The Moral Economists by Rogan Tim;

Author:Rogan, Tim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

4

E. P. Thompson

After 1950 the British economy entered an unprecedented phase of growth. Material living standards had been rising since the 1880s: except in regions beset by unemployment during downturns, real incomes rose consistently for most groups between the 1880s and the 1970s.1 The 15 years after 1950 were the most acute phase of this expansion. GDP per capita rose by 40 percent between 1950 and 1966.2 Unemployment was kept at historic lows—seldom exceeding 2%—throughout this period.3 The distribution of the benefits of this expanding productive power, moreover, was becoming more equitable. By conventional measures the distribution of income and wealth drew nearest absolute equality in Britain during the twentieth century in the early 1970s.4 Successive generations throughout the twentieth century had reason to expect that their grandchildren’s lives would be more comfortable and prosperous than their own.

The critical tradition inaugurated by Tawney in the 1920s was ambivalent about prosperity. What would come to be called affluence in the late 1950s (after the Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 book The Affluent Society) was dubious because it accumulated by virtue of “acquisitiveness”: material enrichment served in some sense to accentuate the spiritual impoverishment which had given that sentiment license.5 John Maynard Keynes made his priorities clear: once the economic problem had been solved, then acquisitiveness could be restored to its rightful place among the baser human motives; first grub, then ethics.6 For the moral economists this order of priorities was problematic: economics and ethics had to be reconciled immediately. Tawney’s own antipathy toward “Mammon” was especially keen, but it was not idiosyncratic: it tapped into a rich vein of social criticism in Britain that ran back at least as far as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle.7 And yet, even while they scorned the wages of acquisitiveness, critics in this tradition—not least Tawney himself—recognized that pockets of social life which seemed to carry the promise of a reconstructed solidarity had formed in regions graced by periods of capitalist prosperity. Rochdale was enriched by the growth of the cotton trade in the late eighteenth century. Reconstruction in Red Vienna was financed by taxes levied on financiers who had accumulated wealth under the Habsburgs. The Rhondda Valley—where Temple’s Men Without Work investigators found forms of solidarity which kept the unemployed from receding into idiocy—had prospered in the coal mining boom of the nineteenth century.

The various ventures in “transcending capitalism” which we examined in the third chapter promised to overcome this ambivalence. Inspired by periods of rising prosperity and stabilizing reform, Durbin and Mannheim argued in their own ways that modernity’s characteristic antinomies—between progress and reaction, capitalism and communism, economics and ethics—were now being overcome. Durbin drew on the twentieth-century human sciences to sustain his contention that the overthrow of capitalism was no longer necessary, and that cultivating emergent solidarities was now the key task of reform. Mannheim built upon Anglo-German conservative thought and contemporary sociology in developing his argument that laissez-faire was to yield not to proletarian revolution but to “planning for freedom.

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