The temptation is to entitle this chapter: ‘The forerunners of Adam Smith’, himself a leading product of the Scottish Enlightenment. The problem, however, is that Smith, in most aspects of economics, was a retrogression and deterioration, rather than an advance, from his notable predecessors.
By the later seventeenth and during the eighteenth century, the once mighty Oxford and Cambridge Universities, previously in the forefront of thought and scholarship, had deteriorated to being merely the playground of wealthy young men. Instead, for over a century, the intellectual leadership of Great Britain devolved on the two great universities of Scotland: the University of Glasgow and particularly the University of Edinburgh.
The founder: Gershom Carmichael
The founder of the tradition of academic economics in Scotland was Gershom Carmichael (c. 1672–1729). Carmichael's father was a Presbyterian minister, who was exiled for heresy by the Scottish, Presbyterian-run government. Born in England, Carmichael graduated from Edinburgh University. He then became ‘regent’ at St Andrews and Glasgow Universities, where courses were taught by ‘regents’ who were essentially young graduate students. After that, Carmichael was Presbyterian minister at Fife. When the regenting system was abolished in 1727, Carmichael was named the first professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, where he died two years later.
Economics, or political economy, was taught as a subset of a course in moral philosophy, and thus the analysis of trade and the economy was embedded in a groundwork and treatment of natural law. In many ways, the eighteenth century Scottish professors followed the post-medieval and late Spanish scholastic method of including economic analysis as one segment of an integrated tome covering ethics, natural law, jurisprudence, ontology, and theology as well as economics proper.
The term, ‘Protestant scholastic’ has been coined for such writers as John Locke, and indeed the phrase is a coherent one, since one does not have to be Catholic to use the rational scholastic method or arrive at scholastic conclusions. A fascinating example of this was perhaps the first Protestant scholastic, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). Grotius, who studied law at the University of Leyden and later became chief magistrate of Rotterdam, was an eminent natural law theorist who brought the concepts of natural law and natural rights to the Protestant countries of northern Europe. In his outstanding work, which made him the founder of international law, De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) (1625), Grotius clearly pushed natural law to its logical and rationalist conclusion: even if God did not exist, natural law would still be eternal and absolute; such law is discoverable by unaided human reason; and even God could not negate – even if He wanted to – such natural law insights as 2 + 2 = 4.
Natural law required the rights of property to be secure in order to enjoy social cooperation, and under Grotius's influence, the idea of the rights of property became expanded to the economic sphere. In a prefigurement of eighteenth century natural law–natural rights theory, Grotius believed in the harmony of human interaction based on free action and property rights. Grotius had been able to work in the rationalist and natural law tradition because his mentor Jacobus Arminius had previously broken off from orthodox Calvinism to stress the freedom of will of every individual. On these important matters of social philosophy, the Arminians had what might be called a ‘neo-Catholic’ position. In politics, Grotius was a leader in the classical liberal, free trade, republican party in Holland, then engaged in their century-long struggle with the monarchist orthodox Calvinists.
Particularly influential on northern European theorists was the late sixteenth century Spanish Jesuit scholastic Francisco Suarez. Suarez and his school heavily influenced two men who are generally considered founders of ‘modern’ philosophy: the early seventeenth century Frenchman, René Descartes: and the late seventeenth century German, Gottfried Leibniz. Suarez's Disputationes Metaphysicae (Metaphysical Disputations) was his most influential work, published in Salamanca in 1597. Particularly important was the second edition, published in Mainz, Germany in 1600, which became the leading philosophy textbook in most European universities, both Catholic and Protestant, for over a century. Leibniz, indeed, referred to the Disputationes as the philosophia recepta (the ‘received philosophy’).
Suarez's work was heavily influential in Protestant central Europe, Bohemia, Germany and Holland. The university of Leyden, a leading academic centre in Holland during the seventeenth century, was a particular focus of Suarezian dominance. And it was at Leyden that Hugo Grotius pursued his studies.
Though Gershom Carmichael, who inaugurated the teaching of economics in Scotland, launched the tradition of reading and studying Grotius – a tradition that was followed by Adam Smith in the eighteenth century line of Scottish intellectual descent – more directly important for Carmichael was Grotius's best-known follower, Samuel, Baron von Pufendorf (1632–94). Pufendorf was born in Saxony, son of a Lutheran pastor. He first studied theology, and then shifted to mathematics, jurisprudence and natural law. Graduating from the University of Jena, Pufendorf went to Leyden, where he published his first work on jurisprudence in 1661. On the basis of this achievement, Karl Ludwig, the elector palatine, created for the young Pufendorf a chair of natural and international law at the University of Heidelberg. In 1672, while teaching at the University of Lund, in Sweden, Pufendorf published his great work De jure naturae et gentium: the following year, he produced the De officio hominis et civis, a resumé or abstract of his great De jure. It turned out, not surprisingly, that the more concise De officio proved more useful as a teaching tool and therefore became the far more directly influential, if inferior product of Pufendorf's pen.
Not only did Professor Gershom Carmichael bring the study of the new natural and international law teachings of Grotius and Pufendorf to British shores, but also he was himself the English translator of De Officio. Carmichael published the English translation in 1718, along with extensive notes and a supplementary commentary. This work turned out to be Carmichael's most important achievement, certainly in economics or the social sciences.1 Six years later, Carmichael published an improved second edition of De Officio, and this edition was reprinted in 1769. Carmichael saw to it that his students were steeped in Pufendorf and in his own commentaries.
Carmichael was the first teacher in Scotland to expound Locke, Leibniz and Descartes, as well as Grotius and Pufendorf. A knowledgeable observer has called Gershom Carmichael ‘the true founder of the Scottish school of philosophy’. A contemporary noted that he was ‘of very great reputation, and was exceedingly valued both at home and abroad’. So much so, in fact, that another observer noted that ‘on Mr Carmichael's death, all the English students have left the University and, indeed, it's very thin this winter, and his name and reputation brought many to it’. Thus Carmichael led the way in the emerging custom of bright English students deserting Oxbridge and going up to a Scottish university for intellectual attainment.
On Carmichael's commentary on the De Officio, the testimony of Carmichael's most distinguished student, Francis Hutcheson, is telling: ‘... Pufendorf's smaller work, De Officio Hominis et Civis, which that worthy and ingenious man, the late Professor Gershom Carmichael of Glasgow, by far the best commentator on that book, has so supplied and corrected that the notes are of much more value than the text’.
Samuel von Pufendorf, like the eighteenth century French and Spanish scholastics, was a pre-Austrian subjective utility–scarcity theorist. That is, he believed that the value of goods on the market was determined by their common valuation placed on them by the consumers, and that the more abundant the supply the lower the value. Thus, Pufendorf:
Of common value the foundation is that aptitude of the good or service by which it helps directly or indirectly to meet human needs... Yet there are some things most useful for human life upon which no definite value is set... The necessity of the good or its great usefulness are so far from always being the first determinant that we can observe men putting a very low value on what is indispensable to human life. This is because nature... gives us a plentiful supply of such goods. In fact a high value proceeds from scarcity....
In his notes to Pufendorf, Carmichael adds some valuable and not so valuable insights. He stresses the subjective nature of utility, pointing out that the usefulness of a good, which is essential to its value, may be either real or imagined. Unfortunately, he also muddied the waters by adding to scarcity as a determinant of value, ‘the difficulty of acquiring’ goods – an obvious ‘real cost’ attempt to measure the value of goods by the effort put into their production.
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