THE

MODERN ATHENIANS

THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

IN THE JEFFREY YEARS, 1802-1829

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)).

Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832)

English legal theorist and social philosopher best known as a leading advocate of utilitarianism and creator of the Panopticon penitentiary design.

JEREMY BENTHAM was born in London in 1748. He attended Queen’s College at Oxford University to study law and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in 1763 and a Master’s in 1766. Although called to the Bar in 1769, he never actually represented a client in court, and instead ‘devoted himself not to practising law but to writing about it, and to writing not about law as it was but about law as it ought to be’ (Dinwiddy 2).

Though primarily legal in nature, Bentham’s philosophy spanned a wide variety of social issues and areas of practice. His first major work, Fragments on Government, attacked Blackstone’s well-regarded theories about the preference for judicial precedence in common law; Bentham preferred the authority of the legislature in creating law. He was greatly interested in the moral theory of utilitarianism, and Lyons places him as a bridging link between the work of David Hume and John Stuart Mill in the development of utilitarian philosophy (5). His interest in the nature of crime led him to explore the power of the law, not just to punish actual crime, but also to deter future crime. The legislature, he argued, had ‘several ways of preventing misdeeds otherwise than by punishment immediately applied to the very act which is obnoxious’. In this vein, he also explored the nature of criminal punishment and proposed a vision of penal reform centered on the reform, rather than the punishment, of prisoners. His model prison, the Panopticon, took him sixteen years to develop, but was ultimately left unbuilt. Foucault suggests that Bentham’s Panopticon was not only ‘a project of a perfect disciplinary institution; but he also set out to show how one may “unlock” the disciplines and get them to function in a diffused, multiple, polyvalent way throughout the whole social body’ (208-9). Bentham also explored questions of judicial reform, law enforcement through police power, economic theory, animal rights, and constitutional codification. He left careful instructions before his death for his body to be preserved and displayed as an ‘auto-icon’; it is currently on display on the campus of University College London, whose founders, Edinburgh reviewers James Mill and Henry Broughman, were in different ways inspired by Bentham’s philosophy of utilitarianism.

In a January 1807 examination of proposed reforms to the Court of Session, Jeffrey referred to Bentham as ‘by far the most profound and original thinker who has yet been formed in that school of jurisprudence’. After quoting extensively from Bentham’s theories on judicial reform, the article notes: ‘We do not take all that Mr Bentham says here for the naked and simple truth; but we believe there is much truth in his statements; and that when the spirit of reformation has gained more strength and purity, it will alter many parts of that English system which is now held out as a model’ (ER 9:483, 485).

Brian Robert Wall, IASH, University of Edinburgh

SOURCES

John Dinwiddy, Bentham (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989).

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Trans. Allan Sheridan, New York: Penguin, 1991).

L.J. Hume, Bentham and Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981).

David Lyons, In the Interest of the Governed: A Study in Bentham’s Philosophy of Utility and Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).