom of choice. Holding that there were limits to what a legislature could do, Sismondi tended to be skeptical of state-controlled virtue.

Sismondi is noteworthy as a precursor of social science, particularly political sociology. He stressed the influence of constitution and law in determining the character of peoples. A free constitution (a republic or constitutional monarchy as in England) would foster free, educated, virtuous citizens; a despotic constitution would stunt and denature humans. In the field of political sociology three of his most significant contributions are: (1) his analysis of changes in Italians since the end of the Middle Ages (He went beyond constitutional analysis, to discuss the role of religion and customs on national character); (2) his encyclopedia article “Prejudice,” which pioneered in the area of social psychology; and (3) his sympathetic treatment of the proletariat in the Industrial Revolution, a theme which influenced many later writers.

Mill: On Liberty

One of the most influential approaches to freedom has been the principle of liberty advanced in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859). Few professed libertarians, however, consistently follow Mill's principle. This fact suggests the need to reexamine Mill's doctrine of tolerance.

Mill distinguished between private acts, which do not harm anyone, and public acts, which do. His thesis is not the trivial proposition that private acts should be left unregulated by the government and by the positive morality of society. Since private acts harm no one, this claim would be universally accepted. Rather, Mill should be taken as arguing that most public acts should be tolerated. An act is defined as “tolerated” if a society's positive morality prohibits it but it is nevertheless protected by the government. The government may protect it either actively, by prohibiting interference with it, or passively, by not taking measures against it.

The wide ranging concept of tolerance Mill favored was supported by an emphasis on the positive value of diversity for society. Although diversity is indeed an important social value, it is argued that, in an unlimited form it can become an evil. Too much change may prove unsettling, both for individuals and societies. The extent to which a society can tolerate changes in its values is determined by its simplicity, stability, and integration.

Four types of libertarian positions may be distinguished according to the way in which liberty and social order are comparatively valued. (1) Extreme libertarians believe that liberty may be restricted only to prohibit direct harm to others. (2) Strong libertarians extend the scope to which liberty may be restricted to include the measures needed to secure a minimum of social order. (3) Classical liberals, including Mill himself, allow restrictions on liberty which aim to insure that a society can develop in which liberty is of value to the individuals composing it. (4) Finally, equalitarian liberals allow the principle of liberty to be limited, as their name suggests, by a principle of equality.

Both liberals and conservatives recognize the need to “budget” liberty. The extent to which liberty should be limited depends to a large degree on the findings of sociology about what is necessary for social order. As such studies are carried further, liberals and conservatives may be expected to find themselves less far apart than they imagined.

Mill, Freedom, and Happiness

John Stuart Mill's defense of personal freedom in his essay On Liberty has drawn the criticism that it is cogent only in so far as it is not utilitarian. The cornerstone of Mill's argument for individual liberty is the “harm principle”: that we may rightly use power against a person only to prevent harm to others (the person's own physical or moral good does not constitute a sufficient warrant for the use of force. Yet, one could ask how an ethical system based solely on the principle of utility could dissuade Edition: current; Page: [58] a member of society from making someone happier than he could make himself when left to his own devices.

Replying to this objection, Mill seems to regard Liberty as an end to be pursued for its own sake. Infringements upon personal freedom would thus constitute the violation of an absolute principle. This, however, would contradict Mill's view (stated in Utilitarianism) that happiness is the only ethical absolute.

The authors assert that this apparent contradiction confuses the meaning of the word “happiness” in Mill's work. Mill abetted this confusion by not clearly distinguishing his two basic uses of the term.

Mill's position becomes a contradictory one if happiness is understood as a simple mental state, consisting of feelings of contentment and well-being. Given this meaning, the pursuit of liberty might indeed conflict with one's happiness—as in the example of the advocates of free speech in the Soviet Union. This simple, monistic view of happiness does in fact appear in Mill's work. However, this notion must not be confused with the idea of happiness as an ethical absolute or as an end in itself. Here, Mill takes a composite view. Happiness consists of various goods such as health, freedom, lack of pain, poetry, etc. These diverse goods are naturally desirable as means to the end of happiness. In Mill's view, however, they are also part of that end, and, as such, they are desirable in and of themselves. Thus, the view that liberty is intrinsically desirable does not contradict the idea that only happiness is to be desired as an end in itself. Happiness is a composite of intrinsically desirable goods.

Nevertheless, this intrinsic view of desirable goods seems to conflict with the essential nature of Mill's utilitarianism, namely that truths are to be discovered within the confines of the contingent world. Mill's defenders have retorted that, when he speaks of various goods as ends in themselves, what he really believes to be desirable as an end is some single, natural principle to which all subsidiary “goods” Pleasure, as a mental state, has often been chosen as the most plausible candidate for this ultimately desirable state.

In fact, Mill does explicitly declare that certain mental states are intrinsically desirable and that all have at least one thing in common: they are all states of happiness or pleasure. That is not to say, however, that only mental states constitute the state of pleasure.

For Mill, pleasure consists not only of the feelings produced by certain activities. It also comprises the objects of these activities and the activities themselves. Thus, in Mill's own words, music, health, poetry, and virtue “are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are part of the end.”

Since the utilitarian good is not monistic, the ranking problems of pluralistic ethical theories immediately arise. For example, is justice or freedom to be more highly prized? In Chapter 4 of Utilitarianism, Mill supplies an embryonic response to this problem. Higher pleasures are to be distinguished from lower ones by “competent judges”—those who have experienced both. Mill's pluralistic ethical position effectively gives the lie to the old charge that utilitarianism, like epicureanism, is a theory fit only for swine.

Freedom of Speech and Moral Development

Almost all Americans would affirm that they support free speech. However, social science data indicates that the concensus breaks down when the question is asked concretely in terms of deviant groups' right to speak (Nazis, Communists, etc.) Edition: current; Page: [59] Reservations are expressed concerning “those with wrong ideas,” “those who talk against churches and religion,” etc.

The upper echelons of society qualify their tolerance of divergent views less so than lower socio-economic classes. Since the educational resources of the elite foster wider opportunities for moral development and since tolerance is a moral activity, researcher Lawrence Kohlberg has theorized that a definite correlation would exist between the level of subjects' moral developmeng and the consistency and quality of their tolerance of free speech.

Kohlberg and his colleagues have carried out a number of experiments with adults to corroborate this thesis. Prof. Patterson, however, has theorized that the process of moral maturation might appear more clearly in children and that correlating their moral development with their level of tolerance would provide a significant and revealing test of the Kohlberg theory.

To evaluate the moral maturity of elementary school pupils, Patterson employed the six-stage scale developed by Kohlberg, who himself followed the research of Jean Piaget. The scale ranges from the “Punishment and Obedience Orientation” in Stage 1 to the “Universal Ethical Principle Orientation” of Stage 6. Individuals pass through the six steps in age-related sequence, and, while rate of development may vary and some individuals may fixate at a certain point, the stage order is never violated. Stage transition is promoted by the individual's discovery of seeming contradictions and inconsistencies in his environment, which he endeavors to resolve.

Patterson further postulated two hypotheses to be tested in his experiments: (1) Since each successive level of moral development constitutes a more adequate mode of resolving moral dilemmas, the higher the stage, the more consistent the application of the principle of free speech; and (2) Those who support free speech in terms of right or principle (a higher level of moral reasoning) will be most tolerant of deviant ideas, and, when asked to provide a possible justification for suppressing deviant expression, those morally advanced subjects would support their justification by lower-level reasoning.

Level of tolerance was tested in two ways. First of all, children were read a series of questions conerning the advisability of free speech. A moral and political dilemma related to free speech was presented along with questions to elicit the child's choice of alternatives and his justification for them. The two tests were found to correlate with each other and, in turn, with the six-stage framework of moral development.

Briefly, moral maturity was found to have a significant relationship to political reasoning. Structures of reasoning about conflict situations were judged by both logical and empirical criteria to correspond to the structures of moral judgement. The research also suggested that the concepts of “tolerance” and “consistency” are far too simple as usually conceptualized, since from stage to stage of moral development, the nature of justification for free speech varies widely. Finally, the experiment throws light on the origins and nature of the quality of tolerance. Prof. Patterson, thus, suggests that Kohlberg's theory may elucidate other aspects of the political process not yet analyzed in the light of moral development.

Freedom in Kant, Hegel, and Marx

Kant, Hegel, and Marx are three influential writers on freedom. Though often condemned, their philosophies can be seen in a more favorable light if they are considered as dialectically related to one another.

Kant's idea of freedom depends upon his distinction between the phenomena of the everyday world and the noumenon, or thing-in-itself. It is only the noumenal self that is free; the empirical self is determined by outward events. Kant's conception wrongly reduces freedom to a purely inner state. One can be free, in his view, even under a despotic government. He believed, however, that one could deduce by pure reason the proper principles of political organization. His ideas on philosophy of law have been very influential.

Hegel criticized Kant's views on freedom for being unhistorical. It is only in society that true freedom can exist. The notion of freedom as arbitrary will most particularly be rejected. Furthermore, freedom develops concretely in history by means of struggle.

The latter theme Marx took up and greatly expanded. He argued that each social system has its own conception of freedom, as determined by the system's economic development. Marx himself, in contrast to his Stalinist disciples, was a strong proponent of freedom of the press. He believed that true freedom could exist only if the state ceased to exist.

Marx, Freedom, and Property

The Communist Manifesto declares: “The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Karl Marx's opposition to private ownership remains controversial and ambiguous.

Many analysts of Marxian theory maintain that there is no possibility of a moral critique of capitalism by Marx, since, for him, all moral principles are imminant in the material situation. To the extent, therefore, that capitalism follows bourgeois moral and legal rules, Marx could not condemn private property as unjust or immoral. These analysts have therefore identified the essence of Marx's opposition to private ownership with various economic or historical factors.

On the other hand, some scholars claim that capitalist appropriation of the “surplus value” (or “unpaid labor”) inherent in a product represented for Marx an exploitation of workers. Such exploitation constituted a violation of the moral principle of justice.

Professor Brenkert finds both views in error. Marx based his critique of private property, not on the moral principle of justice, but on the moral principle of freedom. Edition: current; Page: [61] Human relations as determined by the bourgeois organization of society negate the value of freedom, as Marx viewed it.

At least three dimensions comprise the freedom that Marx advocates. First of all, one is truly free when one is exempt from fortuity and able to participate in the control of one's affairs. Private ownership, by dividing society into the propertied and the propertyless, denies to the latter the direction of their affairs, stands in opposition to a flourishing and harmonious society, and imposes upon all the clutch of the market's invisible hand.

Secondly, freedom requires the concrete objectification of man through his activities, products, and relations. Capitalism obstructs this objectification by providing for only symbolic interactions between people and things—in terms of exchange-value and money.

Thirdly, freedom can only be achieved in and through community—in contact and cooperation with others. In a society based on private property, however, privacy is raised to the level of an ultimate social principle: “Mind your own business.” This capitalist insistence on the separateness of individual interests effectively precludes an understanding of the fact that individual lives reflect and participate in a larger social order.

Prof. Brenkert next proceeds to discuss at length Marx's view of the relativity of justice. If the principle of justice has only relative value as a standard of judgment, how could Marx use the principle of freedom as a transcultural absolute in his condemnation of private property? For Marx, the development of man, his capacities, and relations constitutes the transcultural element in freedom which allows for a critique of all social systems. To one degree or another, every mode of production either fosters or discourages those factors comprising the threefold framework of freedom mentioned above (control of one's affairs, concrete objectification of products and relations, and community).

Unlike a standard of justice, which represents an effect or external product of a system of production, the elements constituting freedom are innate in the development of every economic system. On the basis of these criteria, Marx can assert that, under the system of private property, persons grow progressively less free. As a result, Brenkert argues, this form of economic and social organization is to be condemned.

Neoconservatives, Liberty, and Equality

Neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Moynihan, Daniel Bell, and Robert Nisbet have raised the crucial problem of the relation between equality and liberty. Their strong assault on equality is to a large extent surprising, since few people in America support radically egalitarian measures or endorse redistribution simply for the sake of redistribution. The neoconservative critique of equality focuses on the incompatibility of equality with liberty, meritocracy, and legitimacy.

Equality and liberty are in tension, it is argued, since restrictions on income limit individual freedom, particularly freedom of economic enterprise. This view wrongly sees liberty as an absolute, incapable of mixture with other values. Actually, a large measure of equality is a necessary condition for the self-responsibility without which true liberty is meaningless. The purely negative conception of liberty as the removal of governmental restraint must be supplemented by a conception of liberty as the fulfillment of a positive ideal.

Irving Kristol has pointed out that abilities, Edition: current; Page: [62] and hence economic rewards, tend to distribute themselves in a bell-shaped curve. Thus egalitarianism is inconsistent with a natural, meritocratic order. The social democratic theorist Michael Walzer has aptly responded that there is no reason salaries ought to depend on a single set of abilities; taking different skills of people into account requires that economic power be limited. If this is done, people with different types of ability can express themselves, as opposed to a system in which only the ability to make money counts. The neoconservatives tend to overstress personal responsibility for one's position on the economic scale. They also tend to offer unfair criticism of the moderate egalitarianism of John Rawls.

The final charge against equality is that the undue pursuit of this value weakens legitimacy. Governments cannot meet ever increasing demands for equality and threaten to be swept away in popular resentment directed against the upper classes. The situation is exacerbated by third world nations' demands on the developed countries. This argument drastically oversimplifies the facts. Equality is only one value among many, and it is wrong to regard it as a demonic force responsible for virtually all social evils.

Freedom: the Politics of Justice and Existence

Does political necessity diminish the exercise of individual liberty? Taking as his backdrop the survival of the United States confronted by the Soviet Union, the author believes that some political exigences may affect individual rights and liberties. He divides politics into two branches: (1) the politics of justice which is natural, and (2) the politics of existence, which is artificial. The politics of existence may delimit the politics of justice and liberty.; Niemeyer believes that Communist domination would itself eliminate liberty and impose political monopolization with the attendant suppression of individuals as “class enemies.” The West cannot win if it defines the moral battle as capitalism versus socialism, since, he argues, no one will sacrifice for the “selfishness, injustice, inhumanity, and waste” of capitalism. To battle the seductive appeal of socialism, we must define the issue as freedom versus oppression. For Niemeyer, freedom is intimately connected to a religious conception of man's mind in contact with the divine in contrast with Marxian materialism. Marxism must be permanently blind to the true source of man's being and hence is ideologically vulnerable in its materialism and historical determinism.

Niemeyer stresses that what also needs dramatization is the connection between freedom and prosperity. Freedom is in the greatest jeopardy, however, when those who dominate political power also control all property.

How does Niemeyer translate these ideas into foreign policy? Applying his distinction between the politics of justice and the politics of existence, he concludes that we should avoid “making the world safe for democracy.” Thus, we should avoid interfering in the internal affairs of other nations. Instead, we should define as our motive for opposing communism the intent to preserve freedom. Human rights should not dictate to us who our friends ought to be in the “politics of existence.”

Liberty and the American Revolution

Historians in the early twentieth century tended to view the American Revolution within a narrow socio-economic framework. Questions of taxation, trade, and conflicts of interest between British authorities and the rising American gentry predominated. When these historians considered the intellectual roots of the American revolt against the British, their views fell into two categories. Some writers, like George Otto Trevelyan, Charles McLean Andrews, Moses Coit Tyler, and Samuel Eliot Morrison, viewed the colonists' insistence on representation and individual liberties as a revival of the seventeenth-century, English liberal tradition. Other scholars, such as J. Franklin Jameson, Vernon Louis Parrington, Carl Becker, Gilbert Chinard, and Adrienne Koch, stressed the radical nature of the American experiment—its republican character and its roots in rationalism and the French Enlightenment.

Since 1950, however, the intellectual history of the Revolution has come to center stage. Signs of this new interest appear first in Clinton Rossiter's Seedtime of the Republic (1952). Comparing influential documents of both Colonial and Revolutionary era Rossiter argues that these revolutionary ideas grew in organic fashion from the experience of local self-government during the Colonial period. This coincidence of custom and ideas contrasts with the radical revolutionary traditions of Europe, as exemplified by Mirabeau, Robespierre, Lenin, and Stalin.

Other scholars extended Rossiter's pioneering research. In The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson and The Genius of American Politics, Daniel Boorstin laid emphasis upon the nonEuropean, native and popular nature of the American revolutionary tradition.

In 1960, English historian Caroline Robbins published her essential treatise, entitled The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman. Robbins demonstrated the decisive Political impact on the American Colonies of the eighteenth-century thinkers, known as the “Old Whigs” (or “Commonwealthmen”). Far from the centers of economic and political power in Britain, Old Whig essayists and pamphleteers “praised liberty, warned against the dangers of tyranny, and deplored extravagance, luxury, and corruption in public affairs.” Through Scottish presses and immigrants, these liberal idea flooded into Colonial America.

At about the same time that Robbins published her study, Robert E. Palmer was arguing in The Age of Democratic Revolution that the American Revolution formed but one part of a general democratic movement which spread forth from such diverse centers as Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Philadelphia, Stockholm, London, Geneva, Vienna, and Williamsburg. Nonetheless, Palmer asserts that the American experiment was a radical creation, since it established the first national government based on seventeenth-century principles of the people as original and supreme sovereign.

Subsequent historians such as H. Trevor Colbourn (The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution), Richard M. Gummere (The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition), and Bernard Bailyn (Ideological Origins of the American Revolution) have continued the work of reconstructing the intellectual matrix of the American revolutionary experience.

American Libertarians

The dominant characteristic of “right libertarianism” is opposition to the power of the state. One can distinguish several different varieties of this type of political doctrine, of which individualist anarchism is the most extreme.

The emphasis on individualism in American Literature is noteworthy. For example, Emerson stressed the authority of the self over the state: “with the appearance of the wise man the State expires.” Individualism assumed a more egoistic form in the poetry of Whitman.

Thoreau gave individualism a distinctly political form in his well-known opposition to the paying of a poll-tax. Henry George developed a much more systematic version of individualist politics. His single-tax position,

if carried out, would mean that the state would have little to do beyond collecting the land tax and preserving order.

The most consistent version of right libertarianism was developed by Benjamin Tucker and the circle of writers around Liberty. Tucker's views express the interests of some small tradesmen and manufacturers. He assumed that no government was necessary. Disputes among individuals would be settled by private bargaining, and, if necessary, by boycotts, Tucker, as well as writers such as Lysander Spooner, emphasized the lack of consent of individuals to the state. Tucker's views developed out of his youthful experience of the New England reform tradition.

How Economics Influences Political Theory

Why do economic ideas penetrate political theories to varying extents at given historical times? Twentieth-century economics gives little support to political theories because it looks at man as an impersonal demander of utility rather than as does political theory (i.e., as a being involved in relations of dependence and control with other people). Attempts by political scientists to adapt the economic model of marginal utility equilibrium to an analysis of democracy has failed because it ignores the crucial power relations which any political theory must confront.

As a measure of how powerfully economics penetrates a political theory, we can ask whether the economic relations are viewed as settling the problem of the best Edition: current; Page: [66] possible political order. Put rather indirectly: “the economic penetration of political theory varies with the extent of the market.” That is, as markets come to dominate economic life, so economics impinges upon political theories. Because the rise of markets presents unsettling problems for societies, political theorists become concerned with these factors. Locke, Bentham, and James Mill display an increasing belief in the exploitation of the capital/wage-labor relation, and a corresponding belief in the extent to which government's role was thought to be established by economic relations. Strangely enough, J.S. Mill is pictured as marking a decline in awareness of the exploitative nature of capital, and a consequent decline in economic penetration of their political theories. In redefining utility in qualitative terms, Mill moved political theory away from political economy.

In addition, the economic penetration of political theory varies with the political strength of an exploited class; directly in socialist theory, and inversely in liberal theory. In liberal theory this relationship is borne out in twentieth-century political thought. As capitalism becomes less viable, liberals retreat from economic penetration to idealism. This movement should be countermanded by a political theory again becoming informed by economic insights.

Why Democracies Choose Deficits

Democracies have tended to resort to budget deficits to finance expenditures. We can use a model of political competition which explains deficit financing in democracies by recognizing that institutional arrangements and corresponding assignments of property rights significantly influence individual choice.

We can view politicians as political suppliers of deficits in a monopoly situation: politicians compete for the right to supply a monopoly product (governing) for a limited time which is renewable through reelection. This view implies that political parties will strive to give the voters what they want in order to get elected; hence voters seem in some sense to “want” deficits rather than taxes to finance expenditures. The “rational expectations” literature predicts that (since deficits imply future tax liabilities) rational voters will treat deficits and taxes as equivalent claims and exhibit no preference between the two forms of finance. However, even perfectly rational and foresightful voters will prefer deficits.

One reason politicians can get away with deficit financing without voter preference is the incentive structure. Voters may be conceived of as owners of public goods and politicians as “managers.” Then the politician-managers would have no personal liability for financial mismanagement, and would thus reduce the capital value of the public stock beyond their own pro rata share of future tax liabilities. Deficits are then seen as the least costly means of financing expenditures. Voters, on the other hand, would demand expenditure because they see the increased cost to any one voter as negligible while the potential benefit can be great.

Two factors explain why voters will prefer deficit financing in a democracy. The first is that individuals have positive discount rates (positive time preference), Edition: current; Page: [67] and the second is that they can shift some of the costs to the future. That is, voters desire deficits because they do not rate the utility of next generation's consumption as equal to their own. They can, in fact, shift the burden of the debt to the future by taxing human capital rather than non-human capital. If non-human capital alone were taxed, a budget deficit would place a liability on future income streams of capital goods. This would reduce the present value of the good sufficiently to offset increased future taxes. The present owner would bear the burden of the debt. If human capital is taxed, one cannot capitalize his own present value indefinitely into the future, so part of the future tax will be paid out of the human capital of the next generation. One test of this hypothesis would be if states which rely more on income taxes than property taxes have greater deficits. Testing has shown this to be the case. Governments which routinely tax human capital to finance at least part of their budgets are more likely to run deficits.

Inflation and the Welfare State

The relationship between economic growth and “social welfare” is complex since sometimes they complement and other times they counter one another.

Since World War II, 30 years of prosperity have ensued partly because of “full employment” policies. But these policies can lead to serious problems and even contain the seeds of their own destruction.

The acceleration of wage inflation toward the end of the 1960s was in part the delayed effect of the full employment policies. These government inflationary policies led employers to believe that they could not price themselves out of the market, and workers to believe that they could not price themselves out of a job because the government would always bail them out.

The welfare state was the main reason why public expenditure in Britain rose from 25%–30% of GNP during most of the inter-war years, to 40%–45% during most of the first two post-war decades. But the upsurge of government costs since the mid-1960s displays the irresponsibility of politicians who tried to act on the popular belief that government could provide goods and services like manna from heaven. It printed money and rationalized its actions in terms of the Keynesian acceptance of unbalanced budgets. It would be wrong to blame the founders of the welfare state for recent developments. What we are now witnessing, however, highlights the danger of absent-minded and unlimited enlargement of the state's role.

People in Britain are, however, becoming more aware of the enormous waste in the administration of public expenditure and the arbitrariness in spending public funds. They perceive how they are being forced to accept a pattern of consumption dictated by the state, whereas they would prefer more “private wage” and less “social wage.”

Above all, people are increasingly aware that public expenditure has to be paid for by higher taxation. Whereas during the first post-war decade a married man with two young children paid income tax only if his earnings were at or above the British national average, now he has to pay even if his earnings are under half the national average.

Monetarism and the Depression

Peter Temin's essay on the “great contraction” of the 1930s, Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? (1976), has clarified the Keynesian interpretation of the Depression. Challenging the long prevalent monetarist explanation of Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz in their Monetary History of the United States, Temin claims that a major, autonomous decline in consumption occurred in the early 1930s and that this decline, by its repercussions on financial markets, caused the sharp and persistent recession. Thus, Temin argues that the declining money stock of the 1930s was a symptom of basic changes in the real sector. Consequently, even if bank failures had not reduced the money stock, declines in money would still have been near the actually observed levels. Temin interprets fluctuating interest rates as a sign that the demand for money fell faster than the supply of money contracted (for any given rate of interest).

If valid, these arguments would clearly weaken the monetarist claim that the “great contraction” resulted from inept and unnecessary money management. Several problems, however, weaken Temin's attack. For example, Temin emphasizes the year 1930 in his analysis of the monetarists' argument on the decline of the money stock. This emphasis is surprising inasmuch as Friedman and Schwartz deal with the period 1929 to 1933 and note that the major declines occurred after 1930. Then again, Temin's argument for an autonomous decline in consumption rests on only three observations, consumption in 1921, 1930, and 1938. This narrow focus precludes reliable conclusions: It is difficult to even identify the abnormal year in a selection as sparce as Temin's. Also, it is unclear that a major autonomous fall in exports reinforced the decline in consumption, as Temin argues. Furthermore, he fails to investigate whether declines in the incentive to spend and invest might be a cause of recession.

Temin may also be faulted for suggesting that the money stock would have fallen regardless of bank failures. The evidence indicates an excess supply of money preceding the wave of bank failures. Also, Temin lacks a defensible explanation for the behavior of real money balances. It is possible to explain the decline in short-term interest rates from either a Keynesian or a monetarist viewpoint. Thus, the evidence on real money balances fails to support Temin's explanation of declines in incomes.

Asian Monetary History: Gold & Silver

Under a bimetallic monetary standard of gold and silver, the silver standard countries had acted as automatic stabilizers, absorbing either gold or silver depending on their changing relative prices. But the government-induced shift from bimetallism to the predominant use of gold in the latter part of the nineteenth century, meant that the exchange rate between silver and gold standard countries was free to float for the first time. A combination of circumstances produced a longterm decline in silver prices which, in effect, was a continuous depreciation of this exchange rate. This chronic depreciation stimulated production and exports in the silver standard countries while rendering the exports of the gold standard countries relatively more expensive.

The government of India found fluctuations in the price of silver disquieting. These fluctuations were increased with the passage of the Sherman Act in the U.S. (1890) followed by a repeal of its silver purchase clause. The government acted to place India on a de facto gold exchange standard by intervening to maintain a fixed exchange rate between the India rupee and the British pound sterling.

The Chinese exchange rate would not be pegged and so it continued to fluctuate. These fluctuations meant that interest rates, prices, and output in China diverged from those in the gold standard countries. A floating exchange rate insulated China against an import of the trade cycle from the gold standard countries. Indeed, inflows and outflows of silver acted counter-cyclically in the world economy. The Chinese wholesale price index closely followed the Chinese exchange rate. The U.S. price of silver, and relative prices in the U.S. and in China, also closely followed each other. Chinese prices exhibited greater stability than did the price index in the gold standard countries. This monetary stability was shattered only in the 1930s, when the U.S. government's attempts to maintain the price of silver in effect imposed a massive deflation on the Chinese economy.

Specie Money vs. Antibullionists

Today's monetary issue is as old as economics itself, yet as modern as tomorrow: the question of the monetary standard, which, in modern terms, is the criterion of monetary policy. The “bullionists” are supposed to have won the nineteenth century monetary controversies, yet it is the “antibullionist” dogma that pervails today. We have the abstract (noncommodity) monetary unit desired by the antibullionists, but do not know how to manage it because we adopted it by default rather than by design.

Ricardo argued that nothing would prevent a costless currency from becoming worthless. No one has yet proved him wrong, and today we appear to be proving him right. The banking school became the stewards of the antibullionist doctrine, and relied on banking practice rather than politicians to maintain the value of the monetary unit. Forgotten were the fallacies at the root of banking school principles, such as the Real Bills doctrine. But these fallacies governed the operation of the banking system. The banking school dogma was tested and proved a failure in the thirties. Though the public believed the bullionists had won, public policy had, in effect, unknowingly enshrined the banking school doctrine. Hence, the disastrous consequences for the banking system—which was believed to be the product of the bullionist paradigm, but in fact operated according to the principles of antibullionism.

But the modern International Monetary Fund is simply a repetition of past errors. International reserves, intended to determine the international money supply, must instead function to protect an indeterminate supply. We are still left with the problem. Can a noncommodity money allow us to find a market-determined rule to guide monetary policy in the place of a real commodity money and the derived rules of the past? Monetarists think they have found such a rule, but neglect real factors (e.g., war) that are responsible for inflation-deflation cycles.

“It is no wonder that we do not know what to do. We know not what we have done or are doing.”

Inflation Effects on Capital

The tax laws levy on nominal returns and permit depreciation only on historical costs. For a firm to keep up (in real terms) with inflation, it ought to depreciate on replacement costs; and it ought not be taxed on the increase in nominal income that is necessary solely to maintain the firm's balance sheet as it was before inflation. Since these effects are ignored in our current tax laws, “taxes are being levied not only on the income generated by the capital, but also on the capital itself. This taxation reduces the incentives of firms to invest.”

Likewise, progressive taxation of personal income requires the investor to earn a higher pre-tax return if his after-tax return is to be the same as in a noninflationary environment. An economic environment of high taxes and inflation raises the firm's cost of acquiring capital at a time when their after-tax return is falling. These factors will profoundly distort future economic growth and well-being.

We cannot “learn to live with inflation” and maintain our standard of living. Either politicians must substantially revise the tax laws (which seems unlikely), or we must adopt monetary and fiscal policies to reduce or eliminate price inflation.

Consumption of Public Health Services

Does the social position or class of individuals affect the amount of medical treatment they receive when they are ill? We can answer this by relating public expenditure on Health Services in England and Wales to the incidence of illness in socioeconomic groups.

Various measures of the distribution of ill-health (morbidity) among the social classes indicate that a greater proportion of people in the “lower” classes describe themselves as ill than in the “higher” classes. To some extent this may be explained by the different age and sex demographics of the social classes.

Estimates of public expenditure on health care reveal that relatively more is spent on those in the higher than in the lower classes. One estimate, in fact, suggests that people at the top of the social scale receive at least 40 percent more expenditure per person than do people at the bottom.

The estimated differences in expenditure per person may result from either or both of two factors: differences in the incidence of disease within each social class, and differences in the utilization of the Health Service by those describing themselves as ill within each class. The first alternative seems invalid because the available evidence suggests that “whatever other class differences there may be in Britain, differential incidence of self-reported illness is not one of them.” Therefore, accepting the second alternative leads to the question: why do the higher classes make relatively more use of the Health Services?

A sample utility-maximizing model of utilization would imply that individuals will “consume” National Health care up to the point where the marginal disutility of consuming further care exceeds its marginal utility. The marginal disutility of health care may be lower for the higher classes because they tend to spend less time travelling (as they can use their telephones to make appointments). The higher classes also use more health care because they live near better medical facilities and because they are likely to lose less income during the time they are consuming health care. Moreover, the higher classes may judge the marginal valuation of the benefits from health care as higher because they tend to perceive health services as real improvements in their health.

This suggests that cuts in public expenditure on public services would hurt the higher classes more than the lower classes. If such cuts were also accompanied by tax cuts, the lower classes might be better off and the higher classes worse off than they are now.

Factory Regulation and Vested Interests

Evidence suggests that Lord Althorp's Factory Act actual purpose was not industrial regulation to protect children, but rather an early example of industry leaders using the law to regulate their competitors.

As a legislative landmark in the history of industrial regulation, Lord Althorp's Edition: current; Page: [72] Factory Act of 1833 prohibited the employment of children younger than 12 years of age in Britain's textile mills. In current textbook literature, Althorp's Factory Act established government's right to intervene in industry to protect the economically and socially exploited. Historians have come to view the social welfare scope of the Factory Act as the beginning of modern economic regulation.

The Act was clearly a precedent for subsequent social and economic legislation, but its purpose is open to debate. Rather than intending it to protect young laborers, the authors of the Factory Act designed it to promote the interests of technologically superior cloth manufacturers by driving from business the more numerous but less sophisticated manufacturers who depended on the labor of children.

Before the Reform Act of 1832, a factory bill might well have embodied such humane reform proposals as those of Michael Sadler. However, the Reform Bill's extending of the franchise (and the reconstitution of Britain's electoral districts) hurt the reformers' political base and shifted the new power in Parliament to large manufacturing districts. Resulting factory legislation thus represented the interests of textile magnates rather than the socially-minded country gentry.

Traditionally dependent on water power for their mills, manufacturers had built rural factories away from major centers of population. The steam engine changed much of this. The urban steam mills with their greater power facilitated the greater use of labor-saving machines, which in turn diminished the need for child labor. By shifting political power to the cities, the Reform Bill allowed steam-using manufacturers to apply law to industry rivals.

In effect, the Act decreased the supply of cloth and increased price, and the additional revenues accrued to the plants controlling the largest measure of product unaffected by the Act. Moreover, the penalties for continued employment of children fell most heavily on the mills dependent on water. These penalties placed an additional burden on the competitors of steam-powered plants, thus enhancing the capacity of steam operators to control cloth manufacturing.

Poverty Programs and Government

Mississippi has the greatest incidence of statistical poverty as defined by the official government indicator. However, the author contends, the higher-than-national incidence of statistical poverty in Mississippi does not of itself suggest a need for increased logistical support for programs of service delivery, consciousness raising, or an expanded government presence. In fact, “it might be worthwhile to consider what government is currently doing which it could cease doing if concern for the underprivileged population and expansion of opportunity for that category is the criterion of concern.”

We need to critically reappraise the automatic response of addressing appeals to government for help, solution, aids, and programs. Many of these appeals, regardless of the public interest vocabularies in which they may be couched, seem to work out as the efforts of special groups to profit at the expense of other groups through the political process. And there may be as much effort on the part of government to seek out clientele and beneficiaries as Edition: current; Page: [73] there are efforts to use the collective and coercive power of government. There appears to be considerable government-encouraged activity to mobilize community groups to seek increased government assistance.

Quite frequently it becomes clear after several decades of implementation of a messianic policy that it does not have the consequences enlightened spokesmen said it would have, but rather the consequences predicted by critics. This often leads to new ground wherein those enamored of government really intend to make it “work” in the public interest. The author suggests that we should evaluate the potential outcomes inherent in the process itself. We should also scrutinize schemes to mobilize resources in order to remove those hindrances to opportunity and productivity spawned by interest groups that manage to use the machinery of government in their own behalf (in the name of “the public interest”). We finally need to devise solutions to restrict government from prolonging poverty among persons, groups, or areas.

The Costs of Regulating Market Information

Expanded government-required disclosure of information by business is a legacy of the New Deal. More extensive mandatory disclosure gave the promise of less fraud on investors, better administration in the reporting corporations, more equitable and efficient capital markets, a more efficient allocation of resources, and greater governmental ability to manage the economy. While it is virtually an article of faith in many circles that government-required disclosure is a good thing, it could be that the costs of the SEC and FTC reporting requirements outweigh their benefits. Benston's investigations reveal not only that the cost of providing the required data is quite substantial, but also that the benefits to investors from the data are rather meager.

The Securities Act of 1933 and the Security Exchange Act of 1934 pioneered mandatory disclosure in the securities field. These and subsequent disclosure acts were intended to reduce fraud and inadvertent misrepresentation; reduce security price manipulation made possible through inadequate disclosure; enhance fairness to non-insiders; enhance public confidence in the securities market; increase the efficiency of making securities investments; and provide a greater flow and range of information to investors. Edition: current; Page: [74] Were mandated disclosures successful? “Little, if any, evidence supports the belief that these possible benefits have been achieved. Nor is there much, if any, evidence that is consistent with the claim that the Acts addressed a real problem. Furthermore, reason does not support the belief that the benefits claimed can be achieved or are indeed benefits.”

The FTC requires extensive reporting through its line-of-business report program. Under this program, certain businesses are required to collect and disclose detailed data on shipments, sales, advertising, profits, investments, and assets. The benefits claimed for the program range from improved anti-trust enforcement to enhancing labor's position in wage negotiations. Yet again, the promised benefits of disclosure turn out, upon investigation, to be little more than pious hopes. The FTC line-of-business categories for reporting do not represent a meaningful aggregation of data, and thus cannot realize the purported goals of FTC-required disclosure.

In light of this, why is government disclosure supported despite its cost and its failure to provide benefits? The answer, in part, lies in the public's apparent belief that government regulation of disclosure is beneficial and necessary. Another part of the answer is gained by asking who benefits from government mandated disclosure. The truth is that groups ranging from bureaucrats to financial analysts have a substantial interest in required disclosure. Nevertheless, if evidence can alter beliefs, there is hope for ending the counter-productive disclosure measures that are in large part a legacy of the New Deal.

Rent Regulation

The 1974 Rent Act (UK) on the furnished rental housing sector in Glasgow replaced the Rent Act of 1965. The latter distinguished between furnished and unfurnished lettings and provided security of tenure to unfurnished tenants. Rents of furnished accommodation were generally market determined and tenants had limited security of tenure.

The 1974 Act did not alter unfurnished lettings very much but made substantial changes in furnished lettings: they were regulated in the same manner as unfurnished lettings. Rents were to be “fair rents” assessed by rent officers and were defined as rents established in a free market without a scarcity premium. The fair rent criterion is theoretically imprecise and vague in its possible interpretations. The rent officers operate on an average cost pricing basis. This might seem unlikely to drive out landlords. But there are some difficulties. By giving tenants security of tenure, the 1974 Act increased the risks of letting and reduced the certainty of future returns, and reduced the landlords' ability to dispose of their property in their own way. Since landlords, who usually are small investors with two or three properties, often have a specific disposal date in mind (i.e., retirement from the labor force) this increased uncertainty might be expected to influence investment and letting decisions. In particular, landlords may adopt letting strategies which reduce the effective security of tenure provisions, for example, by letting only to transient tenants.

Surveys indicate that the 1974 Act did, in fact, reduce the supply of furnished Edition: current; Page: [75] properties. This reduction has not been counterbalanced by an expansion in municipal property available for letting. Consequently, those who wish to obtain furnished lettings are trapped between the effects of the Rent Acts and intransigent policies on municipal letting. Paradoxically, the attempt to reduce the power of the landlords results in a reduction in supply and an increase in excess demand. This may actually increase the power of landlords over their tenants. The current review of housing policy and the Rent Act will, perhaps, replace dogma with analysis in formulating housing policies that will be clearly defined.

Engels on Economics

Engels deserves a “more important and more interesting place in the history of economics, Marxist or otherwise, than leading authorities … have been prepared to ascribe to him.” W.O. Henderson's recent two volume Life of Friedrich Engels is no exception.

Engels' economic writings begin with his “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” written when he was only 23 years old. Remarkably, this work identified three themes central to Marxism before Marx wrote them. Engels emphasized periodic crises, a theme of great importance to Marxism even though he exaggerated their importance. Second, Engels predicted concentration of business before the joint stock company, and third, he argued that technological change would render Malthus's gloomy predictions obsolete. Significantly, Engels identified a third factor of production after land and labor—the mental element of thought or invention—which he differentiated from “sheer labor.” This idea, if followed up, would have undermined Marx's system from the start.

The theme of technological progress appears again in Engels' “The Principles of Communism,” a first draft of The Communist Manifesto. Engels' Principles, however, contains a description of the workings of the communist economy which was omitted from the Manifesto. (Marx never did tackle the problem of how a communist economy would function.) In this essay, Engels relies on technological progress to eliminate scarcity and the concomitant need for private property. However, he also calls for a period of transition. Hutchison comments “Never has there been a wider contrast or more extreme contradiction between short-term, ‘transitional’ aims and methods requiring the creation of vast bureaucratic vested interests and, on the other hand, what was professed to be the long-term objective of the ‘withering away’ of the state.”

In Poverty of Philosophy (Introduction of Marx's work), Engels attacks the Utopian Socialists, especially Rodbertus, who had proposed a system of labor money based on a labor theory of value. In his attack, Engels gave an excellent description of the role of a competitive market in resource allocation and guidance of production. “Mises and Hayek could hardly have made the point more forcefully.” However, in his and Marx own utopian schemes, he totally ignored the insight in his criticism of the other utopians. Hutchison concludes, “Surely no one in the whole of intellectual history can have looked a major, pressing intellectual and practical problem so clearly and piercingly in the face and then so blithely and confidently passed on without a word.”

The Depoliticization of Society

Central concepts of classical Greek political philosophy are today anachronistic and tyrannical because of structural transformations in Western social institutions. For example, the Greeks held that the political state is identical with total society, that the polity is a “whole” that subsumes subordinate “parts.” This whole/part scheme was plausible in the ancient Greek polis because politics so colored and dominated most social institutions. But this politicized scheme became illusory in modern Europe with the emergence of liberal bourgeois capitalism. The growing independence of such non-political and semi-autonomous social realms as commerce and religion increasingly claimed the now self-conscious individuals' allegiance. In effect, society and free individuals gradually emerged distinct from the state.

Accordingly, modern attempts to revive the now obsolete premises of Greek politicized thinking harbor false assumptions: (1) that the state can be “humanized” as a family or community with a socially unifying purpose; and (2) that individuals are completely “political animals” that realize themselves through political identification. In the modern pluralist and individualist societies, attempts to return to the old Greek politicized whole/part scheme would tend toward tyranny as Benjamin Constant argued in his De l'esprit de conquête et de l'usurpation (1814). Constant's crucial insight is that the modern revival of the old res publica concept of politics: “only serves to overlegitimize a technically efficient bureaucratic agency with police powers. The idea that only politics provides a ‘public space’ for human self-realization … makes it nearly impossible to understand why citizens might want to resist the coercive encroachments of a hypertrophic state.”

Today in the West we enjoy:

Today democratic centralism would interfere with the naturally harmonious and voluntary arteries of true social action such as nonpolitical science, law, art, family, education, press, and the economy. Also, the modern separation of state and society renders implausible such classical moral claims (in Plato and Aristotle) as the emphasis on duties instead of rights and the subordination of the individual (or his chosen social agencies) to the all-encompassing state.

Aristippus, the article's title character, was a North African voluptuary and pupil of Socrates. As founder of the pleasure-approving and earthy Cyrenaic school he rejected the necessity of submerging his personal individuality in the civic collective. Aristippus believed (says Xenophon) that freedom is incompatible with the politics of ruling or being ruled: “I do not shut myself up in the four corners of a politeia.” Today Aristippus has become a type of the modern depoliticized individual.

Is Philosophy Politically Subversive?

In 399 B.C. Socrates was found guilty by an Athenian court of the charges of corrupting the youth and religious irreverence through his practice of philosophy. Plato's Apology gives the indictment as follows: “Socrates does wrong corrupting the youth and not respecting the gods whom the city respects, but other, new half-divinities.” We need to appreciate the plausibility of the guilty verdict to appreciate the real threat posed perennially to politics and the “city” by philosophy. The nonliberal tradition of Burckhardt and Sorel perceived how politically subversive Socrates was as the prototype of the questioning philosopher. How would we today deal with an analogous court case involving the perennial Socratic issue of the freethinker in collision with various religious, moral, or patriotic beliefs that we may hold sacred and unexamined?

Was Socrates guilty as charged? Important issues of political philosophy lurk in this question. On the surface Socrates rebuts the specific charges of corrupting the youth and religious impiety; but he turns his defense into an offensive and defiant provocation. His counterindictment of the Athenians—that they lack philosophic self-examination—exposes the political subversion always latent in philosophy.

In a disturbing sense Socrates is “guilty,” at least from the perspective of the political city. The Athenian jurors were infuriated by Socrates' tone and style of defense that invited conviction. On the charge that Socrates had novel notions about the city's gods, the jurors might naturally suspect Socrates' very personal and unorthodox inner voice, his daimonion, which pitted private conscience against public law and authority. On the other charge of corrupting the youth, the jury understood that Socrates communicated a “corrupting” esoteric teaching to his inner circle. Socrates' negative teaching, his exposing politicians, poets, and craftsmen to embarrasing crossexamination became an object lesson in skeptical attack for the young.

Decent, nonphilosophic jurors might well be suspicious of how Socrates' damonion made him refrain from participating in politics (31d). “This is Socrates' negative politics: to deny that the public realm is the truly political realm and to assert his inner logos intransigently in the service of the city.” What public good could result from the Socratic questioning that ended in perplexity and undermined the old orthodoxies? In effect, Socrates' court defense recapitulates his offenses as a philosopher against the city. The Apology implies: “When philosophy comes upon the city it comes as a threat.” Plato no doubt sensed this danger but also felt that “The side resisting enlightenment also has something vital to defend and should be addressed.”

Plato's Republic as a Political Dystopia

Plato's dialogue, the Republic has often been taken as presenting Plato's vision of his own ideal state. The Greek name by which the state is called in the dialogue, Callipolis (“the Beautiful City”), at first sight supports this view. In fact, however, Plato's intention in the dialogue was to minimize the role of politics: he presented Callipolis as a city fit only for animals. In this way the customary portrayal of Plato as an enemy of freedom can be reversed: he was in fact a proponent of growth through an inward process involving the social rather than through external action.

Much of the Republic is organized in the form of a comedy, which in the Greek usage implies that the weakness of human nature is stressed. Men are presented in ridiculous fashion, and their pretensions are unmasked. This is particularly evident in the work of Aristophanes, whose comedies strongly influenced the Republic. For example, Aristophanes' The Birds depicts a utopian political society founded, as one might expect from the title, by birds.

Laughter is a frequent theme in the Republic: as Socrates presents the main features of Callipolis, he often laughs or evokes laughter in his audience. In contrast, in the ideal city itself, almost all laughter is banned.

Even more important is the frequent use of animal imagery in Plato's dialogue. The guardian class's breeding policies are compared to animal breeding, and the politician is likened to a shepherd whose concern for his sheep's welfare ends in butchering or exploiting them for his own ends. These references strongly support viewing the Callipolis as something to be avoided.

Plato's actual views on politics may be best discerned in other dialogues, such as the Gorgias. He believed in the inner cultivation of the soul. He contrasted self-development with political action in the city, to the detriment of politics.

Cicero and Modern Political Philosophy

A tradition of hostile criticism—including Plutarch, Petrarch, and most of the nineteenth century, particularly the antiliberal historian Mommsen—has erroneously denigrated and underestimated the Cicero's achievement as a political thinker. This “fabric of criticism” has created the problem of the “two Ciceros”: Cicero the politician, the living man who was pragmatic, vainglorious, and overly attached to Roman power politics; and Cicero the author and moral philosopher, whose philosophic wisdom criticized unjust power and transcended the political Edition: current; Page: [80] and cultural limits of imperial Rome. Even after we dispose of the canard that Cicero was a “mindless eclectic,” we are left to resolve how he tried to reconcile power and philosophy, the city and man, in his political philosophy.

Though only partly successful, Cicero sought to encourage the birth and growth of moral and political philosophy in Rome. His significance as a principled defender of republican liberty and a mediator of the Socratic tradition of moral political philosophy was responsible for a more favorable estimate toward Cicero that was shared by early Christianity, the Renaissance humanists, and the liberal republican tradition in England and revolutionary America. Key works which trace how the classical republicanism associated with Cicero influenced later republicans, particularly the eighteenth century liberal Whigs are: Zera Fink, The Classical Republicans (1945), Robert Cummings, Human Nature and History (1968); Caroline Robbins, The English Common-wealthman (1959); and J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975). Yet despite the ferment of recent American scholarship concerning classical republicanism, political philosophers have shown little interest in examining the political thought of Cicero, one of the central thinkers in that tradition because of such works as his fragmentary De Re Publica and his De Legibus.

Two of the chief names associated with the revival of American political philosophy during the past generation have, however, studied Cicero more intensely: Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. It would illuminate the central issues of politics, to see how these two modern mediators of the tradition of political philosophy deal with the ancient Roman mediator of that tradition. Both Strauss and Voegelin regard Cicero as of secondary interest; their deemphasis of Cicero derives from their underlying principles of political philosophy. Whereas Zera Fink and Robert Cummings stress the continuities of Cicero's political thought with the modern liberal tradition, Strauss and Voegelin stress the discontinuities between the ancients and moderns. Strauss views the moderns as too democratic and not concerned enough with the

moral qualities of a good citizen. Voegelin sees Cicero as “more implicated in the development of Gnosticism and disorder” in an “Ecumenic Age” than in grasping the Platonic insight into being. Yet Cicero, as a bridge between practical policies and philosophy, should have more to offer these two modern political philosophers.

Strauss sees Cicero as a spokesman for the ancient philosophical understanding of politics. Between politics (the city) and philosophy (man) there is a tension. The philosopher, as a defender of the autonomous claims of philosophy before the city, is a potential political subversive. Accordingly, Strauss's analysis of Cicero's De Re Publica stresses the difficulty of reconciling justice and natural law or right with the legitimacy of the Roman Empire. Strauss sees a “radical gap between the philosophic life and the civil or moral life, between philosophy and the city.”

Voegelin finds Cicero difficient as a penetrating philosopher and too Rome-centered a patriot. Indicting Cicero of “Gnostic immanentization,” he believes the De Re Publica chauvinistically favors Roman politics over the philosophically ideal city. Cicero, too much a man of his pragmatic “Ecumenic Age,” was not in touch with “the order of reality through the revelation of one divine ground of all being as the Nous.”

The Roman Jurist Gaius and Social Thought

The second-century A.D. Roman jurist Gaius has exercised continuous, if often subterranean, influence in the development of the social sciences and of social concepts that transcend legal terminology. Although until the nineteenth century Gaius' Institutes of Civil Law was available only in the sixth-century summary provided in the Institutes of the Emperor Justinian, his method of analysis and approach to law nevertheless was followed by many important figures of medieval and modern history. This situation is in a way paradoxical, since Gaius himself is a neglected figure who has not been studied directly very much. “Gaianism” became a dominant archetype of social analysis. “Though by intent a method of teaching law, his book suggested an epistemology,” a paradigm to scientifically study society and culture.

In his attempt to codify Roman law, Gaius proceeded according to a threefold method. First, he considered persons (including degree of “liberty,” kinship, citizenship, and other social status); next objects; and, finally, the relations between persons and objects, i.e., actions. This tripartite classificatory scheme of persons, things, and actions to some extent reflects the influence of Greek philosophy, particularly the systematizing tendencies of Aristotle. In his stress upon beginning with the human world, however, Gaius displays the Roman tendency to avoid metaphysical abstractions divorced from practical considerations. The various uses to which Gaianism was put form “a historical and conceptual sort of palimpsest.”

Justinian's summary of Gaius' work altered its emphasis somewhat. (A similar transformation of Gaianism is apparent in each later epoch). Justinian placed greater importance on the power of the state than did Gaius, as one might expect from a Byzantine emperor. Justinian preserved the tripartite system of organization, however, and it is through his Institutes that the medieval jurists became acquainted with Gaius.

Both the twelfth-century commentators on Roman law at the University of Bologna and the thirteenth-century Glassators adhered to the methodological essentials of the Gaian tripartite scheme. Some of them, such as Baldus, the noted pupil of Bartolus, pointed out that the precepts of Roman law were not always true to historical reality.

In the sixteenth century, a revolution took place in legal studies. Some jurists favored a rationalizing method, proceeding in an almost geometric fashion. Others, influenced by the dialectic of Ramus and by humanism, wished to substitute rhetorical for logical principles of organization. Another school favored a more historical approach, wishing to supplement Roman law by feudal and other historical materials. Among the most important in the latter category were the jurists François Connan and Hugues Doneau. The attack upon the universal validity of Roman law was even more marked in the work of Jean Bodin, who argued that the sovereign was not bound by Roman precedent. Nevertheless, all of these writers display Gaian ways of thinking in their work.

The split between rationalist and historically descriptive methods in the study of law widened in the eighteenth century. Leibniz was perhaps the most ardent rationalist of the period, but the work of the great reviver of natural law, Hugo Grotius, shows that the Gaian tradition was still strong during this period.

The rise of the German Historical School of Law, whose greatest figure was Karl Marx's teacher, Friedrich von Savigny, represented a return to the humanistic preoccupations of Gaianism. Its stress Edition: current; Page: [82] upon particular legal institutions and historical detail as opposed to abstract generalizations did not at all mean that Gaius' tripartite scheme of classification was abandoned. On the contrary, it remained extremely influential, principally through the dominant position of legal studies in nineteenth-century education. Gaian categories played an important role in the rise of sociology, since the founders of the discipline were indebted to Savigny, who used the Gaian plan in his studies of Roman law.

The Myth of Social Hierarchy

One of the major obstacles to progress in the social sciences has been the adoption of the assumption that social hierarchy is inevitable. Supporters of this view usually combine with it the claim that human nature is basically evil and irrational. The proponents of these anti-libertarian approaches are usually social reformers, regarding society as an object to be manipulated. A more productive attitude toward progress in the social sciences involves questioning the heroic assumption that social scientists can remake society. All such plans imply restrictive rules limiting social experimentation, which in their irrationality and self-defeating character are analogous to the thought processes characteristic of schizophrenia. One of the pioneers of a sounder analysis in the social sciences has been the psychologist Trigant Burrow, who believed that social neuroses should be studied from a biological standpoint.

The defenders of social hierarchy support their view by four types of arguments: psychological, contractual, metaphysical, and empirical. The first type assumed that command and obedience are intrinsic to human nature. Since, however, some people command while others must obey, the postulates of human nature suggested by this model are violated in hierarchical organizations. Similarly, in the contractual model, only those in power have freedom; the social contract makes the allegedly free contractors into slaves of the government. Metaphysical arguments about the necessity of order are arbitrary, and the empirical argument that non-hierarchical organizations cannot function ignores contrary evidence.

All of the arguments in favor of hierarchy rest on moves designed to make the position they defend infallibly true. For example, power will be defined in such a way that any claim that a non-coercive relationship exists will simply be defined away as a covert exercise of power. Such a procedure of making one's arguments true by definition should be replaced by a more open epistemology. As Paul Feyerband has pointed out, science has progressed through an “anything goes” policy of free experiment.

The same policy is needed in social affairs. Instead of a rigid hierarchy, freely experimenting social institutions should be encouraged.

Contract and Political Thought

The idea of contract has of course been crucial in the development of theories concerning liberty. The history of contract has been impeded, however, by a false paradigm elaborated by Otto von Gierke, which has dominated scholarly inquiry on this topic. Gierke's model should be replaced by one which emphasizes the linguistic and historical context of the various contractarian authors. We need to devote special care in determining what actually constitutes social contract.

Gierke, in his great work Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, which appeared between 1868 and 1913, judged writers on contract by the extent to which they approximated an ideal model. The model contained two contracts: (1) a social contract establishing a government, founded upon the natural rights of individuals; and (2) a contract of lordship, in which the already constituted society determined its form of government.

Although the social contract was logically prior to the contract of lordship, it in fact succeeded it historically. Many medieval writers, Gierke claimed, accepted the notion of a contract of lordship and it had become by the early modern period a commonplace of discussion. What was new was the contention that society itself rested upon contract, a theory which Gierke found most elaborately developed by Althusius.

Gierke's overemphasis upon the dual contract ideal as an ideal model misleads him into downplaying authors such as Hobbes and Rousseau who do not adhere to it, even though they are major figures in the history of the idea of contract. Gierke often anachronisticaly judges (and misreads) writers by how they conform to a model which had not been formulated at all at the time they wrote. His misuse of evidence is especially apparent in his treatment of the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastics such as Suarez. Also, although Gierke regards Althusius' work as the culmination of the idea of contract, he is forced to admit that later writers did not accept the allegedly essential points of the ideal model of contract which Althusius had developed.

If Gierke's paradigm is abandoned, one can see that the view of contract held, for example, by the French Huguenots in the sixteenth century was not a contract theory as that term is understood today. Mornay, the probable author of the Vindiciae contra tyrranos (1579), postulated two contracts: (1) one between the king, the people, and God; and (2) the other between the king and people by themselves. He did not, however, believe that the institution of monarchy had been established on a contractual basis.

Similarly, the Calvinist theologians such as Theodore de Bèze who wrote on the issue of resistance emphasized the role of the fundamental laws of the kingdom, which were non-contractual. Even Gierke's great exemplar Althusius, although he did indeed found social institutions on contract, did not maintain that it was individuals who made the contracts. On the contrary, families and associations were the proper parties in a contract.

The connection between contracts and individual rights was first made by the English Levellers of the seventeenth century, such as Richard Overton. They did not have a notion of the state of nature, however; this was an innovation of Thomas Hobbes. The Hobbesian doctrine did not supplant the earlier ideas of a constitutional contract, in which some fundamental laws and institutions were held to lack a contractual basis. Both doctrines may be found, for example, in the work of John Locke.

Private vs. Public: the Domain of Freedom

Political observers have noted a curious similarity in the political positions of right- and left-wing radicals. In recent years, this convergence has even led to joint conferences between the two groups. A common hatred of political bureaucracy and a call for decentralization comprise two important elements of this new concensus.

A second issue also unites both new-left radicals and neoconservatives: i.e. where does a just society draw the line between the public and private sectors? They differ sharply, however, as to where each party would draw that line. Nonetheless, the distinction between public and private pervades both ideologies. Prof. Van Gunsteren traces the roots and logic of the public/private dichotomy and next discusses the problematical nature of the modern corporation, an entity which defies classification in this traditional Western framework.

What are the contrasting elements which constitute our conception of what is public and private? Obviously, settings vary for each sphere, for example, homes vs. law courts. Activities take on different meanings depending on whether they occur in public or private settings. (It makes a big difference whether President Carter kisses Jacqueline Kennedy in public or alone in private.) Furthermore, the standards of the public sphere are objective (embodied in a constitution or corpus of law), and they allow for public access to all those considered members of the public. On the other hand, access to an area in the private sphere (a home or club) is under the subjective decision of the owner. In addition, each sphere utilizes differing forms of control over the actions of others: authority backed up by power and force in the public domain; self-interest, love, hate, and expertise in the private domain.

Throughout Western history, the distinction between public and private space has been essential to freedom and to the idea of the individual person. The existence of free individuals rests upon the act of self-awareness. Self-awareness occurs because human beings are able to view themselves from an excentric position. They can assume a “metastandpoint” from which they critically evaluate the relationship that exists between themselves and the environment. This objective metaspace belongs, by its very nature, to the private realm. Modern political thinking, thus, postulates the maintenance of the public/private boundary as basic to the possibility of freedom.

To many, this distinction has become, in its deepest sense, sacred. Violating it (doing private things in public) is viewed as a moral pollution. As a result, the separation between the two realms should not be tampered with lightly.

The modern corporation does seem to blur the distinction, which makes it an incompletely assimilated element in modern life. Defined as a legal person, enjoying many of the freedoms and protections intended for individual persons, the corporation also possesses enormous capital reserves and makes decisions which may deeply affect the structure of society and the lives of individuals.

Government cannot effectively control corporations, since business traditionally may not be forced to produce. Unpopular government measures merely result in reduced investment with, at times, seriously negative social consequences, such as a depression. What is more, no recourse exists against a private decision which produces widespread public repercussions.

Finally, the modern corporation possesses Edition: current; Page: [85] a force in both the private and public domains which few, if any, individuals can match. The status of the corporation, thus, makes a mockery of the “equality” of persons under the law, since few individuals can exert influence with their freedoms when such powerful competitors crowd the field.

Montaigne and the Value of Tolerance

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) and his philosophic successors urged the value of earthly well-being over the life-denying pretension of glory and otherworldly virtues. These attitudes are largely responsible for the prosperity and liberty we today enjoy as members of a liberal commercial society. In particular, Montaigne's genial skepticism and tolerance, as expounded in his longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (II, 12) make him an early seminal architect of modern liberal political theory.

On the surface, Montaigne's “Apology” professes to be a defense of the rationalist Natural Theology of the fifteenth century writer Raymond Sebond. In reality, Montaigne uses his apparent subject as a cover to inculcate the spirit of tolerant and liberal skepticism. The “Apology” provides a theoretical justification for such central tenets of liberal politics as toleration and a “technologically oriented natural science.” It also critiques both conventional philosophy and religion. Man should see himself in continuity with animals in order to confirm the desirability of such tangible and earthly goods as peace, comfort, and health. But man can transcend mere beastiality through skeptical reason. In fact, nondogmatic reason is politically desirable. Traditional restraints on human barbarism (e.g. religions, moral precepts, fear of punishment) have failed; moderation, skepticism, and science will be humane substitutes for dogmatic extremism. Montaigne's epistemology—a form of moderate falsifiable empiricism—keeps human minds open and tolerant of future innovation. Such a tolerant skepticism will lead to scientific free inquiry and political tolerance.

Montaigne's tolerance for acquisitiveness, self-indulgence, and scientific progress leads to earthly peace. “Thus, each individual will be tolerant of the liberty of others … because his goals do not require that others be subordinate to him.” “The public principle of society ought to be: let each go his own way, so long as he respects the equal liberty of others.” Thus Montaigne's skeptical materialism aimed at a liberal commercial society. Montaigne and his successors—Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke—sought to place earthly happiness ahead of such self- and other-denying “virtues” as glory and salvation. Yet one problem remains and has inspired the criticism of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger: Does Montaigne's relativism and tolerance for the free play of commercial bourgeois individuals tend toward the stability of civil liberty?

Commerce, Utility, Character, and Republicanism

The political theory which lies at the basis of the American Revolution rests upon a view of human nature which challenges the assumptions of classical political philosophy. The supporters of “commercial republicanism” such as Montesquieu, Hume, and Tocqueville elaborated a new model of political virtue.

The commercial republicans challenged the pursuit of glory praised by classical political theory. While not denying the achievements of Sparta, for example, writers such as Hume claimed that the attempt to achieve heroic virtue contradicted the requirements of human nature. Montesquieu pointed out also that the other worldly values taught by Christianity went counter to the imperatives of the human condition. Classical political philosophy assumed that truth and virtue were ideals attainable only by an elite. In contrast, the commercial republicans believed that one ought to accept human nature as it actually is in practice.

This more realistic policy led to an emphasis on utility. If society were founded upon each person's pursuit of his own interests, no unrealistically high standard of behavior would be needed for a society's continued existence.

Furthermore, the commercial republicans argued that emphasis on utility would tend to civilize men and, by downplaying glory, de-emphasize militarism and encourage peace. Writers in this tradition such as John Adams assumed that the actual business of government would be the task of a small group. The rest of society would be confined to commercial occupation; but, since utility was the paramount virtue, the majority's sense of self-esteem would be strengthened.

Some of the commercial republicans recognized that the form of society they favored had weaknesses. Adam Smith thought that preoccupation with economic matters might tend to narrow human nature, and Tocqueville feared that the dissolution of social ties not founded upon self-interest might result in collectivism and dictatorship. In spite of these dangers, the commercial republicans believed that the benefits of the new type of society out-weighed its costs. “And oddly enough, a system that frees men to try to satisfy their physical wants is more apt than any likely alternative to lead them to see their need for liberty.”

Quintin Skinner and Western Political Thought

Quintin Skinner's recent two-volume work on the development of political theory in early modern Europe is likely to achieve the status of a classic. Its stress upon resistance to the state in this period provides an important background for modern concepts of liberty, revolution, constitutionalism, and republicanism.

Skinner shows that republicanism was not the product of Renaissance humanism, as Hans Baron and others have argued, but had already emerged among the Italian city states during the Middle Ages. Also, the defense of the de facto sovereignty of the city republic by the jurist Bartolus was especially influential.

Skinner's first volume culminates in an analysis of Machiavelli, whose stress upon the role of the prince Skinner shows to be in the tradition of Italian humanism. One of the strongest features of Skinner's method is his careful presentation of the secondary writers in a given period. Instead of concentrating on a few great theorists, as many historians of political and social philosophy do, he develops the complete intellectual and cultural context in which the major theorists wrote. For example, one is in a position after reading Skinner to understand Machiavelli's true originality, by seeing how he modified the existing paradigm of political writing.

Skinner gives an elaborate treatment of resistance to the state during the sixteenth century. He shows that the Calvinist opponents of royal authority in France often relied on scholastic writers in the work; he maintains that there was no distinctively Calvinist political theory as such. Similarly, as Lutheranism developed, its devotees met the increasing opposition of the Emperor by advocating resistance by the Protestant princes to the mandates of the Imperial Diet.

Besides the tradition of constitutional resistance to authority, the sixteenth century was also characterized by the rise of absolutism. Skinner views Jean Bodin as the leading absolutist theorist, although he is careful to present the remnants of constitutionalism present in his work. Skinner regards George Buchanan as exemplifying the opposite tradition, that of resistance to political authority, to its highest degree, because of Buchanan's secular approach. It is questionable, however, whether Skinner is correct, since the Calvinist writers of the sixteenth century seem more radical.

Skinner should be commended for his use of a variety of historical sources. He at times perhaps fails to distinguish adequately between legal materials used to make a case and works of political theory.