Eavesdropping on a virtuous circle - Richard
Whately and the Oriel Noetics.
Elena Pasquini Douglas
UWA Business School
Abstract
This paper presents Richard Whately, intellectual leader of the Oriel Noetics based at
Oriel College, Oxford from 1811-1831, in context. Building upon the growing secondary
literature on his role in the emergence of political economy as a distinct science from its
natural theology and moral philosophy origins (Moore & White 2009; A.M.C. Waterman
1991b; Waterman 2008; Levy 1999; Levy & Peart 2010; Hilton 1986; Corsi 1988;
Oslington 2001; Rashid 1977), the contribution of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, I
explain the natural theology and moral philosophy that underpins the Noetic School of
Political Economy. Secondly, I present Richard Whately’s combination of political
economy and moral analysis, which I have named the ‘Catallaxy-Virtue Synthesis’, in the
mainstream Smithian, as well as virtue ethics-traditions. With this presentation, I
respond to Deidre McCloskey’s (2008) contention that Adam Smith was “the last of the
former virtue ethicists” with Whately as a later writer in this tradition.
Table of contents
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 The paper 2
1.3 Bounding the historical scope of the project 3
1.4 The structure of this paper 3
1.5 Final remarks on challenges in the project 4
Chapter 2 Method 5
2.1 Introduction 5
2.2 The range of methods in intellectual history 5
2.3. Introducing contextualism 7
2.4 The Sussex school 7
2.5 Summary of lessons for this study 8
Chapter 3 Historical context: 1798 - 1832 11
3.1 Introduction 11
3.2 The times and their spirit 11
3.3 The indivisibility of Church and State in early modern Britain 12
3.4 Which God? 13
3.5 Political programmes – three types of radicals against the Tory’s 14
3.6 Economic reform – Corn Laws, Poor Laws and Currency Wars 16
Chapter 4 Richard Whately 17
4.1 Introduction 17
4.2 Origins 18
4.3 Character 18
4.4 Education and the Oriel Noetics 20
4.5 Whately’s career 21
Chapter 5 Whately’s Noetic intellectual inheritance 27
5.1 Introduction 27
5.2 Meaning of ‘Noetic’ 27
5.3 Membership of the group 27
5.4 Beliefs: Reformist clerics, faith and reason 28
5.5 The Noetics as a clerisy – filters of suitable knowledge 28
5.6 Moral philosophy and natural theology 29
5.6.1 Application of Newtonian science to moral questions 29
5.6.2 The existence of God: Argument from design. 29
5.6.3 ‘Butlerian self-love’ 30
5.6.4 Responses to Malthus theodicy 31
5.6.5 Moral sense school 32
5.7 Smithian Virtue Ethics 33
5.8 The Noetic method applied: The Poor Laws 36
5.9 Noetic Political Economy – A mainstream economic school of thought 37
5.10 Conclusions 40
Chapter 6 The Whatelian ‘Cattalaxy - Virtue Synthesis’ 41
6.1 Introduction 41
6.2 A war on two fronts 41
6.3 Whatelian political economy – a ‘Catallaxy of wealth, virtue and knowledge’ 42
6.4 Reading ‘the great book of human transactions’ 44
6.5 ‘In Virtue, True Wisdom and Happiness’ 45
6.6 The Catallaxy explained 46
6.7 Progress of Knowledge 47
6.8 Correcting Paley’s moral errors 49
6.9 The Whatelian Virtue synthesis – a virtuous circle 50
Chapter 7 Conclusion 53
References 57
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Introduction
Economics emerged as the dominant intellectual paradigm of the twentieth century in
the examination of society. As a discipline, economics has claimed to be ‘value-neutral’
and has formally excluded examinations of ends. Lionel Robbins (1945) reinforced an
earlier demarcation, when he drew a bright line between positive and normative issues.
Positive issues are questions about “what is”; normative issues are those which ask
“what ought to be”; the economist qua economist should be studying “what is” and
never “what ought to be” (Robbins 1945). There are no economic ends and economics
“is incapable of deciding as between the desirability of different ends” (Robbins 1945,
p135). So, we find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a moral and
philosophical circumstance, where the dominant intellectual paradigm has nothing to
say about ends. This leaves a void in answering important questions about the type of
society, communities and neighbourhoods our politicians should be aiming their policy
prescriptions toward. This comment may appear trite or naïve. Perhaps it takes an
engagement with the standpoint of different epochs in history, animated by different
logics, to appreciate how unique a circumstance this is1.
I contend that the age of value-neutrality in which we now live, was first conceived in
the economic, political and theological debates of the first three decades of the
nineteenth century. It is here that we can find the origins of contemporary questions
about economics and ethics, markets and morality, and the responsibilities of the
discipline of economics in the formation of policy. In fact, there are strong arguments
that, the hyper-globalised world we find ourselves in now, is a setting not unlike the
rapidly changing world of early nineteenth century Britain. A new world order appears
to be unfolding; certainly a transfer of proportional wealth between nations rather than
classes is gathering pace. Debates about the fundamental scope and limits of markets
and of governments abound, as they did in the period I intend to consider here.
1.2 The paper
Richard Whately (Whately), intellectual leader of the Oriel Noetics (Noetics) based at
Oriel College, Oxford from 1811-1831, was the first political economist to distinguish
between scientific and moral knowledge, asserting the importance and separate role for
each (Whately 1832, pp. 1-38). This was the foundation of his distinction between
economic science and policy; between deductively derived scientific laws, essential to
understanding economic and exchange dynamics, but forever separate from the
discernment of what ends society should pursue. Having made this distinction, Whately
maintained that an economic system (or catallaxy) was a means of achieving the
ultimate goal of society-wide moral progress. He framed the study and conduct of
political economy accordingly. I argue that Whately and the Oriel Noetics interpreted
Adam Smith’s project in the same light, as discerning the best path for the moral
progress of society (McCloskey 2008; Phillipson 2010). To this end, Whately
endeavoured to refocus the new science of political economy to concentrate on the
social dynamics of ‘exchange’. He proposed the new name ‘catallactics’ from the Greek
‘to exchange’. Prior to implementing policy which resulted from observing the laws of
political economy in the hypothetical, Whately proposed an essential step: a real life
enquiry into the context in which it would be implemented including an analysis of the
consequences for the stock of human virtue in that context. I call this two dimensional
enquiry the Whatelian ‘Catallaxy-Virtue Synthesis’.
The contribution of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, I explain the natural theology and
moral philosophy that underpins the Noetic School of Political Economy. Secondly, I
present Richard Whately’s political economy as a unique conception of economic and
moral analysis, in the mainstream Smithian, as well as virtue ethics-traditions. In this, I
respond to Deidre McCloskey’s (2008) contention that Adam Smith was “the last of the
former virtue ethicists” with Whately as a later writer in this tradition.
Two secondary research questions are examined. The nature of the methodologies that
are best suited to analysis of the work of Classical economists like those discussed here,
and secondly, whether or not the Noetics can be regarded as a formal school or
scientific community (Kuhn 1969).
1.3 Bounding the historical scope of the project
The appropriate starting point is where political economy starts to become a distinct
inquiry that is clearly demarcated from the moral philosophy and Christian theology
from which it emerged. Waterman (1991) identifies this moment as the publication of
Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). This essay was deeply
controversial; it ignited the antagonism to Malthus and the political economists by the
Romantics, Coleridge and Southey, the “self-appointed spokesmen for human beings”
which came to be one of the “fault-lines of British culture” (Donald Winch 1996, pp. 402,
41).
The end-point for our analysis will be the end of the era in which the Noetics and
Whately lived and in turn shaped - the British ancien regime of “Anglican, aristocratic
hegemony” (Clark 1985). This regime had endured throughout “the long eighteenth
century (1688-1832)” (Clark 1985). It was toppled, not in acts of violence or revolution,
but in two strokes of measured political reform: the proclamation of the Catholic
Emancipation Act (1829) and the Reform Act (1832). Epochal change resulted from
both the extension of the franchise to include the burghers of northern industrial towns,
and the removal of restrictions on Catholics, ‘Dissenters’ and Jews.
1.4 The structure of this paper
The chapter sets the scene for the study, identifying the central research issues and the
chronological scope. Chapter 2 presents a discussion on method: the different
historiographical options available to the scholar of the history of economic thought are
examined, with particular focus placed on a school of historiography known as
‘contextualism’ and its appropriateness for this study. Chapter 3 discusses the historical
context seeking to illuminate the spirit of the times by highlighting the political and
economic conditions and the resultant debates and contested reform programmes.
Chapter 4 attempts to bring Whately to life by highlighting his origins, education,
character, formative influences, and career achievements. Chapter 5 seeks to elucidate
the intellectual milieu in which Whately and the Noetics thrived, to adumbrate their
shared intellectual inheritance, and give one example of a collaborative project, the
reform of the Poor Laws. This section concludes by answering one of the research
questions put by this paper, whether or not the Noetics can be regarded as a formal
school in the Kuhnian sense (Kuhn 1969). Chapter 6 presents the Whatelian CatallaxyVirtue Synthesis. It considers Whately’s understanding of an economics of the social
virtues; and economics as “catallactics, the science of exchange” and reciprocity which
had the development of human virtue, not utility or mere wealth, as its stated end. The
final chapter in the paper offers some reflections on the findings of the research in light
of existing scholarship; highlights the benefits of using a contextualist methodology in
undertaking a study like this one; and considers the implications of this analysis for
contemporary debate.
1.5 Final remarks on challenges in the project
This project has faced a couple of principal challenges, both relate to the breadth and
volume of Whately’s scholarship. Unlike the tight disciplinary boundaries employed in
the present day, many classical economists spanned what we call “economics” as well as
moral philosophy, theology, sociology, politics, history and psychology – “that noble
science of politics”2 (Collini, Winch & Burrow 1983). Individual scholars like Whately
worked on a larger canvas and included practical, empirical and moral considerations
as they went.
Chapter 2 Method
2.1 Introduction
If “the past is a foreign country” and history is a dialogue between generations, then a
sensitive translation of the different languages spoken by each age is essential to
historical scholarship3. In the conduct of intellectual history - which examines concepts,
ideas, beliefs and moral systems - an ear for the language of the times under study is
essential. Given the goals of this research project, a method which highlights language
and historical imagination will be of significant value. One method in intellectual
history, ‘contextualism’, provides for the study of texts in the context of their historical
circumstances and pays close attention to the ‘language’ in which they are written. This
method will enable me to gain access to the thinking of these nineteenth century
subjects on their terms not ours.
2.2 The range of methods in intellectual history
Intellectual historians are idiosyncratic when it comes to method; their practice often
reflects deeper philosophical and epistemological bearings. In the discipline of the
history of economic thought, Blaug (1990), citing the work in the history of philosophy
by Richard Rorty (1984), focuses on four broad categories. These are:
“Geistesgeschichten”, from the German meaning ‘spirit of the times’; “historical
reconstruction”, which entails examination of theory using the terms meaningful to the
author and his interlocutors in their times; “rational reconstruction”, which applies
contemporary theoretical terms to the work of past thinkers, observing the line of
development of the theory to its present state4 (Samuelson 1974; Samuelson 1987); and
“doxographies”, which celebrate those theories which point to and confirm the wisdom
of current theory (Blaug 1990, p. 27). The categories needn’t be seen as entirely
mutually exclusive. The boundaries are porous and they are often applied to the same
subject contemporaneously. Donald Winch5 (2009, 1996) adds additional
historiographical practices to the list including: the study of mentalities, the archaeology
of discursive practices, ideologiekritik, cultural materialism, the new historicism, and
deconstructionism.
One of the fault-lines in the methodological debate is science versus culture; scientific
exegesis versus cultural exegesis. Stigler has highlighted the evolution of doctrine as the
purpose of the study, not the understanding of the individuals and their meaning:“The
important thing to the scholar of doctrine was to understand what his contemporaries
thought he thought and how. This rule of interpretation is designed to maximise the
value of a theory to science… one may seek to determine what the man really believed,
although this search has no direct relevance to the scientific progress” (Stigler 1965, p.
448 my italics). To this the advocate of cultural understanding responds that ‘scientific
progress’ is not a formal absolute, but is itself subject to, if not the product of, social and
cultural forces. Heidegger (1927), had another critique to add to this construction of
context and text together: if one must be understood to understand the other, the quest
goes in circles. Heidegger offered this not as a justification of scientism, but rather as an
illustration of the need to proceed with caution, and to develop means of preliminary
understanding that could be deepened with additional inquiry.
If understanding is iterative then the other important axis of methodological debate is
direction in history. In the history of economic thought, for example, the dismissive term
used by Butterfield, ‘Whig history’, is worn by some as a badge of honour. Samuelson
claims that: “in what might be called ‘Whig History of Science’… we pay past scholars
the compliment of judging how their works contributed (algebraic) value-added to our
collective house of knowledge” (Samuelson 1974, p. 76). This view is anathema to the
contextualists who see it as a recipe for misinterpretation of the real meaning of texts.
This assumption that science always has an inevitable forward thrust, and that we are
always adding layers of knowledge, is implicit in the ‘whig’ history of science or
doctrine. I’m firmly with the contextualists on this one.
2.3. Introducing contextualism
In terms of Rorty’s distinctions above, contextualism, is probably closest to a blend of
Geistesgeschichten and historical and linguistic reconstruction. It explores the ‘spirit of
the times’ in order to understand the pressing questions of the day, and the meaning
behind the language employed in a particular age. The theory is therefore examined
using the terms meaningful to the author and his interlocutors in their times. This is no
easy task. The practice goes in and out of favour in various disciplines. Although it is an
orthodox approach in the conduct of intellectual history in politics, it is only practiced
by some in the history of economics and philosophy (Moore 2010).
2.4 The Sussex school
The Sussex school (SS) are of central importance to this study. Firstly, they specialise in
the study of the nineteenth century. Secondly, they have enquired extensively into the
development of economic knowledge. The SS is comprised of, Donald Winch, Stefano
Collini and John Burrow6. I am inspired by their mode of “eavesdropping on the
conversations of the past” (Donald Winch 1996, p. 28). This task requires delicacy; it
involves being as non-intrusive as possible and examining the conversations of the past
while avoiding over-formalised categorising devices and techniques. Overhearing
conversations requires “historical imagination on the part of the writer and reader
these conversations can be understood in their own terms”; a reader should treat past
authors “as one would wish one’s own writing and beliefs to be treated, should the
positions, by some amazing twist of fate be reversed” (Donald Winch 1996, p. 21).
The SS engage in a subtle process to unlock intellectual pre-suppostitions7. Care is
always taken not to allow “today’s conceptual maps to obliterate or to distort those of
the past”(Burrows (1970), quoted in Moore 2010, p94).
The ultimate faux pas to the Sussex contextualists is “celebrating or denigrating a text
from the past reifying or dismissing it in order to legitimate current ideological goals,
this leads not only to distorted readings of texts, but anachronistic readings that are
odds with the historical context that produced these texts” (Moore 2010, p. 90). I do not
take this to mean that history has no relevance to contemporary debates, only that the
historian qua historian’s job is not this work. Once contemporary relevance is invoked,
one has taken off the hat of historian, and donned that of the cultural commentator.
This ‘different hat distinction’ will have relevance in my conclusion.
Another characteristic of the SS useful here is the warning against ‘disciplinary
isolationism’: “it would be an odd fate if the earlier political economists should suffer
from being seen through the narrower lens of later, more professional forms of
economic enquiry: a case of the sins of the children being visited on their greatgrandparents (Winch 1996, p121). Like looking for the lost car keys where the light is
shining rather than in the dark where they fell, disciplinary isolationism in intellectual
history is unfruitful.
The Sussex historiographical contribution asserts that texts are the starting point in the
hermeneutic circle. Winch states that he “proceeds from individual authors and their
texts, to those intellectual and cultural contexts that promise most by way of
understanding what those authors were attempting to do” (Winch 1996, p5). I am
taking a leaf out of his book.
2.5 Summary of lessons for this study
We set out in this chapter to ask which methods are available to the study of the history
of ideas. I have chosen contextualism, and particularly the contextualism of the Sussex
School, as the methodology for this paper because it best meets the challenges posed by
this research project. I take the following list of ‘practice notes’ for the present study
drawing on Moore (2010):
1.
Beware of anachronism always, and especially of contemporary conceptual
frameworks which can obliterate past meaning. Seek to understand the past in its
own terms, language and worldview. (Applied in chapter 3,4 and 5).
2.
Understand the purpose of the text. The questions its author was seeking answers
to. Apply historical imagination to a diligent reconstruction of the context, nature
and effect of the intervention. (Applied in chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6).
3.
Appreciate the “rival languages” at use in the milieu of the main protagonists of
your study and understand the different shape a concept will take at home in each of
these languages. (Applied in chapters 5 and 6).
4.
Attempt to understand the unspoken dimensions of the thinking, the presuppositions that underpin it, the elements of the world-view that are nowhere
written down but inform everything. (Applied mostly in chapter 3, 4, 5 and 6).
5.
‘Eavesdrop’, sidle-up to the protagonists and their conversations without
interrupting to make your own point, and without framing the conversation in your
own terms and without employing excessive conceptual framing and grand
programmes. (Applied in chapter 3, 4, 5 and 6).
6.
Offer sympathetic readings of texts unburdened by comparison to present day
concerns with how the theory or author fared in terms of longevity or influence.
Avoid celebration or denigration of texts with respect to the contemporary
relevance or connections. (Obey this rule as an historian, as a cultural commentator,
different standards apply).
7.
Prefer horizontal (across an historical period) examinations which enable a richer
evocation of the context than the vertical examination which considers the “idea
through sweeps of time”. This also protects the author from making teleological
assumptions. Gently untangle a particular idea or debate in time and through the
personalities in conversation. (Applied in chapter 3, 5 and 6).
8.
Use biographical insight to determine why a question was compelling to the author.
Life-experience is relevant to the choice of questions examined, and although
causation may be difficult to prove, it can provide context and framing to intellectual
projects. (Applied in chapter 4)
9.
Long-form narrative lends itself to a more realistic evocation of subtlety and
nuance of both context and meaning. Ideally, these should be written in a
conversational tone, teasing out themes and with “literary elegance and sustained
narrative rhythm” (Moore 2010). (Applied in chapters 3, 5 and 6).
10.
Texts are the starting point in the hermeneutic circle in intellectual history.
(Applied in chapter 5 and 6).
I will adhere to all of these recommendations to the extent possible in this small paper
except number 5 where I will be in tension with the SS method when I apply labels like
‘virtue-ethics’ tradition, and ‘moral-sense’ school to my subjects. Also, I will be taking off
my intellectual historian’s hat, and donning that of the cultural commentator in my
conclusions. Finally, limitations of length prohibit really dwelling in the richness of the
period and its debates and doing them justice as per recommendation 8 and, as to
‘literary elegance and sustained narrative rhythm’, well, one can but do one’s best.
Chapter 3 Historical context: 1798 - 1832
3.1 Introduction
This section of the paper will commence with an evocation of the times in which
Whately and the Noetics lived highlighting: their principal philosophical challenges, the
nature of God; political ones, the indivisibility of Church and State; and the practical
challenges these produced.
3.2 The times and their spirit
As discussed in the introduction, we are concerned with the period between the publication of
Malthus Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) and the proclamation of the Reform Act
(1832). This period has been called “the end of the beginning of modernity” (Gore 2005, p. 149).
In this brief sketch, our aim is to consider the Geistensgeschichten or ‘spirit of the times” as
defined and outlined previously in Blaug’s (1990) categorisation of approaches to the conduct
of economic history. I seek here to illustrate, what we call in contemporary parlance, the
zeitgeist. The mood, the tone, the intellectual concerns that would have been pertinent to a
group of Anglican divines, the Noetics, in the period here considered.
To summarise the historical backdrop: wars and revolutions across the Channel;
economic transitions and great flows of population into the industrial cities at home; all
put pressure on the extant institutions which were still broadly intact from the Glorious
Revolution of 1662. These Oxford Dons, elite members of the Anglican establishment
and esteemed political and religious (a distinction which could be regarded as
somewhat anachronistic) commentators, men were leaders of debate and shapers of
public opinion. Their role as leading educators in the most prestigious and powerful
educational institutions in the rhealm – the source of a large share of the country’s
political, spiritual and professional leaders – gave them wide influence. In the case of
Whately, Copleston and Senior, they were political actors as well. They can be regarded
as leading members of the ‘clerisy’, in Coleridge’s (1830) terms, his very concept likely
to have been based on observing them at work. In this role, they knew the centrality of
aligning any reform programme which persuaded them rationally, with the tenets of the
liberal theology which had emerged as a result of the British engagement with
Newtonian natural theology (A. Waterman 1991; Waterman 2008).
3.3 The indivisibility of Church and State in early modern
Britain
A succession of authors have drawn a religiously infused portrait of this part of the early to midnineteenth century Britain which had hitherto been drained of its religious colour (Clark 1985;
Hilton 1986; Mandler 1990; A.M.C. Waterman 1991b; Donald Winch 1996). There can be no
understanding of this period of the history of Britain without examining the role of the Church
in its parliamentary capacities (as the ‘Lords Spiritual’ in the Upper House), as well as its role in
the education of Statesmen and the elite, and thereby filtering the doctrines and ideas for
diffusion to the various orders of society. Coleridge described the elite who fulfilled this filtering
role as a clerisy, and, in this particular context, we mean real clerics not just those acting in loco
clerica8.
J.D. Clark emphasises the unities and coherences of the period from 1660-1832 and designates
it as “the long eighteenth century” (Clark 1985). Clark’s portrait presents the essential
dimensions of England in the period under examination as Anglican, aristocratic and
monarchical; an ancien regime which balanced upon the “middle ground of English life: that
form that presented itself as both constitutional and royalist, libertarian and stable, tolerant and
expressing religious orthodoxy, innovative and respectful of what was customary”9. The
intricacy of the relationship between the Church, the Parliament and the Crown, meant that any
calls for reform needed to recast a settlement between these three elements.
For the Tories in the Church of England, Jacobin impulses were doubly haunting. An
unresponsive and inefficient pastoral system, which failed to serve the needs of the population
in the emerging industrial cities, was exacerbated by the commonly-held belief among the
majority of Bishops, that the Church, regarded as a divinely ordained hierarchy, be defended at
all costs. Even modest reforms were greeted by most clergy, and particularly the mostly Tory
Bishops, as aimed at destroying Christianity and morality tout court. The risk of Jacobinism, had
seen vaste swathes of the middle and merchant class “rush back to their pews” (Clark 1985;
Hilton 1986).
The text of the day which best captures the tone and impending drama is the Black Book
published in 1820 and written by journalist John Wade. This polemic outlines the abuses of the
Church; its ineffectiveness; and the costs of its conservatism and resistance to reform:
To spare the rich and plunder the poor, is certainly not Christianity; it is more like
Church of Englandism, which, by monstrous union of Church and State, has perverted
the pure, simple, charitable faith of Christ into a tremendous engine of guilt and spiritual
extortion (Wade 1820, p. 315).
Wade’s second book, The Extraordinary Black Book in 1831, further incited calls for reform.
Shortly after its publication, the House of Lords (comprising a large number of Bishops) rejected
the second Reform Bill (which proposed a redistribution of votes from the ‘rotten boroughs’ to
the fast-growing industrial towns of the North). Jacobin risk flared into the Bristol Riots of 1831.
The crowd turned on the Palace of the Bishop of Bristol and burnt it to the ground. Whately,
then on his way to Dublin in his Bishops carriage, was attacked by the mob in these riots, surely
and event to focus the mind on the need for reform (de Giustino 1995; de Giustino 2003).
3.4 Which God?
As the image of God in a religious society changes, the world-view pivots and there are
implications for the intellectual paradigm in which political and social analysis is
conducted. The competing factions jostling for influence included the Noetics
(rationalists), Evangelicals (pietist), and the Philosophical Radials (athiests). The
Noetics were busy placing Newtonian natural theology and Aristotelian logic at the
service of the ‘moral sciences’. Their ‘watchmaker’ God was discernible from his great
creation; a lawmaker who set in train, vast, complex systems, like seasons and markets.
Understanding Providence meant leaving the master to his work, and recognising the
limits of human intervention. Morality for this group involved logic in reasoning, and
wise legislators ensuring fairness in the face of sectional interests, and the pursuit of
virtue by free, but logically and morally educated, individuals. A laissez faire of: free
trade; specialisation; division of labour; the Divine genius which turned the desire for
social success, with the innate moral and benevolent sense, into public benefit from
private striving.
The Philosophical Radicals were avowed atheists or distant desists. The other religious
faction was the Evangelicals. These more emotively religious folk, were moved by a
Jesus who suffered on the Cross on our behalf and by the potential for redemption by
atonement for ‘the Fall’; a movement of personal piety, not the study of impersonal
forces (Hilton 1986). Our ‘Oxford economic apologists’, the Noetics, did not chime with
the “dominant evangelical ethos of the day” and this cost them influence (Hilton 1986, p.
49). Whately, in particular, did not subscribe to this Augustinian ‘original sin’ end of the
theological spectrum. He took the most optimistic view of the prospects for human
society and moral progress in the presence of increasing wealth (Hilton 1986, p52-55).
3.5 Political programmes – three types of radicals against
the Tory’s
England in the period under examination was under the shadow of various threats: possibile
revolutionary contagion from France; economic instability, driven in part by wars and
revolutions and the resultant inflation, but also by the cataclysmic economic transformation, we
now call the ‘industrial revolution’; and a bellicose Napoleon threatening to invade Britain.
Religious conviction among the privileged classes increased in response, as did the fear of
radicalism among the lower classed (Hilton 1986; Mandler 1990; A. Waterman 1991; Donald
Winch 1996)10.
The fall of both the monarchy and the Church in France weighed on the minds of the
men who ran both in England. It made them sensitive to the benefits and risks in: preemptive constitutional reform; increasing the welfare of the ‘lower orders’ of society;
and expanding education for the broader populace. The risks inherent in the excesses,
inefficiencies and perceived corruption of the Anglican Church were significant.
As part of the intellectual establishment, the Noetics were the Coleridgian clerisy, an
active intellectual class contesting reform programmes. Conservative, liberal and radical
schools of thought struggled for supremacy and the adoption of their programmes in
the court of public opinion. (Allen 1985, pp. 95-96).
Those calling for reform were called ‘Radicals’. But there were at least three main types
of Radicals: the parliamentary radicals (to which group the Noetics belonged), the
popular radicals and the philosophical radicals (both of which the Noetics opposed in no
uncertain measure). The parliamentary radicals were, in Whately’s day, led by Earl
Grey. Following in the tradition established by Charles James Fox, they called for
measured electoral reform focused on the land and capital owning middle-class. The
popular radicals argued for the expansion of the franchise to include artisans and the
labouring classes. Their support in the early nineteenth century was limited and
subdued by harsh repression. The Philosophical radicals included James Mill, Jeremy
Bentham, David Ricardo and JS Mill, and agreed with the parliamentary radicals on
electoral reform, but focused their attention on legislative reform on utilitarian lines.
The opposition to all reform came from the Tories who sought to preserve the ancien regime
tout court. They believed that accession to any of the demands would result in a slippery-slope
to the sort of chaos seen in France. They called for the Church, and the Aristocracy, to be
defended at all costs as a divinely ordained natural order. In these debates, the Evangelicals
were divided.
The formation of government by the Whigs under Earl Grey’s leadership (1830), saw
new legislation presented to Parliament enunciating reform of the electoral rolls and
the end of religious discrimination11. The final demise of the old system was swift. In
1832 the ancien regime in which the Noetics were powerful figures came to its end as
much at their hands as any. This expansion of the franchise and rights, destroyed for all
time the unique privileges of the aristocracy and the clerisy.
3.6 Economic reform – Corn Laws, Poor Laws and
Currency Wars
The other great programmes for reform were economic in nature. These reforms were
driven by knowledge of Adam Smith’s science of the wise legislator as outlined in An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the WON (1776). It entailed opposition to the
mercantilist policies, like the Corn Laws, which served to protect domestic corn and
cereal growers from less expensive foreign competition12. David Ricardo’s doctrine of
comparative advantage was important here. Despite being reformist on electoral
matters, the Whig government of Earl Grey declined the call to repeal the Corn Laws and
they were finally repealed by the Duke of Wellington in 1846.
The other major economic reform proposal driven by the Whigs was the amendment of
the Poor Laws. This will be examined as a collaborative project of the Noetics in chapter
5, section 5.8.
Chapter 4 Richard Whately
“Whateley was beyond doubt the leading spirit of that rising party which never
rose, but which for a short time appeared likely to do for the Church what Earl Grey
had done for the State”.
Overton (1894)
4.1 Introduction
Richard Whately (1787-1863) was a leading light of his times13. He was a wide-ranging
thinker who made contributions to fields of knowledge, including logic, epistemology,
rhetoric , moral philosophy and political economy based on Aristotelian logic and
premises; a reformist educator in Oxford and Ireland; an Anglican priest who
ministered throughout his life; a widely-read populariser of economics, logic and moral
philosophy; a founder of political economy as a University discipline at Oxford and
Trinity College, Dublin; a pioineer of social science and statistical collections; a
theologian and, finally, the Archbishop of Dublin from 1831 until his death. In this
section, we will consider Whately’s origins, character, education and career.
In the public rhealm J.S. Mill was so impressed with his contribution and intellectual
stature that in 1846 he urged the Edinburgh Review publish “a general estimate of the
man and his writings….W[hately] is certainly a very remarkable and even eminent man,
and one whose merits and faults are both very important to be pointed out” (Mill
quoted in Rashid 1977 p147). I will endeavour to building on the existing secondary
literature, contribute to this portrait of eminence, merit and fault.
4.2 Origins
Richard Whately was the fourth son of Joseph Whately of Nonsuch Park, Surrey and
Jane Plumer. He was born on 1 February 1787 in the home of his maternal Uncle,
William Plumer, in Cavendish Square. His family tree contained its share of vicars and
country parsons, including his father. Joseph Whately was also a lecturer at Gresham
College a centre of new ideas and debate in enlightenment Britain. Whately began life as
a “puny sickly child” so delicate that he was not expected to live (Tuckwell 1909, p. 51).
Despised by his elder brothers “as a sort of changeling”, he was left to his own devices
as he grew, displaying great curiosity, eager immersion in books and “theoretic flights in
ethics and politics” as well as stunning ‘feats of mental arithmetic’, which may have
pointed to some aspergic tendencies14. The penchant for “castle-building”, speculation
on abstract subjects and “Utopian schemes for ameliorating the world” and the conduct
of government was the result of highly developed powers of concentration to which he
believed “he owed everything in his life” (Tuckwell 1909, p. 51).
4.3 Character
Whately, “acute in mind, resolute in temper, robust in body, in society genial to the point
of boisterousness” was known, in the Oxford period, for striding through the fields,
dressed in white, with his dog ‘Sailor’ in tow, stunning passers-by (especially undergraduates caught in the company of ladies) as the well-trained Sailor, dropped from
trees into the water (Tuckwell 1909, p. 59). “In Oxford of his day Whately’s was a name
to mention with bated breath” opines the author of the entry in the National Dictionary
of Biography (Rigg 1885). “Whately’s presence was enough to discomfort the polite,
anger the complacent, and embarrass the bashful” chimes another (de Giustino 1995, p.
220). He has variously been described as “brash”, “arrogant”, “alarming”, “provocative”,
“forensic”, “tender” and “optimistic”15. The elements of his character that are certain
and agreed are his forensic intellect, powers of concentration, abstraction and
racionation; his scrupulousness, integrity and consistency of position; and kindness
(Tuckwell 1909, p. 62).
His harsh manners and brusqueness with those of inferior intellect were considered
arrogant by some. His highly “analytical, rational-type, not tempered by any sympathy
with an emotional religion of any kind” (Overton 1894, p. 118) was considered much
more like Bentham and Mill than to the rest of his Oxford colleagues (A. Waterman
1991, p. 207). The Mandler (1990) reading is of a fundamentally optimistic belief in
human nature and society, and the power of providence to liberate the good for
mankind through increasing wealth as long as it follows ethical principles (Mandler,
1990, p81-103).
Other more serious critiques made of him in his day include the charge by many of his
colleagues that he was “more provocative than profound”(de Giustino 2003, p. 56).
Some regarded him as more suited to “destructive rather than constructive
work”(Overton 1894, p. 118). Others, particularly those on the other-side to Whately on
the issue of Church reform, saw him and his Liberal politics as “opportunistic”(Corsi
1988, p. 93). Whately is also recorded as lacking the moral weight of his protégé,
Thomas Arnold. Overton (1894), although not a contemporary, after examination of the
biographical records of both men, concludes that Arnold was “far inferior intellectually
(as it seems to me), but far superior in moral weight” (Overton 1894, p. 120).
Those close to him who knew Whately well record a character who balanced his
extreme acuity of mind with great tenderness in family-life, to his life-long friends; and
great fidelity to his religious faith and the practice of Christian kindness.
To give the last word to one of Whately’s closest friends, Thomas Arnold: “Now I am
sure that in point of real essential holiness, so far as man can judge of man, there does
not live a truer Christian than Whately; and it does grieve me most deeply to hear
people speak of him as of a dangerous and latitudinarian character, because in him the
intellectual part of his nature keeps pace with the spiritual – instead of being left, as the
Evangelicals leave it, a fallow field for all unsightly weeds to flourish in. He is a truly
great man – in the highest sense of the word – and in the safety and welfare of the
Protestant Church in Ireland depend in any degree on human instruments, none could
be found I verily believe, in the whole empire, so likely to maintain it”(Fitch 1901, p.
270).
4.4 Education and the Oriel Noetics
Whately cannot be understood in isolation from the community of scholars that both
formed and sustained him in his intellectual endeavours: the community of Oriel
College, Oxford.16 Under the leadership of first Edward Copleston (Fellow, 1789-1814;
Provost 1814-1828; Bishop 1828-1849) and then Whately himself (Fellow 1811-31),
Oriel College was a hive of intellectual industry, leadership and culture.
From his production of entire shelves of books on a wide array of subjects, some two
million words, we can infer that Whately was well-served in his educational formation.
Near age ten he was placed in a private school near Bristol. The school regime
strengthened his constitution and subdued his precocity. At Oxford he had the good
fortune to have been discovered by Copleston as teacher and tutor. For the first time,
Whately found someone who could understand his mental acuity in all its scope,
appreciate his abstract imaginative powers, and “draw out the powers of his mind”
(Tuckwell 1909, p. 55). Whately would always give to Copleston the credit for the best
of his education.
Whately matriculated from Oriel College on the 6th of April 1805 and graduated with a
B. A. (double major second class) in 1808. This second class result was deeply
disappointing to him, despite being regarded as the fault of the examiners (Tuckwell
1909, p. 56). He did, however, win the prize for the English essay, “The Arts in the
Cultivation of Which the Ancients were less Successful than the Moderns”. The end of
his formal professional education was marked by his election, in 1811, as Fellow of Oriel
College. This was, in his view, “the great triumph of his life” (Tuckwell 1909, p. 57). He
continued to study theology and, like most Oxford dons of the period, he took Holy
Orders in 1811, and in due course, the degrees of Bachelor of Divinity and Doctor of
Divinity.
4.5 Whately’s career
As a Fellow of Oriel, Whately first came to prominence through writing Christian
apologetics and on Church government. His first well known piece was an anonymous
tract, a witty Christian-apologist challenge to Hume and the other extreme skeptics of
religion of the day, Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (1819), which
compared the scant evidence for miracles with the scant evidence anyone who speaks of
Napoleon has of his existence. He published influential reviews of Jane Austen’s work in
the Quarterly Review in 182117. In lauding her realism, social commentary and capacity
to capture the spirit and sensibility of the times, he sends us reaching for the pages of
Austen’s novels for clues to understand the society he lived in, as well as his views on
moral education and the development of moral imagination. Whately celebrated the
legitimacy of the novel as a genre. He argued that imaginative literature, especially
narrative, was more valuable than history or biography. The novel, as pursued by
Austen, offers profound insights into general human nature and experience thereby
expanding the reader’s moral imagination.
In 1820 he met his own life’s companion, his wife Elizabeth. After their marriage in
1822, they and returned to residence at Oxford where he continued on the theme of
Church governance delivering the Brampton Lectures On the Use and Abuse of Party
Spirit in Matters of Religion18. In 1823 they moved to Halesworth in Suffolk. Here he
acquitted his parish duties, which were not over-burdening, with more than customary
consideration. In 1825 he returned his residence again to Oxford as the principal of St.
Alban Hall. His head filled with plans for reform, particularly the centrality of teaching
logic and rhetoric as central discipline of the University curriculum and in the formation
of able minds, he succeeded in this task, with the assistance of his then friend and
protégé, J.H. Newman (Tuckwell 1909).
Oxford was the perfect soil for this “eccentric among eccentrics” to drive his and
Copleston’s vision, of what was possible for Oxford, into existence. Whately was a
brilliant and enthusiastic teacher (Tuckwell 1909; Akenson 1981). He knew he was
teaching the statesmen and professionals of tomorrow and that ‘forming their minds’
was forming the future. He avoided dogmatism and employed the Socratic method by
“stimulus and suggestion”, aiming to “elicit the learner’s powers” (Tuckwell 1909). It
was said of Whately that “no Don was ever less Donnish” due to the oddity in his
manners and habits, and his defiance of convention. He is included in Annan’s study of
the great Oxford dons of the nineteenth century, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics, and
Geniuses (Annan 1999, pp. 40; 45-46). This un-conventionality increased rather than
diminished his influence. Of the Oriel Common Room it was said that it “stinks of
logic”(Tuckwell 1909, p. 59). It was here that Whately’s “cold, penetrating intellect” and
passionate reformist views, found their best expression. In this milieu, and wherever
else Church reformers congregated, in the first three decades of the nineteenth century,
Whately was afforded the audience of an “oracle” (Overton 1894, p. 119).
With time and maturity, his concerns and published writing moved beyond Christian
apologetics and Church governance. His contribution on logic first appeared as an
article in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (1826) and was ultimately published as a
stand-alone treatise with numerous editions of this text. It was read by hundreds of
thousands (Akenson 1981). Elements of Logic became a landmark piece of work in
Britain and the United States where it gave great impetus to the study of logic. J.S. Mill
remarked that Whately had “done more than any other person to restore this study
[Logic] to the rank from which it had fallen in the estimation of the cultivated class in
our country…..” (Mill quoted in Rashid 1977, p148).
Whately also contributed an article to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana entitled Rhetoric
which was also adapted into a book, Elements of Rhetoric, published in 1828. In 1831
Whately was elected to the recently established Drummond professorship of Political
Economy at Oxford in succession to his protégé Nassau Senior. The lectures delivered as
part of his duties, Introductory Lectures (1832) were highly influential and their impact
will be explored later in this narrative.
The economic and political debates of the day have been regarded by Moore & White
(2009) as a contest between two axes: the Christchurch based Charles Lloyd, who had a
great influence on Peel, (the Lloyd-Peel axis), and their combatants, the Oriel team
comprising, Copleston, Whately and Senior (the Noetics). It was in these debates, and
during this period, that Whately came to the attention of the Foxite Liberals of Holland
House “that busy and witty conservatory of liberal opinions” (de Giustino 2003, p227).
After the 1830 establishment of the Whig led Government, many of Whately’s Oxford
students won junior offices with the Whigs (Mandler, 1990). The Foxite Liberals
believed in the abolition of slavery, the extension of civil rights, Catholic emancipation
and religious toleration, improvements in the penal code (Whately’s was particularly
passionate about the end of Transportation) and Poor Law reform. All ideas Whately
both subscribed to, and promoted in his writing, teaching and preaching.
When the Grey government got to work on the reform of the franchise, it was the Lords
Spiritual who blocked the proposed legislation several times. (Ultimately culminating in
the Bristol Riots in which the mob attacked Whately’s carriage near Birmingham). The
Whigs planned to slowly change the character of the House of Lords by adding more
liberal Bishops to its ranks. This was no easy task given that most potential candidates
for Bishoprics were Tories, and, those few of a more liberal persuasion, often proved to
be unsuitable for other reasons, infirmity, age or lack of conscientiousness. Lord
Melbourne was head to remark on the news of the passing of a Bishop “Not another
Bishop dead!”– a far cry from the most famous exclamation in British history about
another Bishop, at another time (de Giustino 1995)19.
Added to the Whigs’s challenge of finding a healthy, scrupulous, liberal, potential
Bishop, was the need to find someone who could cope with the exigencies of Ireland;
Dublin was a Tory stronghold and the “Irish question” was one of the most important
political challenges of the century. The Earl Grey led Government wanted a real
reformer; someone capable of improving the tense situation: “If the constitution
required them occasionally to place men on episcopal thrones, the Whigs required
prelates to make the political and religious establishment, more rational, less expensive,
and somewhat more responsive to public opinion” (de Giustino 2003, p225). They had
found their man in Whately.
Several prominent Whigs of Whately’s acquaintance promoted him on intellectual
grounds, for they too were devotees of the new discipline of political economy and
admired his free-wheeling intellect. Lord Brougham recalled that he promoted
Whately’s appointment by recommending one of his books to Premier Lord Earl Grey,
who as a result gave his recommendation to Whately with “perfect confidence” and
looked forward to "sincere, zealous co-operation . . . in carrying into effect such reforms
as may be conducive to the Church itself20”. (Grey quoted in de Giustino, 2003). They
also promoted him on grounds of character. Whately was known to believe that the first
duty of a public official was scrupulousness and efficiency (de Giustino 2003).
News of his appointment to the Bishopric of Dublin was met with alarm and dismay on
both sides of the religious and political divide. The Tories thought him a Catholic-loving
latitudinarian, given his views on state endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy, and
free religious instruction; the Catholics thought they’d been sent a rabid pugilist. The
appointment of Whately as Archbishop had, in fact, been a shrewd and measured choice.
In fact, JS Mill was amazed they had made such a splendid choice, “One of the most
progressif men in this country is Dr Whately, lately appointed Archbishop of Dublin;
which is in itself equalent to a revolution in the Church (Mill 1831 as quoted in Rashid
1977 p149).
The Dublin period was not as happy for Whately as his Oxford years (Akenson 1981).
He was not well suited to the formality and convention of a divided Ireland.
Intellectually however, it was productive. He published only one course of economics of
his own, but one of his first acts was to endow a chair of political economy at Trinity
College. Established in 1832, the Whately Chair was modelled on the Drummond Chair
the founding of which he had negotiated, and been the second to fill. The Whately Chair
and Trinity College became the intellectual base for the rise of the economics discipline
in Ireland. There is a significant literature which traces this lineage and development
and the influence of the holders of the Whately Chair on Irish life and thought (Black
1945, 1947a, 1947b; Boylan and Foley, 1992; Goldstrom, 1996)21.
In Dublin Whately concentrated many years of study into an annotated edition of
Bacon’s Essays. In 1859 he produced an annotated edition of Paley’s Moral Philosophy.
This work was another particularly influential piece of scholarship to the debates of the
times and we will examine it later in the narrative.
In addition to writing directly for educated audiences, Whately also played a major role
in primary and secondary education in Ireland, creating the first joint Catholic and
Protestant Commissions of education with joint text books, including Catechism
(Akenson 1981). In fact, he became not only the head schoolmaster of the Irish people,
but through his school texts one of the chief instructors of the English working classes
as well (Akenson 1981, p. 172). As a populariser of economics education he was
extremely successful. His books were published in multiple editions, and translated into
sixteen languages, including Maori. Millions of school children, working class people and
others were introduced to the tenets of political economy through his work (Rashid
1977, p154-155).
Chapter 5 Whately’s Noetic intellectual
inheritance
5.1 Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to illuminate the intellectual milieu in which Whately
thrived; the Oriel Noetics and Oxford. Several things will be considered: the derivation
of the moniker ‘noetic’; the members that constituted the group; a review the major
themes in their moral philosophy, illuminating their shared mental universe, and the
ideas that underpinned the development of their political economy and the reform
programmes they initiated; and an examination of one of these collective reform
programmes. This analysis will confirm that the Noetics were, like Adam Smith, both
mainstream political economists and bearers of the virtue ethics tradition. Finally, the
chapter will conclude by demonstrating that the Noetics can be regarded as a ‘scientific
community’ in the Kuhnian sense (Kuhn 1969).
5.2 Meaning of ‘Noetic’
To the student of Aristotle’s Ethics, as the Oriel men were in no small degree, a ‘noetic’
is a man who develops, through exercise, his highest mental faculties. There is no doubt
that the development of the capacity to reason and think was at the heart of the Noetic
programme, and framed each of their intellectual and cultural endeavours. The name
was in common use during their lifetimes and has been confirmed in contemporaneous
sources (Tuckwell 1909, p. 2).
5.3 Membership of the group
In terms of who was in the group, Tuckwell includes: Eveleigh, (Provost 1781-1814);
Copleston; Whately; Arnold, (Fellow 1814-1819); Hampden, (Fellow 1814-1817);
Hawkins, (Fellow 1813-1828); (Provost, 1828-1874); Baden Powell, Degree, 1817. Died
1860; and Blanco White, Fellow 1826. Died 1841. To this group I would add Whately’s
protégé, Nassau Senior. Tuckwell does not include him as he was never a Fellow of Oriel
College, but, in terms of intellectual contribution, as Whately’s collaborator on Elements
of Logic (1828), and as his nominee for the inaugural Drummond Chair in Political
Economy at Oxford, he should definitely be in the frame.
It is appropriate to treat Whately as the lead spokesman of a group endeavour. The
nature of the intellectual product of the Noetics was collective. Some of Whately’s
writing was the product of decade long conversations, a point he made himself,
particularly in respect of his most influential work Elements of Logic (1826 ). While this
bore his name, he claimed its very existence was impossible to imagine, in the absence
of formation by, and continued dialogue with, Edward Copleston. Whatever merit
belonged to his very popular book, “at least half belonged to Copleston”(Whately 1826,
p. iii).
5.4 Beliefs: Reformist clerics, faith and reason
In terms of their religious faith, Moore (2009, p3), describes the Noetics as
“unconventional reformist clerics… [who] deployed logical processes to bolster their
religious beliefs, which they held in an unsentimental fashion, and thereby to some
extent practised that most contradictory of creeds, a logical faith”. Although the Noetics
sought to preserve continuity with the pre-enlightenment social orders and traditions,
where moral development was an essential pursuit of all classes, they accepted that
religion could not be at odds with science. These “clerical economists” (Hilton 1986,
p49), were men devoted to two masters: faith and reason. They “had to overcome a
widespread conviction that political economy was not only dry and repulsive but also
wicked and dangerous…threatening to open up Jacobinical enquiries into thrones and
altars” (Hilton 1986, p. 49).
5.5 The Noetics as a clerisy – filters of suitable knowledge
The primary intellectual challenge for thinkers in this religion-infused period is to
ensure that the canonical texts of late eighteenth century economic thought (especially
Smith, 1776) could be read as congruent with the theological assumptions which
prevailed in the contemporary Anglican orthodoxy (Waterman 1991). The Noetics
played the role of a ‘clerisy’, to employ again the Coleridgian trope. Coleridge’s
conception involved the learned of all denominations:
“which constitute the civilization of a country, as well as the Theological Under
the name of Theology, or Divinity, were contained the interpretation of
languages; the conservation and tradition of past events; the momentous epochs,
and revolutions of the race and nation; the continuation of the records; logic,
ethics, and the determination of ethical science, in application to the rights and
duties of men in all their various relations, social and civil; and lastly, the groundknowledge, the prima scientia as it was named, -- PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine
and discipline of ideas (Coleridge 1830, p47).
In this capacity, the Noetics were the arbiters of what would pass as knowledge and
how it would be transmitted to the elites, and then into the broader social landscape
5.6 Moral philosophy and natural theology
I suggest that there are five fundamental points of natural theology and Christian moral
philosophy that underwrote the Noetic political economy, which was a sub-strand of
what become known as “Christian Political Economy” (D Winch 1996; A. Waterman
1991; Hilton 1986). Each of these points which were embraced by Whately as a Noetic,
are discussioned in sub-section 5.6.1 to 5.6.5 inclusive.
5.6.1 Application of Newtonian science to moral questions
They were inheritors and proselytisers of the application of Newtonian natural theology
which, unlike in France, was a project “not perceived as subversive” (Berlin quoted in
Waterman 2008, p42). Newton, a devoted Christian, an enthusiastic student of scripture
(and alchemy!), imparted a cosmology which confirmed the existence of a God of first
causes; a cosmology where the laws of nature were the laws of God. Whereas in Catholic
countries, the metaphysics of Aquinas provided the intellectual machinery for the
formulation of economic thinking, the transition by the Scottish and English to
Newtonian natural philosophy and natural theology, allowed political economy to find a
path to establishment acceptance, with science as an ally not an enemy (Waterman
2008):“For not only does natural science demonstrate the unity, omnipotence and
omniscience and goodness of God…. It disposes us to wonder and revelation” (Newton,
as quoted in Waterman, p127). How attractive for a Jacobin haunted elite - a scientific
commendation of wealth by free exchange and God!
5.6.2 The existence of God: Argument from design.
Another essential component of the intellectual inheritance of the Noetics was the
teleological argument for the existence of God provided by Archdeacon William Paley
and Bishop Sumner amongst others22. God’s existence in this apology is grounded in the
evidence around us of his subtle craftsmanship. This is a remote deistic God, first cause
and creator of laws in which the complex world around us evolves, in which the
intricacy of the social world are revealed as the masterwork alongside that of nature.
This was an attractive half-way house God for a scientifically, rationalist yet believing
people. Paley and Sumner’s writing played a critical role in educating the minds and
morals, in politics and philosophy, of a generation of late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century members of the clerisy23.
While the Noetics valued Paley’s broader contribution, on other matters of moral
philosophy, they were more critical. In particular Paley’s denial of a moral sense they
regarded as error. This is an important dimension of Whately’s contribution - the
correction of Paley - to thwart its application by the utilitarians. We will explore this
further in section Chapter 6, section 6.6.
5.6.3 ‘Butlerian self-love’
The third element of Christian Moral Philosophy we will examine here is the important
role of the social benefits of self-love in solving the paradox laid down by Mandeville in
the Fable of the Bees – Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Mandeville had, as a rhetorical
device, created a conflict between the creators of wealth by commercial exchange and
the strictures of Christian morality. For this perceived paradox to exist, Christian
morality must exclude self-love which it patently does not (Waterman 2008). Joseph
Butler solved this riddle in his sermon (1726) which showed that private endeavours
and public good could coincide: “self-love is one chief security of our right behaviour
towards society,” and that “under providence there is seldom any inconsistency
between what is called our duty and what is called our interest” (Butler 1736, p. 27).
Smith’s TMS (1759) became the most influential of all the attempts to rise to the
rhetorical challenge set by Mandeville by employing these foundational concepts of
natural theology provided the theological and philosophical moorings for the WON
(Waterman, 2008).
5.6.4 Responses to Malthus theodicy
Malthus, another “man of the cloth”, wrote for polemical effect. He portrayed a world in
which human fertility was set against land scarcity; where rising population would
doom the lower orders of society to misery or vice. For the higher orders, life may no
longer be “nasty, brutish and short”, but for the poor, increased population with less to
go round would keep them in Hobbesian darkness. Malthus framed the negative
consequences rather than the sunlit uplands of trade and commerce creating quite the
storm (Winch 1996). Only an evil God would allow more children to be born than
providence could provide for24. The furore which erupted infected the perceptions of
economists more broadly with enduring consequences. It was at this moment that a
cultural fault-line between the Romantics, (as represented by Southey, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Carlyle and, later, Dickens, Ruskin and Morris) and the political
economists appeared. The Romantics framed it as “the economists against the human
beings” (Southey quoted in Waterman 2008, p131; Winch 1996, p402, 418).
Malthus was a better economist than he was a theologian, and the more theologically
able rallied to save Christian Political Economy (Waterman 2008). Paley was one of the
first to solve this theodicy riddle implicit in Malthus work25. He argued that population
pressure could be reconciled with Butlerian “self-love” where duty and interest nearly
always coincided, and ‘moral restraint’ could provide a Christian solution that would
lead to higher survival rates. Paley and Sumner’s (1818) use of Butler’s ‘discipline and
trial’ and ‘moral restraint’ arguments, as the path to escape misery and vice, were used
by Malthus in his 1817 revision of the Essay. Copleston, founder of the Oriel Noetics,
used these themes, in his letters to Peel on the Poor Laws in 1819 (Waterman 1991).
5.6.5 Moral sense school
Man not only desires to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that which is the natural
and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be
hateful; but to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred.
Adam Smith, TMS, (1790) p113-114.
The Noetics were inheritors of the moral sense school26. Smith and Hume, influenced by
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, are the best known members of this school which holds
that (i) human nature is grounded in a ‘moral sense’ prior to reason, and (ii) that it is
these natural moral sentiments which provide the basis for ordering human social
behaviour.
In terms of moral theory, the moral sense school hold that innate and pre-cognitive
social sentiments should not be supressed. Rather they need to be encouraged and
cultivated in order to be fully revealed. Perceiving humans as innately social and as
other centred as they are self-centred (self-love as well as love thy neighbour),
education involves an ongoing development and refinement of these innate social
sensibilities.
5.7 Smithian Virtue Ethics
The following section sets out how the Noetics inherited the virtue-ethics tradition from
both Smith as well as from Christian teaching. It illustrates my contention that Whately
is, like Smith, a mainstream political economist and a bearer of the virtue-ethics
tradition. Smith, Whately, and the Noetics, see humans as profoundly social, and that
social life flows from the social sentiments of benevolence and fellow feeling, as much
from the exigencies of survival. Whately defined a human as an animal which converses
and trades (Whately 1832, p. 41).
The virtue-ethics tradition is a complete moral theory that commenced with Plato and
Aristotle, was inherited by the Romans and Stoics and was formally embraced by
Christianity in the 13th Century mainly through the writing of Albert the Great (12001280) and his more famous student Aquinas (1225-1274). The foundation-insight is the
same as that which animates the moral sense school: that human nature is innately
social. The virtue- ethics tradition, however, is more explicitly Aristotelian, and departs
from a definition of the purpose, the telos, of a human life. The purpose is to contribute
to be good and to contribute to the development of a polity that pursues and achieves
the good. To do this, humans, as individuals, must develop characteristics that aid in the
achievement of that purpose; “excellences”or “virtues”. A virtue is “an excellence which
aids in the achievement of the common human social purpose”27. Character is developed
through habit forming practice so that these characteristics, virtues, become innate.
Important recent scholarship has reclaimed Smith as a bearer of the virtue-ethics
tradition (McCloskey 2008; Phillipson 2010). In Adam Smith, the Last of the Former
Virtue Ethicists McCloskey (2008) argues against the picture of Adam Smith as an
economist in what she calls “the anti-ethical sense”; that “Smith was a virtue ethicist
first and last” (McCloskey 2008, p. 65)28. The pursuit of wealth alone is not sanctioned
by Smith as a moral code, he describes the perfectly virtuous man as one who acts
according to “the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence”
(Smith as quoted in McCloskey 2008 p51).
The WON, McCloskey asserts, is a letter to a wise (or virtuous) legislator with ‘fit to
purpose’ rhetoric. The legislator’s role is not to teach morality, but to create a system of
laws of freedoms which enable the population to pursue wealth and happiness as
individuals with access to enlightenment and education (McCloskey 2008). This
complements the TMS (first published 1759), which was written to understand what
the moral development in societies depends upon.
Phillipson’s (2010) thesis is that Adam Smith can only be understood in the context of
the intellectual project which dominated his life, the development of a complete ‘Science
of Man’29. Phillipson argues that the TMS was written to provide the first part of the
analysis of: “how men and women satisfy their moral needs and learn to live at ease
with themselves in the world around them, a theory of sociability as well as ethics,
providing what was in effect, an account of the moral economy of a recognisably
modern civil society” (Phillipson 2010, pp. 2-3). Understanding Smith’s approach to self
and society are keys to understanding his purpose. To see Smith in this light is to see
that “the human beings who inhabit the types of societies about which he writes are
driven by moral, aesthetic as well as material needs” (Phillipson 2010, p. 7). Smith is
exploring the “human personality, and the customs habits and institutions which made
political life and the progress of civilisation possible, could be explained in terms of the
imaginative and sympathetic response of an indigent species to the never ending
pressures of need” (Phillipson 2010, p. 279).
Smith is a virtue ethicist as he examines the process by which we acquire the senses of
propriety, justice, political obligation and beauty, upon which our skills in the arts of
social intercourse and our character depend. In doing so, he had introduced into his
analysis, a simple observation about the principles of human nature that had been
ignored by modern philosophy:
“that man’s natural indigence had somehow gone hand in hand with a love of
improvement which he would exercise whenever he felt secure enough to do
so…. it had allowed him to suggest that a reasonably stable society will follow a
material, moral, spiritual and political path of development, that was more
natural and more secure than one which was determined by the whims of its
sovereigns” (Phillipson 2010, p. 280).
The TMS offered a powerful conjecture on the nature of the civilising process, how
citizens set out to satisfy their moral needs and the way in which some acquire that
“sense of fitness and ethical beauty which makes it possible to aspire to a life of virtue”
(Phillipson 2010, p. 157).
This picture of Smith promoting moral outcomes is not in any way in conflict with the
Smith in the WON who promotes commercial society as the means to bring prosperity
which will aid moral improvement through liberating people from the pressing
demands of survival. Phillipson and McCloskey are clear Smith’s oeuvre is a testament
that human maturity relies upon the development of moral imagination at the
individual and collective level. The combination of Smith’s works explains the process
that best frees people from pressing need: a commercial society. This synthetic picture
of Smith promoting commercial society as the means to bring about moral outcomes is, I
would argue, the Noetic reading. For the Noetics, there was no Das Adam Smith problem.
In conclusion, while I agree with McCloskey’s conviction that Smith is a virtue ethicist
but he is not “the last of the former”. Whately, and his sometimes collaborator and
sometimes mouthpiece, Nassau Senior, were mainstream economists who nested
economics within a broader ethical framework focused on human development in a
social setting. In other words, Whately was clearly of the moral sense school as well as a
virtue ethicist. There are many examples in his writings to demonstrate that claim, and
these will be examined in the Chapter which follows.
5.8 The Noetic method applied: The Poor Laws
Whately and the Noetics responded to these intellectual currents in three main
collaborative projects: they increased the study of logic in the Oxford curriculum to
improve rigour (Moore & White 2009, pp. 3-17); they synthesized the moral philosophy
of the age (Waterman 1991 p206-215, 2008, p128, 132; Winch 1996; Oslington 2001,
p838-849); and they contributed to the reform of the Poor Laws (Offer 2006). For the
purpose of this paper, I will use the Noetic contribution to Poor Law reform as an
example to illustrate the application of the Noetic method to a joint endeavour.
The Noetics are credited with being a driving force, in the reform of the Poor Laws
(Mandler 1990 p82; Hilton 1986). Copleston had written a widely influential published
letter to Peel on the state and need for reform of the Poor Laws to cope with the
changing economic conditions and to update the system which had its origins in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some parishes were being bankrupted by the
demand.
The Noetic conception, summarised by Offer (2006 p285), was that the provision of
relief should be done in such a way that it did not exacerbate the situation by
encouraging the able bodied to take it. They came early to the ‘principle of less
eligibility’. The Noetics saw the opportunity of improvement in the hands of the
individual who could pursue virtue (not happiness, or solely material goods). For them
the presence of scarcity encouraged prudence (delayed child-rearing), industry (work).
The accumulation of wealth would enable benevolence. Suffering could be overcome
through duty and virtue.
Copleston’s letters and behind the scene consultations were highly influential. Whately
also contributed letters and guidance to the reform agenda and promoted Nassau Senior
as the Noetic representative in the event of the establishment of a Commission of
inquiry. Following the Swing Riots, the Earl Grey Government set up the Royal
Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws (1832) and Nassau Senior was
appointed to the Commission. Edwin Chadwick, a leading Benthamite was the Secretary
and John Bird Sumner another member.
The Commission took a year to write its report. It painted generous outdoor relief to the
able-bodied as the tap-root of imprudence and dependency (Offer 2006 p286). Removal
was of paramount importance and it recommended sweeping changes to the eligibility
and management processes. The recommendations passed easily through Parliament,
as they were supported by both the Whigs and the Tories, gaining Royal Assent in 1834.
Until Mandler (1990) revised the historical record, it had been considered a triumph of
the Benthamite agenda. Mandler claims, however, it was more a case of a Noetic tail
wagging the Benthamite dog.
Once Whately went to Ireland, and saw conditions there, far worse than those in Britain,
we see a spectrum of views emerge among the Noetics. Whately argued that in the
absence of any demand for labour, there is no threat of work being discouraged by the
provision of relief. On the contrary, relief is the only thing that will keep people alive.
“the population are, not from any want of their own, in permanent need” (Whately
quoted in Mandler 1990, p101). Senior held the original line. Whately’s Irish experience
changed his attitude on the conditions in which poor people were responsible for their
own circumstances; when living virtuously would not trump destitution. The aim of
policy should be to maintain the incentive to improve where this was possible (Offer
2006, p283-302).
5.9 Noetic Political Economy – A mainstream economic
school of thought
Having considered both their shared intellectual inheritance, as well as their shared
projects, we can regard the Noetics as mainstream, and as a formal school in the sense
defined by Kuhn (1969) and Lakatos (1973).
The Noetics who were occupied with political economy as one of their particular
contributions were Edward Copleston, Whately and Nassau Senior. Each have been
included in surveys of the development of economics in the Britain of the period. You
couldn’t get more mainstream than Oxford, in the early nineteenth century. The Noetics
formed part of what Coleridge (1830) described as the clerisy. To a student of history
and culture, the Noetics are the mainstream. However, identifying the Noetic political
economists as mainstream on the doctrinal record requires an examination beyond a
tightly drawn doctrinal history of the discipline common to most textbooks. Recent
scholarship in the history of economic thought has, however, illuminated the diversity
of views and voices that comprised this three decade period between the publication of
Malthus’ first version of the Essay on Population (1798) and the end of the ancien
regime, which also parallels, the rise of the Philosophical Radicals (James Mill, David
Ricardo and J.S. Mill).
Christian Political Economy, while it did not win the day in the canon of the doctrines
that we pass on in undergraduate economics, was certainly a mainstream set of
opinions (Hilton 1986; Waterman 1991; Winch 1996). Reconciling the ‘science of
wealth’ with the tenets of Christian theology was an intention shared by all but the
Philosophical Radicals. Their project was a departure from the Christian project but still
mainstream, although over time, certainly by mid-century, they had won the debate in
the court of public opinion and become the mainstream current. Our question relates to
the earlier period (1798-1832) so our answer is: there are two schools in the
mainstream in this period, the Christian and the Radical. Later on, we will see Christian
Political Economy separate into three schools, the Noetic, the Evangelical and the
Realists focused at Cambridge.
As to whether they were a formal school, Copleston and Whately’s engagement and
influence on members of the broader group demonstrates the standards of a school
properly defined as “a community to an extent unparalleled in most other fields they
have undergone similar educations and professional initiations; in the process they have
absorbed the same technical literature and drawn many of the same lessons from it.
Usually the boundaries of that standard literature mark the limit of a scientific subject
matter (Kuhn 1969, p177)” (my italics).
The Noetics certainly shared similar educations and professional initiations. They were
formed by the education they received over time at Oriel College with its common room
which “stunk of logic”. Secondly, they did absorb the same technical literature and draw
the same lessons from it. Their common grounding included five principal intellectual
sources: Aristotelian logic and virtue ethics; Newtonian natural philosophy; Chrstian
theology; Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy; and Smithian political economy.
They had all read Aristotle, Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, Butler, Tucker, Paley, Malthus
and Sumner. They shared intellectual touchstones, tacit knowledge and an approach to
the development and refinement of ideas. They were four successive generations of
teachers engaged in creating the shared professional initiations: becoming Fellows;
giving lecture series; preparing students for exams; co-writing books on logic, then
moral philosophy and ethics, then political economy30. Finally, they engaged in several
collaborative endeavors of philosophy and rhetoric, reform and intellectual endeavor31.
Within the mainstream history of economics canon, we find Nassau Senior, Whatley’s
protégé, who was selected as the inaugural Drummond Chair of Political Economy,
Oxford as Whately’s recommendation. His lectures in this capacity, which he held twice,
were influential. He rose to high office and was appointed to the Commission to review
the Poor Laws (1934) and was one of the principle re-drafters of the resultant
legislation. He became the main economic adviser of the Whigs and a political economist
to whom history has been kinder with her attentions than to our present subject,
Whately32. Senior was often acting as a conduit for Copleston and Whately’s views.
Waterman goes as far as to say that “in a nutshell, the essential Oxford contribution to
Christian Political Economy lay in Copleston’s correction of Malthus’ economics and
Whately’s correction of Paley’s ethics” (Waterman, 1991 p215).
5.10 Conclusions
This chapter has sought, using contextualist methods, to engage deeply with the
intellectual life of the Noetics. To understand the influences that formed their mental
universe, and how they applied this in their collaborations in the development of
theory, philosophy and reform programmes. The discussion has confirmed one of the
central contentions of this research paper: that the Noetics were bearers of the same
virtue-ethics-political-economy tradition as Smith.
A subset of the Noetics, Copleston, Whately and Senior, were a school of political
economy within the broader Noetic tradition. They existed within the rubric of Christian
Political Economy, but had their own identity and conception, as revealed by their
divergence from Paley’s Christian utilitarianism. They differed from the Evangelical
wing of Christian Political Economy in that they were rationalists to the core. They
agreed on the scientific value of deductive political economy, relying on the discernment
of the ‘good’ through other means, so they were hostile to the programme of the
Philosophical Radicals. They had a unique offering: a version of political economy
formed within a tradition of Noetic moral philosophy.
Chapter 6 The Whatelian ‘Cattalaxy Virtue Synthesis’
6.1 Introduction
This chapter builds toward the final presentation of the product of Whately’s
combination of political economy and moral philosophy, his ‘Catallaxy-Virtue Synethsis’,
which focused as much on virtue and knowledge, as wealth.
First, Whately’s grand strategy “war on two fronts” (Waterman 1991, p206), will be laid
out. Secondly, his newly named “catallactics, the science of exchange”, will be reviewed.
This will include: the scope he proposed for this science, the refocusing of political
economy based on a social understanding of human nature and the distinction between
scientific and moral knowledge; the promise and purpose of the new science; the
method for its conduct; and the deductively derived laws it yields. Finally, the dynamics
of knowledge and virtue creation: social desire; emulation; approbation; reason;
fairness and transparency. Within the small compass of this paper, only two of
Whately’s interventions are considered: (1) his mid-wivery of the science of economics
(covered in Introductory Lectures to Political Economy (delivered in 1831 published in
1832); and, (2) his direct attack on the utilitarians by correcting Paley’s doctrine of
Christian utilitarianism on whose coat tails they had ridden into mainstream
acceptance33.
6.2 A war on two fronts
Richard Whately was a pugnacious man, who charted a course through the Scylla of the
nostalgic evangelicals, with their “post Malthusian economics of sin”, and the Charybdis
of the ‘amoral’ utilitarians, who “sought to annex political economy to their own
subversive ends”(A.M.C. Waterman 1991b, p. 207). Whately’s ends were divine, but as
to means, he took the world as he found it; “political economy as natural theology”,
where the design of the universe reflected the munificence of the creator who had
endowed man with the social instinct for cooperation and reciprocity and therefore
exchange and commerce. He believed that the pragmatic consequence of this new
commercial society would be the capacity for virtue, moral restraint, benevolence and
generosity.
While optimistic by nature, Whately saw little hope of converting the radicals to
Christianity and instead sought to challenge the least tenable of their “avowedly
atheistic” doctrines. He thought better of his prospects of persuading the “high-church
men” of the concordance of political economy with natural theology and the
improvement of society (A.M.C. Waterman 1991a, p. 207). By 1820 the storm over
Malthus supposed theodicy had been met by the work-around provided by Paley,
Sumner and Copleston. Other than the most intransigent romantics (the Lake poets and
their circle), mainstream Christian opinion settled down. The real threat was now the
Philosophical Radical’s plan to hijack the new science for their utilitarian reform
programme. Having established the Westminster Review in 1824 and the University of
London in1826 to propagate their views, Bentham, James Mill and their allies (including
Ricardo until his death in 1823), were gaining the ascendancy in harnessing the new
science of political economy to the cause of ‘radical’ reform.
6.3 Whatelian political economy – a ‘Catallaxy of wealth,
virtue and knowledge’
“As the world always has been, and must be, governed by political economists,
whether they have called themselves so or not, and whether skilful or unskilful; so,
there must always be a tendency, in a country where all stations are open to men of
superior qualifications – there must always, I say, be a tendency, in proportion to
intellectual culture spreads, towards the placing of his power in the hands of those
who have most successfully studied the subject” (Whately 1832, vi)
Senior’s appointment as the Inaugural Drummond Chair was Whately’s idea, and the
lectures reflected their shared views and aspirations for the fledgling science. Despite
Senior’s influential lecture series, the climate against the science remained stormy.
Whately was painfully aware that many regarded Political economy, in Senior’s words:
“with a mixture of dread and contempt – as a set of arbitrary and fanciful theories,
subversive of religion and morality” (Senior 1827, p. 171). Whately now sought to use
his considerable personal intellectual stature, that of the institution to which he
belonged, Oxford, and his religious vows, all in the service of the new science he
believed in so deeply and accepted the Chair following Senior (Whately 1832, vi).
Whately’s lectures were an apologia for economic science. In his introductory lectures,
he made the argument that political economy and theology are distinct,
incommensurable and non-competing fields of enquiry. This critical distinction for him
is that between theory and practice. Political economy as hypothetical learning was
valid and to be protected on the grounds that it can never have a negative moral impact
on society. However, when it came to the implementation of policy, far more careful
concern and investigation was required.
In these lectures, Whately’s also took the opportunity to create a bright line between
‘scientific’ and ‘religious’ knowledge. This line laid the foundation of methodological
orthodoxy in political economy and in what is now called ‘economics’. Precisely because
of Whately’s demarcation, deductive political economy came to be seen as a distinct and
non-competing inquiry from the moral philosophy and theology from which it derived.
Scripture now had a different role: “Scripture is not the test by which the conclusions of
Science are to be tried”, its purpose rather “is to reveal to us religious and moral truths”
(Whately 1832, p19-20). Scripture is one source, there are others, and one of the tasks
of education is to build the mind and the moral truths:
…must be admitted with considerable modification. God has not revealed to us a
system of morality such as would have been needed for Beings who had no other
means of distinguishing right and wrong. On the contrary, the inculcation of
virtue and reprobation of vice in Scripture are in such a tone as seems to
presuppose a natural power, or a capacity for acquiring the power, to distinguish
them. (Whately 1832, p 19-20)
Hypotheticals are one thing, real action another. Whately, like Senior, J.S Mill and
Malthus:
“In their different ways, all of these figures adopted a more restricted – or perhaps it
was simply safer and tidier – view of the scope of the ‘pure’ science of political economy,
one that made a firmer distinction between ethically neutral questions of the
hypothetical science and its far from ethically neutral applications to final goals or
policy” (Winch 1996, p399).
6.4 Reading ‘the great book of human transactions’
In these lectures, Whately sought to recast the scope of study of political economy, away
from its origins from the Greek for ‘household management’, oeconomia, to Catallactics,
a Greek word which simply translated to English means ‘exchange’34. A richer
translation, however, includes connotations of ‘reciprocity’, ‘mutual reward’ and it is
clear that Whately intended these (Whately, 1832, Levy & Peart, 2010). Whately sought
to restore the social to the frame and to evoke directly the spontaneous order, conceived
by Divine wisdom, which market-exchange represented. Whately defined man as an
animal that trades, which behaviour flowed from our profoundly social nature: “there
are few, perhaps none, who deny Man to be by nature a social Being, incapable, except
in community, of exercising or developing his most important and most characteristic
faculties” (Whately 1832, p59). He quotes Aristotle and Cicero in his justification:
“Both of these writers stood opposed to those, of their own times, who
represented the social union as expedient…. They both agreed that social union,
is not formed by men with a view to those advantages, but from an instinctive
propensity…that without society, though a man should possess all other goods,
life would not be worth living” (Whately 1832, p59)35.
Whately speaks of the new science which will teach people “to read the great book of
human transactions”, a science “concerned universally, and exclusively, with exchange”
(Whately 1832, p6). In fact, if there is no one to exchange with, a Robinson Crusoe
situation for example, then wealth creation and economising is outside the scope of
political economy (Whately 1832). For Whately man is a beneficiary of trade, not an
economiser: homo catallacticus not homo economicus.
Echoes of Newtonian natural theology abound in Whately’s treatise. Everywhere we see
the wisdom of providence in having made us social, rational and free, abounds:
the “marks of contrivance with a view to a beneficial end, as we are accustomed
to admire (when our attention is drawn to the study of Natural Theology) …the
beneficent wisdom of Providence, to contemplate, not corporeal particles, but
rational free agents, co-operating in systems no less manifestly indicating design,
yet no design of theirs; and though acted on, not by gravitation and impulse, like
inert matter, but by motives addressed to the will, yet advancing as regularly and
effectually the accomplishment of an object they never contemplated, as if they
were merely the passive wheels of a machine” (Whately 1832, p54).
Self-love and benevolence commuted to public benefit, just as God intended. He also
analogises political economy with medicine, which would not have risen but for disease.
The new science rises to understand the impediments to “good health” to restore “full
liberty from “unjust interference” and “perfect freedom of intercourse between all
mankind” (Whately 1832, p54). Finally, like Smith (1776), he gives us the example of
the city, marvel of “supplying with daily provisions of all kinds such a city as our
metropolis containing above a million of inhabitants”. Whately challenges us to put
ourselves in the role of central planners and consider the “anxious toil which such a task
would impose on a Board of the most experienced and intelligent commissaries” and, as
history records, would achieve nothing like the same efficiency (Whately 1832, p60).
6.5 ‘In Virtue, True Wisdom and Happiness’
Whately made the consideration of virtue and moral improvement even more explicit
than Smith. Like Smith, he believed that the telos, the end of the human animal was
moral improvement; wealth its means. Whately supplemented the essential core of this
economistic theology with accounts of the human capacity for improvement, the
progress of civilised society, in knowledge and virtue, the benefits of emulation and
social sentiments. This is how he reconciled wealth and virtue.
Although Whately made clear that the “strict object of political economy is to inquire
only into the nature, production, and distribution of wealth; not, its connexion with
virtue or with happiness” (Whately 1832, p32) and that “such an enquiry would be
more suitable in an ethics treatise” (Whately 1832, p96), he also argued, like Smith
(McCloskey 2008; Phillipson 2010) that the purpose of all of the moral sciences was to
unlock the secrets of civil moral progress. His framework is the question, what advances
civilisation? That there is a hierarchy of civilisations, based on their moral attainment is
axiomatic: “the apparent design of Providence evidently is, the advancement of
mankind, not only as Individuals but as Communities” (Whately 1832, p67). That this
moral attainment and progress transcends wealth is essential to the Whatelian
conception. In a lecture entitled Progress of Society in Wealth:
“It appears that Society…has a tendency, so far as wars, unwise institutions,
imperfect and oppressive laws, and other such obstacles, do not interfere, to
advance, in Wealth and in the Arts which pertain to human life and enjoyment”
(Whately 1832, p104).
As society’s increase in wealth, more energy is devote to nobler causes: “a devotedness
to temporal objects is no characteristic of a more wealthy and civilised, as distinct from
a more barbarian, state of society” and “in a civilised life [emulation] is frequently
directed (however seldom in comparison with what it should be) to many nobler
objects” (Whately 1832, p96). Whately argued for wealth as a good.
Just as science was not an enemy of God, so wealth was not an enemy of virtue but its
ally. “as the Most High has evidently formed Society with a tendency to advancement in
National Wealth, so, He has designed and fitted us to advance, by means of that, in
Virtue, and true Wisdom, and Happiness” (Whately 1832, p119).
6.6 The Catallaxy explained
This section explains Whately’s proposed method for the conduct of the new science as
well as the key economic insights he affirmed in lectures I and III (Whately 1832).
Whately was a firm proponent of deductive theory. He believed the axiomatic principles
of political economy were few and could be gleaned from rational observation of the
world. The science required two things: data from which we are to reason; and
correctness in the process of deducing conclusions from the data. He invokes Bacon, and
describes a spectrum of sciences between mathematics, in which no induction is
required, and geology, which relies on the collection of information. Political economy,
he explains, is a branch of natural philosophy to be found half-way between the two. In
political economy, facts are few and simple. The challenge is the need to collect the
information on the context, before any policy prescription is applied. He compares this
to mechanics or geometry where knowledge of the laws does not suffice, measurement
of the site of work is all critical. The challenge of economics is the application of the facts
of political economy to the particular context in the real world, which must be measured
and understood.
In terms of economic analysis, and what drives the increase in national wealth,
Whately’s introductory lecture did not contain a great deal of new material. He affirms
the centrality of security of property and quotes extensively from Sumner (1818) and
elaborates in his own words:
‘I have spoken of security of property as the most essential point, because,
though no progress can be made without a division of labour, this could neither
exist without security of property, nor could fail to arise with it’ (Whately 1832,
86-7).
He quoted vast tranches of Smith (WON) about the division of labour, money and trade
and explains the power of each. (Whately 1832, p105).
Whately also emerges as an early opponent of the labour theory of value, “pearls fetch a
high price because men have dived for them; but on the contrary, men dive for them
because they fetch a high price” (Whately 1832, p167). He is also vociferous against war
and an advocate of ‘trade not war’ as the best means to national prosperity and security
through raising the gains of trade (Whately 1832 p112). It is also claimed he is the first
to consider rent, interest and wages reflect different aspects of the more general
problem asset pricing (Rashid 1977 p153)..
6.7 Progress of Knowledge
Where Whately’s political economy does add dimensions of new analysis, is in his
understanding of the psychology and economics of knowledge creation. He is acutely
aware of the heuristic impediments to decision making. If “logic is the grammar of
reasoning”, (Whately 1849, p5) then attacking the logical fallacies which had hitherto
linked poverty with moral goodness was correcting the vocabulary of ideas. He also
attacks the “noble savage” conceptions of the continent and he urges us to make wealth
and its products “goods to us, by studying to use them aright, and to promote, through
them, the best interests of ourselves and our fellow creatures” (Whately 1832, p38).
Throughout the text he uncovers numerous other fallacies and errors of reasoning
which impair individual and collective decision making. This is Whately’s gospel, and it
applies to all classes, nothing will be as beneficent to the wealth of nations as good
reasoning. For Whately, logic itself is a social enterprise. Logic trades in meaning, and
meaning has a social context; passing bad arguments in the rhealm of ideas, is no
different from fraud in the material world (Levy & Peart 2010). In the Whatelian
catallaxy, fallacies are sinful. Whately, was no fan of long causal chains. Levy (2010)
describes his model for “kattalactic rationality” based on self-love “subject to a
reciprocity constraint” thus:
“a society of fair-minded individuals, each with their own presuppositions and
biases, as the nexus of fallacy detection stands in contrast to the platonic vision
of experts who free themselves from pre-suppositions and bias and consequently
have no need for fairness” (Levy & Peart 2010, p176).
This adds depth to the picture of the clerisy Whately had in mind which bears further
reflection beyond our scope here.
To summarise or our purposes now, knowledge is created, and fallacies cleansed
because of a mix of our self-love, and desire to win praise, and to be praiseworthy; our
desire to emulate those we admire and to receive their approbation; and because of our
sheer love of knowledge and truth. Whately:
“desire of gaining knowledge, a desire (found, I imagine, on sympathy) of
communicating it to others, as an ultimate end. This, and also the love of display,
are, no doubt, inferior motives, and will be superceded by a higher principle, in
proportion as the individual advances in moral excellences” (Whately 1832,
p106).
Here he highlights both the social dimensions of the desire to create knowledge, as well
as his vision of moral improvement that he assumes we attain as we, and the society
around us, know more; another virtuous circle.
6.8 Correcting Paley’s moral errors
We turn now to the war on the other front; smiting the utilitarians. The Philosophic
Radicals based their programme of reform on Bentham’s secularised version of Paley’s
utilitarian ethics (Crimmins 1989). Whately made a major contribution to virtue ethics
when he corrected the most influential moral philosophical tract of the day, Paley’s
Moral Philosophy: With Annotations (Whately 1859). This was Whately’s second most
influential book (after Elements of Logic 1826). Paley was the Christian orthodox vessel
on which the philosophical radicals entered mainstream waters. For the utilitarians, the
analysis of scientific reform sufficed, the only analysis to be done was of consequences
and these could be judged scientifically. Moral considerations had been thus eliminated.
For Whately they were correct in regarding political economy as a valuable instrument
for implementing the social values which should guide public policy, but they were
wrong to suppose “that the hedonistic calculus can be a reliable source of (or substitute
for) those values. Only a moral sense preferably illuminated by Holy Scripture can
determine those ends to which political economy is the only means” (Waterman 1991,
p210).
Whately’s battle was fought on the pages of his annotation of Paley’s text which he
thought laid the foundations of Moral Philosophy for “many hundreds – probably
thousands – of Youth while under a course of training designed to qualify them for being
afterwards the Moral instructors of Millions… therefore cannot fail to exercise a very
considerable and extensive influence on the Minds of successive generations” (Whately
1832, preface i). His principal correction:
“man according to him [Paley], has no moral faculty, - no power of distinguishing
right from wrong, - no preference of justice to injustice, or kindness to cruelty,
excepts when one’s own personal interest happens to be concerned. ….The truth,
I conceive, is actually the reverse of this, viz., that Man having in himself a Moralfaculty…by which he is instinctively led to approve virtue and disapprove of vice.
(Whately 1859, p. 77).
Whately describes the ‘calculations of utility’ which cannot discern goodness as being
unsurprisingly met with disgust (Whately 1859, p. 42). In a materialistic universe
presupposed by Bentham (Crimmins 1989) human pleasure and pain are reducible to
the interaction of ‘discrete physical objects’. The effect of this can be evaluated –
subjectively and provisionally - by each individual. But without some of the necessarily
theological understanding of a ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ to human life, it is impossible for
anyone to be sure about the value even of his own pleasures and pains, let alone those
of anyone else. This is Whately’s challenge to Paley:
“For as the believer in God is at a loss to account for the existence of evil, the
believer of no God is equally unable to account for the existence of good, or
indeed anything at all that bears the mark of design (Whately 1859, p68).
Absent an innate ‘moral sense’ men and women are impotent to discern good from evil
in their own lives, let alone comparisons with others, or between societies. The
Benthamite system “can afford no information about what ought to be in public affairs;
and his advocacy of political economy in policy formation is at best unhelpful and at
worst a mere fraud” (Waterman 1991, p 215). This inability to explain the good is the
central deficiency of utilitarian ethics and remains unanswered to this day.
Whately thought he had dealt a decisive blow against the Philosophical Radicals and
their utilitarian programme. Intellectually he had. But science doesn’t occur in a
vacuum, it is subject to the themes and currents of the culture in which it is set. One
wonders whether he was aware that it was the moral authority of the Christian clerisy
that was about to suffer the mortal blow. Whately’s critique of utilitarianism was
published weeks before the release of a book of epochal importance, Charles Darwin’s
(1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Whately and the Noetics had a lot riding on
Paley’s “argument from design” God, and the ‘Watchmaker’ was to prove no match for
the atavistic randomness of natural selection in the court of public opinion. Whately’s
critique of utilitarianism, flowing as it did from ‘argument from design’ theology, and
tainted by association as the product of the Christian clerisy, can perhaps be regarded
as collateral damage in the explosion of the Origin of Species onto the landscape.
6.9 The Whatelian Virtue synthesis – a virtuous circle
This chapter has presented all of the building blocks that now allow us to present the
Whatelian Cattalaxy-Virtue Synthesis in the formation of economic policy. In summary
terms:
End:
Increase in virtue - moral progress of society.
Means: The catallaxy: the social system for exchange
Tenets:
1.
The human is a reciprocating social animal who instinctively engages in social
interactions driven by sympathy and survival including trade in goods and services,
sharing, knowledge creation and other forms of value creation.
2.
The focus of the science should be exchange, reciprocity and cooperation at the social
level, not economising.
3.
Divine providence and the social instinct combine to create this exchange dynamic.
The pursuits of individuals, through exchange, produce social benefits. Private property,
the division of labour and specialisation lead to increases in wealth. Free self-organising
exchange will lead to more international trade which will reduce the incentive for, and
benefits of, wars.
4.
Before applying deductively derived economic laws (science) to a particular context,
the dynamics and measurements of that context must be thoroughly understood, as well
as the moral consequences of the action. Science is one thing, policy another.
5.
The end of each human life is moral improvement and there is a hierarchy of moral
states. The end of societies and communities is to reach states of higher moral
attainment and commercial societies which increase wealth are the means.
6.
Wealth and virtue are not in opposition. Increasing wealth which brings comfort will,
in the main, increase the proportion of human activity which is applied to higher
pursuits beyond survival. As wealth increases, the stock of knowledge and human virtue
will increase; a virtuous circle.
7.
At the individual level, as humans develop, there is a tendency as for them to do a
higher proportion of things that are beneficial beyond their own survival like create
knowledge. As they develop and mature, so do their motivations and moral attaintment.
Education and enlightenment of both spiritual and scientific truths (including political
economy) lead to practical and moral improvement (which are correlated in any event).
8.
All forms of knowledge – moral, reasoning power, scientific knowledge - are forms of
wealth. Humans can develop character which is developed through acquisition of
knowledge, reasoning power and moral imagination and the practice of the virtues until
they become innate.
9.
Distinctions between types of knowledge are important in the pursuit of truth. The
division of knowledge into ‘scientific knowledge’ from observation and
experimentation, and ‘moral knowledge’ from revealed religion and the human moral
faculty is essential.
10.
A morally informed, elite clerisy is required to aid in the discernment of the good for
the society, and to guide the knowledge sets that individuals should attain. However,
there will be an open public contest for knowledge which will destroy fallacies in a free,
rational debate.
This is a unique conception and articulation of classical, Christian Political Economy
in the mainstream Smithian tradition. It highlights certain dimensions of social life
and human purpose, which are perhaps more implicit here, rendered more clearly
by this Noetic moral philosopher a generation or two post-Smith.
Chapter 7 Conclusion
This paper is designed to be both a portrait and an argument. A portrait of Richard
Whately in context, set against the intellectual and social landscape of his times. We
meet him with his collaborators at Oriel College, Oxford, drawing on their shared
intellectual inheritance and approach, engaged in the central philosophical contests of
the day.
It is an argument for a close reading of texts and exploration of their language and
meaning in their historical context. A reading which in this instance, frames Richard
Whately and the Noetic intellectual product, as in the mainstream Smithian and virtue
ethics traditions.
To summarise what we have learned. Firstly, that the Noetics were informed by a
Newtonian natural theology God whose handiwork is revealed in the working of
complex natural and social systems. Secondly, that they shared a Christian moral
philosophy that embraced self-love as an essential duty, which, when combined with
our natural social sympathy, transforms private benefit into public benefit. Thirdly, that
the moral consequence of society itself is virtue, as we seek to know, share and create
knowledge, goods and forward progress. An illustration of Richard Whately’s CatallaxyVirtue-Synthesis has been provided in some detail. This is a unique conception of
political economy and moral analysis, done in separate stages, but which together can
bear the weight of guiding policy. This product is in the Smithian, as well as virtue
ethics-traditions which allowed me to respond to Deidre McCloskey’s (2008) contention
that Adam Smith was “the last of the former virtue ethicists” with Whately as a later
writer in this tradition.
In concluding, I wish to don the hat, not of an intellectual historian, nor a student of the
history of economics, but that of a cultural commentator. I seek to illustrate the
philosophical implications of Whately’s model. Whately argues that it is against the
standards of virtue, not utility, which we should assess the efficacy of the economic
system. His contention, that an economic system can and that the determination of
these ends is not the work of a political economist, or economist, but the work of a
moralist.
An economic system can be set to achieve different ends, for example:
Virtue Utility Pain minimisation
This is consistent with Robbins (1945) position36. The efficacy of the economic system
then should be assessed against the attainment of the specified ends: virtue was the end
sought by the Oriel Noetics (and it is argued, by Smith), utility was the end sought by the
utilitarians and other philosophers have argued for pain minimisation.
My final argument is that we live in an age which fails to properly discern the ends; an
age which has mistaken the need for a separation between scientific and moral
knowledge, which has descended into an age of ‘value-neutrality’. I argue that this age
while born as a consequence of the economic and political debates of the early
nineteenth century, leaves out essential dimensions conceived in the mind of its
midwives. The distinction between scientific and religious knowledge upon which our
age is based, had been “altogether absent in pre-Enlightenment social theory”
(Waterman 1991 p262). I argue that those who created the distinction, Whately being
the first to apply it to political economy, had no intention that means and ends be given
such inconsistent weight in the practice of “the science of the wise legislator”. They
assumed, and their programmes and practice demonstrate, that moral philosophy,
deductive logic and theology, were essential capabilities of those who would develop
and implement policy. It is indeed ironic that their distinctions became the scaffolding
for the present paradigm. Whether by design or unconsciously, in our age, the collective
moral discernment in which the Noetics passionately engaged, has been ‘crowded out’
in the polities of late modernity, in favour of endless disputes over means37.
Whatever the ends, the economic system is but the means.
Modern economists, Robbins in particular have been called to reassert the distinction
between means and ends (Robbins 1945). Robbins explains that the Classical Political
Economists professed the body of scientific knowledge they called ‘political economy’ to
have laws derived from systematic enquiry into the “nature of economic relationships
and their mode of development in different circumstances” (Robbins 1953, p174) and
that with the exception of Physiocracy, that this was the first time a reform movement
based its prescriptions on the basis of systematically derived, scientific laws. He goes on
to make a critical point, consistent with the view of Whately, a view sometimes lost in
our contemporary context:
“You need goals as well – a general objective, a criterion of the expected results of
action. It is all very well to know how the world works, why certain relations emerge in
certain condition, how these relations change when conditions are altered. But unless
you have some test whereby you can distinguish good from bad, desirable from
undesirable, you are without an essential constituent of a theory of policy. You are like
the captain of a ship equipped with charts and compasses and all the means of
propulsion and steering, but without an assigned destination. A theory of economic
policy, in the sense of a body of precepts for action, must take its ultimate criterion from
outside economics. (Robbins 1953, pp. 176-177).
From Whately’s starting point the observation of laws, when applied in the context of
the social world, meant context and consequences needed to be taken into account
against standards of social virtue, not utility. Whately buttressed the importance and
need for political economy to deliver its value-free analysis of what actually occurs. On
the battle-front with the Philosophical Radicals, he exhorted that “political economy by
itself can be of no use in the formation of public policy, additional value premises are
necessary. Athiesm has as much difficulty supplying value premises (‘the good’) as
religion has in justifying evil and that knowledge of the good may come from scripture
but cannot be had from utilitarian principles alone” (Waterman 1991, p32). Whately
“explicated the scope and method of political economy” as a corollary of his
epistemology the dimension of science is value free including enquires into the nature,
distribution and production of wealth, but not its connection to virtue and happiness
(Waterman 1991, p13).
With the Evangelicals on one side and Philosophical Radicals on the other, Whately
conceived of this third way: Aristotelian in its social conception; Newtonian in its
dynamic complexity; grounded not in the scarcity of Malthusian gloom but in the gains
to be had by cooperation, reciprocity, exchange and trade. This is a vision of homo
catallacticus, not homo economicus and it which deserves a much closer reading in our
times.
For Whately, precisely because it is a value-free means and nothing more, a discernment
of ends is also required. Means are necessary, but not sufficient. They cannot be sought
by science, but must be sought among religious and moral truths, beyond the Bible, but
also from study by those in the clerisy, trained to play the role of moral philosophers in
society. Whately’s conception was perhaps more complete than ours. We are left with
the question for our times, who or what should comprise the clerisy, and what role
should economists play within it?
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1
Since the rise of the cities of Babylon four thousand years ago all societies have had, at the
centre of political life, the ends to which they aspired and have celebrated the virtues best
suited to attaining these ends. Macintrye (2007) starts the story with the Greeks.
Taken from T.B. Macaulay’s phrase (1829) and quoted in Collini, Winch, Burrow (1983 p
v): “…that noble science of politics which, of all sciences, is the most important to the
welfare of nations, - which, of all the sciences, most tends to expand and invigorate the mind,
- which draws nutriment and ornament from every part of philosophy and literature, and
dispenses in return, nutriment and ornament to all”. This ‘science of politics’ was
interchangeable with “philosophy, which could prize systematic knowledge and objectivity in
2
the assignment of causal influences, but it did not entail anxiety to achieve what a late
nineteenth century generation of social sciences would call ‘value-neutrality’” (Collini et al.
1983, p14).
3
This is the opening line in the novel The Go Between by Lesley Hartley (1953).
4
In Samuelson’s terms it could be called, ‘Whig history’.
5
Donald Winch is an intellectual historian of long standing who has produced several
important studies of the political and economic debates of the nineteenth-century (Wealth and
Life, 2009, Riches and Poverty 1996).
6
See Moore (2011) for an introduction to the “Sussex Three” who constitute the Sussex School. Donald Winch,
Stefano Collini and John Burrows are at times, and in jest, known as ‘Burrincini” Their’s is a collegial
enterprise since they shared a base at the University of Sussex between the terms of Prime Minister Wilson and
Prime Minister Thatcher. Moore (2011) illustrates ten features of the Sussex school.
7
This is the term elucidated by Collingwood (1939, 1946)
8
In fact, when Coleridge coined the term ‘the clerisy’, in his influential essay On the
Constitution of the Church and State, he was speaking of the Oxford dons who then acted as
the filters of knowledge in the Britain of 1830. The leading figures amongst this class were of
course, the Noetics. Here he conceived of “the support and maintenance of a permanent
class or order…to remain at the fountain heads of the humanities, in cultivating and
enlarging the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical
and moral science; (Coleridge, 1830) pp43-45.
9
This picture of a broadly popular monarchy and the role of the Church of England as a symbol of national
unity was novel when presented in 1985. Clark sought to redress the excesses of both the whig and the
Marxist interpretations of the early nineteenth century. Both of these portraits had excluded religion as a
shaping force in the society of the period. Clark’s purpose was to clarify this critical understanding: “my aim
throughout has been to reintegrate religion into an historical vision which has been almost wholly positivist; to
discard economic reductionism; to emphasise the importance of politics in social history, and to argue against
the familiar picture of eighteenth century England as the era of bourgeois individualism by showing the
persistence of the ancien regime until 1828-1832, and the autonomous importance of religion and politics in
its final demise” (Clark 1985, ppix-x).
10
These fears were not altogether unwarranted. The Cato Street Conspiracy (1820) was an
unsuccessful attempt to kill most of the Members of Cabinet and overthrow the government
and precipitate a French-style revolution. This widely publicised event contributed to the
perception of precariousness
Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, (1764 –1845), also known as Viscount Howick was Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 22 November 1830 to 16
July 1834. He was a member of the Whig Party and the leader of the group known as the
“Foxite liberals”. For a character sketch see Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Warren
Hastings’, Edinburgh Review LXXIV (October, 1941), pp. 160–255.
11
12
The laws were introduced by the Importation Act 1815 (55 Geo. 3 c. 26) and repealed by
the Importation Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict. c. 22)
13
Whately was a major figure of the period. There are three principal biographies recounting his life and no
autobiography. The first of these was William John Fitzpatrick’s Memoirs of Whately, 2 vols (London, 1864).
The second was a biography and collection of correspondence written and edited by Whately’s eldest daughter,
Elizabeth Jane Whately. This was published as The Life and Correspondence of Whately, 2 vols. (London,
1866). More recently, Donald Harman Akenson (1981) wrote A Protestant in Purgatory The Conference of
British Studies biography series. (new series) 2. The National Dictionary of Biography, 1885-1900 by James
McMullen Rigg contains a five thousand word entry on Whately’s life and work. This account identifies him as
an “indpenedent liberal”, social science pioneer, anti-evangelical, advocate of the rights of dissenters, Catholics
and Jews, outstanding teacher, social science pioneer and reformer of tertiary education. There is an entry on
Whately in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, viii: 287-8 by Mary Prior and an entry in the New Palgrave
Dictionary of Economics (Online), by R.D. Collison Black. The most felicitous of the available portraits of
Whately is the chapter on him in Pre-Tractarian Oxford: A Reminiscence of the Noetics by Tuckwell (1909).
There is a stipple-engraved portrait of him in the National Museum and he sat for a portrait by Catterson Smith
which is in the Royal Hibernian Academy. We are left with all two million words of his writing. According to
World Cat Identities, there are 765 works in 2,131 publications in 16 languages and 16,151 library holdings of
his work. The largest single collection of Whately’s papers is held at the Library of Oriel College, Oxford.
14
There has been speculation in the literature as to whether Whately had a mild case of
Asperger’s syndrome, or some other disorder of the autism spectrum (Moore, GC & White,
M.2009)
15
Footnote one gives references for all of these.
Tuckwell’s book, Pre-tractarian Oxford – A reminiscence of the ‘Noetics’ (1909) is a first guide to the life
and times of the Noetics. Winch’s opus, Riches and Poverty – An intellectual history of political economy in
Britain 1750-1834 and the collaborative product of the “Sussex three” The Noble Science of Politics. A study in
Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (1983) and Burrow’s A Liberal Descent Victorian Historians and the
English Past (1981). Another hallmark book in this research is Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement – The
Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785-1865 (1986). It is an essential contextual
16
corrective to the prior neglect of evangelicalism in particular, and religion more generally, in the formation of
intellectual currents through the nineteenth century. Hilton tells us that as the image of God morphed so too did
the politics and political economy. In analysing this period, it is important not to fall for what Forbes (1975)
referred to as the “fallacy of premature secularisation”.
17
He refers to Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
(both published posthumously in 1818) , or to his personal favourite, Sense and Sensibility
(1811). In these pages we can picture the society he perceived himself to be living in. The
bumbling churchmen, scheming mothers, noble and ignoble aristocrats, precariously
positioned lower-gentry, the changes in who was wealthy and the sources of wealth, the
social ‘sudden death’ of financial (or moral ruin), and, importantly, the triumph of the truly,
not seemingly, virtuous. We have it then on good authority, his own, that this was the world
he perceived himself to be living in. Whately compares, favourably, Austen to Homer and
Shakespeare and praises her capacity for drama and suspense. The scholarly literature
confirms that Whately’s review (along with the contemporaneous one by Walter Scott) was
the most significant criticism published before the end of the nineteenth century. Whately and
Scott had set the the tone for the view of Austen held by the Victorians. (Waldron2001,p 89–
90, Duffy 1954p97, Watt 1963,p4–5).
18
Whately continued, throughout his career, to publish on religious belief and the right model of Church
governance for Anglicanism. This writing was widely read and reviewed in the major periodicals of the day.
They were not marginal concerns, but central political issues of the day. In 1825 he published a series of Essays
on Some of the Peculiarities of the Christian Religion, followed in 1828 by a second series On some of the
Difficulties in the Writings of St Paul, and in 1830 by a third On the Errors of Romanism traced to their Origin
in Human Nature.
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent Priest” Henry the VIII of Thomas a Becket,
Archbishop of Cantebury (1162-1170).
19
20
The Foxites shared Whately belief in Erastianism (separate governance of Church and
State), however, this was to be Whately’s great disappointment in life. He wrote many letters
to Grey on models for Church reform and especially on the establishment of a Commission
which would examine the options and plan a course. This was Whately’s principal desire, and
in many respects he took the position of Archbishop of Dublin in order to advance this cause.
Grey, who even here alludes to his intention for ‘zealous cooperation’ doesn’t deliver, and no
Commission is ever called and there is no change in Whately’s lifetime to separate the
governance of Church and State. (Akenson, 1981. de Giustino, 2003)
21
The span of this paper precludes proper treatment of this critical contribution by Whately to Irish events and
debates. He is considered “the Father of economic science in Ireland” Black, RD 1945, 'Trinity College, Dublin,
and the Theory of Value, 1832-1863', Economica, vol. 12, no. 47, pp. 140-148.. The first four Whately Chairs in
Political Economy who he hand selected and whose salaries he paid – Mountifort Longfield, Isaac Butt, J A
Lawson and W Neilson Hancock – have been called “the Dublin School” ibid.. Schumpeter said of them, they
were “men who wrote above their time. (as quoted in Hollander . Hollander also links the “Longfield-Senior
group”, who, like Whately, rejected a labour theory of value and advocated a utility theory of value. Longfield’s
exposition of diminishing degrees of intensity of demand laid the foundations for the formal doctribe of
marginal utility theory prior to its presentation by Jevons, Menger and Walras ibid.. Later appointments to the
Chair included John Elliot Cairnes and Francis Bastable. Cairnes published the influential The Character and
Logical Method of Political Economy (1857), considered to have been produced under the influence of Whately
and Senior ibid., Hollander, S 1977, 'Smith and Ricardo: Aspects of the Nineteenth-Century Legacy', The
American Economic Review, vol. 67, no. 1, pp. 37-41..
22
Both drew on the earlier work of another Oriel man, Joseph Butler (1736) and his Analogy
of Religion.
23
Paley’s principal writings on this theme were in Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy which first
appeared in 1785 and had numerous editions, Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802).
Whately challenges critical elements of the Principles while affirming its broader tenets. Bishop Sumner (1816)
wrote A Treatise on the Records of Creation and the Moral Attributes of the Creator which was very influential.
24
Surely it was an “impiously blasphemous assertion, that the Almighty brings more beings into the world than
he prepared nourishment for”. (Eclectic Review 1832as quoted in Waterman AMC (2008). Malthus a better
economist than he was a theologian and his theodicy (the implication of 1798 Essay on the Principle of
Population was that God let all these people be born in the world for which there was no sustenance and who
would then suffer. Sumner re-introduced the orthodox Butlerian human life on earth as a “state of discipline and
trial (denied by Malthus in 1798) that and then.
25
In fact, JM Keynes speculates whether or not it should really be Paley who is regarded as ‘the first of the
Cambridge economists”. In an essay on Malthus he states:“I wish I could have included some account of Paley
among these Essays. For Paley, so little appreciated now, was for a generation or more an intellectual influence
on Cambridge only second to Newton. Perhaps, in a sense, he was the first of the Cambridge economists. If
anyone will take up again Paley's Principles, he will find, contrary perhaps to his expectation, an immortal
book”. (J. M. Keynes, Essays in Biography)
26
The moral sense school are a group of philosophers with a meta-ethics in which morality is grounded in
moral sentiments and emotions. It commenced with the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), John Locke’s
student who wrote in opposition to his famous tutor. Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) imparted the tradition to
both David Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790). Major works of the school include: the works of
Shaftesburty, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (first published in an unauthorized edition in 1699);
Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good (1725, the works of,
Treatise II of An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue) and An Essay On the Nature and
Conduct of the Passions and Affections, With Illustrations Upon the Moral Sense (1728); Hume, Sections of
Book 3 of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751);
Adam Smith The TMS (1759) which explored various sentiments that make up the moral feelings that ground
moral judgments, that combined provides the moral sense. This understanding was carried forward by
Hutcheson, Smith, Hume and Burke in theory, and Wesley and other leaders of social movements of the
nineteenth century, in practice26 (Himmelfarb, 2004)
27
Macintyre (2007) provides an account of how the virtue-ethics tradition was lived and embodied in societies
from the Greeks until the 18th century when, for the first time in recorded history, a variation on the tradition
ceased to be at the conscious centre of human societies through history, except our own.
28
Why was ethics taken out of Smith? Because virtue ethics represents an obsolete type of
ethics which “somewhat mysteriously disappeared from academic circles after the 6th and
final and substantially revised edition of Smith’s own favourite of his two published books,
The TMS (1759, 1790)” (McCloskey 2008, p43-44). The replacement of virtue ethics in
intellectual circles by: Kant (1785); and Bentham (1789); other programmes including the
Natural rights tradition of Locke and Pufendorf; and the new contractarian theories of
Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes; saw a crowding out of the far older ethical tradition, the virtueethical tradition.
Smith’s theory would be based on the observation of human nature and human history, “a
science which would not explain the principles of social organisation to be found in different
types of society, but would explain the principles of government and legislation that ought to
be followed by enlightened rulers who wanted to extend the liberty and happiness of their
subjects and the wealth and power of their dominions” (Phillipson, 2010, p2). Phillipson
illuminates this ‘Science of Man’ project that Smith had learnt from Hutcheson and Hume.
29
30
We can confirm this from their various biographies and acknowledgements of one another. As we have seen,
Whately acknowledges Copleston as co-author and creator of his most influential work Elements of Logic
(1826). Whately also acknowledges the contribution of J.H. Newman in the drafting of this work. Furthermore,
Newman claimed in his memoir, that Whately had left a deep intellectual impression on him (Newman, 1864).
Finally, and perhaps with greatest long-term impact, Whately was the mentor and life-long friend of the most
influential educator of the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Arnold. We have already heard of Arnold’s
assessment of Whately’s character. To add to this, Stanley’s (1901) Life of Arnold profiles Arnold’s gratitude to
his former teacher: “And he used to look back to a visit to Dr Whately…as a marked era in the formation of his
views, especially as opening to his mind, or impressing upon it more strongly, some of the opinions on which he
afterwards laid so much stress with regard to the Christian Priesthood”. Arnold’s debt to Whately was also
written into the preface of his first published book of sermons.
31
Although Thomas Arnold, for example, concentrated on the application of rigour in the study of history and
classics; education more broadly including the preparation of minds for leadership; issues of Church and State
governance; he validated the pursuit of the laws of political economy by others in the group. Similarly with
Hinds who pursued epistemology, and others in the group who were theologians and Biblical scholars.
Senior was the only professional economist of the group and he has left us his Drummond
lectures including the influential Two Lectures on Population with a Correspondence
between the Author and T.R. Malthus and numerous other manuscripts, letters and
32
contributions. Senior was a frequent publisher in the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh
Review and he published a major work, Outline of the Science of Political Economy.
33
Whately’s Annotations to Paley’s Moral Philosophy (1849) although finally published after our study period,
was conceived within it.
34
Interestingly, this proposal was taken up by many others over the years (Lawson 1843, Hancock 1849,
Patrick Plough [Pseudonym]1842, Schumpeter 1908, 1954, Von Mises 1954, The success of these various
forays is sympathetically explored in Kirzner (1960).
35
Hes goes as far as to claim that if Aristotle had been trying to express his meaning, he
would have been likely to employ the term as well (Whately, 1832, p4, 58-59).
36
It is not the least implied that economists should not deliver themselves of ethical questions, any more than an
argument that botany is not aesthetics is to say that botanists should not have views of their own on the lay-out
of gardens. On the contrary, it is greatly to be desired that economists should have speculated long and widely
on these matters, since only in this way will they be in a position to appreciate the implications as regards given
ends of problems which are put to them for a solution (Robbins 1945, p149-150).
37
This critique is made by Macintyre (1981, 2007); Taylor (2008); Himmelfarb (2004).