[ 132 ] The Great Transformation
and enjoyments, "and that they should be stimulated by all legal
means in their exertions to procure them." Ironically, in order to evade
the law of nature, men were here enjoined to raise their own starvation
level. And yet, these were undoubtedly sincere attempts on the part of
the classical economists to rescue the poor from the fate which their
theories helped to prepare for them.
In the case of Ricardo, theory itself included an element which
counterbalanced rigid naturalism. This element, pervading his whole
system, and firmly grounded in his theory of value, was the principle
of labor. He completed what Locke and Smith had begun, the human -
ization of economic value; what the Physiocrats had credited to Na-
ture, Ricardo reclaimed for man. In a mistaken theorem of tremen-
dous scope he invested labor with the sole capacity of constituting
value, thereby reducing all conceivable transactions in economic soci-
ety to the principle of equal exchange in a society of free men.
Within Ricardo's system itself the naturalistic and the humanistic
factors coexisted which were contending for supremacy in economic
society. The dynamic of this situation was of overwhelming power. As
its result the drive for a competitive market acquired the irresistible
impetus of a process of Nature. For the self-regulating market was now
believed to follow from the inexorable laws of Nature, and the un-
shackling of the market to be an ineluctable necessity. The creation of
a labor market was an act of vivisection performed on the body of soci-
ety by such as were steeled to their task by an assurance which only sci-
ence can provide. That the Poor Law must disappear was part of this
certainty. "The principle of gravitation is not more certain than the
tendency of such laws to change wealth and vigour into misery and
weakness . . . until at last all classes should be infected with the plague
of universal poverty," wrote Ricardo.* He would have been, indeed, a
moral coward who, knowing this, failed to find the strength to save
mankind from itself by the cruel operation of the abolishment of poor
relief. It was on this point that Townsend, Malthus and Ricardo, Ben-
tham, and Burke were at one. Fiercely as they differed in method and
outlook, they agreed on the principles of political economy and op-
position to Speenhamland. What made economic liberalism an ir-
resistible force was this congruence of opinion between diametri-
cally opposed outlooks; for what the ultra-reformer Bentham and the
* Ricardo,D.,PrinciplesofPoliticalEconomyandTaxation, ed. Conner, 1929,p. 86.
Political Economy and the Discovery of Society [ 133 ]
ultra-traditionalist Burke equally approved of automatically took on
the character of self-evidence.
One man alone perceived the meaning of the ordeal, perhaps be-
cause among the leading spirits of the age he alone possessed intimate
practical knowledge of industry and was also open to inner vision. No
thinker ever advanced farther into the realm of industrial society than
did Robert Owen. He was deeply aware of the distinction between so-
ciety and state; while harboring no prejudice against the latter, as God-
win did, he looked to the state merely for that which it could perform:
helpful intervention designed to avert harm from the community,
emphatically not the organizing of society. In the same way he nour-
ished no animosity against the machine the neutral character of which
he recognized. Neither the political mechanism of the state, nor the
technological apparatus of the machine hid from him the phenome-
non: society. He rejected the animalistic approach to society, refuting
its Malthusian and Ricardian limitations. But the fulcrum of his
thought was his criticism of Christianity, which he accused of "indi-
vidualization," or of fixing the responsibility for character on the indi-
vidual himself, thus denying, to Owen's mind, the reality of society
and its all-powerful formative influence upon character. The true
meaning of the attack on "individualization" lay in his insistence on
the social origin of human motives: "Individualized man, and all that
is truly valuable in Christianity, are so separated as to be utterly inca-
pable of union through all eternity." His discovery of society urged
him on to transcend Christianity and seek for a position beyond it. He
grasped the truth that because society is real, man must ultimately
submit to it. His socialism, one might say, was based on a reform of hu-
man consciousness to be reached through the recognition of the real-
ity of society. "Should any of the causes of evil be irremovable by the
new powers which men are about to acquire," he wrote, "they will
know that they are necessary and unavoidable evils; and childish un-
availing complaints will cease to be made."
Owen may have nourished an exaggerated notion of those powers;
otherwise he hardly could have suggested to the magistrates of the
County of Lanark that society should be forthwith newly started from
the "nucleus of society" which he had discovered in his village com-
munities. Such flux of the imagination is the privilege of the man of
genius, but for whom mankind could not exist for lack of understand-
ing of itself. All the more significant was the irremovable frontier of
[ 134 ] The Great Transformation
freedom to which he pointed, that was given by the necessary limits set
to the absence of evil in society. But not until man had transformed so-
ciety according to the ideals of justice would this frontier become appar-
ent, Owen felt; then man would have to accept this frontier in the spirit
of maturity which knows not childish complaint.
Robert Owen, in 1817, described the course on which Western man
had entered and his words summed up the problem of the coming
century. He pointed to the mighty consequences which proceed from
manufactures, "when left to their natural progress" "The general
diffusion of manufactures throughout a country generates a new
character in its inhabitants; and as this character is formed upon a
principle quite unfavourable to individual or general happiness, it
will produce the most lamentable and permanent evils, unless its ten-
dency be counteracted by legislative interference and direction." The
organization of the whole of society on the principle of gain and profit
must have far-reaching effects. He formulated them in terms of hu-
man character. For the most obvious effect of the new institutional
system was the destruction of the traditional character of settled
populations and their transmutation into a new type of people, mi-
gratory, nomadic, lacking in self-respect and discipline—crude, cal-
lous beings of whom both laborer and capitalist were an example. He
proceeded to the generalization that the principle involved was un-
favorable to individual and social happiness. Grave evils would be
produced in this fashion unless the tendencies inherent in market in-
stitutions were checked by conscious social direction made effective
through legislation. Doubtless, the condition of the laborers which he
deplored was partly the effect of the "allowance system." But essen-
tially, what he observed was true of town and village laborers alike,
namely, that "they are at present in a situation infinitely more de-
graded and miserable than they were before the introduction of those
manufactories, upon the success of which their bare subsistence now
depends." Here again, he hit rock bottom, emphasizing not incomes
but degradation and misery. And as the prime cause of this degrada-
tion he, rightly again, pointed to the dependence for bare subsistence
on the factory. He grasped the fact that what appeared primarily as an
economic problem was essentially a social one. In economic terms the
worker was certainly exploited: he did not get in exchange that which
was his due. But important though this was, it was far from all. In spite
of exploitation, he might have been financially better off than before.
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