There is more than one reason why this new work from Donald Winch will be met with considerable interest by historians of economics and intellectual historians more generally (parts of five of the chapters have been published previously).
In a long and distinguished career of research primarily devoted to interpreting the history of political economy from its very beginnings as a modern social science, Winch has provided deep and thoughtful accounts of the nature and significance of political economy as an intellectual project, in various of its developments and dimensions, through to the nineteenth century (for example, see Winch Reference Winch1971; Reference Winch1978; Reference Winch1996). Wealth and Life is offered as the completion of an intellectual history begun with Riches and Poverty (in the advertising summary at the front of the book)—or, as the author himself puts it, a “sequel” (p. 2).
At least one more reason for readers of this Journal to be interested in this book is that Winch has been a critic of “traditional” forms of history-of-economic-thought scholarship (made explicit here again, pp. 22–25), so that his work may be seen as an exemplar of at least one proposed alternative way of approaching the history of the discipline.
In twelve chapters the book examines in turn: Mill’s political economy and wider social thought, and the responses to it of John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot, and W. Stanley Jevons (chapters 2–6); Louis Mallet’s economic liberalism, in opposition to Mill and J.E. Cairnes (and to socialism), and Henry Sidgwick’s economics, with particular reference to the latter’s more positive engagement with “economic socialism” (chapters 7, 8); Alfred Marshall’s reconstruction of political economy, including construction of his version of its history, in part interpreted by way of contrast with Herbert Foxwell’s views on “[t]he old generation of economists and the new” (p. 305n), with debates around socialism a strong theme here also (chapters 9, 10); and, finally, J.A. Hobson’s attempt at a “social economics” and “economic humanism” (pp. 298, 311), against the backdrop of the professionalization and institutionalization of economic science (culminating in the formation and development of the Royal Economic Society and the Economic Journal), Hobson being the most prominent British self-proclaimed dissenter against orthodox economics, at the end of the period covered by the book (chapters 11, 12).
An appendix reflects on “the legacy of the Gradgrind caricature [of utilitarianism, deriving from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times] during the second half of the twentieth century” (p. 368), particularly in the writings of F.R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, and E.P. Thompson. For Winch, this is an account of Leftwing myth creation, and of false dichotomizing:
far less willingness [than shown by Dickens] to believe that there were any halfway houses has been shown by twentieth-century readers who have accepted Gradgrind as the embodiment of a repellent mentality. With this came the catastrophic interpretation of Britain’s experience of urban industrialization, with political economy and utilitarianism being treated as complicit with the worst aspects of this experience. Gradgrind thus became a scapegoat for past errors and a persisting obstacle to any humane conception of a future social order, with the further implication that Jerusalem would be constructed on the high moral ground that stood above vulgar economic facts and calculations (p. 369).
There are many strands running through this history, as Winch tells it, and different readers will be more or less interested in different aspects. For this reader, and perhaps for historians of economic theory generally, the aspect of particular interest is the fuller and more nuanced picture it provides of the doctrinal transition from classical economics to marginalism in Britain, a transition in theoretical beliefs interweaved with policy, politics, and moral sensibilities. One striking illustration of this interplay provided by Winch is Foxwell’s annotation on the inside cover of his edition of David Ricardo’s Principles: “The first edition of this disastrous book, which gave us Marxian socialism and the Class War. Deductive playthings of this type, completely divorced from realities, make very dangerous literature for the half-educated. It is like giving a child a razor to play with” (p. 257).
The central organizing theme of the book as a whole, captured in the title, is the supposed opposition between “wealth” and “life,” the “bitter argument between economists and human beings” in Arnold Toynbee’s words (pp. 1–2), “the … schism between romantics and utilitarians” (p. 368). The history of British political economy over this period of Britain’s rise to economic pre-eminence in the world can be understood as a key site upon which this conflict was played out. The argument between political economy and its critics becomes, rightly or wrongly, a kind of proxy war for critics of industrial capitalism. But as Winch is quick to point out, the alleged wealth/life dichotomy is not merely an issue between political economy and its opponents; it is in part a debate that unfolds also within political economy. Indeed, Mill emerges as a thinker not so amenable to the critics’ stereotypes of political economists. And near the end of the period under consideration, Marshall may be read as consciously seeking to rise above the dichotomy and thereby render it redundant. Insofar as he is interested in making a judgment on the conflict between political economy and the critics of it considered here, Winch comes down on the side of Marshall (p. 25) and of economic science.
Winch thus regards the economists-versus-human-beings dichotomy as largely, though not completely, false (“artificial” and “fundamentally misleading,” pp. 365–366). And to the extent that there is a residual of substance to it, he sides with the economists, at least in a qualified way (pp. 395–98). Perhaps this judgment is correct; but for this reviewer a doubt remains after reading this absorbing and very valuable intellectual history. Or one may say, a larger question remains. The persistence of intellectual (intellectual in some sense) antipathy to political economy and economics, from at least the early nineteenth century to the present, is a strikingly evident fact. Winch’s book provides an account of a large and important part of that history of antipathy. Is that phenomenon of ongoing substantial dissent explicable by reference to, or by reference only to, the persistence of pathologically anti-rationalist and/or sentimentalist intellectuals in modern society? Or is there really something problematic about the methodological, theoretical, and/or ethical character of the science—whether or not the proponents and practitioners of that intellectual project regard it as an “autonomous” intellectual discipline in some sense? That is to say, is there something problematic here that therefore objectively calls forth dissent? (Whether the dissenters’ various views are adequate or otherwise, either as mere critique or in terms of offering a positive alternative, is another question.)
Why is there no similar persistent tradition of dissent in relation to pure and applied natural sciences? And why is there no similar persistent strain of opposition to the other social sciences? One need not embrace R.H. Tawney’s response to Marshall—“There is no such thing as a science of economics … [i]t is just cant” (p. 25)—in order to suspect that there is something intrinsically problematic about the project of an economic science, as we have known it in its various forms since around the middle of the nineteenth century.
