The Law of Progress and the Ironies of Individualism in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society, I analyzed a shift in the history of economic thought from a labor theory of value concerned with the social relations of production, reproduction, and distribution to a theory of consumption that made the individual's taste, choice, and preference its theoretical base. 2 I also showed a simultaneous shift from the sociology of high Victorian literature to the individualism, psychologism, and subjectivism characterizing much literature of the fin de siècle. With the so-called "Marginal Revolution" in economic thought that began in the 1870s, the figure of Economic Man became more consumer than producer or Malthusian reproducer, and economic theory became more methodologically, causally, and politically individualist. Given that current critiques of Marginal or "neoclassical" economics, now the dominant disciplinary paradigm globally, often resolve into critiques of methodological individualism, this essay looks more closely at different models of Individualism as they developed in the course of the nineteenth century. The relation of the Individual to the State or collective has been a problem at least since Plato and exacerbated in the West since the seventeenth century. 3 I focus on some cultural manifestations of that problem in nineteenth-century Britain when fears of competitive individualism in market society began to be articulated and analyzed, occasionally in some sophisticated "Third Way" formulations. Herbert Spencer's influential idea that all Progress was progress toward individualism implied at the broadest cultural levels fears of anomie, isolation, and egoism that had gone well beyond Adam Smith's idea of self-interest leading to the social good. Today the issue is whether economics is in any sense a science of social relations of production, consumption, and distribution, or whether it takes as its domain merely the "choices" of individuals as revealed in consumption patterns. [End Page 315]