THE_BRENNER_DEBATE._Agrarian_Class_Structure_
and_Economic_Development_in_Pre-Industrial_Europe

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Capitalism - Bibliothèque et Archives Canada PHD THESIS FULL PDF 

www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk4/etd/MQ89460.PDF

This article was published in ANTIPODE: A RADICAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY, 26,4,(1994):351-76.

ROBERT BRENNER IN THE TUNNEL OF TIME

J.M. BLAUT University of Illinois at Chicago

Euro-Marxism

Robert Brenner is a Marxist, a follower of one tradition in Marxism that is as diffusionist, as Eurocentric, as most conservative positions. I cannot here offer an explanation for this curious phenomenon: a tradition within one of the most egalitarian of all socio-political doctrines yet a tradition which, nonetheless, believes in the historical superiority (or priority) of one community of humans, Europeans, over another, non-Europeans. Eurocentric Marxists are not racist, nor even prejudiced, although most of them believe that Europeans have always been the leaders in the forward march of history; that Europe is the fountainhead of civilization, the main source of innovative social change. For these scholars, the origins of capitalism are European. Capitalism's further development consisted of an internally generated process of improvement within its classic homeland, the European world. The impact of capitalism on the rest of the world has been, on balance, progressive. Colonialism and (today) neocolonialism are not significant for capitalism, are rather a marginal process, a temporary aberration or diversion or side-show, not a vital need of the system as a whole, which evolves in response to internal laws of motion.

This is the accepted version of Anievas, Alexander and Nisancioglu, Kerem (2013) What’s at Stake in the Transition Debate? Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 42 (1), 78-102. Published version available from Sage at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305829813497823Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/20673/

Robert Brenner on political accumulation and the transition to capitalism

Ricardo Duchesne*

University of New Brunswick, Saint John, P.O. Box 5050, Saint John, New Brunswick, E2L 4L5, Canada

Received 20 September 1998; accepted 23 July 1999

The Brenner Debate

The Dobb-Sweezy debate is often considered an intra-Marxist debate insofar as the questions and issues that were posed during it were mostly of interest to those already convinced of, or working within the Marxist theoretical tradition of historiography. The discussion charted below, “the Brenner Debate,” discusses many of the same issues, and its eponymous exponent Robert Brenner, argues indeed from a Marxist informed theoretical position. Nonetheless, the central issues in this debate were much more wide-ranging owing in part to the focus of the debate on long-term economic development in Europe. This pulled historians from various traditions into discussing the inherent orthodoxy of ‘the demographic approach’ for this problem. It is the strength of Brenner’s position, and its significance for historically informed theory that provided the groundwork for ‘Political Marxism’ (what was originally an epithet coined by Guy Bois in the contribution below, and later reclaimed in a positive sense by Ellen Meiksins Wood (1981)).

The "Brenner Thesis"

INTRODUCTION

I suppose most people who got their Marxist education in Marxist parties share certain basic assumptions about how First World economic and political hegemony over the so-called Third World has been achieved. It was a function of economic exploitation going back to the discovery of the New World and the several hundred years of advantage this gave the First World, as it expanded its control over countries to the East as well. Gold and silver mined by indigenous peoples, colonial plantations, disruption of local handicrafts in places like India all worked together to give nascent capitalist institutions in Europe the "supercharging" they needed to leapfrog over other countries where similar institutions were also gestating.

So I was surprised, if not shocked, to discover that Robert Brenner, a leader of the left-wing American group Solidarity, wrote a series of articles in the 1970s denying such connections. Brenner's critique was directed against a group of thinkers who, like Paul Sweezy, viewed themselves as operating in the Marxist tradition, and others, like Andre Gunder Frank, who rejected Marxism altogether. What they all had in common was a perspective that development in the core countries is a cause of underdevelopment in the so-called periphery. The prosperity and global power of nations like the United States was a function of the poverty and weakness of countries like Vietnam, Nicaragua and Angola.

But in Brenner's words (New Left Review, 104, 1977), these thinkers "move too quickly from the proposition that capitalism is bound up with, and supportive of, continuing underdevelopment in large parts of the world, to the conclusion not only that the rise of underdevelopment is inherent in the extension of the world division of labour through capitalist expansion, but also that the 'development of underdevelopment' is an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself."

I will argue that the 'development of underdevelopment' is indeed an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself, but before doing so it will be necessary to provide some historical background into Marxist thinking on these questions. Since Brenner claims to be defending classical Marxism against newfangled, neo-Smithian deviations, it would be useful to now review what Marx and Marxists have written.

The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism

www.unsa.edu.ar/histocat/haeconomica07/lecturas/lawcountries.pdf

by RP BRENNER - ‎2001 - ‎

Keywords: Brenner debate, economic development, Netherlands agrarian ... standing debate on the transition to capitalism, with respect to earlier stages of.

In the most recent phase of the discussion on the historical conditions for economic development, or the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the town-dominated Low Countries have been neglected, because the focus has been to such a large extent on agrarian conditions and agrarian transformations. This article seeks to make use of the cases of the medieval and early modern Northern and Southern Netherlands, the most highly urbanized and commercialized regions in Europe, to show that the rise of towns and the expansion of exchange cannot in themselves bring about economic development, because they cannot bring about the requisite transformation of agrarian social-property relations. In the non-maritime Southern Netherlands, a peasant-based economy led to economic involution. In the maritime Northern Netherlands, the transformation of peasants into market-dependent farmers created the basis for economic development.

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 2 No. 1, January 2002, pp. 88–95. Charles Post © Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres 2002.

SUGGESTIONS AND DEBATES
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution:Reflections on the Brenner Debate and its Sequel 
ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD
 The "Brenner Debate" launched by Past and Present in 1976 was about "agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe". Robert Brenner's recent book, Merchants and Revolution, has opened a new front in the debate by introducing merchants and "commercial change" into the equation.1 Although the book's massive Postscript carefully situates Brenner's analysis of commercial development in the context of his earlier account of the agrarian transition from feudalism to capitalism, this is unlikely to foreclose debate about how, or even whether, his more recent argument about the role of merchants in the English revolution can be squared with the original.Brenner thesis. What is at issue here is not just divergent interpretations of historical evidence but larger differences about the nature of capitalism. The following argument has more to do with the latter than with the former, and it will be concerned with Brenner's work and the debates surrounding it not just for their own sake but for what they reveal about the dominant conceptions of capitalism, in Marxist and non-Marxist histories alike.

 Comments on the Brenner–Wood Exchangeon the Low Countries 
CHARLES POST 

The exchange between Brenner and Wood on the Low Countries in the early modern period raises a number of theoretical and historical issues relating to the conditions for the emergence of capitalist social-property relations and their unique historical laws of motion. This contribution focuses on three issues raised in the Brenner–Wood exchange: the conditions under which rural household producers become subject to ‘market coercion’, the potential for ecological crisis to restructure agricultural production, and the relative role of foreign trade and the transformation of domestic, rural class relations to capitalist industrialization. Keywords: Brenner debate, economic development, 

Is there anything to defend in Political Marxism?

By Neil Davidson

Issue #91: Features

At the conclusion of their article, “In Defense of Political Marxism” (International Socialist Review #90, July 2013), Jonah Birch and Paul Heideman note that: “Advocates of Political Marxism like Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Charles Post share a tremendous amount with their critics like Jairus Banaji, Neil Davidson, and Ashley Smith in their common perspective on the necessity for revolutionary socialism from below.”¹ It is certainly true that members of Solidarity like Brenner and Post are revolutionaries who have made significant contributions to issues of central importance to the Left, many of which are perfectly compatible with the International Socialist tradition.² Others from the same organization, like John Eric Marot, have critically engaged with aspects of that tradition such as our attitude to the Left Opposition, but in comradely ways that helped to develop our collective understanding.³ 

One of the difficulties with Political Marxism, however, is its political indeterminacy. Not all proponents are revolutionaries: Wood inhabits a position close to that of Ralph Miliband and his successors on the editorial board of The Socialist Register, although she too has made important theoretical contributions, above all in relation to the nature of democracy under capitalism. Other Political Marxists, however, inhabit an almost exclusively scholastic universe in which ferocious declarations of adherence to what they take to be the Marxist method are completely detached from any socialist practice, resulting in a kind of academic sectarianism.

The uneven relationship of Political Marxists to socialist practice is not however the main problem with this theoretical tendency. If it was simply a provocative historical argument about the emergence of capitalism then it would have no necessary implications for contemporary politics—and several Political Marxists have produced historical works which contain important findings independent of how persuasive or otherwise one finds the Brenner Thesis, notably Brenner’s own Merchants and Revolution and Post’s The American Road to Capitalism. 

The Brenner debate revisited

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. <!--[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

• Foundations
• What is a social science?
• Ontological questions
• Social science disciplines
• Some debates about methodology
• Social explanation
• Social cognition
• Agency and collective action
• Identity and culture
• Causal mechanisms
• Structures and processes
• Institutions
• Power
• Materialism
• Historical explanation
• China

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.

© Daniel Little 2011

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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

 (c) The Growth op a Land Market among the Peasants 72 

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

 (c) Enclosure and Conversion by the Manorial Authorities 213 

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

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

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

 (c) The Engrossing of Holdings and Displacement OF Tenants . *. . . .253 

(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

 (c) The Undermining of Customary Tenures . 

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

 (c) Success and Failure of State Intervention 377

 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