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OUT OF THE COFFEE HOUSE OR HOW POLITICAL ECONOMY PRETENDED TO BE A SCIENCE FROM MONTCHRÉTIEN TO STEUART
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2021
Abstract
The essay investigates the proposition that economic questions are a fit subject for science. This investigation will involve a selective examination of seventeenth-century writings before looking at again selective Enlightenment texts. The essay is deliberately wide ranging, but it aims to pick out the emergence or crystallization of political economy by noting how theorists sought to establish it as a subject matter and in the process develop ways of studying it that aimed to uncover regularities and exhibit generality, systematicity, and precision. Together these supported its pretensions or claims to be a science that would in a Baconian manner be useful and free of the perceived shackles of a moralistic classical disparagement of economic activity.
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- Research Article
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- © Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation 2020
Footnotes
I am grateful to David Schmidtz, the other contributors to this volume, and an anonymous reviewer for comments and observations about the contents of this essay. Earlier versions of the essay benefited from comments by Glasgow colleagues and from Pedro Pimenta, Fernão de Oliveira Salles, Leonardo Müller and other participants at a conference at the University of São Paulo (I am especially grateful to Professor Pimenta for his invitation and support). I am also indebted to Jose Menudo and Gilles Campagnolo for their helpful observations.
References
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3 Hume, Essays, 253–55. This definition of science is reiterated in his History of England (3 volumes) (London: George Routledge, 1894), I, 338.
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6 Hume, Enquiries, 90.
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8 Hume, Essays, 275.
9 A key methodological principle in the execution of the science of man is tracing observational “experiments” to universal principles, that is, by “explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes,” Hume, Treatise, xvii. Compare Isaac Newton’s first rule of reasoning, “Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes,” in Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writing, ed., H. S.Thayer (New York: Hafner, 1953), 3.
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13 Giovanni Botero, for example, paid relatively little attention to industry and commerce, though he did allow that the power of state is now judged as much by its wealth as its size, (Ragion di Stato [Venice 1589], VII, 3).
14 See Tomaselli, Sylvana, “Political Economy: The Desire and Needs of Present and Future Generations,” in Fox, Christopher, Porter, Roy, Wokler, Robert, eds, Inventing Human Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 292–322.Google Scholar
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18 Steuart, Principles in Works, I, 16. The inclusion of “free nations” in his subtitle significantly speaks to this.
19 Aristotle, The Politics (London: Loeb Library, 1944), 1257a12.
20 Ibid., 1328b40-41. Similar sentiments can be found in Plato and Xenophon, while among Roman authors, Cicero judges merchants to be engaged in a sordid or demeaning activity; indeed, they have to tell lies to make a living (Cicero, De Officiis [London: Loeb Library, 1913], I, 150).
21 Montchrétien, Traicté, 61.
22 Montchrétien, as well as a playwright, was himself an (unsuccessful) knife manufacturer. Richard Giffiths, The Dramatic Technique of Antoine de Montchrestien (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 11.
23 Montchrétien, Traicté, 137–41, 73–75.
24 In 1602, William Fulbeck noted that both Plato and Aristotle saw “merchandizing” as “an enemy to virtue.” Pandects of the Law of Nations quoted in Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 189.
25 Hume, Treatise xxvii. A similar contrast using the same language is made by François Quesnay. See Philosophie rurale ou économie générale et politique de l’agriculture, 3 volumes (Amsterdam, 1764), I, 115.
26 Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Campbell, R. and Skinner, A. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1982 [1776]), V.i.g.14/796. Jean D’Alembert’s Discours Préliminaire to the Encyclopédie (1752) exemplifies the self-conscious modernity of the Enlightenment.Google Scholar
27 He devotes one chapter to nutrition of a commonwealth which consists of “Plenty and Distribution of Materials Conducting to Life,” and in the elaboration of which he discusses questions of trade, money, and taxation. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1651]), chap. 24.Google Scholar
28 Ibid., chaps. 6 and 17.
29 Child, Joseph, A New Discourse on Trade, 5th ed. (Glasgow: 1751), 42, 108Google Scholar. The last phrase is quoted by Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 125; and Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 145. Neither pursues the point.
30 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap.14.
31 This is a central theme in Appleby’s Economic Thought. See also Hirschman, Albert, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977) for a rather different trajectory; but the basic point is the same.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
32 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 5.
33 Smith is extremely skeptical and wary of pretensions on the part of politicians to be acting for the public good, Wealth IV.ii.109/456, IV.ii.39/468, IV.vii.c.75/623, and so on.
34 Mary Poovey aptly calls them “merchant apologists,” A History of the Modern Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) xvii, 87f.
35 Mun, Thomas, England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade (Oxford: Blackwell, 1928 [1664]), 1.Google Scholar
36 Malynes, Gerard, Lex Mercatoria (London, 1622), Dedicatory Epistle [unpaginated].Google Scholar
37 Malynes, A Treatise of the Canker of England’s Commonwealth (London: 1601), 55–56. Finkelstein calls Malynes “at heart an Aristotelian,” in Harmony and Balance, 27. More broadly, Mun (England’s Treasure, 7) and Child (New Discourse, vii) both express sentiments that show they still feel they have to acknowledge the case for the moralized disapproval of commerce.
38 Misselden, Edward, The Circle of Commerce (London, 1723), 17, 19.Google Scholar
39 Hume, Essays, 277; Malachy Postlethwayth, Great Britain’s True System (London: 1757), 225.
40 Hobbes, Leviathan, 28. He links “Science” with the “knowledge of consequences” which begins from the “settled significations of names,” (Leviathan 35, 33).
41 North, Dudley, Discourses upon Trade (1691/92) reprinted in McCulloch, J. R., ed., Early English Tracts on Commerce (Cambridge: Economic History Society, 1952), 510–11.Google Scholar
42 Ibid., 502–03, 515, 527, 528–29.
43 Barbon, Nicholas, A Discourse of Trade (1690), ed. Hollander, Jacob (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1905), 11Google Scholar. For the claim that North “had absorbed” Barbon’s message, see Paul Slack, “The Politics of Consumption and England’s Happiness in the Late Seventeenth Century,” English Historical Review 122 (2007): 609–31, at 626.
44 Berry, Christopher J., The Idea of Luxury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chap. 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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46 Houghton, John, England’s Great Happiness (London, 1677), 8.Google Scholar
47 See Jacob, James, “The Political Economy of Science in Seventeenth-Century England,” Social Research 59 (1992): 505–32, at 524.Google Scholar It was these expressions of “demoralization” that were later amplified by Mandeville and it was his open if still oblique defense of luxury and critique of frugality that kept the moralistic attitude to consumption alive and against which the self-styled scientists of political economy set themselves. Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees (1721–32), 2 volumes, ed. F. B. Kaye (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1988) I, 107–23. However, Mandeville himself never articulates a considered account of “political economy,” adopting for all intents and purposes a mercantilist perspective. See, for example, Harry Lindreth, “The Economic Thought of Bernard Mandeville,” History of Political Economy 7 (1975): 192–208.
48 See Supple, B. E., Commercial Crisis and Change in England 1600–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), chaps. 8 and 9.Google Scholar
49 Cary, John, Essay towards Regulating the Trade and Employing the Poor of This Kingdom, 2nd ed. (London, 1719), 1.Google Scholar
50 Josiah Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which Respectively Attend France and Great Britain with Regard to Trade (Dublin, 1757), iii. A little later it is called “this most useful and extensive Science” (ibid., v).
51 Tucker, Josiah, The Elements of Commerce (Bristol, 1755) 6, 7.Google Scholar
52 In Thayer, Newton’s Philosophy of Nature, 179.
53 Redman, Deborah, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
54 Verri, Piero, Meditazione sulla economia politica, ed. Venturi, Franco (Milan: Mondadori, 1998 [1728]), 33.Google Scholar Elsewhere he refers to the “science of political economy,” which has as its subject pretty much the same list (quoted by Venturi from Verri’s annotations of the Meditazione 165).
55 See Wakefield, Andre, “Cameralism: A German Alternative to Mercantilism,” in Mercantilism Reimagined, ed. Stern, Philip and Wennerlind, Carl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 136.Google Scholar
56 Quoted in Lisbeth Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 103. See Koerner, Linnaeus, chap. 5 for a discussion of Linnaeus’ compendious notion of “economy.”
57 Condillac, Etienne, Commerce et le Gouvernement in Oeuvres Complètes, 3 volumes, ed. Roy, Georges Le (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947–51 [1776]), II: 247.Google Scholar
58 Condillac, Oeuvres I: 105, 106.
59 Ibid., II, 420. “Une langue bien faite” is a favorite phrase that recurs throughout his work.
60 Condillac, Essai sur l’origine les connoissances humains, in Oeuvres I, 27; La Logique, in Oeuvres II, 413. See Isabel Knight, The Geometric Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), chap. 9 for a discussion of the link between Condillac’s Commerce and his work on language.
61 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4; Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning in The Physical and Metaphysical Works of Lord Bacon, ed. Joseph Devey (London: Bohn Library, 1868), 210.
62 Condillac, Cours d’Études (Book 6) (1775) in Oeuvres II, 224, 226.
63 Condillac, Commerce in Oeuvres II, 247, 318. The use of “principles” is common (see, for example, Cary and Verri quoted above and its presence in the title of Steuart’s book as well as the subtitle of Condillac’s Commerce). The prestige of Newton’s Principia doubtless assisted its diffusion as is evident in Condillac’s definition in his Traité des Systèmes, “a system is more perfect when its principles are few in number: even better still when they are reduced to one” (Oeuvres I: 121). See Perrot, Histoire, 73, for a table of the rapidly increasing number of works published (in French) in the eighteenth century with système, principes, and théorie in their titles.
64 Richard Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du Commerce en général, ed. Stéphane Couvreur (Paris: Coppet, 2001 [1755]), 1. Condillac called the Essai one of the best works on the subject (Oeuvres II, 276 n). His influence can be seen in Beccaria, Mirabeau, Postlethwayt, and Smith, among many others.
65 See Poovey on “numbers” as the epitome of what she calls “the modern fact” in contrast to “interpretation,” Modern Fact xii, 123 (on Petty’s role).
66 William Petty, Preface to Political Arithmetic (1690) in Charles Hull, ed., Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, 2 volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), I: 244. Though the term “political arithmetic” appears in the title of several of Petty’s pamphlets, he nowhere else spells out what he means. A contemporary commenting on Petty’s Two Essays in Political Arithmetic (1687) upon their publication observed positively that he had “made it appear that Mathematical Reasoning is not only applicable to Line and Numbers but also affords the best means of Judging in all concerns of humane life” in Petty, Economic Writings, II, 513 n. Notwithstanding that observation, the apparent contrast between (implicitly) rhetoric and the objectivity of the quantifiable should not be overdrawn. See Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10, cf. 303. Nonetheless McCormick (5) also summarizes the broad scholarly agreement that political arithmetic was a “methodological innovation that brought the quantitative techniques and empirical spirit of the Scientific Revolution to practical questions of economy, society and politics.” Paul Slack claims political arithmetic is “the most striking manifestation” of the “deliberate creation of political economy” (The Invention of Improvement [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], 3, cf. 91).
67 Charles Davenant called Petty a “great genius” for beginning political arithmetic, which Davenant defined as “the art of reasoning by figures upon things relating to government.” However, he judged Petty to have built his calculations on false premises. Nonetheless, Davenant affirms, the “faculty of computing” is the way to give a true account of the balance of trade provided it “draws its conclusions from many premises.” Discourses on the Public Revenues and on Trade, in Charles Whitworth, ed., Works, 5 volumes (London, 1771), 1: 127, 129, 146, 149–150. But Cantillon upbraided both Petty and Davenant because as political arithmeticians they dealt only with effects, not causes and principles, Essai, 16. Smith would seem to agree (see below).
68 Mirabeau, Tableau Oeconomique avec ses Explications (Amsterdam, 1760), 23. Quesnay knew Petty’s work, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 125 n.
69 Mirabeau, L’Ami des Hommes (Amsterdam, 1759), Pt. 6: 2. François Quesnay especially stressed the mathematical basis; without calculation there would be no science, only confusion and error. See letter to Mirabeau quoted in Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 135.
70 See Catherine Larrère, “L’Arithémetiques des physiocrates,” Histoire et Mesure VII (1992): 5–24 (15ff). Quesnay defended “the new economic science” in Éphémérides du Citoyen 10: 1 (1767), 164. Cf. Philippe Steiner, La ‘Science Nouvelle’ de l’Économie Politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998) who aptly calls this “a contested context,” 25.
71 Beccaria, Cesare, Dei Delitti e delle Pene, ed. Venturi, F. (Torino: Einaudi, 1965), 20–21.Google Scholar
72 Ibid., 34. On the emergence of the association of moral certainty with probability, see Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. chap. 1. For the eighteenth century, see Baker, Keith, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), esp. chaps. 3 and 4.Google Scholar
73 Smith, Wealth IV.v.b.30/534; IV.ix.27/672.
74 Smith, Adam, Correspondence, ed. Mossner, Ernest and Ross, Ian (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1987), 164.Google Scholar
75 Smith, Wealth IV.ii.9/456 cf. IV.ix.50/687.
76 Steuart, Principles, in Works, I: 218, 219.
77 Ibid., I: 218. The reference here to “free people” is a clear signal of his adherence to the modern liberty as freedom under the law and his rejection of the ancient liberty of the classical moralists; he is explicit that he is dealing with “modern politics” (see ibid., I: 319, I: 6, 217).
78 Ibid., I: 218. The statesman’s self-interest lies in the “public spirit.” See Christopher J. Berry, “James Steuart on the Public Good,” in Jose Menudo, ed., The Economic Thought of James Steuart (London: Routledge, 2020), 3–13.
79 Steuart, Principles, in Works, I: 122. He spells out that he is using “statesman” as a “general term to signify the legislature and supreme power” regardless of particular constitutional form, I: 2.
80 Ibid., I: 200, IV: 219; III: 460; I: 106, II: 73.
81 Ibid., II:3, IV: 140.
82 Ibid., I: 402, IV 117.
83 Redman, Deborah, “Sir James Steuart’s Statesman Revisited in the Light of Continental Influences,” Scottish Journal of Political Economy 43 (1996): 58–59;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Andrew Skinner, “Biographical Sketch” prefixed to his edition of the Principles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), xl n.
84 For the Steuart link (albeit transcended [aufgehoben]) to Hegel, see Paul Chamley, “Les origins de la Pensée Économique de Hegel,” Hegel Studien 3 (1965): 225–61, but for a critique and overall assessment, see Gilles Campagnolo, “Steuart, Hegel, Chamley” in Menudo, Economic Thought.
85 Hegel, Georg, Jenenser Realphilosophie [1805/6], in Werke, ed. Lasson, Gustav and Hoffmeister, Johannes (Leipzig: Meiner, 1922), vol. XX, 239.Google Scholar
86 See Urquhart, Robert, “The Trade Wind, the Statesman and the System of Commerce: Sir James Steuart’s Vision of Political Economy,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 3 (1979): 379–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Urquhart’s is one of the more discriminating discussions. Maynard Keynes never cites Steuart, which is perhaps not surprising since his historical references in the General Theory are all derived from Eli Hecksher’s Mercantilism (London: Unwin, 1955 [1st published 1931]).
87 For Smith the objects of political economy are to supply or enable plentiful revenue and subsistence for the people and sufficient revenue for the state to provide public services. Wealth IV. Introduction/428. For Steuart the “principal object of this science [political economy]” is “to secure a fund of subsistence for all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which may render it precarious.” Steuart, Principles, in Works I, 3.
88 Steuart, Principles, in Works I, 34 cf. I, v; I, x.
89 In his rhetoric lectures Smith judges the “Newtonian method,” in contrast to the “Aristotelian,” the “most philosophical” because it deduces phenomena from a principle and “all united in one chain.” Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres, ed. J. Bryce (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1985), 146. John Millar who attended Smith’s lectures linked his achievement to Newton’s, An Historical View of the English Government, ed. M. Salber Phillips and Dale Smith (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 2006), 404 n.
90 Lal, Deepak and Myint, Hia, for example, in language heavily reminiscent of Smith, declare that they use the term “political economy” to “direct attention to political, institutional and historical factors affecting economic growth and income distribution.” The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 7Google Scholar. For the articulation of a path from Smith, contrary to the route to neoclassicism, see Moral Sentiments and Material Interests, ed. Herbert Gintis et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005) chap. 1.
91 See, illustratively, Tucker who declares there is “a natural Disposition or instinctive Inclination, of Mankind towards Commerce,” Elements, 3. There is nothing novel here; a hundred fifty years earlier John Wheeler proclaimed that there is “nothing in the world so ordinarie and naturall unto men as to contract, truck, merchandise, and trafficke one with another,” A Treatise of Commerce (London: 1601), 6. That commerce was coeval with human society was a standardly drawn implication of the Providential arrangement that humans were not self-sufficient. (It is beyond the scope of this essay to pursue this question.)
92 Smith, Wealth I.vii.15/75; II, iii.28/341; Fernando Galiani, Della Moneta, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Laterza: Bari, 1915 [1751]), 45.
93 See inter alia Hume, Essays, 263; Smith, Wealth, “Introduction,” 4/10. As Smith professed in his lectures, opulence as well as freedom is a “blessing.” Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, P. G. Stein (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1982), 185, 453. For more on this see Berry, Luxury, chap. 6 and Christopher J. Berry, Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), chap. 3.