Irish Political Economy Vol1

Tom Boylan, Tadhg Foley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000549782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Business

First published in 2004. This is a collection of carefully selected works and material, attempts to extend the current state of scholarship in the area of Irish Political Economy. The range and variety of material presented should be of interest not only to students of economic thought but also to those working in such fields as Irish Studies, history, politics, sociology and intellectual history. Volume 1 includes the scope and methodology.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I

DOI: 10.4324/9781003100867-2

In Whately’s opinion the name ‘political-economy’ was an unfortunate one, indeed etymologically a virtual contradiction, having reference to the polis and oicos, ‘the one treating of the affairs and regulation of a Commonwealth, the other, originally at least, of a private Family’ (vol. 1, chapter 3). He coined the term ‘catallactics’, meaning the science of exchanges, as his preferred alternative name for political economy. Indeed, W.E. Hearn had similar reservations about the name and he was the first author in the English language to use the name ‘plutology’ for the discipline, finding the terms both ‘wealth’ and ‘exchange’ inadequate for his purposes. For Hearn, the term political economy connoted an art, indeed the art of government, rather than a science, and had been treated as such, scientific protestations notwithstanding, by most of its practitioners.¹ He argued that a practical emphasis on an art that produced ‘fruit’ militated against a science that produced ‘light’, thus inhibiting the growth of economic knowledge.² Isaac Butt too was unhappy with the term ‘political economy’ (vol. 1, chapter 1). Clearly this dissatisfaction with the name of the discipline indicated problems about its scope and methodology, its putative scientific character, and its relationship with ideology. Whately limited the term wealth to ‘things contemplated as exchangeable’ (vol. 1, chapter 3), prescinding entirely from questions of their desirability in other respects or their capacity to contribute to ‘public and private happiness’ (vol. 1, chapter 3). In like manner, Hearn reprimanded Senior for considering matters of ‘well being’ as well as of ‘wealth’ in a scientific discourse.³

Defining production as the creation of utility, Butt

endeavoured completely to distinguish between that relation of things to our nature, by which they minister to our wants, or satisfy our desires, and that relation to each other by which they are mutually exchanged in certain proportions – the one is utility, and the other value; the first is evidently the basis of the second; and it is utility, and not value, which is the end and object of all human effort, and of the act of exchange itself.

(vol. 1, chapter 3)

This approach to ‘utility’ and ‘value’ corresponded with Smith’s ‘value in use’ and ‘value in exchange’. In defining wealth, Butt emphasized the fact that things, both immaterial as well as material, which ‘minister to the wants, or satisfy the desires of man’ had to be of their nature ‘capable of being transferred’ (vol. 1, chapter 1). Butt, noting popular hostility to ‘political economy’, denied the charges that the discipline was opposed to religion and morality.

Lawson considered ‘how experience may be made to assist us in our scientific researches, and, on the other hand, how our scientific knowledge enables us to make a proper use of the teachings of observation and experience’ (vol. 1, chapter 2). He criticized those writers, in the Ricardian mode, whose conclusions, he claimed, exceeded their premises or who neglected to make ‘due allowance for those disturbing causes which modify the results pointed out by abstract speculation’ (vol. 1, chapter 2). For Lawson, the social and moral sciences, as well as those of the material world, presupposed as well as exemplified divine order and harmony, exhibiting ‘wondrous regularity, in the midst of apparent confusion’ (vol. 1, chapter 2). For O’Hagan, who was connected with the Catholic University of Ireland, political economy ministered to the desires and appetites of mankind but of those desires it had no ‘measure, except their number and intensity’ and as to their ‘comparative worth’ it was ‘absolutely blind and unintelligent’ (vol. 1, p. 88). Wealth had a tendency, especially in developed countries, to become ‘an enormous temptation to evil’, tending ‘to make the soul the body’s slave’ (vol. 1, p. 93).

According to J.A. La Nauze, Hearn’s Plutology was ‘the first book in English (and I think in any language) systematically to apply the Darwinian theory of organic evolution to political economy, and to insist that the proper method for the study of economic society was biological’.⁴ Hearn was also a pioneer in placing wants at the centre of economic analysis and Jevons was generous in acknowledging his contribution: ‘I have the more pleasure and confidence in putting forward these somewhat heretical views concerning the general problem of Economics, inasmuch as they are nearly identical with those arrived at by Professor Hearn, of Melbourne University’.⁵

Two Irishmen, John Elliot Cairnes and Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie, were leading protagonists internationally in debates concerning economic methodology, with Cairnes defending a version of deductivism and Leslie advocating the historical method. As against Comte (who had a small Irish following, the most distinguished of whom was John Kells Ingram), Cairnes argued against the proposition that ‘society should be contemplated in the totality of its elements’ and that ‘no investigation should be undertaken into any portion of those elements except in constant connection with parallel investigations carried on contemporaneously into all co-existing portions of the complex whole’ (vol. 1, p. 119). Cairnes defended the relative autonomy of political economy and denied that social facts could be dealt with only in the Comtean ensemble. For Cairnes political economy was both a mental and a physical science and economic factors were paramount in any social formation, though many ‘subordinate influences’, economically speaking, could ‘intervene to disturb, and occasionally to reverse, the operation of the more powerful principles, and thus to modify the resulting phenomena’ (vol. 1, p. 151). He saw political economy as like the physical sciences that had reached the ‘deductive stage’:

Its premisses are not arbitrary figments of the mind, formed without reference to concrete existences, like those of Mathematics; nor are its conclusions mere generalized statements of observed facts, like those of the purely inductive natural sciences. But, like Mechanics or Astronomy, its premisses represent positive facts; whilst its conclusions, like the conclusions of these sciences, may or may not correspond to the realities of external nature, and therefore must be considered as representing only hypothetical truth.

(vol. 1, p. 154)

The conclusions would ‘correspond with facts only in the absence of disturbing causes’ (vol. 1, p. 155).

Associating himself especially with the German historical school, Cliffe Leslie excoriated the ‘à priori and abstract method of economic reasoning’ which he saw as dominating ‘English’ political economy (vol. 1, p. 200). For Leslie

Political Economy is not a body of natural laws in the true sense, or of universal and immutable truths, but an assemblage of speculations and doctrines which are the result of a particular history, coloured even by the history and character of its chief writers; that, so far from being of no country, and unchangeable from age to age, it has varied much in different ages and countries, and even with different expositors in the same age and country.

(vol. 1, p. 176)

He condemned the reduction of economic motivations to the mere love of wealth and ease and he briskly deconstructed such terms as ‘interest’ and ‘wealth’. The term ‘desire for wealth’, for instance, covered diverse motives which varied in ‘different individuals, different classes, different nations, different sexes, and different states of society’ (vol. 1, p. 190). Deductivist political economy, looking only at the ‘assumed motives of individuals’, ignored altogether the ‘collective agency of the community’. Its axioms were so restrictive that Bagehot ‘limited political economy to England at its present state of commercial development, and to the male sex in England’ (vol. 1, p. 218). In Leslie’s view, another serious defect in ‘abstract political economy’ was the virtual elimination of consumption as a category of analysis. He saw deductivism as a kind of theodicy, the product mainly of natural law theory and Christian theology, presupposing a symmetrical universe where interests harmonized. Against its unified ‘nature’, Leslie counterpoised a differentiated and frequently conflictual ‘history’.

In 1877 Francis Galton proposed that Section F of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which dealt with ‘Economic Science and Statistics’, should be abolished as the subject lacked scientific credentials. The following year Ingram, who with Leslie was a leading evangelist for the historical method in the English-speaking world, defended the scientific honour of the discipline at the British Association’s meeting in Dublin. Repudiating the ‘common-sense’ approach of Bonamy Price, Ingram argued that social phenomena, including economic ones, admitted of scientific treatment. He claimed that the ‘decline in the credit and influence of political economy’ was due, in large measure, to the ‘vicious methods followed by its teachers’ (vol. 1, pp. 233). Working-class distrust of its doctrines was ‘not altogether unfounded’, as its study was often recommended ‘with the real, though disguised, object of repressing popular aspirations after a better order of things’. The widespread opposition of the ‘higher intellects’ was connected with the ‘egoistic spirit’ in which it was steeped, a spirit which he significantly connected with ‘vicious method’ (vol. 1, p. 233). Ingram’s grounds for opposition to the dominant school were reducible to four related propositions:

first, to the attempt to isolate the study of the facts of wealth from that of the other social phenomena; secondly, to the metaphysical or viciously abstract character of many of the conceptions of the economists; thirdly, to the abusive preponderance of deduction in their processes of research; and fourthly, to the too absolute way in which their conclusions are conceived and enunciated.

(vol. 1, pp. 234–5)

The study of society he likened to that of biology, not only in its static but also in its dynamic, evolutionary aspect. In Comtean fashion he saw political economy as but a ‘chapter’ of the ‘one great science of Sociology’ (vol. 1, p. 10). Economic investigation needed to be taken out of the hands of ‘lawyers and men of letters’, whose education had been largely ‘of a metaphysical kind’, and entrusted to a ‘genuinely scientific class’ who would give it a ‘truly positive character’ (vol. 1, p. 329).

In his review of Jevons’s The Theory of Political Economy, Cairnes stated that the mathematical mode ‘of presenting economic truths admits of but very limited application’.⁶ But within a decade his fellow-countryman, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, published a book, Mathematical Psychics, which was subtitled, An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences. The ‘science of quantity’, he wrote, was ‘not alien to the study of man ... in so far as actions and effective desires can be numerically measured by way of statistics’ (vol. 1, p. 257). But mathematical procedures were also applicable to conditions that where ‘accompanied with greater or less pleasure than others’:

Where there are data which, though not numerical are quantitative – for example, that a quantity is greater or less than another, increases or decreases, is positive or negative, a maximum or minimum, there mathematical reasoning is possible and may be indispensable.

(vol. 1, p. 257)

Using an utilitarian model focused on consumption and wants (as in Hearn and Jevons), Edgeworth aimed to construct a felicity calculus, a ‘hedonimetry’ of agents maximizing their utility. Methodologically he saw this procedure as restoring the ‘characteristic advantages of deductive reasoning’ (vol. 1, p. 258). Writing in the year of the momentous 1881 Irish Land Act, which significantly valorized ‘custom’ at the expense of ‘contract’, he spoke of Ireland as a country ‘convulsed by political conspiracy and economical combination’ (vol. 1, p. 265). Focusing generally on the concept of contract, he opposed Leslie’s views, maintaining that there was an ‘essential unity of the different kinds of contract’, and that a ‘general theory of contract’ was possible (vol. 1, pp. 271, 278). He argued that an increase in combination, whether of workers or tenants, led to an increase in ‘indeterminateness’ (vol. 1, p. 136). Edgeworth’s analysis was based mainly on the contract between landlord and tenant, so central to the ‘crisis’ in Ireland.

William Dillon, defending the inductive, historical methodology, and viewing political economy as a branch of sociology, added two further objections to deductivism to the four already presented by Ingram. He condemned the ‘persistent practice of looking at the phenomena of wealth from a strictly cosmopolitan stand-point’, to the neglect of ‘national divisions’, as well as the practice of ignoring the ‘fact of the plurality of causes’ (vol. 1, p. 285). Posnett claimed that political economy could be ‘best regarded as one of the chapters of Social Evolution, but none the less a distinct chapter, with distinct facts and distinct theories of its own’ (vol. 1, p. 299). A proponent of the historical method, he criticized orthodoxy for assuming conditions of free competition, uninhibited by ‘custom’, so that the ‘sublunary confusion’ of the actual world ‘was transformed into the neat regularity of “Natural” Wages, “Natural” Profits, “Natural” Rents, and “Natural” Incidence of Taxation’ (vol. 1, p. 315).

In a lecture delivered in 1884 defending political economy, Bastable argued that the discipline was not opposed to ‘true benevolence’, it was not revolutionary, its study was not incompatible with ‘the highest literary and aesthetic culture’, it would retain a relative autonomy within sociology, and that its principles were as applicable to Ireland as to any place else (vol. 1, p. 317). Methodologically, Bastable found merit in all approaches, instancing the work of Cairnes, Jevons, Leslie, and Newmarch on the gold question. In his ‘Address’ to the British Association in Oxford in 1894, Bastable compared the state of political economy as it was then with its condition in 1860 when Senior ad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chronological table of reprinted articles and chapters
• General introduction: Irish political economy in the nineteenth century
• Introduction to Volume I
• 1 An Introductory lecture
• 2 Five Lectures on Political Economy: lecture I
• 3 ‘Nature and subjects of the science’
• 4 ‘Views preliminary to the study of political economy’
• 5 ‘Of the industrial evolution of society’
• 6 ‘M. Comte and political economy’
• 7 The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy: lectures II and III
• 8 ‘The political economy of Adam Smith’, ‘On the philosophical method of political economy’, and ‘Political economy and sociology’
• 9 ‘The present position and prospects of political economy ….’
• 10 ‘Part I’ and ‘On the present crisis in Ireland’
• 11 ‘Political economy and sociology’
• 12 ‘The historical method in political economy’
• 13 An Examination of Some Current Objections to the Study of Political Economy
• 14 ‘Conclusion’
• 15 ‘Prediction as a test in political economy’
• 16 ‘Address to the economic science and statistics section of the British Association, held at Oxford, 1894’