The Victorian World and the Underworld of Economics

THE VICTORIAN WORLD 171 right, as we have seen. But if he meant that their physical misery would worsen, he was wrong. Indeed, a Royal Commission convened to look into the slump of 1886 expressed particular satisfaction with the condition of the working classes. And this was not just the pa- The Victorian World tronizing cant of class apologists. Conditions were better- and the Underworld perceptibly and significantly better. Looking back on the situation from the i88os, Sir Robert Giffen wrote: 'What we of Economics have to consider is that fifty years ago, the working man with wages on the average about half, or not much more than half what they are now, had at times to contend with a fluctu- ation in the price of bread which implied sheer starvation. Periodic starvation was, in fact, the condition of the masses of - working men throughout the kingdom fifty years ago." But by the time Giffen wrote, although prices had risen, wages had risen faster. For the first time, the English working- Karl Marx pronounced his sentence of doom on capitalism in man was making enough to keep body and soul together-a the Manqesto of 1848; the system was diagnosed as the vic- . sorry commentary on the past, but a hopeful augury for the tim of an incurable disease, and although no timetable was .future. given, it was presumed to be close enough to its final death And not only had wages gone up, but the very source of struggle for the next of kin-the Communists-to listen surplus value had diminished: hours were far shorter. At the avidly for the last gasp that would signal their inheritance of Jarrow Shipyards and the New Castle Chemical Works, for power. Even before the appearance of Capital in 1867, the example, the work week had fallen from sixty-one to fifty- deathwatch had begun, and with each bout of speculative four hours, while even in the sweated textile mills, the stint fever or each siege of industrial depression, the hopeful drew was reduced to only fifty-seven hours. Indeed the mill own- nearer to the deathbed and told each other that the moment ers complained that their wage costs had risen by better than of Final Revolution would now be soon at hand. 20 percent. But while progress was expensive, it paid intangi- But the system did not die. True, many of the Marxist ble dividends. For as conditions ameliorated, the muttering laws of motion were verified by the march of events: big of 1848 died down. "You cannot get them to talk of politics so business did grow bigger and recurrent depressions and un- long as they are well employed," testified a Staffordshire employment did plague society. But along with these confir- manufacturer on the attitude of his working force. mations of the prognosis of doom, another highly important Even Marx and Engels had to recognize the trend. "The and portentously phrased Marxist symptom was remarkable English proletariat is actually becoming more and more by its absence: the "increasing misery" of the proletariat bourgeois," mourned Engels in a letter to"~arx,"so that the failed to increase. ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would ap- Actually, there has been a long debate among Marxists as pear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeois, of a bour- to what Marx meant by that phrase. If he meant only that geois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat." more and more of the working class would experience the Clearly, Marx was premature in his expectation of im- "misery" of becoming proletarians-wage workers-he was pending doom. For the faithful, of course, the disconcerting 172 THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS THE VICTORIAN WORLD 173 turn of events could be swallowed in the comforting knowl- written by the greatest of academicians, but perhaps by the edge that "inevitable" still meant inevitable, and that a matter most revealing of them-a strange, shy professor named of a generation or two came to little in the grand march Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, a nephew of that Maria Edge- of history. But for the non-Marxist surveyors of the scene, worth who had once played charades with Ricardo. the great Victorian boom meant something else. The world Edgeworth was undoubtedly a brilliant scholar. In his more and more appeared full of hope and promise, and the final examinations at Oxford, when he was asked a particu- forebodings of a dissenter like Karl Marx seemed merely the larly abstruse question, he inquired of his examiners, "Shall I ravings of a discontented radical. Hence the intellectual answer briefly, or at length? and then proceeded to hold bombshell that Marx had prepared went off in almost total si- forth for half an hour, punctuating his reply with excursions lence; instead of a storm of abuse, Marx met the far more into Greek while his examiners gaped. crushing ignominy of indifference. But Edgeworth was not fascinated with economics be- For economics had ceased to be the proliferation of cause it justified or explained or condemned the world, or world views that, in the hands of now a philosopher, now a because it opened new vistas, bright or gloomy, into the fu- financial trader, now a revolutionary, seemed to illuminate ture. This odd soul was fascinated because economics dealt the whole avenue down which society was marching. It with quantities and because anything that dealt with quanti- became instead the special province of professors, whose in- ties could be translated into mathematics! The process of vestigations threw out pinpoint beams rather than the wide- translation required the abandonment of that tension-fraught searching beacons of the earlier economists. world of the earlier economists, but it yielded in return a There was a reason for this: as we have seen, Victorian world of such neat precision and lovely exactness that the loss England had caught the steady trade winds of late- seemed amply compensated. nineteenth-century progress and optimism. Improvement To build up such a mathematical mirror of reality, the was in the air, and so quite naturally there seemed less world obviously had to be simplified. Edgeworth's simplifica- cause to ask disturbing questions about the nature of the tion was this assumption: evey man is a pleasure machine. voyage. Hence the Victorian boom gave rise to a roster of Jeremy Bentham had originated the conception in the early elucidators, men who would examine the workings of the nineteenth century under the beguiling title of the Felicific system in great detail, but not men who would express Calculus, a philosophical view of humanity as so many living doubt as to its basic merits or make troublesome prognosti- profit-and-loss calculators, each busily arranging his life to cations as to its eventual fate. A new professordom took over maximize the pleasure of his psychic adding machine. To this the main life of economic thought. Its contributions were general philosophy Edgeworth now added the precision of often important, yet not vital. For in the minds of men like mathematics to produce a kind of Panglossian Best of All Alfred Marshall, Stanley Jevons, John Bates Clark, and the Possible Worlds. proliferating faculties that surrounded them, there were no Of all men to have adopted such a view of society, Edge- wolves in the economic world anymore, and therefore no worth seems a most unlikely choice. He himself was as ill- life-and-death activities for economic theory to elucidate. constructed a pleasure machine as can be imagined. The world was peopled entirely with agreeable, if imaginary, Neurotically shy, he tended to flee from the pleasures of sheep. human company to the privacy of his club; unhappy about The sheep were never more clearly delineated than in a the burden of material things, he received few of the plea- little volume entitled Mathematical Psychics, which ap- sures that for most people flow from possessions. His rooms peared in 1881, just two years before Marx died. It was not were bare, his library was the public one, and his stock of ma- 174 THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS THE VICTORIAN WORLD 175 terial wealth did not include crockery, or stationery, or even tenets of conservatism. Edgeworth actually believed that his - stamps. Perhaps his greatest source of pleasure was in the algebraic insight into human activity might yield helpful re- construction of his lovely imaginary economic Xanadu. suits in the world of flesh and blood. His analysis involved ~utregardless of his motives, Edgeworth's pleasure- such terms as these: machine assumption bore wonderful intellectual fruit. For if economics was defined to be the study of human pleasure- mechanisms competing for shares of society's stock of pleasure, then it could be shown-with all the irrefutability of the differential calculus-that in a world of perfect competition "Considerations so abstract," wrote ~dgiworth,"it would each machine would achieve the highest amount of of course be ridiculous to fling upon the floodtide of practical pleasure that could be meted out by society. politics. But they are not perhaps out of place when we re- In other words, if this was not yet quite the best of all mount to the little rills of sentiment and secret springs of mo- possible worlds, it could be. Unfortunately, the world was not tive where every course of action must be originated." organized as a game of perfect competition; men did have "The little rills of sentiment," indeed! Whit would Adam the lamentable habit of sticking together in foolish disregard Smith have thought of this conversion of his pushy mer- of the beneficent consequences of stubbornly following their chants, his greedy journeymen, and his multiplying laboring ' self-interest; trade unions, for example, were in direct con- classes into SO many categories of delicate pleasure-seekers? troversion to the principle of each for himself, and the uncle- In fact, Henry Sid~ck,a contemporary of Edgeworth's md niable fact of inequalitiesof wealth and position did make the a disciple of J.

Load more