Principles Of Political Economy Research Articles

On land, life, and labour: Abundance and scarcity in Locke, Smith, and Ricardo

In the modern age, and not before, men began to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition… This doubt, or rather the conviction that life on earth might be blessed with abundance instead of being cursed by scarcity, was prerevolutionary and American in origin; it grew directly out of the American colonial experience… Theoretically speaking, the stage was set when first Locke… and then Adam Smith held that labour and toil, far from being the appanage of poverty, the activity to which poverty condemned those without property, were, on the contrary, the source of all wealth. Ricardo inverts the terms of this analysis… What makes economics possible, and necessary… is a perpetual and fundamental situation of scarcity: confronted by a nature that in itself is inert and, save for one very small part, barren, man risks his life… [I]t is related… to the biological properties of a human species…; it is related also to the situation of those living beings that run the risk of not finding in their natural environment enough to ensure their existence; lastly, it designates in labour, and in the very hardship of that labour, the only means of overcoming the fundamental insufficiency of nature and of triumphing for an instant over death. As these epigraphs attest, the emergence of economic thought has long been understood by theorists as a crucial development for politics in the modern era. These comments appear in the context of quite different projects. For Arendt, the concern was how what she termed the “social question”—that of the existence of poverty—had informed the development of revolutionary thought and practice since the late 18th century. Foucault, instead, made his observations as part of what he termed an “archaeology of the human sciences,” an investigation that provided crucial foundations for his subsequent—more explicitly political, and today more famous—genealogy of modern “government.” In spite of their divergent aims, the comments of Arendt and Foucault revolve around a remarkably similar constellation of ideas: Both are concerned with notions of abundance and scarcity, and both link this to a discourse on labour. Perhaps less intuitively, both give centrality to new understandings of “life,” Arendt through a critique of how economic analysis placed “the life process of society… at the very centre of the human endeavour” (1977);1 Foucault by arguing that the emergence of political economy marked the birth of a new kind of political rationality—a “biopolitics” centered around the government of life (see also Foucault, 2008, 2009).2 Although these passages read almost as if they were a continuous commentary, this is something of a sleight of hand. In fact, neither thinker traced Locke–Smith–Ricardo lineage in this way: Arendt did not acknowledge a subsequent shift in liberal political economy marked by Ricardo and the economists of the early 19th century; Foucault, meanwhile, was not here comparing Ricardo to Locke or Smith—though he did address their work elsewhere—but rather to the French Physiocrats. Yet, it is more than a linguistic accident that these comments seem to speak so directly to each other. In fact, the genealogy suggested by the juxtaposed quotes traces an important lineage, though one with which neither Arendt nor Foucault engaged in detail. While not addressing directly the arguments of either of these two thinkers, therefore—the resonances and tensions between which have already been explored in some depth elsewhere (Blencowe, 2010)—this article takes their provocative respective commentaries as a fruitful starting point for tracing a new approach to the development of a modern politics of life. As insightful as these commentaries are, I seek to go beyond an anthropocentric bias that has been the focus of recent criticism within political theory (Bennett, 2004; Krause, 2016), and for which Foucault in particular has been criticized (Lemke, 2015). What interests me especially is how setting these three canonical discussions side-by-side helps chart the transformation of notions of life, understood not only as specifically human life, but rather in terms of the relationship between humans and the broader panoply of nonhuman life on earth. In short, I suggest that Arendt and Foucault were both right—that Locke and Smith should be regarded as thinkers of abundance, while Ricardo should be seen as a thinker of scarcity—but that making sense of this shift, and its ramifications, requires coming to terms with changing underlying ontologies of nature. While the natural law influence in Locke and Smith's work placed emphasis on the human capacity to adapt the abundance of nonhuman life on earth to meet human ends, Ricardo's modern political economy represented a loss of faith in the essential fecundity of nature, and the ability of humans to overcome environmental limits through technological and sociopolitical innovation. In order to carry out this investigation, I turn to an important though often overlooked category that was touched on by both Arendt and Foucault, but which was for neither a central focus—that of land. Here, rather than assuming a view of land—more conventional in political theory—as a purely passive “resource” that is subject to appropriation,3 I look at how, within a specifically British tradition of thinking about “improvement” within discourses on government, land acted as a privileged site of the action—even agency—of nature, with property rights forming the principal means through which relations between human and nonhuman life were articulated. In particular, I suggest, contra Foucault, that it was this discourse, which here I trace through the work of Locke and Smith, that was the theoretical precursor to the new “biological” political rationality of which Ricardo's work is emblematic. Viewed in these terms, the birth of 19th-century political economy appears not as the sudden irruption of life into theories of government, but rather a radical schematization of earlier ideas about life, marked by the disavowal of the spontaneous agency of nature, and the hardening of a separation between the human and the nonhuman. As much as Arendt and Foucault did not focus on land specifically, their respective comments on life, and their shared concern for the concept of labour, still provide crucial guidance. It is well known both that land was the primary object of labour for Locke and that the conceptual affinity between land and labour was foundational to what is often called by economists the “classical economics” of Smith and Ricardo (e.g., Hollander, 2016)—even if, as this article goes some way to demonstrating, the discursive unity that this label implies is one that should be treated with caution.4 For both Arendt and Foucault, however, the significance of labour goes beyond both appropriation (traditionally more a concern of political theorists) and the creation of value (traditionally more a concern of political economists) and instead points to more fundamental questions around subsistence, understood as the survival of biological life. While, for Foucault (2009), the political economy of the 19th century embodied a new understanding of man as a “species,” crystallized especially in the concept of “population,” I suggest that this, in fact, represented the disappearance of a view of man as one species amongst many, and the emergence of a new and anthropocentric lens for understanding subsistence that has informed economics to the present day. The argument proceeds in three sections. The first section addresses the famous chapter “Of property” in book two of Locke's Two Treatises of Government (2017; hereafter TT), emphasizing the ways in which regimes of property are seen to encode shifting relations between humans and nonhuman nature, as well as the important work done here by notions of death and decay. Section two moves to Smith's seminal The Wealth of Nations (2014; hereafter WN), reading the central arguments of the work, and the stadial history on which they hinge, as essentially an elaboration of the schema sketched by Locke, but sharpening the sense of property as articulating relations between human and nonhuman life. Section three turns to a work read by Foucault and others as the quintessential statement of political economy in the early 19th century, Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (2004; hereafter PPET), arguing that its treatment of land in fact represents a radical departure from the Lockean/Smithian schema, inverting ideas about the inherent fecundity of nature, and instantiating a much bleaker reading of human–environment relations. The conclusion returns to a discussion of Arendt and Foucault. Locke's Second Treatise famously placed questions around land at the heart of a theory of government. Private ownership of land, he argued, was the very basis of “civil”—by which he meant civilized—society, “the chief end whereof is the preservation of property” (TT II.85). His work distinguished itself from that of other major 17th-century legal theorists such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, however, by suggesting that private property rights were derived not simply from the use of land, in a general sense, but specifically from the application of labour in order to better the condition of land for cultivation, an idea understood through the distinctively English concept of “improvement.” It was this argument that required Locke to expand at some length on the nature of this labour, and, by extension, on the relations between human and nonhuman life that it encoded. [t]he Labour of his Body, and the Work of his hands,… are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. (TT II.27) As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common. (TT II.32) For Locke, then, the concept of labour was above all associated with subsistence—understood as the preservation of human life—and it was this irrevocable connection that underpinned justifications for property of all kinds.5 Yet, property in land was not an immutable fact of human existence. In fact, the toil of gathering uncultivated wild goods, and the patient industry of agriculture and husbandry represented, for Locke, starkly divergent modes of human interaction with the natural fertility of the earth, associated with very different phases of human social development. In fact, as various commentators have noted, though not developed in detail, Locke's commentary hints at a notion of the development of societal subsistence in distinct stages. Recent scholarship has helped to reveal this by stressing the central role of animal life in Locke's text (Guha-Majumdar, 2020). Such work captures something essential about Lockean property rights: They are expressed first and foremost not merely in terms of the relations between humans that they necessarily imply, but, more fundamentally, in terms of how they articulate modes of relation between humans and a broader web of life on earth. Nevertheless, these arguments can be extended to think not only about animals, but nonhuman life in general, including plants. [I]f the Fruits rotted, or the Venison putrified, before he could spend it, he offended against the common Law of Nature, and was liable to be punished; he invaded his Neighbour's share… (TT II.37) This was a central point for Locke—humans had a natural right to appropriate plant and animal life, but only insofar as they could make use of these goods before they spoiled. Property over nonhuman life, that is, could be justified only by the preservation of human life. Anything else was an infraction against natural law, and, indeed—what for him amounted to the same thing—the will of God (TT II.31). The impetus of this natural right carried into his theory of government. Though frequently overlooked, the chapter on property in fact hinted at another distinct nonsedentary mode of subsistence, that of pastoralism.6 The implications of this are not developed by Locke, but it seems clear enough that he saw this as implying quite a different mode of interaction between human and nonhuman life. This described a system based around the domestication of animal life, but “without any fixed property in the ground they made use of,” discussing through biblical examples societies that “wandred with their Flocks, and their Herds, which was their substance” (TT II.38). being now not the Fruits of the Earth, and the Beasts that subsist on it, but the Earth it self; as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest (TT II.32) For Locke, then, property in land was explicitly understood in terms of the command over plant and animal life that it grants. While appropriation of land was synonymous with “inclosure” (e.g., TT II.33), it was not simply the erecting of boundaries—real or imagined—that interested Locke. Rather, it was the labour expended in improving the land that explained and justified private appropriation of the earth. subdue the Earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of Life, and therein lay out upon it something that was his own, his labour (TT II.32) Undoubtedly, by “life,” here, he intended specifically human life. Improvement was thus specifically the process of directing a fertility always-already present in nature by directing it toward the production of those goods that met human needs. The same measures governed the Possession of Land too: Whatsoever he tilled and reaped, laid up and made use of, before it spoit, that was his peculiar Right; whatsoever he enclosed, and could feed and make use of, the Cattle and Product was also his. But if either the Grass of his Inclosure rotted on the Ground, or the Fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of the Earth, notwithstanding his Inclosure, was still to be looked on as Waste, and might be the Possession of any other. (TT II.38) This so-called no spoilage proviso was accompanied by another qualification of the right to appropriate land, which suggested that, according to the law of nature, this was only justified if there was “enough, and as good left” for others (TT II.33). What is sometimes overlooked, however, is that Locke's provisos were immediately nullified by the introduction of money. His well-known proclamation that “in the beginning all the World was America” occurs in the midst of a discussion of commerce and its relation to property and spoilage, and these words are immediately followed by the less well known, “and more so than that is now; for no such thing as Money was any where known” (TT II.49). [I]t is plain, that Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they having by a tacit and voluntary consent found out a way, how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one, these metals not spoileing or decaying in the hands of the possessor. (TT II.50) Indeed, though the implications of this change are only hinted at by Locke, it is even possible to suggest that there is at least a hint here of an additional property regime, one which no longer reflected property relations conceived as expressing the form of a society of subsistence cultivators, but which was instead premised on an extended division of labour, and the primacy of commerce. Although there are doubts amongst scholars regarding the extent to which Locke's comments constitute a stadial history of the kind that came to assume a prominent role in 18th-century thought (Palmeri, 2016), it seems clear that there is at least a nascent sense of distinct regimes of property within the Two Treatises, and also a sense of progress through these regimes.8 Most obviously, the development of agriculture is seen unambiguously as superior when compared with the supposed poverty of hunter-gatherer subsistence, allowing the conversion of unproductive “waste” land to productive cropping and husbandry. To the extent that commerce appears—according to Locke's reasoning—to do away with the problem of spoilage, the introduction of monetized subsistence relations appears too as a clear advance. [C]onsidering the plenty of natural Provisions there was for a long time in the World, and the few spenders,… there would be then little room for Quarrels or Contentions about Property so establish'd. (TT II.31) Here and elsewhere, Locke's writing reveals a concern for the relationship between forms of property and population density at a given stage of development. Later, he clarifies that, “in the Beginning,” though labouring the earth may have provided an original right of property, it was not until “the Increase of People and Stock… had made Land scarce” (TT II.45) that such property rights would have been formalized through a kind of compact between men. There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several Nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life; … And a King of a large and fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England. (TT II.41) Value was created by improving the natural fertility of the land, directing it toward the fulfillment of human needs. In this way, Locke was able to argue that private appropriation, far from diminishing the resources available for others, actually served to increase what he termed “the common stock of mankind” (TT II.37).9 Foucault suggested that it was only somewhat later that saw the sudden irruption of “life” into theories of government, with a new concern for humanity considered as a “species.” But in fact Locke already thought in terms of a human species, using the term explicitly throughout the Two Treatises (e.g., TT II.79), and embedding ideas of population dynamics deep within his political theory. To an extent, he had inherited such a way of thinking from the natural law tradition.10 But in Locke's hands, and especially modulated by English ideas of improvement, this was sharpened into what was already a clear, if still nascent, account of the historicity of human subsistence relations, understood in terms of relations to nonhuman nature. It was this, most importantly, I suggest, that he bequeathed to a tradition that would subsequently give rise to modern political economy. Within The Wealth of Nations, the only direct references to Locke are to other writings on currency, with Locke appearing here as one of Smith's “mercantilist” adversaries.11 Nevertheless, it is clear that Smith was well aware of the content of the Two Treatises, as is evident from the surviving records of his Lectures on Jurisprudence (Meek et al., 2014; hereafter LJ) delivered during his tenure at Glasgow University. The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. (WN I.x.c.12) Yet, he rejected the applicability of a “labour theory of property” beyond the most primitive forms of appropriation.11 Smith's work also diverged from Locke in the crucial respect that it jettisoned the notion of a distinct “state of nature.” In this view, as Foucault aptly noted of the work of Smith's Scottish contemporary Adam Ferguson, “civil society is an historical-natural constant for humanity” (Foucault, 2008). Rather than theorizing a transition from a “natural” state to a “civil” one—which for Locke required positing an instantiating contract between men—Smith instead sought to explain a more gradual development of social institutions.12 Nevertheless, as significant as these differences might be, focusing on them detracts from broader continuities in the overall scope of their arguments, specifically around land and property. Locke's defense of private property had hinged on the claim that, by encouraging the improvement of the earth, this institution served to increase the “common stock of mankind.” Although pointing to supposed examples, in the form of a contrast between the few “conveniences” afforded to Native Americans and the many to day labourers in England, he stopped short of attempting any kind of analytical demonstration of exactly how private property and improvement would increase societal wealth. Nearly a century later, however, Smith attempted precisely such a demonstration. the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages. (WN I.i.11) Within the literature, this parallel has been noted most forcefully by Hont and Ignatieff (2010), who found in both Locke and Smith's work a recognition of an apparent “paradox of commercial society”—as they put it, why was it that a modern society which did not return the whole produce of labour to the labourer provided a better standard of living to the very poorest than the societies of the past? Smith's answer, though developed in much more detail and at vastly greater length, paralleled that already suggested in Locke's Treatises: private property in land, and the improvement that this engendered, was understood as the foundation of a productive societal order based around commerce and an advanced division of labour that ultimately increased resources for all. It was not only these central concerns that the two shared, but also their mode of reasoning by appeal to a conjectural history of human development. In particular, the central place of improvement within The Wealth of Nations led Smith to place a similar emphasis on the ways in which different regimes of property expressed and mediated relations between human and nonhuman life.13 Whereas a sense of societal stages remained largely implicit in Locke's work, in Smith's a stadial history was fully formed. This was laid out in the greatest depth in his Lectures, where he had instructed students explicitly that, “[t]here are four distinct states which mankind passes through:—first, the Age of Hunters; secondly, the Age of Shepherds, thirdly, the Age of Agriculture; and fourthly, the Age of Commerce” (LJ(A) i.27), but the same understanding plays a central role also within The Wealth of Nations.14 The step betwixt these two is of all others the greatest in the progression of society, for by it the notion of property is extended beyond possession, to which it is in the former state confined. When this is once established, it is a matter of no great difficulty to extend this from one subject to another, from herds and flocks to the land itself. (LJ(A) ii.97) When once it has been agreed that a cow or a sheep shall belong to a certain person not only when actually in his possession but where ever it may have strayed, it is absolutely necessary that the hand of government should be continually held up and the community assert their power to preserve the property of the individualls. The chase can no longer be depended on for the support of any one. All the animalls fit for the support of man are in a great measure appropriated. Certain individualls become very rich in flocks and herds, possessed of many cattle and sheep, while others have not one single animall. (LJ(A), iv.21) For Smith, this innovation enabled pastoralists to support a far greater number of individuals on “the same extent of equally fertile territory” (WN IV.vii.c.100). And yet the concentration of animals in a single space necessitated that a shepherd “should frequently change his situation, or at least the place of his pasturing, to find pasture for his cattle” (LJ(A) i.48–49). The most important operations of agriculture seem intended, not so much to increase, though they do that too, as to direct the fertility of nature towards the production of the plants most profitable to man. (WN II.v.12) Through this direction, “the labourers and labouring cattle” (WN II.v.12) were able to produce well in excess of their own subsistence, allowing the further extension of a division of labour, as expressed, in particular, in the historical divide between the agricultural countryside and the trade- and manufacturing-oriented towns (WN III). And yet, as Smith was also keenly aware, especially looking at the condition of parts of his native Scotland, agriculture too raised its own problems in relation to the direction of nature's fertility. In particular, soil could quickly become “entirely exhausted” (WN I.xi.k.3) without careful attention, and the feudal property regimes that had dominated across Europe—and which, for Smith, provided the archetype of the agricultural stage of society—had provided cultivators with neither the resources nor the incentive to maintain the condition of land (WN III.ii). It was this question, in fact, that lay at the heart of Smith's tentative optimism regarding the prospects of a burgeoning fourth, “commercial” stage of society. The little offals of their own table… supply those animals with a part of their food, and they find the rest in the neighbouring fields without doing any sensible damage to any body. (WN I.xi.k.10) But, as he observed, with progressive enclosure and conversion to commercial farming, such “unimproved wilds” (WN I.xi.b.6) were diminishing, decreasing the availability of various subsistence goods, and thus raising their exchangeable value, creating incentives for landowners to convert land specifically to commercial forestry or pasture. In all farms too distant from any town to carry manure from it, that is, in the far greater part of those of every extensive country, the quantity of well-cultivated land must be in proportion to the quantity of manure which the farm itself produces; and this again must be in proportion to the stock of cattle which are maintained upon it. The land is manured either by pasturing the cattle upon it, or by feeding them in the stable, and from thence carrying out their dung to it. (WN I.xi.k.3) By increasing the exchangeable value of animals and increasing conversion of land to pasture, the rise of commerce thus offered new opportunities for improved farming practices. What Smith envisioned, then, was that commercial society would continue to enhance soil fertility until a point at which the “compleat improvement and cultivation” (WN I.xi.k.12) of the country had been reached, at which point it would be “fully peopled” (WN I.ix.14). For Smith, it was not only agriculture that would benefit. Rather, this improved direction of the earth's fertility was the foundation for the advancement of human industry in general and the increase of societal wealth (Steeds, 2022). Here, as in Locke's work, population appeared as the key driver of evolving property relations (Smith, 2020). Each successive societal stage represented, for Smith, an improvement in the mode of relation between human and nonhuman life, such that a greater human population could be sustained, and, indeed, with ever greater access to the “necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life” (WN I.v.1). In this way, his argument, albeit elaborated in far more detail, paralleled central threads of Locke's thought around property. However, while Smith's argument can be read, and indeed has been, as putting forward at least an implicit justification of private property in land,15 as a work of political economy the main conclusions of the text operated on another level, addressing what Smith termed matters of “police.” Key to his intervention in this respect was his introduction of a theory of capital. While his stadial theory suggested that the “natural” course of societal development was one in which the rise of commerce would lead to the improvement of land, Smith's argument was that the misguided policy of European states to date had frustrated this process, through misguided attempts to privilege high-value manufacturing exports in the hope of bringing bullion into the territory. This, he suggested, had held back investment in agriculture, slowing the progress of improvement. His famous promotion of the “natural liberty” (WN IV.ix.51) of the market was premised on the idea that removing government attempts to steer industry would provide the surest means to encourage the natural progress of land improvement and the increasing abundance that this engendered. It was this idea that the growth of capital should be a central focus of government that was to set the direction for political economy in the nineteenth century. Like Locke and Smith, Ricardo put forward an argument that accorded questions around land and improvement a central place. As in Smith's political economic text, the only direct reference to Locke in Ricardo's Principles is to his work on currency (PPET, 369), but unlike Smith, there is no evidence that Ricardo was also familiar with the Two Treatises. The influence of Smith is unambiguous, however, and indeed much of the work is set up as a response to The Wealth of Nations. The writer, in combating received opinions, has found it necessary to advert more particularly to those passages in the writings of Adam Smith from which he sees reason to differ; but he hopes it will not, on that account, be suspected that he does not, in common with all those who acknowledge the importance of the science of Political Economy, participate in the admiration which the profound work of this celebrated author so justly excites. (PPET, 6) This preface accordingly outlines a number of distinctly familiar themes, from a concern for agriculture and the way that the “produce of the earth” is realized by

On the Meanings of Crisis

The pandemic has revealed the deep and structural inequalities marking various lifeworlds and social landscapes, accelerating trends and vulnerabilities long at play. It has further entrenched deep inequalities between the Global South and the North. At the same time, the pandemic has ushered in a profound realization of the interconnectedness and imbrication of various fields: the medical, the economic, the political, and the environmental. One crisis has led to another in a cascade of interlinked crises, eroding the legitimacy of political leaders and governing structures. It has led to a temporal, material, and social suspension, which was most acutely felt during state-imposed lockdowns, and has, at least temporarily, confined people to the immediate present. This suspension has impeded our ability to think in the uncertain, unpredictable, and opaque terms of a future.Like all crises, the pandemic triggers a radical rethinking not only of the present and the future, but also of the past. It compels us to think of crises in the past; how they were understood, lived, and experienced; and what their causes were as well as what their long-term legacies have been. More specifically, it prompts us to explore how social actors—individually and collectively—understood and explained a specific contemporary crisis. Was there a clearly identified consciousness of living through a crisis as it was unfolding? Did a series of catastrophic events subsequently and in hindsight come under the label of crisis? How did various understandings of crisis change as the conditions of the suspension of “normal” daily life shifted? How did social and individual practices and actions adapt or react to changing circumstances? Which social groups were understood to have been most affected by past pandemics, wars, famines, economic collapse, and other crises? Did this lead to a conceptualization of or a deeper reflection on what today we might call structures of vulnerability? By structures of vulnerability, I am referring to political, social, and economic conditions that have the power to negatively impact individuals and collectives in the long term and make them more prone to suffer and impede their recovery in times of crisis.The allocation of responsibility for crisis is a central concern in intellectual history and the history of ideas: how and when did thinkers understand crisis as a nexus between “natural” disasters, such as drought and disease, on one hand, and political decisions, action and inaction, on the other? Such actions could range from mismanagement, corruption, incompetence, and stalling to deliberate neglect or even specific targeting of groups and regions deemed less valuable or undesirable to the state, local officials, local elites, or colonial powers, European or Zionist.Another set of questions pertains to temporality. Was a specific crisis understood to be temporary? And to be an anomaly? Was it a rupture or a pause for those who lived through it? For specific writers and social actors, this must have been the case—a momentary pause that would hopefully end with a return to “business as usual.” While for others, the crisis came as an opportunity to mobilize for fundamental change. If, for many social actors, crisis represented a transition or a breaking point, we should also pay heed to thinkers who understood crisis as structurally endemic.One such author was Muhammad Fahmy Husayn, an Egyptian writer whose book, Principles of Political Economy (Mabadi’ al-iqtisad al-siyasi, 1908–1911) sought to explain the debilitating economic and financial crisis that struck Egypt in 1907. A number of interrelated financial crises in the world, in part triggered by a liquidity crunch, affected countries that had been particularly linked through the circulation of global capital. Egypt, whose economy had been even more dependent on the cotton crop since the British Occupation of the country in 1882 and thus deeply imbricated with global financial networks, was especially vulnerable. It was among the first countries to be affected by this global financial crisis, with devastating consequences for the population. Relying in part on British political economists as well as Friedrich Engels, Husayn argued that monetary, financial, and economic crises were all interconnected and were structural, endemic to capitalism, and cyclical, and that “the economic crisis repeats itself every ten years” (236). The analysis—and summary of other thinkers’ analyses—that Husayn provided on crisis was considered authoritative and was still relevant enough some fifteen years later to be reproduced in an important reference work. In fact, the entry for crisis (azma) in Muhammad Farid Wajdi’s encyclopedia relied almost exclusively on Husayn’s work, which was copied verbatim and covered fourteen pages.1Other instances of suspension and devastation barely receive mention. In the preface to the first volume of another encyclopedia, the “original” Da’irat al-Ma‘arif, author and compiler Butrus al-Bustani, a leading figure of the Arabic nahda, or Arab intellectual renaissance, of the late nineteenth century, made a cursory reference to the cholera that had struck greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham) in 1875. The outbreak delayed the production and publication of that first volume for six months. Bustani hastened to add that during this suspension, he (and presumably the entire team behind the Da’ira, who were based in Beirut) put this time to good use by collecting more books and preparing more entries (Da’irat 3). It is not clear whether Bustani was downplaying the crisis and terrible suffering that cholera had wreaked from a place of privilege. It is equally unclear if he saw the outbreak as a temporary blip or one instance of a recurring event. Perhaps Bustani took part in a sort of emotional denial or blackout, hiding fear and anxiety in plain sight, leaving it to the historians of the future to read such emotions between the lines and in the pages of the encyclopedia itself.Having so far relied on an understanding of crisis as an event through which historians order their periodization and understanding of the past—and through which they prioritize calls for the study of periods, focusing on those deemed periods of crises that triggered suspension—I want to simultaneously destabilize and complicate the notion of crisis as an organizing principle and a unit of historical analysis and, by the same token, address another question raised by the editors of this special issue, namely, “what does the Global South teach us about navigating crisis?”First, much of the suffering, death, and suspension during the modern history of the Middle East happened outside of specific periods of “crisis”: the conscription of peasants into Muhammad Ali’s army; the building of large infrastructural works for the sake of developing and modernizing Egypt; in other words, the state and its elites’ specific vision of a future world, colonialism, as well as the logic of global capitalism and the infrastructure it required, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and thus deprived them of a future. According to one estimate, around one-third of the 350,000 peasants who were forcibly recruited to work on the Mahmudiyya Canal died due to disease, malnutrition, and terrible work conditions (Mikhail 243).2 For the Suez Canal, 8 percent of the labor force died (Fintz, Moulin, and Radi 16). Second, many crises have nearly completely disappeared from the historical record, given that the populations affected were not deemed worthy of study. Quasi-invisible crises, such as the famine in Central Anatolia (1873–75) that Özge Ertem recently analyzed, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people—the death toll of the famines was over one hundred thousand in the span of two years (Ertem 153). Clearly, there were many invisible crises that have escaped and demand our attention.3 Third, crises are rarely self-contained events that last for a couple of years. Their causes often have roots in a distant past preceding the crisis itself, but their impact and effects can last for generations. We know the effects of starvation can be passed on to future generations, and that starvation can negatively affect the health of descendants of famished individuals (Columbia University Irving Medical Center). Famine, as well as other traumatic events, including wars and pandemics, can leave genetic, physical, and mental traces on descendants. And the descendants of stateless refugees, in many cases, have inherited their ancestors’ status or nonstatus.This is not to suggest that the history of the modern Middle East is one of perpetual crisis. Rather, it is to question assumed binaries between health and unhealth, crisis and normalcy, even war and peace, and ultimately, hope and despair. The intellectual and social history of crises invites us to dig deeper into structures of vulnerabilities, violence, and inequity and write their longue durée histories. Memory, narration, and study of past crises can help us make sense of and comprehend our contemporary crisis. They also work to build a repertoire of collective actions, solidarity, and futures, past and present, that can help us suspend despair in moments of crisis. After all, crises and emergencies have historically offered opportunities to effect change, and have often led to collective expressions and demands for just solutions instead of individual conflicts over scarce resources. It is such historical moments of contestation and new imaginings that we should work to recover.The author would like to thank Sherene Seikaly for her invitation to contribute to this special volume and for her invaluable suggestions.

Book Review: Main Concepts and Principles of Political Economy

Book Review: Main Concepts and Principles of Political Economy

Smith or Malthus? A Sea‐Change in the Concept of a Population

This two-part article offers a critical appreciation of Malthus's political economy of population to mark the bi-centenary of his Principles of Political Economy (1820). His general economic theory emerged after the first four editions of his famous Essay, in three steps: (1) a rapidly produced series of essays on tariffs, rents, and capital mal-distribution (1814–1815); (2) consequent revision of the economic basis of the Essay (1817); and (3) formal statement in the Principles. His main economic writings thus belong to a later, more mature period of his work, and their evolution is of particular interest for demography on three counts. One is that his rethinking was stimulated directly by the need to rectify serious deficiencies he had come to recognize in the Essay. Second, this makes his later thought of more direct interest to today's study of population and development. Third, all three steps began in, and were sustained by, dialogue with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The dialogue led to further thinking beyond the Essay, with major innovative developments. Comparison to the Smithian baseline shows (1) that the familiar stereotype of Malthus as prophet of population-laden disaster is seriously incomplete; and (2) capital distribution replaces population distribution as a mechanism of growth, inducing a radical change in the concept of population.

Robert Malthus, Thomas. 1836, “Introduction”, Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed. London: W. Pickering (the first edition was published in 1820).

Article Robert Malthus, Thomas. 1836, “Introduction”, Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed. London: W. Pickering (the first edition was published in 1820). was published on June 1, 2021 in the journal Man and the Economy (volume 8, issue 1).

The Ecological Politics of the Belu Community in Preserving Nature and Supporting Sustainable Development

Political ecology is the relation between ecologically rooted social science and the principles of political economy and the reality of environment exploration. It aims to represent an alternative to apolitical ecology. The field synthesizes the central questions asked by the social sciences and ethics about the relations between human society and its bio-cultural-political complexity, and a significantly humanized nature. This article discourse the phenomenon on environment reality in Belu community, East Nusa Tenggara Province -Indonesia, especially the local community in Belu in relation with the environment. Research methods use phenomenological analyzes and literature review. Finding research that the local indigenous or community in Belu is doing political ecological to counter capitalism, strengthening indigenous local values, supporting sustainable development and protecting ecological justice. This finding can give inspiring to the local people in Indonesia and the other side of the world to take action to protect the environment and supporting sustainable development concept.

Taxation of Rent from Ricardo to George

Due to current urbanism practices that are rent-oriented and far from being sustainable, the need to purify cities from the pressure of rent has arisen. This need has prompted professionals to seek solutions. The land value taxation method which can be defined as the suggestion of taxing the land in full or at a higher rate compared to the improvement on it, unlike the classical property tax approach, is a tool that needs to be worked on with the potential of providing the transfer of urban rent to the public by appropriating rent through taxation. This tool can also be used to solve various rent-based urban problems. In this study, which examines land value taxation in terms of the history of economic thought, the development of the land value taxation proposal is summarized by explaining the position of Ricardo’s rent theory in the aforesaid development and the approaches of two thinkers regarding the rent and taxation of rent are compared. The structure of the study is principally based on two books: Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty” and David Ricardo’s “Principles of Political Economy and Taxation”. As a result of the analysis made in this study, it can be said that Ricardo and George hold differing views of rent which are both based on different foundations. In relation to this, it has been deduced that Henry George, while questioning the system of private ownership in land while researching the paradox of progress and poverty, and proposing land value tax for returning rent to the public that created the progress, is more effective in finding solutions to the problem of returning the rent to the public.

Surveying Financial Decisions? From Homo Economicus to Historical Specificity and J.S. Mill’s Cultural–Institutional Individualism

The aim of this paper is to evidence that non-economic factors, such as culture, emotions and ethics, can be seen as an important force in influencing human economic behavior and human action. This is conducted by putting the homo economicus notion into the perspective of the history of economic thought and, more specifically, of John Stuart Mill. More specifically, Mill’s institutional individualism, as is presented in his System of Logic (1843), and his relativity of economic doctrines construction, as is included in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), are synoptically delineated. Through Mill’s analysis, it is supported that cultural differences between different states of societies are determinant in understanding different behaviors. The paper concludes that Mill’s historical specificity and his more pluralistic version of cultural–institutional methodological individualism are more compatible in understanding human decision making.

J.S.Mill and the Irish Land Question: From Irish Economic History to Coherent Socialism and Irish Historicism

John Stuart Mill is regarded as the last representative of the classical school of political economy. However, in a variety of issues, he developed interesting and radical economic views. The Irish land question is one of the most characteristic cases of his transition from classical economic analysis to a liberal version of socialism. This article attempts to illustrate this transition by highlighting Mill’s pluralistic and historically specific political economy. This is achieved through the delineation of his views on the Irish land question indexing his Principles of Political Economy (1848), England and Ireland (1868) and his pamphlet Land Tenure Reform (1871). The article concludes that Mill’s heretic views regarding the Irish land question are associated with his transition towards socialist views and facilitated the emergence of the Irish historical school of the late nineteenth century.

A Reconsideration of the Role of Demand in Malthus’s Theory of Accumulation*

Abstract This paper is concerned with the role of effective demand in Malthus’s theory of accumulation expounded in his Principles of Political Economy. As is well known, Keynes praised Malthus for being a forerunner in identifying a lack of effective demand as a cause of depression in economic activity and a constraint on growth. There have since been many interpretations in the literature of Malthus’s position by reference to his arguments against Say’s Law in contending the possibility of “general gluts” and to his theory of capital accumulation. We begin by examining Malthus’s conception of the supply-side factors that determine what we call, “potential accumulation”, being accumulation that is not constrained by demand. The paper then considers the role of effective demand in Malthus’s well known contention of the possibility of “general gluts” and, connectedly, in his theory of demand-constrained capital accumulation. On this basis, we then appraise whether Malthus’s theory anticipates Keynes’s principle of effective demand by reference to the debate on this question in the literature, showing that while Malthus lacked a meaningful saving-investment analysis, he does provide insights important to the modern demand-led approach to growth.

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815-1900, by Richard Adelman

Reviewed by: Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 by Richard Adelman Jonathan Loesberg (bio) Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900, by Richard Adelman; pp. viii + 233. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, $80.63. Richard Adelman's Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 is, by turns, enlightening and exasperating, frequently for the same reasons. Adelman follows a familiar path through nineteenth-century English attitudes toward aesthetics, art, and their political implications from Romantic consciousness through Victorian glorifications of work to late-century aestheticism. He revises our understanding of his line of inquiry both by considering different forms of literature within it—political economy and gothic fiction, for instance—and by making some unexpected connections among the various works he addresses. At the same time, some of these forays and connections occur through a movement from one field of inquiry to another without consideration of how the elements he analyzes change their meanings or significance. In order to understand how this occurs, we must begin by noting the more or less implicit definitions of the terms of his title. Aesthetic consciousness is not here a particular mode of perceiving artistic and natural beauty, as it was discussed in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English and German aesthetic theory. It is, rather, a particularly English Romantic phenomenon in which meditation on a natural object, whether sublime or quotidian, brings one to some kind of realization that takes one out of oneself to "open the mind to modes of being and modes of thinking beyond quotidian consciousness" (146). Idleness is a part of this consciousness because the consciousness occurs first in a moment of passive solitude. While this definition interprets well the Romantic poetry and thought Adelman discusses—Percy Shelley's "Mont Blanc" (1816), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" (1798), and John Keats's concept of negative capability—this is hardly the only (or even the usual) form of consciousness conceived of as aesthetic, nor the only kind of idleness discussed. Thus, for instance, not all idleness accompanies the aesthetic consciousness Adelman finds so positive, and some aesthetic theories concern artworks because they have their own kind of value. Let us start with idleness. One of the most interesting connections Adelman makes is between the idleness connected with aesthetic consciousness and the idleness that, as the opposite of labor, concerned political economists. The connection makes good sense with regard to John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848). That work does indeed value inactivity and rest from labor as allowing human self-cultivation and this version of idleness does indeed entail Romantic consciousness that Adelman analyzes. He is less persuasive, however, in his discussion of David Ricardo's fear of idleness as connected to aesthetic consciousness. For Ricardo, labor produces wealth, but it is also an activity in which human beings would not naturally engage. Idleness is not concomitant with an aesthetic consciousness but simply the absence of labor and something to be avoided if human beings are not to lack what their labor would produce. In a different vein, Adelmen connects Karl Marx's and William Morris's alignment of aesthetic consciousness with labor to Thomas Carlyle's connection, in his gospel of work, between work and aesthetic production. But for Carlyle, as for Ricardo, idleness was a natural but invidious human desire, and so work, which had to be willed, also produced all good things. Both Marx and Morris thought labor to be a natural human state: not a gospel of work to be preached, but a need to be fulfilled in an ideal state (alienated labor was, of course, another thing entirely). [End Page 341] Perhaps the most surprising result of Adelman's insistence on measuring all forms of aesthetic discourse against Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley arises in his reading of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. His treatment of Arnold's theory of culture as an essentially conservative, not to say panicked, response to the activity leading up to the Second Reform Bill is, of course, not that new. Adelman rejects Arnold's theory first because its demand that we know the best that has been known and thought in the world demands a...

Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture, by Wendy Parkins

Reviewed by: Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture by Wendy Parkins Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (bio) Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture, by Wendy Parkins; pp. vi + 238. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, £110.00, £36.99 paper, $155.00, $47.95 paper. At first blush, the topic of Victorian sustainability may strike some readers as wildly anachronistic. After all, the term sustainable development entered into widespread circulation with Gro Harlem Brundtland's 1987 UN report "Our Common Future," that warned of long-term challenges to global and intergenerational equity, including deforestation, desertification, fossil fuel exhaustion, climate change, population pressure, and decline in biodiversity. These concerns were plainly products of a specific historical moment. And yet it would be a grave mistake to assume that worries about environmental degradation have surfaced only in recent decades. Historians and literary scholars have for some time now explored the deep roots of sustainability, preservationism, Malthusianism, and environmental utopianism. Wendy Parkins's Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging and stimulating exploration of the problem of environmental degradation and its remedies during the nineteenth century. Major themes include discourses of urban pollution and sprawl; affective and spiritual bonds with animals and with the wider natural world; debates about agricultural chemistry and soil fertility; experiments in post-growth economies and simple living; and the Victorian science of climate change. According to Parkins, the Victorians were the first to contemplate "the widespread environmental despoliation wrought by industrialization" on a national and planetary scale (1). Victorian writers challenged the "instrumentalist view of the natural world" in literature "as well as in the fields of politics, economics, philosophy and agriculture" [End Page 322] (Gillen D'Arcy Wood qtd. in Parkins 2). This critique also had a constructive side, aimed at conceiving social "alternatives beyond the imaginative horizons of industrial capitalism" (33). Victorian forms of sustainability thus ranged beyond the ecological and technological realms into psychology and everyday practice. John Parham opens the anthology with an exciting essay on John Stuart Mill, which rightly stresses the radical character of Mill's famous chapter on the stationary state in Principles of Political Economy (1848). Parham places Mill's call for voluntary limits to growth in the context of his exchanges with French utopian thought, especially Auguste Comte's sociology and Joseph Fourier's communitarianism. He then traces the evolution of Mill's views forward to the 1860s, connecting stationary state economics with his interest in the Common Preservations Society and the Land Tenure Reform Association. Subsequent chapters by John Holmes, Peter Adkins, Emma Mason, Roslyn Jolly, and Mary L. Shannon explore a series of parallel projects in sustainability, springing from the same context as Mill's environmental sensibility. Holmes looks at William Morris's sprawling narrative poem "The Earthly Paradise" (1868–70), while Adkins examines the intellectual roots of Edward Carpenter's socialist experiment in simple living. Mason turns to theology to uncover what she calls the "ecology of grace" in Christina Rossetti's poetry (69). On her reading, Rossetti's The Face of the Deep (1892) articulated a radical promise of multi-species community and spiritual kinship with the nonhuman. Jolly's essay uncovers in early Victorian travelogues an ideal and practice of "slow travel" intended to counter the "speed and artificiality of modern life" (103). Shannon investigates the many meanings of the Thames in Charles Dickens's writings. She shows how the river linked country and city both as a pastoral idyll and as a conduit of pollution and waste. The second half of the volume includes contributions by Lesley Kingsley, Matthew Ingleby, Michael Shaw, Paul Young, and Dennis Denisoff, with an afterword by Gillen D'Arcy Wood. Kingsley explores the many cultural meanings of guano from high farming and popular chemistry to sanitation and social theory. Ingleby tackles incipient concerns with suburban growth through a genealogy of the term sprawl. Shaw's piece carries on the theme of urban planning by looking at Patrick Geddes's social theory from an aesthetic point of view. Young considers W. H. Hudson's The Purple Land That England Lost (1885) as an eco-romance about the environmental consequences of British global meat markets. Young also demonstrates how...

Thomas Malthus’s Rhetorical Political Economy

ABSTRACT David Ricardo and his followers forged rational argumentation and empirical verification into the discipline of classical political economy. Thomas Malthus distinguished his own view of the discipline from Ricardian social science by prudentially applying his rationally derived and empirically verified models to complex historical circumstances. He theorized this addition in the second edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, refined it in his Principles of Political Economy, and he practiced prudential argumentation in his arguments about the corn laws (1814–15). This Malthusian political economy is rhetorical in two senses of the word. First, Malthus inserted prudence (a virtue associated with rhetoric since antiquity) into political economy. Second, by appealing to people’s lived experiences, Malthus made political economy popularly persuasive.

Thomas Malthus’s Rhetorical Political Economy

ABSTRACT David Ricardo and his followers forged rational argumentation and empirical verification into the discipline of classical political economy. Thomas Malthus distinguished his own view of the discipline from Ricardian social science by prudentially applying his rationally derived and empirically verified models to complex historical circumstances. He theorized this addition in the second edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, refined it in his Principles of Political Economy, and he practiced prudential argumentation in his arguments about the corn laws (1814–15). This Malthusian political economy is rhetorical in two senses of the word. First, Malthus inserted prudence (a virtue associated with rhetoric since antiquity) into political economy. Second, by appealing to people’s lived experiences, Malthus made political economy popularly persuasive.

Lord William Wyndham Grenville’s manuscript notes on the first edition of David Ricardo’s Principles

This article focuses on unpublished manuscript notes by Lord William Wyndham Grenville on the first edition of David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy. Its aim is twofold. First, it is to strengthen our knowledge of Grenville’s economic thought which was praised by figures of his time but remains today almost totally unrecognised. The second purpose is to assess the part that Grenville may have taken in the development of Post-Ricardian political economy. Our conclusion is that Grenville most likely played a key role in the development of Political economy at the University of Oxford in the late 1820 s and early 1830 s.

The distinction between relative and positive profit: Sir James Steuart after Adam Smith and the Classics

The distinction between relative and positive profit was put forward by Sir James Steuart in the shortest chapter of his book An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767). This distinction has been scarcely noticed in the literature to follow except for some comments made by Marx especially in the initial chapter of his Theories of Surplus Value. The purpose of this paper is to investigate, in an attempt to keep words apart from concepts, whether and to what extent Steuart’s distinction, which is never mentioned in Smith’s Wealth of Nations (in spite of his familiarity with Steuart’s work), is an essential part of Adam Smith’s system of thought. The point of departure for tracing this distinction is, first, Smith’s elementary example of dwelling-houses and profitable buildings; and, then, his more advanced discussion (to be developed by later scholars and in particular by Marx) between the process of circulation (from one individual to another) and the process of production (and reproduction) of national wealth in the light of the two points of view, that of an individual and that of the whole society, on which Smith’s theory of capital is based. This point of departure is used in the paper to trace Steuart’s distinction between relative and positive profit behind the different terminology adopted in the classical literature that followed suit with particular regard to the wage-profit inverse relationship, the competition-of-capitals doctrine and the distinction between value and wealth. Steuart’s own distinction is thus used in the paper to support Ricardo’s conception of the “neat produce” as put forward in his Essay on Profits; as well as to differentiate Ricardo’s theory of rent (as a transfer of existing wealth between different parties rather than as a creation of new wealth) not only from Malthus’s theory (in which the two concepts of rent are mixed up) but also from Smith’s (who used the word rent to convey the former concept in Book I and the latter concept in Book II of the Wealth of Nations).

Two unpublished letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Smith of Easton Grey

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces and transcripts two hitherto unpublished letters by the political economist David Ricardo to his neighbour and intimate friend Thomas Smith of Easton Grey. In these letters dated 11 December 1819 and 12 February 1821, Ricardo mentioned the third edition of his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, as well as his notes on the first edition of Malthus’s Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to their Applications. Ricardo referred also to several contemporary debates in the House of Commons where he seated for the borough of Minchinhampton since the early part of the year 1819. Amongst these debates are the ‘Seditious Meetings Prevention Bill’; the affair of a pamphlet anonymously published in late 1819 and entitled A Trifling Mistake; the issue of parliamentary reform; and Ricardo’s opposition to Alexander Baring on the origin of the contemporary distress as well as on his project of a return to bimetallism as a measure of relief.

Moral and Ethical Political Economy: to the 200th Anniversary of the S . Sismondi’s Book “New Principles Of Political Economy”

The relevance of the article is due to the significant date — the 200th anniversary of the publication in 1819 of the “New Principles of Political Economy” (“Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, ou de la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population”) by Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi (also known as Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi), the founder of the economic romanticism. In this book, the purpose of this branch of human knowledge for the first time is interpreted not through the prism of the dominant ideas of economic liberalism at the turn of the XVIII–XIX centuries, but from the point of view of moral and ethical values. Here Sismondi examines and comprehends the alternative arguments formulated against the adherents of classical political economy (and, above all, the author of “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” published in 1817 by D. Ricardo) about the unattainability of automatic self-regulation of the market system and the expediency of its permanent regulation by the state within the framework of economic reforms that can provide a leading role in the economy of small business. Through historical and economic analysis, the author compared the evaluative judgments about the innovations contained in the book by S. Sismondi, related to the moral paradigm of political economy he justified, in the works of K. Marx, V. I. Lenin, S. Gide, S. Rist, M. Blaug and other researchers of economic science in the past and present. The author substantiates the generalizing conclusion that creativity of S. Sismondi, in the context of moral and ethical political-economic values, contrasted his own vision of scientific and practical problems — political economy and the implementation of the proposed reform project, the absolutisation of the principles of economic liberalism for the formation of a non-cyclical crisis-free socio-oriented economic system and the achievement of social justice in society.

Hegel et l’économie politique de son temps

Dans Économie politique et philosophie chez Steuart et Hegel (1963), Paul Chamley examine l’intérêt que Hegel prit tôt pour l’économie. Il le rapporte à l’influence sur Hegel de la lecture, à Francfort, de l’ Enquête publiée par James Steuart, ouvrage (aujourd’hui trop négligé) qui précéda La Richesse des nations d’Adam Smith. Quels thèmes majeurs Hegel y puisa-t-il ? Existe-t-il d’ailleurs une « économie hégélienne » per se  ? Les notions hégéliennes en ce domaine sont-elles d’un bloc ? Outre l’effet du livre de Steuart, s’exercèrent les influences du caméralisme germanique traditionnel et du classicisme britannique naissant. Il faut donc montrer plus de circonspection que Chamley n’en eut et cet essai réévalue les vues de Hegel sur l’économie dans son époque

The community of advantage

In 2018 I completed a book that I had been working on for longer than I like to recall: The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist's Defence of the Market (Sugden, 2018). Its title is taken from a passage in John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, first published in 1848. Mill is contrasting what he sees as the enlightened economic views of his own time with the mercantilism of the past. Mercantilism, he says, treats economic relations between countries as if they were relations between rival tradesmen trying to undersell one another. This obsolete way of thinking “overruled for centuries all sense of the general community of advantage which all commercial countries derive from the prosperity of one another” (Mill, 1871, III. xxv. §1). Mill is telling his readers that the market is a community of advantage. [C]ommerce first taught nations to see with good will the wealth and prosperity of one another. Before, the patriot … wished all countries weak, poor, and ill-governed, but his own: now he sees in their wealth and progress a direct source of wealth and progress to his own country. (1871, II. xvii. §5) As the subtitle of the book suggests, my stance as author is that of a behavioural economist and an economic liberal. I am trying to counter the increasingly widespread belief that the findings of behavioural economics justify regulatory interventions in the economy that would previously have been thought unacceptably paternalistic. This view of the normative implications of behavioural economics was expounded in two influential early papers with the significant titles ‘Libertarian Paternalism’ (Sunstein & Thaler, 2003) and ‘Regulation for Conservatives’ (Camerer, Issacharoff, Loewenstein, O'Donoghue, & Rabin, 2003). Notice the suggestions that these papers will provide justifications of paternalism and regulation to which libertarians and conservatives cannot object. Colin Camerer and his co-authors are particularly explicit about this, claiming that by “cataloging a list of common decision-making errors that even highly competent, well-functioning people make in predictable situations” (p. 1218), behavioural economics reveals new ways in which unregulated markets might fail to promote welfare. Earlier generations of economists proposed regulations to counter imperfect competition and imperfect information; in the same spirit, Camerer et al. say, behavioural economists now propose paternalistic regulations to counter the imperfect rationality of economic agents (p. 1218). Similarly, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (2003, p. 1162) claim that individuals are liable to make “inferior decisions in terms of their own welfare – decisions that they would change if they had complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities, and no lack of willpower”, and argue for “self-conscious efforts, by private and public institutions, to steer people's choices in directions that will improve their own welfare”. If one starts (as most economists have done) from the presupposition that normative economics is about how to organise an economy so that individuals' preferences are maximally satisfied, and if one interprets behavioural economics as showing that individuals make errors in implementing their own preferences, Camerer et al. are perhaps justified in treating such errors as just another kind of market failure. But a liberal might still be uneasy about the suggestion that it is part of the job of a social planner or regulator to determine what individuals' ‘true’ preferences are and to use those preferences, rather than preferences revealed in individuals' actual decisions, as the basis for normative judgements about public policy. Some of my fellow behavioural economists think I am being contrarian in opposing paternalism while contributing to a research programme that is discovering the many ways in which individuals' decisions are inconsistent with the received theory of rational choice. But it is important to realise that, until the early 2000s, the research programme of what is now called behavioural economics was almost entirely empirical. It challenged the descriptive validity of rational choice theory, but did not develop a normative theory of its own. I worked in that research programme throughout the 1980s and 1990s, while also working as a theoretical and philosophical economist, in what I saw as the liberal tradition of David Hume, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, and James Buchanan. I never thought that these two aspects of my work were in tension. A lot of my theoretical work was concerned with identifying conceptual limitations of received rational choice theory and proposing alternative ways of understanding rationality and normative judgement. These proposals often worked by downplaying the role of preferences. For example, this was a time when many economists and philosophers were struggling with the problem of how to represent the value of individual liberty within the formal framework of social choice theory. The moral requirement that each individual should have a ‘protected sphere’ of personal choice was construed as implying some restriction on the relationship between individual preferences and ‘social preferences’, but attempts to formalise that restriction ran into difficulties if individuals had ‘meddlesome’ preferences about one another's private affairs. I showed that the problem dissolved if one forgot about preferences and defined each individual's protected sphere in terms of his opportunities for choice. How each individual chose to use these opportunities was up to him, and irrelevant for the definition of liberty (Sugden, 1985). In another contribution to social choice theory, Peter Jones and I considered how the extent of an individual's ‘effective freedom’ might be measured. We argued that this measure should not depend on the individual's actual preferences over the options in her opportunity set, but instead on how well that set catered to the range of preferences that would be reasonable or normal for someone in her position (Jones & Sugden, 1982). In a third strand of work, I developed a theory of team reasoning in which non-selfish behaviour does not directly reveal altruistic or ‘social’ preferences; instead, each individual is motivated to play his part in mutually beneficial practices, conditional on others doing the same (Sugden, 1993). The ‘market’ or market organization is not a means toward the accomplishment of anything. It is, instead, the institutional embodiment of the voluntary exchange processes that are entered into by individuals in their several capacities. That is all there is to it. As my approach to normative analysis is very different from familiar forms of welfare economics, I have not been surprised that it has remained a minority taste. But I was, and still am, surprised that behavioural economists have been so ready to interpret contraventions of rational choice theory as evidence of decision-making error. In the pioneering era of the 1980s and 1990s, this was exactly the interpretation of anomalies that mainstream economists typically favoured, and that we behavioural economists disputed. (Look, for example, at the exchange between Charles Plott, 1996 and Daniel Kahneman, 1996. Plott is suggesting that decision-making behaviour that contravenes rational choice theory is the result of errors which, with sufficient experience, individuals learn to correct. Kahneman [1996, pp. 251–2] argues that, viewed in the perspective of empirical psychology, Plott's distinction between “latent” rationality and error is “deeply problematic”.) As some of us used to say, it is as if decision-makers are held to be at fault for failing to behave as the received theory predicts, rather than that theory being faulted for failing to make correct predictions. It seems to me that, in their desire to make normative pronouncements, many of my fellow behavioural economists are not taking the psychological evidence sufficiently seriously. My book weaves together four main strands of argument. The first strand concerns a question that economists rarely ask explicitly: To whom should normative economics be addressed? Neoclassical and behavioural economists usually write as if addressing an imagined ‘social planner’, implicitly conceptualised as a benevolent autocrat. Philosophers who write about normative economics sometimes imagine instead that they are engaging in ‘public reasoning’, addressing an assembly of moral agents who are trying to decide what, all things considered, is good for people. Both approaches treat normative analysis as an attempt to find a ‘view from nowhere’ – an impartial view of what is good for people that is not any actual person's view of what is good for him or her. Following Buchanan, I propose a different approach – that of contractarianism. Instead of taking a view from nowhere, a contractarian imagines herself addressing citizens as individuals, advising them how to reach mutually beneficial agreements. The logic of this approach disallows paternalism. If you are addressing a social planner or an assembly of public reasoners, you can coherently recommend a policy on the grounds that it promotes the welfare of certain individuals, even though those individuals do not want it to be adopted. But the contractarian has to show that her recommendations are in the separate interests of each individual, as that individual perceives those interests. For a contractarian, what is wrong with paternalism is not that it has morally objectionable properties, as viewed from nowhere. It is that a paternalistic proposal is not properly addressed. If you want to prevent someone from making a choice that you think would be bad for her, the person you need to address is her, not someone who has assumed the role of a self-appointed guardian. The second strand is a critique of ‘behavioural welfare economics’ – the approach to normative analysis that was proposed by Camerer et al. (2003) and Sunstein and Thaler (2003), and which is now favoured by most behavioural economists. This critique originated in a paper I wrote jointly with Gerardo Infante and Guilhem Lecouteux (Infante, Lecouteux, & Sugden, 2016). Behavioural welfare economics implicitly assumes that people have context-independent ‘true’ or ‘latent’ preferences which, because of psychologically induced errors, are not always revealed in actual choices. It aims to reconstruct latent preferences by identifying and removing the effects of error on decisions, and to design policies to satisfy those preferences. Its implicit model of human agency is of an ‘inner rational agent’ that interacts with the world through an imperfect psychological ‘shell’. I argue that there is no satisfactory evidence to support this model, and no credible psychological foundation for it. If the concept of true preference has no empirical content, the idea that such preferences can be reconstructed is a mirage. The third strand of the book proposes an alternative form of normative economics that does not use the concept of preference. I begin by looking for a normative criterion that citizens might reasonably want economists to use when making recommendations about public policy. As a first step, I propose the Individual Opportunity Criterion – the principle that, as viewed by each citizen separately, more opportunity for that person is better than less. When an individual makes choices over time, ‘more opportunity’ includes opportunities for her to change her mind from one period to another. I argue that each citizen can endorse this criterion without needing to believe that her own preferences are rationally consistent. However, it is intrinsic to the idea of a market that the set of opportunities available to any one person depends on the choices that other people make from their opportunity sets. Thus, what each person can expect to gain from participating in the market cannot be described by any particular opportunity set, specified independently of other people's choices. What people collectively can expect from the market is a rich array of opportunities to trade with each other on terms that they might find mutually acceptable. Building on Sugden (2004) and on work I have done with Ben McQuillin (McQuillin & Sugden, 2012), I propose an Interactive Opportunity Criterion which (roughly speaking) says that individuals collectively should have as much opportunity as possible to carry out whatever voluntary transactions they might want to make. (‘Might’ here ranges over the entire range of preferences that a person might plausibly have: there is no reference to actual preferences.) I show that this criterion is satisfied in the equilibrium state of a competitive market, also defined without reference to preferences. This result is encapsulated in one of my favourite slogans. Let us say that a person is willing to pay for a good if he is willing to give up what would induce others (or, if he is liable to change his mind, himself at another point in time) to supply it. Then to say that the Interactive Opportunity Criterion is satisfied is to say that each person is able to get whatever he wants and is willing to pay for, when he wants it and is willing to pay for it. Recognising that this is a result about a highly idealised economy, I consider a range of conditions that are usually considered as ‘market failures’ to be corrected by governmental regulation. I discuss these conditions, and possible responses to them, from a contractarian viewpoint. I argue that neoclassical arguments for regulations against cartels and against the exploitation of monopoly power can be endorsed on contractarian grounds, as can certain kinds of regulations against spurious complexity in pricing. But I raise doubts about the significance of behavioural arguments for regulation that assume choice overload or preferences for self-constraint. Finally, I ask what properties a market economy must have if it is to be psychologically stable – that is, if it is to reproduce a general belief that its governing principles are fair. I argue that, because of the division of knowledge and because the opportunities open to each person depend on how other people choose to use their opportunities, markets cannot guarantee that individuals are rewarded according to the efforts they make, or according to the talents they put to use. Here I follow Hayek (1976, p. 94), who recognises that “in the cosmos of the market we all constantly receive benefits which we have not deserved in any moral sense”. Psychological stability has to rest on continuing expectations of mutual benefit, defined relative to a baseline that evolves over time and that cannot be justified in terms of abstract principles of fairness. Nevertheless, if the market is to be recommended to each individual separately, each individual must be able to expect to share in the benefits that markets create. Maintaining such expectations typically requires some form of social insurance, but if markets are to work, there cannot be full insurance against underserved losses. The final strand of the book considers the moral status of markets. Virtue ethicists such as Elizabeth Anderson (1993) and Michael Sandel (2012) have argued that there are ‘moral limits’ to the proper domain of the market: market relations (it is said) are based on self-interested and instrumental motivations, and are thereby morally impoverished. A related idea in economics is that socially valuable practices (particularly those of trust and reciprocity) can depend on pro-social and intrinsic motivations which the market tends to ‘crowd out’. An important strand of behavioural economics is concerned with modelling intrinsic motivation, ‘social preferences’, and preferences for conforming to social norms. Building on work I have done with Luigino Bruni (Bruni & Sugden, 2013) and Andrea Isoni (Isoni & Sugden, 2019), I argue that market relations can be viewed by those who participate in them as cooperative: each party can act with the intention that the parties together achieve mutual benefit. Such an intention is neither self-interested nor altruistic. To explain this kind of intention, I develop a version of the theory of team reasoning that uses opportunity-based rather than preference-based concepts and makes minimal assumptions about people's rationality. The essential idea is encapsulated in a moral rule or norm, the Principle of Mutual Benefit. This requires that when you are participating with others in an interaction that each of you has chosen to enter, and for as long as the other participants follow the principle too, you should behave in such a way that the other participants are able to satisfy normal expectations about the consequences of the interaction for them. In a population of people who act on the principle, those actions tend to reproduce social practices (for example, practices of honest trading) that provide opportunities for mutual benefit. In contrast to the implications of many social-preference theories in which reciprocity is treated as returning kindness for kindness, the hypothesis that people act on the Principle of Mutual Benefit does not lead to the ‘Paradox of Trust’ – the paradoxical conclusion that if everyone were completely trustworthy, trust would not reveal pro-social intentions, and so could not prompt trustworthiness. In the final chapter of the book, I argue (in what I take to be the spirit of John Rawls's 1971 account of justice) that a contractarian can recommend to individuals that, consulting only their own interests, they agree that some principle of behaviour is to count as moral – that each will use her best endeavours to conform to it, to support others in conforming to it, and to censure others if they fail to conform. I end with a contractarian recommendation to my fellow-citizens: that it is their common interest to accept the Principle of Mutual Benefit. This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No. 670103, and from the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK (award no. ES/P008976/1).