Introduction

Citation

Connelly, J. (2010), "Introduction", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 37 No. 11. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijse.2010.00637kaa.001

Introduction

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Social Economics, Volume 37, Issue 11

About the Guest Editor

James Connelly Joined the Department of Politics and International Studies in the University of Hull in 2006. He teaches political theory, contemporary political philosophy and environmental politics. He has published two editions of his co-authored book Politics and the Environment: From Theory to Practice and several articles on the politics and ethics of the environment. He is currently writing a monograph on environmental virtues and citizenship. He also writes on the political philosophy of R.G. Collingwood and the other British idealists (Method, Metaphysics and Politics: The Political Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood was published in 2003), on the philosophy of history, on electoral systems and political participation.

Writers in the idealistic tradition have, since the early nineteenth century, striven to provide accounts of the world, and of the place of human beings and their activities within it. Although their focus has often been spiritual, or aesthetic, or ethical, they have always showed considerable interest in philosophical economics, by which I mean an attempt to understand the role and significance of the economic dimension of life not as an isolated study, but as part of the wider study of human activity in general. In the early part of the twentieth century, J.A. Smith, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in Oxford, led the way and was followed by others, including contemporary non-idealists such as H.W.B. Joseph, who, just before the First World War delivered a series of lectures on justice and wages in which he sought to show the inadequacies of the labour theory of value. This formed the basis of his book The Labour Theory of Value in Karl Marx (Joseph, 1923), which was reviewed in The Economic Journal by Bonar (1893), the author of Philosophy and Political Economy. This was a major survey of the relations between philosophy and economic theory from Plato and Aristotle onwards, taking in Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Smith, Malthus, Bentham, James Mill, J.S. Mill, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx and others on the way. Other valuable philosophical writings on economics (usually in relation to ethics and social philosophy) include work by Bernard Bosanquet, T.H. Green, D.G. Ritchie, Edward Caird, J.S. Mackenzie, H.J.W. Hetherington, John MacCunn, and the Italian idealists Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile who influenced “new idealists” such as Collingwood. The tradition of philosophical economics emanating from the idealist camp was kept alive by the writing of T.M. Knox and R.G. Collingwood in Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s, and important elements can be found in the thinking of Michael Oakeshott, whose writings straddled the period from 1920 to 1980.

These writers did not practise first order economics: they were not economists themselves. Their focus lay, typically, in expounding a view of the place of economics and economic activity in human life, particularly in ethical, social and political life and institutions, by exploring the fundamental presuppositions of economic science. Although they recognised the necessity of abstraction in the work of theoretical and empirical economists (derived from the grounding of the discipline upon certain presuppositions), they always insisted that the concrete whole was not built up of such abstractions and was not reducible to them. On their view, “homo economicus” was an abstraction or imposter masquerading as something real. It also followed that for them human agents could not be reduced to a supposed single defining characteristic in the manner often taken to be implied by Edgeworth’s (1881, p. 16) statement that “the first principle of economics is that every agent is actuated only by self-interest”. We can agree with Hollis (1987, p. 6) when he points out that it is important to separate two possible senses of this principle: the first that people are moved solely by personal gain and the second that in which people are “moved to seek the satisfaction of their own desires”. Edgeworth himself thought his first principle a useful rule of thumb rather than a general truth about people – thereby accepting its limited presuppositional truth; that is, it is a working presupposition upon which economics can be founded, but is not taken to be a general truth of human nature or explanatory of all human conduct. Despite Edgeworth’s reservations, many have taken his first principle to be a general, unrestricted truth and hailed it as a general principle of behaviour. This interpretation would be rejected not only by Edgeworth himself but also certainly by the idealists and most philosophical observers of economics.

Given the choice, the idealists aligned themselves more with the second interpretation rather than the first, although they objected to any principle they saw as reducing human conduct to a single principle from which everything else is then to be derived, and in terms of which everything else can be explained. They raised similar objections to Bentham’s famous opening statement in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (originally published in 1789) where he asserted that:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light (Bentham, 1948, p. 1).

Their objection to this formulation was in part based on empirical grounds, or grounds rooted in a fundamentally different way of understanding the wellsprings of human motivation; in part, it was an objection based on the view that we should never take a mere aspect of conduct (they would never have claimed that we are never selfish or self-interested) as standing for the whole of conduct. They objected to taking (or mistaking) the abstract for the concrete and then insisting that it is more real than the concrete actuality of human life; in other words, they objected to reification or to what Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. A different, but related critique came from Collingwood, who observed the tendency among some thinkers when they notice an overlap between concepts to identify the concepts. This he termed “the fallacy of identified coincidents”:

[…] a philosopher who has begun by thinking that every concept must have a group of instances to itself may conclude that, since there is only one group of instances, there is only one concept: he therefore declares his two specific concepts identical. Thus, it is observed that a man who does his duty often thereby increases the happiness of people in general; it is reasonably conjectured that this is so, not often merely, but always; and it is concluded that since a dutiful action always increases the general happiness, there is no distinction between the concept of duty and the concept of promoting happiness. Errors of this type are so common that a catalogue of them might fill a book. The false principle at work in them is that, where there is no difference in the extension of two concepts, there is no distinction between the concepts themselves. This I propose to call the fallacy of identified coincidents (Collingwood, 2005, pp. 48-9).

The British idealists sought to overcome one-sided representations of ethical, political and social life, and a direct consequence of this is that they were always social economists. For them, economic activity required, for its full explanation, a social context. Thus, although they all were profoundly critical of, and united in their objection to, utilitarianism, this did not imply that they were indifferent to means-ends relationships, the economic dimension of life or the importance of motivation (including selfish motivation) in human life. They objected strenuously to reduction of the whole to a part, which was then taken either to be the whole itself, or as the dominant factor in determining the character of the whole. In this manner, they objected not only to utilitarianism, but also to materialist conceptions of history where economics is held to be the dominant driving force of the historical process.

The four papers in this issue cover different aspects of idealism in relation to economics. Peter Johnson considers the work of R.G. Collingwood, who made several interesting and profound contributions to the philosophy of economics and to our understanding of the relation between wealth, society and civilisation. Colin Tyler illustrates the way in which, for idealists, economics is inescapably embedded in related issues in social and ethical philosophy. As his opening quotation illustrates, Caird claims that the science of economics is co-extensive with moral science (or ethics) – it is complementary and although it can be distinguished, it cannot be separated from it. Gene Callahan offers an account of how the critical realism of the late twentieth century and the idealism of the nineteenth century converge and the importance of this for their account of economics. He shows how the resources of idealism can be used to conceptualise developments in the critical realist approach to economics. James Connelly considers the approach of T.M. Knox, Editor of Collingwood, translator of Hegel, erstwhile businessman and sometime Principal of St Andrews University, who was writing on the notion of economic activity in the 1930s at the time of considerable controversy over the presuppositions of economics, typified by the recent appearance of Robbins’ (1932) An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science.

James ConnellyGuest Editor