History of Economic Analysis part 47 ppt

Hartley’s work (1791) and re-expounded with brilliant efficiency by our own colleague James Mill: 3 the mind, a Lockian blank; psychic life, a mechanical system of associations. Even J.S.Mill felt unable to rest content with this, and A.Bain was to combine it with Darwinian elements and elements derived from the German physiological psychologists into something that was pretty far removed from associationist orthodoxy. But for us the question arises: since this associationist orthodoxy was part of Benthamite orthodoxy, shall we not expect that it influenced the economics of the group that was another part of it? Of course, we shall—but we shall be disappointed. The case illustrates very well the nature of the relation of a comprehensive system to its parts. Psychological associationism agrees all right with the utilitarian philosophy or the utilitarian theory of ethics or of behavior in general and in this sense does implement the rest. But if, on the strength of this, we proceed to examine James Mill’s little treatise on economic theory, we find that its propositions are completely independent of associationist psychology and are just as compatible with any other: though a province of the Benthamite empire, the economics of the utilitarians was a self- governing province that could have lived equally well if severed from the empire. This verifies a result already arrived at in other connections. 4 The only thing that needs to be added is evolutionist psychology. As has been mentioned, both Darwin and Spencer faced the problem of the manner in which the human mind acquired each ‘mental power’: they attempted to construct genetic theories of ‘instincts,’ emotions, curiosity, memory, attention, beliefs, moral sense, social virtues, and the like. It should be observed that such endeavors are not psychology in the ordinary sense: for example, analysis of the faculty of ‘memory’ is one thing, and a hypothesis on how we came to have this faculty is another thing. However, genesis may suggest truly psychological theories, and it is understandable that Darwinian influence began to assert itself in professional psychology before long. Economists, however, did not take to this line of research, though it has obvious bearings upon problems of economic behavior and of its malleability, say, in a socialist organization of society—something worth pondering! 3 Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829). 4 Observe, in particular, that the same thing also holds for Hume: his economics has nothing whatever to do with either his psychology or his philosophy. And so for Locke. On the other hand, the relation of associationism to utilitarian economics is complicated by the fact that Bentham’s own economics differed from the economics of the other utilitarians who were his followers in everything else. History of economic analysis 422 [(b) Logic, Epistemology, and Cognate Fields.] In these fields 5 substantial advance would have to be reported both as to philosophical foundations (Kant; Hegel’s Logic is not logic in any technical sense though relevant to it in several points) and as to formal and practical developments (Lotze, De Morgan). From our standpoint, it is important to mention the work of a man who holds a key position in the history of the fields within our range of vision, Richard Whately 6 (Anglican archbishop of Dublin). And of great significance for the picture of that period’s Zeitgeist is the effort made by another key man to realize a desideratum that has been formulated again and again—in our own day, by J.Dewey—to bring logic nearer to the actual procedures of science: Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences (1837). 7 The program of modern 5 If we may call mathematics a cognate field, it was the one that made the biggest strides. About these nothing can be said here except that this period—following as it did upon the ‘heroic age of mathematics’ in which the excitement of pioneer discovery had all but crushed the interest in logical foundations and in critical analysis of concepts and methods—laid the groundwork of modern (rigorous) mathematical reasoning. But a few data on probability must be mentioned, owing to the importance of the subject for statistics and for economic theory. Laplace’s Théorie analytique des probabilités was first published in 1812; his Essai philosophique (which is quite eighteenth century, however) in 1814; Poisson’s famous Recherches in 1837; Cournot’s Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilités in 1843; P.L.de Tchebycheff’s paper (‘Des Valeurs moyennes’ in Liouville’s Journal de mathématique, pure et appliquée), 1867; Venn’s Logic of Chance (often invoked by Edgeworth) in 1866. Fechner’s Kollektivmasslehre (1897) belongs in this period though not chronologically. The same applies to J.von Kries’s Principien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung (1886). The Cournot of probability is the great economic theorist (see below, Part IV, ch. 7, sec. 2). My high opinion of his theory of random events is a layman’s opinion. But it was shared by the late Professor Czuber of Vienna. 6 Elements of Logic, which appeared originally as an article in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (1826). For his work in economics, see ch. 4 below. 7 William Whewell’s (1794–1866) powerful and masterful personality belongs to, and illustrates at its best, that class of scientific men whom we have called Academic Leaders: he was a peerless influence in Trinity College and in Cambridge generally, one of those environment-creating individuals who belong in the history of science even if they never wrote a line. Such was not Whewell’s case, however. The History is not only a work of erudition but a live source of inspiration (so it was to J.S.Mill), though his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) is disappointing (at least, so it is to me) and though his Elements of Morality including Polity (1845) has been deservedly forgotten. He was also something of an economist. His Lectures (1852 and 1862) do not, it is true, amount to much, though he was far too able ever to be quite uninteresting. But he displayed sense for quality by editing the works of Richard Jones (see below, chs. 5, 6) and a touch of originality by making an attempt that no commonplace mind would have made in his day, viz. to express mathematically a few propositions of the economic theory of his time (3rd vol. of the Cambridge Philosophical Transactions). This effort does not go beyond stating in symbols what had already been stated in The Intellectual scenery 423 empiricist logic—as taught by the Vienna positivists such as Carnap, Frank, Richard von Mises, Schlick—is to analyze scientific procedure and to do away with, as not only irrelevant but meaningless, everything else, especially all ‘metaphysics.’ Whewell was, of course, far removed, subjectively, from either this program or the conceptual constructs with which it is being implemented. But, objectively speaking, his book, owing to the influence it exerted on Mill’s Logic, is a landmark on the long road that leads toward logical positivism. [(c) J.S.Mill’s Logic.] These scanty remarks have prepared us for a discussion of the work in which we are primarily interested. From our standpoint, J.S. Mill’s Logic must hold a place of honor, not only because we claim the author for our own, not only because we economists are much more likely to turn to it than to any other methodological treatise of that time, but also because it was one of the great books of the century, representative of one of the leading components of its Zeitgeist, influential with the general reading public as no other Logic has ever been. A less striking patch of color in our picture than is the Origin of Species, it is hardly a less indispensable one—although it does not stand out, as does the Origin of Species, when we look back on the historical sequence of performances and ideas that produced the situation of today in the respective fields, and although Mill’s 8 book is dead in a sense in which Darwin’s is not. The best way of explaining, to economists, the nature of Mill’s performance is to point out the family likeness that exists between his Logic and his Principles of Political Economy, which will be fully discussed in the appropriate place below (ch. 5). With admirable modesty, Mill disclaimed, in both cases, any pretense ‘of giving the world a new theory of intellectual operations’ or of economic processes (see the prefaces to the first editions of both books). In both cases, his aim was words and therefore does not really constitute mathematical economics (there is no mathematical reasoning). But his rudimentary demand analysis, considering its date, does not quite deserve Jevons’ contemptuous verdict that has since been repeated many times. All this is mentioned here because the brevity of our sketch will not permit notice of performances such as Whewell’s in their appropriate places. 8 J.S.Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (1843). One has in mind the success of this book, as much as or more than the success of its author’s Political Economy, when one speaks of Mill’s sway over the generation of English intellectuals that entered upon their careers in the 1850’s and 1860’s. Abroad, part of the reading public was impervious to such influence. But the rest embraced Mill’s message with even greater enthusiasm. The book was found in the house of a peasant in Ireland. It was called the ‘book of books’ by an accomplished Viennese woman (a Fabian and suffragist) who felt herself to be progress incarnate. It occupied a place of honor not much below Plato’s in the mind of at least one philological philosopher I knew as a boy—all of which I say in order to convey, first, that the book was a living force in bourgeois civilization History of economic analysis 424 and, second, that the correlation between individuals’ enthusiasm for it and their competence to judge it was not quite satisfactory. to co-ordinate existing elements of knowledge, to develop them, and, as he liked to put it, ‘to untie knots’ (scilicet in existing strings). In neither case did he succeed completely; but in both he did eminently useful work, work that was perhaps all the more pregnant with suggestions because it contained stimulating discrepancies of doctrine. Both works, besides being of the same class of performance, reveal in a similar manner the mental stature and the—shall I say ‘moral’?— propensities of their author. Within the range of his comprehension, he was eminently fair and fully resolved to open the doors of his mind to ideas of widely different origin—in the Logic he went so far as to pay (via a quotation from Condorcet) a well-deserved compliment to scholastic performance. He was ‘matter of fact’: though his mind was not ‘practical’ in every sense of the word, he was always ‘practical’ and even pragmatist in intention, the practically useful result attracting him before everything else. In the case of the Logic, his practical purpose was to analyze scientific procedures with a view, first, to establishing their validity (‘to appraise evidence’) and, second, to developing rules that might inspire or guide research. This makes it very difficult to describe his fundamental standpoint or standpoints in terms of modern ‘empiricist’ and ‘positivist’ logic, for the problems and methods that are characteristic of the latter and divide its staff of workers (especially in the Grundlagenforschung of mathematics) were largely beyond his ranges of vision and interest. (Wherefore it is unjust, by the way, to criticize from a modern standpoint occasional utterances of his that seem to be relevant to modern controversies.) But this essentially practical purpose of the Logic also renders it difficult to describe Mill’s fundamental views in terms of older philosophies. The significance of the Kantian revolution he hardly grasped. In a general way, it may be said that his philosophy had its roots in the English empiricism of the Locke-Hume tradition and, in particular, that it had an associationist psychological background. But I believe, though I cannot prove here, that neither statement is entirely correct. In any case, Mill was not narrowly empiricist or narrowly associationist: Hartleyan associationism comes in for criticism in the Logic, especially at a strategic point in Book VI. The purpose of the book almost makes it a complement of Whewell’s, to which in fact it owes much. Let us put it like this: Mill’s Logic is primarily a theory of scientific knowledge (inference), essentially theoretical as compared with Whewell’s book and still more so as compared with any treatise on any individual science; but it is primarily The Intellectual scenery 425 practical as compared with any treatise on pure logic or pure epistemology (which were, however, pretty much one and the same thing for Mill). As regards logical fundamentals, Mill leaned heavily on R.Whately even where he dissented from him. 9 Cautious and noncommittal as Mill was with reference to certain points of philosophical fundaments, modest as he was with reference to his personal contribution, in one respect he was neither cautious nor modest: exactly as in his Political Economy, in a manner that strikes us as curiously naïve, he cheerfully claimed an entirely impossible degree of finality for the results he expounded. He seems to say to us: why, I have collected and systematized the best ideas of this enlightened age, the principles either promulgated or conformed to by its ablest thinkers— what more can there possibly be left to do? His confident teaching fared in logic much as it did in economics. Book I, ‘Of Names and Propositions’ (including Classification and Definition), in which there are passages almost suggestive of modern ‘semantics,’ and Book II, ‘Of Reasoning’ (Syllogisms; Deductive Sciences, which Mill holds are really inductive in so far as their premisses are derived by a process of induction from experience), cover ground on which Mill felt that the going was easy: for him who hardly ever looked below the surface, no serious problem arose to bar the way. He felt differently about the ground covered in Book III, ‘Of Induction’ (or generalization from experience, the core of scientific procedure and the core of Mill’s performance). It contains the axiom of the uniformity of the course of nature, his theory of valid induction that is derived from it, his philosophy of causation, his famous ‘four methods’ (of Agreement, of Difference, of Residues, of Concomitant Variations), all of which is partly marred by faults of thought or exposition that can be explained on only one hypothesis: that even there, though writing on subjects that gripped him intensely, he wrote as he always did—in haste. But precisely because of this, substantial improvement can be effected in several cases without injury to his main positions. On the whole, there cannot be any doubt that Book III constitutes one of the great contributions to the theory of scientific knowledge. The many points of interest in the essentially subsidiary Books IV and v must be passed by, but Book VI, ‘On the Logic of the Moral [Social] Sciences’ is of first-rank importance to us. It should be perused together with Mill’s older (pre-Comtist) essay on the method of economics (1836) that has been included in the volume on Some Unsettled Questions. 9 Another revealing reference in the Logic (and in the Examination of Hamilton) is to Dr. Thomas Brown’s Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, which, edited after Brown’s death (1820), had a most successful career. The interesting point is that this Scottish physician and philosopher, though he accepted sensationalism to a large extent, never abandoned ‘intuitive’ knowledge and had no empiricist theory of causation. The significance of Mill’s strong History of economic analysis 426 recommendation of the book is not entirely destroyed by his qualifying objections to its argument. In order to do justice to this methodology of the social sciences, two things must be borne in mind. First, as an inevitable consequence of more fundamental shortcomings of Mill’s general epistemology, there are many things in Book VI to which objections may be raised. But they do not impair its argument very much. Thus, his extension of the methods of the physical to the social sciences, including the concepts of scientific law and of causation, are not nearly as objectionable as one might think because he watered down physical causation so radically as to make its extension to the social sciences practically harmless: his ‘naturalism’ was naturalism with its teeth pulled. Second, we must not forget that the fame and influence of Mill’s work gave wide currency to his views so that much that reads trite and stale—like quotations from Hamlet—does so by virtue of his own achievement. When all this is borne in mind, nothing remains but admiration. In a running battle with Comte, Mill triumphantly vindicated the actual procedure of economists while conceding—in fact, absorbing—all that should be conceded or absorbed. The standard method of economics was what he called the Concrete Deductive Method supplemented by the Inverse Deductive or Historical Method for research into historical changes of the social set-up as a whole. Had this been properly appreciated, the pointless later squabble of economists over induction versus deduction would have been avoided. The ‘purely theoretical’ set of problems was taken account of by his ‘abstract or geometrical’ method, the misuse of which for direct application to practical problems he made the target of scathing 10 criticism. The ‘empirical laws,’ nicely divided into uniformities of coexistence and uniformities of change, are assigned a place with which we can find but little fault. The impossibility of universally applicable, practical maxims was fully recognized as was the necessity of studying actual human behavior in all its local and temporal varieties—which should have taken off the curse from the economic man for all times. The axiomata media of his Ethology offered suggestions that are not fully exploited even now. The distinction that had to be fought for, sixty years later, between the problems of the effects that follow from a given cause under given social conditions and the problems of the ‘laws’ that determine those social conditions themselves is there. In fact, Mill unfolded a program that harnessed the purest of pure theory and the most concrete of institutional research into peaceful co-operation and this 10 This adjective is I think justified, though Mill’s invariable courtesy, in some cases reinforced by filial respect, made him tone down his wording. It will read surprisingly but can be strictly proved that the methodological doctrine that Mill preached does not differ at all from the position eventually (though not at first) adopted by Schmoller. The Intellectual scenery 427 without emasculating either. Of course, Jevons reads fresh and stimulating even where he utters a platitude; Mill never reads fresh and stimulating even where he speaks valuable wisdom. That was the fault of his early training. But as regards this Book VI, though it contains nothing that was not said better later on—for example, by the elder Keynes—I conclude with advice to the reader to go back to it. 6. PRE-MARXIAN SOCIALISM In Chapter 2 above, we have said almost nothing about the socialism and the socialist groups or movements of the period. Painting in the large, we had hardly an opportunity for doing so. The omission can be repaired in a few words. 1 The second half of the eighteenth century produced a number of isolated socialist (or semi-socialist) writings but, before the French Revolution, nothing that can be called a movement. The French Revolution itself was bourgeois in origin, character, and ideology. The disintegration after 1791 of both its political set-up and its political thought was, however, associated with a literature that, though of very little importance in itself, was both indicative of a more than momentary socialist humor in a sector of the intellectual world of France, and instrumental in keeping it subterraneously alive during the Napoleonic regime. This provided a basis for the burst of propagandist activity, literary and other, of a socialist (or semi-socialist) nature that we observe in France until the advent of the second empire. 2 The revolution of 1848, though also bourgeois in origin, was quickly to show the existence of a sort of general staff of a revolutionary socialist army and even the existence of more or less definite plans for running a socialist state. Frightened to death, bourgeois groups did what Louis XVI could never be prevailed upon to do, that is, they suppressed the revolution by military force before it was too late. Thus, France holds priority in time as regards modern socialist literature; and among the business classes of all countries, the French business class was during that period the only one to face socialist revolution as a serious possibility. English Chartism, both in 1836–9 1 The interested reader has at his command plenty of sources of further information from which to supplement the jejune remarks that follow. He must remember that, from the standpoint of the aims of this book, we are not directly interested in social movements and their ideologies per se. In this particular case, brevity is excused in addition by the fact that our statements in this paragraph are not controversial. For general reference, Professor Alexander Gray’s Socialist Tradition (1946) is recommended. 2 The literary component of the movement supplied, however, part of the ideas of the socialisme autoritaire of Napoleon III, as has been mentioned already, just as socialist and semi-socialist workmen supplied part of the political support that raised him to power. History of economic analysis 428 and 1840–48, 3 never amounted to anything like that, although it had a basis in early trade union organization that made it more serious in another and more fundamental sense. The only other socialist labor movement of importance was the German one that produced two organized parties: Lassalle’s Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (1863) and Bebel’s and Liebknecht’s Socialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (1869), which amalgamated in 1875. 4 The foundation and career of the First Inter-national (1864) is mentioned here only because of Marx’s famous Inaugural Address. 5 [(a) Associationist Socialism.] Now, the one thing that is important for us to keep in mind is that the Marxist phase of socialist thought did not dawn before the beginning of the subsequent period. 6 The socialism of the period under discussion was non-Marxist and associationist. 7 This term is to denote all the varieties of socialist planning that adopt the principle of running production by workmen’s associations—of social reconstruction through producers’ co- operatives. Associationist socialism is, therefore, extra-scientific, because it does not concern itself primarily with (critical) analysis—as does Marxism—but with definite plans and the means of carrying them into effect. In addition, associationist socialism is unscientific because these plans involve assumptions about human behavior and administrative and technological possibilities that cannot stand scientific analysis for a moment. On both counts, Marx was quite justified in including associationist writers in his category of 3 The People’s Charter itself, it should be remembered, was drawn up by William Lovett and Francis Place, the Bentham disciple, and was Benthamite and not at all socialist. In fact, its ‘six points’ embody nothing but radical parliamentary reform. 4 Neither A.Bebel’s nor W.Liebknecht’s achievements come within the scope of this book. But the exploits of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64; the reader’s attention is called to the biography by George Brandes, there are also several others) in sociological and economic analysis cannot go unmentioned though there will be no occasion to refer to them again. A highly cultivated man of brilliant abilities and indomitable energy, he was first and last a man of action whose intellectual, let alone scientific pursuits—though always attended to with zest—were always secondary to the excitements of a fascinating life. An exception should be made, perhaps, for his most finished performance, Das System der erworbenen Rechte (1861), a brilliant piece of legal sociology that dazzled many a professional jurist. However, if we do make this work an exception and if we do assume that it was the product of genuine concentration, then we must also recognize that, along with very considerable philosophical and legal learning and strong critical ability, it displays lack of originality. His other writings display the same lack of originality, but unrelieved by learning, though still coupled with ability far and away above the common run of writers, socialist or other. The three most important economic publications, the Arbeiterprogramm (1863), the Offenes Antwortschreiben (1863), and Herr Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch, der ökonomische Julian (1864), are all of them brilliant pamphlets that embody, so far as analysis is concerned, a somewhat superficial but ably exploited Ricardianism—which accords with Lassalle’s own view inasmuch as he described the only economics that seemed worth while to him as an ‘immanent development’ of Ricardo’s teaching. This, by the way, is all his theory has in common with Marx’s. To describe Lassalle either as a popularizer or as a disciple of Marx is quite erroneous. As regards agitatorial tactics and practical proposals, he was the very antipode of Marx—which is what caused the schism that impeded the progress of German political socialism until 1875 (Gotha Congress), when to Marx’s infinite disgust, fusion was accomplished on a program that made large concessions to Lassalle’s views. The Intellectual scenery 429 5 But no Marxist will take pride in this particular performance. Its contents reveal the effects of compromises that were perhaps inevitable but were of the sort that roused Marx’s wrath when indulged in by other people. In fact, it was—as Marx himself pointed out with a mixture of humor and bitterness—thoroughly un-Marxist. 6 Let me point out at once that, so far as analysis is concerned, the Marxist phase not only began but also ended with the subsequent period. This statement may seem surprising because we attach quite naturally high importance to the further revivals of Marxism in Russia and New York. But it will be substantiated below (Part IV, ch. 5, sec. 8). 7 The term is convenient and I beg leave to use it, although I am aware of the awkwardness involved in using the same phrase in the same book in two entirely distinct meanings (psychological associationism—socialist associationism). Utopian Socialists 8 and in fighting them bitterly. For he realized that they were discrediting serious socialism. By 1840, they had in fact succeeded in imparting to the very word Socialism a connotation of freakishness that helps to explain the attitude toward it that was specific to French economists: 9 to them, and not without reason, socialism came to mean two things, violence and nonsense. Some of the ‘utopist’ ideas were in fact unalloyed nonsense—in several cases, definitely pathological nonsense—and hardly any of them can be taken quite seriously, though an exception should perhaps be made in favor of L.Blanc (1811–82). 10 For us this is indeed not quite enough to warrant our neglecting them: freaks and dreams may yet enshrine sound pieces of analysis. Search undertaken in this spirit, however, yields but meager results. Not that we do not find sound reasoning and sound observation here and there; but most of what there is of it is trivial. Hence I shall mention only the outstanding examples of Robert Owen (1771– 1858) and Charles Fourier (1772–1837), 11 who with Saint-Simon shared in a huge wave of American enthusiasm. 8 Marx described as utopian any form of socialist thought but his own, which he called ‘scientific.’ The defining characteristic of his scientific socialism is, however, the scientific proof of the inevitability of socialism, so that with him the phrase ‘utopian’ should not have meant the same as ‘not serious,’ though it did. By a ‘bourgeois economist,’ Marx denoted an economist who fails to see this inevitability or, much more restrictively, an economist who believes in indefinite survival of the capitalist order. If the reader observe that these definitions do not coincide with the meanings usually attached to the terms, he will save himself many misunderstandings. 9 Engels attributed the fact that Marx chose Communist instead of Socialist for use in the title of the Marx-Engels manifesto to Marx’s dislike of a term that had acquired a flavor of ‘respectability.’ It is more likely, however, that Marx disliked it because it had acquired a flavor of oddity. 10 Louis Blanc (Organisation du travail, collected articles first published in 1839) was no doubt also an associationist of humanitarian and rhetorical propensities that earned him semi-benevolent contempt from later critics, bourgeois and socialist. But his proposals differed from, say, Owen’s by an element of practicability that shows especially in the more than supervisory role assigned to the bureaucracy (state). This element suggests possible influence upon Lassalle. Blanc once made the proposal that emerged again with some socialists, in and after 1930, to hand over to workmen factories that had closed down. Distribution according to the principle ‘to everyone according to his needs’ was a pet idea of his (though not adhered to), and he may be responsible for its currency among the socialists of his and a later time. 11 The interested rearder will find bibliographies of (and on) both in any work of reference. As regards Owen, there was good reason for the emergence of a large literature about him for, quite independently of his plans and experiments of the New Harmony type, his ideas as well as his practice were of seminal importance in very many different ways that had little to do with one History of economic analysis 430 another. Thus, his fundamentally paternalistic measures at New Lanark created a model for the labor policy of the modern large-scale concern and, more important than this, initiated a new attitude toward wage questions. His emphasis on the value of strikes and trade unions versus political action makes him a classic in the history and theory of trade unions. His ideas on artisans’ co-operatives have made him the patron saint of one of the significant move ments of that and a later time. Not only was ‘moral grandeur’ (Torrens) his but This is our opportunity for a glance at the American (and not only U.S.) Social-Science Movement. 12 The word Science, when used in connection with this movement, must be taken in a sense akin to the one it carries in the phrase Christian Science rather than in the usual one, for there was little genuinely scientific effort. A society that produces a comparatively prosperous stratum more quickly than it produces a cultural tradition is open to unbalancing infiltrations of ideas, even apart from the influence of physical immigration. A small number of people enjoyed leisure—‘lettered ease’ it was with some—and had open minds, which compensated shrewdness in business by enthusiasms and radicalisms, as generous as they were uncritical, in everything else. One of the most characteristic of these enthusiasms was the layman’s enthusiasm for ‘science’—and especially for social alchemy because, to the untrained mind that vibrates with unemployable energies, the real thing is not half so exciting as is the fake. This is the sociology of the movement. Its real importance for the impulse it gave to American economics and sociology is as difficult to appraise as is the real importance for serious research of the romanticist movement in Europe, of which, in fact, the social-science movement may be interpreted as the specifically American counterpart. I can see no relation between it and the performances that eventually established both economics and sociology in the United States, and am inclined to think that its petering out around the epoch of the Civil War was more favorable to social research than was its emergence. But the reader will easily see all that can be adduced for the opposite view. But how can we account for the presence of sponsors of associationism whose claims to being taken seriously are not open to doubt? Well, for one thing, there is the influence of the literary fashion that the French associationists certainly succeeded in creating. For another thing, there is the support that associationist socialism as a plan for comprehensive social reconstruction derived—quite illogically, of course—from the actual co-operative movement and its literature. Both these elements will, I think, account for the asso- also, within the sphere of thought and action defined by our examples, sound and even shrewd common sense (as his own business success suffices to prove). But as soon as he stepped out of this sphere, which was truly his own, his complete lack of analytic ability of the more subtle kind showed up immediately. Neither his ideas of the Labor Note that was to replace ‘money’ nor his ideas of an Equitable Labor Exchange are nonsense in themselves, but he just did not know how to protect his case against the most obvious criticisms. As regards Fourier, the reader is referred to the one really enlightening item I have come across in the large literature about him: E.S.Mason’s ‘Fourier and Anarchism,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics (February 1928). Two points must be made: first, Fourier did base his plan (of which the Brook Farm colony was the most famous embodiment) upon an elaborate analysis of human nature, in general, and of the nature of society, in particular, but it was all conceived in the worst style of eighteenth-century speculation; second, his phalanstère organization has but a qualified The Intellectual scenery 431 . theory of valid induction that is derived from it, his philosophy of causation, his famous ‘four methods’ (of Agreement, of Difference, of Residues, of Concomitant Variations), all of which is partly. work of a man who holds a key position in the history of the fields within our range of vision, Richard Whately 6 (Anglican archbishop of Dublin). And of great significance for the picture of. this associationist orthodoxy was part of Benthamite orthodoxy, shall we not expect that it influenced the economics of the group that was another part of it? Of course, we shall—but we shall