The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  Perhaps today we would diagnose Jones as suffering from chronic depression, and treat him with psycho-pharmaceuticals. But Whewell had another cure in mind. A firm believer in the power of hard work to distract the mind from its demons, Whewell encouraged Jones to complete a project they had been planning since the earliest days of the Philosophical Breakfast Club meetings, one they both felt to be of the utmost importance—not only for Jones’s mental health, but for the well-being of the nation. Jones would be responsible for turning the discipline of economics into an inductive, Baconian science.

  ECONOMICS, OR “political economy,” as it was then called (in contrast with a family’s “domestic economy”), was fast becoming all the rage. Nearly everyone, it seemed, was reading and talking about it. Jane Marcet, who had achieved popular success with her Conversations on Chemistry, turned to economics in 1816. Her Conversations on Political Economy, which presented economic theory in a format designed for the edification of women and children, went through sixteen editions. Journals and newspapers were filled with articles on economic topics such as taxes on imported corn, proposed solutions to the “pauper problem,” and descriptions of cavernous, newly mechanized factories. By 1822, Maria Edgeworth could write to a friend back in Ireland that, in England, “It has now become high fashion with blue ladies [i.e., bluestockings, or intellectual women] to talk Political Economy, and make a great jabbering on the subject.… [F]ine ladies require that their daughters’ governesses should teach them Political Economy.”6

  Like everyone else in those days, the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club had ardently discussed the hot topics in political economy while at Cambridge.7 By the time of their meetings, Jones had decided to devote to the subject whatever hours he could eke out from his probable future life as a clergyman. After graduating, all four men continued to follow the progress of this discipline—especially Jones and Whewell, whose early letters to each other are filled with economic discussions.

  This widespread interest in political economy was fueled by the feeling that economic problems were reaching a boiling point in the nation. Looking across the English Channel, the British saw the French Revolution and its bloody aftermath as a grim reminder of what could come of a laboring class pushed to the brink. And those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder in Britain were being pushed hard. In the final third of the eighteenth century, a large proportion of the British population lived in grinding poverty. Many families barely survived on a monotonous diet of stale bread, freezing in shacks or cellars, having nothing to look forward to but an even more pinching old age. Life was cheap in the countryside, where most people lived; violence was accepted and even enjoyed: cockfights, public whippings and hangings, and the occasional local riot added sparks of excitement to the dull daily routine. While on a visit to England in 1769, Benjamin Franklin exclaimed in disbelief, “I have seen, within a year, riots in the country, about corn; riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers; riots of weavers; riots of coal-heavers; riots of sawyers; riots of Wilkesites; riots of government chairmen; riots of smugglers, in which custom house officers and excise-men have been murdered, the King’s armed vessels and troops fired at!”8 These frequent local riots continued into the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Many in the upper classes still feared that a general riot of the masses could not be far behind.

  By 1800 life was getting better for some. A growing middle class—shopkeepers, craftsmen, professionals such as physicians and clergymen, and manufacturers—were able to feed their families, and even had money left over for such luxuries as tea, cutlery, and porcelain crockery. But life was getting harder for farm laborers, who still made up a majority of the lower classes. The increased application of the Enclosure Laws had closed off open fields and common land in rural areas—land people had previously been free to use for grazing animals, growing food, collecting firewood, and hunting. This land was now privately owned, off limits to the poor who had depended on it to supplement their meager earnings. Making matters worse, fewer farm laborers were given live-in situations, reducing them to day laborers paid only when they were needed to work the land. A series of bad harvests meant that there was not as much work; farm laborers went long periods of time between jobs. The dearth also led to the skyrocketing of the price of wheat: from 45 shillings a quarter in 1789, to 84 shillings a quarter in 1800, and averaging 102 shillings between 1810 and 1814. Large landowners grew richer than ever, while farm laborers faced the constant specter of starvation.9

  The situation was exacerbated by an acceleration of population growth in the last part of the eighteenth century. Families had more mouths to feed and less money to spend on food, which was growing ever more expensive. Most laborers could survive only because of the welfare system of the time, known as the poor laws, which had been in effect since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, two hundred years before.

  From Eizabeth’s time onward, landowners had paid taxes called “rates” to their local parishes. The money raised in this way was given to the poor members of the parish—both to those out of work and to those whose labor did not pay enough to live on. It was not a perfect solution, but it did alleviate the worst cases of poverty while not unduly harming the wealthier landowners.

  Suddenly, however, the number of poor was growing by leaps and bounds, and so was the amount of money needed to take care of them: from £2 million in 1786 to £4.2 million in 1803 and £6 million in 1815.10 Poor rates were going up, and landowners were complaining.

  The problem was real enough, but it attained the status of a “crisis” that needed solving because of the writings of a young clergyman from Surrey. Thomas Robert Malthus (always called Robert by his friends and family) was the sixth of seven children of Daniel and Henrietta Malthus. Daniel, known as a liberal and eccentric landowner, was a friend of the Scottish thinker David Hume, and had gone on botanizing trips with the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Robert would later recall evenings at home with the likes of Hume, the English radical William Godwin, and other philosophers and political writers. After graduating from Jesus College, Cambridge, as ninth wrangler, and being ordained as an Anglican clergyman, Robert returned home and commuted from there to his nearby parish.

  Until Daniel Malthus died in 1800, he and his son—both feisty intellectuals—often argued about the issues of the day. One of those disputes led to the publication, in 1798, of the book that made Robert Malthus famous: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. William Godwin in England and the Marquis de Condorcet across the Channel in France had agreed that misery and vice were the result of bad government. Both men believed that under better civil conditions the human race could continually perfect itself and its societies until everyone enjoyed long, healthy, happy, and free lives. Thus political radicalism could help bring about a new age for mankind. (Condorcet’s optimism for the future was not borne out in his own case: once a leading light of the French Enlightenment, and a liberal supporter of the French Revolution, he died in prison under mysterious circumstances after being arrested for “treason,” a charge manufactured by the radical Jacobins when Condorcet argued against the constitution they had prepared.)

  The young Malthus dissented from such optimistic expectations. He deemed it impossible to perfect men’s lives, for a law no less binding than Newton’s law of universal gravitation ordained that the size of the population would always exceed the available food supply. Expressing this with mathematical-sounding precision, Malthus claimed that while population always increases geometrically, by doubling (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.), food supply always grows only arithmetically, by simple addition (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.). Thus it is inevitable that there will be more people than food to nourish them, resulting in misery for the masses—enmeshed as they were in a continuous “struggle for existence,” a notion that would later prove inspiring to Charles
Darwin as he worked on his theory of evolution.

  This dire situation was not caused by bad government, and could not be solved by political reform. It was due to both nature and human nature, neither of which could be altered. On the one hand, Malthus argued, there is a limit to how much food can be grown on a given amount of fertile land. On the other, mankind has an inescapable need to eat, and an unavoidable desire for sex, a desire leading to procreation. Limiting family size by the use of condoms or other artificial means was not an option in those days—at least not in the opinion of a clergyman like Malthus. Even decades later, a seventeen-year-old John Stuart Mill (the future philosopher and economist) would be arrested in a London park on obscenity charges for distributing pamphlets discussing birth control. As late as 1920 the Church of England’s annual Lambeth Conference condemned all “unnatural means of the avoidance of conception” (married Anglicans were finally given theological permission to use condoms a decade after that). There was always sexual abstinence within marriage, but Malthus did not have high hopes that people—especially in the lower classes—would submit themselves to it. Population would therefore inevitably increase beyond the amount of food needed to sustain it, and the poorest people would watch their children starve.

  One thing that would not help the poor, the Reverend Malthus knew, was to give them more food or money. This would only give them the resources to have more children, or keep alive those already born, perpetuating the evil consequences of pauperism by increasing the population.11

  Malthus’s Essay focused attention sharply on the pauper problem. He had declared the situation inevitable, and claimed that the old solution was part of the problem. People began to wonder what else could be done.

  They began to seek answers from the discipline of political economy, which seemed to hold the key to putting the nation’s financial affairs in order, thereby solving the problem of poverty. Malthus himself was named the first Professor of Political Economy in England, in 1806 (at the East India Company College at Haileybury, where generations of imperial diplomats and merchants were trained, exporting their Malthusian views to the colonies). But since most of the later writers on economics accepted Malthus’s population principle, their prescriptions did not hold out too much promise of a better life, especially for the poor. As that ever-cranky Thomas Carlyle would later put it, the science of political economy was “dreary, stolid, dismal, and without hope for this world or the next”; it was, indeed, a “dismal science.”12

  NOT LONG AFTER Malthus’s book appeared, a wealthy stockbroker named David Ricardo, on holiday in Bath, picked up Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the same work that had inspired de Prony’s great table-making project. Smith’s book, first published in 1776, had not been particularly influential on the field of economics when it appeared, but by 1800 it was considered the classic text of the discipline—in part because politicians as diverse as the Whig leader Charles James Fox and the head of the Tories, William Pitt the Younger, lauded Smith’s work, and claimed to be guided by it in setting economic policy.13 By 1814 many people believed that Smith had founded the discipline, ignoring a long tradition of political economy prior to his work. Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand”—first used in his book Theory of Moral Sentiments, to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace, caused by the confluence of self-interest, competition, and supply and demand—fit the times, both for Whigs and Radicals such as Fox, Godwin, Thomas Paine, and their followers, who saw free trade as an extension of individual liberty, and for the conservative Tories and theologians who recast the invisible hand as the working of God’s will. (Many political economists of the day argued that riches were a sign of God’s favor, and that God Himself had ordained that there be poverty, so that people would have incentive to work hard.)

  Smith had been Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. When he began to write about political economy, he did not see this as a change of subject matter. For Smith, political economy was a “moral science,” in the sense that it concerned not only economic matters but also ethical ones. Smith believed that one could not discuss markets without discussing morality. Economic growth was only possible if certain moral values were cultivated, such as frugality and industry. And economic growth alone was not the be-all and end-all—the political economist must consider not only what policies would make a nation rich, but what policies would make its inhabitants happy and virtuous.

  Ricardo admired The Wealth of Nations, but he began to conceive of political economy in a radically different way. Economics was not a branch of moral philosophy, he believed, but a kind of science. Indeed, Ricardo thought that economics should be molded into “a strict science like mathematics.”14 The political economist, like the mathematician, must ignore social, political, and moral factors, which Ricardo felt were irrelevant to the material well-being of the nation. The role of the political economist, in his view, was to tell nations how to increase their wealth, not how to create just societies filled with contented citizens.15

  Ricardo believed that economics should proceed as geometry does: by first positing truths called “axioms,” which are not discovered by studying the world or performing experiments, but are known simply by rational thought or by definition (such as the axiom “all triangles have 180 degrees”), and next by using deductive reasoning to reach theorems (“all right triangles have 180 degrees”). Ricardo hoped to use this method to produce universal laws governing the production and distribution of wealth. He argued that all economic theory must start from the axiom that “men desire to obtain as much wealth with as little effort as possible.” From this axiom Ricardo claimed that universal economic laws could be deductively inferred. One of these was the law that the market price of labor (what is actually paid for a day’s work) would always tend toward the natural price (what would be required to keep a laborer and his family alive, what we would call “subsistence wages”). This conclusion, known as the “iron law of wages,” implied that a worker could never expect to earn more than the barest amount needed for survival, and led Ricardo to his belief that laborers were doomed to a bleak existence.

  Ricardo further believed that there would always be conflict between the different classes of a society. When the cost of “corn” (the agricultural staples, including wheat and oats) was high, the landowner benefited, as he could get away with charging more in rent from his tenant farmers. Yet when corn was expensive, the farmers had to pay more in rent to the landowner, and all laborers had to pay more for their bread. So the landowner was the only one happy when corn prices were high; indeed he had incentive to keep it that way, even at the expense of others.

  Jones and Whewell read Ricardo’s book when it first appeared, sending their opinions of it back and forth in letters between Cambridge and Ferring, where Jones was living at the time. The two were disturbed by Ricardo’s view that economic science need not be concerned with what was good for a society and its people. As Bacon had proclaimed, science should bring about “the relief of man’s estate.”16 Knowledge of economic laws could and should be deployed to improve the lot of the masses. Indeed, what was the point of the wealth of a nation if not to make its people happy, or at the very least to reduce the numbers of people living in direst poverty?

  But this was not their only complaint. They agreed with Ricardo that political economy was, and should be, a science. They believed, however, that it was not a deductive science like geometry, but an inductive science, like geology. Empirical evidence was required to invent economic theories, which could then be tested by comparing predictions derived from them to what actually occurs. Only then should the economist be confident that his laws were true. Just as the geologist could not work from his armchair, but must go into the field with his hammer, chipping away at rock formations and examining geological strata, so, too, the political economist could not merely propose a priori axioms and deduce conclusions from them. Rather, the economist must study the economic
conditions that prevailed in the past, and the particular behaviors and motivations of people under those conditions, in order to draw conclusions about the present and future economic situation. And just as the structure of geological strata—those layers of rock with shared characteristics distinct from other, contiguous layers—differs in various parts of the world, so, too, economic conditions are not the same everywhere. Thus the economist must study not only his own society, but others elsewhere around the globe.

  In 1826, after Jones had moved to his new parish in Brasted, Whewell sent him a large map, telling him to “paint [it] in the most brilliant colors by which rent can be represented” in each part of the world, just like William Smith’s stupendous colored map of the geological strata in England (1815)—the first national-scale geological map ever produced.17

  Drawing the connection between geology and political economy was not merely a rhetorical move on Whewell’s part: many scientific men of the day saw strong parallels between those disciplines, and there was a great deal of interaction between geologists and economists. Economic topics—related to agricultural questions concerning soil type and climate, and to industrial issues having to do with mineral and hydrocarbon extraction—were often discussed at the meetings of the Geological Society of London. Ricardo himself often attended these meetings, as did Jones and, of course, Whewell. Richard Whately, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, sat in on Buckland’s geology lectures at the university. Whewell’s friend the geologist Charles Lyell was frequently in the audience of J. R. McCulloch’s London lectures on political economy. George Poulett Scrope was both a geologist (who served as secretary of the Geological Society, along with Lyell, in 1825) and an economist who wrote so many leaflets on economic issues that he was known as George “Pamphlet” Scrope.18 Years later, at the thirtieth-anniversary meeting of the Geological Society, Jones gave a “truly elegant speech” on the similarity of the sciences of geology and economics—elegant enough that it was remembered by Lyell, even though after the meeting he and some others went off to Lord Cole’s for dinner, wine, cognac, and cigars, the enjoyment of which caused Lyell to be ill for five days.19 (Unfortunately, no written record of Jones’s extemporaneous speech survives.)