Religion, Business and Wealth in Modern Britain

David Jeremy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134701995
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The relationship of economics, capitalism and wealth to the ethics and morality of religion has intrigued and challenged policymakers, pressure groups, theologians, sociologists, economists and historians for centuries. Here David Jeremy addresses these questions in the context of modern Britain. His preliminary survey of historical controversies within religion and business, and the accompanying chronology of significant events since the 1770s are an extremely useful introduction for those unfamiliar with the field.

Part I
The relationship between religion and political economy

1
Christianity, secularisation and political economy

B.W.Young

In one of a series of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1831, Richard Whately made a semi-prophetic observation that just failed to be fulfilled:

That Political-Economy should have been complained of as hostile to Religion, will probably be regarded a century hence (should the fact be then on record) with the same wonder, almost approaching to incredulity, with which we of the present day hear of men sincerely opposing, on religious grounds, the Copernican system.¹

As the century wore on, and aided, especially from the 1860s onwards, by the polemics surrounding Darwinism, the disjunction between science and religion which Whately hinted at became a cliché in a way that he would have deplored. That political economy should thus have begun to be perceived to have detached itself from religion was part of this simplified depiction of the movement of science away from theology which some nineteenth-century practitioners of both the natural and the evolving social sciences frequently and deliberately promoted.²

Alongside the more consciously secular representatives of science were the pious promoters of religion as the supreme antidote to worldliness, whom it suited to denounce such compromising notions as the confessionally efficacious union between Christianity and political economy of the sort advocated by Whately. The very particular dimensions of this debate, so far as it concerned political economy, were at their most emphatic in the 1830s and 1840s. Relations between the two had been somewhat easier in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, although they were to begin to grow more complicated after the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776. The question that this chapter will address is thus twofold: how far was political economy a secularising science, and how far was it itself secularised both by its practitioners and by the disavowals of its opponents? For Whately such a question would have seemed all but unintelligible; by 1843, however, the barrister Samuel Richard Bosanquet, a follower of John Henry Newman and John Keble (Whately’s younger colleagues at Oriel College, Oxford), would denounce the very science which Whately had so vigorously and so recently championed:

This empire of commerce has its code of laws. The legislators of this table are the doctors of the school of political economists. ‘These sages in the satanic school in politics,’ as they have been justly called, have framed a code of maxims, which are characterised as much by their direct opposition to the precepts of the Gospel, as they are by any other peculiarity.³

Despite the reservations of the likes of Bosanquet, Whately continued his mission in promoting a profoundly Christian account of political economy when he became Archbishop of Dublin, and in so doing he continued a tradition which had characterised much of the initial progress of political economy in eighteenth-century Britain. A clerical economist of the calibre of Thomas Robert Malthus, for example, had worked in the wake of such predecessors as Josiah Tucker, a former dean of Gloucester, who had devoted much of his energy to clarifying issues in economic policy, especially as these involved trade, foreign relations, and the need for charitable provision for the poor.⁴ Similarly, William Paley, the favoured apologist for natural theology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, occasionally concerned himself with aspects of economic thought.⁵ Of these thinkers only Malthus would ultimately secure himself a place in the canon of classical political economy as this emerged over the nineteenth century, but this ought not to blind us to the contributions of the likes of Tucker and Paley to this emerging science. It is the prevalence of this otherwise predominantly secular canon of classical economists in the work of historians of economic thought which has tended to preclude a proper appreciation of a specifically Christian contribution to its development, whether it be provided by a Tucker or a Whately.

The analogous problem of ‘the canon’ of literary texts has become central for the academic study of English literature, the field which extended the idea from its original place in theology. Interestingly, canon formation in literature was very much a creation of the early and mid-nineteenth century, the very time when the canon of classical political economy was also being taxonomised by Marx and others.⁶ The emergence of the literary ‘canon’ has itself been related by some literary theorists to the economic, social and aesthetic theories of Adam Smith;⁷ the founding figure of the canon of political economy has thus been seen as playing a considerable role in the formation of a literary canon by scholars influenced by Marx, one of the principal architects of the analogous canon of political economy.

This chapter will follow this periodisation of the development of the canon of political economy, and in so doing it will pose the intimately related questions of how far the first period witnessed a secularisation of political economy, and how far, during the second period, efforts were successfully made to Christianise the discourse of political economy.

FROM MANDEVILLE TO SMITH: THE SECULARISATION OF POLITICAL ECONOMY?

It is literary scholars as much as historians of economic thought who have rediscovered a major text in what has been assumed to be the largely secularising discourse of political economy: Bernard de Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees. Nor yet is it difficult to see why Mandeville’s implicitly anti-Christian account of the relationship between private vices and public benefit has attracted the attention of scholars who have long tended to interpret the role of the burgeoning social and economic sciences as inherently secularising discourses. Mandeville’s notoriously amoral tract led contemporaries to denounce his flagrantly anti-Christian stance regarding the way men ought to conduct their affairs.⁸ Mandeville’s work initiated what was to become, for many of its later combatants, a contest between a firmly Christian moral economy and a consciously secular political economy. This division became a genuinely binary affair: at one extreme stood the Nonjuror William Law, whose reply to the Fable concentrated on its supposed immorality and tendency to the promotion of atheism; on the other, stood Mandeville himself.⁹

Mandeville was particularly deplored by clerical commentators for his defence of luxury, and he quickly became identified as the major theorist of self-interested consumption.¹⁰ Clerical theorists were plainly more exposed by this question: Joseph Priestley, the prominent Dissenter, stressed the beneficial effects of luxury, while others, such as Tucker and Paley, were more typically ambivalent.¹¹ Tucker’s work concentrated on the inter-relationship of public and private morals, and the emphasis in his political economy was frequently on the political.¹² For some sense of the explicitly Christian nature of Tucker’s preoccupations, it is worth comparing him with a contemporary economist, Sir James Steuart, whose work covered much of the same ground in the evolving study of political economy.

Steuart’s work is more usually compared with that of his fellow Scot Adam Smith, but it is worth comparing him with Tucker not least as the work of both men has tended to be obscured by the attention paid to Smith. It is difficult to ascertain Steuart’s religious position with any degree of accuracy. A Jacobite who had to clear his name in order to win back favour in a Britain from which he had been exiled as a traitor, Steuart was unusually close to European discussion concerning political economy, especially as this subject was understood in France. In this way, the example of Steuart interestingly affirms John Robertson’s recent contention that the Scottish Enlightenment’s close links with French thought included, as a major component, a doughty concern with the science of political economy.¹³ Robertson has also claimed that this cosmopolitan Enlightenment was decidedly secular in its concerns, becoming, at times, deliberately irreligious. Steuart’s position in this picture is somewhat more ambiguous. Andrew Skinner, the most recent editor of Steuart’s An Inquiry Into the Principle of Political Oeconomy (1767), simply described him as a deist, while another commentator, S.R.Sen, had no hesitation in calling him a ‘devout Christian’.¹⁴ The truth of the matter is considerably more difficult to disentangle.

Steuart left little published material from which it might be possible to reconstruct his religious position. Writing in 1771 against the ‘Common Sense’ philosophy of James B...

Table of contents

• Routledge International Studies in Business History
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The relationship between religion and political economy
• Part II Nonconformists and wealth
• Part III Quakers and wealth
• Part IV Ethnicity, religion and wealth
• Index