other simple formulae to offer. I have none and must content myself with pointing out that we have been looking at the roots of modern totalitarianism. Quite different from this in nature, but equally hostile to economic and political liberalism in our sense, was another movement that is much easier to define because it defined itself. We adopt, for brevity’s sake, the usual but misleading name for it: Christian Socialism. Also for brevity’s sake, we confine ourselves to the Roman Catholic branch of it, which was the only one to form great independent parties (like the German Center party) that present a unique feature: they are held together exclusively by the religious allegiance of their members, who for the rest differ in economic interests and political attitudes as much as it is possible to differ—through the whole range from extreme conservatism to extreme radicalism—and yet co-operate effectively. Throughout the period, the Catholic Church was on the continent of Europe the object of legislative and administrative attacks from hostile governments and parliaments—in England hostility did not go beyond violent talk about ‘Vaticanism’—which is what might have been expected in a predominantly ‘liberalistic’ world. What could not have been expected is that these attacks everywhere ended in retreat and that they left the Catholic Church stronger than it had been for centuries. Political Catholicism arose from a renascence of religious Catholicism. Looking back, we see not merely reassertion of the Catholic standpoint by people who had never abandoned it; we see also a change of attitudes among people who had: around 1900 it was a common observation to make that in a Catholic family the old and elderly were laicist and liberal and the youngsters believers and ‘clerical.’ This is one of the most significant patches of color in our picture. But for the purposes of this book another fact is of still greater importance. Political Catholicism from the first stood for social reform. I cannot do more than mention the names of de Mun, von Ketteler, von Vogelsang. 9 This concern of the Catholic Church with the conditions of labor was nothing new and only adapted an old tradition to the problems of the epoch. 10 But something that was new developed toward the end of the century, namely, a definite scheme of social organization that, making use of the existing elements of groupwise co-operation, visualized a society—and a state—operating by means of self-governing vocational associations within a framework of ethical precepts. This is the ‘corporative’ state adumbrated in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931). Since it is a normative program and not a piece of analysis, no more will be said about it in this book. I merely add the name of the man who has done more than any other for this conception of society, Heinrich Pesch, S.J. 11 9 The reader will find a survey in F.S.Nitti, Catholic Socialism (English trans., 1895). 10 Official recognition was extended to the Catholic sponsors of the cause of labor by several encyclicals, especially Rerum Novarum (1891). 11 That great man (1854–1926) was not particularly proficient in analytic economics, which is why his treatise, Lehrbuch der Nationalökonomie (1905–23) will not be mentioned again though, so far as scholarship is concerned, it has few equals. Other works of his bring out his doctrine still better, e.g. Liberalismus, Sozialismus, und christliche Gesellschaftsordnung (1896–9). The reader is referred to the work of a man who may, I believe, be considered his pupil: O.von Nell-Breuning, The Reorganization of the Social Economy (English trans., 1936). The understanding of Pesch’s doctrine is rendered more difficult by both Marxist and liberalist misinterpretations, and also by a tendency—common to friends and foes alike—to link it too closely with scholastic views. There is, of course, the same background of social and moral philosophy, but there is little affinity between the problems visualized by, say, Molina and Pesch. History of economic analysis 732 Finally, what was the attitude of economists? This question is difficult to answer because the republic of economists was torn by the same dissensions that agitated the political bodies. Individuals were still fairly numerous who clung to the liberalist faith in its integrity—particularly numerous in the United States. And there were also strictly liberalist groups—in Europe, the Paris group (see below, ch. 5, sec. 3) being the outstanding instance. But Marshall professed himself in sympathy with the aims of socialism and spoke without explanation and qualification of the ‘evils of inequality’; also he was the first theorist to prove theoretically that laissez-faire, even with perfect competition and independently of those evils of inequality, did not assure a maximum of welfare to society as a whole; and he favored high taxation more than is compatible with simon-pure liberalism. This goes for most of the English economists. If we class them as ‘liberals,’ it is owing to the strong stand they made for free trade and also, perhaps, to the fact that we do not sufficiently attend to the metamorphosis of the creed of the English liberal party discussed above. Most German economists were pillars of Sozialpolitik and thoroughly averse to ‘Smithianism’ or ‘Manchesterism.’ 12 On the whole, the economic professions of all countries were politically supporters of the counter-tendencies to liberalism rather than of the still dominating liberal ones. In this sense, we can say that the alliance between economics and liberalism—and, with exceptions, between economics and utilitarianism—was broken. 3. POLICIES In all departments of public policy, events reflected both the still dominant current of laissez-faire liberalism and the counter-currents that were indicative of the redistribution of political weights and of the new attitudes adumbrated in the preceding section. (a) Free Trade and Foreign Policy. Around 1870, many observers—M. Chevalier among them—predicted confidently that universal and perfect free trade would prevail before the century was out. Implicitly and explicitly they also expected the victory of those principles and practices of foreign policy that are associated with free trade, such as the settlement of disputes by mutual concessions or arbitration, reduction of armaments, international gold monometallism, and the like. Such expectations were not so absurd as they seem to us now. For all those things are, in fact, among the essentials of economic and political liberalism in our sense, and expectations cannot be called absurd that follow from the logic of a dominant system. 12 There were always some thoroughgoing liberals in the Gladstonian sense, even in Germany. But they were few and distinctly unpopular among their brethren. Schmoller once asserted publicly that a ‘Smithian’ was unfit to occupy a professorial chair. Even American ‘New Dealers’ did not go quite so far as this. The career of a more than competent economist of that type, Julius Wolf, illustrates the point. He was strongly pro-capitalist—and was ‘cold-shouldered’ in consequence. Background and patterns 733 Moreover, until the turn of the century, there was more than logical deduction to support them. England upheld free trade, and other powers 1 kept their deviations from it within reasonable bounds. There were several major wars. But allowance must be made for survivals and for inherited situations. Moreover, peace was concluded in each case by consent and without display of vindictiveness. The International Court at The Hague and several cases of settlement of disputes by arbitration seemed to promise further advance toward a pacific if not pacifist state of affairs. Until (roughly) 1900, military expenditure remained comparatively moderate everywhere 2 and was not unsuccessfully fought by min-isters of finance. 3 England and France greatly expanded their colonial empires, and Germany and Italy made a beginning in colonial enterprise, by means of the unblushing use of force. But even here the contemporaneous ‘liberal’ observer might have taken comfort from certain facts. The significance of so strong a display of the ‘imperialist’ attitude as was England’s treatment of the Boer republics, for instance, is materially reduced by the facts that this policy was strongly opposed throughout by part of the Liberal party and that the leader of this party (Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman) scored a resounding victory at the polls very shortly after (1906). It is only our knowledge of the outcome that induces us to place a different interpretation upon those ‘exceptions’ and ‘backslidings’ and also upon such things as the increase of the German fleet, the military preparations of the Balfour government, Germany’s blustering, and England’s efficient entente policy. All the same, it is true that all of this, these ‘exceptions’ included, heralded a new attitude that developed against the resistance 1 France returned to her protectionist tradition—but in a mild form—as soon as she was free to do so after the fall of Napoleon III. Germany at first continued her nearly free-trade policy. Bismarck’s tariff reforms were in the protectionist direction but, compared with modern standards, very moderately so. The treaty policy of his successor, Caprivi, was an attempt to return to a regime not substantially differing from free trade. The pressure of the agrarian interests and those of the heavy industries account for a more purposeful but still moderate protectionist policy later on. The United States re-emphasized protectionist tradition in the nineties. Russia and Spain continued their protectionist policy. But all in all and compared with what was to happen in and since the First World War, it is approximately correct to say that, in principle and actual practice, the world was ‘substantially free trade.’ It is only in comparison to the principles professed by extreme free traders that it can be called aggressively protectionist, at least, if we exclude the United States, Russia, and Spain. This applies also to the use of tools of foreign-trade policy other than tariffs. The most important exception, the continental sugar subsidies, was abolished within the period. 2 Comparison is with national incomes as well as with budgetary totals. 3 When the atmosphere changed, most of these ministers gave in. A notable exception was Böhm- Bawerk (see below, ch. 5, sec. 4a), who resigned on army estimates in 1904. History of economic analysis 734 of Gladstonian liberalism and got the better of it 4 toward the end of the period, witness the armament race and other unmistakable symptoms. This ‘imperialist’ or ‘neomercantilist’ attitude was general. But it stood out in classic purity in the protectionist (‘Tariff Reform’) campaign in England that was associated with the brilliant leadership of Joseph Chamberlain, though it ended, for the time being, in failure. The essential element in the program was Imperial Preference, not protection per se: economists’ arguments about the economic merits or demerits of protective duties thus failed entirely to meet the real—the imperialist—issue. (b) Domestic Policy and Sozialpolitik. Toward the end of the preceding period, extension to new strata of the right to vote had ceased to be a patent in which liberal parties had a proprietary interest. The period under discussion brought further extensions which clearly presaged, though they did not reach, universal suffrage. This was, of course, in keeping with the liberal current; but it was a potent factor in producing the counter-currents. The rest of domestic policy was in keeping with this—on the whole and with exceptions that must not detain us. In the field of industrial policy, the first measures of regulation or control put in an appearance—the Interstate Commerce Act, regulation subject to judicial revision of the prices charged by utilities, and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act are American examples. 5 But public regulation or control still remained ‘interference,’ a term that does not necessarily imply disapproval but seems to indicate an opinion to the effect that legislative or administrative activity in the field of industry requires special justification in every individual case or class of cases. Much more important, however, was the new attitude toward social reforms in the interest of labor—Sozialpolitik. The reforms actually carried out consisted chiefly in (a) legislation enabling governments to take a different attitude toward organized labor and strikes (in England the decisive steps were taken in the late, seventies, by the Disraeli government); (b) legislation about hours and other conditions of work (an English instance is the introduction of the 8-hour day for miners, 1908); (c) social insurance (accident, sickness, 4 Once more, let me advert to the fact that this attitude is open to two different interpretations: the one that may be summed up in the proposition that ‘imperialism is the last stage of capitalism’ and amounts to holding that capitalist interests turned ‘imperialist’ under the new conditions of large- scale production—dumping, rising wage costs, and so on; and the other that may be summed up in the proposition that the bourgeoisie, losing hold, accepted ‘imperialist’ policies as it accepted other things—making, of course, the best of them—that were not in its own line. But for our present purpose it does not greatly matter which of these theories we accept. The fact of the emergence of a new attitude, at variance with the liberal creed, is beyond doubt and this suffices. 5 Interpretation often presents difficulties. Thus, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act may be interpreted as a measure in defense of competition, one of the essential elements of the liberalist schema of things. This was indeed its ideology. But it will also bear interpretation in a sense that puts it in the counter-current, viz. as an expression of a novel attitude toward business interests. Background and patterns 735 old age, and eventually unemployment). Here Germany led (the acts of 1884 and 1887, expanded by legislation in the nineties) but the English non-contributory old-age pensions of the Campbell-Bannerman government and the further steps taken under the Asquith government marked important advances beyond the German example. Barring some enactments in individual states, there was practically nothing of the kind in the United States. In Europe, however, all countries advanced on these lines though at different rates of speed. For us, however, the important thing is not what was actually done. Nor are we primarily interested in the questions how far the measures actually carried may be fitted into the liberalist schema and how far they mean only continuation of older policies—older policies of the liberalist or else the paternalistic state. To some extent both questions may certainly be answered in the affirmative; there was less of a new departure than either friends or foes of Sozialpolitik were inclined to believe. It is the new spirit in which they were taken that is important to us, the new attitude toward them by a large part of the bourgeois public, and the fact that they were understood—again: by friends as well as foes—to be the first installments of a much wider scheme of reconstruction. It is this relation to future fundamental reconstruction which places Sozialpolitik in the counter- current, even where it enjoyed the support of the new species of reforming liberals as distinct from the support of radicals on the one hand and conservatives on the other. Finally, it is important to notice the relation in which Sozialpolitik stood to imperialism or nationalism or neo-mercantilism. This relation was not universal, that is to say, it was not present in the scheme of one type of supporters, the bourgeois radicals. Where these furnished the principal contingent of supporters, as they did in England, the relation fails to show on the surface. But with men of the type of Joseph Chamberlain, social reform and imperialism were complements even there. In Germany, this shows much more clearly. The age is not understood so long as account is not taken of those to whom national self-assertion and Sozialpolitik were but two sides of the same medal. (c) Fiscal Policy. Since nothing shows so clearly the character of a society and of a civilization as does the fiscal policy that its political sector adopts, we shall expect current and counter-current to show particularly clearly in this field. They do. On the one hand, the balanced budget—in fact the budget that shows some surplus to be applied to the reduction of debt—remained a fundamental article of financial faith, although practice often failed to conform to it; further, taxation was for raising revenue only and was not to exert any other effects beyond what was inevitable; and in order to keep taxes as low as possible, expenditure was to be confined to ‘necessary’ purposes. Gladstone (and his chancellors of the exchequer) kept to these principles throughout. So did Goschen, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the second Salisbury administration (1886–92), and, so far as they were able to do so, all the continental ministers of finance whose names are likely to go down in history, such as Raymond Poincaré, Witte, Pierson, History of economic analysis 736 Böhm-Bawerk, 6 and Miquel. The three last names may be used to exemplify an advance beyond Gladstonian finance—an advance partly paralleled in England by the introduction of the super-tax in 1909—that may yet be said to fit the scheme of laissez-faire liberalism: the introduction of the progressive income tax on the total income of individuals as ascertained from their declarations, which was, of course, something quite different from the income tax in the English acceptance of the term. We are so familiar with it that we have lost the sense for the boldness of this innovation. But if the reader reflects that at the time (early nineties) no great country had introduced anything like it and that the English system then carried well-earned prestige owing to its economic and administrative success, he will realize the greatness of the achievement that is primarily associated with the names of the Prussian minister of finance, Johannes von Miquel (1891–3), and of the Austrian minister of finance, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. 7 On the other hand, the counter-current asserted itself victoriously: all the three principles mentioned were violated. The first, the balanced-budget, or rather the budget-in-surplus, principle was never, so far as I know, violated intentionally, unless we so interpret the Freycinet program of reconstruction after the Franco-German War and the Japanese program of development after the Sino-Japanese War. 8 Deficit financing, on the whole, remained stigmatized as frivolous and unworthy of respectable governments. But the other two princi- ples gradually lost their hold upon political consciences: Sir William Harcourt’s progressive estate duty (1894) and Lloyd George’s ‘people’s budget’ (1909), for instance, aimed at other goals than mere revenue raising; and the third principle broke down on the side of expenditure for social purposes, desire for which put an end, toward the close of the period, to the popularity of low taxation of the higher incomes and of ‘retrenchment.’ (d) Money. Substantially the credo of economic and political liberalism prevailed in the field of monetary policy throughout the period. In fact, it prevailed longer than that, as the English Cunliffe report of 1918 (final report, 1919) and the English Gold Standard Act of 1925 suffice to prove: of all the articles of that credo, the gold standard was the last to go. Silver remained the monetary metal of the greater part of mankind and, as we shall see 6 With reference to Pierson, see below, ch. 5, sec. 6. 7 Böhm-Bawerk was minister of finance three times, but not when the great Austrian reform of direct taxation was actually carried (1896). The political credit goes to other men. But he had resigned his professorship and entered the ministry of finance as a senior permanent officer in 1889 in order to prepare that reform, which was mainly his work. Another famous theorist shared in it, however, viz., R.Auspitz (see below, ch. 5, sec. 4a), who was then in parliament. 8 For the purpose of alleviating depressions, public works were repeatedly resorted to, e.g. in Austria in the eighties. Background and patterns 737 more fully in Chapter 8, enjoyed support of one kind or another everywhere. 9 But all ‘advanced’ nations stayed on, or established, the gold standard, in some instances at considerable sacrifice. Most modern economists will feel that even England could have done with a little monetary stimulation during the eighties. Also they may wonder why the German Empire was so keen on adopting the gold standard after 1871. But they will be quite unable to understand why countries such as Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia, which had entered the period with paper currencies that were depreciated in terms of silver, should have retarded their growth and imposed hardships upon themselves in order to raise their monetary units to a largely arbitrary gold parity. These countries could just as well have stayed ‘off gold’ or, if they had to have it, could have introduced the gold standard at the gold value (of their currencies) that happened to prevail when it occurred to them to take this action. The riddle becomes still more baffling when we reflect that there was no political pressure to enforce that policy: for all the interests that really count politically—farmers, landowners, manufacturers, workmen—all suffered by it and even the benefit to creditors was by no means beyond doubt; only government employees were clear gainers. We cannot go into the question how far, in the conditions of the times and particularly from the standpoint of each individual country, an economic case may be made out for it all the same. It must suffice to point to certain extra-economic and extra- national considerations that were without doubt decisive: past experience with depreciated currencies had invested the gold standard with a prestige that was for the time being unchallengeable; the unfettered or ‘automatic’ gold currency had become the symbol of sound practice and the badge of honor and decency; and there was the admired example of England, whose creditor position, moreover, added further weight to it. Perhaps this explanation raises more problems than it solves. That it is true is certain. But the counter-currents asserted themselves also in monetary policy. We observe a growing awareness of the necessity to control money markets by central bank action other than the ‘classic’ discount policy. As the period wore on, we also observe a growing reluctance in all countries to play the gold standard game, as witnessed by resort to the gold exchange standard and, even in England and Germany, to ‘gold devices.’ Perhaps the gold standard was never ‘automatic’; by the end of the period, it certainly had ceased to be so if it ever was (see below, ch. 8). The reasons for this were more political than purely economic: they link up with neo-mercantilist attitudes and with the increasing strain in international relations that began to be felt around 1900, also with increasing public expenditure. Arguments against the unfettered gold standard multiplied. It was losing its popularity like a naughty child that tells embarrassing truths. 4. ART AND THOUGHT So far, whenever we probed below the surface of routine activities, which almost everywhere ran on bourgeois lines, we have discovered new patterns in process of 9 It is not without interest to note that A.J.Balfour was in favor of bimetallism, though his cabinet colleagues would not hear of the slightest concession to it. History of economic analysis 738 formation, counter-currents indicative of impending fundamental change. We get the same impression when we cast a glance on the manifestations of that period’s Zeitgeist in the Arts and in Philosophy. (a) Bourgeois Civilization and Its Recalcitrant Offspring. According to a common saying, that period had no style. There is some truth in this: no doubt, the business and professional classes lived, as a rule, uninspired lives in ugly homes that dishonored the elements of past styles they combined; bought ugly furniture of similar type and nondescript pictures; supported a theatrical and a musical tradition of which the glories were inherited from the past; and read a literature that was largely commonplace in all varieties except the professionally scientific one. This style of life in all its manifestations—in England it came to be called Victorian—is now a byword of stodginess or dreariness and in fact testifies to the bourgeoisie’s lack of capacity for cultural leadership, which is as pronounced as is its lack of capacity for political leadership. Nevertheless, diagnosticians who leave it at that are wrong, and it is easy to indicate the point at which they go wrong: they fail to credit the bourgeois civilization of that period with all its great creations; and they fail to see that parents’ lack of ability to lead may turn their children against them but does not alter the fact that they are their children. The period saw the emergence, through a succession of stages, of a new music; of a new style of painting; of a new novel, a new drama, and a new poetry; and, in the midst of Victorian horror, of a new architecture. To be sure, the bourgeois public looked with amazement on most of these creations and did its best to smother them. Equally sure is it that many of the creations were by nature hostile to the social structure from which they sprang: and that many of the creative individuals were enemies of the social world they beheld, and felt themselves to be the demiurgos of another. But this does not alter the facts that both the works and the men did spring from that structure; that most of the men were bourgeois by birth and upbringing; and that their works were as much the products of the bourgeois mind as were the railroads and the power plants. Thus, capitalist society was on its way toward a new civilization all its own when it was overtaken by the meaningless catastrophe of 1914–18 that put its world out of gear. (b) Bourgeois Civilization and Its Philosophy. We have had glimpses of that period’s religious and political schemes of thought—and of certain changes that occurred in both—that should suffice to convince us that the Weltanschauung of laicist liberalism did not prevail unchallenged. However, so far as it did prevail, we have as little difficulty in describing the bourgeois public’s mental furniture as we have in visualizing the physical furniture of its homes. If we discard various sublimations and evasions we find utilitarian ethics—centering upon social service in the utilitarian sense—and, as a ‘philosophy,’ an evolutionary rather than mechanistic materialism. 1 Religion, in most cases dropped tacitly rather than renounced explicitly, was replaced by an ‘attitude’—a word that we have all the more reason to record because it was used by one of the leading economists of the period, A.Marshall 2 — that preserved the ethical inheritance of Christianity and was in general not actively Background and patterns 739 hostile to the abandoned beliefs and to the churches that taught them though, as we know, there also was militant laicism. This made for historical reading: for some it was the means of completing a work of destruction; for others it was the means of satisfying cultural and ethical sympathies that survived dogmatic allegiance. This seems to be the secret of the huge success with the general public of such works as Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, which was laicist in import yet completely free from any explicit hostility to Christianity. But the preference for historical reading extended beyond the sphere of theology and for a similar reason: uncritical liberalism was meeting with many disappointments (as we have seen) and hence was losing its superficial optimism; outside of the strongholds of Catholicism and Marxist socialism, the period was one of faltering beliefs all round, particularly as regards political democracy; and history and historical criticism appeal to such a frame of mind. Nowhere was this so much the case as it was in France. The success with the public of Hippolyte Taine’s Origins of Modern France (English trans., 1876–94) will therefore be our only illustrative example. 3 History of art, history of literature, history of philosophy all appealed for the same reason. Classical education, which was as yet almost intact, fostered these habits. Of course, this was not all. Equally in accord with the spirit of the age was the widespread interest in the physical sciences, which in response produced a large popularizing literature: there was not as yet ‘science for the millions’ but there was what might be termed ‘science for the tens of thousands.’ All that it is necessary to mention for our purposes, however, is the prominence, within the total demand for this literature, of demand for books and periodical articles on biological evolution, mainly of the Darwinian type. After what has been said above, we shall understand this and in consequence the popular success of even the professional writings of such men as 1 These terms, I trust, are self-explanatory. But it should be emphasized that evolutionary materialism took two distinct forms: the prevailing tendency was Darwinian but the evolutionism of the Condorcet-Comte type (see above, Part III, ch. 3, sec. 4d) was widely adopted by people who had never heard of either Condorcet or Comte. 2 See J.M.Keynes, Essays in Biography, p. 162. The masterly pages of the Marshall biography that center in that passage are by far the most instructive ever written about the process, as observed in the Cambridge milieu, by which Christian belief, gently and without any acerbities, was dropped by the English intelligentsia. This development is paralleled by similar ones elsewhere. The cases of Marshall and of other Cambridge men such as Sidgwick differ from those of similarly conditioned men on the Continent, so far as I can make out, only by the fact that the former, having started their intellectual travels with a thorough grounding in Anglican theology (and, owing to the constitutions of Cambridge and Oxford colleges, with definite obligations toward it), arrived at their final positions by way of conscious wrestling rather than by growing agnostic through indifference, as did many of the latter. 3 But the success of literary criticism of a similar pessimistic type would illustrate our point still better. It must suffice to mention a man and a book that were much in fashion: Émile Faguet (professor of poetry), Le Culte de l’incompétence (English trans., 1911)—a highly characteristic performance. History of economic analysis 740 Haeckel. 4 Where a writer combined evolutionism with sponsorship of naïve laissez- faire, we shall understand still better. This combination accounts for the vogue of the writings of Herbert Spencer. 5 At this point we might stop were it not necessary to advert to the surprisingly favorable reception accorded by the bourgeois reading public to the first products of a spirit contemptuously hostile to its civilization. I do not mean the revival of Thomistic thought, which cannot be described as contemptuously hostile to bourgeois civilization as a whole—but only to its specifically laicist edition—and which was, in any case, not yet a live power in the general public’s thought. 6 Nor do I mean the increasing popularity, among non-socialist readers, of Marxist writings, for these, though hostile enough to the economic arrangements of the capitalist world, cannot be described as hostile to the bourgeoisie’s cult of utilitarian rationality or to its laicism or even (so far as Marxist orthodoxy is concerned) to its democratic humanitarianism. 7 What I do mean is a current of thought that turned precisely against this liberal cult of rationality and ‘progress’ and this liberal and democratic humanitarianism. On the political plane, it may be called anti-democratic, on the philosophical plane, anti-intellectualist. Nietzsche would make a bad example both because his teaching does not constitute a sufficiently pure form of this line of thought and because its influence was—and is to this day—smaller than we are sometimes invited to believe. Bergson’s name had better be reserved for our list of the currents in the professional philosophy of that age. But there was one man who represented ideally what we are trying to visualize: that man was Georges Sorel. 8 4 Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), see, e.g., his Anthropogenie (1874; English trans., 1879). He invited lay interest by his highly militant attitude (see his Kampf um den Entwicklungsgedanken, 1905; English trans., 1906) and by his attempt to expand the theory of evolution into a general philosophical scheme (see his Welträtsel, 1899; English trans., Riddles of the Universe, 1900). The reader will understand that I am mentioning Haeckel as a representative instance. I might mention just as well a dozen of other more definitely ‘popular’ writers. 5 Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)—trained in physics and mathematics, railroad engineer, inventor, writer on current economic topics, sometimes on the staff of newspapers (which included subeditorship for five years of the London Economist)—was a genuine philosopher in the particular sense of being by nature made for a life of thought, to which in fact he settled down in 1860 in order to produce, from 1862 to 1896, his Synthetic Philosophy that comprised, besides the introductory First Principles, the Principles of Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Ethics. His eight volumes of Descriptive Sociology—an impressive collection of facts compiled by the sweat of the brows of his research assistants—is the only other work that need be mentioned here (though some of his most characteristic utterances occur in parerga, such as The Man versus the State, 1884). Spencer was a man of representative eminence who, to an amazing degree, was at the same time profound, clever, and silly. The man who rediscovered Buffon’s idea of the evolution of higher (complex) organisms from lower (simpler) before Darwin’s paper had thrilled the scientific world may justly be called profound. And the man who invented the velocimeter (for locomotives) and a dozen of other gadgets was all that the phrase ‘clever’ conveys. But no other word but ‘silly’ will fit the man who failed to see that, by carrying laissez-faire liberalism to the extent of disapproving of sanitary regulations, public education, public postal service, and the like, he made his ideal ridiculous and that in fact he wrote what would have served very well as a satire on the policy he advocated. Neither his economics nor his ethics (normative as well as analytic) are worth our while. What is worth our while to note is the argument that any policy aiming at social betterment stands condemned on the Background and patterns 741 . emergence, through a succession of stages, of a new music; of a new style of painting; of a new novel, a new drama, and a new poetry; and, in the midst of Victorian horror, of a new architecture. To. example. 3 History of art, history of literature, history of philosophy all appealed for the same reason. Classical education, which was as yet almost intact, fostered these habits. Of course,. most of these ministers gave in. A notable exception was Böhm- Bawerk (see below, ch. 5, sec. 4a), who resigned on army estimates in 1904. History of economic analysis 734 of Gladstonian