Paul Janet.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] We already endeavoured to make this philosophy known at its earliest appearance, by an article that appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes of the 19th October, 1873, under the title, “A New Phase of Spiritualism.” We are now dealing with the most recent form of this new school.
[2] Hamilton’s “Discussions: Cousin, Schelling.”
[3] Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles,” First Part p. 18.
ON THE MORAL LIMITS OF BENEFICIAL COMMERCE.
When a Professor of Political Economy was first established in the University of Oxford, a controversy presently arose in the academical common rooms concerning the just meaning of the phrase. Among elder and conservative men, the most active-minded insisted that it ought to receive the full width of meaning attached to it by Aristotle in his Treatise on Economy, which, with him, was essentially the economy of the State—that is, in pure Greek, political economy, although this epithet is not annexed to his title. By this interpretation, the science naturally and necessarily became implicated with moral considerations, which never can be excluded from the statesman’s view. But the actual students and professors of the new science—eminently Mr. Nassau Senior and Dr. Whately, shortly afterwards Archbishop of Dublin—naturally feared that by such an interpretation political economy would become confounded with politics; would, indeed, cease to be a science; and by so great an enlargement of its area, would fail to receive that special and definite cultivation which Adam Smith had bestowed on it, as the theory of national wealth. Whately indeed, to avoid this inconvenient extension of the sense, proposed to call the topic, not political economy, but Catallactics—that is, the science of exchanges. Excellent in many respects as the last title was, it might have seemed to exclude the whole doctrine of taxation, and still more decisively all discussion of Malthus’s theory of population, which belongs to politics or to morals, not at all to the doctrine of exchange. In the end, the economists ruled that their science does not at all teach what ought to be, but simply what is, what goes on, and will go on, as an inevitable result of individuals holding exchangeable right in definite articles. Thus they seemed to have driven moral considerations out of their science, as much as out of gardening or medicine. To call their political economy, on that account, heartless (as so many have done) may seem ridiculous; but this form of attack on it arose from a perception or belief that its professors were claiming for it an imperative force, while disclaiming morality, and were assuming that it was a sufficient and supreme rule for political action.
Of late it has been maintained on a special ground that moral considerations cannot wholly be excluded from political economy. Dr. W. B. Hodgson, first holder of a new chair in Edinburgh as Professor of Mercantile Economy, has urged that, in so far as morality or immorality in individuals affects wealth and the markets, we do not exhaust the discussion on exchanges while we neglect this consideration. Perhaps indeed no one, in discussing taxation, has omitted to consider what taxes lead to fraudulent evasion or to smuggling; but economists hitherto, with great unanimity, have resolved that, in their character of economists, they will not notice moral evils from an opium trade, or from sale of deadly weapons and ammunition, or from traffic in intoxicants; nor can one in general discover from their writings that they know vice to be wasteful, or national expenditure on needless and foolish objects undesirable. They have a right to select what topics they will treat, and what they will not treat. They have a right to say: “Such and such considerations belong to morals, not to our political economy.” But, on the one hand, if they are resolved that their science shall be as unmoral as engineering or navigation, they must not claim for it any decisive weight in State-politics; on the other hand, the topics which they neglect need, so much the more urgently, to be treated by others, especially since we have no professors of practical morals, and (for more reasons than one) questions of the market are not thought suitable to the pulpit.