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The Debate on Economic and Social Security in the Late Eighteenth Century
Rothschild Rothschild, Emma
Rothschild
Rothschild, Emma
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Abstract
"“The heart of flint that has disgraced the beginning of the nineteenth century”, William Godwin wrote in 1820, was the characteristic, in particular, of “as many of us as studied the questions of political economy”.1 Political economy, he wrote in his extended response to Malthus’s Essay on Population, is inimical to “all the ramifications of social existence”; it sees the world as a cold and cruel scene, or as “a city under the severe visitation of a pestilence”.2 Like the poet Robert Southey, Godwin thought that the tendency of economists was to treat men in isolation from their social and public lives. “Adam Smith’s book is the code, or confession of faith of this system”, Southey wrote in 1812. “Pluck the wings of his intellect, strip him of the down and plumage of his virtues, and behold in the brute, denuded, pitiable animal, the man of the manufacturing system!”3 The point of this essay is to look at ideas of social development — including the social security and social integration of the poor — in the political economy of the late 18th century, and at their reflection in subsequent laissez-faire economics. The cruel reputation of political economy is quite undeserved, I will suggest, in relation to Adam Smith, and to his most distinguished followers in the period before the French Revolution. Social development, in their writings, was not inimical to but rather a condition for the development of commerce. The flint-hearted view of society, in which men and women are surrounded only by incentives, and inspired only by fear, was an innovation of the decade after Smith’s death in 1790, and of the period of intense fright that followed the French Revolution. I will look first, in what follows, at Smith’s own description of some of the constituents of social security and insecurity in the Wealth of Nations. I will then look at the development of these and related ideas in pre-Revolutionary France, and in particular at proposals of the great French statesman Turgot, and of the mathematician and economist Condorcet, for the reform of social assistance and for a social security insurance fund. These proposals were the object of intense criticism, it will be seen, in the period following the Revolution, and in discussions of the reform of the English Poor Laws; the rejection of social security was indeed of central importance to the quite different development of Smith’s thought in Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on Population of 1798. There were two sharply opposed views of social security in the laissez faire political economy of the late eighteenth century, associated respectively with Condorcet and with Malthus. Malthus’s views have been far more influential than Condorcet’s in subsequent economic thought. But Condorcet’s ideas — or the road which was not taken in 1790s — are of continuing interest, it will be proposed, for modern economics. I will suggest, in conclusion, that Turgot’s and Condorcet’s ideas of social integration can illuminate modern debates over economic and social policy. The political economy of the late Enlightenment provides no support for the view of many contemporary proponents of laissez faire that social security is inimical to economic development, or that social equality is a form of luxury, to be promoted only in countries which are already rich."(pg 1)
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1995-05
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With permission of the license/copyright holder