Ian Castles (1935-2010) is best known as the first Secretary of a new-born Department of Finance (1979-1986) and the eleventh Australian Statistician (1986-1994).
I wish to shine a light here on a
scholarly production of Ian Castles: his paper of 1984 entitled ‘Economics and
anti-Economics’. This paper is equally remarkable and neglected. It is
neglected: it is almost impossible to obtain. And it is remarkable that a
public servant senior engrossed in administration could, amid the cares of such
an office, produce what is essentially a Masters thesis born of the scrutiny of
miscellaneous recondite texts.
The subject of Castles’ paper is the
so-called ‘the moral critics of political economy’ of the 19th c.
His thesis is that that they were, in truth, immoral critics of political economy. Even ‘immoral’ is
understatement; in reading Castles paper I am left with the thought that
‘appalling, atrocious, indecent to the point of villainy’ would be closer to
the mark.
Castle’s case is a careful 30,000
word long examination of the actual; what was actually said by the
economists (as distinct from what they were said to have said); and what was
actually believed by anti-economists. In detailing the gulf between these two
actuals, Castles’ paper amounts to a crushing piece of table-turning upon these
supposed ‘moral critics’.
Castles paper is a tour de force. But in the source of that
force we may also locate its lacking; its ad
hominem aspect. When I say ad hominem
I hardly need say that Castles does not proceed by denigrating the personal
attributes of his targets; he did not describe any of them as an ‘ill-bred,
half witted Scotchman with a damned soul’; that is John Ruskin’s own well-bred
caption for Adam Smith. When I say ad
hominem I mean that Castles’ strategy is to show is that the positive assertions
of anti-economists were ignorant and ludicrous, and their normative positions
were obnoxious. There is a
power in this, procedure and a frailty: for it is clear that to show that someone has
misrepresented (besmirched, calumnied) a corps of doctrine is not to show the
doctrine is true, or even an advance towards truth. And to demonstrate that the
persons who have censured some tendency are far more censurable themselves, is
not to demonstrate the tendency itself is beyond any censure. Thus while Castles
paper establishes that the ‘moral critics’ offended justice, it leaves unidentified,
unexamined and unresolved the questions at issue that were the background of
that act of injustice. And his method of ‘personal critique’ leaves open a
method of ‘personal defence’; where the anti-economist shrugs ‘we all know that
Ruskin was barking mad; but still… ’. I
wonder if these deficiencies in its dialectic strategy may explain the aspect
of proximity-without-contact that I have in contemplating Castles’ paper: for
I am conscious that Ian’s apparently vanquishing riposte to anti-economics
appeared on the eve of an eruption of
anti-economics in Australia of which in
its ignorance, frenzy and indecency would almost match that of the 19th
c originals. We must infer the paper did not prevent that eruption; we may
suspect it did little to temper its frenzy. During that ghastly episode Castles
paper would have given heart to a few economists who knew of the paper; but by
its nature it could not supply the logical tools that might provide of logical
antidote to the distemper.
One can’t do everything in a single
paper!
Let me try to distill what it does
do.
At the outset Castles groups of his
protagonists.
On one side Castles places the
‘Economists’; by which he means the Classical Economists.
On the other side are
‘anti-economists’, sometimes known to historians of ideas as the ‘sages’ of
19thc Britain; though perhaps better described as the rhapsodists, the Savonarolas, the berserks of that society: S.T Coleridge, Thomas
Carlyle and John Ruskin, who, over two generations, personified a blazing seam
of social and political reaction in British intellectual life; and exhaled
cyanide gas against the ‘dismal science’, as Carlyle so enduringly branded it.
But, critically,
Castles adds to ‘the anti-economists’ a second trio of persons; very different
in character and station from the first; but who under mantle of progressivism
broadcast in the 20th c the same travesty of economics promulgated
by reactionaries of the 19th. These are three ‘teledons’ or celebrity intellectuals of the
1960s and 1970s; CP Snow, JK Galbraith, and Kenneth Clarke; the authors of,
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
The Age of Uncertainty
Civilisation: A Personal View
respectively.
The case against classical economics
which these three disseminate was essentially the same, and amounted to
insinuating a responsibility of classical economics for the banes of 19th
c ‘industrialism’: those Dark Satanic Mills; that ‘the condition of the working
class’, poverty amidst plenty, the Poor House vs Ascott House. The classical economists, at the very least,
bestowed a self-satisfied benediction on this awfulness. They were therefore culpable
of moral delinquency; or ‘inhuman[ity]’ in the words of Kenneth Clark, who Castles rightly identifies as the leading 20th c disciple of Ruskin’s ‘devastating’ (in Clarke;s word[1]) anti-economics.
Ian Castles contends that the truth about
the economists and the anti-economists is much closer the very opposite; that
classical economists possessed a feeling of humanity, and a sympathy for
humanity; and it was the anti-economists gripped by a loathing of much of their
fellow species .
Castles sustains that claim by
contrasting the positions of the two groups on various heads of social and
economic policy of the day. Let me go through them.
Education;
Castles points our that ‘probably the
first serious proposal ever’ for universal [publicly funded] education’ Adam
Smith, in the Wealth of Nations. [2] In his lead on education
Smith was followed by virtually every political economist. Coleridge was roughly
contemptuous of such programs of universal education. Ruskin maintained it was
best if not all children were required to learn to read.
Ireland
Castles bears evidence of a leniency
of the classical economists to perpetually troubled Ireland. Ricardo
recommended that to Ireland be applied a ‘system, of kindness, indulgence and
conciliation’. And Nassau Senior, no soft touch in these matters, contended
that ‘the erection, regulation and support of fever hospitals, infirmaries and
dispensaries [in Ireland] should be fully and immediately attended to’(Senior
1831).[3] It was the anti-economists who, as Castles documents, felt an irritated,
resentful impatience at such solicitation for Ireland’s wants, and repeatedly
insisted that the Lord would provide whatever necessaries Ireland might require.[4]
The New Poor Law
The New Poor Law would seem to be a prize case for anti-economists. But however severe the New Poor Law, it
needs to be registered that it was the express position of those Political Economists
who favoured the Law (such as Mill) was that the Law was warranted by the obligation
of society to relieve the destitution of the destitute. However qualified that
obligation was in the minds of Mill and the like, they held the destitute had a
rightful and lawful claim on society, and the New Poor Law was to meet that
claim.
Political Economists could also be
friends of private charity, and the greatest of them was the greatest friend;
Ricardo. On his estate Ricardo established a dispensary, an alms house, and a
school; he was a prolific subscriber to various charities: the Poor of the
Parish of Hanovers Square, Extreme Distress at Spitalsfield and Persons
Confined for Small Debts …. (the list is extensive).
It was Carlyle who considered all
this provision for the poor (be it public or private) an absurdity.
Why not regiment these unfortunate wretches, put colonels and corporals
over them and thrash them, if it proved needful, into habits of industry …Try
them for a couple of years and if they could not feed themselves … they ought
to be put out into the world’ …. Sell them in Brazil as niggers.
Slavery
Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Senior, were
strenuous anti-slavers; the anti—economists were almost always slavers.
Coleridge snarled that the Empire
was being subverted by abolitionism. In Unto
This Last – the anti-economics frenzy so by praised
Clarke - Ruskin announced that slavery is ‘an inherent, natural and eternal
inheritance of much of the human race. It
was Carlyle’s fury at abolitionism was the very occasion of his coinage the
‘Dismal Science’; in his paper the ‘Nigger
Question’ of 1849, in which, amidst fantasies of firing squads for political
economists, he champions slavery as ‘the answer’ to that ‘question’.
There is an historical epilogue
here: ‘the Eyre Controversy’. In October 1865 a rioting mob in Jamaica killed
18 people. At the behest of the Governor, Edward James Eyre, British troops
executed, or lawlessly killed, 586 blacks, and flogged another 600.
Scandalised, JS Mill formed a Jamaica Committee. But Carlyle ‘heartily sorry
for Eyre’, and with Ruskin formed a Eyre Defence Committee to rebut the ‘nigger
philanthropists’ of Mill and Henry Fawcett.
Let me pause to insert a
speculation. I put to you that all three of these ‘moral critics’ of political
economy adopted - presumably as a model for British public - the persona of tyrant. In the conduct of Eyre we have
sinister possibility of Life imitating Art. Thus there is a more than personal
significance in the character – the bad character – of the anti-economists; and
there is a broader significance in the good
character of Ricardo and Malthus. The evidence on that score, that Ian
Castles’ careful plots, is that this most vilified of men they were equable,
amicable, affectionate.
There is also an added significance in
the intellectual honesty of the classical economists, about which Ian also
assembles a fund of personal testimony. For the insinuation of JK Galbraith in
the Age of Uncertainty is that the
classical economists were not so; his implicit message is the only significance
in their thought lies in whatever propaganda purpose it might be put. It may
seem strange for a supposed historian of economic doctrine to impute such logical insignificance to the theories
of classical economics ; but the imputation is doubtless rooted in the position
(so congenial to the adversaries of classical economics) that reality is
plastic; that it can be pushed into any desired shape; that we have play-doh
economy is free of constraints, trade-offs, costs, … The upshot is that there is no hidden
mechanism to trouble over, there is no economic law to be uncovered; only
political power to be obtained
Very different was the outlook of
the political economists, who believed that a powerful but complex mechanism underlay economic
events; a mechanism that was hidden to
careless observer but yet could be found. It was on account this outlook that,
as Maria Edgeworth records, ‘[Ricardo and Malthus] hunted in search of truth
and huzzaed wherever they found her ... .’
I
suspect it was partly that jubilant sense of discovery; that naïve joy;
that impelled Ricardo to unabashedly advance his doctrines in the form of
motions to the House of Commons, that were lost by vast majorities; provoking
even one of his parliamentary allies to rise
from the bench and declare that the Member for Portarlington must have
‘descended from Jupiter’.
How unworldly the ‘worldly
philosophers’ seem in contrast to Clark, Galbraith and Snow, those three sleek greyhounds of various mid-20th
‘corridors of power’. The ambassador’s residence, the division lobby of the
House of Lords, the weekend party at Windsor castle; such were their natural
habitats.
And it is on account of their
unworldliness that the classical economists were very differently motivated to
write than Galbraith etc. On this difference Castles tellingly quotes Galbraith
from his Affluent Society;
Audiences of all kinds applaud what they like best … the great
television and radio commentators make a profession of … saying with elegance and unction what their
audience find most acceptable.
Indeed.
The conflict between the wish to be
something in the world and the wish for other things brings me Castles
treatment CP Snow.
What provokes Castle’s ire in Snow’s
Two Cultures is Snow’s light minded
pairing – in a single phrase - of Napoleon wiith Adam Smith. To give some
quarter to Snow for his apparent fatuity, I wonder if, as a self-identified
‘democratic socialism’ Snow was seeking some epitomisation of ‘autocratic
capitalism’ and failing to find one, settled for epitomisation of autocracy
(Napoleon) and epitomisation capitalism (Smith). But, however that may be,
Castles does not hesitate to pounce, and stresses the perfect antipathy between
the world views of the Emperor and the professor; the one a philosophy of
conquest, and the other a philosophy of exchange; an antithesis exemplified in
their stance to empire: the one the
supreme imperialist; the other an emphatic
anti-imperialist, who saw empire as corrupt and costly methods of
Mercantilism; and who would have found every corroboration for this thesis the ‘Continental
System’ introduced by Napoleon. This last policy provoked some forward
opposition by some economists in France, which Napoleon dismissed as ‘the
twaddle of economists’. As T. B McCauley said, Napoleon ‘hated political
economy’
In its revolutionary despotism we can doubtless
detect in the Napoleonic empire a prefiguring of the totalitarian state. But we
can also see a prefiguring of the totalitarian state in Napoleon’s sensitivity
to (and anxiety about) social ideas, including economic ideas. Napoleon once
complained if there were a monarchy made of granite, the abstractions of the
economists would be enough to grind it into dust. Napoleon was resolved to subvert any such
subversion by abstract thought: thus J-B Say, having refused the importunate
overtures of the Emperor, was dismissed from the Legislature, and publication
of his Treatise of Political Economy
forbidden; thus Napoleon abolished the Institut concerned with social sciences,
amidst much fuming about ‘ideologists’ (while preserving the Institut of natural
sciences and humanities).
Warp it, break it; make it teach that black is
white. This is how totalitarian societies deal with social thought. War is Peace, Freedom is
Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
In ‘Economics and Anti-economics’, written in 1984,
Castles makes effective rhetorical reference of Orwelllian oxymorons to
underline the perverse rewriting of history of economics by Clark and Galbraith.
‘Inhumanity is Humanity’ is the double-speak slogan under which they stand. And
yet Castles’ references to Orwell’s 1984 in
some respects miss the mark. For we don’t live in a totalitarian state; and the
perversely false mythologies of Clark and Galbraith flourish without the
terroristic negative incentives of such a state. A free society evidently
contains positive incentives that
powerfully nourish such mythologies. Pondering what those positive incentives
are brings me back to the unwitting (or shameless) admission of Galbraith that
Castles highlighted:
Commentators make a profession of saying with elegance and unction what
their audience find most acceptable
The looming reference is the corruption to thought
that lies in the temptations to popularity and celebrity. To put the thought
another way, unpopularity and obscurity can be a price of integrity. An
indifference to those prices can be a source of integrity
We are fortunate that considerations of popularity
and celebrity did not figure in Ian Castles motivations to write ‘Economics and
Anti-economics’. It is a powerful piece of history of economic ideas. Yet it
was never his lot to have it published by Andre Deutsch (it was never published
at all). It was not his lot to deliver his economics by Reith Lecture; he did
not have a BBC microphone or camera. Instead he delivered his paper to a
session in Canberra of the (soon to expire) ANZAAS Conference; no place at all
for any ‘great radio and television commentator’.
Ian Castles had the worldly unworldliness of
Ricardo, and regardless of the presence or absence of the television camera, he
‘hunted in search of
truth and huzzaed wherever he found her’.
References
Castles, Ian (1984) ‘Economics and Anti-Economics’,
54th ANZAAS Congress, 18 May 1984
Clark, Kenneth (1950) The Gothic Revival : an Essay in the History of Taste , London, Constable
Coleman, William (2004) Economics and Its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economics ,
Palgrave Macmillan
Senior, Nassau (1831) Letter to Lord Howick on a Legal Provision for the Irish Poor.
[2] Barthelemi-Gabriel Rolland is recorded by
historians of education to be the author, in 1768, of the very first such
proposal (see Coleman 2004, p257).
[3] James
McCulloch believed that in Ireland ‘the poor should have a claim, a right to
support’. Senior opposed such a claim (Senior 1831, 30).
[4]
‘What are the great causes of
Irish misery?’ asked John Wilson (anti-economist and friend of ST Coleridge) …
Without hesitation we reply … he is the author of his own misery … in the
qualities of disposition for national prosperity, he stands at the lowest of
civilised men’ (see Castles 1984, p34).
