From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature by Elaine Hadley & Audrey Jaffe & Sarah Winter

Author:Elaine Hadley & Audrey Jaffe & Sarah Winter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030241582
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The organicism of Lloyd’s vision of the social field is striking: Society is a “whole” with a “surface,” around and against which the importunities of sustenance “press” with greater and greater exigency. Although in Lloyd’s metaphor it is the “difficulties” of maintaining children that spread and overflow the surface of society, the reader is invited to imagine the hordes of surplus children themselves “pressing” against the metaphorical breast of the commonwealth.

The scenario Lloyd describes is now referred to as the “tragedy of the commons .”6 Lloyd’s illustration of the phenomenon, as in the earlier example from Malthus, also has recourse to the relative health of cows and grazing land: “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn, and cropped so indifferently from the adjoining inclosures?” (482). The answer is that each individual herdsman, acting purely from self-interest, will continue to graze more and more heads of cattle as long as he reaps all the benefits of their sale but shares their costs (in the form of the common stock of grass) with the other herdsmen.

Lloyd’s cattle thus “eat” men, but in a more indirect manner than Malthus’s. Whereas in the earlier example, cattle and human beings were in a sense competing for the same sustenance (land diverted to cattle grazing is land that is not being used to grow food directly for human consumption), in Lloyd’s scenario, the intervening structure of a “system of equality” is necessary to draw out the interconnectedness of bovine and human welfare. In the logic of Lloyd’s text, the scenario of land held in common is imposed upon an imaginary pre-existing state of “natural” self-interest: “I do not profess to be here considering generally the merits of systems of equality, and, therefore, I shall not stop to inquire, whether any, and what substitute, for the motive of private interest, can be suggested, to stimulate exertion, to prevent waste, and to check the undue increase of population” (480). It is only in the case of a frankly bizarre combination of perfect self-interest and zero regulation with commonly held property that the tragedy of the commons as Lloyd describes it would pertain.7

Lloyd ultimately concludes, at the end of his second lecture, that the theory of population thus supports the already established “common reasons” for private land ownership, “since the earth can never maintain all who can offer themselves for maintenance” (495). The institution of private property is thus naturalized in Lloyd’s scenario, and consequently, so are the concomitant checks to population.

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