|
By Chris R. Tame Libertarian Heritage No. 19 ISSN 0959-566X
ISBN 1 85637 396 7 www.libertarian.co.uk email: admin@libertarian.co.uk © 1998: Libertarian Alliance; Chris R. Tame. This essay was first published in G. A. Wells, ed., J. M. Robertson (1856-1933): Liberal, Rationalist, and Scholar, Pemberton Books, London, 1987, as “J. M. Robertson: The Critical Liberal”, pp. 93-122. Minor stylistic and grammatical alterations have been made, and the footnotes restored to their original form. It was originally delivered as a paper at the Adam Smith Club Conference, organised by Chris Tame, “The Forgotten Genius: The Life and Work of J. M. Robertson, 1856-1933”, at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London on March 24th 1984. The views expressed in this publication
are those of its author, and LA Director: Chris R. Tame 
FOR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY Contents
I. Introduction The old adage that history is always written by the victor is as true for the history of ideas as for the more dramatic record of conflict in political and military affairs. In the history of both political thought and social theory J. M. Robertson was on the losing side. The ideas he expounded and the movements of which he was a part, or even led, are those which during this century have been pushed from the forefront of political and intellectual life. Why, then, should I — and hopefully the reader — be concerned with the act of reclamation which this essay is attempting? The answer is twofold. Firstly, there is such a thing as objective history, and whether or not one has any sympathy with Robertson or his outlook, his consignment to an Orwellian "memory hole" can only distort our understanding of the historical record. As Conrad Kaczkowski states in his unpublished doctoral dissertation, Robertson was "an outstanding and representative figure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries".[1] An understanding of his role in both intellectual matters and political life can only help illuminate the history of the period. Secondly, some of us might consider it premature, as well as less than just, to consign both Robertson and the liberal movement of which he was an important part to the ideological dustbin of history. Admittedly, intellectual and political currents, in both "left-" and "right-wing" guises, which we can label broadly as statist, collectivist, anti-individualistic, authoritarian, and irrationalist, have been the predominant "paradigm" in economic, political and social thought for most of the twentieth century.[1] But the past twenty years have seen a steady renaissance of radical, rationalist and individualistic liberalism.[2] For those of us, like myself, in sympathy with this liberal revival, the rediscovery of Robertson not merely aids the propagation of the liberal perspective, but can assist in a more viable reformulation of it. In other words, we can hopefully profit from a grasp of both the strengths and weaknesses, the valid and the invalid, the successes and failures of the thought of a great exponent of liberalism. For those not in sympathy with Robertson’s political position, however, an understanding of it will at least give a clearer grasp of its ideological character, and that of its present- day liberal adherents. II. Class Conflict and the Economic Interpretation of History Part of Robertson’s significance and greatness lies in the wealth of his intellectual concerns. A multi-lingualist of immense learning, he applied his mind to, and wrote extensively on, a multitude of subjects. In all areas his work was characterised by both breadth and depth of knowledge, clarity of expression, and intellectual insight, on which Professor Stanislav Andreski has positively commented.[4] However, it is primarily the political significance of Robertson with which I am concerned. As Kaczkowski declares, he was "a well-known radical-liberal theoretician and politician, he played an active role in British politics for over twenty years and was a recognised authority on economic questions, in particular free trade".[5] My focus will not be so much on his role in party politics but on his significance as a thinker, as one of the last great representatives of a major tradition of liberal thought. The roots of one tradition of liberalism in class analysis, in a broad sociological perspective and in an economic interpretation of history have, until relatively recently, been forgotten. At best, liberal class analysts and historians have been consigned by Marxists to footnotes as vague and alleged "precursors" of Marxist sociology and historical materialism. [6] However, in Britain this liberal sociological outlook was co-extensive with the development of liberal economics. Adam Smith’s economics, for example, was very much part of a broader "sociological" concern with, as he put it, "the general principle of law and government and of the different revolutions they have undergone in different periods of society". [7] The Wealth of Nations embodied much of Smith’s historical sociology and his analysis of class factors in economic and political life. This approach was in fact shared, to a greater or lesser degree, by the whole "Scottish School" or "Scottish Enlightenment". Smith never completed his proposed broader study although the rediscovery of a longer version of his Lectures on Jurisprudence gives further evidence of his philosophy of history). But his colleague John Millar, in his major work The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks,[8] delineated systematically a liberal analysis of class formation and conflict and of historical development. The major stream of British liberalism chose, however, to refine the tools of classical economic analysis, rather than develop its historical and sociological insights. The last of the major classicists to maintain a class and historical analysis as a broader political economy’ wedded to liberal values was James E. Thorold Rogers.[9] But he left no disciples and, insofar as he was remembered, it was as a founding father of empirical economic history. Henry Thomas Buckle was really the only nineteenth century historian to attempt a detailed liberal philosophy of history. But in spite of a brief period of popular acclaim, he too exerted little influence and left no disciples. Robertson was, then, the last great exponent in Britain of liberal class and historical analysis. He was consciously indebted to the Scottish School,[1] to Charles Comte[11] and to Buckle, to whom he devoted a major critical study[12] and whose History he edited in a fine annotated version.[13] Of Rogers he said that he "enlarged in a suggestive fashion" on the economic interpretation of history, but that his "application of the principle does not carry us far"[14] — an incorrect assessment in my view. III. Historical Sociology What, then, was the nature of the liberal class and historical analysis championed by Robertson? His concern in his historical work as in all his scholarship was to apply "scientific thoroughness" in "the statement of historic causation", to discover "general laws" and to establish "determining conditions, the economic above all" in a "true science of social evolution".[15] His interpretation was not, however, the dogmatic assertion of aprioristic axioms, for he stressed the importance of the "study of the concrete process".[16] His "economic interpretation" was largely a view of the "economic motive" in human behaviour, not an ascription of irresistible influence to particular social institutions or so-called "modes of production". In this sense "sociological truth" is ultimately "rooted in psychology and biology".[17] "The main primary factors in politics or corporate life" are thus "all-pervading biological forces, or tendencies of attraction and repulsion" between individuals. [18] He insisted on the one hand that economic motives be recognised as affecting social action in general, and on the other that "varying forms of social machinery react variously on intellectual life".[19] He explicitly rejected any view of inevitability in historical events or any mono-causal approach to them, "so many and so complex are the forces and conditions of progress in civilisation".[20] Thus "functions that were originally determined by external conditions came in time to be initial causes — the teeth and claws so to speak, fixing the way of life for the body politic."[21] His view of class conflict is clear. "Home politics", he declared, "is the sum of the strifes and compromises of classes, interests, factions, sects, theorists, in all countries and in all ages."[22] The history of the world is as much one of class co-operation as well as conflict, and of classes conceived broadly in terms of all sorts of interest groups and ideologies, not merely as some automatic reflex of the "mode of production". Neither did he adhere to the utopian delusion of the so-called "scientific socialist" that this conflict would ever end: "the clash of opposing tendencies is perpetual, ubiquitous, inevitable",[23] although modes of conflict might well change (i.e., the "blind" conflict of war might well be replaced with more civilised intellectual conflict). History was, in Robertson’s view, thus an "endless process of compromise among social forces"[24] to which "movements of true public spirit" contribute as well as more venal clashes of "class needs and interests".[25] He was not driven to crude collectivism which negated the role of individuals as compared to "classes" — "men of genius have counted for something in all stages of upward human evolution."[26] We might have been spared much tedious historical exegesis if Robertson’s balanced view of motivations had prevailed over countless Marxist-inspired attempts to demonstrate the "economic basis" of every social phenomenon. Thus, he explicitly commented on the fruitless attempts to discuss the "class politics" of religious conflict in the late Tudor period — fruitless since "in reality class politics was for the most part superseded by sect politics".[27] In other words, religious disagreements, "destructive passions", could lead to real conflict just as much as clashes of "real" economic or political interest. Economic determinism, then, "used as a sole interpretive principle ... may lead to all manner of errors". The correct historical method is clearly to "recognise and trace the reactions of all the factors".[28] It was this balanced and sensible approach to historical causation that he saw embodied in "the method and basis of Buckle" above all others. In view of the short shrift given to liberal class theoreticians and historians by Marxist scholars, one cannot but take ironic satisfaction in Robertson’s similar treatment of Marxist historical materialism — in his parenthetical observation that "several members of the Marxian school have dealt very acutely and instructively with the element of economic causation in ancient and modern life."[29] For Robertson, Marxism represented little more than a partisan expropriation of a liberal doctrine, "arbitrarily applied by Marx to civilisation in the light of a class gospel and a doctrinaire purpose".[30] Moreover, Marx’s approach was vitiated by putting a "catastrophic and finally static theory of social destiny under a pseudo-evolutionary form".[31] Its persistence as a political ideology, a quasi-religious hope, was to Robertson "in itself an extremely interesting sociological phenomenon".[32] Elsewhere he declared that in Das Kapital there was "a sociological teaching of permanent importance, and that is the principle which has been stated by [Marx’s] followers as ‘Economic determinism’." But he emphasised again that this was not original to Marx, merely "newly applied". The perspective originated in the Scottish writers and in Charles Comte, and Buckle was, "as it were, resuscitating a buried movement and reviving a forgotten interest". If this point was understood, he declared, scholars would be "less dithyrambic over the service done to sociology by Marx". What Marx had added to the approach was to wed it to absurd economic doctrines, like "surplus value", and to "formal fallacies of the most grotesque description".[33] IV. The Application of Class Analysis Robertson’s studies were not dictated by simple scholarly interest. He sought a usable past. "Either we are thus to learn from history", he declared, "or all history is as a novel without a purpose."[34] His principal application of class analysis in contemporary politics lay in his defence of Free Trade against the rising forces of Protectionism. Free Trade was not simply science itself, "the unshakable inference of a hundred years of economic experience verifying the economic science on which the great experiment was founded", but its abridgement was a classic case of the acquisition of special privilege by a distinct class interest. Thus he declared:
He noted that liberal democracies had not remained immune from the forces of class pressure and mutual predation:
Other aspects of Robertson’s sociology were equally wedded to his liberal concerns. In his "The Sociology of Race", a discussion of the "eloquent fiasco"[38] of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (the classic statement of racism), he effectively disposed of both its historical idiocies and its absurdities of reasoning. In The Germans he refuted the "Teutonic Gospel of Race" with a wealth of historical and ethnological evidence "which once for all reduce[s] to absurdity the theory of the hereditary possession by any race or race-mixture of qualities which ensure their progress or ‘success’ under any conditions."[39] In The Saxon and the Celt[40] he made a similar critique of the "Anglo-Saxon" version of racial superiority, which cast the Celtic peoples in the inferior role. And he made adverse comments on racialist explanations in his book on Buckle.[41] In matters of foreign affairs Robertson shared the "isolationist", anti-interventionist orientation which characterised much of the classical liberal tradition. He thus denounced "thoughtless demands for intervention in the affairs of foreign nations, impossible proposals to redress the wrongs suffered by foreigners at the hands of their own people."[42] Kaczkowski comments that Robertson’s position stemmed less from the laissez-faire classical liberal tradition than from his moral thesis that the basis of all human relations was "reciprocity".[43] However, it was precisely the ideal of reciprocity, the harmony of human interests, that the classical liberals saw as embodied in free trade and which in their view necessitated a new order of international peace.[45] Robertson himself declared that "a sane Political Economy had done more for the promotion of peace than all the moral exhortation in other literature."[46] Robertson was a major influence (along with such anti-war liberals as Herbert Spencer, Gustave de Molinari and Jacques Novicow) on the last great figure in the liberal anti-war tradition, Norman Angell. Angell’s essay "War as the Failure of Reason" was published along with an essay by Robertson in a volume entitled Essays Towards Peace.[49] I would emphasise that Robertson was not a dogmatic pacifist and never allowed his desire for peace to lead him into ignoring aggressive intentions when they arose. Thus his opposition to increased naval estimates ceased the moment Germany’s aims became obvious, and he analysed and denounced the "civicidal madness" of the theory and practice of German "Caesarism".[50] Although a founder member (and President) with Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner of the Rationalist Peace Society in 1910, they both supported the First World War, while allowing that Britain, "in common with other great Powers, may have been guilty of faults of omission and commission". In a statement signed by them, and issued in the name of the Committee of the RPS in 1916, Robertson and Bonner rejected absolutist pacifism, declared that "moral appeal" was quite useless against the "ruthless barbarian", and held that there were two classes of war which, "lamentable as they must be, might yet be quite justifiable", namely "wars of defence and wars of independence". [51] Robertson’s position on imperialism was marked by a similar balance. Imperialism might be a bad ideal, but the British Empire was in existence and a sudden withdrawal might also have undesirable consequences.[52] He considered imperialism detrimental for various reasons. Massive imperial concentrations of power lead, by clear psychological laws, to a spiral of enmity and to the creation of "zealous enemies", [53] who perceive the concentration of power as a threat to which they respond by embarking on a similar course of imperial expansion. Imperialism, in his view, also encouraged both the "nominally defunct principle of a monopoly market"[54] and "primitive racial egoism", destroying the "instinct of domestic sympathy".[55] In his most detailed critique of imperialism, Patriotism and Empire, Robertson sought to find its class roots, the specific interests that profit from it. I find his analysis less than successful, for it is never clear whether he believed that industry, financial interests, the business class as a whole (or as distinct groups) profited from imperialism, or whether it was merely specific sections of these groups that did so.[56] Ironically, Robertson’s failure to produce a really satisfactory account of imperialism can be seen as the result of not following his own methodological precepts. Such an account would need to integrate a sensitive perception of the role and nature of classes and interest groups (without falling into fallacious reifications) with an understanding of the role of both mistaken ideas and atavistic psychological motives. But if Robertson did not always live up to his own philosophy, he did at least make its principles clear. This philosophy lies firmly in the liberal tradition of methodological individualism that warned against raising concepts and categories into supposedly real entities, and against perceiving reality in mere allegory. "Beware of allegorical sociology", he declared in a critique of Schaffle, the German academic sociologist who expended "enormous effort" on elaborating "the dream of a ‘social organism’", a "kind of actual Leviathan" into a scientific demonstration.[57] VI. Robertson as a Political Thinker: Socialist, Neo-Liberal, or ‘Guarded Individualist’? Characterising the nature of Robertson’s liberalism has not always appeared easy, however. Martin Page has described him as "one of the unsung prophets of the British Welfare State"[58] and one of his oldest friends, J. P. Gilmour, termed him a "philosophical Socialist".[59] However, his other close friend, John A. Hobson, opined that "Robertson stood upon the whole by laissez-faire liberalism".[60] And Kaczkowski similarly describes him as "a strict Bright-Cobden Liberal when it came to economics and free-trade ... the last Liberal of the rationalist-radical tradition".[61] Some of Robertson’s statements do indeed suggest that he was a socialist. He once seemed to refer to himself as a "scientific socialist" although his wording is somewhat ambiguous. [62] Elsewhere he declares "an ultimate Socialism" to be "the highest ideal".[63] Moreover, his work is full of critical remarks on laissez-faire and on free-market capitalism. "Mere Free Trade and laissez-faire", he declared, "have not produced and cannot conceivably produce a really sound society. They have yielded us a large and blindly multiplying proletariat, subject to deplorable fluctuations of employment and comfort ..."[64] He attacked what he described as "a deadening competitive industrialism", its "ugliness, apathy, and degradation"[66] and "the social rapine of self-seeking trade".[67] He concluded: "Decidedly, our needed social solutions are not being reached on the lines of laissez-faire."[68] Similarly, he seemed to accept the socialist view that a boom and bust cycle was inherent in a free market, saying that "the periodic miseries [arose] out of industrial anarchy" [69] and that there was something irrational about a "blind industrial competition".[70] He thus declared that he had "no fixed prejudice against legislation as such"[71] and advocated such measures as "socialisation of public monopoly profits as those of railways, banks, gas-works, waterworks". [72] He also spoke in favour of state old-age pensions and taxation of "unearned wealth".[73] Throughout his book on Buckle he criticised that writer’s laissez-faire position. Robertson’s "socialism" thus seems to resemble that of those socialist and neo-liberal thinkers who argued that a rational and scientific society is one in which "society" scientifically chose to regulate "itself". In reality this view is actually a form of "scientism", a fallacious view of the nature of science and a a profoundly unscientific understanding of the nature of social processes.[74] Some of Robertson’s most "scientistic" statements can be found in his generally approving discussion[75] of the American sociologist Lester Ward, himself a classic expounder of the scientistic approach. In his 1891 essay "Outlines of Social Reconstruction", Robertson saw "a greater measure of equality in material well-being" as attainable through "the corporate action of the citizens through their political machinery".[76] Such interventionism represented in his view a "collectively conscious society, a society which has realised evolution and is constructing a universal sociology".[77] Consistent with all this is Robertson’s very critical evaluation[78] of the radical libertarian writer Auberon Herbert who, as the leading American anarchist Benjamin Tucker declared, was "a true anarchist in everything but name".[79] Hopefully Martin Page’s in-progress biography of Robertson will illuminate his relations with the radical liberals and individualists of the period. He certainly held one of them, Joseph Hiam Levy (not to be confused with the socialist writer Hyman Levy), in high regard[80] and, while editor of The National Reformer, featured Levy’s essays in it frequently, as Bradlaugh had done before him.[81] Other individualist contributions which Robertson published in this journal included an essay on "Freedom and Marriage" by Wordsworth Donisthorpe,[82] which had been rejected by The Liberty Annual, the publication of the Liberty and Property Defense League. Donisthorpe’s was, along with Herbert and Levy, one of the leading radical individualist thinkers of the period, although like his fellows, now generally written out of intellectual history and mainstream views of the history of liberalism.[83] Whilst Editor of The Free Review Robertson published essays by many of these diverse individualist and anarchist writers.[84] Nevertheless, in spite of all the above, Robertson, throughout virtually all his writings, distances himself from socialism proper. Moreover, for every anti-capitalist remark, there are at least as many hostile evaluations of socialism. He castigated reformers who "interfere with reasonable freedom in their gropings after improvement" and who "openly flout the eternal yearning of men for freedom". While praising the honesty of both socialists and individualists, he stated that they represented "extremes of error". "‘A plague o’ both your houses!’" was his final judgment.[85] Robertson also repeatedly described the great classical liberal Herbert Spencer as his "intellectual father"[86] and as "one of the great minds of the modern world".[87] He considered Spencer’s polemic against the sins of legislators to be "powerful and often unanswerable", and agreed that "a great deal of modern philanthropic legislation has missed its mark". Spencer, he said, "remains one of the most effective monitors against hasty legislative action".[88] He also praised John Stuart Mill for the eloquence and wisdom of his support for "a doctrine that is ever being venomously assailed and too often being sullied", namely "the doctrine that the good of mankind is a dream if it is not to be secured by preserving for all men the possible maximum of liberty of action and of freedom of thought."[89] Again, Robertson’s hostile comments about laissez-faire can be balanced by favourable ones about its "fundamental truth".[90] Society, he said, had "gained much from its application",[91] and while "quite done with as a pretext for leaving uncured deadly social evils which admit of curative treatment by State action", laissez-faire "is not done with as a principle of rational limitation of State interference", and as a "wholesome caveat against hasty scheming".[92] Robertson distanced himself from socialism in his earliest writings, but his hostility to it does seem to become more pronounced and more systematic in his later works. Thus in Fiscal Fraud and Folly, a passionate critique of protectionism, he lumps together in an ideological rogues’ gallery "political adventurers, opportunists, grafters, socialists, and sciolists in general".[93] He doubted the feasibility of centrally planning an entire society and attacked trade union leaders who thought they "know in advance all about the real treatment of the vast complexity of industry and international trade, and this by [their] inner light as ... good Trade Unionist[s]".[94] In this context he went on to criticise certain trade unionists for "unlimited interference with international, to say nothing of domestic trade". Socialist theorists like G. D. H. Cole were lambasted for relying on mere "well-worn doctrinary formula" instead of offering detailed expositions of how a socialist society would operate. He added:
He also observed sardonically that he was "unaware" that the Labour Party "possessed or accepted any economist", and stated that he had "never detected in Mr. Cole’s polemic an economic as distinguished from a sectarian ethical ideal".[96] The example of Soviet Russia seems to bode large in Robertson’s shift of emphasis. The socialist school had "tried its hand", in Russia and the "terrific object-lesson" correctly accounted, in his view, for the "large body of solid scepticism among the workers as to Communist promises".[97] One of Robertson’s last political works was the dour and memorable The Decadence of 1929. Written under the pseudonym "L. Macaulay" as an imaginary account, by a future historian of 1949, of the "decay of England", it rings even truer now than when he penned it. It is a vision of the "commercial suicide of the United Kingdom" and a settling of scores with all those who had contributed to the collapse. Who, then, were the guilty men? There were the businessmen, those who had abandoned free trade for the legalised theft of tariffs, "the traders who, once honestly proud of their honest and helpful if commonplace commerce, of their service in lightening the burden of life for the mass of mankind, were now grown still prouder of their acquired function of licensed pickpockets." There were also the socialists advocating wholesale nationalisation but who lacked intellectual honesty. Refusing to accept the evidence of individual failures of their schemes, they had always pleaded that socialism could and would succeed when applied to a whole nation. But, Robertson declared, "socialism had been so applied in Russia", with "miserable social and industrial failure" as the result.[98] Marxian socialism was a "doctrinaire dream, scientifically on all fours with all the previous and contemporary Utopianisms ... demonstrably a spurious equation, in which the really vital factors were falsified." The "unthinking" adherents of Marxism, in his view, "knew neither economics nor history".[99] But it was such doctrinaires who, in Robertson’s opinion, were the "aggressive driving force" in "most labour constituencies". Believing "all the encomiums of a non-existent prosperity" in the Soviet Union, its adherents disrupted the meetings of their liberal opponents. Moreover, such intolerance was not restricted merely to the ranks of the Marxists. Socialists generally were "scheming for a society in which not only would there be no machinery whatever for the publication of criticism, since all would be bound to do their share of productive labour for the State alone, but criticism of the new social system itself would be absolutely prohibited." George Bernard Shaw’s "genial" comment that "when once Socialism was established, anyone who questioned the system would be sent to an insane asylum" was utterly representative of the prevailing authoritarianism of the Left. When liberals of a previous generation had pointed out that "socialism inevitably excluded the public criticism of its own validity, and involved a state monopoly of all printing and publication, the Socialists loudly denied the statement." But now, Robertson declared, "they avowed that under Socialism all critics of the system would at least be incarcerated."[100] In general, socialism offered mere "visionary issues" and an "appeal to ignorance, thoughtlessness, to gullibility". It relied on the "principle of inflaming and exploiting the ignorant" and, fundamentally, "on the great motive of envy" — in both class and personal respects. It was simply, in his view, the mirror-image of the predatory class politics of the Conservative Party and the business interests.[101] Intellectually, socialism was merely "panacea mongering". It’s exponents assumed that:
He held that, economically, socialism was utterly naive. "Confidently proposing to supersede the whole machinery of individual enterprise by which economic life had been built up", it ignored the roots of innovation. Thus socialists "took for granted that inventions of every kind would continue to abound, though nobody needed to secure or improve his own income by inventing anything, since there was already enough wealth for all, if only it were properly distributed." [103] "To comprehend the vast complexity of free commerce was beyond the power even of the Socialist intelligentsia in face of the Russian collapse." Their thoughts were little more than "draughts of philanthropic sentiment with grains of second-hand economic theory", while "the proletariat seemed convinced that trade-union secretaries could manage all industry and commerce, with fifty per cent profits for all."[104] The decline of Britain as outlined in The Decadence was fundamentally the result of intellectual failure. An intelligent public spirit was simply absent, and could not be appealed to against the prevalence of "sinister interests" and economic ignorance. As Robertson declared:
Ultimately, the fall of Britain and the British Empire stemmed from the same "central fact" underlying that of the Roman Empire: "Men did not understand the total causation of their social system."[106] Industrial Britain had "let its heritage fall from its hands" and declined "from the status of a first-rate to that of a third-rate power".[107] In his final years Robertson strenuously opposed attempts to incorporate the freethought and rationalist movement into some broader so-called "progressive movement" — an incorporation sought by a number of socialists and Marxists in a typical piece of "popular front" infiltration and manipulation. Robertson held that rationalists could honestly disagree over political positions, and that the growth of rationalism was encouraged more by the "rationalizing habit" of debate between them than by a political partisanship which would merely destroy or tear apart the established rationalist organisations.[108] He had always opposed such "mergers" on tactical grounds, but his later opposition seemed much more marked by opposition to Marxism and socialism, per se. Communism was, in his view, "working irrationalism in the name of Reason".[109] In 1933 he penned his most notable refutation of the so-called "scientific Humanists" (i.e. Marxists), in an essay entitled "Contaminated Ideals". He roundly condemned as fallacious Marxist historical materialism and "surplus value" theory, and "the deep-seated human bias to tyranny" which was manifest in Marx’s "scheme of revolutionary brute force, slaughter, and class hatred in place of fraternity". The "dogmatic and coercive purpose ... inherent in the post-Owen Socialist ideal" was clear long ago, he declared, and in this connection he recalled the refusal of socialists in a debate with Bradlaugh to forswear censorship of non-socialist views. Both in their theory and in their practice in Soviet Russia, socialists, "after benefiting by the right of free speech, propose to abolish that right as soon as they triumph". He concluded: "In sum, then, the ideal of logical persuasion without a shadow of coercion, which is part and parcel of the rationalist ideal, is simply incompatible with the ostensible Socialist ideal." The "pretentious aggression" and "pseudo-science" of the Marxists were threatening "all ideals of free progress in systems which trample liberty under foot, and, dismissing persuasion, eviscerate the mental life even as we see today."[110] It did not escape him that Mussolini had "mentally evolved as a Socialist". [110] Robertson’s critique of socialism was not restricted to its Marxist or egalitarian forms. In his essay on "Utopia" he offered a biting critique of H. G. Wells’ authoritarian Fabian socialism as well as of romantic utopias in general. Such literary absurdities represented a flight from the "depressing side of life" into a situation where all human dilemmas and problems dissolved into a picture harmony of perfection. Man, he argued, is not "an animal of whom it is predicable that every member of the species must and will one day live a mental life in terms of the ideals of Mr. Wells, or yours or mine." "Endless variation in congenital endowment, from the highest to the lowest", is ineradicable in the species.[112] Robertson detected romantic utopianism in all form of socialism. Socialists were, in his view, "zealots of the impossible" and "manufacturers of mere catchwords rather than of practicable policies".[113] They were possessed by a "consummate incompetence to face the practical problem". [114] Like Bradlaugh, he was saddened to find socialist doctrine "appealing to and applauded by, not the clearheaded and self-controlled workers, but the neurotic, the noisy, the passionate, the riotous".[115] Robertson also objected strongly to the socialist celebration of class struggle. A class analysis of historical development did not, for him, imply an acceptance of class conflict as a phenomenon conducive to social progress or to the creation of either a more efficient or a more just society. In his view it was the "supreme duty of Liberalism", its "special mission and function" to "guard earnestly and actively against the recurring risk of class cleavage and class conflict" and to refuse to "pander to class hate either among the rich or among the poor".[116] The weakness of socialism lay not merely in the massive gap between its rhetorical claims and promises and its proposals for implementing its goals, but in the even greater discrepancy between its promises to create a "new Moral World" and its blatant "exploitation of malice" and "ingrained habit of hostility and virulence".[117] Those who champion the cause of labour against an illdefined "bourgeoisie" ignored, in his view, its productive activities. They had succeeded only in erecting "labour" as a "concept and principle of disunion — a league of the handworkers against all who are not of them, and an ideal of ‘social revolution’ in which they shall set their feet on the others’ necks."[118] A representative example of Robertson’s shift to a more hostile evaluation of socialism can be found in his change of mind about the relationship between socialism and war. In early essays he declared that it was "hardly conceivable that, if France and Germany were socialised, the war spirit would remain as before"[119] and that one of the great merits of the socialist movement "is that it is really destroying the spirit of national enmity, as between the workers of the different nations".[120] By 1916 things looked a little different, and he noted then "the virtual surrender to German militarism made even by Socialists who profess to repudiate militarist ambitions". [121] He also observed the racialist tendencies of German socialist scholars such as Woltmann and Reimer, and declared:
He concluded:
However, even in 1916, he still "recognize[d] in the Socialist ideal the highest ethical and the highest economic conception of social life."[123] Robertson was quite clearly not a radical libertarian along the lines of his contemporaries Auberon Herbert, J. H. Levy, and Wordsworth Donisthorpe, or of such modern advocates as Ayn Rand, David Friedman, Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick. But neither did most of the so-called laissez-faire liberals adhere to such a vigorous libertarianism.[124] Nevertheless, simply to term him a neo-liberal along the lines of Hobson or Hobhouse seems to me not quite accurate either. He had a far greater commitment to individual liberty as both goal and method than in the case of most of the neoliberals. [125] This is reflected in his The Meaning of Liberalism, something of a definitive statement of his political philosophy, where he characterised liberalism as fundamentally "a movement of liberation".[126] And although he clearly moved from a greater to a less sanguine view of socialism and state interventionism, his thought remained largely coherent and consistent in its basic outlook. The preface to his 1892 book The Fallacy of Saving[127] included a long quotation from the neo-liberal Thomas Whit taker advocating that moderate intervention be considered on its merits, case by case. And in 1928 he contributed a Foreword to Whittaker’s own treatise The Liberal State, which is a detailed exposition of this approach. He endorsed Whittaker’s critique of authoritarian state socialism, of "the drill-sergeants of the Fabian Society", and distinguished between liberal and illiberal elements in socialistic theory. Whittaker’s approach, like Robertson’s, was a moderate, basically individualist one, with "democratic" and "informed" state actions seen as sometimes necessary to achieve liberal and individualistic ends.[128] It is surely significant that by 1933 Robertson was referring to his position as one of a "guarded individualism".[129] A little earlier he had characterised it as endorsing:
VII. Economics Robertson may claim to be considered as an economic as well as a sociological and political thinker. The bulk of his work in this field is a defence of international free trade, the principle upon which, he declared in 1928, "Liberalism must stake its very existence".[131] His other contributions, however, bear the same ambiguities we have noted in his political thought. Thus, in one of his earliest works, The Eight Hours Question (1893), he offered a cogent critique of the campaign for the state enforcement of an eight-hour working day and pointed to "the very real social dangers of an allround interference with the hours of labour". Rejecting "crude Marxian economics" and the "happy-go-lucky inclination" for state interference, he offered the following assessment of the desirable division between free competition and state regulation:
If this work represents the liberal pole of Robertson’s economic thought, The Fallacy of Saving of 1892 shows him as a critic of classical economics, of what he called "the great error of the laissez-faire school ... that unlimited saving can support unlimited industry". His views on this matter can certainly be termed proto-Keynesian.[135] But while he argued them more coherently than do other exponents of underconsumptionism and "funny money", they suffer, in my view, from the same fallacies as all such writings, including those of Keynes himself.[136] The tension between liberalism and interventionism was not resolved in the work of Robertson which comes closest to systematic economics, namely his The Economics of Progress of 1918. Here he restated his opposition to class struggle and his support for free trade and a mixed economy liberalism, where elements of nationalisation and "national management" would help eliminate "waste".[137] He also rejected the theories of the libertarian free banking advocates A. Egmont Hake and O. E. Wesslau (the authors of Free Trade in Capital and other works).[138] Of greatest relevance to socialism is his emphasis on the importance of production, for socialists of his time and ours act as if economic affairs are merely a matter of readjusting distribution of some static but adequate supply of resources. Robertson declared:
A common tactic of anti-liberal scholars at least since the nineteenth century has been to challenge the validity of economic science by reference to the findings of anthropology and ethnology. The alleged existence of so-called noncommercial or non- economic societies and behaviour refutes, it is claimed, the universality of economic laws.[140] In one of his last essays Robertson criticised anthropological investigations of "primitive economics" for being "needlessly anxious to dispute over general conceptions of economic action and causation" and for their common "desire to discredit all ‘old’ methods in political economy". "Economists", he countered, "have long known well enough that in both primitive and mediaeval life there were social and political and religious forces which created a situation largely different from the modern. It was the modern problem that they were concerned to study."[141] VIII. Elements of Philosophy i. Natural Rights and the Nature of Emotion While certainly contributing to the explication of many of the techniques of reason (as in his Letters on Reasoning), Robertson did not attempt to explore wider epistemological or metaphysical issues or to construct a scientific ethical system. Nevertheless, in a variety of areas he made a number of extremely suggestive and penetrating observations. Many of these are remarkably prescient of the approaches of liberal rationalist philosophers of today. For instance, he perceived that the source of — or need for — any sensible moral code must be a utilitarian one. But he did not fall into the fallacies of either crude collectivist or amoralist forms of utilitarianism. The "sense of final utility is always the final standard"[143] but our "utility" can be graded or categorised hierarchically according to our natures. We owe it to ourselves to pursue "‘the best and the highest’".[144] Of interest in this connection is Robertson’s standpoint concerning natural rights. While such concepts were being rejected by the mainstream of philosophy and the academic world in general, his admittedly parenthetical digressions resembled the Aristotelian natural rights approach championed by most liberal philosophers today. The term, he said, has "a real content" and "a real use" in indicating the nature of reciprocity.[145] As he explicated:
Rights are simply the generalisation of our own individual "self-preservation and self-assertion" to all identical entities; "duty" is simply "reciprocity" in observing these others’ rights.[147] The elaboration of an ethical egoism on Aristotelian, natural rights/natural law lines by such contemporary liberal rationalists as Ayn Rand, Tibor Machan, Eric Mack, Murray Rothbard and others incorporates these insights.[148] Robertson also presented an interpretation of emotion presaging the more detailed expositions of a number of (largely libertarian) contemporary philosophers and psychologists. He thus declared that "not only are ideas and emotions not antagonistic aspects of consciousness, but they are positively inconceivable apart." Normal emotion, in his view, "belongs to an idea". "Affect the perception, the idea, alter or modify or supersede that, and the emotion will take care of itself as surely as your shadow." He thus rejected the traditional assertion of anti-rationalists, conservative or collectivist, that reason is "cold" or "heartless", and human life of necessity irrational because of its emotional constituents. "The upward path for men lies by the way of knowledge and reason — a path from which emotion is in nowise shut out, but in which it is ever more finely touched to finer issues." It is a "motor force" which can be directed wisely or foolishly.[150] ii. Individualism Versus Collectivism Robertson’s commitment to reason, to individual autonomy and to self-sovereignty dictated his attitude not merely to political collectivism and tyranny but to other anti-individualist forces. He rejected Fascism and nationalism not merely because of their factual claims, but also because of their moral character, their "reduction of the living individual to the status an atom in the non-moral state" and their implication that "men exist for the State and not the State for men".[151] The submission of the individual to "the collective pride and lust-to-power of the tribe", to the horrors of war and blind nationalism, were "due fruits of the persistence on the mediaeval path of ‘vigorous government’".[152] Similar reasoning underlies Robertson’s rejection of sexual collectivism. "The spirit of individual self-assertion", he said, "is the stuff of spiritual equality" and is as desirable for women as for men. Walt Whitman’s maxim of "Resist much, obey little" was his stated ideal. The relations of dominance and subservience existing between the sexes were blatantly at variance with "the indefeasible rights of personality as such" and are an inheritance from a time characterised by the "cruel clash of brute force, and ... mindless tyranny of naked strength".[153] Needless to say, he rejected claims (curiously reborn in the chauvinism and sexism of the contemporary socialist "feminist" movement) that women have a "mission" to "elevate" and "purify" politics. There was, he said:
iii. Robertson’s Concept of Reason Joseph McCabe called Robertson "the most considerable figure in British rationalism after the death of Bradlaugh ... the recognized leader of the rationalist movement".[155] While I am not concerned here with Robertson’s specific critique of Christianity and of religion generally, it is important to understand how he viewed reason, and to appreciate his conviction that the rule of reasoning in every aspect of life and behaviour, individual and social, was beneficent. Robertson lies in the radical rationalist and individualist tradition associated with the Levellers, the eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen, Paine, various natural rights/natural law philosophers, the fin de siecle individualists and, of course, modern libertarians such as Rand and Rothbard. In the view of those committed to this tradition, including Robertson himself, the practice and exercise of reason liberate the individual from the constraints and injustices of society, politics and religion, all of which noticeably rely on anti- rational elements. As he put it:
Liberalism, it followed, was "a war of reason" and its adherents formed "a party of principle that shall know why it acts, and foresee its way".[157] He opposed all religions because they rendered a "fictitious account of the world, and of human life" and hence "confuse men’s ideas of right and wrong, and of wisdom and unwisdom". He explained:
Certain eminent thinkers might, he thought, be able to function adequately while adhering to rational thought in their specialist sphere and to nonsense in another; but he felt that, for the majority, "irrational opinions are just so much deadweight, so much rubbish in the wheels of the thinking machine, wasting its power and throwing it out of gear."[159] For him, rationalism constituted a moral duty to oneself — the ideal process of "making each day a conscious new beginning in the higher life". Progress and happiness in individual and social life are related dialectically: there is no social progress and improvement without individual progress and improvement, and vice versa-and such improvement is always an improvement of rationality:
Robertson’s concept of reason has been attacked by Kaczkowski as "singularly unphilosophical" and "somewhat untraditional in approach".[161] Robertson in fact sums reason up as "only second thought against first thought: more precisely it is a careful plexus of our modes of knowledge and inference ... not a different function from primary thinking or believing." In other words:
Far from being unphilosophical this approach seems to me to be both perceptive and prescient of that of Sir Karl Popper. [167] Indeed, Popper’s view of science as proceeding by a process of "conjectures and refutations", based on insight and inspiration, is also presaged by Robertson’s view of the role of unsupported ideas as tools of reasoning and discovery. [164] IX. Robertson’s Liberalism: A Critical Assessment I have tried to show that Robertson was a productive and important thinker. That his political philosophy seems a "curious combination of the old and the new liberalism", as Kaczkowski puts it,[165] is understandable in the light of the prevailing ignorance of the radical rationalist tradition in classical liberalism. His attempt to treat all subjects with objectivity and rational scrutiny, free from apriorism, dogmatism or fanaticism produced a body of thought that at first glance is not easy to classify. Nevertheless, as I have attempted to show, he adhered to traditional liberal individualist values and concerns, and his thought, unlike that of some so-called neo-liberals, remained quite distinct from socialism. I have already indicated that my own interest in Robertson is not merely antiquarian. His radical rationalist and liberal approach is undergoing a revival. The issues he discussed are still, after all, the disputed political and economic questions of our time. What then can we learn from him? While I would concur with Professor Andreski’s estimate of the favourable balance of "correctness" in his work, it does seem to me that there were frequent errors both in his reasoning and — as Andreski himself admits[165] — in his factual evidence. The correction of those errors and a more accurate knowledge of social and economic facts appears to me, however, to lead one inevitably lead one to an appreciation of the libertarian and individualist strands in his thought, and to a rejection of the interventionist and socialist ones. study the details. For example, it is hard to reconcile Robertson’s repeated attacks on capitalist endeavour with his implicitly individualist comments on natural rights and individual assertion. Moreover, production, trade and competition in the market place — i.e. in the absence of coercive force and special privilege — is hardly "rapine" or blind egoism. As he himself put it at one point, the ideal of industry is, after all, "the honest rendering of service for service".[167] It is difficult to grasp the meaning of his view that socialism represented some higher "reciprocity" than that of the free market. Indeed, it is frequently impossible to see, in the light of his observations on the reality of socialist experiments and the views of actual socialists, what socialism meant at all — other than a phrase denoting a desirable state of affairs (and who doesn’t desire such a state!). One suspects too that in spite of his attempt to conceive of morality in rational terms, he was still dominated by the intellectual residue of traditional religious altruism and anti-individualism, with its rejection of individual self-assertion and self-interest.[165] Other ethical incoherencies are present. If one does not accept (as Robertson indeed did not) the labour theory of value, it is hard to see why "unearned increments" of any sort of property — land, capital or personal skills — should be subject to government confiscation, or why some sorts of labour (i.e. factory workers) should be favoured by state action above others (i.e. entrepreneurs).[169] Robertson himself stressed "how important the factual error is" that "knowledge is the soil in which judgment waxes, and ... every process of reasoning tends to be deepened and refined as it is based on a widened knowledge of the sum of things."[170] Among his own serious factual errors are his confident assertions about the superiority of state postal services and telegraphy, refuted by evidence available even at the time. Subsequent experience of these and other nationalised industries throughout the world has only reinforced this evidence.[171] Robertson’s naive belief that there was little danger that state employees could constitute a powerful interest group and combine against the public interest[172] needs little comment in an age of mass action, strikes and violence by myriad groups of state employees. It also seems to me that Robertson did not observe the lessons of his own class analysis. He ignored the extent to which the problems and conditions of his time were the result of coercive class legislation, the many interventions both historical and contemporary, from which the market order was still struggling to free itself but for which it was ironically being blamed.[173] Moreover, in the light of both his contemporary and historical observations, one is amazed at Robertson’s failure to realise that an extension of political machinery into social and economic life could only increase conflict and disruption, as different interest groups would struggle for control and for the benefits of interventionism. As he himself wrote after some direct Parliamentary observation of real life, "every operation of State finance in peace is a battle-ground of interests, all represented in the legislature."[174] His own earlier account, in The Evolution of States, of the extension of state power in the Roman Empire really should have warned him. He wrote there: "As the scope of the State increased from age to age, the patrician class found ready to its hand means of enrichment which yielded more return with much less trouble than was involved in commerce."[175] Perhaps the major fallacy in Robertson’s work is what has subsequently been described by Friedrich Hayek as ‘scientism’, the belief that scientific progress means an extension of an allegedly ‘scientific control’ to society as a whole — "the controlled and rational progressive action of the whole community", as Robertson put it.[176] Apart from the fact that such regulation in reality means the regulation of some people by others — something which Robertson’s own methodological individualism should have alerted him to — it ignores the real nature of social existence. For in a market society a ‘spontaneous order’ emerges from uncoerced individual action. The spontaneous order of (relatively) free market societies has repeatedly shown itself to be more productive and harmonious than any type of imposed order.[177] Robertson occasionally deplored what he called "waste". But this — when it is not merely a derogatory misnomer for consumer decisions which do not meet with someone else’s approval — is merely the price of the process of adjustments that enable the free market to be so incredibly productive.[178] Scientism, then, is a profoundly unscientific doctrine, ignoring the true nature of the entities and processes for which it attempts to prescribe.[179] There is no way that a scientific planner can make "exact calculations" — a phrase Robertson uses in his The Meaning of Liberalism — for the economy as a whole. This was pointed out by his contemporary, W. H. Mallock, although only worked out systematically by the "Austrian School" economists of the later twentieth century in the so-called "economic calculation" critique of socialism. The sort of information necessary for any would-be planner is simply not accessible to any one individual. The knowledge required is tacit knowledge, implicit in the multitude of decisions and evaluations of all individuals. Rational economic calculation is hence impossible under central economic planning.[180] As a great exponent of radical rationalism and liberalism, and as a significant sociologist, Robertson deserves to be rescued from an unjustified obscurity. That his thought was not without its ambiguities and errors is to say merely that he was as other men. And, as he put it himself, the only "safeguard against the risks of reasoning is just — more reasoning". [181] I find it hard to imagine that Robertson, were he alive, would not have fulfilled the intellectual duty he proclaimed, that of "perpetually revising and widening [one’s] thought and ... knowledge, so forever reaching towards fresh enlightenment."[182] I like to think that he would have joined those of us who today champion a more vigorous and systematic rationalist and radical libertarianism, shorn of any fatal residues of statism.
|