A Critical Examination of Socialism

by W. H. Mallock

CHAPTER VIII

THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY.
SPECULATIVE ATTEMPTS TO MINIMISE IT

When socialism, says Mr. Sidney Webb, shall have abolished all other monopolies, there will still remain to be dealt with the most formidable monopoly of all—namely, "the natural monopoly of business ability," or "the special ability and energy with which some persons are born." The services of these monopolists, he sees and fully admits, would be as essential to a socialistic as they are to any other community which desires to prosper according to modern standards. He sees and admits also that these exceptional men will not continuously exert or even develop their talents unless society can supply them with some adequate motive or stimulus. Accordingly, since he maintains that no scheme of society would be socialistic in any practical sense which did not completely, or at least approximately, eliminate the motive mainly operative among such men at present—namely, that supplied by the possibility of exceptional economic gain—he fairly faces the fact that some motive of a different kind will have to be discovered by socialists which shall take the place of this.

I mention Mr. Webb in particular merely because he represents the views which all intellectual socialists are coming to hold likewise. This specific problem of how to provide the natural monopolists of business ability with all adequate motive to develop and exercise their talents is engaging more and more the attention of the higher socialistic thinkers; and if we take together the passages in their writings which deal with it, it has by this time a voluminous literature of its own.

We shall find that the arguments brought forward by them in this connection divide themselves broadly into two classes, one of which deals with the problem of motive directly, while the other class aims at preparing the way to its solution by showing in advance that its difficulties are far less formidable than they appear to be. Without insisting on the manner in which they are urged by individual writers, we will take these two classes of argument in the logical order which they assume when we consider their general character.

These preparatory arguments, with which we will accordingly begin, while admitting that some men are undoubtedly more able than others, aim at showing that the superiority of such men to their fellows is not so great as it seems to be, and that any claims made by them to exceptional reward on account of it consequently tend to reduce themselves to very modest proportions.

These arguments possess a peculiar interest owing to the fact that they have not originated with socialistic thinkers at all, but have been drawn by them from the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century generally, in so far as it was applied to historical and sociological questions. The dominant idea which distinguished this school of thought was the insignificance of the individual as compared with society past and present. Thus Herbert Spencer, who was its most systematic exponent, opens his work on the Study of Sociology with an elaborate attack on what he calls "The Great Man Theory," according to which the explanation of the main events of history is to be sought in the influence of exceptional or great men—the men who, in vulgar language, are spoken of as "historical characters." Such an explanation, said Spencer, is no explanation at all. Great men, however great, are not isolated phenomena. Whatever they may do as the "proximate initiators" of change, they themselves "have their chief cause in the generations they have descended from," and depend for the influence which is commonly attributed to their actions, on "the multitudinous conditions" of the generation to which they belong. Thus Laplace, he says, could not have got far with his calculations if it had not been for the line of mathematicians who went before him. Cæsar could not have got very far with his conquests if a great military organisation had not been ready to his hand; nor could Shakespeare have written his dramas if he had not lived in a country already enriched with traditions and a highly developed language.

But though it was Herbert Spencer who invested these arguments with their most systematic form, and gave them their definite place in the theory of evolution as a whole, they were widely diffused already among his immediate predecessors, as we may see by the following passage taken from an unlikely quarter. "It is," says Macaulay, in his Essay on Dryden, anticipating the exact phraseology of Spencer, "the age that makes the man, not the man that makes the age.... The inequalities of the intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that in calculating its great revolutions they may safely be neglected." And Macaulay is merely expressing a doctrine distinctive of his time—a doctrine which, to take one further example, dominated in a notable way the entire thought of Buckle. This doctrine, which, to a greater or less degree, merges the organism in its environment, or the individual, however great, in society, has been seized on by the more recent socialists just as the theory of Ricardo, with regard to labour and value, was seized on by Karl Marx, and has been adapted by them to their own purposes.

Thus Mr. Bellamy, whose book, Looking Backward, descriptive of a socialistic Utopia, achieved a circulation beyond that of the most popular novels, declares that "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of the thousand of the produce of every man are the result of his social inheritance and environment"; and Mr. Kidd, a socialist in sentiment if not in definite theory, urges that the comparative insignificance, the comparative commonness, and dependence for their efficiency on contemporary social circumstances, of the talents which we are accustomed to associate with the greatest inventions and discoveries, is proved by the fact that some of the most important of these have been made by persons who, "working quite independently, have arrived at like results almost simultaneously. Thus rival and independent claims," he proceeds, "have been made for the discovery of the differential calculus, the invention of the steam-engine, the methods of spectrum analysis, the telephone, the telegraph, as well as many other discoveries." Further, to these arguments a yet more definite point has been added by the contention that, as socialist writers put it, "inventions and discoveries, when once made, become common property," the mass of mankind being cut off from the use of them only by patents or other artificial restrictions.

The aim of socialists in pursuing this line of reasoning is obvious. It is to demonstrate, or rather to suggest, that "the monopolists of business ability," in spite of their comparative rarity and the importance of the services performed by them, are far from being so rare or so superior to the mass of their contemporaries as they seem to be, that their achievements owe far more than appears on the surface to the co-operation of the average members of society, and that consequently a socialistic society could justly demand and practically secure their services on far easier terms than those which they command at present.