But apart altogether from their connection with State Socialism, Rodbertus and Lassalle would deserve a place in our history. Rodbertus is a theoretical writer of considerable vigour and eloquence, and his thoughts are extraordinarily suggestive. Lassalle was an agitator and propagandist rather than an original thinker, but he has left a lasting impression upon the German labour movement. Hence our determination to give a somewhat detailed exposition of their work, especially of that of Rodbertus, and to spare no effort in trying to realise the importance of the contribution made by both of them.
1. Rodbertus
In a history of doctrines Rodbertus has a place peculiarly his own. He forms, as it were, a channel through which the ideas first preached by Sismondi and the Saint-Simonians were transmitted to the writers who belong to the last quarter of the century. His intellectual horizon—largely determined for him by his knowledge of these French sources[880]—was fixed as early as 1837, when he produced his Forderungen, which the Gazette universelle d’Augsburg refused to publish. His first work appeared in 1842,[881] and the earliest of the Soziale Briefe[882] belong to 1850 and 1851. At the time these passed almost unnoticed. It was only when Lassalle in his treatise in 1862 referred to him as the greatest of German economists, and when conservative writers like Rudolf Meyer and Wagner drew attention to his work, that his books received the notice which they deserved. The German economists of the last thirty years have been greatly influenced by him. His ideas, it is true, are largely those of the earliest French socialists, who wrote before the movement had lost its purely intellectual tone and become involved in the struggle of the July Monarchy, but his clear logic and his systematic method, coupled with his knowledge of economics, which is in every way superior to that of his predecessors, gives to these ideas a degree of permanence which they had never enjoyed before. This “Ricardo of socialism,” as Wagner[883] calls him, did for his predecessors’ doctrines what Ricardo had succeeded in doing for those of Malthus and Smith. He magnified the good results of their work and emphasised their fundamental postulates.
Rodbertus’s upbringing decreed that he should not become involved in that democratic and radical socialism which was begotten of popular agitation, and whose best-known representative is Marx. Marx considered socialism and revolution, economic theory and political action, as being indissolubly one.[884] Rodbertus, on the other hand, was a great liberal landowner who sat on the Left Centre in the Prussian National Assembly of 1848, and his political faith is summed up in the two phrases “constitutional government” and “national unity.”[885] The success won by the Bismarckian policy gradually drew him nearer the monarchy, especially towards the end of his life.[886] His ideal was a socialist party renouncing all political action and confining its attention solely to social questions. Although personally favourably inclined towards universal suffrage, he refused to join Lassalle’s Arbeiterverein because Lassalle had insisted upon placing this article of political reform on his programme.[887] The party of the future, he thought, would be at once monarchical, national, and socialistic, or at any rate conservative and socialistic.[888] At the same time we must remember that “in so far as the Social Democratic party was aiming at economic reforms he was with it heart and soul.”[889]
Despite his belief in the possibility of reconciling the monarchical policy with his socialistic programme, he carefully avoided the economic teachings of the socialists. His too logical mind could never appreciate their position, and he had the greatest contempt for the Socialists of the Chair. He would be the first to admit that in practice socialism must content itself with temporary expedients, although he cannot bring himself to believe that such compromise constitutes the whole of the socialistic doctrine. He refers to the Socialists of the Chair as the “sweetened water thinkers,”[890] and he refused to join them at the Eisenach Congress of 1872—the “bog of Eisenach,” as he calls it somewhere. He regarded the whole thing as a first-class comedy. Even labour legislation, he thought, was merely a caprice of the humanitarians and socialists.[891] So that whenever we find him summing up his programme in some such sonorous phrase as Staat gegen Staatslosigkeit[892] (“the State as against the No-State”) we must be careful to distinguish it from the hazy doctrines of the State Socialists.[893] Despite himself, however, he proved one of the most influential precursors of the school, and therein lies his real significance.
Rodbertus’s whole theory rests upon the conception of society as an organism created by division of labour. Adam Smith, as he points out, had caught a faint glimmer of the significant fact that all men are linked together by an inevitable law of solidarity which takes them out of their isolation and transforms an aggregate of individuals into a real community having no frontiers and no limits save such as division of labour imposes, and sufficiently wide in scope to include the whole universe.[894] As soon as an individual becomes a part of economic society his well-being no longer depends upon himself and the use which he makes of the natural medium to which he applies himself, but upon the activity of his fellow-producers. The execution of certain social functions, which Rodbertus enumerates as follows, and which he borrows partly from Saint-Simon, henceforth become the determining factors: (1) The adaptation of production to meet demand; (2) the maintenance of production at least up to the standard of the existing resources; (3) the just distribution of the common produce among the producers.
Should society be allowed to work out these projects spontaneously, or should it endeavour to carry out a preconceived plan? To Rodbertus this was the great problem which society had to consider. The economists of Smith’s school treated the social organism as a living thing. The free play of natural laws must have the same beneficial effects upon it as the free circulation of the blood has upon the human body. Every social function would be regularly discharged provided “liberty” only was secured. Rodbertus thought this was a mistake. “No State,” says he, “is sufficiently lucky or perhaps unfortunate enough to have the natural needs of the community satisfied by natural law without any conscious effort on the part of anyone. The State is an historical organism, and the particular kind of organisation which it possesses must be determined for it by the members of the State itself. Each State must pass its own laws and develop its own organisation. The organs of the State do not grow up spontaneously. They must be fostered, strengthened, and controlled by the State.”[895] Hence, after 1837 we find Rodbertus proposing the substitution of a system of State direction[896] for the system of natural liberty, and his whole work is an attempt to justify the introduction of such a system. Let us examine his thesis and review the various economic functions which we defined above. Let us also watch their operation at the present day and see how differently these functions would be discharged in a better organised community.
1. It is hardly correct to speak of production adapting itself to social need under existing conditions, because production only adapts itself to the effective demand, i.e. to the demand when expressed in terms of money. This fact had been hinted at by Smith, and Sismondi had laid considerable stress upon it; but Rodbertus was the earliest to point out that this really meant that only those people who already possess something can have their wants satisfied.[897] Those who have nothing to offer except their labour, and find that there is no demand for that labour, have no share in the social product. On the other hand, the individual who draws an income, even though he never did any work for it, is able to make effective his demand for the objects of his desire. The result is that many of the more necessitous persons must needs go unsatisfied, while others wallow in luxury.
Truer word was never spoken. Rodbertus had a perfect right to insist on the fundamental fallacy lurking within a system which could treat unemployment—that modern form of famine—as simply an over-production of goods, and which found itself unable to modify it except through public or private charity. His remedy consisted of a proposal to set up production for social need as a substitute for production for demand. The first thing to be done was to find out the time which each individual would be willing to give to productive work, making a note of the character and quantity of goods required at the same time.[898] He thought that “the wants of men in general form an even series, and that the kind and number of objects required can easily be calculated.”[899] Knowing the time which society could afford to give to production, there would be no great difficulty in distributing the products among the various producers.
This is to go to work a little too precipitately and to shun the greatest difficulty of all. The uniform series of wants of which Rodbertus speaks exist only in the imagination. What we really find is a small number of collective needs combined with a great variety of individual needs. Social need is merely a vague term used to designate both kinds of wants at once. The slightest reflection shows that every individual possesses quite a unique series of needs and tastes. To base production upon social need is to suppress liberty of demand and consumption. It implies the establishment of an arbitrary scale of needs which must be satisfied and which is to be imposed upon every individual. The remedy would be worse than the evil.