History of Economic Analysis part 43 pps

But quite irrespective of these, there is one point about the gold standard that would redeem it from the charge of foolishness, even in the absence of any purely economic advantage—a po

5 GOLD The little that need be said for our purposes on the currency and banking policies of that period will be more conveniently reserved for the last chapter of this Part In consequence, there is only one point to make here After the monetary disturbances—the inflation—incident to the Napoleonic Wars, all countries struggled back to what was considered normalcy This took many decades in such countries as Austria, but was achieved promptly and with comparative ease in England and France On the Continent, normalcy meant silver or a bimetallic standard, but England, after having legalized the de facto gold standard established in the eighteenth century, resumed gold redemption of Bank of England notes within a few years of Waterloo, much as she returned to gold at prewar parity (though in a somewhat different form) after the First World War of our time Moreover, it was a perfectly ‘free’ or ‘automatic’ gold standard that allowed for no kind of management other than is implied in the regulatory power of any central bank that is ‘a lender of last resort’ Our question is: why? The measure drew fire from many quarters, even from some economists Powerful agrarian interests attributed to it—never mind now whether rightly or wrongly—the depression that plagued them There was enough unemployment to induce the government (Castle-reagh, 1821) to propose public works—an almost Rooseveltian program—as a remedy Merchants do not relish losses, nor bankers frozen assets—and there were plenty of both Also, we shall see that many competent people advocated a managed paper currency Nevertheless, the gold-standard policy was never in real danger politically, and if it was not, until much later, adopted by all industrialized countries, this was not a matter of their choice: in spite of all counterarguments, the ‘automatic’ gold standard remained almost everywhere the ideal to strive for and pray for, in season and out of season Again: why?

At present we are taught to look upon such a policy as wholly erroneous—as a sort of fetishism that is impervious to rational argument We are also taught to discount all rational and all purely economic arguments that may actually be adduced in favor of it But quite irrespective of these, there is one point about the gold standard that would redeem it from the charge of foolishness, even in the absence of any purely economic advantage—a point from which also many other attitudes of that time present themselves

in a different light An ‘automatic’ gold currency1 is part and parcel of a laissez-faire and free-trade economy It links every nation’s money rates and price levels with the money rates and price levels of all the other nations that are ‘on gold.’ It is extremely sensitive to government expenditure and even to attitudes or policies that do not involve expenditure directly, for example, to foreign policy, to certain policies of taxation, and, in general, to

precisely all those policies that violate the principles of economic liberalism This is the

reason why gold is so unpopular now and also why it was so popular in a bourgeois era

It imposes restrictions upon governments or bureaucracies that are much more powerful than is parliamentary criticism It is both the badge and the guarantee of bourgeois

freedom—of freedom not simply of the bourgeois interest, but of freedom in the

1

Of course, it is never quite automatic and this phrase is misleading I use it here for the sake of brevity and do not mean by it more than that all other means of pay- ment should be redeemable in gold and that everyone should have the right to import and export, monetize or demonetize, gold at will

History of economic analysis 382

bourgeois sense From this standpoint a man may quite rationally fight for it, even if fully

convinced of the validity of all that has ever been urged against it on economic grounds

From the standpoint of étatisme and planning, a man may not less rationally condemn it,

even if fully convinced of the validity of all that has ever been urged for it on economic grounds

Socio-political backgrounds 383

CHAPTER 3 The Intellectual Scenery

1 THE ZEITGEIST OF THE PERIOD AND ITS PHILOSOPHY

THE TRUTH of our proposition that the Zeitgeist of a period can never be defined in

terms of a single system of mutually consistent ideas or beliefs is brought home to us when we turn to the philosophical currents of that time in order to discover the philosophical affiliations, if any, of the social sciences

(a) Utilitarianism

The most obvious of these affiliations is with English utilitarianism.1 This was indeed a product of the eighteenth century But it ran the best part of its career in the first half of the nineteenth No philosophy at all in the technical sense,2 unsurpassably shallow as a

‘philosophy of life,’ it fitted to perfection the streak of materialistic (antimetaphysical) rationalism that may be associated with liberalism and the business mind Actually, however, the majority of the English business class did not accept it but, whether Anglican or nonconformist, kept to the religious philosophy of either Church or Chapel The utilitarian leaders evidently knew why they were so careful not to affront religion openly.3 And all leading politicians knew why they left utilitarianism severely alone Its appointed apostles, the philosophical radicals,4 were at first a very small circle that gathered around Bentham and James Mill J.S.Mill cannot be called a utilitarian without qualification In some respects he outgrew the creed; in others he refined it But he never renounced it explicitly, and it was through his influence upon the rising generations in the 1850’s and 1860’s that a more sophisticated utilitarianism established itself in the intellectual centers, especially in Cambridge But it did not not become dominant This seems to be clear from an analysis of the position of the men who were

1

See Sir Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians (1900)

2

Evidently, the ‘calculus of pleasure and pain’ and the principle of ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’ do not, in themselves, assert anything about specifically philosophical or

epistemological problems, though they are capable of producing an ethical doctrine The reason why this speculative deficiency of utilitarianism was not more keenly felt was that utilitarians found what they wanted ready at hand in the empiricist tradition of the Locke-Hume type

3

J.S.Mill’s Three Essays on Religion appeared posthumously in 1874 The views on religion that are contained in his elaborate Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865) probably

did not filter through to the general reading public

4 See e.g C.B.R.Kent, The English Radicals (1899); E.Halévy, La Formation du radicalisme

philosophique (1901–4; English trans 1928)

then or later became leaders of Cambridge life and thought, particularly of Sidgwick.5

It will be maintained later that there is no point in calling Ricardo a utilitarian, though

he was personally connected with the group and may have professed sympathy with its creed Bentham, James Mill, and (with qualification) J.S.Mill were the only prominent economists who were also prominent and militant utilitarians, as Beccaria and Verri had been in the eighteenth century It was natural for Bentham and the Mills to see themselves in the role of philosophical patrons of economics and to assume responsibility for an alliance between economics and utilitarianism that was acquiesced in by many later economists, such as Jevons and Edgeworth; but it was neither necessary nor useful This alliance is the only reason why utilitarianism looms so large in the economist’s picture of nineteenth-century thought, much larger than is justified by its importance

either as a philosophy or as a factor of the Zeitgeist We must digress for a moment in

order to consider the effects of that alliance upon economics The reader will recall that, for earlier epochs, we have dealt with this question already

Since economists, especially nontheorists, are and always have been apt to

entertain exaggerated notions about the importance of philosophical backgrounds upon the positive work of economic analysis, we shall understand that this alliance made English economic theory unpopular in many quarters Especially with some German writers the utilitarian garb was quite sufficient for wholesale condemnation of the theory that appeared in this guise More interesting than this attitude, which rested upon nothing but an obvious misunderstanding, is, however, the question

of the real influence of utilitarian philosophy upon the contents of

‘classic’ economics We must distinguish influence upon policy recommendations, economic sociology, and economic analysis proper As regards the ‘classic’ recommendations, there are no doubt many that are wholly neutral with respect to any philosophy of life: one need not be a utilitarian in order to recommend peasant proprietorship for Ireland, or in order either to recommend or condemn return to the gold standard after the Napoleonic Wars But there are others—unconditional free trade, for example—that did imply views of general policy and attitudes to life that

do seem, to say the least, to link up with utilitarianism better than with any other philosophy of life As regards economic sociology, utilitarianism can only be described as a complete failure since its

5

Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) really has claim to more attention than we can bestow upon him His work in economics will be noticed in passing where it belongs chronologically, but there is little in his eminently reasonable rendering of ‘classic’ doctrine to call for comment in a sketch like this Nor, I am afraid, would a historian of ethics or politics—the other two fields in which he produced major work—be able to say more But he was one of the greatest English university men all the same: milieu-creating, milieu-leading, soul-shaping to an extraordinary degree Perhaps lack

of originality is one of the conditions for this particular type of academic achievement Of all the Cambridge leaders, he was—with his antimetaphysical mind that was so lucid and so wingless— the one most favorably disposed to accept utilitarian starting points Nevertheless, his ethics cannot

be called straight utilitarianism, and this is the test, for it is here that a utilitarian creed, qua

philosophy, would have to assert its sway

The Intellectual scenery 385

rationalistic conception of individual behavior and of social institutions was obviously and radically wrong But as regards that part of economic analysis which works with rational schemata, utilitarian philosophy, though superfluous, does no harm And this fact, as critics would have recognized if they had been competent economists, salvages the bulk of the work in economic analysis done by the utilitarians.6

Professional philosophy in England, mainly the philosophy of the Scottish common-sense school, was but moderately affected by utilitarianism and was, on the whole, hostile

to the utilitarian way of disposing of specifically philosophical problems But there was during that period no leader of English philosophical thought strong enough to counteract the able and vigorous propaganda of the philosophical radicals Leaders of thought that did counteract it to some extent were produced by the romantic (see below, sec 2) and several religious movements A leader of still another type might be mentioned here, Carlyle.7 For economists he is one of the most important and most char-

6

Of course, this should not be understood to mean that this work was not open to objection on other grounds

7

Thomas Carlyle’s (1795–1881) fame rests on the solid basis of his historical works that are too well known to be mentioned here But one should not call him a historian without adding that,

besides being much else, he was a historian sui generis He painted portraits in the style and spirit

of the artist Though these portraits rest on sound and often minute research, they render artistic not scientific interpretations The modern reader will be amazed to miss economic and social facts almost completely And he will turn away with something like disgust from the overemphasis on the personal element that he finds everywhere Yet this is not quite what he should do By itself Carlyle’s ‘hero worship,’ which seems to make history a tissue of individual biographies, is not indeed acceptable sociology But in times when the personal element and its explanatory value are

in danger of being drowned in statistics and when the ‘common man’ holds the stage, Carlyle’s hero worship, by stressing the forgotten factor, personality, comes in as a useful antidote Directly

relevant to the history of economics are his Chartism (1840), Past and Present (1843), and

Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)

Carlyle’s emphasis upon the element of personality (the contrast with Bentham, who was

individualist without being a ‘personalist,’ should suffice to show that the two are entirely distinct) calls up the name of R.W.Emerson (1803–82), who was, to use his own phrase, another

Representative Man With him, that emphasis did not amount to hero worship, and to this extent his contribution to a sociological schema of the historical process is sounder though less original than

is Carlyle’s Emerson did not cross swords with ‘classic’ economics But from another angle he is

still more impor tant for us: his thought, the focus of many currents and the source of others, was

the adequate expression of the civilization of that age as it mirrored itself in the particular

conditions of the New England environment This I conceive to be his claim to eminence in the

history of thought I am sorry this sounds involved However, since it is impossible to describe that (New England) intellectual and moral environment in the available space, we must leave it with this sentence Not can we afford to stay to look at the Concord and Cambridge (or Boston) circles with which, directly and indirectly, Emerson and his associates were connected This is all the more regrettable because they are the sources of an important component of a specifically American radicalism that influenced the attitudes of American economists long after those circles themselves had disappeared, and accounts for much that a European finds hard to understand A study of Thoreau’s writings might prove particularly enlightening (On the ‘social science movement,’ see below, sec 6a.)

History of economic analysis 386

acteristic figures in the cultural panorama of that epoch—standing in heroic pose, hurling scorn at the materialistic littleness of his age, cracking a whip with which to flay, among other things, our Dismal Science This is how he saw himself and how his time saw and loved to see him Completely incapable of understanding the meaning of a theorem,

overlooking the fact that all science is ‘dismal’ to the artist, he thought he had got hold of

the right boy to whip A large part of the public applauded, and so did some economists who understood no more than he did what a ‘science’ is and does But the digression above on utilitarian economics shows that he was not wholly in error The utilitarian economists did advocate policies indicative of a philosophy of life that fully deserved all the stripes that Carlyle administered And the reader should for a moment stop to ponder over the difficulty that has so much to do with the futility of so many of our controversies, namely, the difficulty that both the professional and the public mind experience in disentangling the analytic aspect of such cases from the cultural philosophy that goes with it, and in realizing that adverse criticism of the former is perfectly compatible with admiration for the latter and vice versa Something, however, may be said for Carlyle even from the analytic point of view: he had the vision, though he had not the means to make it analytically articulate, of an economic sociology that was much more realistic than was the utilitarian What a nation is and really wants and what are the real determinants of its fate, he saw much more clearly than did Bentham; the analysis that might be distilled from his pages would take account of a number of important facts that Bentham ignored or, at all events, brushed aside, because from the standpoint of his creed they were simply irrelevant aberrations J.S.Mill sensed this to some extent He grew to realize that the scheme of utilitarian rationality is quite inadequate beyond a limited range of problems But he was not the man to make anything of it, and so the vision of one man and the analytic power of another never met to work together Carlyle influenced another but (for us) much less important prophet, Ruskin, who, though his writings on economic subjects belong to the subsequent period, shall therefore be mentioned here

Almost throughout the period under discussion, John Ruskin (1819–1900; any work of reference will give the reader all that is needed to appreciate the points to be made in this paragraph) was one of those creative interpreters of art—painting, architecture, sculpture, and also poetry—whose interpretations are themselves works of art, works that have a life of their own and elicit admiration even in those who (like myself) do not believe in

them as interpretations For us, it is particularly important to note his contributions to a

general sociology of art, his attempts to analyze the social conditions that produce, or are favorable to the production of, great works of art From the end of the 1860’s on, he turned, however, to the mission that was to make him so popular with the crowd as well

as with economists of radical propensities—wrathful and dilettantic criticism of the sins

of capitalism: the reader will quickly acquire an adequate notion of this criticism by

dipping into Unto this Last (1862), Munera Pulveris (1872), and Fors Clavigera (1871– 84), all in The Works of Ruskin I have only one point to make There is a definite reason

for objecting to Ruskin’s way of handling economic problems (I am not speaking, of course, of his generous and not unsuccessful practical work in the interest of the welfare and civilization of the masses): he failed to do in this field what he did as a matter of course in the field of art We know that he prepared himself most sedulously for his career as an interpreter of art; that he mastered techniques and studied historical detail

The Intellectual scenery 387

according to the canons of scholarship It is ‘genius’ that speaks from his interpretations, but genius tutored and made effective by learning In the field of economics he did nothing of the sort; all he did was to add generous indignation to half-understood

observations and undigested pieces of reading It is this and not his evaluations (with

which many of us will sympathize) that puts him out of court, except for such writers as J.A.Hobson The judgment I pass on him—and he stands for so many—is exactly the same that he himself would have passed on any writer who undertook, for example, to criticize Turner’s paintings without having previously acquired, by morally neutral study,

an adequate mastery of the relevant facts and techniques

(b) German Philosophy

The reader presumably knows that the first part of the period under discussion witnessed the peak achievements of German speculative philosophy, and the names of Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer will immediately turn up in his mind But, no matter whether he knows much or little about them, it is impossible to enter here into the purely philosophical aspects of their work All I can say without proof about Kant, Schelling, and Schopenhauer is this First, their creations are striking examples of autonomous philosophical thought: it would be hopeless to try to link their teaching with the attitudes that may be associated with the class position of the bourgeois or any other element.8 Second, Kant was the only one of the three to exert significant international influence;9 but in Germany, all three of them wielded powerful influence upon the thought of generations in whose mental pattern the philosophical component then counted for still more than it did during the subsequent period Nevertheless, whatever else this influence may have touched or shaped, it did not extend to the professional work

of German—let alone of other than German—economists Many of them no doubt would have described themselves as Kantians But their professional methods and results were just as compatible with any other philosophy This question of influence posits itself somewhat differently in the cases of Fichte and Hegel

Fichte10 calls for comment, because he associated with his speculative philosophy, in 8

Some Marxists have tried it, fortified ed by the conviction that it must be possible to do so Such a

conviction will always insure some measure of spurious success that means nothing: everything can

be forced into correlation with everything else

9

Kantian ideas spread in particular to England Even James Mill grappled with them, but the nonutilitarians, Hamilton especially, and also philosophy-minded divines, put them under heavy obligation, which, considering the elements of English origin that we find in Kant, will not surprise

us A.Marshall’s enthusiasm for Kant—highly significant of the intellectual atmosphere of his early days—will be noticed in the appropriate place

10

The works of J.G.Fichte (1762–1814) that are particularly relevant to us are his Reden an die

deutsche Nation (1808), his Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796–7), and Der geschlossene

Handelsstaat (1800), all in his Sämmtliche Werke (ed by I.H.Fichte, 1845–6) Difficulties of

interpretation are greatly increased by the fact that his ideas underwent, in several essential

respects, changes of two different types: his philosophy changed, in the course of his life, in consequence of his own work upon it; his general outlook changed in consequence of a German’s typical experiences during the Napoleonic period that turned the cosmopolitan—who had defined a man’s country as that country which happens at any time to stand ‘at the height of civilization’— into an ardent patriot

History of economic analysis 388

the technical sense of the term, a social and political philosophy that trespassed freely

on the economics field and must be noticed for two reasons He blocked out a plan for a particular economic organization of society that will be considered below in the section

on socialism And he has been assigned a key position in the early development of O.Spann’s ‘universalist economics.’11

Fichte was, to be sure, no individualist in the Benthamite sense and no laissez-faire man If this constitutes a ‘universalist,’ then he was one, and the only thing to be said is that this species will then grow uncomfortably numerous If this is not enough to constitute a universalist, we are left with Fichte’s conception of a superindividual and

‘superconscious’ group mind—in which the individual consciousnesses participate The mere fact that he emphasized the autonomy of the phenomenon Society as against the phenomenon State, besides being as old as scholasticism, has certainly nothing specifically ‘universalist’ about it It is true that this conception is in the ‘universalist’ line, but it is also in many other lines, for example, in the entirely positivist line of Durkheim Perhaps it is somewhat less unrealistic to assume a connection, via romanticism, between Fichte and Spann than it is to trace Durkheim’s thought to Fichte Confidence in such purely phraseological relations is in any case misplaced and only serves to prevent perception of more substantial ones

Hegel12 calls for comment on three counts: first, because of his stupendous success; second, because of his theory of the state and because his philosophy constitutes an important branch of what we shall term evolutionism; third, because of his formative influence on the thought of Karl Marx

All that I can say about the first point is that it makes Hegel’s philosophy one of the 11

As has been mentioned already, the idea that the history of economics may be described in terms

of the struggle between two ‘systems’ of thought, an individualist and a universalist one, is really Professor Pribram’s But it was Professor Spann who founded what is known in Germany as the universalist school On Fichte’s relation to it, as conceived by the latter, see O.Spann,

Haupttheorien der Volkswirtschaftslehre (1st ed., 1911, many later ones; English trans 1930) The

reader who wishes to have a further and more sympathetic first introduction to universalist

economics than I am able to provide is referred, once for all, to Professor Salin’s exposition in the

Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (article, ‘Economics,’ section on ‘Romantic and Universalist

Economics’), where all the works of Spann are mentioned

If the reader will carefully go over Professor Salin’s exposition (op cit vol V, pp 386–7), he will immediately see the reason for lack of sympathy on my part If universalists were content to preach

a ‘holist’ meta-economic or philosophical interpretation of both economic reality and economic theory, there would be no objection; in fact I should actually sympathize with their

meta-economics, though I might interpret it to myself in terms of Gestalt psychology In any case, their

philosophy would be as irrelevant for us as was Quesnay’s theology But they make larger claims, viz claims to having developed a new and different method of analysis They actually ‘reject’ propositions about pricing and money, for example And all they do after rejecting them is to reformulate them in a clumsy and inadequate way For instance, after rejecting the concept of equilibrium, Professor Spann introduced the concept of equi-importance (at margins), which is to

do exactly the same things

12

G.W.F.Hegel (1770–1831) For us, the most important of his works are: Phänomenologie des

Geistes (1807; 2nd ed of English trans 1931), his most ‘realistic’ performance that may serve to

elucidate some of his more ‘abstract’ phases; Wissenschaft der Logik (1812–16, English trans 1929) and Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (ed 1837, from lecture notes; rev

English ed 1899)

The Intellectual scenery 389

factors in the Zeitgeist we are trying to survey More than this I cannot say because the

success was beyond anything I might be able to account for I could explain temporary success in Germany of the philosopher who is credited with the saying: ‘Of all my pupils one only has understood me; and this one has misunderstood me.’ Perhaps I could also explain, partly by the fact that Hegelian philosophy is capable of widely different interpreta-tions, why Hegel’s influence on German thought not only proved durable but also experienced a strong revival in the twentieth century But what is beyond my power

of comprehension is the great influence he exerted in England, France, Italy, and the United States, that is, on soils that should not have been favorable to this plant The fact itself is indubitable, however The second point will be dealt with in section 4 of this chapter The third, Hegel’s influence on Marx, constitutes our immediate concern

Many Marxists, and not only those of philosophical bent of mind, have come near to stating that Marxism is rooted in Hegelism and that, the relation being one of dependence, acceptance of the ‘dialectic method’ constitutes part of Marxist orthodoxy Marx himself was of a different

opinion In the preface to the second edition of the first volume of Das

Kapital, he tells us that as a philosopher he had been a Hegelian; that he

never lost his early preference for Hegel’s philosophy; and that what he considered superficial criticisms of it only served to strengthen his taste for ‘coquetting’ with it; but that he never allowed himself to be guided by

it in his positive research into the facts of capitalist society I suggest that this statement be accepted Authors often misinterpret their own procedure

and there is the possibility that Marx was mistaken But it can be shown that he was not For every proposition of his, economic and sociological,

as well as his vision of the capitalist process as a whole, may be either traced to sources other than philosophical—such as Ricardo’s economic theory—or else understood as results of strictly empirical analysis of his own The Hegelism of his exposition is not more than a form that we can discard in all cases without affecting the substance of his argument The only case that could possibly be considered doubtful will be discussed below

‘Idealistic’ (that is, metaphysical) philosophy never ruled unchallenged As the period wore on, the streak of materialism that we associate with bourgeois rationality asserted itself independently of the utilitarian current Among other things, it encouraged a materialistic interpretation of Hegel: some people discovered that his metaphysical concepts are not really necessary for his general mode of reasoning, which can stand without them, and dropped them accordingly Perhaps the most important of the Hegelians who, in doing so, developed into straight materialists was Ludwig Feuerbach.13 13

L.A.Feuerbach’s (1804–72) most important work, Das Wesen des Christenthums (1841; English

trans., 2nd ed., 1877), holds a key position in two respects: first, it attacked the foundations of that part of Hegel’s metaphysics that irked its ‘free-thinking’ followers most, the part that seemed to lend support to religious beliefs; second, it attacked, though less directly, Hegel’s metaphysics altogether and turned—a most significant sign of the times—philosophy into a sociology of sorts

History of economic analysis 390

(On Marx’s violent hostility to Feuerbach’s system of thought—that of course does not exclude his being influenced by it—see below, sec 3c.)

The poor lot of ‘free thinkers’ (exponents of mechanist or sensationalist materialism), who published in the last decades of that period and are significant only because their popular success was an important sign of the times, owe something to him but less than

we might suppose and less than many historians have supposed Once more: in analyzing broad currents of ideas we are too prone to assume relations between the bubbles that bubble up from the same crater

(c) Comtist Positivism

Of course, that period’s pattern of philosophic thought was very much richer than our survey suggests But we shall take from it only one more strand that not only embodies

another of the main components of that period’s Zeitgeist, but also is particularly

important for economists In France professional philosophy continued to keep up a Cartesian tradition, curiously interwoven with ideas that hailed from the English empiricists, from Condillac, and, in reaction against Condillac, from Scottish ‘common sense.’14 The antimetaphysical component, which, disregarding any other possible

meaning of the word, I shall call positivist, asserted itself in many ways But it found its

most nearly adequate expression in a suggestion thrown out by Saint-Simon and carried

out by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), a theoretical physicist by training, in his Cours de philosophie positive, which was to satisfy two distinct and logically independent needs:

first, the need for a general body of thought that would fill the void left by receding

metaphysical speculation, the need for a substitute for philosophy (or religion); second,

the need for a general body of thought that would put some order into the tropical growth

of specialized research Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy—‘synthetic’ indeed!— that appeared in installments from 1862 on (First Principles, Biology, Psychology, Sociology, and Ethics) was, in a sense, another attempt to satisfy both needs

Comte’s Cours appeared, 1830–42, in six volumes Of Comte’s other writings only his letters to J.S.Mill (Lettres d’Auguste Comte à John Stuart Mill, 1841–1846, publ 1877) come within our orbit As regards the

rest, the less said the better It should be kept in mind that, in speaking of

Comte and his work, I am referring exclusively to those two publications,

for Positivism and Comtism were to acquire also, from the aberrations of

his declining years, quite different meanings

14

That group is usually referred to, with a value judgment, as eclectics, which perhaps does not do full justice to its most important member, Victor Cousin It is associated with another group of political theorists and practitioners (and historians) that gathered around the strong personality of Royer-Collard (the ‘doctrinaire’ party as it was called; Guizot, the historian and prime minister belonged to it—more or less) Both groups are important elements in the Paris picture of the epoch between 1815 and 1848, and their thought displays parallelisms with that of the period’s

economists But I can mention them only in order to apologize for my inability to insert them

The Intellectual scenery 391