2. Individualism in Politics and Economics

INDIVIDUALISM IN POLITICS AND ECONOMICS¹

The term Individualism was cited by Henry Reeve (of Edinburgh Review fame) in William IV’s reign as “a novel expression.” John Stuart Mill is (wrongly) credited with having given it currency and popularity. Although he discusses the subject at great length in his Political Economy, he seldom if ever uses the exact term—his judicious and well-balanced mind was adverse to the manufacture of labels. He preferred to employ such expressions as “individual freedom,” “individual property,” “those who have been called the laissez-faire school,” etc. Even in Liberty, published much later, which is rightly regarded as a classic of Individualism, he avoids the term, although he uses (perhaps not more than once) the word “Individuality” in that sense.

However, the term is an extremely convenient one to express the views of those who would confine the functions of the State and various public authorities to a relatively small province, i.e., maintaining law and order, the army, the navy and other means of national defence, the enforcement of contracts, the maintenance of public services which cannot conveniently be entrusted to private enterprise, and in general the provision of a fair field for the play of individual energy. It is opposed to Collectivism, Socialism, Communism, and the various other means of restricting liberty, whether these be adopted by public authorities, quasi-private corporations, private firms, hereditary autocrats, military dictators, or the like. It should be remembered that in Mill and many writers of the older generation the terms Socialism and Communism are used as equivalents; and it is hardly necessary to remind any serious student that words, especially general terms,² are very slippery articles, and that many discussions are barren and lead to complete misunderstanding, because the parties engaged in them have no clear definition of the terms in their minds, or, at any rate, are using the terms in a sense different from that employed by their opponents.

Modern as the term Individualism may be, the thing itself is older. Undoubtedly traces of the theory may be found in Latin and Greek writers; but it is needless to go back further than the seventeenth century, for three very good reasons:

1. In the Greek world the City State was supreme—the individual citizen lived and moved as a member of the State.³ So Pericles is made by Thucydides to say: “If a man prospers individually when his country is destroyed, he is none the less joined in the general ruin, while he comes through in complete safety if the State prospers, even though he himself suffers calamities.” In the Roman Empire citizens had only legal rights. The State was autocratic.

2. The medieval theory of politics and economics was feudal and paternal. To Macaulay’s schoolboy, and even to people less well informed, this fact is so familiar that the mere statement will suffice. It is clear that up to 1500 A.D. there was little scope for a theory of Individualism.

3. The Classical Revival, though it revolutionized a large part of modern thought, at first did nothing to change the general attitude toward the State. This was only to be expected, seeing that the State was supreme in Classical theory.

At last, in the seventeenth century, came the rise of Individualism, and this was due to several causes:

1. The Protestant Reformation brought private judgment into theology, and the new habit of thought soon extended to other questions, and, above all, to the problems of individual rights and the functions of the State.

2. The wars of Religion which devastated Europe, made men distrust the principle of authority, which had seemingly led to those horrors. The wars, having been conducted by Governments, helped to undermine confidence in official wisdom, i.e., in governments. A careful reader of Pope’s poetry will notice that almost every line is permeated with scorn, not only for the general human capacity but for “the great” in particular; and nearly all the leading eighteenth century writers hold similar opinions. Thus Gray, in contemplative mood, exclaims:

“How low, how little are the proud,
How indigent the great!”

But long before Pope, the Swedish Oxenstiern (1654) had summed up the whole matter in his renowned saying: “Behold, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.”

3. The action of despots, benevolent or otherwise, who introduced innumerable and vexatious regulations to control the business and daily life of their subjects, caused thoughtful men to distrust government action. The restrictive policy carried out by Colbert, under Louis XIV, with a multitude of protective regulations, provoked a reaction to the laissez faire school of France; and the French merchants’ cry “let us alone”⁴ became the motto of economic and political reformers. But before this, in the reign of Charles II., there had come forward the English founder of Individualism, the master builder in that school of empiric philosophy which is one of the most characteristic products of England. This man was John Locke.⁵ His name and writings are not today very familiar to the general reader, because nearly all his principles were translated into practice by other men, famous in their day and tolerably well known to posterity, while Locke is little more than a name, venerated but nowadays seldom read. And yet he is, directly and indirectly, perhaps the most influential writer⁶ who has appeared in the last two hundred years.

We are here only concerned with his political philosophy. Its direct influence in England was immense. The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 sprang naturally from his theory of government. Adam Smith’s doctrine of Natural Liberty and Bentham’s general theory of Individualism owe much to him. John Stuart Mill acknowledged him as one of his masters in philosophy. But great as was his direct influence in England, it produced even more striking effects in France and America. The Declaration of Independence may be traced largely to the philosophy of Locke, who (though his constitution for South Carolina was a practical failure) may also claim to have had a share in the Constitution of the United States. Adam Smith drew from the physiocrats who drew from Locke. Tom Paine and the other “Friends of the People” found in Rousseau a like intermediary.

The precursors of Revolution in eighteenth century France owed much to Locke. Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists were all more or less his disciples. Though Rousseau is also in one sense a founder of Socialism, his famous and unhistorical Social Contract was taken from Locke, who borrowed it from Hobbes, converting it from an argument for an all powerful despot to an argument for a limited constitutional monarchy, free and tolerant. Everyone knows the far-famed declarations of Rousseau’s Social Contract and the Constitution of the United States—that all men are born free and have a natural right to freedom and security.⁷ But few have read them in Locke’s Of Civil Government, where they appeared much earlier.

For Locke and his disciples, including Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and a long line of British and American statesmen, the main object of Representative Government is the freedom and happiness of the individual citizens who control it by their votes and support it by their taxes. Thus Locke’s political philosophy crossed the Channel, and became the groundwork of Quesnay, Turgot, Bastiat, and other advocates of laissez faire, which was a French synonym for Individualism. Crossing the Atlantic it became the groundwork of American policy in internal affairs. Locke was the first considerable publicist to lay down the momentous doctrine that the State is secular—that it has a well-defined province in which alone it may act, i.e., that its business is to secure to men their civil rights, leaving all other matters to individual volition or voluntary co-operation. Thus he says in A Letter Concerning Toleration: “The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests. Civil interests I call life, liberty, health and indolency [freedom from pain] of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like. It is the duty of the civil magistrate, by the impartial execution of equal laws, to secure unto all the people in general, and to every one of his subjects in particular the just possession of these things belonging to this life.”

In refusing to extend toleration to Roman Catholics, Locke followed Milton in his Areopagitica. In those times it was believed that Rome, if it regained power, would overthrow constitutional liberty. The Inquisition was still active. No one advocated universal toleration except members of persecuted minorities. In the reign of James II, most English Dissenters, when offered toleration on condition that the Roman Catholics should also be tolerated, declined the boon.

Locke, it may be said, laid down the theory so frequently set forth by Macaulay—that the duty of Government is to preserve the lives and property of its subjects, and that their other activities must be left in the main to moral influences and to free competitive enterprise. Locke did his business so thoroughly that the English theory remained unchanged for more than a century and a half. Indeed, if tendencies admitted of exact dates, we might say that Locke’s theory was almost unchallenged until the publication of the Fabian Essays in 1889.

In Civil Government Locke expounds the Individualistic view of private property, and again lays down the quintessence of Individualism: “The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.” He qualifies his theory of a Social Contract, Compact, or Covenant, by pointing out that “men when they enter into society give up . . . liberty” of a kind; “yet it being only with an intention in every one the better to preserve himself, his liberty and property,” the power conferred “can never be supposed to extend farther than the common good, but is obliged to secure everyone’s property,” etc., etc. This artful qualification of the common good, serves as a complete defence of the “Glorious Revolution,” which gave us effective parliamentary government.

As Locke is of capital importance in our subject, those who wish to study it thoroughly should at least read his monumental essay. Some critics may object that we have over-valued Locke, seeing that he was anticipated in many respects by Hobbes as well as by Milton and other Republican writers. It is true that Hobbes, like Locke, was in a sense Individualist. But his influence, for various reasons, was much smaller. Besides, though Hobbes and Locke adopted many of the same premises, they drew from them quite different conclusions. Locke argued in favor of a free commonwealth, while Hobbes pointed to an absolute monarchy.

Locke’s victory over all opposing schools of thought was so complete that Emancipation and Liberty became for more than a century after his death the keynotes of English political philosophy. Under the early Georges individual liberty was not only the admiration of all intelligent foreigners, but it had gone quite as far as public opinion approved. With the American revolution democratic reformers came to the front. But all progress was stopped by the French Revolution.

One of the few able men who wrote in nominal opposition to Locke’s point of view was Bolingbroke, whose brilliant Patriot King (published in 1749) is probably more admired today than it was at the time of his death. But Bolingbroke, though he had a more extended view of the functions of Government than Locke, did not write in strong opposition to his principles. His ideal, “a patriot king at the head of a united people,” was capable of a more or less “democratic” interpretation.

The policy of Walpole, and indeed his successors, was Quieta non movere, “Let sleeping dogs lie.” A politician might have said, “We are all individualists now.” Tory Dr. Johnson and non-party Goldsmith joined in composing the couplet:

“How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!”

In the same year that the Patriot King was published appeared the far more important L’Esprit des Lois of Montesquieu, a revolutionary book because it introduced the historical method. It helped to confirm the prevalent mode of thought, because it held up the British Constitution to the admiration of mankind.

We may then take it for granted that among thinkers and writers there was little effective opposition to Individualism in the eighteenth century.

In the economic sphere Hume, Tucker and Burke were all advocates of free trade and industrial emancipation from red tape regulations. But Adam Smith was the great architect. Individualism, already firmly rooted in England, was made impregnable in economics for generations by his Wealth of Nations, which appeared in 1776. At second hand or otherwise this work is so well known that it would be waste of time to dilate upon it. Until Adam Smith came into the field the Individualistic practice in politics had not, as a rule, extended to trade in spite of Walpole’s experiments in that direction. But within seventy years the triumph of laissez faire in economics was complete. Pitt, the first great modern Tory statesman, absorbed Adam Smith’s teaching and educated his party. This was a decisive factor; till then the one check upon Individualism had been Tory hostility to the Whigs—the political heirs of Locke. Henceforward the Tories, though as a body inclined to Protection and State control of trade, could be persuaded by leaders like Huskisson or Peel (however unwillingly) to remove restrictions from commerce and industry; indeed, in late Victorian days their leader, Lord Salisbury, and the bulk of his Parliamentary followers remained Free Traders. Free Trade means the absence of a Protective Tariff. Freedom of Trade means freedom not only from tariffs but from restrictions and regulations of all kinds, including those imposed by Trade Unions or combinations of employers, as well as those imposed by Government. This robust growth of economic Individualism was largely due to the seed sown by the Wealth of Nations and to the popular arguments of Cobden and the Manchester School.

It is impossible here to do more than glance at the important developments of laissez faire in France and the United States. In France the movement for economic emancipation was led by the Physiocrats, who by their contemporaries were called “Economistes.” Many of their members, as Quesnay and Turgot, were great and beneficent figures in the history of France. The zeal they displayed for industrial and commercial liberty was natural in reflective men contemplating the feudal servitude of the French people, who were, like Rousseau’s Man, everywhere in chains. They rightly attributed the poverty and misery of France to the obsolete regulations which everywhere sterilized effort and enterprise. Writing in the Encyclopédic, Turgot condemns “le malheureux principe qui a si longtemps infecté l’administration du commerce, je veux dire la manie de tout régier, et de ne jamais s’en rapporter aux hommes sur leur propre intérêt.” The Physiocrats detected the fallacies of the Mercantile Theory and the Balance of Trade. Adam Smith owed much to them; but his judicious mind rejected their “crank” doctrine—that land is the sole source of wealth. Unhappily for France, Turgot fell, and instead of his wise reforms came revolutionary violence and the wars that made Napoleon the military despot of France. Napoleon created a new bureaucratic state, more efficient than the old monarchy but hardly less subversive of freedom. Nevertheless Individualism revived in France after Waterloo and found a brilliant protagonist in Frédéric Bastiat, whose writings are a most lively exposure of the fallacies of Socialism, Protectionism and Militarism.

When we turn to the United States, we find there in Thomas Jefferson the master Individualist—for ability and consistency he has few if any rivals in the practice of that political creed. Having received the pure doctrine of Locke, he found during his residence in France a kind of laboratory in which he watched the French experiments in government. In the end he was able to establish in the United States a form of political thought which dominated it from the first decade of the nineteenth century and still prevails.⁸ This may be called a triumph in observation and experiment, extremely rare in practical politics. The American tariff, indeed, is contrary to Jefferson’s philosophy. But it must be remembered that the United States constitutes the largest and richest free trade area in the world with forty-eight states enjoying complete liberty of exchange for all their products and a maximum of freedom from economic restrictions.

We must now turn to England and the Industrial Revolution which will engage our attention more closely than its twin French sister. This vast change, which lasted roughly from 1760-1846, is now described in all text-books. England passed from home industries to factory industries. The Individualist régime, which then prevailed, enabled her to effect the change with comparative ease, and a period of wonderful expansion followed. For the second half of the nineteenth century Great Britain led the world in manufactures, commerce and shipping. Capital accumulated. Wages rose steadily. All classes prospered. The eighteenth century had been the age of optimists, and Adam Smith was one of them. He believed that Heaven would help those who helped themselves, and his anticipation of the prosperity which would follow commercial freedom was realized in Victorian England. One of his doctrines was that, if the individual trader were left to himself, the study of his own advantage would lead him to a course of action which would also be advantageous to society. Let him pursue his own interest, and he would be “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

In the literature of Individualism after Locke, Bentham is perhaps the leading figure; he was to the nineteenth century what Locke was to the eighteenth, and he showed how an Individualistic conception of society might be made the basis of wonderful improvements in public administration. He was a strong advocate of public economy, and was careful to insist that the functions of central and local authorities should be limited to police, public health and other services which do not lend themselves to voluntary effort. His small Manual of Political Economy, published in 1798, puts the economic case in a nutshell: “With the view of causing an increase to take place in the mass of national wealth, or with a view to increase the means either of subsistence or enjoyment, without some special reason, the general rule is, that nothing ought to be done or attempted by government. The motto, or watchword of government on these occasions, ought to be—Be quiet; . . . The request which agriculture, manufacturers, and commerce present to governments, is modest and reasonable as that which Diogenes made to Alexander: ‘Stand out of my sunshine.’ We have no need of favour—we require only a secure and open path.”

That Utilitarianism, Individualism, and Political Economy enjoyed so long a reign, and even held sway at the Universities, was largely due to the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, a very great man, who to all his other gifts added a candour, rare in controversy, which secures the confidence of the reader and makes him feel that he is not reading propaganda but accompanying the author on a journey in search of truth. Mill’s lucidity of thought and style helped to extend his influence, and he soon took the place of Bentham as the leading exponent of utilitarian Individualism. His virtues and unselfish public spirit won him the title of “the Saint of Rationalism.” Among Mill’s books Political Economy, Representative Government, and above all, On Liberty, are the most important for our subject. They influenced, and still influence, the views of intellectuals on the critical problem of what should be the relationship under democratic institutions between the people and their government. Mill’s analysis of the whole subject provides a most valuable contribution to political and economic science. There is a fine moral elevation of tone which lifts his arguments and conclusions far above the level of mere party controversy or the narrow and selfish interests of classes. The argument for free speech and complete toleration, and for individual liberty in general, has never been developed with such persuasive force as in Mill’s brief but masterly treatise On Liberty. Among Mill’s contemporaries the most brilliant of the writers who took part in this controversy was Macaulay. There is no more crushing exposure in our literature of the fallacies of State Socialism and of the theory that a government ought to be extravagant and meddlesome than Macaulay’s essay on Southey’s Colloquies of Society. It is worthy to be printed alongside Bastians unmasking of the French experiments in Communism.

The most powerful political force on the side of Individualism in the middle years of the nineteenth century was, of course, the Manchester School under the leadership of Cobden and Bright, supported by economists like Henry Fawcett and Thorold Rogers. It was equally opposed to Protectionism, Militarism and Socialism. With its support Gladstone introduced a severe economy into all departments of State and instituted the financial control of an efficent Treasury Department on the principles already laid down by Sir Robert Peel.

Among the apostles of Individualism after the death of Cobden and Mill were Herbert Spencer and his disciple Auberon Herbert. Herbert Spencer’s The Man versus the State is an effective pamphlet against the Socialistic tendencies which began to permeate both the Liberal and Conservative Parties in the ’Eighties and the ’Nineties of last century. Among the politicians who aided this movement the most conspicuous was Joseph Chamberlain. His Radical Programme was issued in 1885, and when he passed over to the Conservative Party he took with him some of its items, including free education, which was carried by Lord Salisbury’s Government.

Meanwhile, a Socialist Party was being gradually formed under such leaders as Hyndman, Morris and Keir Hardie. In 1889 there appeared the Fabian Essays, which won many converts to a moderate and progressive type of Socialism. Its most brilliant exponent was Mr. Bernard Shaw; but it owed even more to the researchful industry and incessant activity of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb. A little later appeared Blatchford’s Merrie England, which caught the popular fancy and helped to turn many working class Radicals into Socialists. But it was not until the Great War, with all the terrible suffering and economic loss which accompanied and followed it, that British industry and capital were at last confronted with a strong Labour Party and threatened by an active group of Communists who aimed at the expropriation of property and at the Marxian ideal known as the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Since then Socialist propaganda has been very active among the working classes, and a considerable section of the British Press has been inclined to compromise with its proposals rather than to meet them and counter them by the principles and arguments of Individualism, opposing free competition and enterprise to monopolistic combinations and bureaucratic red tape.

¹ This was the introduction to The Philosophy of Individualism: A Bibliography published in 1927 by The Individualist Bookshop of London. Because it gives so compact, informative and balanced a survey of the intellectual history of individualism I am reprinting it in full. Although it was originally anonymous, I have since learned (see my own introduction) that the author was W. H. Hutt. The footnotes are also his, except one or two which are signed with my own initials.

²Latet dolus in generations—”Fallacy lurks in general terms”—is an old and true maxim of the Schoolmen.

³ “The Hellenic State, like the ancient State in general, because it was considered all powerful, actually possessed too much power.”—Blumschli, The Theory of the State (Book I., c, iii).

⁴Laissez faire might be translated “Leave us to act as we please.” Its literal meaning is, of course, “Let do.”

⁵ Much of Locke’s most important work was written in that reign, though not published till later.

⁶ On the whole, the most important figure in English philosophy.”—Sorley. Camb. Hist. Eng. Lit. Vol. VIII., c. 14.

⁷ These assertions, of course, are found in the Declaration of Independence, but not specifically in the Constitution.—H. H.

⁸ This statement was written, it must be remembered, in 1927.—H. H.