History of Economic Analysis part 17 potx

[b Analytic Aesthetics and Ethics.] The way in which that fundamental science of man—of human nature, human knowledge, and human behavior—produced all sorts of ‘natural laws’ may be ill

that social processes are governed by a super-individual logic of their own, to the understanding of which the psychology of individuals and groups has nothing to contribute except the knowledge of surface phenomena for the sake of which, moreover,

it is not necessary to go very far into psychology No matter which of these two views of the nature and method of the social sciences we make our own, we must never forget that the one sponsored by our representative authors cannot simply be taken for granted In order to emphasize this we will give it a distinctive label, Psychologism

Second, the sociology that was based upon that science of man tended to overstress, just as Aristotle’s had overstressed, the element of rationality in behavior It is therefore interesting to note that the best brains began to react against this For instance—curious

lag phenomenon!—while the contrat social was carried to the high-water mark of its

popularity by such writers as Rousseau, Hume already denounced it as a completely imaginary and, moreover, unnecessary construct In addition, he fired another shot at a similar target when he penned the pithy sentence: ‘ ’tis not, therefore, reason which is the

guide of life but custom (Abstract, p 16)

[(b) Analytic Aesthetics and Ethics.]

The way in which that fundamental science of man—of human nature, human knowledge, and human behavior—produced all sorts of ‘natural laws’ may be illustrated best by what may be described as the English ‘natural aesthetics’ and the ‘natural ethics’

of the eighteenth century Of course, not all speculations on aesthetics and ethics were offshoots of that science, even in England, but we are interested only in those that were, because these present highly revealing analysis by methods that were to serve economic analysis for more than a century to come

Natural aesthetics and ethics were, first, analytic aesthetics and ethics: though the normative purpose was never discarded, it was not allowed to interfere with the primary task of explaining actual behavior This analytic point of view had been brought to the fore already during the seventeenth century, for aesthetics, by a number of Italian writers and, for ethics, by Hobbes and Spinoza.5 Second, the analytic task was tackled in the spirit of what was defined above as psychologism: not only was psychology to provide the approach to the aesthetical and ethical phenomena, but it was to explain all there was

to explain about them Third, the psychology actually used, though not always strictly associationist, was always individual psychology, introspective, and of the most primitive kind, rarely if ever involving anything beyond some simple hypothesis about the reactions of the individual psyche from which everything else followed by deduction 5

Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) The two works relevant to the subject in hand are his Ethics and his Tractatus politicus (both of which appeared posthumously, 1677) The purely scientific program in

question is obscured by the fact that Spinoza’s ethics eventually weld into a highly metaphysical system But he did emphasize the necessity of analyzing human passions as they are instead of preaching about them Since this is our only opportunity of saluting that great thinker, let me quote here a sentence of his which, though it refers to politics and ethics, every economist ought to be

able to repeat on his deathbed: ut ea quae ad hanc scientiam spectant, eadem animi libertate, qua res mathematicas solemus, inquirerem sedulo curavi (I have sedulously tried

Aesthetical and ethical values were thus explained in a manner suggestive of that in which Italian and French economists in the eighteenth century, and the majority of economists of all countries in the nineteenth, explained economic values This procedure was called empirical and in a sense it was, but only in the sense in which, for example, the Jevons-Menger-Walras theory of marginal utility is There was nothing

‘experimental’ or inductive about it and it was in fact not very realistic, notwithstanding all the programmatic utterances, war cries, and appeals to Francis Bacon

Aesthetics, then, tended to shrink, so far as this school of thought is concerned, to an analysis of the pleasurable sensations evoked by a work of art, the psychology of the creative effort of the artist receiving less attention.6 In order to exhibit the analogy that interests us, we shall compare the objective fact that a work of art is considered as

‘beautiful’ in a given social group with the objective fact of market price The aesthetic theory in question will then be seen to explain the former fact by subjective valuations of the members of the group, much as the analogous economic theory explains the latter fact

by subjective valuations of the individuals participating in a market In both cases subjective valuation creates the objective value—we know that this had been taught, in the case of commodities, by the scholastic doctors—and not the other way round: a thing

is beautiful because it pleases, it does not please because it is ‘objectively’ beautiful Of course, we may go on to ask why certain things please certain people and we may probe into the origins of our ideas about the beautiful But however far we may get in these and similar problems, we always move within the range of a particular conception of the meaning of things, even if we introduce, by special hypothesis, a ‘sense’ of the beautiful Different authors went to different lengths in ‘subjectivizing’ aesthetics Nevertheless, it was this subjectivization that constituted the main contribution of the school in question and which, moreover, its members felt to be the particularly realistic or ‘experimental’ or nonspeculative element in it The principal English authors to mention are Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Alison The first three are much more important for ethics.7

to deal with the subject of this science with the same serene detachment to which we are

accustomed in mathematics)

6

This is only broadly true, and even so only for the English theory envisaged The

psycho-sociological meaning of artistic creation was touched upon by Hobbes and subjected to searching analysis by Vico

7

A.Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), the grandson of the politician of

doubtful fame The work that co-ordinates his earlier publications, and hence the only one that

needs to be mentioned, is Characteristicks of Men, Manners,

The preceding argument fully applies also to ethics but must be supplemented, in this case, by some additional considerations So far as analytic ethics—analysis of actual conduct—is concerned, the main points of the story are quickly told Hobbes had described actual conduct, by means of what he supposed to be its determining factor, individual and hedonist egotism This may have appeared to him as the acme of realism but is, as a matter of fact, nothing but a postulate or hypothesis and an obviously unrealistic one at that Shaftesbury countered this theory by another hypothesis, the hypothesis of altruism: he explained that for man who habitually lives in society it is just

as natural to develop fellow feelings and hence to value the good of other people as it is

to develop self-interest and to value his own good On this he superimposed still another hypothesis, also derived from introspection, according to which the virtuous experience pleasure from doing good irrespective of their appreciation of its effects This is what is specifically known as Shaftesbury’s moral-sense theory, which, though its explanatory value is evidently not great, met with considerable success precisely because of the extreme simplicity of the ‘psychology’ involved Shaftesbury’s position was systematically elaborated by Hutcheson And Hume, under the influence of all three, created the moral type of the amiable, easy-going, humane, soberly pleasure-loving egotist that summed up the sort of person he was himself: no asceticism or any other

‘monkish’ virtue for him—no indeed!—and hence, of course, not for anyone else That

unprejudiced analysis of these monkish virtues might, perchance, unearth the true key to the ethical phenomenon was quite beyond his range of vision Abraham Tucker (1705– 74)8 similarly posited satisfaction of individual desires as the ultimate goal and universal motive of action I do not think I am wrong in attributing the Hume-Tucker opinion also

to Bentham, who held that the only interests an individual can be relied on to consult are his own, but added a qualifying note by emphasizing reasonable or enlightened self-interest that does take account also of other people’s self-interests, feelings, and reactions The English moralists of the eighteenth century were, however, no more prepared to

do without a normative standard of conduct and judgment than any other moralists ever have been Some were content to fall back upon a moral law that men know and accept intuitively, an idea that foreshadowed the moral imperative of Kant Even Locke appealed to such intuition, though this was a bad lapse from grace for an empiricist But solutions of this type would never have done for Hume or Bentham To their way of thinking all that was empty metaphysics At the same time they were quite ready to turn their humane egotism into an ideal, that is to say,

Opinions, Times (1711) Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), owing to his having been the teacher

(and a predecessor in the Glasgow chair) of A.Smith, is for us a ‘key man.’ A vital and most

successful teacher—perhaps all the more successful because he seems not to have despised

occasional phraseological fireworks—he exerted widespread influence His chief work embodies

the harvest of years of lecturing: A System of Moral Philosophy (publ posthumously in 1755; see

below subsec e) For the subject in hand, as well as for some subjects that are to follow, we must

mention his Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) See W.R.Scott, Francis Hutcheson…(1900) Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste

(1790), is particularly characteristic of the possibilities and limitations of the psychologistic

approach

8

Light of Nature Pursued (1768–77, republ 1805)

to convert their theory of conduct into a source of norms for conduct We have seen that Hume modeled the moral world to his own image.9 It is plain that, with delightful nạveté, he thoroughly approved of this image: the schema of his own preferences was the reasonable schema On the other hand, reason had eliminated all super-personal values except the good of society But, in view of that philosophy of human values, what else could this good of society consist in but the sum total of all the satisfactions accruing

to all individuals from the realization of their hedonic schemes of preference? If this be

so, have we not discovered, at one stroke, the rationale of social values, the relation between them and individual values, and also the only norm of morality that can possibly

be meaningful? Affirmative answers to these questions had been suggested already in the seventeenth century, especially by Bishop Cumberland10 and, less distinctly, by Grotius, who did not go far beyond the common-good concept of the scholastics The eighteenth-century writers, especially those between Hume and Bentham, only elaborated the fundamental canon of Utilitarian Ethics: good is every action that promotes, bad is every action that impairs, social welfare Before we consider this canon in its wider aspects, we must glance at a work of particular interest to the economist, that of A.Smith.11

With the possible exception of Shaftesbury’s this performance must, I think, be placed far above all others First, he distinguished, like Hutcheson but more clearly than anyone else, between ethics as a theory of behavior and ethics as a theory of people’s judgments about behavior, and resolutely concentrated on the latter Second, this theory of ethical judgment is based upon our ability to place ourselves, as it were, in the other man’s place (‘sympathy’) and to understand him, the judgment of our own acts being then derived from our principles of judging others Third, the natural is conceived of as that which is psychologically normal—to be analyzed realistically—and not identified with, but distinguished from, the ideal rule of reason (see vol I, p 128, 6th ed.) Fourth, the influence of utility upon aesthetic and ethical approbation is not treated simply as a postulate but as a problem in the actual practice of judging (Part IV) Fifth, custom and fashion are not only recognized as relevant factors but systematically investigated (Part V) ‘Systems of Moral Philosophy,’ that is, theories other than A.Smith’s own, come in 9

This tendency of the social philosopher to exalt his own schema of life’s values into an ethical norm from which to judge the habits and tastes of all other men deserves attention because it runs through the whole economic literature and explains a great part of the value judgments of

economists Marshall, for instance, had a very definite conception of the Noble Life (see below, Part IV) It does not take much trouble to realize that this conception was shaped on the model of the typical life of a Cambridge professor Tastes, pursuits, levels of comfort widely different from

it, he at best viewed with indulgence but without ever embracing them with full understanding It hardly needs to be emphasized how important this is for an appreciation of economists’ attitudes to the social worlds they live in

10

De legibus naturae (1672)

11

The Theory of Moral Sentiments; or, An Essay towards an Analysis of the Principles by which Men naturally judge concerning the Conduct and Character, first of their Neighbours, and

afterwards of themselves To which is added, A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages This is the title of the 6th ed., 1790 The 1st appeared in 1759 under the title of The Theory of Moral Sentiments The differences between the two, though considerable, are (apart from the Dissertation)

not of any great importance

for criticism that is occasionally trite but on the whole strikingly successful (Part VII)

Plan and performance are quite similar to the plan and the performance of the Wealth of Nations

[(c) Self-Interest, the Common Good, and Utilitarianism.]

We know that both Self-Interest and the Common Good were old stagers But around the middle of the eighteenth century, they asserted themselves with a new energy, not only in ethics, but over the whole field of social thought In particular, they were, or were supposed to be, the basic and unifying principles of all the social sciences, practically the only ones ‘reason’ had espoused Helvétius12 (1715–71) compared the role of the principle of self-interest in the social world to the role of the law of gravitation in the physical world Even the great Beccaria13 went to the length of asserting that man is wholly egotistic and egocentric and does not trouble at all about any other man’s (or the common) good It should be observed once more that this individual self-interest was oriented on rational expectation of individual pleasure and pain,14 which must, in turn, be defined in a narrowly hedonist sense It is true that the eighteenth-century authors added qualifications and recognized pleasures that are not usually classed as hedonist, such as pleasures from malevolence, from the acquisition of power, and even from religious belief and practice In consequence, defenders of that doctrine have been to some extent successful in their attempt to redeem it from the allegation that has made human behavior turn on beef-steaks But this success—apart from the fact that it does not touch all the other objections that may be raised against any theory that overstresses rationality in behavior—was more apparent than real For if we go very far beyond the grossest gratifications of the simplest appetites, we come dangerously near to identifying expectation of ‘pleasure’ with all possible motives whatsoever, even with intentional suffering of pain, and then, of course, the doctrine becomes an empty tautology Worse still, if we allow too much scope to such ‘pleasures’ as may be afforded by exertion, victory, cruelty, and the like, we may get a picture of human behavior and of society that differs totally from the one those men actually envisaged Thus, if we are to derive the

conclusion they derived from their ideas about pleasure and pain, we have after all no

choice but to adopt a definition of the latter that may indeed allow some freedom for going beyond beefsteaks, but only a limited one; that is to say, we have no choice but to adopt a theory of behavior that is at variance with the most obvious facts Why, then, was

it so readily adopted by many good brains? The answer seems to be that these good 12

De l’Esprit (1758), Discours II, ch 2 The book, one of the continental forerunners of English

utilitarianism, enjoyed a sweeping success Few writers have ever professed more nạve and more unconditional belief in education and legislation—that work, of course, upon a perfectly malleable human material which reacts mechanically to physical experience

13

The work that is relevant for us at the moment is his famous trềtise Dei delitti e delle pene

(1764), which, a beacon light in the history of the emergence of modern criminal law, illustrates the truth that analytic and practical merit do not necessarily go together

14

The standard reference on this subject is Verri’s essay on the nature of pleasure and pain

published, long after it had circulated and influenced minds, in his Discorsi di argomento filosofico

(1781) Systematic classification and analysis of the various pleasures and pains is due to Bentham

brains belonged to practical reformers who fought a historically given state of things that seemed to them ‘irrational.’ In such a struggle, simplicity and even triteness are the chief virtues of an argument, and beefsteak philosophies the best answer to a system of supermundanely sanctified rights and duties Not that these authors were insincere: we all

of us quickly convince ourselves of nonsense that we habitually preach

We have seen above how the common good or social expediency of the scholastic doctors was harnessed into a particular shape by the eighteenth-century votaries of reason Let us repeat and reformulate The pleasures and pains of each individual are assumed to be measurable quantities capable of being (algebraically) added into a

quantity called the individual’s happiness (felicità); a frequently used German term was Glückseligkeit These individual ‘happinesses’ are again summed up into a social total, all of them being weighted equally: ‘everyone to count for one, nobody to count for more

than one.’ Finally, that social total is substituted for, or identified with, the common good

or welfare of society, which is thus resolved into individual sensations of pleasure or pain, the only ultimate realities This yields the normative principle of Utilitarianism, namely, the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number, which is chiefly associated, in recognition of ardent advocacy, careful elaboration, and extensive application, with the name of Bentham.15 If the idea was of ancient origin and grew so slowly as to defy dating, the slogan itself may be dated more precisely: so far as I know, it occurs first in

Hutcheson (op cit 1725), then in Beccaria (op cit 1764, la massima felicità divisa nel maggior numero); after that in Priestley (op cit 1768), to whom Bentham gives the

credit for what to him was a ‘sacred truth.’ Hume does not have the slogan, but should be included in this series all the same

15

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), trained as a lawyer, though he early retired to a life of research and propaganda, became the undisputed leader of the utilitarian circle and the central figure of a group usually described as Philosophical Radicals His performance in the field of economics will

be noticed elsewhere Here he interests us as a philosopher, sociologist, and theorist of legislation The only one of his many voluminous works (ed John Bowring, 1838–43) that need be mentioned

is An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), which widely influenced

thought and legislative practice though, on the Continent, similar ideas spread from domestic roots particularly in Italy and France

The essentials of the utilitarian system had, however, been presented before in the Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) by William Paley (1743–1805), and some of them in the Essay on the first Principles of Government (1768) by Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), the versatile

theologian and scientist who, besides being

The word Utilitarianism is Bentham’s.16

The essential point to grasp is that utilitarianism was nothing but another natural-law system This holds not only in the sense that the utilitarians were the historical successors

of the seventeenth-century philosophers of natural law; nor only in the sense that the utilitarian system developed from the system of the philosophers which, though evident, can be proved in detail from the history of ethics, on the one hand, and from the history

of the common-good concept, on the other; but it holds also in the much more significant sense, that in approach, in methodology, and in the nature of its results utilitarianism actually was another, the last, natural-law system The program of deriving, by the light

of reason, ‘laws’ about man in society from a very stable and highly simplified human nature fits the utilitarians not less well than the philosophers or the scholastics; and if we look at this human nature and the way in which it was supposed to work, as we did above, we realize that the affinity goes much further than that

Like the systems of the philosophers or the scholastics, utilitarianism presents a threefold appeal First it was a philosophy of life, exhibiting a scheme of ‘ultimate values.’ It is here that we must look for the source of the ineradicable impression that utilitarianism, Bentham’s especially, was something new and fundamentally antagonistic to the older systems But,

as the reader should know by now, the difference was not great so far as the philosophy of the current business of everyday life is concerned For the sphere of stable, barn, shop, and market, the scholastic doctors were utilitarian enough The real difference was that the doctors confined the utilitarian point of view to purely utilitarian activity where it is (nearly—

not even there wholly) adequate, whereas the utilitarians reduced the whole world of human values to the same schema, ruling out, as contrary

to reason, all that really matters to man Thus they are indeed entitled to the credit of having created something that was new in

a church historian of note and a famous controversialist on theological matters,

was also a recognized research worker in electricity and chemistry That essay

may be called the bridge between Locke’s theory of government and James Mill’s

unfortunate exploits in this field Neither Paley nor Priestley, however, contributed much that cannot be found in earlier writings, e.g in Cumberland’s work already

referred to Of continental ‘precursors’ it is sufficient to mention again Beccaria,

Verri, and Helvétius With Beccaria, the relation, to be presently discussed, of

utilitarianism to earlier natural-law systems is particularly clear

From the large literature on English utilitarianism and on the Philosophical

Radicals, J.S.Mill’s essay on Utilitarianism (publ 1863) deserves the reader’s first attention Also see: Sir Leslie Stephen’s work, The English Utilitarians (1900),

H.J.Laski’s Political Thought…already referred to, W.L.Davidson’s Political

Thought in England: The Utilitarians from Bentham to J.S.Mill (1915), and

Graham Wallas’ charming book on Francis Place (1898)

16

The interesting note of skepticism sounded by A.Smith in a famous dictum of

his should be recorded here: he remarked in passing that, so far as conscious

happiness is concerned, there is not much difference between any state that we

accept as permanent and any other

literature—for it cannot be attributed to Epicurus—namely, the shallowest of all conceivable philosophies of life that stands indeed in a position of irreconcilable antagonism to the rest of them

Second, utilitarianism was a normative system with a strong legal slant

It was, like the scholastic system, a system of moral imperatives, on the one hand, and of legislative principles, on the other Bentham considered himself primarily a moralist and legislator,17 and it was as a criterion of

‘good’ and ‘bad’ legislation that the principle of greatest happiness of the greatest number acquired for him paramount importance Observe once more the equalitarian element in it which was as essential as the element

of happiness And these two together with the belief not only that any individual was very much like any other, but also that every individual was nondescript and malleable material with few or no innate characteristics of his own, then produced the fundamental political ‘plank’

of Benthamism: educate people and let them vote freely and everything else will take care of itself.18

But, third, again like the natural law of the philosophers and the scholastics, utilitarianism also was a comprehensive system of social science embodying a uniform method of analysis And this aspect of it is separable from the two others in the same sense in which the analytic work of the scholastics and the philosophers is separable from the rest of their thought In other words, it is logically possible to despise utilitarianism, root and branch, both as a philosophy of life and as a political program and yet to accept it, as an engine of analysis, in all or some of the departments of the social sciences But since, on the one hand, utilitarianism may be not much more valuable as an engine of analysis than it is in the other two respects and since, on the other hand, 17

Before Bentham, the catalogue of utilitarian moralists does not quite coincide with the catalogue of utilitarian legislators, and in a more complete exposition it might be advisable to distinguish the histories of moral and political utilitarianism Most of the important names, however, would occur in both, and in view of the close relation we need not insist further on that distinction

18

It should be observed that these political principles do not uniquely determine a man’s allegiance to a political party or the position he will take on any practical political question Bentham impressed his personal preferences upon a group of personal adherents—the Philosophical Radicals already mentioned—and the strong coherence of this group accounts for a definite program (in substance laissez-faire combined with universal suffrage) and the impression that this

program followed inexorably from analytic premisses But in other times and countries, the Benthamites might have been conservatives—Hume was, and most

of the Italian utilitarians were—or else socialists There is nothing surprising in this so soon as it is realized that preference plays so large a part in arriving at conclusions as to practical policy that it bends almost any analytic structure to its dictate A man may accept Marx’s analytic work entirely and yet be a conservative

in practice

Many economists have not hesitated to declare that it is basic to economic theory—Jevons even defined economic theory as ‘a calculus of pleasure and pain’—the extent of its influence upon analytic work should

be cleared up at once

It is the common failing of laymen, philosophers, and historians of thought to pay exaggerated respect to whatever presents itself as a fundamental principle Actually, people do not always make use, in scientific work any more than in the practical concerns of life, of the fundamental principles to which they profess allegiance Utilitarianism being a set of such fundamental principles, we must therefore inquire in every case what role it was allowed to play So far as economics is concerned, we may, however, return broad answers for four types of cases First, utilitarian hypotheses are completely valueless in questions of interpretations of history or in questions touching the moving forces of economic history Second, utilitarian hypotheses are worse than valueless

in all problems involving questions of actual schemes of motivation, for example, in such a problem as the economic effects of inheritance Third, utilitarian hypotheses are in fact basic to that part of economic theory that

is usually referred to as Welfare Economics—the heir to Italian

eighteenth-century theories on felicità pubblica We adopt these

hypotheses habitually when discussing such problems as the effects of

‘transfers of wealth from the relatively rich to the relatively poor.’ And this is precisely the reason why the propositions of welfare economics never convince anyone who is not already convinced beforehand and irrespective of any argument For though there is, of course, an aspect of these problems to which the utilitarian approach is appropriate—provided

we believe it to be methodologically admissible—this aspect is evidently not the only one: we have proved very little, when we have proved that transferring a rich man’s dollar to a poor man increases welfare in the utilitarian sense Fourth, in the field of economic theory in the narrowest sense of the term, utilitarian hypotheses are unnecessary but harmless For instance, we can state and discuss the properties of economic equilibrium without introducing them But if we do introduce them, results are not materially affected, hence not impaired This makes it possible for us to salvage much of economic analysis that at first sight seems hopelessly vitiated by utilitarian preconceptions

[(d) Historical Sociology.]

The writers of the eighteenth century have often been blamed for lack of ‘historical sense,’ a disability that went in fact so far with some of them as to make them blind to the values of bygone civilizations All the more necessary is it to point out that the antidote developed along with the disease If we find, in some instances, the most foolish contempt for Greek art—Voltaire being put above Homer, for instance—we also find the origins of its modern cult If we sometimes find a perfectly stupendous absence of interest in history, we also find a rich crop of serious historical work that laid the

foundations of nineteenth-century developments We cannot do more than list five essential points: a good beginning was made with systematic collection of materials; new methods of interpretation and criticism of documents were worked out;19 economic and cultural history began to divert some of the attention previously all but monopolized by political and military history; the (relatively speaking) detached report that renders documentary evidence began to prevail over epics or preachings (Hume, William Robertson, Gibbon);20 and the awakening of interest of the public is attested by the success of popular universal and national histories Of course, there is such a thing as unhistorical history, that is to say, a man may do historical work without ever getting the

specifically historical angle But Hume’s History of England (8 vols., 1763) was not of

this kind Though hopelessly out of date by now, it will always be a landmark of historiography—which shows that he, at least, was not a slave to his utilitarianism Still more noteworthy from our standpoint is the emergence of Historical Sociology— sometimes called Philosophy of History21—that is to say, of sociological theories that, on the one hand, used historical material in order to arrive at generalizations and were, on the other hand, intended to explain individual historical states and processes The greater part of this kind of work was dilettantic and of a nature to disgust serious historians Some of it was, moreover, unhistorical in the sense just defined: historical fact was often

twisted to fit the preconceptions of la raison Nevertheless, there were also considerable

and even path-breaking performances By way of example, I may mention Condorcet, Montesquieu, and one who was one of the greatest thinkers to be found in any age in the field of the social sciences—Vico.22 Condorcet’s

19

F.A.Wolf’s (1759–1824) seminal Prolegomena ad Homerum appeared in 1795, but was the

result of earlier work

20

To this day historians have not ceased to preach, to bestow praise and blame, and to air their personal, social, and national prides and hates What I mean to convey is that substantial progress was made toward presentation of facts in something like a scientific spirit and away from the epic 21

See Robert Flint, History of the Philosophy of History (1893)

22

The Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94; Oeuvres, ed 1847–9; English readers are perhaps best referred to Lord Morley’s essay on him, republ in Critical Miscellanies, 1886–1908, vol II), one

of the encyclopédistes (see below, sub e), roamed over almost all fields of science and policy

Among other things, he was a trained mathematician; his ventures in the application of the calculus

of probabilities to legal and political judgments, though not wholly felicitous, gave an important impulse; he propagated ‘natural rights,’ popular sovereignty, and equal rights for women, and was a great hater of Christianity—in all of which, ardor completely extinguished his critical faculty His

contributions to economics are not worth mentioning The work relevant here is Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795; English trans 1802).Montesquieu (1689–

1755) presumably needs no introduction beyond the remark that he was one of the most influential thinkers of all times and that in particular, though his economics is insignificant—without

originality, force, or scholarship—he greatly influenced A.Smith in other respects The three works

to mention are the—also insignificant—Lettres persanes (1721), the Considerátions sur les causes

de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734), and of course his magnum opus, De l’Esprit des lois (1748), which is so much more than mere ‘esprit sur les lois.’

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744; Opere, newest ed Nicolini, 1911–31; bibliography by B.Croce,

1904; revised, enlarged ed 1947–8) Part of the extensive Vico literature is impaired by attempts of authors to claim the great name for tendencies of their own, but see Croce’s essay (English trans

by Collingwood, 1913), R.Flint’s Vico (1884), and a few beautiful pages on Vico in Tagliacozzo’s Economisti napoletani (1937); there are several good German books, especially those by Werner