Eavesdropping on a virtuous circle Richard Whately and the Oriel Noetics. Elena Pasquini Douglas uwa business School
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| 14 There has been speculation in the literature as to whether Whately had a mild case of Asperger’s syndrome, or some other disorder of the autism spectrum (Moore, GC & White, M.2009)
15 Footnote one gives references for all of these. 16 Tuckwell’s book, Pre-tractarian Oxford – A reminiscence of the ‘Noetics’ (1909) is a first guide to the life and times of the Noetics. Winch’s opus, Riches and Poverty – An intellectual history of political economy in Britain 1750-1834 and the collaborative product of the “Sussex three” The Noble Science of Politics. A study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (1983) and Burrow’s A Liberal Descent Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981). Another hallmark book in this research is Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement – The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785-1865 (1986). It is an essential contextual corrective to the prior neglect of evangelicalism in particular, and religion more generally, in the formation of intellectual currents through the nineteenth century. Hilton tells us that as the image of God morphed so too did the politics and political economy. In analysing this period, it is important not to fall for what Forbes (1975) referred to as the “fallacy of premature secularisation”. 17 He refers to Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (both published posthumously in 1818) , or to his personal favourite, Sense and Sensibility (1811). In these pages we can picture the society he perceived himself to be living in. The bumbling churchmen, scheming mothers, noble and ignoble aristocrats, precariously positioned lower-gentry, the changes in who was wealthy and the sources of wealth, the social ‘sudden death’ of financial (or moral ruin), and, importantly, the triumph of the truly, not seemingly, virtuous. We have it then on good authority, his own, that this was the world he perceived himself to be living in. Whately compares, favourably, Austen to Homer and Shakespeare and praises her capacity for drama and suspense. The scholarly literature confirms that Whately’s review (along with the contemporaneous one by Walter Scott) was the most significant criticism published before the end of the nineteenth century. Whately and Scott had set the the tone for the view of Austen held by the Victorians. (Waldron2001,p 89–90, Duffy 1954p97, Watt 1963,p4–5). 18 Whately continued, throughout his career, to publish on religious belief and the right model of Church governance for Anglicanism. This writing was widely read and reviewed in the major periodicals of the day. They were not marginal concerns, but central political issues of the day. In 1825 he published a series of Essays on Some of the Peculiarities of the Christian Religion, followed in 1828 by a second series On some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St Paul, and in 1830 by a third On the Errors of Romanism traced to their Origin in Human Nature. 19 “Will no one rid me of this turbulent Priest” Henry the VIII of Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Cantebury (1162-1170). 20 The Foxites shared Whately belief in Erastianism (separate governance of Church and State), however, this was to be Whately’s great disappointment in life. He wrote many letters to Grey on models for Church reform and especially on the establishment of a Commission which would examine the options and plan a course. This was Whately’s principal desire, and in many respects he took the position of Archbishop of Dublin in order to advance this cause. Grey, who even here alludes to his intention for ‘zealous cooperation’ doesn’t deliver, and no Commission is ever called and there is no change in Whately’s lifetime to separate the governance of Church and State. (Akenson, 1981. de Giustino, 2003) 21 The span of this paper precludes proper treatment of this critical contribution by Whately to Irish events and debates. He is considered “the Father of economic science in Ireland” Black, RD 1945, 'Trinity College, Dublin, and the Theory of Value, 1832-1863', Economica, vol. 12, no. 47, pp. 140-148.. The first four Whately Chairs in Political Economy who he hand selected and whose salaries he paid – Mountifort Longfield, Isaac Butt, J A Lawson and W Neilson Hancock – have been called “the Dublin School” ibid.. Schumpeter said of them, they were “men who wrote above their time. (as quoted in Hollander . Hollander also links the “Longfield-Senior group”, who, like Whately, rejected a labour theory of value and advocated a utility theory of value. Longfield’s exposition of diminishing degrees of intensity of demand laid the foundations for the formal doctribe of marginal utility theory prior to its presentation by Jevons, Menger and Walras ibid.. Later appointments to the Chair included John Elliot Cairnes and Francis Bastable. Cairnes published the influential The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy (1857), considered to have been produced under the influence of Whately and Senior ibid., Hollander, S 1977, 'Smith and Ricardo: Aspects of the Nineteenth-Century Legacy', The American Economic Review, vol. 67, no. 1, pp. 37-41.. 22 Both drew on the earlier work of another Oriel man, Joseph Butler (1736) and his Analogy of Religion. 23 Paley’s principal writings on this theme were in Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy which first appeared in 1785 and had numerous editions, Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802). Whately challenges critical elements of the Principles while affirming its broader tenets. Bishop Sumner (1816) wrote A Treatise on the Records of Creation and the Moral Attributes of the Creator which was very influential. 24 Surely it was an “impiously blasphemous assertion, that the Almighty brings more beings into the world than he prepared nourishment for”. (Eclectic Review 1832as quoted in Waterman AMC (2008). Malthus a better economist than he was a theologian and his theodicy (the implication of 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population was that God let all these people be born in the world for which there was no sustenance and who would then suffer. Sumner re-introduced the orthodox Butlerian human life on earth as a “state of discipline and trial (denied by Malthus in 1798) that and then. 25 In fact, JM Keynes speculates whether or not it should really be Paley who is regarded as ‘the first of the Cambridge economists”. In an essay on Malthus he states:“I wish I could have included some account of Paley among these Essays. For Paley, so little appreciated now, was for a generation or more an intellectual influence on Cambridge only second to Newton. Perhaps, in a sense, he was the first of the Cambridge economists. If anyone will take up again Paley's Principles, he will find, contrary perhaps to his expectation, an immortal book”. (J. M. Keynes, Essays in Biography) 26 The moral sense school are a group of philosophers with a meta-ethics in which morality is grounded in moral sentiments and emotions. It commenced with the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), John Locke’s student who wrote in opposition to his famous tutor. Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) imparted the tradition to both David Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790). Major works of the school include: the works of Shaftesburty, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (first published in an unauthorized edition in 1699); Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good (1725, the works of, Treatise II of An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue) and An Essay On the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, With Illustrations Upon the Moral Sense (1728); Hume, Sections of Book 3 of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751); Adam Smith The TMS (1759) which explored various sentiments that make up the moral feelings that ground moral judgments, that combined provides the moral sense. This understanding was carried forward by Hutcheson, Smith, Hume and Burke in theory, and Wesley and other leaders of social movements of the nineteenth century, in practice26 (Himmelfarb, 2004) 27 Macintyre (2007) provides an account of how the virtue-ethics tradition was lived and embodied in societies from the Greeks until the 18th century when, for the first time in recorded history, a variation on the tradition ceased to be at the conscious centre of human societies through history, except our own. 28 Why was ethics taken out of Smith? Because virtue ethics represents an obsolete type of ethics which “somewhat mysteriously disappeared from academic circles after the 6th and final and substantially revised edition of Smith’s own favourite of his two published books, The TMS (1759, 1790)” (McCloskey 2008, p43-44). The replacement of virtue ethics in intellectual circles by: Kant (1785); and Bentham (1789); other programmes including the Natural rights tradition of Locke and Pufendorf; and the new contractarian theories of Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes; saw a crowding out of the far older ethical tradition, the virtue-ethical tradition. 29 Smith’s theory would be based on the observation of human nature and human history, “a science which would not explain the principles of social organisation to be found in different types of society, but would explain the principles of government and legislation that ought to be followed by enlightened rulers who wanted to extend the liberty and happiness of their subjects and the wealth and power of their dominions” (Phillipson, 2010, p2). Phillipson illuminates this ‘Science of Man’ project that Smith had learnt from Hutcheson and Hume. 30 We can confirm this from their various biographies and acknowledgements of one another. As we have seen, Whately acknowledges Copleston as co-author and creator of his most influential work Elements of Logic (1826). Whately also acknowledges the contribution of J.H. Newman in the drafting of this work. Furthermore, Newman claimed in his memoir, that Whately had left a deep intellectual impression on him (Newman, 1864). Finally, and perhaps with greatest long-term impact, Whately was the mentor and life-long friend of the most influential educator of the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Arnold. We have already heard of Arnold’s assessment of Whately’s character. To add to this, Stanley’s (1901) Life of Arnold profiles Arnold’s gratitude to his former teacher: “And he used to look back to a visit to Dr Whately…as a marked era in the formation of his views, especially as opening to his mind, or impressing upon it more strongly, some of the opinions on which he afterwards laid so much stress with regard to the Christian Priesthood”. Arnold’s debt to Whately was also written into the preface of his first published book of sermons. 31 Although Thomas Arnold, for example, concentrated on the application of rigour in the study of history and classics; education more broadly including the preparation of minds for leadership; issues of Church and State governance; he validated the pursuit of the laws of political economy by others in the group. Similarly with Hinds who pursued epistemology, and others in the group who were theologians and Biblical scholars. 32 Senior was the only professional economist of the group and he has left us his Drummond lectures including the influential Two Lectures on Population with a Correspondence between the Author and T.R. Malthus and numerous other manuscripts, letters and contributions. Senior was a frequent publisher in the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review and he published a major work, Outline of the Science of Political Economy.
34 Interestingly, this proposal was taken up by many others over the years (Lawson 1843, Hancock 1849, Patrick Plough [Pseudonym]1842, Schumpeter 1908, 1954, Von Mises 1954, The success of these various forays is sympathetically explored in Kirzner (1960). 35 Hes goes as far as to claim that if Aristotle had been trying to express his meaning, he would have been likely to employ the term as well (Whately, 1832, p4, 58-59). 36 It is not the least implied that economists should not deliver themselves of ethical questions, any more than an argument that botany is not aesthetics is to say that botanists should not have views of their own on the lay-out of gardens. On the contrary, it is greatly to be desired that economists should have speculated long and widely on these matters, since only in this way will they be in a position to appreciate the implications as regards given ends of problems which are put to them for a solution (Robbins 1945, p149-150). 37 This critique is made by Macintyre (1981, 2007); Taylor (2008); Himmelfarb (2004). Download 281.83 Kb. Share with your friends:
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