Polemic, Ideology and Christian Political Economy PDF

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Revolution, Economics and Religion

Christian Political Economy, 17981833
A. M. C. Waterman
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511521508
Online ISBN: 9780511521508
Hardback ISBN: 9780521394475
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Chapter
1 - POLEMIC, IDEOLOGY AND CHRISTIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY pp. 1-14
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511521508.001
Cambridge University Press
CHAPTER I
Polemic, ideology and ' Christian Political

Economy'
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS POLEMIC! AND VICE VERSA
To expect an historian to write with no polemical intent is not unlike

expecting a privately owned business to conduct its affairs with a
view to the public interest. No doubt it can be done. But to require
it is unreasonable and is, moreover, to miss the point of the activity.
History is served not so much by the pure intentions of the author as
by the criticism of his colleagues.
The original purpose of this book, therefore, was unashamedly
polemical. It was to disturb a popular view of modern intellectual
history, and to challenge one of its scholarly correlatives. I have by
no means lost sight of this object. But its pursuit has generated a
number of secondary aims, some of which may interest historians,
economists, theologians, political theorists, and others with no desire
to grind my particular axe. What this means is that instead of having
only one reason for existing, my book now has no fewer than five. For
the evidence which supports my primary thesis bears upon two
questions much canvassed by historians of eighteenth and early
nineteenth-century British politics; and upon two others of importance for some, at least, among my fellow economists. Each of the
five must be explained.
The popular view that I had in mind is a belief that ' Christian
Social Thought' or ' Christian Social Teaching' for the two are all
too often confounded - was more or less moribund from the
Reformation until the emergence of'Christian socialism' (alternatively, the 'Social Encyclicals') in the nineteenth century. As
Tawney said of the Church of England, 'The social teaching of the
Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to
think' (Tawney 1947, 147). The scholarly correlative may also be
found in Tawney, though it has lately been revived by E. R.
Norman. 'An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own',
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Polemic, ideology and 'Christian Political
Economy'
declared Tawney, 'inevitably accepts that which happens to be

fashionable'. Throughout the eighteenth century and well into the
nineteenth, the church 'accepted the prevalent social philosophy
and adapted its teaching to it'. Religious thought was no longer 'an
imperious master' of political theory ' but a docile pupil' (Tawney
1947, 160, 161). For at least three centuries, Norman has suggested,
' the social attitudes of the church have derived from the surrounding
intellectual and political culture and not...from theological learning' (Norman 1976, 10).
It was Tawney's own polemical purpose to contrast this putative
quiescence unfavourably with that late-Victorian Anglican socialism
to which, through the influence of Charles Gore and William
Temple, he had become affected (Preston 1979, 83-110). 'Silently,
but unmistakably, the conception of the scope and content of
Christian ethics which was generally, though not universally accepted
in the nineteenth century, is undergoing a revision' (Tawney 1947,
12). Once again, after a lapse of some two or three centuries, the
Christian churches are and ought to be engaged in social criticism.
' Issues which were thought to have been buried by the discretion of
centuries have shown in our own day that they were not dead but
sleeping' (Tawney 1947, 12).
At first glance it may seem surprising that Edward Norman
should have accepted Tawney's account of the passive and
accommodating nature of Christian social thought in eighteenth and
nineteenth-century Britain. He did so, however, in order to make a
polemical point which is almost the opposite of Tawney's. The
secularization of European thought which the latter (incorrectly)
identified in the seventeenth century was not reversed in Victorian
times, but accelerated. What was true of the eighteenth century is
true, a fortiori, of the present. 'The Christian religion has lost the
power, and also the confidence, to define the areas of public debate,
even in moral questions. Instead, it follows the definitions made by
others' (Norman 1979, 4). Tawney's strictures upon the social ethics
of Josiah Tucker and Paley apply with equal force to those of
Maurice and Westcott, Gore, Temple and of Tawney himself For at
least since the English Revolution, shall we say,
The theologians have always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways
which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond almost
exactly to the values of their class and generation. Thus theological
scholarship justified the structural obligations of the eighteenth-century
world, then it provided a Christian basis for Political Economy; later
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Intellectual history as polemic: and vice versa
collectivist principles were hailed as the most perfect embodiment of the

compassion prescribed in the New Testament; and even the contemporary
doctrines of 'liberation' and 'secularization' have been given powerful
theological support. (Norman 1976, 10-11).
There is no denying a large measure of plausibility to this account.

It would have been strange indeed had Tawney's own views escaped
the social conditioning he perceived in earlier stages of European
capitalism. Norman may well hoist him with his own petard.
Like Edward Norman I wish to dispute the widely held belief that
the faithful practice of Christianity, rightly understood, must create
a predisposition in favour of a collectivist, or non-market social
order. Yet I am easy with his strategy. For two reasons, one
theoretical, the other empirical, I believe it to be vulnerable to
objection. In the first place, it must be the case that all political
doctrines in whatsoever period of history are socially conditioned.
This tells us nothing about their truth or falsehood, nor about their
logical connexion with the Christian or any other religion. Moreover,
even 'theological learning' itself is and must be 'derived from the
surrounding intellectual and political culture' to an extent that
weakens the force of Norman's antithesis between the two. In the
second place, as I have previously argued (Waterman 1983a), a close
inspection of the evidence does not wholly support the claim that
' theological scholarship... provided a Christian basis for Political
Economy'. 'Theology' and 'political economy' were then (and
perhaps still are) less distinctly separated than Norman makes it
appear, and were frequently the intellectual property of one and the
same scholar. During the early decades of the nineteenth century at
any rate, ' theological scholarship' played a more active role than he
allows.
I shall therefore adopt a different strategy to make what I take to
be the same point. Leaving aside the validity or otherwise of presentday attitudes, I shall exhibit a pre-Victorian tradition of Christian
social thought in order to demonstrate first, that ' the Church' had
by no means 'ceased to think' at that time; and secondly, that the
results of such ' thinking' were drastically opposed in their political
implications to that automatic hostility to capitalism which Tawney
and those of like mind held to be inseparable from Christianity.
It is of the first importance that I declare my purpose in so doing.
'Christian Political Economy' was strongly favourable to private
property rights, free and competitive markets, the institutions of
marriage and wage-labour, and a high degree of social and economic
Cambridge
Polemic, ideology and ' Christian Political Economy'
inequality. I report and analyse its arguments in this book not in

order to recommend them to the reader, nor because I believe they
have any immediate or obvious relevance to the social problems of
our own time. Nor do I expose the content of this tradition in order
to criticize, appraise or refute it. Still less is it my object (as to some
extent, and in different ways, it was both Tawney's and Norman's
object), to provide an externalist 'explanation' of its intellectual
history in terms of some causal social process and thus to discredit its
message. My purpose thefirstpurpose of this book is none of these,
but rather to understand the tradition, and so to help the reader
understand it. For in this way we may begin to discover, as Quentin
Skinner (1969, 52) has well put it, 'the essential variety of viable
moral assumptions and political comments'.
It is impossible to understand the political ideas of eighteenthcentury Europeans without recognizing that the distinctions we now
quite properly draw between specialized branches of'theological',
'philosophical', 'scientific' and 'social' inquiry were then of far less
importance and in many cases hardly possible. David Hume's Essays,
for example, contain matter that he described as 'Moral, Literary
and Political' and which we should now classify as 'anthropology',
'economies', 'history', 'journalism', 'philosophy', 'political science'
and 'theology'. Samuel Johnson was expert in law, knowledgeable
in 'chymistry' and theology, learned in classical and much other
European literature, and omnicompetent as lexicographer. After
seven years in the chair of Chemistry at Cambridge, during which he
conducted many important researches, Richard Watson became
Regius Professor of Divinity in 1771 whereupon he pursued his new
studies with as much assiduity and success. There was then a unity
to intellectual activity which is now forever lost. Above all is it
impossible to understand the thought of pre-industrial, European
society without an imaginative awareness of the extent to which that
unity was determined by the presuppositions of Western Christianity.
Though Hobbes and Helvetius, Hume and Voltaire, and many
another ' infidel' had wholly or partially detached themselves from
Christianity or even, in some cases, from religious belief of any kind,
the 'secularization of the European mind' (Chadwick 1975) was a
concomitant of widespread industrialization and did not occur until
well into the next century. The terms of political debate, in the ancien
regime, were set by the theological requirements of Christian
orthodoxy.
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I am aware that this claim may still appear controversial. As
recently as 1985 Professor J. G. A. Pocock (1985a, 33), reviewing the
'state of the art' in eighteenth-century historiography, could report
that ' we study the era in which English and Scottish writers for the
first time engaged in fully secular discussion of their society and its
destinies, from which point British intellectual history can begin to
be written'. Insofar as this book supplies evidence of the centrality
of theological concerns in pre-industrial political discourse, its second
purpose may thus be seen as affording support for the position of I.
R. Christie (1984, esp. 184-5, 206-14), J. C. D. Clark (1985) and
others (e.g., Le Mahieu 1976; Crimmins 1983, 1986, 1989a; Hole
1989) who have called in question the prevailing 'positivism' and
consequent reductionism, of eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury historiography.
Ian Christie, Jonathan Clark, R. A. Soloway (1969) and Robert
Hole have described the crucial part played by orthodox Anglican
theology in 'The intellectual repulse of revolution' by British
intellectuals in the 1790s. It is now generally agreed, moreover, that
the English Jacobins were not so much muzzled as actually
vanquished in fair fight, '...the radicals were defeated by the force
of their opponents' arguments and by the climate of conservative
opinion among the politically conscious, not simply by recourse to
repressive measures and the forces of order' (Dickinson 1977, 272,
cit. Christie 1984, 159). None of these accounts, however, nor any
other that I am aware of, continues the story of the 'intellectual
repulse of revolution' to its final and most interesting chapter, which
is the classic confrontation between William Godwin and T. R.
Mai thus from 1798 to 1803. For Godwin had answered Burke in
1793 with such authority that for four crucial years, from the Reign
of Terror to the French landing in Wales, the initiative passed back
to the 'radicals'. Not until the first Essay on Population (1798) were
the Jacobins finally routed.
The essential ingredient in Malthus's victory, and that which was
entirely new in counter-revolutionary polemic of the time, was the
'new science' of political economy. The unassailable prestige of
Newton's scientific method, and that method itself, first appropriated
to the study of human social phenomena by David Hume in the mid1750s (Waterman 1988), were brilliantly deployed by Mai thus to
show that both Burke and Godwin were wrong: and wrong for the
same reason. Partly because of the requirement that anti-Jacobin
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Polemic, ideology and 'Christian Political Economy'
doctrine should be consistent with Anglican orthodoxy, there was

considerable criticism and development of Malthus's ideas - by
himself and others - over the next three decades, and it is this
particular programme that I have labelled 'Christian Political
Economy'. Its theological aspects were crucially dependent upon a
'liberal' mutation of orthodoxy which, I shall argue, had its origins
in Cambridge in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
The 'ideological alliance of political economy and Christian
theology' (Waterman 1983a) in these years was a decidedly new
strain in British 'conservative' thought. Its social theory, whilst
demonstrating both the inevitability and the beneficence of existing
economic institutions, did so in a way that was wholly compatible
with the most whiggish desire for 'reform'. Its theological aspects,
though satisfying both the letter and the spirit of the Anglican
formularies, did so in a way that successfully enlisted in the service
of Christianity the new insights of the Enlightenment. It is therefore
the third purpose of this book, and that for which I claim the greatest
novelty, to demonstrate that Christian Political Economy discovered
tenable middle ground, during the first three decades of the
nineteenth century, between an ultra-tory defence of the ancien regime
on the one hand, and ' radicalism' in any of its varieties, Jacobin,
plebeian or 'Philosophic', on the other. In so doing it supplied the
ideological underpinnings of the new 'liberal-conservatism' of
Canning, Huskisson and Peel, thereby smoothing the transition from
what was left of an ancien regime in the 1820s to the emerging
industrial and increasingly pluralistic society of the Victorian age.
Viewed from this standpoint my book may be regarded as an
extended footnote, or technical appendix, to Boyd Hilton's (1988)
recent work on 'Evangelical' social thought.
In the terminology of Lakatos (1970, 133-4), t n e social-theoretic
'hard core' of this programme was the central, organizing
conception of classical political economy: Adam Smith's 'cheerful'
vision of a self-regulating market economy, as modified by Malthus's
' gloomy' recognition of the dominance of scarcity in human social
life. It is no accident that Christian Political Economy should be
almost exactly conterminous with the evolution, at the hands of
Chalmers, Malthus, West, Ricardo, Senior and others, of what
Samuelson (1978) has aptly called the 'canonical classical model' of
political economy. Though Ricardo deserved (and has always
received) the chief credit for defining the formal structure of this
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'model', his achievement would have been impossible but for the
pioneering work of Mai thus on population, diminishing returns and
rent. And in fact there was the most fruitful friendship, collaboration
and mutual criticism between the two until Ricardo's early death in
1823.
Those authors who followed Malthus in the theoretical elaboration of Christian Political Economy Paley, J. B. Sumner,
Copleston, Whately and Chalmers criticized and improved various
aspects of the arguments presented in the first and subsequent
editions of the Essay on Population; and Malthus responded to their
criticisms in five successive recensions over twenty-eight years. Of
necessity therefore there is much about Malthus and his works in
what I have to say. Viewed indeed from the blinkered standpoint of
my own academic discipline economics and the history of economic
thought this book may well appear, at least in part, as a
microscopic examination of certain parts of the Essay on Population:
carried out under far greater magnification than has ever yet been
employed.
In view of the immense volume ofink that has been spilt over the
Essay for nearly two hundred years, it may well be wondered what
more of use remains to be said. The answer is a corollary of my second
theme. Economists, for the most part, have been even more willing
than historians to filter the literature of pre-industrial society
through the conceptual apparatus of their own secularized, technical
and specialist consciousness. Malthus above all seems to have
created a problem for the 'economic mind'. Marx and Bagehot,
Cannan, Schumpeter and many others equally eminent would seem
to have missed the point of what Malthus was trying to say.
At bottom this has almost always been a consequence of the same,
fundamental misperception. The Essay has been seen as a book
'about' economics, or demography, or politics, or even theology.
It has not been seen for what I believe it is: an anti-Jacobin defence
of property rights embedded in the religious world-view and
theological framework of eighteenth-century Anglican Christianity.
I am aware that this is a somewhat eccentric view, which I hold, at
least so far as my own profession is concerned, with a small handful
of others. I am also aware that Malthus himself displayed a certain
ambivalence towards his adversaries in 1798. Though a clergyman
he was a whig, reared by Dissenters. Cambridge of the 1780s had
afforded but indifferent preparation for the unaccustomed role of
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defensor Jidei. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity in regarding

Godwin's 'system of equality' as 'beautiful and engaging'. Nevertheless it is the fourth purpose of this book to supply evidence in
support of my opinion that the Essay on Population is largely
unintelligible without an intimate awareness of the ideological
warfare of which it was a part, and of the philosophical and
theological discourse with which that warfare was carried on.
Enough has now been said to make it quite clear that this is a
polemical book about polemical books. How is human knowledge
enlarged by so ignoble a purpose ? First I owe an explanation of two
words I have so far used without apology: 'polemic' and 'ideology'.
' Polemic' is a ritualized act of war similar in that respect to
games of chess or bridge whereby one author seeks to ' defeat'
another by demonstrating to the satisfaction of informed bystanders
that his opponent's arguments are ill-founded and therefore
untenable. There is no reason (save human pride, vainglory and
hypocrisy) why this activity need not take place with the utmost
charity and mutual forbearance. Malthus and Ricardo were intimate
friends. But it is of the essence that both - or all, in a multi-person
game - should play to win.
' Ideology' now has many meanings, and no meaning. I shall not
use the word in a Marxian sense as a form of' false consciousness'
capable in principle of being dispelled by 'correct' social analysis.
Instead I shall follow Schumpeter's usage and mean by it a set of
'rationalizations', produced in any society by those groups or classes
in a position to assert themselves, which serve to glorify the
importance or otherwise advance the interests of those groups or
classes. In this sense Marxism itself is 'ideology', but none the worse
for that. For as Schumpeter insisted, 'it cannot be emphasized too
strongly that, like individual rationalizations, ideologies are not lies'
(Schumpeter 1954, 36).
Though polemic may arise from many different motives, one of
the strongest of which is the sheer joy of competitive sport, it is
obvious that much - perhaps most - of the ' polemic' engaged in by
historians, economists and other students of human society, has an
'ideological' function. Malthus sought to refute the arguments of
Godwin in order to show that 'the established administration of
property' maximized the disposable income of landlords, thereby
affording 'everything that distinguishes the civilized, from the
savage state' and so making the world safe for clergymen and college
Cambridge
fellows. Nevertheless it is often felt, especially by economists, that it

is very unscientific, not to say demeaning, to descend to ideological
polemic. Economics should be 'value free'; economists should
refrain from offering advice or passing judgement upon social goals;
and should concern themselves with establishing 'meaningful
theorems' which 'predict', 'describe' or 'explain' observable (and
measurable) economic phenomena.
Deeply as I approve of this orthodox view of social science,
honesty compels me to admit that it often fails to describe what
actually happens. For in some cases at least, if not in most, what is
eventually acknowledged to have been ' scientific progress' emerged
not as the fruit of disinterested inquiry but as the unintended outcome of
ideological polemic. So long as a community exists of informed and
critical colleagues, and so long as the prizes for polemical victory are
awarded fairly by that community the operation of Gresham's Law
will be suspended: good arguments - however unworthy their
motivation - will drive out bad.
Economists, of all people, should find it no surprise that an
Invisible Hand may operate in the history of their own discipline. It
is at any rate the fifth and final purpose of this book to illustrate that
point by showing that the eventual outcome of the ideological
polemic I describe was of profound and lasting significance for
economic science.
Before turning to these tasks it remains only to say rather more
carefully just what will be meant in this book by 'Christian Political
Economy'.
A DEFINITION OF 'CHRISTIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY'
The astute reader will already have noticed that I have committed,
or seem about to commit, a serious anachronism. If it be true that the
unity of pre-industrial thought was determined by the presuppositions of the Christian religion, how can there be useful work for the
adjective 'Christian' in 'Christian Political Economy'? Traditional
European society-Jonathan Clark's ancien regime - w a s founded
upon the unity of'church' and 'state'. In principle at least, all social
theory was therefore a branch of ecclesiology. Only when a nontheological, empirical and 'scientific' study of society had emerged,
owing no deference to the 'Queen of the Sciences', could there be
any social theory (or 'social thought' or 'social teaching' - the three
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are blurred together in Troeltsch's Soziallehren) which was not

'Christian 3 . But in that case, of course, a formidable epistemological
question arises. How might such a 'secular', or 'autonomous' social
theory be called ' Christian' at all? Are we hopelessly poised between
the devil of anachronism and the deep blue sea of unmeaning?
This merely formal dilemma mirrors a genuine predicament of the
authors to be considered in this book. For by the end of the
eighteenth century the world of ideas was in a condition somewhat
like that of a great lake in early spring. To a casual glance all is as
it ever has been: nothing but ice to the horizon. But on closer
inspection all is in flux: cracks and fissures everywhere, patches of
water, and great flows beginning to break off and drift downstream.
Thus did the intellectual unity of traditional society appear when
Malthus wrote his first Essay in 1798. Europe was evidently no longer
strictly 'traditional'. But as yet there was hardly a sign of what it
would look like when it became ' modern' in the second half of the
next century. Those who wished to welcome and avail themselves of
the new knowledge associated with the Enlightenment, whilst at the
same time remaining true to the faith and practice of Christianity,
were treading on thin ice indeed.
Especially was this the case with political economy, which was
gradually making way, in France and Great Britain at any rate, as
a legitimate and useful inquiry governed by canons owing nothing to
Christian or any other theology. For precisely this reason it was
reviled as godless and repudiated as 'hostile to religion' by a wide
spectrum of theological opinion ranging from ' two-bottle orthodoxy'
at the one end to the Lake Poets at the other. The belief that political
economy and Christian theology are mutually exclusive and
antipathetic was shared by a very different and politically opposed
party: a small but highly influential group of radicals led by Jeremy
Bentham and James Mill. In the early 1820s the 'Philosophic
Radicals', as they later became known, made a determined attempt
to hijack political economy to their own, unashamedly atheistic
programme of'reform'. It has lately been suggested, indeed, that
political economy supplied the tools for undermining the legitimacy
of the English ancien regime (Kanth 1986). But this is to exaggerate
both the political and the intellectual potency of Bentham and his
disciples. It was the single-handed achievement of Richard Whately
to defeat the Philosophic Radicals by showing that a defensible
demarcation is possible between 'scientific' and 'theological'
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A definition of' Christian Political Economy'
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knowledge, thereby insulating each from illegitimate encroachment

by the other.
Whately's demarcation afforded retroactive justification of those
- such as Malthus, Paley, Sumner and Copleston - who had risked
the censure of their fellow Christians by defending a social theory
based almost entirely upon political economy and hardly at all upon
a traditional ontology of society that Troeltsch (1931) misleadingly
described as ' Christian sociology'. It freed political economy from
attachment to any particular religious or political creed, making it
equally accessible to all who would submit to its discipline. And by
safeguarding the integrity of each, it validated the ideological
alliance of political economy and Christian theology that Malthus
and his colleagues attempted to create.
Now, a distinction between theological and scientific ' knowledge'
which recognizes the proper territory of each whilst denying to either
the right to invade the other is precisely characteristic if not
definitive of modern, 'pluralistic' or 'secular' consciousness. In
forging his powerful weapon for the ideological defence of the
establishment, Whately surrendered the traditional justification
of its intellectual monopoly: the sovereignty of Christian dogma
over all human inquiry. What I have called 'Christian Political
Economy' is therefore of necessity a phenomenon of the brief
transition between 'ancien regime' and the 'secular society' it helped
to create. It had its origin in that moment when classical political
economy was conceived through the insemination of' Smith on the
Wealth of Nations' by 'Malthus on Population'. Though cracks and
fissures were apparent to a discerning eye, the ideas, attitudes and
institutions of traditional society still filled the landscape. Political
economy might be serviceable in repelling the adversaries of the
ancien regime, but only if consistent with orthodox Christianity. Forty
years later most of the ice had floated out of the lake and the shape
of things to come was clearly visible to all save to Keble, Newman
and the other 'Tractites'. The ancien regime was dead, and its defence
was thus a dead issue. Political economy and Christian theology had
been set free to go their separate ways. Very soon it ceased to be part
of the ordinary, public business of a scientist to reconcile his findings
with religious doctrine.
In a formal sense, therefore, 'Christian Political Economy' is a
label for the intellectual enterprise of combining classical political
economy with Christian - specifically Anglican - theology in norm-
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Polemic, ideology and 'Christian Political
Economy'
ative social theory. The term 'classical political economy' is often

used loosely to embrace everything from Petty's Political Arithmetick
(1690) to Marx's Capital (1867). As I have already indicated, I use
if more precisely in Samuelson's 'canonical' sense. Therefore the first
Essay on Population must be the earliest possible terminus a quo both of
'classical' and therefore of'Christian' political economy. By the end
of the 1830s the latter enterprise ceased to have any compelling
ideological or scientific motivation. Until the Disruption of the Kirk
in 1843 Thomas Chalmers continued to assert his (non-Anglican)
version of the ' Christian Political Economy' case for the ancient
establishment in church and state. But he produced no new ideas
after his Political Economy (1832) and Bridgewater Treatise (1833)
and even in these works the intellectual degeneration of the tradition
is all too evident. I shall therefore select the appearance of the latter
as the terminus ad quern. In between lie Paley's Natural Theology (1802),
several revisions of the Essay by Malthus, and important works by
John Bird Sumner, Edward Copleston and Richard Whately.
'Christian Political Economy' is not an entirely new name. It was
originally coined in the 1830s to refer to a very different tradition of
thought. And it has lately been reintroduced by Salim Rashid in a
sense similar to mine, though less clearly specified. Rashid employed
the term to label Whately's contributions to economics (Rashid
1977), and it would appear that he means it to apply to the works
of any English-speaking economist in Holy Orders from Josiah
Tucker (1713-99; see Shelton 1981) to Richard Jones (1790-1855).
My reasons for preferring a more restrictive definition have already
been given. More must be said, however, about its nineteenthcentury usage.
The Dublin Review of July 1837 printed a lengthy article on
'Christian Political Economy' (DRJuly 1837, 165-98), being a
review of the celebrated treatise of Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont,
Economie politique chretienne,firstpublished in Paris in 1834 (Villeneuve
1834). Villeneuve had read Adam Smith and Say, but 'the works of
Malthus afterwards shook all his preconceived ideas'. His purpose
was to discover ' the Causes of Pauperism as it exists in France and
Europe, and... the Means of Relieving and Preventing it' (DR, 177,
165). Yet his work, and that of the school of French catholic
economists of which he was the most distinguished member, cannot
be described as ' Christian Political Economy' in the sense in which
I use it. For the explicit distinction between ' science' and ' theology'
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A definition of' Christian Political Economy'
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which became characteristic of the British tradition was unknown to

him.
Au sein d'une paisible retraite, je m'attachai a recueillir mes souvenirs et
mon experience, a interroger tour a tour Peconomie politique, les theories
philosophiques de la civilisation, la statistique, la legislation et les sciences
morales qui avaient rapport aux causes de Pindigence. D'abord un horizon
vague et immense s'etait offert a mes regards; peu a peu, a Uaide surtout du
phare lumineux du christianisme, il me sembla que Ton pouvait distinguer
nettement les causes des desordres moraux et materiels des societes; les faits
se classerent naturellement... (Villeneuve 1834, 1, 20; my italics)
His reviewer described the tradition as ' a new school of political

economists. Catholic in its faith, and catholic in its manner of conceiving
science' (DR, 175; my italics). As a result, the outcome in terms of
fruitful explanation was disappointing, as even the favourably
disposed Dublin Review acknowledged. Villeneuve maintained that
'the accumulation and concentration of commercial capital, the
universal use of machinery... would indefinitely multiply the number
of the poor' (DR, 178-9). Schumpeter later recognized 'the depth
and social significance of his convictions; the wisdom of many of his
practical recommendations; the scientific value of much of his
sociology': but noted 'the defects of his technical economics, which
was in fact rudimentary' (Schumpeter 1954, 490, n. 1). After Villeneuve's death the term ' Christian Political Economy' passed out of
mind for more than a century, its author remembered, more
fittingly, as the 'Precursor of Modern Social Catholicism' (Ring
Villeneuve's unsuccessful attempt to construct a political economy
that should be ' catholic in its manner of conceiving science' was
evidently more consistent with the world-view of traditional society
than Whately's secularized 'science'. Yet Whately only expressed
more sharply and explicitly what in retrospect can be seen to have
characterized British political economy from the first: the attempt to
separate questions of'fact' from questions of'value'. According to
the Edinburgh Review, indeed, it was precisely this point which
distinguished 'the English writers, or chrysologists as M. Cherbuliez
would call them, or followers of Dr Smith' from ' the foreign school
(we term them so for convenience, although there are many English
authors whose views assimilate to theirs)'. The latter maintained
' that it is the office of the political economist to point out in what
way social happiness may best be attained through the medium of
Cambridge
14
national wealth. Our own writers reply, that this is the province not
of the economist, but of the politician'. Following Senior, whose
Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836) was the subject of his
article, the reviewer contends that' the study is purely a science', but
'a science which neither recommends to do, or to abstain from
doing... which regards Man in the abstract, and, simply as a wealthcreating animal' (ER October 1837, 77-83passim). Senior was a
former pupil and life-long friend of Whately and his methodological
position was defined and determined by the latter. Though the
distinction between 'fact' and 'value' is less clear in earlier writers
of the English-speaking classical school, it was the considered
opinion of Schumpeter that
Most of the writers of standing who paid serious attention to the
fundamental questions of methodology clearly saw, and strongly emphasized, the distinction between arguments about what is and arguments
about what ought to be: the distinction between the 'science' of economics
and the 'art' of policy. (Schumpeter 1954, 540)
We see from this that 'Christian Political Economy' was the
mainstream of Anglo-Scottish social theory in the early nineteenth
century, and that 'Philosophic Radicalism' was a backwater. For
the latter, by its desire to subsume questions of 'value' under
questions of'fact', was merely the formal opposite of Villeneuve's
'catholic' social science. 'Philosophic Radicalism' asserted the
empire of science over religion: 'Economie politique chretienne" the
empire of religion over science. By developing a distinction between
'fact' and 'value' latent in earlier work, Christian Political
Economy' constructed a typically British compromise between
absurd extremes. As I hope my remaining chapters will show, this is
only one of several ways in which the tradition I shall describe
revealed the English, specifically Anglican, genius for discovering a
navigable via media through which to steer the ship of church and
state.
Cambridge

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Revolution, Economics and Religion

Polemic, ideology and ' Christian Political

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS POLEMIC! AND VICE VERSA

To expect an historian to write with no polemical intent is not unlike

Polemic, ideology and 'Christian Political

declared Tawney, 'inevitably accepts that which happens to be

Intellectual history as polemic: and vice versa

collectivist principles were hailed as the most perfect embodiment of the

There is no denying a large measure of plausibility to this account.

Polemic, ideology and ' Christian Political Economy'

inequality. I report and analyse its arguments in this book not in

Intellectual history as polemic: and vice versa

Polemic, ideology and 'Christian Political Economy'

doctrine should be consistent with Anglican orthodoxy, there was

Intellectual history as polemic: and vice versa

Polemic, ideology and ' Christian Political Economy'

defensor Jidei. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity in regarding

Intellectual history as polemic: and vice versa

fellows. Nevertheless it is often felt, especially by economists, that it

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are blurred together in Troeltsch's Soziallehren) which was not

A definition of' Christian Political Economy'

knowledge, thereby insulating each from illegitimate encroachment

Polemic, ideology and 'Christian Political

ative social theory. The term 'classical political economy' is often

A definition of' Christian Political Economy'

which became characteristic of the British tradition was unknown to

His reviewer described the tradition as ' a new school of political

Polemic, ideology and ' Christian Political Economy'

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