LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

THE BRENNER DEBATE EXPLAINED

The Brenner Debate The agricultural revolution Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England witnessed an agricultural revolution which involved massive changes in land tenure, the organization of production on farms, the techniques employed in farming, and the productivity of agriculture. Thus the sixteenth century represented a sharp change in English rural life: the emergence of the capitalist farm in place of small-scale peasant cultivation, the intensification of market relations, increase in population, and eventual breakthrough to capitalist development in town and country. The social consequences of this revolution were massive as well: smallholding peasant farming gave way to larger capitalist farms; hundreds of thousands of displaced peasants were rapidly plunged into conditions of day labor, first in farming and then in manufacture in towns and cities; higher farm productivity permitted more rapid urbanization and the growth of an urban, commercialized economy; and higher real incomes provided higher levels of demand for finished goods which stimulated industrial development. Thus the agricultural revolution was the necessary prelude to the industrial revolution in England. [1] “It was the growth of agricultural productivity, rooted in the transformation of agrarian class or property relations, which allowed the English economy to embark upon a path of development foreclosed to its Continental neighbours. This path was distinguished by continuing industrialization and overall economic growth through the period when `general crisis' gripped the other European economies” (Brenner 1982:110). It was indeed, in the last analysis, an agricultural revolution, based on the emergence of capitalist class relations in the countryside which made it possible for England to become the first nation to experience industrialization [through higher levels of grain productivity and higher income to stimulate demand for industrial goods]. (Brenner 1976:68) This process poses at least two problems for historical explanation. First is an historical question: why did breakthrough occur in England in the sixteenth century and not the fifteenth or the nineteenth? And the second is geographic: why did this process of agricultural development occur in England but not on the Continent? In particular, why did agrarian life in the French countryside remain relatively unchanged throughout this period? And why did eastern Europe slide into a “second feudalism”? [2] A variety of explanations have been advanced for these developments. Some economic historians (e.g., M. M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie) have maintained that the cause of this process of change was an autonomous increase in either population or commerce or both. Robert Brenner argues, however, that these explanations are inadequate, since these large-scale factors affected the whole of Western Europe, while capitalist breakthrough occurred only in Britain. Brenner holds that the determining factor is the particular character of social-property relations in different regions of Europe (particularly the conditions of land-tenure and associated forms of surplus extraction), the interests and incentives which these relations impose on the various actors, and the relative power of the classes defined by those relations in particular regions. Brenner's explanation of these developments is thus based on “micro-class analysis” of the agrarian relations of particular regions of Europe. The processes of agricultural modernization unavoidably favored some class interests and harmed others. Capitalist agriculture required larger units of production (farms); the application of larger quantities of capital goods to agriculture; higher levels of education and scientific knowledge; etc. All of this required expropriation of small holders and destruction of traditional communal forms of agrarian relations. Whose interests would be served by these changes? Higher agricultural productivity would result; but the new agrarian relations would be ones which would pump the greater product out of the control of the producer and into elite classes and larger urban concentrations. Consequently, these changes did not favor peasant community interests, in the medium run at least. It is Brenner's view that in those regions of Europe where peasant societies were best able to defend traditional arrangements--favorable rent levels, communal control of land, and patterns of small holding--those arrangements persisted for centuries. In areas where peasants had been substantially deprived of tradition, organization, and power of resistance, capitalist agriculture was able (through an enlightened gentry and budding bourgeoisie) to restructure agrarian relations in the direction of profitable, scientific, rational (capitalist) agriculture. Hypertext Book | UnderstandingSociety | Daniel Little <!--[if lt IE 6]> <![endif]

Saturday, January 2, 2010

The Brenner debate revisited

One of the defining controversies in the field of economic history in the past 35 years is the Brenner debate. Robert Brenner published "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe" in Past and Present in 1976 (link) and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" in 1982. In between these publications (and following) there was a rush of substantive responses from leading economic historians, including M. M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. (Many of the most significant articles are collected in Aston and Philpin's The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe.) Brenner's theories injected important new impetus into the old question: what led to the advent of capitalism? (Maurice Dobb had stimulated a similar burst of scholarship on this topic with his 1963 Studies In The Development Of Capitalism (link). Brenner's discussion of the Dobb debate can be found in his essay, "Dobb on the transition from feudalism to capitalism" here.)

The core issue of the debate is large and important: what were the social factors that brought about the major economic transformations of the European economy since the decline of feudalism? Feudalism was taken to be a stagnant economic system; but in the sixteenth century things began to change. There was something of an agricultural revolution in England, with technological innovation, changes of cropping systems, and significant increase in land productivity. There were the beginnings of manufacture, leading eventually to water- and steam-powered machines. There was a population shift from the countryside to towns and cities. There was industrial revolution. (Marx describes much of this process in Capital; here's an earlier post of his concept of "primitive accumulation.") So what were the large social factors that caused this widespread process of social and economic change? What propelled these dramatic changes of economic structure?

The great economic historian M. M. Postan offered a simple theory: “Behind most economic trends in the middle ages, above all behind the advancing and retreating land settlement, it is possible to discern the inexorable effects of rising and declining population” (Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages, p. 72). Against this view, Brenner writes: "Under different property structures and different balances of power, similar demographic or commercial trends, with their associated patterns of factor prices, presented very different opportunities and dangers and thus evoked disparate responses, with diverse consequences for the economy as a whole. Indeed, . . . under different property structures and balances of class forces . . . precisely the same demographic and commercial trends yielded widely divergent results" (Brenner 1982:16-17). Key to Brenner's argument is the fact that agricultural change was substantially different in England and France; so he insists that an adequate causal explanation must identify a factor that varies similarly.

From the distance of several decades, the dividing lines of the Brenner debate are pretty clear. One school of thought (Postan, Ladurie) attempts to explain the economic transformations described here in terms of facts about population, while the other (Brenner's) argues that the central causal factors have to do with social institutions (social-property relations and institutions of political power). The demographic theory focuses its attention on the factors that influenced population growth, including disease; the social institutions theory focuses attention on the institutional framework within which economic actors (lords, peasants, capitalist farmers) pursue their goals. The one is akin to a biological or ecological theory, emphasizing common and universal demographic forces; the other is a social theory, emphasizing contingency and variation across social space.

A voice that doesn't come into the debate directly but that is highly relevant is that of Douglass North. His book (with Robert Paul Thomas), The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, offers a theory of modern economic development that falls within the category of "social institutional theory" rather than demographic theory. But whereas Brenner finds primary causal importance in the institutions that define local class relations (a Marxian idea), North argues that property relations that create the right kinds of incentives will stimulate rapid economic growth (a Smithian idea). And North finds that this is the innovation that took place in England in the early modern period. It was the creation of capitalist property relations that stimulated economic growth.

This schematic representation of the strands of argument in the Brenner debate suggests competing causal diagrams:

population growth => economic activity => sustained economic growth (Postan)
weak peasant farmers, strong capitalist farmers => enclosure and farming innovations => rapid agricultural growth (Brenner)
enhanced protections of property rights => incentive for profitable activity => sustained economic growth (North)

But it seems clear in hindsight that these are false dichotomies. We aren't forced to choose: Malthus, Marx, or Smith. Economic development is not caused by a single dominant factor -- a point that Guy Bois embraces in his essay (Aston and Philpin, 117). Rather, all these factors were in play in European economic development -- and several others as well. (For example, Ken Pomeranz introduces the exploitation of the natural resources, energy sources, and forced labor of the Americas in his account of the economic growth of Western Europe (The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy). And I suppose that it would be possible to make a climate-change argument for this period of change as well.) Moreover, each large factor (population, prices, property relations) itself is the complex result of a number of great factors -- including the others on the list. So we shouldn't expect simple causal diagrams of large outcomes like sustained economic growth.

Not all the heat of this debate derives from a polemic between a neo-Marxist theorist and the Malthusians; there is also a significant disagreement between Brenner and another important Marxist economic historian, Guy Bois. Bois' Crisis of Feudalism appeared in 1976 -- the same year as Brenner's first paper in the debate. The crisis to which Bois refers is an analogy with a classic Marxist claim about capitalism: where Marx discerned a crisis in capitalism deriving from the falling rate of profit, Bois found a crisis in feudalism deriving from a falling rate of feudal levy. (Here is an interesting review by Chris Harman of another of Bois' books, The Transformation of the Year One Thousand: The Village of Lournard from Antiquity to Feudalism.) Bois criticizes Brenner's account for being excessively theory-driven. He argues that Brenner begins with a commitment to class struggle as a fundamental explanation, and then forces the facts of French and English rural life into this framework. Better, he argues, to let the complexity of the historical situations emerge through careful evaluation of the evidence. "Brenner's thought is, in fact, arranged around a single principle: theoretical generalization always precedes direct examination of historical source material" (Aston and Philpin, 110). And Bois argues that the evidence will suggest that it is the declining feudal levy rather than the capacity for resistance by French peasants that best explains the course of events in France.

In short, one important consequence of the Brenner debate was the renewed focus it placed on the question of social causation. Brenner and the other participants expended a great deal of effort in developing theories of the causal mechanisms that led to economic change in this period. And in hindsight, it appears that a lot of the energy in the debates stemmed from the false presupposition that it should be possible to identify a single master factor that explained these large changes in economic development. But this no longer seems supportable. Rather, historians are now much more willing to recognize the plurality of causes at work and the geographical differentiation that is inherent in almost every large historical process. So the advice that Bois extends -- don't let your large theory get in the way of detailed historical research -- appears to be good counsel.

A web-based text for the philosophy of social sciences

A WEB-BASED RESOURCE
The philosophy of social sciences raises a series of foundational questions having to do with how we can arrive at empirically and theoretically supported understandings of social and individual behavior. What is involved in explaining social outcomes and patterns? How do agents cause outcomes? What roles do social entities such as structures, organizations, or moral systems play in social causation?
My blog, UnderstandingSociety, addresses a series of topics in the philosophy of social science. What is involved in "understanding society"? The blog is an experiment in writing a book, one idea at a time. In order to provide a bit more coherence for the series of postings, I've organized a series of threads that link together the postings relevant to a particular topic. These can be looked at as virtual "chapters". This list of topics and readings can serve as the core of a semester-long discussion of the difficult philosophical issues that arise in the human sciences. It roughly parallels the topics I cover in the course I teach in the philosophy of social science at the University of Michigan.
Look at this web document as a web-based, dynamic monograph on the philosophy of social science; and look at this list of threads as one possible route through some foundational issues in the philosophy and methodology of social science.

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THE PRE BRENNER DEBATE

The Agrarian Problem In The Sixteenth Century

by R.H. Tawney

Publication date 1912

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

PART I.—THE SMALL LANDHOLDER

The Rural Population— (a)

The Classes of Landholders . . .19 (5)

The Freeholders 27 (c)

The Customary Tenants . . . 40

II. The Peasantry — (a) The Variety of Conditions . . . .55

( b) The Consolidation of Peasant Holdings . 57

III. The Peasantry { continued)—

{d) The Economic Environment of the Small Cultivator ....... 98 17.

The Peasantry {continued)— {e) Signs op Change 136

The Growth of Competitive^ Rents on New Allotments 139

{g) The Progress of Enclosure among the Peasantry 147

PART II.—THE TRANSITION TO CAPITALIST AGRICULTURE

I. The New Rural Economy — (a) Motives and Causes 177

{b) The Growth op the Large Leasehold Farm 200

II. The Reaction of the Agrarian Changes on the Peasantry —

(a) The Removing of Landmarks. . . .231

(b) The Struggle fob the Commons . . .237

(1) The Agrarian Changes and the Poor Law .,^266

III. The Question of Tenant Right —

(a) The Tenants at Will and the Leaseholders 281

(b) The Copyholders 287

PART III.—THE OUTCOME OF THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION

I. The Agrarian Problem and the State —

(a) T^ Political and Social Importance op the Peasantry 313

(b) Legislation and Administration . . .351

II. General Conclusions 401

Appendix I 410

Appendix II 422 Index 437

Richard Henry "R. H." Tawney (/ˈtɔːni/; 30 November 1880 – 16 January 1962) was an English economic historian,^[1]^[2]social critic,^[3]^[4] ethical socialist,^[5] Christian socialist,^[6] and an important proponent of adult education.^[8]^[9]

The Oxford Companion to British History (1997) explained that Tawney made a "significant impact" in all four of these "interrelated roles".^[10] A. L. Rowse goes further by insisting that "Tawney exercised the widest influence of any historian of his time, politically, socially and, above all, educationally".^[11]

A HISTORY OF BRITISH SOCIALISM MAX BEER

INTRODUCTION

The book which is now published under the title '' A History of British Socialism, Volume I.,*' was intended by the author to be the first of two volumes, the second of which would carry the story of British Socialism into the opening decade of the present century. The War intervened before the second volume was ready for the Press, and Mr. Beer, like most other students, was compelled for the time being to lay his literary work on one side.

The first volume, therefore, is now published separately, the next, it is hoped, will appear on the return of peace. Together they will form the most complete account of the development of Socialist thought m Great Britain which has yet appeared. The subject of the present volume is the growth of Socialism down to the rise of Chartism, and its readers must remember that there is a sequel in which the story is completed.

But the period with which it deals is sufficiently distinct to be studied separately, and the book is a unity, not a mutilated fragment. Mr. Beer's book is a study of political thought upon the group of problems created by the rise of capitalist agriculture and capitalist industry, as it developed in the country which was the first to experience the transition, and which experienced it most completely.

It is called, A History of British Socialism," because the particular aspect of that thought with which it IS primarily concerned is the effort, partly gritical, partly constructive, at once aspiration, theory, prophecy, and programme, which had as its object to substitute for the direction of industry by the motive of personal profit and the method of unrestricted ^competition some principle of organization more compatible with social solidarity and economic freedom.

Like other summary designations of complex political forces, Socialism is a word the connotation of which varies, not only from generation to generation, but from decade to decade ; and Mr. Beer has wisely refrained from trimming the edges of an experimental and combative history to fit the framework of any neat definition. Instead of formulating a canon of Socialist orthodoxy and grouping the exponents of the faith according to the different degrees of their proximity to it, he has allowed the significance of his title to emerge from the different and sometimes contradictory currents of thought which inte mingle, in their natural complexity and exuberance and crudity, in the pages of his book.

His work is not the chronicle of a sect or of a party, but the analysis of a moral and intellectual movement. As the present volume shows, that movement can claim some classics. But it has developed less through the literary succession of a chain of writers than by the renewed and spontaneous reflection of each generation upon the dominant facts and theories which confronted it. The mental atmosphere of England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the reactions of the French Revolution and the long War, the agitation which preceded, and the disillusionment which followed, the first Reform Bill, the influence of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and the Utilitarians form a background without a description of which English Socialism, in its seminal period, is unintelligible.

Mr. Beer has set them m the high light which they deserve. He presents the main elements in the political thought of the time, not as specimens in a museum, but in the tumultuous energy and profusion with which they swept across the mind of a tormented generation. The key to the heart of an economic age lies in economics, as to that of a religious age it is religion. What he offers is a study of one side of the great debate upon the merits of modern industrial civilization, which the nineteenth century, at the climax of its triumphant self-confidence, could ignore but could not silence, and which is still unended. His feet are always planted on solid earth, and he is not of those who would convert history into a procession of abstractions.

But the theme of his book is political thought, not political events, and he is more interested in the workshops where doctrines are forged and sharpened than in their use in the field, if there are critics who regard the history of opinion as an unprofitable dilettantism, they may be invited to reconsider their judgment when they have read the second part of the present volume. For the ideas whose development and genesis it traces are not antiquarian cunosities, but a high explosive,—and an explosive which has not yet been fired.

These ideas have a long history, and the first ninety-one pages of the present volume are given to a description of the communist elements in English thought from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Like the Christianity of Plato, the Socialism of the ammae naturahter soctahshcae of the pre-industrial era bears its name by metaphor or analogy, and the treatment which it receives from Mr. Beer must not be interpreted as implying that he regards a spiritual affinity as a direct affiliation. The importance for him of the earlier thinkers consists in the legacy of political principles which they transmitted.

Capitalist industry arose, as he points out, in a country which was intellectually prepared to receive it. It developed, not by a fortuitous series of technical discoveries, but through the concentration of thought upon definite problems to the exclusion of others, and there is a sense in which Locke and Blackstone were as truly its pioneers as Arkwright and Crompton. The first part of the book, therefore, is in the nature of an introduction to its main theme,—the development of political thought under the stress of Industrial Revolution.

The social history of the years from 1760 to 1840 has received more attention in England than that of any other period Toynbee, Held, Cunningham, and Mantoux have made its mam features familiar, and the brilliant books of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have painted an unforgettable picture of the meaning of the new economic regime to the workers in village and town. The political philosophy which triumphed has been the subject of an elaborate study by Leslie Stephen. Prof. Wallas has desenbed it, while it still had to fight for its existence. Prof. Dicey has shown how in the day of its power it transformed English thought and institutions between 1832 and 1870. What has never been adequately written is the history of the political philosophy which failed.

For the victory of the panegyrists of the new industrial order was so complete as to obliterate the very remembrance of its critics, and to create the impression that Utilitarian- ism spoke with the voice of reason itself. That is what seemed to be the case to the contemporaries who applauded. That is how it still often appears to-day. There was a leaden obscurantism which would not think. There was a blind movement of misery among masses hardly capable of thought. But in the first forty years of the century which saw the establishment of capitalist industry intelligence was united in its approval, and an alternative philosophy did not find expression in England till it was imported in the forties from abroad. That impression is natural, but the present volume shows that it is an illusion.

In the clash of political idea^ in the early nineteenth century there were not two protagonists, but three, and the least known had not the least vitality For capitalism was no sooner dominant than it produced its critics, and side by side with the economic theory of Ricardo and the political theory of Bentham there appeared a body of doctrine which attacked the fundamental basis of the new order.

It is not the case, therefore, as has sometimes been suggested, that the classical land of capitalist industry had to wait for an exposition of Socialism till a German exile disinterred dusty blue books in the British Museum. As Marx himself was well aware, there was an indigenous English Socialism which, except for the inspiration to all creative thought given by France, owed nothing to foreign influences.

Spence, Ogilvie, and Paine, oi whom an admirable account is contained in the late Mr. P. A. Brown's The French Revolution in English History, were agrarian reformers, though Paine was much more as well Godwin was an anarchist; Charles Hail was a conservative critic of capitalism rather than a socialist. But the writings of Gray, Thompson, Hodgskin, and Bray, all published, except that of Bray, which appeared in 1839, decade 1820-1830, laid down the main lines of Socialist thought more than twenty years before the appearance of the Communist Manifesto. Their works are almost unobtainable. Except in Prof. Foxwell's introduction to Anton Monger's book. The Right to the whole Produce of Labour, no adequate exposition of their writings has appeared in English.

And, as readers of the present work will discover, they were not isolated eccentrics, but representatives of a current of thought which offered the working classes what in the twenties and thirties they needed most,—a philosophy interpreting the causes of their degradation, and a body of articulate doctrine which could fuse into energy their misery, their passion, and their hope. It is this current of thought, its antecedents, affinities, and ramifications, its theoretical developments and practical effects in the world of industry and politics, which occupies the greater part of the present volume. Its immediate influence was pro- found.

The word '' Socialism " appears first to be used in the Co-operative Magazine of November, 1827, in which those who think that Capital should be owned, not individually, but in common, are described as Communists or Socialists/' Its meaning was not collectivism, but co-operation ; and co-operation not in the specialised sense which it has since assumed of a particular method of conducting trade, but with the larger significance of a social order based on fraternity, not competition. In that sense it was still used by the Rochdale Pioneers of 1844, when they proposed to ''arrange the powers of production, distribution, education, and government, or, in other words, to establish a self-supporting home colony of united interests."

Co-operation was a body of social principles before it was an economic device, and, if its practical application owed most to Robert Owen, the intellectual elaboration of the faith was the work of the early English Socialists. Their relation to Chartism and Trade Unionism was equally important To the former they helped to give the anti-capitalist bias, which, as the excellent work of the late Mr. Hovell shows was the practical motive to rally the turbulent workers of the North to the decorous political programme enunciated by Lovett and the London Workingmen's Association. Influenced partly by their teaching, which was disseminated in a popular form through the papers read by the working classes, trade unionism assumed a revolutionary and aggressive character as remote from the aims of the sober defensive associations of the sixties and seventies as from those of the local journeyman’s clubs of the eighteenth century.

That property not earned by labour is theft, that there is necessarily a class- war between the producers and the non-producers, that economic power precedes political power and that salvation must come, not from Parliament, but from syndicalist movements on the part of the organised workers—these were the watch words of the advanced trade unionism of the thirties ‘ ' With us, universal suffrage will begin in our lodges, extend to the general union, and finally swallow up the political power ” ; “ Social liberty must precede political liberty While we are in a state of social slavery, our rights would be exercised to the benefit of our tyrants, and we should be made subservient to the parties who work us for their purposes.” ^ Under the stimulus of such ideas, trade unionism became an effort directed to overthrowing the existing economic system, rather than to improving the condition of the wage-earner within it.

Trade union history, which like trade union law, has suffered from the tyranny of over-rigid definitions, requires to be rewritten in the light of them. When that is done, movements which now appear novel or ephemeral will possibly be found to be the re-emergence of tendencies which are fundamental and permanent. " The English intellect,” writes Mr Beer, in his preface, " from its sheer recklessness is essentially revolutionary. ... In periods of general upheaval, when the dynamic forces of society are vehemently asserting themselves, the English are apt to throw their mental ballast overboard and take the lead in revolutionary thought and action. In such a period are we living now.” His words are more appropriate to The present moment than to that at which they were written. "

Social Reconstruction ” is not the invention of the twentieth century ; and those who are concerned with it to-day may find in the intellectual ferment of the peiiod explored by Mr. Beer a medicine to chasten their hopes and to fortify their resolution. A foreign scholar has certain advantages in writing the history of modern England. He is not scorched by the embers of living controversies He is free from the prejudices of sect or paity, and can view his subject through plain glass. The snares of ready-made interpretations are not about his feet, nor conventional judgments upon his lips His eye for the sharp outline of facts has not been dimmed by a haze of familiar words. He can find a new significance in the obvious and still be surprised at what is surprising.

But only scholarship of a high order can give him the learning needed to compose a work like the present volume, and only long familiarity can save him from misinterpreting the atmosphere of a foreign nation. Mr. Beer possesses both. He is an indefatigable student, who knows the social history of England from the middle of the eighteenth century, as it is known only to Professor Graham Wallas, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. And his twenty years of residence in England have given him the working acquaintance with the unstated assumptions of English political life which is hardly less necessary than historical knowledge for the task which he has undertaken.

The present book is only part of the work which he had planned. In addition to the second volume, which was almost completed, he had begun, in conjunction with a friend, the task of reprinting the more noteworthy writings of the early English Socialists, and some of them were already in proof when he was interrupted. I see now," he wrote, in the last week of July, 1914, that I must use every moment for work. The War will upset all plans, if Germany gets involved in the Austrian madness I feel more than ever that no agitation and no class- war are of any use. Man is still brutal, and despite all religion, culture, and science, not far removed from the wild animal."

At a time when to speak of the unity of Europe seems a cruel jest, a work hke that of Mr. Beer, the history by an Austrian scholar of the English contribution to an international movement, is not only a valuable addition to historical knowledge, but a reminder that there are intellectual bonds which preceded the War and which will survive it English readers will thank him both for the one and for the other, and will hope that, by the publication of his second volume, he will in the near future increase the obligation under which he has already iaid them.

R. H TAWNEY

The Conquest of Happiness

by Russell, Bertrand, 1872-1970

Publication date 2013

Topics Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Happiness

Publisher New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation

Language English

“Should be read by every parent, teacher, minister, and Congressman in the land.”—The Atlantic In The Conquest of Happiness, first published by Liveright in 1930, iconoclastic philosopher Bertrand Russell attempted to diagnose the myriad causes of unhappiness in modern life and chart a path out of the seemingly inescapable malaise so prevalent even in safe and prosperous Western societies. More than eighty years later, Russell’s wisdom remains as true as it was on its initial release. Eschewing guilt-based morality, Russell lays out a rationalist prescription for living a happy life, including the importance of cultivating interests outside oneself and the dangers of passive pleasure. In this new edition, best-selling philosopher Daniel C. Dennett reintroduces Russell to a new generation, stating that Conquest is both “a fascinating time capsule” and “a prototype of the flood of self-help books that have more recently been published, few of them as well worth reading today as Russell’s little book.”

I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owing things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. —Walt Whitman

Contents
Introduction by Daniel C. Dennett
Preface
I Causes of Unhappiness
1. What Makes People Unhappy?
2. Byronic Unhappiness
3. Competition
4. Boredom and Excitement
5. Fatigue
6. Envy
7. The Sense of Sin
8. Persecution Mania
9. Fear of Public Opinion

II Causes of Happiness
10. Is Happiness Still Possible?
11. Zest 12.
Affection 13.
The Family 14.
Work 15.
Impersonal Interests 16.
Effort and Resignation 17.

The Happy Man
Introduction
What do you think a philosopher is? There are two quite different stereotypes in the popular imagination: the ivory tower theoretician who frets over abstract question so removed from everyday concerns that their answers could matter only to other philosophers, such as “Do numbers exist, and if so, what are they?” or “Is time an illusion?”; or on the other hand the thoughtful counselor whose wise advice is sought on the most pressing of human issues: “How should I live?” and “Why is it important to be good?”

The first kind of philosopher resides in a philosophy department at a university and talks only to other philosophers. The second can be found in a public park, engaging a throng of laypeople in a discussion that will change their lives. Socrates, who died in Athens in 399 BC, is the major source of both stereotypes: he was condemned by the authorities to drink the fatal cup of hemlock for being too dangerous a philosopher of the second sort, but he also inaugurated the style of questioning that fills academic philosophy departments with “professional philosophers” of the first type, conceptual technicians whose disputes are largely inaccessible to anybody outside the field.

Bertrand Russell, who died in Wales in 1970 at the age of ninety-seven, is the best example ever of a philosopher who not only lived up to both stereotypes but enlarged the difference between them. His technical work in logic created the field of mathematical logic (laying the foundations on which Alan Turing and others created the computer) and posed the central issues that have preoccupied analytic philosophers in universities ever since. His three-volume work with Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, consists of hundreds of pages of formal proofs designed to establish all of mathematics on a firm logical foundation, and is one of the most unreadable great books ever written.

But he was also a passionate antiwar activist in the public square, who went to prison during World War I for his pacifism, was deeply critical of Communism (since a meeting with Lenin in 1920, when he visited Russia to investigate the revolution), supported the war against Hitler, an evil greater than war itself, but later was an ardent antinuclear polemicist and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. His appointment to a professorship at City College of New York was reversed by the college administration, which declared him “morally unfit” because of his boldly expressed views on sexual morality. He never was ordered to drink the hemlock, but he seems to have done whatever he could to provoke that wish in authorities wherever he confronted them.

Russell published more than one book a year for over seventy years, often publishing as many as three or four in a single year. The Conquest of Happiness, appearing in 1930, falls roughly in the middle—it’s hard to count—and is a good example of his “popular” writing, less extreme than some of his other polemics. (In 1950 he anthologized some of his most controversial short pieces in a volume entitled Unpopular Essays, a witty acknowledgment of his eagerness to provoke.)

The Conquest of Happiness is a fascinating time capsule, a mixture including perennial observations that speak as clearly to us today as they did to its initial readers, and antiquated issues and attitudes that by today’s standards are offensive when they are not amusing. A good way to read this book is to consider it a temporal telescope that allows us to see how far we’ve come. Russell himself deserves some of the credit for moving our moral imagination out of obsolete orthodoxies into better territory, but here we see a journey in progress, still oblivious to biases that cramp his vision. Perhaps the moral to draw from this confrontation is that we should probably expect our grandchildren to be as uncomfortable with some of our attitudes as we are with some of Russell’s.

Russell was born into the British aristocracy, with an inherited title (the Right Honorable Earl Russell) and considerable wealth. His circumstances were always comfortable, but he never basked in luxury, choosing instead to use his inherited resources to support a life of intense activity on all fronts, in logic, philosophy, and public morality, and vigorously investigating controversial topics from the rise of Bolshevism in Russia to criticism of the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Still, his position in the aristocracy shines through, as when he supposes the typical man “arrives home, tired, just in time to dress for dinner,” or, in his chapter on envy, he lets this drop: Take, for example, maid servants: I remember when one of our maids, who was a married woman, became pregnant, and we said that she was not to be expected to lift heavy weights, the instant result was that none of the others would lift heavy weights, and any work of that sort that needed doing we had to do ourselves.

His position on women shows serious stains of sexism by today’s standard— though he was in his day a champion of women’s rights—and unlike many other books of the era, there are only faint hints of racism in his choice of words, as when he repeats the legend of the “Chinaman” saying “Me no drinkee for drinkee, me drinkee for drunkee,” or describes a “carload of colored people” as the only folks in a traffic jam who are actually enjoying themselves, as he recommends.

One of the most striking patterns in the book is Russell’s willingness to extrapolate from his own highly unusual life experience to generalizations about life in general. One of the advantages of an aristocracy, he notes (and what are the others, one wonders?) is that “where status depended upon birth behavior was allowed to be erratic.” Ah, thank goodness for all the nonconformist earls and duchesses whose eccentric enthusiasms have so wonderfully expanded our horizons!

In addition to Lord Russell, how many can we count? Aside from Lord Byron’s brilliant daughter Ada, Countess Lovelace (who was the first to articulate the concept of a computer program in her work with Charles Babbage), and a few landed aristocrats who investigated novel methods of farming, the field is rather deserted. These historical curiosities are sprinkled engagingly among the reflections of timeless wisdom that make up most of the book, a prototype of the flood of self help books that have more recently been published, few of them as well worth reading today as Russell’s little book.
—Daniel C. Dennett, 2012

Roads to freedom :

socialism, anarchism,

and syndicalism

by Russell, Bertrand, 1872-1970

Publication date 1918

Topics Anarchism, Socialism, Syndicalism, Guild socialism

Publisher London : Allen & Unwin

(Also published as Roads to Freedom)

INTRODUCTION

The attempt to conceive imaginatively a better ordering of human society than the destructive and cruel chaos in which mankind have hitherto existed is by no means modern : it is at least as old as Plato, whose " Republic " set the model for the Utopias of subsequent philosophers. Whoever contemplates the world in the light of an ideal—whether what he seeks be intellect, or art, or love, or simple happiness, or all together—must feel a great sorrow in the evils that men needlessly allow to continue, and—if he be a man of force and vital energy—an urgent desire to lead men to the realization of the good which in- spires his creative vision. It is this desire which has been the primary force moving the pioneers of Socialism and Anarchism, as it moved the inventors of ideal commonwealths in the past. In this there is nothing new.

What is new in Socialism and Anarchism is that close relation of the ideal to the present sufferings of men which has enabled powerful political movements to grow out of the hopes of solitary thinkers. It is this that makes Socialism and Anarchism important, and it is this that makes them dangerous to those who batten, consciously or unconsciously, upon the evils of our present order of society. io Roads to Freedom

The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticizing, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large. They find themselves born into a certain place in society, and they accept what each day brings forth, without any effort of thought beyond what the immediate present requires. Almost as instinctively as the beasts of the field, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought, and without considering that by sufficient effort the whole conditions of their lives could be changed.

A certain percentage, guided by personal ambition, make the effort of thought and will which is necessary to place themselves among the more fortunate members of the community ; but very few among these are seriously concerned to secure for all the advantages which they seek for themselves. It is only a few rare and exceptional men who have that kind of love towards mankind at large that makes them unable to endure patiently the general mass of evil and suffering, regardless of any relation it may have to their own lives.

These few, driven by sympathetic pain, will seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape, some new system of society by which life may become richer, more full of joy and less full of preventable evils than it is at present. But in the past such men have, as a rule, failed to interest the very victims of the injustices which they wished to remedy. The more unfortunate sections of the population have been ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and weariness, timorous through the imminent danger of immediate punishment by the holders of power, and morally unreliable owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To create among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort after general amelioration might have seemed a hopeless task, and indeed in the past it has generally proved so.

But the modern world, by the increase of education and the rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners, has produced new conditions, more favourable than ever before to the demand for radical reconstruction. It is above all the Socialists, and in a lesser degree the Anarchists (chiefly as the inspirers of Syndicalism), who have become the exponents of this demand.

What is perhaps most remarkable in regard to both -Socialism and Anarchism is the association of a widespread popular movement with ideals for a better world. The ideals have been elaborated, in the first instance, by solitary writers of books, and yet powerful sections of the wage-earning classes have accepted them as their guide in the practical affairs of the world. In regard to Socialism this is evident ; but in regard to Anarchism it is only true with some qualification. Anarchism as such has never been a widespread creed ; it is only in the modified form of Syndicalism that it has achieved popularity.

Unlike Socialism and Anarchism, Syndicalism is primarily the outcome, not of an idea, but of an organization : the fact of Trade Union organization came first, and the ideas of Syndicalism are those which seemed appropriate to this organization in the opinion of 12 Roads to Freedom the more advanced French Trade Unions. But the ideas are, in the main, derived from Anarchism, and the men who gained acceptance for them were, for the most part, Anarchists. Thus we may regard Syndicalism as the Anarchism of the market-place, as opposed to the Anarchism of isolated individuals which had preserved a precarious life throughout the previous decades. Taking this view, we find in Anarchist-Syndicalism the same combination of ideal and organization as we find in Socialist political parties. It is from this standpoint that our study of these movements will be undertaken.

Socialism and Anarchism, in their modern form, spring respectively from two protagonists, Marx and Bakunin, who fought a lifelong battle, culminating in a split in the first International. We shall begin our study with these two men first their teaching, and then the organizations which they founded or inspired. This will lead us to the spread of Socialism in more recent years, and thence to the Syndicalist revolt against Socialist emphasis on the State and political action, and to certain movements outside France which have some affinity with Syndicalism— notably the I.W.W. in America and Guild Socialism in England. From this historical survey we shall pass to the consideration of some of the more pressing problems of the future, and shall try to decide in what - respects the world would be happier if the aims of Socialists or Syndicalists were achieved.

My own opinion—which I may as well indicate at the outset—is that pure Anarchism, though it should be the ultimate ideal, to which society should continually approximate, is for the present impossible, and would not survive more than a year or two at most if it were adopted. On the other hand, both Marxian Socialism and Syndicalism, in spite of many drawbacks, seem to me calculated to give rise to a happier and better world than that in which we live. I do not, however, regard either of them as the best practicable system. Marxian Socialism, I fear, would give far too much power to the State, while Syndicalism, which aims at abolishing the State, would, I believe, find itself forced to reconstruct a central authority in order to put an end to the rivalries of different groups of producers.

The best practicable system, to my mind, is that of Guild Socialism, which concedes what is valid both in the claims of the State Socialists and in the Syndicalist fear of the State by adopting a system of federalism among trades for reasons similar to those which have recommended federalism among nations. The grounds for these conclusions will appear as we proceed. Before embarking upon the history of recent movements in favour of radical reconstruction, it will be worthwhile to consider some traits of character which distinguish most political idealists, and are much misunderstood by the general public for other reasons besides mere prejudice. I wish to do full justice to these reasons, in order to show the more effectually why they ought not to be operative.

The leaders of the more advanced movements are, in general, men of quite unusual disinterestedness, as is evident from a consideration o*f their careers. Although they have obviously quite as much ability as many men who rise to positions of great power, they do not themselves become the arbiters of contemporary events, nor do they achieve wealth or the applause of the mass of their contemporaries. Men who have the capacity for winning these prizes, and who work at least as hard as those who win them, but deliberately adopt a line which makes the winning of them impossible, must be judged to have an aim , in life other than personal advancement ; whatever admixture of self-seeking may enter into the detail of their lives, their" fundamental motive must be outside Self.

The pioneers of Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism have, for the most part, experienced prison, exile, and poverty, deliberately incurred because they would not abandon their propaganda ; and by this conduct they have shown that the hope which inspired them was not for themselves, but for mankind. Nevertheless, though the desire for human welfare is what at bottom determines the broad lines of such men's lives, it often happens that, in the detail of their speech and writing, hatred is far more visible than love.

The impatient idealist—and without some impatience a man will hardly prove effective—is almost sure to be led into hatred by the oppositions and disappointments which he encounters in his endeavours to bring happiness to the world. The more certain he is of the purity of his motives and the truth of his gospel, the more indignant he will become when his teaching is rejected. Often he will successfully achieve an attitude of philosophic tolerance as regards the apathy of the masses, and even as regards the whole-hearted opposition of professed defenders of the status quo. But the men whom he finds it impossible to forgive are those who profess the same desire for the amelioration of society as he feels himself, but who do not accept his method of achieving this end. The intense faith which enables him - to withstand persecution for the sake of his beliefs makes him consider these beliefs so luminously obvious that any thinking man who rejects them must be dishonest, and must be actuated by some sinister motive of treachery to the cause. Hence arises the spirit of the sect, that bitter, narrow orthodoxy which is the bane of those who hold strongly to an unpopular creed.

So many real temptations to treachery exist that suspicion is natural. And among leaders, ambition, which they mortify in their choice of a career, is sure to return in a new form : in the desire for intellectual mastery and for despotic pow r er within their own sect. Frorn these causes it results that the advocates of drastic reform divide themselves into opposing schools, hating each other with a bitter hatred, accusing each other often of such crimes as being in the pay of the police, and demanding, of any speaker or writer whom they are to admire, that he shall conform exactly to their prejudices, and '•make all his teaching minister to their belief that the exact truth is to be found within the limits of their creed. The result of this state of mind is that, to a casual and unimaginative attention, the men who have sacrificed most through the wish to benefit mankind appear to be actuated far more by hatred than by love. And the demand for orthodoxy is stifling to any free exercise of intellect, producing an atmosphere in which a man of wide culture and detached thought finds it impossible to breathe.

This cause, as well as economic prejudice, has made it difficult for the " intellectuals ' to co-operate practically with the more extreme reformers, however they may sympathize with their main purposes and even with nine-tenths of their programme. Another reason why radical reformers are misjudged by ordinary men is that they view existing society from outside, with hostility towards its institutions. Although, for the most part, they have more belief than their neighbours in human nature's inherent capacity for a good life, they are so conscious of the cruelty and oppression resulting from existing institutions that they make a wholly misleading impression of cynicism.

Most men have instinctively two entirely different codes of behaviour : one towards those whom they regard as companions or colleagues or friends, or in some way members of the same " herd " ; the other towards those whom they regard as enemies or outcasts or a danger to society. Radical reformers are apt to concentrate their attention upon the behaviour of society towards the latter class, the class of those towards whom the " herd ' feels ill-will. This class includes, of course, enemies in war, and criminals ; in the minds of those who consider the preservation of the existing order essential to their own safety or privileges, it includes all who advocate any great political or economic change, and all classes which, through their poverty or through any other cause, are likely to feel a dangerous degree of discontent.

The ordinary citizen probably seldom thinks about such individuals or classes, and goes through life believing that he and his friends are kindly people; because they have no wish to injure those towards whom they entertain no group-hostility. But the man whose attention is fastened upon the relations of a group with those whom it hates or fears will judge quite differently. In these relations, a surprising ferocity is apt to be developed, and a very ugly side of human nature comes to the fore. The opponents of capitalism have learnt, through the study of certain historical facts, that this ferocity has often been shown by the capitalists and by the State towards the wage earning classes, particularly when they have ventured to protest against the unspeakable suffering to which industrialism has usually condemned them.

Hence arises a quite different attitude towards existing society from that of the ordinary well-to-do citizen : an attitude as true as his, perhaps also as untrue, but equally based on facts, facts concerning his relations to his enemies instead of to his friends. The class-war, like wars between nations, produces two opposing views, each equally true and equally untrue. The citizen of a nation at war, when he thinks of his own countrymen, thinks of them primarily as he has experienced them, in dealings with their friends, in their family relations, and so on. They seem to him on the whole kindly, decent folk. But a nation with which his country is at war views his compatriots through the medium of a quite different set of experiences : as they appear in the ferocity of battle, in the invasion and subjugation of a hostile territory, or in the chicanery of a juggling diplomacy.

The men of whom these facts are true are the very same as the men whom their compatriots know as husbands or fathers or friends, but they are judged differently because they are judged on different data And so it is with those who view the capitalist from the standpoint of the revolutionary wage-earner : they appear inconceivably cynical and misjudging to the capitalist, because the facts upon which their view is based are facts which he either does not know or habitually ignores.

Yet the view from the outside is just as true as the view from the inside. Both are necessary to the complete truth ; and the Socialist, who emphasizes the outside view, is not a cynic, but merely the friend of the wage-earners, maddened by the spectacle of the needless misery which capitalism inflicts upon them.

I have placed these general reflections at the beginning of our study, in order to make it clear to the reader that, whatever bitterness and hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love.

Though difficult, it is not impossible ; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest. If ultimate wisdom has not always been preserved by Socialists and Anarchists, they have not differed in this from their opponents ; and in the source of their inspiration they have shown themselves superior to those who acquiesce ignorantly or supinely in the injustices and oppressions by which the existing system is preserved