Out of Slavery by Jack Ernest Shalom Hayward

Author:Jack Ernest Shalom Hayward [Hayward, Jack Ernest Shalom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781134727094
Google: lHkAi6gMAVcC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-04T15:56:35+00:00

In short, its object was to redefine for the benefit of a new and more enlightened generation the principles by means of which the national interest was to be promoted. In this way, according to Smith, ‘it proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign’.27 Yet it was also, and this he and his successors continually emphasised, a science, a system of principles based on empirical observation and logical reasoning, and, as such, quite independent of politics. It was, as one of his successors, John Elliot Cairnes put it in his Character and Logical Method of Political Economy, ‘a science in the same sense in which Astronomy, Dynamics, Chemistry, Physiology are sciences’.28Politicians might pay attention to it or they might not, but in either case the empirical data and the conclusions to be drawn from it were available for their instruction.

What is also clear, however, is that, then as now, the advice given by economists was in practice rather less neutral than these protestations imply. For what we see when we look back over the history of this ‘science’ is that despite its claim to objectivity it has also operated as a supporting faith. Indeed, the political economists themselves continually talked of morals in that they saw it as being the task of statesmen and moralists to spread the knowledge of true morals, in the sense that wisely circumscribed self-interest would harness the energies of individuals in ways that would promote the interests of the community at large. Exactly how self-interest should be circumscribed was, of course, a matter that could be debated, although in general they agreed that the greater the economic liberty that was accorded to individuals the larger would be the yield, in terms of economic prosperity, to society. In short, what we have, masquerading as a science, is a faith in a divinely ordained harmony of egoistic and altruistic impulses in man.

There are four further points which should perhaps be made. One is that it was an entirely appropriate faith for societies undergoing changes, such as those which we see occurring in Western Europe and the Northern United States. By this I do not mean that it occasioned those changes but rather that it was a reflection, a rationalisation if you like, of developments that were already occurring. This is not to impugn the originality of the political economists but merely to suggest that, as has so often happened since, originality in economics consisted of bringing theory into line with practice, or at least with practice as observed in the commercial and industrial centres. The second point is that what they proposed on the basis of this obviously limited experience were universal laws, that is to say laws such as the laws of physics and chemistry, the effects of which were to be observed in all societies everywhere. The third point is that these laws were implicitly hostile to slavery. It is easy to see why. After all, if greater liberty, the unleashing of individual

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