History of Economic Analysis part 46 potx

But they will not admit this for reasons— beliefs, philosophies—that are extraneous to the logically essential content of the economic interpretation of history: philosophical determini

For clarification and illustration, it will be useful to distinguish five differ-ent—though often overlapping—types of evolutionist thought, all of which loom large in the intellectual scenery of this period and also in that of the subsequent one: what follows refers to both periods, though instances are taken only from the one under survey

(a) Philosophers’ Evolutionism

Hegel is the outstanding example With every apology for the temerity involved, I shall put the one point that is relevant for the purposes of this book as follows Let us postulate

the existence of a metaphysical entity—no matter what we call it—that is ultimate and

absolute reality, and let us thus place ourselves on the standpoint of an ultra-idealistic philosophy.2 Let us, at the same time and in the same sense, define the same reality as the

totality of all actual and potential observational facts How is this possible? It is possible,

if, as, and when we see in these observational facts, as it were, runes that embody (manifestations of) that entity3—in much the same way in which we should do so if we adopted straight pantheism in the ordinary sense Now, that entity is supposed to undergo

an immanent evolution in an essentially logical process of theses, antitheses, and syntheses.4 And so does the observational reality This is the kind of thing that will always appeal to one type of mind and never to another We pass on with a definition and

a comment The definition: reasoning from the conception of a metaphysical entity, which in unfolding its own contents produces a sequence of changes in the reality of

experience, we call emanatist The comment: the reader will observe that of Hegel’s

emanatist conception of evolution something remains, even if we drop its metaphysical trappings, namely, the idea or perhaps discovery that reality, as we know it from

experience, may be in itself an evolutionary process, evolving from inherent necessity,

instead of being a set of phenomena that seek a definite state or level, so that an extraneous factor—or at least a distinct factor—is necessary in order to move them to another state or level as the analogy with Newtonian mechanics suggests This idea, if tenable, is of course extremely important As regards philosophy, it renders it possible to proceed, for example, from Hegelianism in its original acceptance to what may be termed 2

Idealism as applied to German philosophy from Kant to Hegel has, of course, nothing whatever to

do with idealism in the ethical sense

3

This is what Hegel’s famous phrase was meant to convey (if we equate our metaphysical entity to reason): whatever is, is rational (conforms to reason) and whatever is rational (thinkable), is As meant, this does not lend any support to conservative attitudes But the reader will have no

difficulty in realizing how easily it can be made to do so Moreover, Hegel’s phrasing invites such

an interpretation This was even an important factor in his success

4

The irreverent did not fail to notice that here was an opportunity of proving Hegel’s system to be nonsense Misguided by their inability to rise to Hegelian heights, they pointed—with a vicious smile—to the fact that this piece of philosophizing cannot be readily translated into English The

German verb aufheben means both to cancel and to raise Hegel averred that a thesis, A is B, and its antithesis, A is not B, aufheben each other into something higher, a synthesis that comprises the content of both But contradictory statements do not aufheben each other in the sense of raising each other into something more comprehensive: they simply cancel, i.e annihilate, each other—

which would be rather serious for Hegel and evolution It is, of course, possible to save the

situation A warning to us remains, however

Hegelian materialism, which many of the so-called Young Hegelians did As regards sociology, it suggests a novel approach to the facts of social change

Before going on, we may notice two other methods by which philosophers sometimes contrived to impart to their philosophies an evolutionary slant ‘Progress’ was in the air and, like other people, philosophers enjoy being up to date The agnostic or materialist, especially of the semi-popular variety, was apt to substitute intellectual progress for the entities that he discarded, that is to say, he was apt to raise a loan from what will be described below (d) as Condorcet-Comte evolutionism; or else he was apt to exploit biological evolu-tionism (e) for philosophical purposes Whatever we may think of this as

a philosophy, it made popular literature

(b) Marxist Evolutionism

I have just adverted to the possible implications for sociology that a despiritualized Hegelian philosophy might harbor This suggests that here we have after all more than a phraseological influence5 of Hegel upon Marx If, nevertheless, we maintain substantive autonomy of Marx’s so-called Materialistic Interpretation of History as against Hegelism, and if we list it as a separate type of evolutionism, we allow ourselves to be guided by two considerations First, Marx’s theory of history developed independently of Marx’s Hegelian affiliation We know6 that his analysis started from a criticism of the current (and apparently immortal) error that the behavior that produces history is determined by ideas (or the ‘progress of the human mind’), and that these in turn are infused into actors

by purely intellectual processes To start with this criticism is a perfectly sound and very positive method but has nothing to do with Hegelian speculation Second, Marx’s theory

of history is a working hypothesis by nature It is compatible with any philosophy or

creed and should therefore not be linked up with any particular one—neither Hegelianism nor materialism is necessary or sufficient for it.7 What remains is, again, Marx’s preference for Hegelian phrasing—and his own and most, though not all, Marxists’ preference for anything that sounds anti-religious

5

An example of the purely phraseological influences, of which there are many, will be noticed in passing The untutored reader of Marx’s writings may wonder why Marx speaks so often of

‘contradictions’ of capitalism when he means nothing but mutually counteracting facts or

tendencies: these are contradictions from the standpoint of Hegelian logic This has had an amusing

consequence To this day, the average Marxist, accepting the word Contradiction in the sense it carries in ordinary logic and parlance, infers that Marx wished to charge the capitalist system with

logical incompatibilities in this ordinary sense every time he spoke of ‘contradictions’—which, of

course, is not the case

6

See e.g Marx’s introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (publ by Kerr, Chicago, 1904) The original German edition (Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie) was published in 1859, the Einleitung (introduction) in the Neue Zeit, 1902–3; the English translation by

N.I.Stone includes the ‘recently published’ introduction in an appendix

7

I have found that this statement is likely to cause surprise But proof is easy For we may fully accept the doctrine of freedom of individual will in the sense in which it is taught, e.g., by St Thomas Aquinas, and still go on to argue that the exercise of this free will, being limited by physical and social data, will in general produce a course of events in conformity with these data The economic interpretation is nothing but a hypothesis about what, in turn, determines these data, and per se implies neither absence of the individual’s moral responsibility for his acts nor refusal to

admit the possibility of supermundane influence upon these data themselves and the ways in which they work out Marxists, it is true, will not admit this But they will not admit this for reasons— beliefs, philosophies—that are extraneous to the logically essential content of the economic

interpretation of history: philosophical determinism is, as a matter of fact, mostly associated with sponsorship of the latter, but in logic it has nothing to do with the methodological determinism that

is implied in it

Both the achievement embodied in that hypothesis and the limitations of this achievement may be best conveyed by means of a brief and bald statement of the essential points (1) All the cultural manifestations of ‘civil society’—to use the eighteenth-century term—are ultimately functions of its class structure.8 (2) A society’s class structure is, ultimately and chiefly, governed by the structure of production

(Produktionsverhältnisse), that is, a man’s or a group’s position in the social class

structure is determined chiefly by his or its position in the productive process (3) The social process of production displays an immanent evolution (tendency to change its own economic, hence also social, data) To this we add the essential points of Marx’s theory

of social classes, which is logically separable from points (1) to (3) that define the economic interpretations of history but forms part of it within the Marxian scheme (1′) The class structure of capitalist society may be reduced to two classes: the bourgeois class that owns, and the proletarian class that does not own, the physical means of production, which are ‘capital’ if owned by employers but would not be ‘capital’ if owned by the workers who use them (2′) By virtue of the position of these classes in the productive process, their interests are necessarily antagonistic (3′) The resulting class

struggle or class war (Klassenkampf) provides the mechanisms—economic and

political—that implement the economic evolution’s tendency to change (revolutionize) every social organization and all the forms of a society’s civilization that exist at any time All this we may sum up in three slogans: politics, policies, art, science, religious

and other beliefs or creations, are all superstructures (Überbau) of the economic structure

of society;9 historical evolution is propelled by economic evolution; history is the history

of class struggles.10

This is as fair a presentation of Marx’s social evolutionism as I am able to provide in a nutshell The achievement is of first-rank importance11 although the elements that enter into it are of very unequal value or, rather, unequally impaired by obvious ideological bias Least valuable for any but agitatorial pur-

8

I repeat that the term ‘function’ here used does not imply causal determination In fact, an attempt

to insist on such ‘absolute’ or ‘mechanical’ determination would not achieve anything except to make the theory very easy to refute Both Engels and Plekhanov, the chief Marxist authorities on the subject, have seen this and both relaxed considerably on the stringency Emphasis upon

‘ultimately’ was one of the means of doing so

9

One aspect or application of this theory we have discussed in Part I, viz the doctrine of the inevitable ‘ideological bias’ of all thought

10

Marx’s ideas on social evolution and classes are, of course, basic for everything he ever wrote, and comments on them are strewn all through his works—which does not make it any easier to do justice to them But of all his publications, the following seem to me the most important sources to

be used in any attempt at interpretation: the Communist Manifesto; the Class Struggles in France; the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and the Critique of Political Economy (All available

in English translations; for details as to dates and publishers, see Sweezy, op cit p 382.)

This achievement should, I believe, be attributed to Marx alone For every performance of such scope it is, of course, possible to name forerunners But there were rather less of them than we are accustomed to find in comparable cases The only

poses is the theory of social classes that Marx associated with his economic interpretation

of history: the two-class schema is all but useless for serious analysis; exclusive emphasis upon class antagonism is as patently wrong—and as patently ideological—as is exclusive emphasis upon class harmony of the Carey-Bastiat type (see below, ch 4); and the proposition that the evolution of forms of social organization is brought about by a mechanism that can be described exclusively in terms of the struggle between those two classes is a simplification that eliminates the essentials of the mechanisms actually at work A qualification must, however, be added: if we get from Marx an ideologically warped definition of classes and of class antagonisms, and if in consequence we get an unsatisfactory description of political mechanisms, we nevertheless get something very worth having, namely, a perfectly adequate idea of the importance of the class phenomenon If in this field there existed anything like unbiased research, Marx’s suggestions would have led long ago to a satisfactory theory of it

But the economic interpretation of history is a different matter If we reduce it to the role of a working hypothesis and if we carefully formulate it, discarding all philosophical ambitions that are suggested by the phrases Historical Materialism or Historical Determinism, we behold a powerful analytic achievement Points (1) and (3) may then be defended against objections, most of which turn out to rest upon misunderstandings.12 Point (2) is less reliable: it

claimant for whom it is possible to argue at all is Lorenz von Stein (1815–90), whose Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs (1842, later ed., entitled Geschichte der socialen Bewegung in Frankreich, 1850, newly edited, 1921) is in fact an important piece of analysis that

links up the development of socialist ideas with the realities of social movements and economic changes This, however, is not the economic interpretation of history; still less is it possible to find the latter in the socialist writers themselves, whom Stein discussed, or in the French historians of the revolution, the restoration, and the Orléans regime So far as my knowledge of them entitles me

to judge, they all emphasize more or less the economic element in the historical processes they describe which they could hardly have helped doing But obviously this is not enough I suspect that those who find in this literature anything suggestive of the economic interpretation of the historical process as a whole entertain a different conception of the latter than I thought it proper to adopt Mere recognition of the importance of the economic factor is a triviality and neither

distinctive nor meritorious in itself The case of Saint-Simon, which may be an exception, will be stated below

12

By simple experiment, the reader may easily satisfy himself how well point (1) works Take e.g

so modest a ‘cultural manifestation’ as the modern murder story Observe its chief characteristics— not forgetting its English—and correlate them with the salient facts about the social structure of our time You will not fail to enjoy an enlightening experience

I take this opportunity to advert to one of those misunderstandings of which, on one occasion, Engels himself was guilty Taking ‘materialism’ mistakenly in its ethical sense, some writers have taken what they called ‘historical materialism’ to mean that men are actuated by material, i.e economic, interests as motives in the psychological sense Marx’s theory does not mean this and has room for all kinds of motives

works well with some historical patterns and not at all with others.13 This problem Marx does not seem to have taken very seriously But there was another, to the solution of which he devoted the bulk of his giant powers for the rest of his life Obviously, the vast fabric, of which the economic interpretation of history was the base, would have had to remain incomplete without a full analysis of that immanent evolution of the economic sector on which the evolution of human civilization as a whole was made to rest For him the economic interpretation of history was, therefore, still more a program than it was an achievement to be valued for itself

We have reached a point of vital importance for a proper understanding of Marx’s work On the one hand, we can now visualize his unitary Social Science, the only significant all-comprehensive system that dates from this side of utilitarianism: we see the manner and the sense in which he welded into a single homogeneous whole all

branches of sociology and economics—a venture that might well dazzle the modern

disciple even more than it dazzled Engels, who stood too near the workshop On the other hand, we now see Marxist economics in its true light Its individual features, or some of them, will come in for notice and appraisal in their places Here I wish only to insist on the greatness of the conception and on the fact that Marxist analysis is the only genuinely evolutionary economic theory that the period produced.14 Neither its assumptions nor its techniques are above serious objections—though, partly, because it has been left unfinished But the grand vision of an immanent evolution of the economic process— that, working somehow through accumulation, somehow destroys the economy as well as the society of competitive capitalism and somehow produces an untenable social situation that will somehow give birth to another type of social organization—remains after the most vigorous criticism has done its worst It is this fact, and this fact alone, that constitutes Marx’s claim to greatness as an economic analyst That he was more than an

economic analyst we have seen in this section That he was more than an analyst need not

be explained again

[For a discussion of the views of Marx and Schumpeter on the topics covered in this section, see O.H.Taylor, ‘Schumpeter and Marx: Imperialism and Social Classes in the

Schumpeterian System,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1951 This is a review article of Schumpeter’s Imperialism and Social Classes (English trans., ed with

an introduction by Paul M.Sweezy, 1951).]

13

The Marxist principle can be illustrated by such processes as the elimination of the artisan class

by large-scale manufacturing industry But as Dühring pointed out, other instances can be adduced

to show that this ‘causality’ is often reversed—the truth being of course that there is

interdependence between the conditions of production and the social structure The situation of the Marxist principle can be somewhat improved by recognizing the fact that social structures may outlive the conditions of production that created them—which will account for a certain number of discrepancies without destroying the theory Another device is more dangerous: we might define, e.g., the activity of a tribe of warlike conquerors as ‘productive’ and then say that the social

organization that results in conquered countries still comes within the range of the Marxist

interpretation But this is very near to making a tautology of it

14

We deal elsewhere with the Smith-Ricardo-Millian contribution to the theory of economic change Even those readers who see merit in it, granting even the possibility that it may have given Marx a basis from which to start, will have to admit that it looks embryonic beside his

(c) Historians’ Evolutionism

Mere preoccupation with the problems of describing the events of an ever-changing world does not spell evolutionism in the sense of this section Professional historians, therefore, are not evolutionists by profession They become evolutionists—of a distinct type—only when they try to arrange states of society—economic, political, cultural, or general ones—into sequences that are supposed to be necessary in the sense that each such state is the necessary and sufficient condition for the emergence of the one that follows it The oldest and most primitive way of doing this is by constructing typical stages through which an economy must pass This method was represented in that period

by Friedrich List, whose scheme—hunting, agriculture, agriculture plus manufacture, agriculture and manufacture plus commerce—met with deserved criticism from Karl Knies:15 we should indeed have put down this scheme as completely worthless were it not for the fact that it may be used (and was used by List) as a simple expository device for impressing upon beginners (or the public) the lesson that economic policy has to do with changing economic structures and therefore cannot consist of a set of unchanging recipes Another example is Bruno Hildebrand’s scheme: exchange economy, money economy, credit economy Beyond this there is not much to report in this category—the better a historian, the more averse he is to such constructions—except that a vague belief in evolutionary sequences, such as historical sequences that were supposed to bear analogy with the youth, manhood, and old age of individuals, are not infrequently met with in historical writings of that period An economist and economic historian who indulged in this belief without however being misled by it, as far as I can see, was W.Roscher.16 It is worth noting that this belief in ‘laws of economic history’ constitutes one of the main differences between his methodology and Schmoller’s, who nevertheless had a type-series of his own: village economy, town economy, territorial economy, and national economy

(d) The Intellectualist Evolutionism of Condorcet and Comte

Condorcet,17 more than any other writer, elaborated the theory of social evolution that is specifically associated with the thought of the Enlightenment and is present, implicitly or

explicitly, in the writings of all the votaries of la raison: let us call it Intellectualist

Evolutionism It is the last word in simplicity Reduced to its essential content, it comes

to this: human reason, a given force, wages an incessant war of conquest on man’s physical environment and, at any given stage, on the beliefs or habits of thought that mankind has acquired at previous stages of its history From this incessant struggle results, on the one hand, an indefinitely increasing insight into the true laws of nature and, in consequence, an even more perfect technological control over the forces of nature and, on the other hand, an indefinitely

15

See his Politische Ökonomie vom Standpunkte der geschichtlichen Methode (1853, enlarged ed.,

1883)

16

The work of List, Hildebrand, and Roscher will be discussed below in ch 4, sec 5

17

Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795; see above, Part II, ch 2, sec 7d)

increasing freedom from erroneous and antisocial beliefs and propensities: human intellect, perfecting itself, perfects the whole of human nature, hence also human institutions, without assignable limit Since many readers’ minds are presumably imbued with this theory—perhaps to the point of accepting this ‘progress of the human mind’ as a matter of course—we had better make sure that we understand the objection to it: it fails because it postulates what it is to explain Changes—adaptive and, possibly, also autonomous—in beliefs, in stocks of knowledge and techniques, and in habits of thought are no doubt historically associated with other manifestations of social evolution But they are conditioned, to say the least, by the facts of a changing social structure, and so

are their modi operandi If we attribute, say, modern positivism or the modern airplane to

the progress of the human mind, we have evidently not done much toward their explanation In fact, we have done nothing: we have only renamed the problem If, in order to remedy this, we appeal to the perfectibility of the human mind, we have still done nothing: we have only postulated the solution And if, recognizing this, we introduce additional factors of explanation, for example, biological ones, we have left the moorings of intellectualist evolutionism

But in spite of its patent inadequacy, this theory survived in the liberal or progressive circles that continued the tradition of the Enlightenment Lecky and Buckle, however much their arguments may differ, can be mentioned again in illustration of this For us, however, Comte’s position is of particular interest His schema or ‘law’ of three stages, according to which civilization evolves from a religious or magical stage to a metaphysical and then to a scientific one, clearly hails from the thought of the Enlightenment: it does not differ essentially from Condorcet’s Moreover, it is not only unbelievably narrow but also, in Comte’s own sense, speculative and unscientific: research on the lines of his ‘positive’ program would have immediately revealed the presence of factors and mechanisms that cannot be reduced to the one factor embodied in that ‘law.’ Observe, however, that, superficially, the law seems easy to verify: rational scientific procedure (though not in politics) is in fact one of the features that are characteristic of our own time; and magic is in fact characteristic of the primitive mind— the question is only how much this means and how far the correlation admits of causal interpretation

There is one more point to be noticed The religious, metaphysical, and scientific attitudes are evidently social and not simply individual phenomena Therefore, Comte’s stages may be said to be stages in the development of a collective or group mind Much more definitely than Condorcet, Comte in fact adopted this concept and he did something toward elaborating it There is, of course, a world of difference between his collective mind and the national soul of the romanticists Viewed as tools of analysis, however, both come to much the same thing and both have influenced the work of later sociologists and social psychologists

(e) Darwinian Evolutionism

This is the only kind of biological evolutionism to be noticed here Lamarck’s influence was largely, though not wholly, superseded by Darwin’s (who, however, was generous in his references to Lamarck); and Mendel, though he published his three laws in 1866, did not exert any direct influence at all.18 The ‘Historical Sketch’ added by Darwin to the

third and later editions of the Origin of Species will tell the reader the fascinating story of

the gradual emergence of the decisive ideas, so that nothing needs to be said about it here.19 It is, however, necessary to offer the following comments on the social significance of the book and on its significance for the social sciences.20

In the first place, the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man make one of the biggest patches of color in our picture of that period’s Zeitgeist Their secular importance for

mankind’s cosmic conceptions is comparable with that of the heliocentric system They were very widely read by the general public, passionately discussed, and effective in refurnishing the bourgeoisie’s mental house, though it seems that, in most cases, this 18

G.J.Mendel (1822–84), an Augustinian monk, not only did excellent experimental work—this is professional opinion; I have, of course, none of my own—but also offered the theoretical

interpretation of it that proved acceptable to biologists when his results were independently

rediscovered (about 1900) He refrained from any application to social processes Since we are interested in the sociology of science, the question arises: what can we learn from this case of neglect of a most important performance? Examination of the case seems to show, however, that it teaches us nothing Robert Mayer personally communicated his discovery (mechanical equivalent

of heat) to men (one man at least) of indubitable professional standing, who could and should have

understood and promulgated it Cournot published his Recherches (see below, Part IV, ch 7) in the

broad daylight of one of the great intellectual centers But Mendel lived in a convent, situated in a provincial town, and published his results in an obscure local periodical, that is, in a manner that amounted to hiding them Thus, this case of neglect is self-explanatory

19

The reader is urgently advised to peruse it carefully It is one of the most important pieces of scientific history ever written, and presents a case study about one of the objects of our interest— the ways of the human mind and the mechanisms of scientific advance In addition, it elucidates a concept that plays some role in our own story, the concept of Inadequate Acknowledgment of Priorities Darwin illustrates the meaning of this concept by presenting an ideal instance of what is Adequate Acknowledgment In everything he did, that man was a living and walking compliment

to himself and also to the economic and cultural system that produced him—a point recommended

to the reader whenever he feels like ruminating on the civilization of capitalism (and, incidentally, about more modem forms of organization of research)

Charles Darwin (1809–82) took long in evolving, still longer in publishing, the fruits of his labor

The Origin of Species…was published in 1859 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex was published in 1871, after Vogt and Haeckel (also others) had already pronounced in favor of

its main theses Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 19 treat matters directly relevant to general and economic sociology

Herbert Spencer’s essay, which Darwin commends so generously, appeared first in the Leader,

1852, and his Psychology in 1855, whereas Mill’s Principles, the restatement of ‘classic’ economic

thought, appeared in 1848

20

The reader will observe that in what follows I do not of course presume to judge the book as a professional performance in its own field The delicate question of a research worker’s proper behavior in matters that involve the results and procedures in fields other than his own, therefore, does not arise at the moment, though it does arise in connection with ‘Darwinist’ social theories

new furniture did not oust metaphysical furniture that still existed but only occupied empty space Our fundamental beliefs and attitudes are beyond the power of any book to make or shake; in particular, I do not think that any cultivated person will find his faith destroyed through reading Darwin, provided that person has any faith to destroy.21

In the second place, however much or little we may think of the causal role of Darwinism, its symptomatic importance is beyond question It came, and rode to success, exactly when it should have done so according to the Marxist theory of intellectual superstructures And it was one current only in a broader river as the independent but analogous developments in geology suffice to show.22 This was the same river that also carried along the other evolutionisms that we have been discussing above But in all other respects these were logically independent of either Darwinism or any other biological theory: it is quite important to realize this in order to avoid confusions that threaten our understanding of the intellectual history of the period Marx may have experienced satisfaction at the emergence of Darwinist evolutionism But his own had nothing whatever to do with it, and neither lends any support to the other

In the third place, Darwinism or Darwinist talk did intrude into sociology and economics later on This will be touched upon in our survey of the intellectual scenery of the next period (Part IV, ch 3) For the period under discussion, I can find no significant influence upon the social sciences apart from what we may conceive Darwinist influence to have done to people’s general habits of thought.23 Both Darwin and Spencer contributed to psychology, and the latter displayed a propensity for sociological applications from the first But this is all In concluding, I wish to comment on Darwin’s remark to the effect that he derived inspiration from Malthus’ theory of population It seems very hazardous,

to be sure, to dissent from a man’s statement about his own mental processes But quite insignificant events or suggestions may release a given current of thought; Darwin himself did not include Malthus’ work in the Historical Sketch mentioned above, though

he did refer to it in his introduction; and the mere statement that ‘more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive’ (which, moreover, is doubtful Malthusianism) is, in itself, not more than a platitude I am afraid, therefore, that the service rendered by economics to the evolution of the Darwinian doctrine bears some analogy to the service rendered to Rome by the celebrated geese

21

I say cultivated person because the case is different for the untrained mind that lacks resources

for interpretative and critical defense But, then, the untrained mind takes shelter behind authority 22

These are associated with the name of Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875) almost as much as

biological evolution is associated with the name of Darwin His Principles of Geology (1830–33) does not quite ‘let the murder out’ but, by implication, it says as much as does his Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863)

23

In 1872, Walter Bagehot published his Physics and Politics (more appropriate titles would have been Biology and Sociology or Biological Interpretation of History), which uses, among other

things, Darwinian social psychology In itself no more than a piece of brilliant dilettantism, the book contains many suggestions that came to fruition later on It is still worth reading

5 PSYCHOLOGY AND LOGIC The most interesting products of that period’s work in the field of psychology are those that anticipate, or at least herald, the developments of the subsequent period I am referring to the cerebral anatomy of P.J.Cabanis, F.J Gall (whose work also includes the first theory of reflex action), Sir Charles Bell, and P.P.Broca; to the physiological or experimental psychology of Tetens and Bonnet, later on continued with much greater success by Johannes P.Müller, E.H.Weber, R.H.Lotze, G.T.Fechner; to the related line taken by Claude Bernard;1 and, if we insist on including Völkerpsychologie in

psychology at all, to the work of F.T.Waitz, who was mentioned above in the section concerned with Environmentalism Furthermore, if we also include philosophies about the collective mind—and if we choose to call them the harbingers of modern social psychology—we have to add, on the one hand, Comte and, on the other hand, Herder and many other ‘romantics.’

[(a) Associationist and Evolutionist Psychology.]

But more directly relevant for the possibility of a psychological foundation of technical economics—if indeed we have any use for such a foundation—are the psychologies of Herbart (1776–1841) and Beneke (1798–1854).2 The former worked out a simple con- ceptual apparatus for the analysis of psychic phenomena as they are given by introspective observation without recourse to physiology Economists might have learned something from him, though more from his methods than from his results Barring a few quotations that do not mean anything, I have not however been able to find any instances

to prove that either his psychology or his general philosophy exerted any influence upon the professional work of economists I wonder whether the same should be averred for

the element in that period’s psychological work that is by far the most important one

from the standpoint of a history of economics—Hartleyan associationism This associationism should have been obsolete by then but was revived by a new edition of 1

These names are mentioned merely as pointers for readers who, if they should wish to go further, will meet them in any history of psychology—which is why I refrain from giving titles and dates The names of Cabanis, Broca, Weber, and Fechner are associated with performances of particular interest to us Some will be mentioned again in the corresponding chapter and section of Part IV so that we do not lose our thread The reader will understand, of course, that I am not competent to judge the value of such work as Gall’s or Lotze’s in its technical aspects and that in consequence

my choice of names may be misleading: the list is the list of an economist whose impressions are in part due to chance reading (guided, however, to some extent, by professional advice) and chance contacts The name of Broca, e.g., stands where it does because this author combined to an unusual degree research in brain anatomy and in cultural anthropology, but also because his work impressed

me greatly in my formative years

2

See e.g J.F.Herbart’s Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (1816) and his Psychologie als

Wissenschaft…(1824–5) Herbart’s very influential philosophy and pedagogics do not interest us here F.E.Beneke’s Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten (1822; the opposite pole to Kant’s

Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten) and Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft

(1833) make psychology the only basis of logic, ethics, and aesthetics and afford an excellent illustration for what is meant in the present book by Psychologism