Defending Political Theory After Burke: Stewart's Intellectual Disciplines and the Demotion of Practice

Ryan Walter

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 80, Number 3, July 2019, pp. 387-408 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2019.0028

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/729724

Access provided at 16 Aug 2019 00:08 GMT from University of Queensland Defending Political Theory After Burke: Stewart’s Intellectual Disciplines and the Demotion of Practice

Ryan Walter

Perhaps therefore it is a fault of Mr. Burke, that he is ever checking this disposition of the mind to soar to original principles, and detaining you midway amongst combinations of private feelings, usage, prudence or convenience; whilst Mr Paine on the contrary is continually assisting you to throw out ballast, till you are lifted out of sight of all fabricks of human contrivance, and having brought you to those sublime heights, he keeps you out of reach of all useful and practical inference. —William Cusac Smith1

Burke established a rhetoric of prescriptive conservatism with such intellectual power and religious conviction . . . that he bade fair to displace Scottish social theory from its role as the chief ideological support of the Whig order. —J. G. A. Pocock2

I would like to thank the referees, Anna Plassart, and the late Barry Hindess for comments and suggestions. 1 [William Cusac Smith], The Rights of Citizens: Being an Examination of Mr. Paine’s Principles Touching Government. By a Barrister (Dublin, 1791), 4. 2 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and His- tory, Chieﬂy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 280.

387

PAGE 387 ...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:42 PS JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019

By linking philosophy’s role in recreating French society with England’s painful memories of government innovation during the previous century, Edmund Burke’s Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (1790) derived much of its rhetorical force by exploiting the period’s fear of enthusiasm.3 The aim was to portray as destructive the idea of remodeling society using notions of natural right, and the tactic might be judged to have been as successful as the publication.4 As a consequence of Burke’s intervention, the latitudinarian intellectual culture that had ﬂourished since at least mid- century gave way to loyalism and attempts to portray even moderate reformers as Jacobins.5 In this context, the act of producing abstract and metaphysical accounts of politics and society came to be viewed suspi- ciously. Burke’s counsel was for the legislator to revere custom, prescription, and inheritance. He tied all three concepts together in his creative rework- ing of English common law for anti-revolutionary purposes.6 The key point was to understand that political life mimicked the natural life of the human species in using time to transmit knowledge to ensure perpetuity. It was in this regard that Burke described society as a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. A legislator with this view of society would not embrace purely theoretical plans for sudden change.7 The effect on political debate was severe. Consider William Pitt’s response in Parliament to the petition from the Society of the Friends of the

3 J. G. A. Pocock and Gordon J. Schochet, “Interregnum and Restoration,” in The Varie- ties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 177. For enthusiasm more generally see Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995), chap. 1. 4 William B. Todd, A Bibliography of Edmund Burke (London: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1982), 150. Note the contemporary Francis Plowden’s comment that Burke’s principles came to be widely adopted in the following years: Francis Plowden, A Short History of the British Empire in the Last Twenty Months (London, 1794), 19. 5 Mark Philp, Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 119–20. 6 See Paul Lucas, “On Edmund Burke’s Doctrine of Prescription: Or, an Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers,” The Historical Journal 11, no. 1 (1968): 57–58. 7 Edmund Burke, “Reﬂections on the Revolution in France,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. L. G. Mitchell and William B. Todd (1790; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8:53–293, at 82–84, 147. Iain Hampsher-Monk has noted that Burke’s language here is surely drawn from Francis Bacon. See Burke, “Reﬂec- tions on the Revolution in France,” in Burke: Revolutionary Writings, ed. Iain Hampsher- Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 35n72. For the passage of Bacon noted by Hampsher-Monk, see Francis Bacon, “Of Innovations,” in The Essays or Coun- sels, Civil and Moral of Francis Bacon, ed. Henry Morley (London, 1883), 114.

388

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:43 PS PAGE 388 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke

People, which proposed reform to address irregular representation and the distorting role of patronage.8 Pitt equated the proposed reforms with French principles of individual suffrage and an equal right to representation, warning that if they were implemented then the British Constitution would be destroyed by an “equalising anarchy.”9 In any case, Pitt insisted, the whole business of reforming with abstract principles was disastrously misplaced: “The merit of the British Constitution is to be estimated, not by metaphysical ideas, not by vague theories, but by analysing it in practice. Its benefits are confirmed by the sure and infallible test of experience.”10 Such intellectual caution was exactly what Burke had mandated. So much is conveyed in the pamphlet written by Burke’s friend William Smith, quoted in the first epigraph above. Yet Smith favored a greater role for “original principles” in the legislator’s repertoire than did Burke, but less than needed to reach Paine’s “sublime heights.”11 Smith’s intervention reminds us that, until they had become suspect, there were several forms of speculative thinking that had supported the Hanoverian regime. One such form was the “philosophic Whiggism” of William Paley, developed in The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), which elevated utility over rights and counseled subjection to the existing order.12 Another species was the “sceptical Whiggism” of Adam Smith and David Hume, as labeled by Duncan Forbes,13 which provided a conjectural-historical defense of commercial society against its republican or civic-humanist detractors by revealing how virtue changed over time, such that a “commercial human- ism” was appropriate for the age at hand.14 The political status of both forms of speculation changed after the French Revolution. For example, a review of Smith’s Wealth of Nations published in the Annual Register in 1776, hence likely by Burke, merely referred to it as “rational theory,”15

8 “Debate on Mr. Grey’s Motion for a Reform in Parliament,” in The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London, 1817), 30:787– 925, at 795–96. 9 William Pitt, “May 7, 1793,” in The Speeches of the Right Honourable William Pitt, in the House of Commons (London, 1806), 2:143–56, at 155. 10 Pitt, 154. 11 For Smith see R. B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 1750–1800 (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), 164–66. 12 Sergio Cremaschi, Utilitarianism and Malthus’s Virtue Ethics: Respectable, Virtuous, and Happy (New York: Routledge, 2014), 28. 13 Duncan Forbes, “Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty,” in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 179–201. 14 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 50. 15 The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1776, vol. 19 (London, 1776), 241.

389

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:43 PS PAGE 389 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019 but by 1793 it was dangerous to extol Smithian principles, which have been described as “virtually seditious” by one commentator.16 Similarly, Paley’s Principles was quickly incorporated into Cambridge curricula after initial publication in 1785, but in 1802 the Anti-Jacobin Review was worrying over the text’s potential to sanction Jacobin principles.17 These facts are established in the historiography and well known. What is less well known, however, is the means by which those who were committed to political speculation attempted to defend themselves. Or, to put the question in narrower terms, how could one reject the allegation of “enthusiasm” and maintain a positive account of one’s intellectual activi- ties? The current paper takes up this issue by examining Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), in which Stewart was prepared to speak variously of a field of inquiry called “the theory of politics” and “political philosophy,” and of figures such as the “political theorist” and “speculative philosopher” who had mastered a vocabulary— including the terms “government” and “power”—that referenced the complex ideas needed to understand this field and enlighten the conduct of statesmen. This exercise is intended to reveal two neglected dynamics of Britain’s intellectual culture following the French Revolution. First, those sympa- thetic to political speculation were not sitting ducks but defended themselves by pointing to elaborate intellectual disciplines that could prevent abstract arts of reasoning from falling into enthusiasm. Second, self- described “theorists” such as Stewart turned the tables on practical critics such as Burke by redescribing the veneration of “practice,” “custom,” and “facts” as superstition and naı¨vete´. Given the eventual success of theoretical styles of inquiry,18 it is surprising that we know so little of the counter- tactics that secured their place in the modern period. In this respect, the paper aims to contribute to the recent and dispersed project to write a “history of theory,” from Kant’s metaphysical paideia as described by Ian

16 Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlighten- ment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 55. For the legal and social persecutions brought to bear on radicals and reformers, see Kenneth R. Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 17 Anthony Waterman, “A Cambridge ‘Via Media,’ ” in Political Economy and Christian Theology since the Enlightenment: Essays in Intellectual History (London: Palgrave Mac- millan, 2004), 72. 18 Consider the development of a Tory brand of political economy that reached similar heights of abstraction to its utilitarian rival, as described by Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Inﬂuence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795– 1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

390

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:43 PS PAGE 390 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke

Hunter,19 through Keith Tribe’s account of how Marx read British political economy through German metaphysics,20 to the “Theoretical Practices” of Talcott Parsons and his attempts to legitimize theory in the postwar social sciences academy as portrayed by Joel Isaac.21 The shared premise of this work is that to theorize is a peculiar activity, one only undertaken by certain actors under speciﬁc political and cultural conditions. In the case of Stew- art, those conditions were hostile, and they called forth an account of theory premised on a vanishing style of intellectual discipline, and a counter- attack on theory’s practical critics that is still performing front-line service today.

I. STEWART’S ELEMENTS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN MIND AND THE DEFENSE OF POLITICAL THEORY

Stewart’s Elements should be placed in at least two contexts. The ﬁrst is pedagogical: the formation of polite and virtuous young men at the Univer- sity of Edinburgh by way of moral philosophy. When Stewart succeeded Adam Ferguson in 1785 as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, he was fortunate to be entering a setting where moral philosophy’s worth as a means for shaping youth was taken for granted. The larger historical process by which this status was secured for moral philosophy has been described by Richard B. Sher and Nicholas Phillipson.22 In short, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a “moderate literati” gained control of church and university and then harmonized them in view of such enlight- ened values as “politeness,” forming the institutional core of what has come

19 Ian Hunter, “The Morals of Metaphysics: Kant’s Groundwork as Intellectual Paideia,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 4 (2002): 908–29. 20 Keith Tribe, The Economy of the Word: Language, History, and Economics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 6. 21 Joel Isaac, “Tangled Loops: Theory, History, and the Modern Sciences in America,” Modern Intellectual History 6, no. 2 (2009): 398–99. See also Isaac, Working Knowl- edge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 22 Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1985); Nicholas Phil- lipson, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikula´sˇ Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 19–40; Nicholas Phillipson, “The Pursuit of Virtue in Scottish University Education: Dugald Stewart and Scottish Moral Philosophy in the Enlightenment,” in Universities, Society, and the Future: A Conference Held on the 400th Anniversary of the University of Edin- burgh, ed. Phillipson (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1983), 82–101.

391

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:44 PS PAGE 391 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019 to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Then, as ﬁgures such as William Robertson and Adam Ferguson rose in reputation and institutional status, they began to enter the city’s elite, whose sons they were training for careers as doctors, lawyers, and statesmen. In this setting, where religious belief, erudition, and politics were not perceived to exhibit competing values, “virtue” described a form of comportment that was to be cultivated in all spheres of life. Stewart’s commitment to this understanding of moral life is evident in his Outlines of Moral Philosophy, an epitome of his philosophy published in 1793. The intimate connection between philosophy of mind, moral conduct, and political life is spelled out at the beginning of part 1 of the trea- tise23:

1. The object of Moral Philosophy is to ascertain the general rules of a wise and virtuous conduct in life, in so far as these rules may be discovered by the unassisted light of nature; that is, by an examination of the principles of the human constitution, and of the circumstances in which man is placed. 2. In examining the principles of our constitution with this view, our inquiries may be arranged under three heads; according as they refer, (1.) To the intellectual powers of man. (2.) To his active and moral powers. And (3.) To man, considered as the member of a political body.

What is striking to a contemporary reader is the idea that philosophy of mind could be capable of guiding our political lives. Yet this is central to Stewart’s project. The fundamental premise is that the human constitution —our mental faculties and their interrelations—was designed by God in such a manner that our intellectual and moral powers can only develop along their intended paths in political society. It follows that by understanding our faculties and how to govern them correctly we learn not only how to conduct ourselves as individuals, but we also learn simultaneously how to govern ourselves correctly among other rational creatures with whom we are jointly expressing and perfecting our deepest natures. This was an intoxicating doctrine for young men. Henry Cockburn,

23 Dugald Stewart, Outlines of Moral Philosophy: For the Use of Students in the Univer- sity of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1793), 11–12. Since the argument being made treats the temporal context as crucial, the ﬁrst editions of both the Outline and Elements are used.

392

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:44 PS PAGE 392 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke one of Stewart’s pupils, described the resonance of his teaching: “To me his lectures were like the opening of the heavens. I felt that I had a soul.”24 We may speculate that part of Stewart’s appeal for students such as Cockburn was the way his philosophy rendered the operation of one’s own mind explicable and susceptible to virtuous government. To grasp this point, compare Stewart with Adam Smith. As Stewart stated in his memorial for Smith, he did not agree with the account of moral phenomena set out in Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments because it was ﬂawed by Smith’s “too great a desire of generalizing his principles.”25 What Stewart meant by “generalizing” was Smith’s attempt to account for virtue in terms of the natural history of society. That is, Smith held that our sense of moral “pro- priety” grew out of endless social interactions that develop the capacity to assess behavior from the point of view of an “impartial spectator”; we con- jure the impartial spectator to provide ourselves with a standard of behavior that deserves the approbation of others, regardless of whether or not other persons (who may not be impartial) actually do approve of our behavior. This strategy allowed Smith to minimize metaphysical commit- ments regarding the mind’s faculties, but at the cost of removing the source of virtue from the mind to anonymous social processes that varied histori- cally and geographically. Stewart, in effect, was returning virtue to the care of the individual will.26 The second crucial context in which to locate Stewart’s Elements is the variable project of developing a “science of politics,” running from at least David Hume to John Stuart Mill.27 This science combined styles of thinking that have now been parsed into distinct disciplines—economics, sociology, history, and philosophy—such that it represents an extinct tradition.28 So identiﬁed, Stewart’s version of the science can again be distinguished by noting the rival version of Smith. Perhaps most important is Stewart’s dimi- nution of the descriptive-historical aspects of Smith’s science, and Stewart’s optimism regarding the future course of human improvement in compari- son to Smith’s skeptical stance.29 Further, Knud Haakonssen has underlined

24 Henry Cockburn, Memorials of His Time (Edinburgh, 1865), 1:26. 25 Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith,” in W. P. D. Wightman, J. C. Bryce, and I. S. Ross, eds., The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. 3, Essays on Philosophical Subjects with Dugald Stewart’s Account of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 2:41. 26 Phillipson, “The Pursuit of Virtue in Scottish University Education,” 94–97. 27 Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3. 28 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics,3. 29 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, esp. 23–61.

393

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:45 PS PAGE 393 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019 the way in which Stewart dissolved Smith’s conception of the science of the legislator. For, where Smith used natural law to demarcate political economy as the science’s sub-branch concerned with police (in the eighteenth- century sense) and prosperity, Stewart inverted this relationship by making natural jurisprudence merely a component of a political economy now expanded into the master discipline for governing societies.30 A belief in political economy’s destiny as the master science of society was passed on in different degrees to those Scots who founded the Edin- burgh Review—Francis Lord Jeffrey, Henry Brown, Francis Horner, and Sydney Smith.31 But, as with most students, the reviewers were selective about what they took from their teacher. Jeffrey, for example, deflated the metaphysical training of his youth when reviewing one of Stewart’s texts in the Edinburgh Review, claiming that it would not lead to new scientific discoveries.32 In retrospect, this looks like an early sign that political economy was becoming independent of the Scottish moral philosophy that had underwritten its early development.33 If the loss of political economy as a client discipline augured poorly for Stewart’s metaphysics, then an unex- pected source of support was its reception by Oxford Tory high-churchmen, such as Edward Copleston, who used Stewart’s Elements in their contests with dissenters of various stripes.34 Viewing both facts together, it is at least fair to say that the continued appeal of metaphysics as capable of legislating what counted as sound reasoning in all domains was uncertain. With this context in view, it is now time to examine how Stewart responded in his Elements to the delegitimation of abstract and metaphysical inquiry into politics following the reception of Burke’s Reflections.35 Clearly, the context provides a good part of the answer, one that reveals Stewart as ideally placed to defend the notion of developing a theory of politics. For the Elements was a publication that emerged from a moral philosophy curriculum for young men expecting professional careers in a

30 Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 7. 31 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, 25. 32 Francis Jeffrey, “Stewart’s Philosophical Essays,” Edinburgh Review 17 (1810): 167– 211. See Cristina Paoletti, “Common Sense in the Public Sphere: Dugald Stewart and the Edinburgh Review,” History of European Ideas 38, no. 1 (2012): 162–78. 33 A similar point is made by Collini, Winch, and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, 57–58. 34 Pietro Corsi, “The Heritage of Dugald Stewart: Oxford Philosophy and the Method of Political Economy,” Nuncius 2, no. 2 (1987): 94. 35 For the reception of this text in Scotland, see Anna Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chap. 3.

394

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:45 PS PAGE 394 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke polite society. The text was therefore largely an instruction manual directing youth on how to govern their thinking in the ways necessary to get along under the existing regime. The other part of the answer relates to Stewart’s refutation of Burke’s account of theory and practice. Stewart was prepared to defend the role of abstract generalizations in “the theory of legislation” because they could be just as grounded in experience as the claims of the Burkean “political empiric.”36 Stewart could set aside Burke’s enthusiasm smear by showing that, while enthusiasm was dangerous, it was a by-product of the ill- government of one or more of the mind’s faculties. And this was a danger that Stewart specifically equipped his “political theorist” to guard against. But Stewart also countered the Burkean move by redescribing the reliance on precedent and experience in the terms of his philosophy of mind, in which precedent emerged as a superstition arising from mere association, not causation. Such superstition was the result of failing to develop the mind’s powers to distinguish between events that simply followed one another and events that caused one another.37 It followed that society need not rely on fortune for the design of its institutions but could draw on a science of politics. Thus, the general aim of Stewart’s arguments was to steer a middle course between the rage for political innovation on one side, and skepticism toward reform on the other.38 How did Stewart respond to the standing indictment of speculation? He began by conceding that thinking could be poorly done, creating pre- posterous results.39 A leading example arose from the Platonists’ presump- tion that a philosopher could perceive essences: “By withdrawing the attention from the distinguishing qualities of objects, and giving a common name to their resembling qualities, they conceived universals to be real exis- tences, or (as they expressed it) to be the essences of individuals; and flat- tered themselves with the belief, that by directing their attention to these essences in the first instance, they might be enabled to penetrate the secrets of the universe, without submitting to the study of nature in detail.”40 The results of such inquiries were mere phantasms, absurdities, and mixtures of fact and metaphysical speculation. This malady afflicted almost every science where fact and metaphysics were mingled from want of properly specifying the true objects and methods of inquiry.41 Such contamination could

36 Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (London, 1792), 234–35. 37 Stewart, Elements, 352–66. 38 As argued in Collini, Winch, and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, 38. 39 Stewart, Elements, 1–2. 40 Stewart, Elements, 216. 41 Stewart, Elements, 44–46.

395

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:45 PS PAGE 395 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019 be hard to detect, Stewart claimed, because metaphysical discourses tended to obscure the fact that the objects they purported to study were beyond human conception. Often, for example, speculators would attempt to dis- guise the absurdity of their theories by keeping the metaphysical compo- nents concealed, focusing their discourses on the observable phenomena under which the metaphysical causes purportedly lay.42 These speculations were dangerous not only because they could dazzle and bewilder the understanding, but also because they obscured the limits of human knowledge.43 Such was the strategic concession to the critics of metaphysics: some of it was bad. But this did not imply that the answer was to expel it from the realm of useful knowledge, for the idea was rather to reconstruct metaphysics on the basis of experiment and observation, just like “physics” had been remodeled after Bacon. Stewart found the task to be proven possible by his major inﬂuence, Thomas Reid, in his studies of perception, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man.44 The effect of Reid’s research was to free philosophers from attempting to penetrate into mysteries beyond human understanding using a sophisticated yet senseless vocabulary.45 According to Stewart, the crucial feature of human consciousness that determined the limits of human reason was that God had not made humans “capable of reasoning concerning classes of objects, without the use of signs.”46 In making this claim, Stewart was locating himself in a continuing debate between Nominalists and Realists. And it allowed him to shift emphasis from reasoning in the sense of inspecting the relations between propositions—as when examining a syllogism—to inspecting the notions that propositions expressed.47 That is, attention was to be shifted from the connections between “All humans are mortal” and “All Americans are humans” to the categories “humans” and “Americans”; in this example the categories are represented by words, but diagrams and formulas could serve in geometry, and symbols in algebra. In regard to this scrutiny of categories, Stewart considered “other intellectual processes” distinct from reasoning or “deduction, properly so called.”48 What were these other processes? The ﬁrst was “application.” In algebra, for example, even the best practitioners of calculus could fall into

42 Stewart, Elements, 65–66, 69. 43 Stewart, Elements, 89. 44 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. Derek Brookes and Knud Haakonssen (1785; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002). 45 Stewart, Elements, 87–91. 46 Stewart, Elements, 190. 47 Stewart, Elements, 174–75. 48 Stewart, Elements, 175.

396

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:46 PS PAGE 396 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke paradox and absurdity by failing to regard the conditions that a hypothesis involved: in a vacuum a cannonball and feather would fall under gravity at the same speed,49 but we do not live in vacuums. Geometry was largely protected against this danger because diagrams could act as a check on reasoning by revealing to the senses the relations that hold between the quantities being investigated.50 In the non-mathematical sciences, the role of diagrams must be fulfilled by examples and illustrations in revealing “speculative absurdities.”51 The second non-logical process that required scrutiny was signification. The need arose from the ambiguity inherent in using words as instruments of investigation. The dangers were far greater in metaphysics, morals, and politics than in natural philosophy. In algebra, for example, the longest investigations could be carried on without any fear of a break in the chain of reasoning owing to the signs with which reasoning was conducted. By contrast, in studying politics one was obliged to pay constant attention to signification, a “much more difficult effort of the mind than the logical process.”52 These challenges could be met if the theorist cultivated a number of skills. One was to develop the habit of illustrating elaborate claims and argumentation with cases or examples, thus meeting the need for application to check reasoning. Another was to reason using general terms, fixed in their meaning by accurate definition and made familiar through force of habit. By using general terms a person could also avoid the danger of being distracted by their own particular experiences, or by the arousal of the imagination.53 In fact, here we have reached one of the distinguishing features of the theorist’s intellectual labor, for the use of abstract and general terms not only protected them from the ambiguity inherent in words but made it possible to discover “comprehensive theorems” of tremendous utility to humanity, on a par with the advantages of algebra over arithmetic.54 Yet abstract and general terms came with their own set of dangers. Above all, there lay the potential for abstract thought to produce dazzling nonsense and enthusiasm because general terms often denoted abstractions, or real things of a complicated nature, such as “government” and “power.”

49 Galileo Galilei, “On Motion,” in On Motion and On Mechanics, ed. I. E. Drabkin and Stillman Drake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), chap. 8. 50 Stewart, Elements, 176. See the excellent discussion in Richard S. Olson, Scottish Phi- losophy and British Physics, 1740–1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 71–83, 88–91. 51 Stewart, Elements, 177. 52 Stewart, Elements, 178. 53 Stewart, Elements, 178–80. 54 Stewart, Elements, 212.

397

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:46 PS PAGE 397 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019

Here, then, it is possible to see thinking about politics in an abstract manner as one of the tasks of the philosopher, where the philosopher was understood as a distinctive type of intellectual whom Stewart set in explicit op- position to practical men, at times described simply as the “vulgar.” Philosophers used “comprehensive terms” and “abstraction” to access “general truths” and “general theorems,” while practical men did not sur- mount above “particular truths.”55 Such mastery required a specific set of disciplines: “an uncommon capacity of patient attention, and a cautious circumspection in conducting our various intellectual processes, which can only be acquired by early habits of philosophical reflexion.”56 In short, the philosopher was recognized by the fact that they ascended to the abstract and the general in the correct manner. This involved beginning with individual objects, events, and facts, “to lay a ground-work for accurate classification, and for a just investigation of the laws of nature,” and general principles should be “resolvable” into these primary units—these “particular observations.”57 If we look past the fact that deriving general principles seems to be under-prescribed, then we can ask what was one to do with general principles once they had been formulated? Stewart’s answer was that general principles should be refined, and then joined together to yield increasingly comprehensive conclusions. These results would abridge the process of study for future generations who could, as it were, pick up where their predecessors had left off, and the ultimate outcome would be the discovery of the laws of nature and the effects of their combination.58 All this would require ethical labor simultaneous with, and inextricable from, the intellectual labors considered above, which we now consider.

II. THEORY AND ETHICAL LABOR

The link between individual behavior and philosophy in Stewart’s thought is signaled in the following statement, taken from his Outlines of Moral Philosophy: “The ultimate object of philosophical inquiry is the same which every man of plain understanding proposes to himself, when he remarks the events which fall under his observation, with a view to the

55 Stewart, Elements, 212–13, 224. 56 Stewart, Elements, 213. 57 Stewart, Elements, 215, 218, 224. 58 Stewart, Elements, 220. On this, see Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, chap. 7.

398

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:46 PS PAGE 398 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke future regulation of his conduct. The more knowledge of this kind we acquire, the better we can accommodate our plans to the established order of things, and avail ourselves of natural Powers and Agents for accomplish- ing our purposes.”59 In this passage, “conduct” refers simply to one’s behavior in a world governed by natural laws of cause and effect. However, the greater focus of Stewart’s thought in general, and in his Elements in particular, was the conduct of the intellect, understood as the government of discrete faculties that ought to be cultivated to the maximum possible degree in the pursuit of human nature’s perfection, in contrast to merely satisfying ourselves with developing those faculties that were called upon by a given station in life. A by-product of pursuing such perfection was happiness, which increased as the mind’s powers approached the limit of their cultivation. Happiness and human perfection thus walked hand in hand. At this point it is possible to perceive the peculiarity of the context under study: only someone trained to believe that the mind had faculties that should be cultivated in the name of human perfection would feel anxi- ety about merely exercising their mind in ways that were useful and pleasur- able. Once perfection was accepted as the destination to strive toward, some pitfalls immediately presented themselves. While the vulgar might not develop even one of the mind’s powers to its maximum, where the metaphysician would likely have mastered abstraction and conception, it was nevertheless the case that in the vulgar mind all the powers still held a relative balance one with another, something conducive to tranquility of mind and prudent conduct.60 (As will be seen, the vulgar were susceptible to tumults of a different nature.) Philosophy, in other words, was essential to the perfection of human nature and yet its practice carried risks. Enthusi- asm, for example, was commonly a by-product of the ill-government of the power of abstraction.61 The indispensable service that abstraction per- formed for humans was to allow the mind to look past the distinguishing peculiarities of objects and focus attention on the attributes that they possessed in common, making classiﬁcation possible.62 Of course, the principle upon which any given classiﬁcation was organized represented a choice, and hence this power was subservient to reason and imagination. Mathe- matics represented reasoning with abstractions, while the poet worked with

59 Stewart, Outlines of Moral Philosophy,3. 60 Stewart, Elements, 21, 28–29. 61 On this, see Collini, Winch, and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, 33–35. 62 Stewart, Elements, 153.

399

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:47 PS PAGE 399 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019 objects that could actually be sensed: “the poet is supplied with all his materials by experience; and as his province is limited to combine and modify things which really exist so as to produce new wholes of his own; so every exertion which he thus makes of his powers, presupposes the exercise of abstraction in decomposing and separating actual combinations.”63 Because the poet’s abstractions were subservient to their imagination, typically they would be able to state to themselves the objects on which they have brought abstraction to bear, at least as objects of conception, just as the painter who sketches a centaur has abstracted from conceptions of man and horse. By contrast, the mathematician’s abstractions—such as length abstracted from any other dimension—will often not be available to human conception. That this fact had been poorly understood explained innumerable pathologies in intellectual life. If it were widely recognized that Euclid’s first definitions were not capable of human conception, then they would only have been taught in passing. Instead, students all over Europe spent fruitless hours attempting to conceive of objects beyond the human mind’s powers.64 If the attempt to generate conceptions in relation to abstractions that were simply beyond the power of human conception was one source of mental derangement, then another was an excessive taste for the activity of abstraction. One of the leading effects of civilization was to accustom the mind to using general propositions, although the capacity was unevenly distributed, and obviously more common among the educated.65 Even within a particular class in a civilized society, some individuals would pos- sess a greater “philosophic spirit” than others.66 We saw in the previous section that generating abstract principles depended on two things. The first was the quality of the observation and classification from which they arose. The second was the art with which principles were applied to practice, which would typically require adjustment to the case at hand. Those possessed of a philosophic spirit would likely neglect both arts. First, they would be impatient with the process of gathering their observations care- fully, and they would be equally hasty in the process of abstraction—the process of moving from the differences apparent in a set of particulars to the qualities possessed in common. Second, such thinkers would apply their generalizations to practice without paying sufficient heed to local circumstances. Such a mind required due regulation if it were to achieve success in

63 Stewart, Elements, 156. 64 Stewart, Elements, 157. 65 Stewart, Elements, 223. 66 Stewart, Elements, 224.

400

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:47 PS PAGE 400 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke the conduct of everyday affairs. And the regulation that Stewart seemed to have in mind was to treat general principles “merely as approximations to the truth, the defects of which, must be supplied by habits acquired by personal experience.”67 As with so many of his contemporaries, Stewart used the example of mechanics when reconciling theory and experience. The theory of mechani- cal powers is abstracted from friction, and from the weight of levers, which were considered as mathematical lines and perfectly inﬂexible. In this way complex problems were simpliﬁed to the extent that they could be solved using elementary geometry. Something similar happened in “the theory of politics.”68 The distinguishing features of particular forms of government were left behind in the process of abstraction, which allowed individual instances to be placed into general classes according to their prevailing tendency. This resulted in three categories: monarchy, aristocracy, and democ- racy. In reality, all governments were mixtures of these types, but always focusing on this fact would make it impossible to arrive at general principles. In the same manner, the farmer worked with only a few categories of soil, physicians a small number of temperaments, and the moralist with a few principles of human action.69 Yet the art of application was irreducible. In the following comments, Stewart draws out the tragic consequences of the dependence of good theory on good implementation:

Hence . . . the mere theorist so frequently exposes himself, in real life, to the ridicule of men whom he despises; and, in the general estimation of the world, falls below the level of the common drudges in business and the arts. The walk, indeed, of these unenlightened practitioners, must necessarily be limited by their acci- dental opportunities of experience; but, so far as they go, they operate with facility and success; while the merely speculative philosopher, although possessed of principles which enable him to approximate to the truth, in an infinite variety of untried cases, and although he sees, with pity, the narrow views of the multitude, and the ludicrous pretensions with which they frequently oppose their trifling successes to his theoretical speculations, finds himself perfectly at a loss, when he is called upon, by the simplest occurrences of ordinary life, to carry his principles into execution.70

67 Stewart, Elements, 225. 68 Stewart, Elements, 226. 69 Stewart, Elements, 226. 70 Stewart, Elements, 227.

401

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:48 PS PAGE 401 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019

Stewart admitted that it was difficult to specify the content of the practical skill that was so crucial to the successful implementation of theory. The world of business, for example, cultivated such experience, and success in it could be achieved without the habits of theoretical speculation. But mere experience did not prepare someone for new circumstances.71 In making these claims, Stewart was strategically specifying the relationship between “the mere theorist” and practice to enable his counter- account of the role of practice in knowledge and politics. In short: with general principles in hand, the office of practical skill was limited to reme- dying the imperfections of theory. Stewart may have enjoyed enlisting Burke’s words in pressing this case. He quoted from Burke’s speech on American taxation, in which Burke claimed that at times statesmen would be obliged to draw on a general knowledge of mankind because the business of office offered no precedents.72 The lesson that Stewart drew from Burke was that operating in a narrow sphere of experience unamplified by general principles impoverished the mind. This was skillful rhetoric, for Stewart had not only protected theory from the attack of practical men and their “ludicrous pretensions,” but he had also reduced experience to theory’s adjunct. It followed that the fears around theory and speculation in politics that had so terrified Edmund Burke did not arise from some defect internal to political speculation. What Burke had referred to as “enthusiasm”73 and “fanaticism”74 Stewart was able to redescribe as merely the “rash application of general principles.”75 He did so by distinguishing between two groups of political reasoners: those who cleaved to existing institutions and rejected novel plans of legislation (Burke), and those who were prepared to reason a priori from the principles of human nature (Stewart). Since “the theory of legislation” used generalizations that were arrived at by abstract- ing from particulars, it could be just as grounded in experience as the claims

71 Stewart, Elements, 228. 72 Stewart, Elements, 229. For the quotation from Burke, see Burke, “Speech on American Taxation,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford (1774; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 2:432. 73 Burke, “Reﬂections on the Revolution in France,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. L. G. Mitchell, William B. Todd (1790; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8:108. 74 Burke, “Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P. J. Marshall and Donald C. Bryant (1791; Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2015), 4:460. 75 Stewart, Elements, 233.

402

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:48 PS PAGE 402 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke of the “political empiric,” so long as one proceeded “cautiously and philosophically.”76 We have already seen that this required an element of practical skill when it came to implementation, and that in making this part of his argument Stewart greatly restricted the function of experience to mop- ping up those areas where theory did not reach. Yet this was only one element of Stewart’s extended attack on the Burkean case for precedent and usage. Stewart further redescribed Burke’s veneration for custom and usage as philosophically naı¨ve: it represented merely “an unenlightened veneration for maxims which are supposed to have the sanction of time in their favour, and a passive acquiescence in received opinions.”77 This represented an abuse of general principles because attention was not paid to the circumstances that generated the maxims, foreclosing their universality. Only philosophy could remedy this weakness by revealing the correct method for generating principles in politics—by examining the human constitution and the laws that regulate human affairs. This, Stewart claimed, would produce principles from “a much more extensive induction, than any of the infer- ences that can be drawn from the history of actual establishments.”78 Trans- lating this argument into today’s terms, the disciplines that Burke placed on the statesman’s reasoning excluded too many data. The ﬁnal stage in Stewart’s attack was to undermine the supposed purity of facts. Versions of this argument are routinely made in today’s humanities academy. There were so many circumstances simultaneously operating in a society at a given time—ideas, manners, the character of the people, relations between orders of the society—that simply tracking certain constitutional practices in the manner of Burke was an inadequate fac- tual basis. Faced with the enormity of details and processes, the only remedy was to produce “systematical descriptions” of societies that worked rather like the general rules of grammar—simplifying and organizing the materials to be studied. If such descriptions were to be called “theory,” then it was simply the case that “every such description must necessarily be more or less theoretical,” since every description was partial compared to the abundance of particulars.79 Thus, opposing experience to theory in the way that Burke presumed was philosophically untenable. As today’s adage has it, there are no facts without theory. Of course, Stewart’s gloss was unsatis- factory, since Burke’s history of constitutions was embedded in a history of

76 Stewart, Elements, 234–35. 77 Stewart, Elements, 236. 78 Stewart, Elements, 236. 79 Stewart, Elements, 239–40.

403

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:49 PS PAGE 403 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019

manners.80 Stewart was being fairer when he wrote that some writers dis- played a “zeal against reformation,”81 and little was to be gained by arguing with them. Such was Stewart’s case for the theoretical scrutiny of society. The case was made in tandem with remedies for a potential side effect of theory, excessive abstraction. The fact that theoretical schemas could exhibit beauty was a leading cause of overindulgence in abstraction, which could lead to incompetence in everyday affairs as the price of inattention to the particular. Nevertheless, if given a choice, one should prefer a comprehensive genius ill-directed to theoretical beauty over the circumscribed views of the working drudge, and it was perfectly understandable when the former struggled to descend to everyday life!82 A second cost arising from the love of theory was more serious—the tendency to join the ranks of the “Utopian projectors” who would sacrifice civic tranquility for reform. (By contrast, the masses, who did not, of course, contemplate theoretical perfection, were merely exposed to having their passions roused by demagoguery.)83 The utopian’s passion for progress could lead them to embrace violence as a valid means for change. Such passion could be restrained by keeping in view the complicated structure of the social whole because it reminded one of the uncertain effects that would flow from changes in one institution onto society in general. The desire for reform could also be restrained by keeping faith that the age of progress was at hand: partial and violent change stemmed from impatience.84 In other words, the defense against becoming a zealot for violent change was to cultivate some old virtues—prudence and temperance—and Stewart’s office of pedagogue to young men in a polite society once more emerges as a fact to emphasize. Imagination was another of the mind’s powers that could lead to enthusiasm if it were misgoverned. Where conception replicated something that had been felt or perceived, imagination selected qualities from different conceptions and then abstracted away from them in order to combine them

80 Classically studied in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, chap. 10. 81 Stewart, Elements, 244. 82 Stewart, Elements, 230–32. Compare Smith on this theme: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [hereafter TMS], VI.ii.2.15 (cited by book, section, chapter, and paragraph, and quoted in the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. 1, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macﬁe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 83 Stewart, Elements, 247, 250–51. 84 Stewart, Elements, 257–59.

404

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:49 PS PAGE 404 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke in a novel manner, in accordance with judgment. It was evidenced in Mil- ton’s Garden of Eden and in Harrington’s Oceana, and refined imagination was typically a habit acquired through intellectual labor and experience.85 Stewart claimed that those who failed to cultivate the power would struggle to participate in the feelings of those beyond their immediate circle. This argument took Stewart onto the terrain of Smith’s moral theory, and we find him quoting Smith at length on the role of the impartial spectator in moderating behavior in the pursuit of the approval of others.86 According to Stewart, Smith overstated both the way in which self-love alters behavior and the role of the impartial spectator mechanism in correcting it. Instead of this process of push and pull, the “benevolent principles of our nature” were sufficient to bring us into imaginative contact with the circumstances of others, which led to other-regarding behavior.87 Early education was essential to awakening and developing this imaginative capacity that soft- ened human behavior; thus, once again, Stewart worried over the vulgar, whose imaginations were deformed by want of culture, hence rarely exer- cised, hence rarely under steady command. This fact made the inferior orders vulnerable to “the violence of enthusiasm” because, when their imaginations were finally aroused, the excitement was “perfectly ungovern- able, and [produced] something like a temporary insanity.”88 By contrast, educated men were able to withdraw their attention from imaginative objects, such as Oceana, and return to everyday objects, so governing their susceptibility to enthusiasm. If this was the case for the inferior and superior orders in general, how ought Stewart’s political speculator or theorist stand in relation to the government of their imagination? Given the discussion of abstraction above, we may expect that they were especially vulnerable to ill-government of the imagination, and this is indeed the case. Utopian projectors were, by definition, engaged in the construction of imaginary objects, such as Oceana. This fact, along with the social reclusiveness often inherent to abstract speculation, and the corresponding decay in those faculties attuned to everyday occurrences, could see the proper balance between the imaginative life and everyday life overthrown. More explicitly, “the mind gradually loses that command . . . over the train of its ideas,” with the ultimate result that “the most extravagant dreams of imagination acquire as powerful an

85 Stewart, Elements, 475–76. 86 For the original in Smith see TMS, II.ii.2. 87 Stewart, Elements, 506. 88 Stewart, Elements, 507.

405

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:49 PS PAGE 405 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019

inﬂuence in exciting all its passions, as if they were realities.”89 Once a mind was this disturbed, exposure to everyday life could even exacerbate the situ- ation because it stimulated further trains of thought in imaginative direc- tions, even as the poor ﬁgure perceived himself to be acting with “the most perfect wisdom and consistency,” while others perceived only “folly.”90 Political speculators were exposed to the danger of becoming madmen, and so Stewart’s prudential disciplines related not only to the quality of their reasoning but to their mental health too.

III. CONCLUSION: THE TIDE OF THEORY

The primary aim of Stewart’s teaching was to give to young men an understanding of their own minds so that they could govern their thinking and behavior. This project entailed an appreciation for the nature of the knowledge that humans could produce, and how that knowledge should be inserted into the work of government by legislators. Someone trained in Stewart’s curriculum would, as we saw, be able to use the power of abstraction to place a particular government into a general class according to its prevailing tendency, whether it be monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic. Yet the student would also know that abstractions of this type could not apply literally to practice, nor could they afford “any considerable assis- tance in conduct, without a certain degree of practical and experimental skill.”91 Identifying this limit to the application of the categories was just as important as deriving them in the first place, and its effect was to insulate speculation from attack by making any failures in application the result of practical skill; if the philosopher king failed then it was the latter who let down the former. The political theorist was thus potentially any young man who had mastered the philosophy of mind, and to this extent it must be noted that we are a long way from the specialization that exists in this field today. It was simply the case that the good subject would contribute to the public by pursuing truth, and one area where truth should accumulate was the science of legislation. It is therefore not surprising to find that Stewart warned against “contracting the pedantry of a particular profession,” and asserted that “it ought not to be the leading object of any one, to become an eminent metaphysician, mathematician, or poet; but to render himself happy as an

89 Stewart, Elements, 508–9. 90 Stewart, Elements, 511. 91 Stewart, Elements, 226.

406

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:50 PS PAGE 406 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke individual, and an agreeable, a respectable, and an useful member of society.”92 This is hardly a style of theory capable of turning the world upside down and, as noted at the beginning of the paper, Stewart’s pedagogical context goes a long way to explaining how he could so conﬁdently respond to the attack on theory as a socially dangerous activity. But what of the larger stakes of this article regarding the ultimate triumph of theory in nineteenth-century Britain, a triumph occurring beyond the conﬁnes of Scotland’s universities? The overall picture is one of untrained theorists multiplying and overwhelming the efforts of the initiated to keep them in check. Stewart’s former students at the Edinburgh Review largely attempted to hold the line. Francis Jeffrey, as editor, used Stewart’s arguments to sepa- rate the Review and the Whigs from Jacobinism while maintaining a place for abstract speculation on social life,93 and Francis Horner and Henry Brougham described cases of poor metaphysics and failures to govern the mind in severe terms when reviewing contemporary works.94 Yet the period’s print culture imposed no restrictions beyond literacy for entry into public debate on topics of the highest importance. Take the more than twenty years of debate over the Bank of England’s note issue, the so-called Bullion Controversy, which was widely perceived as a contest between “practical men” and “metaphysicians.”95 The latter included learned men such as Horner, but also a motley bunch of projectors and autodidacts such as David Ricardo. Unlike Stewart’s philosopher of mind, Ricardo had not submitted to a set of intellectual disciplines to which he could point as guarding him against the dangers of enthusiasm, and he was widely perceived to have succumbed to its dangers.96 And yet Ricardo not only cap- tured the public’s attention (and through J. R. McCulloch, the Review’s),97

92 Stewart, Elements, 22–23. 93 Biancamaria Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review 1802–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 87. 94 See, for example: [Henry Brougham], “Art. VIII. An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its Increase. By the Earl of Lauder- dale,” Edinburgh Review 8, no. 4 (1804): 343–77; [Francis Horner], “Art. VIII. An Essay on the principles of commercial exchanges&c.,” Edinburgh Review 9, no. 17 (1806): 111–36; [Francis Horner], “Art. III. An Essay on the Theory of Money, and Principles of Commerce,” Edinburgh Review 10, no. 20 (1807): 284–99. For the attribution of authorship see Frank W. Fetter, “The Authorship of Economic Articles in the Edinburgh Review, 1802–47,” Journal of Political Economy 61, no. 3 (1953): 232–59. 95 See, for example, the review in [Charles Herries], A Review of the Controversy Respect- ing the High Price of Bullion (London, 1811), 9. 96 See Ryan Walter, “The Enthusiasm of David Ricardo,” Modern Intellectual History 15, no. 2 (2018): 381–409. 97 Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society, 161

407

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:51 PS PAGE 407 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019 but purchased the rotten Irish borough of Portalington in order to insert himself into the heart of parliamentary reasoning,98 and once so placed went about speaking “as if he had dropped from another planet,” as he was described by Brougham.99 From the perspective of Stewart, Ricardo would seem to exemplify the dangerous results that could arise when theory left the academy to be conducted by the untrained. And he was only the beginning.

The University of Queensland.

98 R. G. Thorne, “Ricardo, David,” in The History of Parliament, ed. R. G. Thorne (Lon- don, 1986), vol. 5. 99 Henry Brougham, quoted in William Smart, Economic Annals of the Nineteenth Cen- tury: 1801–1820 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1910), 733.

408

...... 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:51 PS PAGE 408