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Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

J. Bartlett Brebner
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Extract

Seven or eight years ago our Association and its common-law bride, the Committee for Research in Economic History, earnestly set about producing offspring. One cluster of them, it was expected, would look like examples of laissez faire in the United States. In 1943 we inspected these infants in the form of four papers read at our annual meeting; more recently they have been maturing into books. And now we are obliged to acknowledge that they have disappointed the anticipations of their parents by looking rather more like state intervention than like laissez faire. The announcement of Louis Hartz's study, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1774-–1860, is not untypical of the comments on all of them which have been consistently made by relatives, friends, and scholarly reviewers. That announcement says: “Through his critical appraisal of Pennsylvania, a leading state in the formative years of the Republic, Mr. Hartz advances the perhaps startling thesis that the contemporary theory of laissez-faire’ actually embraced a vigorous concept of state economic responsibility.”

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 8 , supplement S1 , January 1948 , pp. 59 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1948

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References

1 The introduction and footnotes to the second edition, however, reveal a good deal of inner uncertainty, for example, p. xxx, n. I.

2 Translated as The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928)Google Scholar.

3 For a summary view of his intellectual course, 1870–1937, see Brebner, J. B., “Halévy: Diagnostician of Modern Britain,” Thought, XXIII (1948), 101–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 SirCarr, C. T., Concerning English Administrative Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 26Google Scholar. His first lecture is a witty, perceptive distillation from the revision in this matter upon which he had embarked twenty years earlier. Sec his Delegated Legislation (Cambridge: The University Press, 1921)Google Scholar.

5 But consider the exceptions culled by Viner, Jacob, Adam Smith, 1776–1826 (Chicago: Trie University of Chicago Press, 1928), chap. vGoogle Scholar.

6 His first glimpse of enlightenment seems to have come in 1788 (Halévy, Philosophic Radicalism, p. 147), but he was diverted until 1808, when, characteristically, he discovered the “principle of self-preference” (ibid., p. 405). The anonymous author of the lony review of Bentham's works in Edinburgh Review, CLV1II (1843), 460–516Google Scholar, seems mistaken in dating the discovery in 1814 or in 1822 (ibid., 494–502).

7 Philosophic Radicalism, Part I, chap, iii, and Part II. Compare J. S. Mill's assertion about the Philosophical Radicals: “Their mode of thinking was not characterized by Benthamism in anysense which has relation to Bentham as a chief or guide, but rather by a combination of Bentham's point of view with that of modern political economy, and with the Hartleian metaphysics.” — Autobiography, edited by Coss, J. J. from the original manuscript in the Columbia University Library (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), p. 73Google Scholar. James Mill's “mind and Bentham's were essentially of different construction.”—ibid., pp. 142–43.

8 The two hundredth anniversary of his birth. Bentham's own circle was small; James Mill's, particularly after the foundation of the Westminster Review, was larger. As J. S. Mill testified: “The influence which Bentham exercised was by his writings …. my father exercised a far greater personal ascendancy.”—Autobiography, p. 71. The writings centered in the Constitutional Code and the Procedure Code, with parliamentary, judicial, and legal reform proposals emerging concurrently.

9 For instance, the factory inspectors of the thirties secured the co-operation of the “good” manufacturers, and thereby the growth of intervention, by agreeing to enforce the regulations upon their “rascally” competitors. Cf. the “Honest Manufacturer” and the “Reducer” (of wages) in Marshall, L. S., The Development of Public Opinion in Manchester (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1947), pp. 215–17Google Scholar.

10 It does not mention Marx, Engels, or Darwin, but neither, in effect, did Dicey, forty years later.

11 First published in Oxford and Cambridge Review in June 1907; and with an introduction by Dorothy Fosdick (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).

12 The subtitle of On Social Freedom.

13 “That government is always in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it ….”—Autobiography, p. 114.

14 “Education, habit, and the cultivation of the sentiments, will make a common man dig or weave for his country, as readily as fight for his country …. the hindrance is not in the essential constitution of human nature ….”—ibid., p. 163.

15 Always a great and irresistibly attractive engine of taxation. See Robinson, Howard, The British Post Office (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948)Google Scholar.