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1. the Damnation of Economics

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1. the Damnation of Economics Notes 1. The Damnation of Economics 1. One example of vice-regal patronage of anti-economics is Canada’s ‘Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction’. In 1995 this honour was bestowed upon John Raulston Saul’s anti-economic polemic The Unconscious Civilization (published in 1996). A taste of Saul’s wisdom: ‘Over the last quarter-century economics has raised itself to the level of a scientific profession and more or less foisted a Nobel Prize in its own honour onto the Nobel committee thanks to annual financing from a bank. Yet over the same 25 years, economics has been spectacularly unsuc- cessful in its attempts to apply its models and theories to the reality of our civili- sation’ (Saul 1996, p. 4). See Pusey (1991) and Cox (1995) for examples of patronage of anti-economics by Research Councils and Broadcasting Corporations. 2. Another example of economists’ ‘stillness’: the economists of 1860 did not join the numerous editorial rebukes of Ruskin’s anti-economics tracts (Anthony, 1983). 3. The anti-economist is not to be contrasted with the economist. An economist (that is, a person with a specialist knowledge of economics) may be an anti- economist. The true obverse of anti-economist is ‘philo-economist’: someone who holds that economics is a boon. 4. One may think of economics as a disease (as the anti-economist does), or one may think of economics as diseased. Mark Blaug: ‘Modern economics is “sick” . To para- phrase the title of a popular British musical: “No Reality, Please. We’re Economists”’ (Blaug 1998, p. 13). This second position is not as radical as the first position. Yet, the two can encourage the same consequence. 5. Kanth reveals the essence of the anti-economists when he declares ‘the point . is not to criticise economics endlessly, but to dispense with it altogether’ (Kanth 1997, p. 3). Henderson does the same when she demands that economics must ‘simply be swept away’ (Henderson 1981, p. 12). 6. The radicalness of the renunciation that is characteristic of anti-economists is not found in Keynes. Recall that Keynes believed classical economics was valid as a special case. Marx, by contrast, could never allow that bourgeois political economy was true as a ‘special case’. 7. An example of the identification of economics with the market: the one thing many environmentalist critics of economics ‘know’ about economics is that economics favours markets (see Kelman 1981a). These environmental critics do not favour the market, and so they decide they do not favour economics. 8. Robert Torrens once wrote: ‘And who are the distinguished Economists who support the doctrines of the Manchester School? I know of not one, with the exception of Senior; and he possesses in an unusual degree of perfection the faculty of self-refutation’ (quoted in O’Brien, 1977, p. 7). 9. Skousen (1991) is an example of the denigration of economics by a free-market advocate. 10. Thus Senior in 1839 proposed only a gradual reduction in the duty of corn over 12 years. Torrens in 1843 opposed the complete and immediate abolition of the Corn Laws. 239 240 Notes 11. Engels: ‘our economics is essentially Christian’ ([1844] 1973, p. 221). 12. To continue, economists have been criticised for being high born (Pusey 1991), and for being low born (see Castles 1984; Fetter 1925). In the ‘Inheritor and the Econo- mist’ Samuel Ferguson ‘casts its Economist as a low-bred English laissez-faire fanatic, in contrast with the genteel cultivation of the Inheritor’ (Eagleton 1999, p. 99). 13. Friedman (1986), for example, praises the value of economists in general, despite his attribution of great harm done by the ideas of Keynesian economics. 14. Ferdinand Galiani’s methodological critique of economics combined a rejection of law-likeness in economic affairs with a confident a priorism (see Coleman 1995, pp. 120–2). 15. Comte illustrates the holistic objection: ‘The avowal of the economists that their science is isolated from social philosophy in general, is itself a sufficient con- firmation of my [negative] judgement; for it is a universal fact in social, as in biological science, that all the various general aspects of the science are scien- tifically one, and rationally inseparable . Thus, the economical or industrial analysis of society can not be effected in the positive method, from its intellectual, moral, and political analysis’ (Comte [1855] 1974, p. 447). The Comtean anti- economist John Kells Ingram (1823–1907) pursues the thought: ‘He who treats every disease as purely local, without regard to the general constitution, is a quack . These considerations are just as applicable mutatis mutandis to the study of society’ (quoted in Ekelund 1966, p. 178). 16. For one statement of the holistic critique of economics see Heilbronner (1970, p. 91). Syme (1876) is a nineteenth-century example. 17. A kindred objection is that the economists have mistaken the meaning of wealth. Thus, it is claimed, wealth is not material but ‘moral’; it is the social capital of society that makes a society strong (Bonald). Alternatively, wealth is ‘life’ (Ruskin). 18. We see a disregard for the economic on account of a low esteem of the material in the derision of Leavis (1963) for the ‘standard of living’, or in Arnold’s (1871, p. 42) pronouncement that political economy is ‘boring’. 19. A riposte to political economy similar to that of Carlyle’s was made by the anti- economist Bonald early in the nineteenth century. ‘We know exactly . how many chickens lay eggs . we know less about men: and we have completely lost sight of the principles which underlie and maintain societies’ (quoted in Cohen 1969, p. 479). 20. The utopian has little interest in the economic system of their future utopia, and thus ‘Utopian Economics’ is a book that will remain unwritten. Utopians have no interest in dealing with the economic problem, since they have no appreciation of its existence (see Gordon 1991, p. 161).This is one reason why they are utopian. 2. The ‘Wretched Procurers of Sedition’ 1. Toussenel (1847). 2. The Abbé Coyer, a leading critic of the Loi de Dérogeance, that regulated the economic activity of the nobility in France, was a popular author with the physiocrats (Kisaki 1979). 3. It was on account of the candid championship of economic privilege that conservatives repudiated the reforms of Turgot. It was, for example, complained that the abolition of the corvée would ‘confound the Nobility...and the Clergy... with the people’ (Stephens 1895, p. 133) The result of emancipating industry would be that ‘every manufacturer, every artist, every workman would regard Notes 241 himself as an isolated being, depending upon himself alone . All subordination would be destroyed’ (quoted in Stephens 1895, p. 134). 4. The counter-revolutionary author Sénac de Meilhan (1736–1803) exemplifies a conservative identification of economic liberalism with political liberalism. Meilhan admired Turgot and despised Necker, yet ‘Sénac de Meilhan assimilated the struggle for liberty of the press to the campaign for liberty of the grain trade, viewing both as manifestations of the same subversive spirit’ (Kaplan 1976, p. 611). 5. Certain Revolutionary legislation also bore the imprimatur of the physiocrats; the Revolutionary decree of 29 August 1789, freeing the grain trade, and the land tax established by the Constituent Assembly on 1 December 1790 followed physiocratic precepts. 6. It was Louis XV who dubbed Quesnay his thinker, not Louis XVI. 7. Charles de Coux (1787–1864) was one anti-economist who took up Bonald’s theme of the materialism of economics, and blamed on it several economic ills. In his opinion the ‘half Protestant, half atheist’ followers of Adam Smith were to blame for the ‘maximum’ of 1793, the assignats and fiscal bankruptcy (Coux 1832, p. 45). Smithians were to blame for these policies (all antagonistic to the precepts of political economy) on account of their elevation of material wealth over moral wealth. 8. Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont (1784–1850) was another Right anti-economist, similar to Bonald. See Villeneuve-Bargemont (1839, p. 365) for his blame of the ‘immense catastrophe of 1789’ on (among other things) ‘English economic and political theories’. 9. In Italy many chairs in political economy were suppressed in the Restoration (Augello and Guidi 1996, p. 30). 10. The ‘ultraroyalist’ police were sympathetic to the attempts to resurrect guilds (Sibalis 1988, p. 729). 11. Another lecturer on political economy at the Conservatoire who fell foul of the ‘ultras’ was Charles Dunoyer (1786–1862) His journal Le Censeur was twice closed down, and he was imprisoned in 1817 (Staum 1998). 12. Under the head of ‘Right anti-economists’ one might also include Jean-Charles- Leonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773–1842), save for his warm personal relations with political economists, including Ricardo. Though commonly seen as ‘progressive’, Sismondi was attracted to the paternalist trinity of land, church, and locality (see Desroussilles, 1976; and Lutfalla, 1976). Alison wrote in praise of Sismondi in Blackwood’s (Alison 1845). 13. Charles Fourier was the author of Political Economy Made Easy: ‘Economists have agreed to sanction commercial fraud and cheating with a licensed system of general and individual lying’ (Fourier, 1828, p. 7). 14. The execution of Louis XVI. 15. ‘One must never forget the powerful position held by cameralism as an “entrenched orthodoxy” if one is to appreciate the audacity and liberating impact of the new laissez-faire doctrines taught by the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith’ (Epstein 1966, p. 177). Smith achieved renown in Germany only after 1789. The same is true of Italy (Palyi [1928] 1966, p. 188). 16. ‘Müller deeply resented Smith’s attempts to dissolve the social order into a mechanism composed of individuals as the ultimate social units, and he was convinced that Smith’s appeal to and reliance on self-interest would lead to anarchy’ (Aris 1936, p.
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