THE

MODERN ATHENIANS

THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

IN THE JEFFREY YEARS, 1802-1829

Tag Archives: Adam Smith

Political economy

as it was clarified in the mid-18th century by Adam Smith and David Hume, was the systematic study of the structures of wealth, markets, and finance, especially as they informed individual interactions, social arrangements, governmental power, and international relations. For the Edinburgh, the dissemination of knowledge about economics and its political ramifications was one of its crucial missions.

DURING the early years of the 19th century, political economy had theoretical and applied aspects which transformed both legal and economic practices in the century following Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). The causes and effects of inflation and national debt; the relationship between the economic aid, in the form of relief to the poor, and population increase (often called the Malthusian controversy); the legal structuring of loans, annuities, taxation, and insurance; and the development of infrastructures of consumer purchasing such as stores and restaurants in crowded cities, and the concomitant rise in elaborate advertisements and theories of desire represent only some of the more salient aspects of economics during the romantic period, which Karl Polanyi identified as the ‘Great Transformation’ when land, money, and labor were reconstituted as commodities. Throughout Jeffrey’s time as editor of the Edinburgh Review, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations remained the touchstone text for Political Economy, but its implications were established not only by the text itself, but by the pamphlets, articles, and books that sought to clarify, modify, and extend it; on any given issue, Smith would be generally adduced by both proponent and opponent as an authority. In an 1820 review on the Evils of Public Ignorance’, the Edinburgh laments the misapplication of ‘laissez faire’ policies: ‘how many people have we heard thus disposing of all nice matters of national polity by crying out, “Adam Smith”’ (ER 34:222).

The Edinburgh understood the dissemination of economic knowledge as among its crucial missions, and further understood the dissemination of knowledge generally as deeply implicated in the production of national wealth and personal well-being. It recognized a dynamic loop between the belief in economic laws and the success of those laws. Thus, by circulating knowledge about economics, the Edinburgh increased the efficacy of its practical effects. Francis Horner, who eventually headed the committee that produced the Bullion Report (1810), realized that ‘knowledge may be considered in the light of a commodity, prepared by a separate profession, and consumed or enjoyed by the community as a luxury’ (Horner 1:96), and, as Jerome Christensen has observed, the Edinburgh ‘commodifies Horner’s epiphany’ and ‘aims to be the medium of exchange’ in the market Horner contemplates (116). Thus, the extension of economic knowledge was implicated in the construction of a market for knowledge itself. In its first issue, the Edinburgh acknowledged the ‘General Diffusion of Knowledge’ as ‘one great cause of the Prosperity of North Britain’ (ER, 1:92) and declared that the knowledge derived from economic disasters such as the South Seas Bubble partially compensated for that disaster.

From the founding of the Edinburgh until Jeffrey’s retirement as editor, more than 180 articles use the phrase ‘political economy’ – four in the first issue, of which three are written by Francis Horner. Horner reviewed Thornton’s book on paper credit in this first issue, John Ramsey McCulloch reviewed Ricardo on Political Economy and Taxation in 1818, and Richard Whately reviewed N.W. Senior’s Introductory Lectures on Political Economy in one of the final issues Jeffrey oversaw. The Edinburgh devoted considerable attention to the behavior of money within markets, and the various ways regulation could manipulate that behavior (see currency and finance). Discussing Senior’s Introductory Lectures, the Edinburgh acknowledges that there ‘are so many crude and mischievous theories afloat, which are dignified with the name of Political Economy, that the science is in no small danger of falling into disrepute’ (ER, 45:170). Under Jeffrey’s guidance, the Edinburgh saw that the way in which political economy was understood was integral to the way in which political economics would function, and that the reliance of markets on bad economic assumptions could have catastrophic results.

The Edinburgh contained two kinds of economic articles. First, there were those that specifically engaged economic theories, and these tended to emphasize monetary policy and the relations of markets, capital, wages, and consumption. Second, there were those articles that explored the specific conditions in which economics figured – considering the effects of a reduction of the duties on wine (July 1824) and coffee (January 1825), for example, and attending to the consequences of foreign trade on English wages. There were reviews of practical matters such as forgery and pauperism, but in these considerations, the reviewers sought to ground their reasoning in both statistical or historical knowledge and a theory of markets that implied a qualified notion of human rationality.

McCulloch, whose first review for the Edinburgh was on Ricardo’s Principle of Political Economy in 1818, became the Review’s primary economic theorist through the 1820s. He published reviews that espoused a hybrid political economy between Ricardo’s insistence on the comparative advantages of individual specialisation and relatively free trade among nations, on the one hand, and, on the other, the earlier position along ‘the lines of Smith’s cost-of-production approach’ (Fontana 76). Thomas Malthus, Jeffrey’s friend and an occasional contributor to the Edinburgh, wrote to a friend in 1821 that the Review ‘has so entirely adopted Mr. Ricardo’s system of Political Economy that it is probably neither you nor I shall be mentioned in it’ (quoted in Fetter 239). Although Malthus was exaggerating and many of the frequent references to him in the 1820s are laudatory, McCulloch was critical of a number of his positions, such as that on the way the accumulation of capital affects buying power and wages (Mar 1824). Although attentive to Malthus’s principle of population, the Edinburgh instituted into economics its theory of genius, noting that no ‘possible limits can be assigned to the powers and resources of genius, nor consequently to the improvement of machinery, and of the skill and industry of the labourer’ (ER 41:13). Thus a notion of intellectual progress, which the Edinburgh took as its own primary social function, was grafted onto Ricardo’s economics, to create a mechanism (or at least its illusion) of inevitable progress.

Mark Schoenfield, Vanderbilt University

 SOURCES

Christensen, Jerome, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

Horner, Francis Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Horner, M. P. 1843. Ed. Leonard Horner. 2 vols, (London: Murray, 1853).

Fetter, FW, “The Authorship of Economic Articles in the Edinburgh Review, 1802-47” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 61.3:(Jun., 1953) 232-259.

Fontana, Biancamaria. Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1832 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

 

Philanthropy

the practice of charitable donations by private givers to address social needs.

While the word philanthropy became part of the English lexicon in the seventeenth century, it ‘did not become a term of widespread use with the British and American public until the nineteenth century with the emergence of new forms of economic stratification and a new kind of institutional giving’ (Christianson 30-31). The ideological basis of philanthropic giving was an idea of sympathy first articulated by Frances Hutcheson in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), in which benevolence is seen as fundamental to moral virtue. David Hume and Adam Smith adapted Hutcheson’s ideas in negotiating the ‘dynamic between self-interest and sympathy in the regulation of civil society’ (Christianson 37). Adherents to philanthropy argued that it addressed social problems that could not be rectified by market forces or government action; its detractors believed that philanthropy threatened core social values – such as thrift, work, and self-sufficiency – by creating a culture of dependency.

In line with a reaction against sentimentalism in the Romantic period, the writers and reviewers in the Edinburgh Review often questioned the role of philanthropy in public discourse – a review of a pro-abolition pamphlet in July 1804, for example, expresses gratitude that it contained ‘none of that sentimental rant and sonorous philanthropy by which the cause of humanity has been so often exposed to ridicule’ (477).

Brian Robert Wall, IASH, University of Edinburgh

 SOURCES

Frank Christianson, Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot and Howells (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007).

Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie, or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words (London: Huntington Press, 1623 (republished 1930)).

Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

are important political ideologies that shaped modern understandings of nationness and which continue to inform – and, indeed, circumscribe – present-day thinking about national, international, and universal belonging.

NATIONALISM AND COMSOPOLITANISM are part of a broader complex of ideas about nations and national identity that emerged along with the modern nation in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. In an age that witnessed not only two key revolutions which redefined the nation-state (the American Revolution and the French Revolution) but also ongoing reconfigurations of national identity and national borders both on the Continent (Napoleonic Wars) and within Britain (the Acts of Union bringing Scotland and Ireland into Great Britain), the question of nation was a critical one. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism operated in the period as competing (although not always oppositional) responses to this question. In general, nationalism and cosmopolitanism rest on different notions of what a nation is and what it means to belong to a nation.

Nationalism typically defines the nation in particularist terms such as language, history, blood, and geography. In these models, the nation is considered homogeneous and unified, and it is thus frequently imagined as an organic whole. Such particularist notions of nation lend themselves to understandings of national identity and national character as something essential or non-voluntary. Also, because it conceives the nation as both distinct and discrete, nationalism often justifies political projects of national sovereignty and self-determination and supports economic and political policies such as isolationism and non-intervention.

Cosmopolitanism, in contrast, builds out of Enlightenment notions of the civil contract, and – like liberal or civil nationalisms – typically defines the nation in the rationalist and abstract terms of shared rights and shared constitution. In this formulation, national identity is neither essential nor exclusive, and can therefore co-exist with other national and transnational affiliations. In general, however, cosmopolitanism subordinates national belonging to universal belonging. As a political or economic category, then, cosmopolitanism considers nations in their relation to international or global structures, arguing that nations are dependant upon those broader structures for their integrity or preservation, or arguing for the elimination of nations or national borders altogether. As the above definitions suggest, nationalism and the cosmopolitanism have a close and unstable relationship in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European thought. At their most basic, however, nationalism privileges the national over the universal, and cosmopolitanism privileges the universal over the national.

From 1802 to 1829, the Edinburgh Review was arguably the most influential proponent of cosmopolitanism in Britain. From the start, the early Edinburgh aligned itself with both Scottish and Continental projects of enlightenment, advocating an ‘innocent cosmopolitanism’ of the intellect to counter the prevailing ‘violence of national animosity’ (ER 1:253). Setting itself against the parochial prejudices and insular small-mindedness of its predecessors and rivals, it cultivated a cosmopolitan attitude of disinterestedness and open-mindedness towards subject matter both local and foreign. Indeed, an important part the Edinburgh’s mandate was to inform Britons about political and intellectual developments taking place outside of Britain, especially those taking place of the Continent, and its first volume tellingly included numerous reviews of foreign works, including J. J. Mounier’s De l’Influence attributée aux Philosophes, and Charles Villers’ Philosophie de Kant. Significantly, the periodical’s commitment to reviewing foreign works continued throughout the Napoleonic wars, a time when other periodicals ceased to review foreign literature for fear of being suspected of Jacobinism. Influenced by the socio-political theories and political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment, the early Edinburgh Review took a cosmopolitan approach to the important issues of its day, including the question of nation. More often than not, the periodical advanced a cosmopolitan understanding of the nation as a heterogeneous and non-unified civil entity, an understanding that informed its own self-identification as a British periodical coming out of a post-Union Scotland, as well as its support for various national insurrections taking place on the Continent. Politically, the early Edinburgh considered British affairs to be closely tied to what was happening on the Continent, and it broached a liberal model of Europe as a ‘great federacy’ of nations (ER 1:354). Economically, it drew on the political economy of countryman Adam Smith to argue for a commercially-based internationalism in which commodities circulated freely across national borders. Overall, the cosmopolitanism of the early Edinburgh Review stood out in the nationalistic political climate of early nineteenth-century Britain, especially during the Napoleonic Wars, and it was repeatedly attacked as unpatriotic: ‘the watchword of Government was let loose upon us; and we were accused of wishing to lower the flag of England to her former rebellious colonies; and, in conjunction with our Transatlantic brethren, to aid Bonaparte in his views of universal empire:—and this because we were wanting in that truly British feeling, which is ready to sacrifice every opinion to that of the Minister of the day” (ER 20:234). Renewed interest in the question of nation at the end of the twentieth-century, however, has given new life to many of the cosmopolitan tenets advanced in the early Edinburgh Review.

Esther Wohlgemut, University of Prince Edward Island

 

Abolition of the Slave Trade

, the popular campaign and parliamentary debate process that culminated in the 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which illegalized the transatlantic sale of slaves across the British Empire.

CRITIQUES of the practice of slavery and the slave trade were printed as early as the late seventeenth century. Notable Scottish intellectuals such as Adam Smith, George Wallace, and Adam Ferguson offered legal and philosophical justification for ending the slave trade, as did English jurist William Blackstone and American physician Benjamin Rush. Official efforts to abolish the slave trade began with the 1787 formation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, led by the popular campaigning of Thomas Clarkson and the parliamentary action of William Wilberforce. The Committee’s efforts took twenty years to come to fruition and resulted in the 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. While the Act eliminated the trade, it did not illegalize slavery or emancipate those held as slaves; complete British emancipation came with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

The Edinburgh Review consistently attacked the slave trade up to the Act of 1807, with Jeffrey and Brougham, especially vigorous in favour of its abolition, taking the Review with them. In July 1808, Samuel Taylor Coleridge contributed a review of Thomas Clarkson’s The History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade which caused controversy because Jeffrey altered it to highlight the contribution of William Wilberforce, who had himself contributed a review on the topic in 1804.

BRW

 

SOURCES

David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987).

The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People, ed. Stephen Farrell, Melanie Unwin, and James Walvin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007).

Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440 – 1870 (London: Papermac, 1997).

 

 

Abolition of the Slave Trade

Critiques of the practice of slavery and the slave trade were printed as early as the late seventeenth century. Notable Scottish intellectuals such as Adam Smith, George Wallace, and Adam Ferguson offered legal and philosophical justification for ending the slave trade, as did English jurist William Blackstone and American physician Benjamin Rush. Official efforts to abolish the slave trade began with the 1787 formation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, led by the popular campaigning of Thomas Clarkson and the parliamentary action of William Wilberforce. The Committee’s efforts took twenty years to come to fruition and resulted in the 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. While the Act eliminated the trade, it did not illegalize slavery or emancipate those held as slaves; complete British emancipation came with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

The Edinburgh Review published letters from those in favor and those opposed to the abolition of the slave trade from 1802 until the 1807 Act. Francis Jeffrey was in favor of abolition and the April 1804 volume of the Review carried his article “Considerations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” In July 1808, Samuel Taylor Coleridge reviewed Thomas Clarkson’s The History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

B.W.