J.G.A. Pocock writes in Virtue, Commerce, and History:
“It was hard to condemn the destruction of rural society without engaging in some degree of nostalgia, and a wholesale condemnation of modernity necessarily entailed some degree of neomedievalism. there was a neomedievalism among romantic gentry who liked to imagine the days when they had been Tory protectors of the poor, Whig defenders of their ancient liberties, and Burkean-Coleridgean upholders of a code of chivalric manners. … Even today, it might not be impossible to classify English Marxist thinkers as either progressive radical Whigs for whom socialism is the rebellious but natural son of liberalism, or alienated Tory radicals who denounce liberal capitalism, instead of praising it for its revolutionary role, as the destroyer of popular community and moral economy.”[1]
Pocock was writing in the middle of the 1980s, and in any case my general unfamiliarity with the discourse of the times renders his judgement the one I admit as prima facie true. But behind this sentiment is the coming together of two disparate lines of thought that are pervasive in most analyses of economic thought, especially when concerned with questions of a moral character. Why is it that questions of the moral economy are wholly dominated by the Germanic ghost of Karl Marx? For someone who eschewed the market en masse, surely, he would find himself surprised to be the progenitor and monopolistic owner of ostensibly an entire field of academic inquiry, which has been abandoned to his dialectical and historical materialism and to the supposition that surely, moral relations in economic forms cannot exist in any scheme of action apart from his. It is this that is my complaint with William James Booth’s otherwise first-rate analysis of the role of households in the moral economy: it is too deferential to Marx; it refuses to see beyond the Marxist paradigm even though it readily and openly admits to the practical and theoretical failures of the doctrine.[2] That the question of moral economy was breached with sufficient detail by Aristotle and Xenophon, Locke and Rousseau, is important — but is the discussion of Marx always the feather in the cap?
Karl Marx may have been an astute critic of capitalism, but his thought is of no value to us. We do not see the world wholly stratified through class; neither do we intrinsically commit everything in our grasp to the exploitative grasp of capital-led productive systems and means of exchange. We do not have ‘false consciousnesses’; the proletariat runs the tyranny of the masses, whilst the Marxists run the tyranny of the classes. And yet, the long dead and discarded ghost of Marx looms over us: it is not the spectre of communism, but rather of the tall tales and outdated ideologies of Marx that seem to haunt our intelligentsia en masse and reduce them to proponents not of virtue and the good, but of a dismally outmoded mode of thinking about the world that is unable to stick even its nose out of the time in which it was conceived. The point of this invective, thus, is only to decry the slavish and uncritical fashion with which moral economists confine themselves to Marx, in no small part, and corrupt the brilliance of their work with the uncouth and brutish influence of a degenerative ideology.
Our case in point is Booth, who writes: “For the questions that Marx, and through him Aristotle, have placed on the agenda ….”[3] What follows in that sentence is wholly irrelevant. What pious student of Aristotle and the ancients clumps him together in such an ungainly formation, with a man whose pernicious and perfidious ideology was responsible for producing murderous regimes everywhere it went, whether it was Russia or the Ukraine or East Germany, an ostensibly prosperous society reduced to dereliction in the span of two score years? Aristotle, on the one hand, provides for a substantive, hierarchical oikos and polis that has a formal idea of perfection, of the good, and of virtue, but does not ignore bare realities; Marx, on the other hand, calls for the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The virtues of Marx are not the virtues of Aristotle, and though they may bear some passing familiarity, they are only as appropriately termed into one classifying category as Raphael’s grace is with the degenerate horrors of Jackson Pollock. Yes, both may share some similarities — they both used paint and applied it on a physical surface, but is that not where the similarities end? The former has in him an inner calm and a grace that can elevate anything he seems to lay his eyes and brushes upon; the latter is so ghastly as to provoke screams of horror in both the innocent child as well as the gentlemen who has inculcated a finesse and sense of taste that goes beyond slavish adherence to fad and lunges toward the formal world enthusiastically and intelligibly. If no sane man would place Jackson Pollock and Raphael of Urbino together in any substantial way, it is only then that the light of the insane comes into vivid expression.
Perhaps this is what leads Booth to remark that “the autonomy or separation of economic theory from a conception of the good mirrors, in Marx’s view, the freedom from human control of economic phenomena.”[4] Reading this sentence produces in the sane individual and the reasonable thinker a shiver of revulsion, for it tacitly endorses Marxist dogma whilst delegating to the realm of the damned all those other important thinkers in the tradition of moral economics who have so far found grounds to substantiate their critiques — original, lively, and vital — without the double edged sword of the communist revolution. This is to note that thinkers who do not write paeans to the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital have some additional value beyond those who merely regurgitate, in however pressing a skin, Marxist dogma about whatever it is that they seek to study. The essence of Marxism is a revolutionary revulsion to hierarchy and order, and it is that spirit that Booth seems to unwarrantedly excuse that casts doubt upon the soundness of his analysis. Marxism seeks to erase differences between men — in that it is no different from the equally vicious dogma of the philosophes — and simultaneously erases all nuance in the object of its study. Can Booth not find a tradition of economics that goes beyond this rather churlish and crude obsession with the dogma of an age gone by?
That which Booth seems to admire in Marx, and in Marx alone, is almost without doubt of Aristotelian origin; that which Booth decries is almost always Marx’s own thought. This is the gist of the conclusion to the book,[5] and it is this that makes one think carefully about the centrality of Marx to the question of political economy. In turn, it puts to Professor Pocock the extraordinary question with an ordinary answer: the question of the fetishisation of Marx, which is, if one is to borrow from his red cabal, only the ideological manifestation of commodity fetishes:
“Burke had discerned the advent of the politics of romanticism and alienated sensibility, which has preoccupied conservatives ever since; it is in Marxism, paradoxically enough, that we find continued the conservative assurance that intellect can again be disciplined by the processes of production. But Burke would have known what to say about the Great Cultural Revolution and the evacuation of Phnom Penh.”[6]
In other words, it is the aim of the Marxist to turn everyone who is not a Marxist expressly so into some form of a crypto-Marxist. The Marxist monopolists have turned the study of the history of ideas into a mockery of the very ideas they seek to study because their only ends are the lionisation and aggrandisement not of the ideas they study but of their messiah, upon whose altar they sacrifice the innocent souls of those they ought to revere instead. There are Marxists who find kinship in Edmund Burke, but they forget so often that the ends never justify the means for the Right Honourable Member of Parliament; they forget that he was a tolerant yet appreciative supporter of the Established Church; that he was a student of those very men they seek to appropriate for themselves but fail to do so. The roots of Marxist thought are not Burkean. In the quote I opened this post with, Pocock declaims the poor state of English thought insofar as it is hegemonised by the despotic spectre of Marxism. Thus, we get this gem of a statement from Pocock:
“Marxist and marxisant historians retain an apparently ineradicable allegiance to the idea of the rising bourgeoisie or middle class, without which, it seems — though one may want to ask why — not only their classical system but their entire way of thinking would disintegrate.”[7]
Alternatively, we have this:
“Marxists of the simpler kind will at this point toss their usual double-headed penny and proclaim that insofar as Tory rhetoric spoke for the country opposition it was nostalgic (so they were right after all), and insofar as it spoke for the urban opposition it was bourgeois (so they were right after all). The difficulty about this move is that it does not tell us why the same rhetoric served to articulate opposite systems of values, and this cannot be done by appealing to the common sophism that it does not matter what people say because the Marxist knows what they mean.”[8]
We are faced with the steamroller of Das Kapital and of Marx’s works, voluminous enough to pose a fatal challenge to an opponent if used with sufficient momentum. The process through which it may be done — either a strong whack on the head with the thirty-odd volumes leading to a deathly concussion, ending one’s intellectual career instantly, or the dedicated consumption of the contents of those tomes, which enter and then reside like termites in one’s mind, ending one’s intellectual career sooner rather than later unless one is pulled out of the hellish abyss — is sufficiently permissive of agency, more so of the individual(s) responsible for the provision of those texts than the poor soul inflicted by it. It is sufficient to know only the one thing about Marxist thought in action: the whole of it is represented by “the common sophism that it does not matter what people say because the Marxist knows what they mean.”[9]
We are, then, faced with a similar issue, namely, that we have ignored that tradition of the moral economy that exists outside of the clutches of the Marxist cabal. This is found, more importantly and prominently in the neomedievalism of John Ruskin of Le Petrie de Venezia, of Benjamin Disraeli, the First Earl of Beaconfield, in R.H. Tawney, and not least of all in the stalwarts of English conservatism, Edmund Burke and Dr. Johnson. When Disraeli speaks of the two nations in Sybil, or of the English constitution in what seems to be the next instalment of Burke’s Reflections, updated to reflect events occurring between the commencement of the Terror and the various upheavals in France, it seems that he object of his piety is not the unlimited acquisition of wealth; neither is it the control of men by the impersonal, economic forces of the market. When Ruskin writes of his idyllic communes in the Lake District, he does not have in mind a world of ideas, but a world of viable action that is isolated from the vagaries of the industrial world that turned the stones of Venice into feed for the lime kilns. When Tawney writes of acquisitive societies, he dismisses Marx and his lurid fantasies; he shows that the moral world of the economy can exist without an inkling of Marxist dialect and still maintain rigour, vitality, and prescient importance. When Burke writes of the ancient liberties of the Englishman, it is clear that his inheritance is faith, piety, and the English constitution and common law, and rare glimpses of the chivalric ethic that we find more absent in our world than Burke could ever imagine. Is it reasonable to think that there is not a inkling of the moral imagination in these individuals, that even the arch-enemy of the conservatives, John Stuart Mill, who by no account was a dreaded Marxist, could find expression of the subordination of the economy to human ends? What about Joseph Schumpeter, whose Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy is only read for the first part, and for ends that are wholly unrelated to the whole of the book’s argument? There is no dearth of thinkers who repudiate the Marxist paradigm in moral economics, but find expressions of moral sentiment in economic and human pursuits. And it is to the detriment of our intellectual experience that most discussion of the moral economy is subordinated to Marxist teleological aims.
We suffer because we demand surety, and we find surety in a comprehensive system that is already laid out for us. We do not stop and think, but only trudge along on the insistence of the spectre of Marx’s demonic ghost. We prefer to be spoon-fed, but think not of the harm that it does to our grey matter. It is this slavish adherence to the paradigm that must stop, for the new paradigm is wholly and substantially corrupt. It does more than a great injustice to objects of our study, which ought to be the subject of a certain veneration, but are now suffering from the afflictions of some virile disease. The new paradigm is monopolistic and wholly inconducive to significant discussion for it takes its ‘common sophism’ to be the end of all discussion. It is the monopolisation of discourse in certain substratum that Pocock takes aim at and decries; while Virtue, Commerce, and History ostensibly contains essays about the history of political ideas pertaining to the aforementioned subjects in the eighteenth century and thereabouts, it has as its methodological enemy the poverty of thought that Marxist dialectical has wreaked upon our thinking souls and the resultant disenchantment it has wantonly wrought upon our world. And it is time that those who think about the moral implications of economic transactions are free to not be beholden to the despotic monopoly of a nineteenth century goof, whose ideology is the progenitor of such modes of thought that manifest themselves in the vapid emptiness of Mondrian, the uniformity and utter nihilism of Rothko, and the childish dawdling of Rauschenberg. Marxism may not have been successful where it ought to have counted, namely, the structuring of economic relations, but it sure was successful in another, unrelated domain of action: the intellectual world. Michael Oakeshott writes in perhaps the most scathing exegesis of the ‘mass man’s intellectual class:
“He is not necessarily ‘poor’, nor is he envious only of ‘riches’; he is not necessarily ‘ignorant’, often he is a member of the so-called intelligentsia; he belongs to a class which corresponds exactly with no other class. He is specified primarily by a moral, not an intellectual, inadequacy. He wants ‘salvation’; and in the end will be satisfied only with release from the burden of having to make choices for himself.”[10]
Such an intellectual substratum is wholly opposed to substantive ideas of freedom — even positive freedom — and to the virtues that have sustained the body politic in all its strength. It is this that we cannot countenance, and it is this domination that makes the wonder of Booth’s exegetical prowess turn into dust: he seeks refuge in the dingy, familiar Marx: he plays it safe. And it is this safety that renders the wonderful efforts of the first hundred and seventy six pages moot.
[1] J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 294.
[2] William James Booth, Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993).
[3] Booth, Households, 281.
[4] Booth, Households, 282.
[5] cf. Ibid, 281–85.
[6] Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 191.
[7] Ibid, 241.
[8] Ibid, 246.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Masses in Representative Democracy’, in Freedom and Serfdom: An Anthology of Western Thought, ed. Albert Hunold (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1961), 167–68.