Eavesdropping on a virtuous circle - Richard Whately and the Oriel Noetics.

Elena Pasquini Douglas

UWA Business School

 

 

 

Abstract

This paper presents Richard Whately, intellectual leader of the Oriel Noetics based at

Oriel College, Oxford from 1811-1831, in context. Building upon the growing secondary

literature on his role in the emergence of political economy as a distinct science from its

natural theology and moral philosophy origins (Moore & White 2009; A.M.C. Waterman

1991b; Waterman 2008; Levy 1999; Levy & Peart 2010; Hilton 1986; Corsi 1988;

Oslington 2001; Rashid 1977), the contribution of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, I

explain the natural theology and moral philosophy that underpins the Noetic School of

Political Economy. Secondly, I present Richard Whately’s combination of political

economy and moral analysis, which I have named the ‘Catallaxy-Virtue Synthesis’, in the

mainstream Smithian, as well as virtue ethics-traditions. With this presentation, I

respond to Deidre McCloskey’s (2008) contention that Adam Smith was “the last of the

former virtue ethicists” with Whately as a later writer in this tradition.

 

 

Table of contents

 

Chapter 1   Introduction   1

1.1   Introduction   1

1.2   The paper   2

1.3   Bounding the historical scope of the project   3

1.4   The structure of this paper   3

1.5   Final remarks on challenges in the project   4

Chapter 2   Method   5

2.1   Introduction   5

2.2   The range of methods in intellectual history   5

2.3.   Introducing contextualism   7

2.4   The Sussex school   7

2.5   Summary of lessons for this study   8

Chapter 3   Historical context: 1798 - 1832   11

3.1   Introduction   11

3.2   The times and their spirit   11

3.3   The indivisibility of Church and State in early modern Britain   12

3.4   Which God?   13

3.5   Political programmes – three types of radicals against the Tory’s   14

3.6   Economic reform – Corn Laws, Poor Laws and Currency Wars   16

Chapter 4   Richard Whately   17

4.1   Introduction   17

4.2   Origins   18

4.3   Character   18

4.4   Education and the Oriel Noetics   20

4.5   Whately’s career   21

Chapter 5   Whately’s Noetic intellectual inheritance   27

5.1   Introduction   27

5.2   Meaning of ‘Noetic’   27

5.3   Membership of the group   27

5.4   Beliefs: Reformist clerics, faith and reason   28

5.5   The Noetics as a clerisy – filters of suitable knowledge   28

5.6   Moral philosophy and natural theology   29

5.6.1   Application of Newtonian science to moral questions   29

5.6.2   The existence of God: Argument from design.   29

5.6.3   ‘Butlerian self-love’   30

5.6.4   Responses to Malthus theodicy   31

5.6.5   Moral sense school   32

5.7   Smithian Virtue Ethics   33

5.8   The Noetic method applied: The Poor Laws   36

5.9   Noetic Political Economy – A mainstream economic school of thought   37

5.10   Conclusions   40

Chapter 6   The Whatelian ‘Cattalaxy - Virtue Synthesis’   41

6.1   Introduction   41

6.2   A war on two fronts   41

6.3   Whatelian political economy – a ‘Catallaxy of wealth, virtue and knowledge’   42

6.4   Reading ‘the great book of human transactions’   44

6.5   ‘In Virtue, True Wisdom and Happiness’   45

6.6   The Catallaxy explained   46

6.7   Progress of Knowledge   47

6.8   Correcting Paley’s moral errors   49

6.9   The Whatelian Virtue synthesis – a virtuous circle   50

Chapter 7   Conclusion   53

References   57

 

 

Chapter 1  Introduction1.1  Introduction

Economics emerged as the dominant intellectual paradigm of the twentieth century in

the examination of society. As a discipline, economics has claimed to be ‘value-neutral’

and has formally excluded examinations of ends. Lionel Robbins (1945) reinforced an

earlier demarcation, when he drew a bright line between positive and normative issues.

Positive issues are questions about “what is”; normative issues are those which ask

“what ought to be”; the economist qua economist should be studying “what is” and

never “what ought to be” (Robbins 1945). There are no economic ends and economics

“is incapable of deciding as between the desirability of different ends” (Robbins 1945,

p135). So, we find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a moral and

philosophical circumstance, where the dominant intellectual paradigm has nothing to

say about ends. This leaves a void in answering important questions about the type of

society, communities and neighbourhoods our politicians should be aiming their policy

prescriptions toward. This comment may appear trite or naïve. Perhaps it takes an

engagement with the standpoint of different epochs in history, animated by different

logics, to appreciate how unique a circumstance this is1.

I contend that the age of value-neutrality in which we now live, was first conceived in

the economic, political and theological debates of the first three decades of the

nineteenth century.  It is here that we can find the origins of contemporary questions

about economics and ethics, markets and morality, and the responsibilities of the

discipline of economics in the formation of policy. In fact, there are strong arguments

that, the hyper-globalised world we find ourselves in now, is a setting not unlike the

rapidly changing world of early nineteenth century Britain. A new world order appears

to be unfolding; certainly a transfer of proportional wealth between nations rather than

classes is gathering pace. Debates about the fundamental scope and limits of markets

and of governments abound, as they did in the period I intend to consider here.

1.2 The paper

Richard Whately (Whately), intellectual leader of the Oriel Noetics (Noetics) based at

Oriel College, Oxford from 1811-1831, was the first political economist to distinguish

between scientific and moral knowledge, asserting the importance and separate role for

each (Whately 1832, pp. 1-38). This was the foundation of his distinction between

economic science and policy; between deductively derived scientific laws, essential to

understanding economic and exchange dynamics, but forever separate from the

discernment of what ends society should pursue. Having made this distinction, Whately

maintained that an economic system (or catallaxy) was a means of achieving the

ultimate goal of society-wide moral progress. He framed the study and conduct of

political economy accordingly. I argue that Whately and the Oriel Noetics interpreted

Adam Smith’s project in the same light, as discerning the best path for the moral

progress of society (McCloskey 2008; Phillipson 2010). To this end, Whately

endeavoured to refocus the new science of political economy to concentrate on the

social dynamics of ‘exchange’. He proposed the new name ‘catallactics’ from the Greek

‘to exchange’. Prior to implementing policy which resulted from observing the laws of

political economy in the hypothetical, Whately proposed an essential step: a real life

enquiry into the context in which it would be implemented including an analysis of the

consequences for the stock of human virtue in that context. I call this two dimensional

enquiry the Whatelian ‘Catallaxy-Virtue Synthesis’.

The contribution of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, I explain the natural theology and

moral philosophy that underpins the Noetic School of Political Economy. Secondly, I

present Richard Whately’s political economy as a unique conception of economic and

moral analysis, in the mainstream Smithian, as well as virtue ethics-traditions. In this, I

respond to Deidre McCloskey’s (2008) contention that Adam Smith was “the last of the

former virtue ethicists” with Whately as a later writer in this tradition.

Two secondary research questions are examined. The nature of the methodologies that

are best suited to analysis of the work of Classical economists like those discussed here,

and secondly, whether or not the Noetics can be regarded as a formal school or

scientific community (Kuhn 1969).

1.3 Bounding the historical scope of the project

The appropriate starting point is where political economy starts to become a distinct

inquiry that is clearly demarcated from the moral philosophy and Christian theology

from which it emerged. Waterman (1991) identifies this moment as the publication of

Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). This essay was deeply

controversial; it ignited the antagonism to Malthus and the political economists by the

Romantics, Coleridge and Southey, the “self-appointed spokesmen for human beings”

which came to be one of the “fault-lines of British culture” (Donald Winch 1996, pp. 402,

41).

The end-point for our analysis will be the end of the era in which the Noetics and

Whately lived and in turn shaped - the British ancien regime of “Anglican, aristocratic

hegemony” (Clark 1985). This regime had endured throughout “the long eighteenth

century (1688-1832)” (Clark 1985). It was toppled, not in acts of violence or revolution,

but in two strokes of measured political reform: the proclamation of the Catholic

Emancipation Act (1829) and the Reform Act (1832). Epochal change resulted from

both the extension of the franchise to include the burghers of northern industrial towns,

and the removal of restrictions on Catholics, ‘Dissenters’ and Jews.

1.4 The structure of this paper

The chapter sets the scene for the study, identifying the central research issues and the

chronological scope. Chapter 2 presents a discussion on method: the different

historiographical options available to the scholar of the history of economic thought are

examined, with particular focus placed on a school of historiography known as

‘contextualism’ and its appropriateness for this study. Chapter 3 discusses the historical

context seeking to illuminate the spirit of the times by highlighting the political and

economic conditions and the resultant debates and contested reform programmes.

Chapter 4 attempts to bring Whately to life by highlighting his origins, education,

character, formative influences, and career achievements. Chapter 5 seeks to elucidate

the intellectual milieu in which Whately and the Noetics thrived, to adumbrate their

shared intellectual inheritance, and give one example of a collaborative project, the

reform of the Poor Laws. This section concludes by answering one of the research

questions put by this paper, whether or not the Noetics can be regarded as a formal

school in the Kuhnian sense (Kuhn 1969). Chapter 6 presents the Whatelian Catallaxy-

Virtue Synthesis. It considers Whately’s understanding of an economics of the social

virtues; and economics as “catallactics, the science of exchange” and reciprocity which

had the development of human virtue, not utility or mere wealth, as its stated end. The

final chapter in the paper offers some reflections on the findings of the research in light

of existing scholarship; highlights the benefits of using a contextualist methodology in

undertaking a study like this one; and considers the implications of this analysis for

contemporary debate.

1.5 Final remarks on challenges in the project

This project has faced a couple of principal challenges, both relate to the breadth and

volume of Whately’s scholarship. Unlike the tight disciplinary boundaries employed in

the present day, many classical economists spanned what we call “economics” as well as

moral philosophy, theology, sociology, politics, history and psychology – “that noble

science of politics”2 (Collini, Winch & Burrow 1983). Individual scholars like Whately

worked on a larger canvas and included practical, empirical and moral considerations

as they went.

 

Chapter 2  Method2.1 Introduction

If “the past is a foreign country” and history is a dialogue between generations, then a

sensitive translation of the different languages spoken by each age is essential to

historical scholarship3. In the conduct of intellectual history - which examines concepts,

ideas, beliefs and moral systems - an ear for the language of the times under study is

essential. Given the goals of this research project, a method which highlights language

and historical imagination will be of significant value. One method in intellectual

history, ‘contextualism’, provides for the study of texts in the context of their historical

circumstances and pays close attention to the ‘language’ in which they are written. This

method will enable me to gain access to the thinking of these nineteenth century

subjects on their terms not ours.

2.2 The range of methods in intellectual history

Intellectual historians are idiosyncratic when it comes to method; their practice often

reflects deeper philosophical and epistemological bearings. In the discipline of the

history of economic thought, Blaug (1990), citing the work in the history of philosophy

by Richard Rorty (1984), focuses on four broad categories. These are:

“Geistesgeschichten”, from the German meaning ‘spirit of the times’; “historical

reconstruction”, which entails examination of theory using the terms meaningful to the

author and his interlocutors in their times; “rational reconstruction”, which applies

contemporary theoretical terms to the work of past thinkers, observing the line of

development of the theory to its present state4 (Samuelson 1974; Samuelson 1987); and

“doxographies”, which celebrate those theories which point to and confirm the wisdom

of current theory (Blaug 1990, p. 27). The categories needn’t be seen as entirely

mutually exclusive. The boundaries are porous and they are often applied to the same

subject contemporaneously. Donald Winch5 (2009, 1996) adds additional

historiographical practices to the list including: the study of mentalities, the archaeology

of discursive practices, ideologiekritik, cultural materialism, the new historicism, and

deconstructionism.

One of the fault-lines in the methodological debate is science versus culture; scientific

exegesis versus cultural exegesis. Stigler has highlighted the evolution of doctrine as the

purpose of the study, not the understanding of the individuals and their meaning:“The

important thing to the scholar of doctrine was to understand what his contemporaries

thought he thought and how. This rule of interpretation is designed to maximise the

value of a theory to science… one may seek to determine what the man really believed,

although this search has no direct relevance to the scientific progress” (Stigler 1965, p.

448 my italics). To this the advocate of cultural understanding responds that ‘scientific

progress’ is not a formal absolute, but is itself subject to, if not the product of, social and

cultural forces. Heidegger (1927), had another critique to add to this construction of

context and text together: if one must be understood to understand the other, the quest

goes in circles. Heidegger offered this not as a justification of scientism, but rather as an

illustration of the need to proceed with caution, and to develop means of preliminary

understanding that could be deepened with additional inquiry.

If understanding is iterative then the other important axis of methodological debate is

direction in history. In the history of economic thought, for example, the dismissive term

used by Butterfield, ‘Whig history’, is worn by some as a badge of honour. Samuelson

claims that: “in what might be called ‘Whig History of Science’… we pay past scholars

the compliment of judging how their works contributed (algebraic) value-added to our

collective house of knowledge” (Samuelson 1974, p. 76). This view is anathema to the

contextualists who see it as a recipe for misinterpretation of the real meaning of texts.

This assumption that science always has an inevitable forward thrust, and that we are

always adding layers of knowledge, is implicit in the ‘whig’ history of science or

doctrine. I’m firmly with the contextualists on this one.

2.3.  Introducing contextualism

In terms of Rorty’s distinctions above, contextualism, is probably closest to a blend of

Geistesgeschichten and historical and linguistic reconstruction. It explores the ‘spirit of

the times’ in order to understand the pressing questions of the day, and the meaning

behind the language employed in a particular age. The theory is therefore examined

using the terms meaningful to the author and his interlocutors in their times. This is no

easy task. The practice goes in and out of favour in various disciplines. Although it is an

orthodox approach in the conduct of intellectual history in politics, it is only practiced

by some in the history of economics and philosophy (Moore 2010).

2.4 The Sussex school

The Sussex school (SS) are of central importance to this study. Firstly, they specialise in

the study of the nineteenth century. Secondly, they have enquired extensively into the

development of economic knowledge. The SS is comprised of, Donald Winch, Stefano

Collini and John Burrow6. I am inspired by their mode of “eavesdropping on the

conversations of the past” (Donald Winch 1996, p. 28). This task requires delicacy; it

involves being as non-intrusive as possible and examining the conversations of the past

while avoiding over-formalised categorising devices and techniques. Overhearing

conversations requires “historical imagination on the part of the writer and reader

these conversations can be understood in their own terms”; a reader should treat past

authors “as one would wish one’s own writing and beliefs to be treated, should the

positions, by some amazing twist of fate be reversed” (Donald Winch 1996, p. 21).

The SS engage in a subtle process to unlock intellectual pre-suppostitions7. Care is

always taken not to allow “today’s conceptual maps to obliterate or to distort those of

the past”(Burrows (1970), quoted in Moore 2010, p94).

The ultimate faux pas to the Sussex contextualists is “celebrating or denigrating a text

from the past reifying or dismissing it in order to legitimate current ideological goals,

this leads not only to distorted readings of texts, but anachronistic readings that are

odds with the historical context that produced these texts” (Moore 2010, p. 90). I do not

take this to mean that history has no relevance to contemporary debates, only that the

historian qua historian’s job is not this work. Once contemporary relevance is invoked,

one has taken off the hat of historian, and donned that of the cultural commentator. 

This ‘different hat distinction’ will have relevance in my conclusion.

Another characteristic of the SS useful here is the warning against ‘disciplinary

isolationism’: “it would be an odd fate if the earlier political economists should suffer

from being seen through the narrower lens of later, more professional forms of

economic enquiry: a case of the sins of the children being visited on their great-

grandparents (Winch 1996, p121). Like looking for the lost car keys where the light is

shining rather than in the dark where they fell, disciplinary isolationism in intellectual

history is unfruitful.

The Sussex historiographical contribution asserts that texts are the starting point in the

hermeneutic circle. Winch states that he “proceeds from individual authors and their

texts, to those intellectual and cultural contexts that promise most by way of

understanding what those authors were attempting to do” (Winch 1996, p5). I am

taking a leaf out of his book.

2.5  Summary of lessons for this study

We set out in this chapter to ask which methods are available to the study of the history

of ideas. I have chosen contextualism, and particularly the contextualism of the Sussex

School, as the methodology for this paper because it best meets the challenges posed by

this research project. I take the following list of ‘practice notes’ for the present study

drawing on Moore (2010):

1.     Beware of anachronism always, and especially of contemporary conceptual

frameworks which can obliterate past meaning. Seek to understand the past in its

own terms, language and worldview.  (Applied in chapter 3,4 and 5).

2.     Understand the purpose of the text. The questions its author was seeking answers

to. Apply historical imagination to a diligent reconstruction of the context, nature

and effect of the intervention. (Applied in chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6).

3.     Appreciate the “rival languages” at use in the milieu of the main protagonists of

your study and understand the different shape a concept will take at home in each of

these languages. (Applied in chapters 5 and 6).

4.     Attempt to understand the unspoken dimensions of the thinking, the pre-

suppositions that underpin it, the elements of the world-view that are nowhere

written down but inform everything.  (Applied mostly in chapter 3, 4, 5 and 6).

5.      ‘Eavesdrop’, sidle-up to the protagonists and their conversations without

interrupting to make your own point, and without framing the conversation in your

own terms and without employing excessive conceptual framing and grand

programmes. (Applied in chapter 3, 4, 5 and 6).

6.     Offer sympathetic readings of texts unburdened by comparison to present day

concerns with how the theory or author fared in terms of longevity or influence.

Avoid celebration or denigration of texts with respect to the contemporary

relevance or connections. (Obey this rule as an historian, as a cultural commentator,

different standards apply).

7.     Prefer horizontal (across an historical period) examinations which enable a richer

evocation of the context than the vertical examination which considers the “idea

through sweeps of time”. This also protects the author from making teleological

assumptions. Gently untangle a particular idea or debate in time and through the

personalities in conversation. (Applied in chapter 3, 5 and 6).

8.     Use biographical insight to determine why a question was compelling to the author.

Life-experience is relevant to the choice of questions examined, and although

causation may be difficult to prove, it can provide context and framing to intellectual

projects. (Applied in chapter 4)

9.     Long-form narrative lends itself to a more realistic evocation of subtlety and

nuance of both context and meaning. Ideally, these should be written in a

conversational tone, teasing out themes and with “literary elegance and sustained

narrative rhythm” (Moore 2010). (Applied in chapters 3, 5 and 6).

10.     Texts are the starting point in the hermeneutic circle in intellectual history.

(Applied in chapter 5 and 6).

I will adhere to all of these recommendations to the extent possible in this small paper

except number 5 where I will be in tension with the SS method when I apply labels like

‘virtue-ethics’ tradition, and ‘moral-sense’ school to my subjects. Also, I will be taking off

my intellectual historian’s hat, and donning that of the cultural commentator in my

conclusions.  Finally, limitations of length prohibit really dwelling in the richness of the

period and its debates and doing them justice as per recommendation 8 and, as to

‘literary elegance and sustained narrative rhythm’, well, one can but do one’s best.

 

Chapter 3  Historical context: 1798 - 1832 3.1 Introduction

This section of the paper will commence with an evocation of the times in which

Whately and the Noetics lived highlighting: their principal philosophical challenges, the

nature of God; political ones, the indivisibility of Church and State; and the practical

challenges these produced.

3.2  The times and their spirit

As discussed in the introduction, we are concerned with the period between the publication of

Malthus Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) and the proclamation of the Reform Act

(1832). This period has been called “the end of the beginning of modernity” (Gore 2005, p. 149).

In this brief sketch, our aim is to consider the Geistensgeschichten or ‘spirit of the times” as

defined and outlined previously in Blaug’s (1990) categorisation of approaches to the conduct

of economic history. I seek here to illustrate, what we call in contemporary parlance, the

zeitgeist. The mood, the tone, the intellectual concerns that would have been pertinent to a

group of Anglican divines, the Noetics, in the period here considered.

To summarise the historical backdrop: wars and revolutions across the Channel;

economic transitions and great flows of population into the industrial cities at home; all

put pressure on the extant institutions which were still broadly intact from the Glorious

Revolution of 1662. These Oxford Dons, elite members of the Anglican establishment

and esteemed political and religious (a distinction which could be regarded as

somewhat anachronistic) commentators, men were leaders of debate and shapers of

public opinion. Their role as leading educators in the most prestigious and powerful

educational institutions in the rhealm – the source of a large share of the country’s

political, spiritual and professional leaders – gave them wide influence. In the case of

Whately, Copleston and Senior, they were political actors as well. They can be regarded

as leading members of the ‘clerisy’, in Coleridge’s (1830) terms, his very concept likely

to have been based on observing them at work. In this role, they knew the centrality of

aligning any reform programme which persuaded them rationally, with the tenets of the

liberal theology which had emerged as a result of the British engagement with

Newtonian natural theology (A. Waterman 1991; Waterman 2008).

3.3 The indivisibility of Church and State in early modern Britain

A succession of authors have drawn a religiously infused portrait of this part of the early to mid-

nineteenth century Britain which had hitherto been drained of its religious colour (Clark 1985;

Hilton 1986; Mandler 1990; A.M.C. Waterman 1991b; Donald Winch 1996).  There can be no

understanding of this period of the history of Britain without examining the role of the Church

in its parliamentary capacities (as the ‘Lords Spiritual’ in the Upper House), as well as its role in

the education of Statesmen and the elite, and thereby filtering the doctrines and ideas for

diffusion to the various orders of society. Coleridge described the elite who fulfilled this filtering

role as a clerisy, and, in this particular context, we mean real clerics not just those acting in loco

clerica8.

J.D. Clark emphasises the unities and coherences of the period from 1660-1832 and designates

it as “the long eighteenth century” (Clark 1985). Clark’s portrait presents the essential

dimensions of England in the period under examination as Anglican, aristocratic and

monarchical; an ancien regime which balanced upon the “middle ground of English life: that

form that presented itself as both constitutional and royalist, libertarian and stable, tolerant and

expressing religious orthodoxy, innovative and respectful of what was customary”9. The

intricacy of the relationship between the Church, the Parliament and the Crown, meant that any

calls for reform needed to recast a settlement between these three elements.

For the Tories in the Church of England, Jacobin impulses were doubly haunting. An

unresponsive and inefficient pastoral system, which failed to serve the needs of the population

in the emerging industrial cities, was exacerbated by the commonly-held belief among the

majority of Bishops, that the Church, regarded as a divinely ordained hierarchy, be defended at

all costs. Even modest reforms were greeted by most clergy, and particularly the mostly Tory

Bishops, as aimed at destroying Christianity and morality tout court. The risk of Jacobinism, had

seen vaste swathes of the middle and merchant class “rush back to their pews” (Clark 1985;

Hilton 1986).

The text of the day which best captures the tone and impending drama is the Black Book

published in 1820 and written by journalist John Wade. This polemic outlines the abuses of the

Church; its ineffectiveness; and the costs of its conservatism and resistance to reform:

To spare the rich and plunder the poor, is certainly not Christianity; it is more like

Church of Englandism, which, by monstrous union of Church and State, has perverted

the pure, simple, charitable faith of Christ into a tremendous engine of guilt and spiritual

extortion (Wade 1820, p. 315).

Wade’s second book, The Extraordinary Black Book in 1831, further incited calls for reform.

Shortly after its publication, the House of Lords (comprising a large number of Bishops) rejected

the second Reform Bill (which proposed a redistribution of votes from the ‘rotten boroughs’ to

the fast-growing industrial towns of the North). Jacobin risk flared into the Bristol Riots of 1831.

The crowd turned on the Palace of the Bishop of Bristol and burnt it to the ground. Whately,

then on his way to Dublin in his Bishops carriage, was attacked by the mob in these riots, surely

and event to focus the mind on the need for reform (de Giustino 1995; de Giustino 2003).

3.4 Which God?

As the image of God in a religious society changes, the world-view pivots and there are

implications for the intellectual paradigm in which political and social analysis is

conducted. The competing factions jostling for influence included the Noetics

(rationalists), Evangelicals (pietist), and the Philosophical Radials (athiests). The

Noetics were busy placing Newtonian natural theology and Aristotelian logic at the

service of the ‘moral sciences’. Their ‘watchmaker’ God was discernible from his great

creation; a lawmaker who set in train, vast, complex systems, like seasons and markets.

Understanding Providence meant leaving the master to his work, and recognising the

limits of human intervention. Morality for this group involved logic in reasoning, and

wise legislators ensuring fairness in the face of sectional interests, and the pursuit of

virtue by free, but logically and morally educated, individuals. A laissez faire of: free

trade; specialisation; division of labour; the Divine genius which turned the desire for

social success, with the innate moral and benevolent sense, into public benefit from

private striving.

The Philosophical Radicals were avowed atheists or distant desists. The other religious

faction was the Evangelicals. These more emotively religious folk, were moved by a

Jesus who suffered on the Cross on our behalf and by the potential for redemption by

atonement for ‘the Fall’; a movement of personal piety, not the study of impersonal

forces (Hilton 1986). Our ‘Oxford economic apologists’, the Noetics, did not chime with

the “dominant evangelical ethos of the day” and this cost them influence (Hilton 1986, p.

49). Whately, in particular, did not subscribe to this Augustinian ‘original sin’ end of the

theological spectrum. He took the most optimistic view of the prospects for human

society and moral progress in the presence of increasing wealth (Hilton 1986, p52-55).

3.5  Political programmes – three types of radicals against the Tory’s

England in the period under examination was under the shadow of various threats: possibile

revolutionary contagion from France; economic instability, driven in part by wars and

revolutions and the resultant inflation, but also by the cataclysmic economic transformation, we

now call the ‘industrial revolution’; and a bellicose Napoleon threatening to invade Britain.

Religious conviction among the privileged classes increased in response, as did the fear of

radicalism among the lower classed (Hilton 1986; Mandler 1990; A. Waterman 1991; Donald

Winch 1996)10.

The fall of both the monarchy and the Church in France weighed on the minds of the

men who ran both in England. It made them sensitive to the benefits and risks in: pre-

emptive constitutional reform; increasing the welfare of the ‘lower orders’ of society;

and expanding education for the broader populace. The risks inherent in the excesses,

inefficiencies and perceived corruption of the Anglican Church were significant.

As part of the intellectual establishment, the Noetics were the Coleridgian clerisy, an

active intellectual class contesting reform programmes. Conservative, liberal and radical

schools of thought struggled for supremacy and the adoption of their programmes in

the court of public opinion. (Allen 1985, pp. 95-96).

Those calling for reform were called ‘Radicals’. But there were at least three main types

of Radicals: the parliamentary radicals (to which group the Noetics belonged), the

popular radicals and the philosophical radicals (both of which the Noetics opposed in no

uncertain measure). The parliamentary radicals were, in Whately’s day, led by Earl

Grey. Following in the tradition established by Charles James Fox, they called for

measured electoral reform focused on the land and capital owning middle-class. The

popular radicals argued for the expansion of the franchise to include artisans and the

labouring classes. Their support in the early nineteenth century was limited and

subdued by harsh repression. The Philosophical radicals included James Mill, Jeremy

Bentham, David Ricardo and JS Mill, and agreed with the parliamentary radicals on

electoral reform, but focused their attention on legislative reform on utilitarian lines.

The opposition to all reform came from the Tories who sought to preserve the ancien regime

tout court. They believed that accession to any of the demands would result in a slippery-slope

to the sort of chaos seen in France. They called for the Church, and the Aristocracy, to be

defended at all costs as a divinely ordained natural order. In these debates, the Evangelicals

were divided.

The formation of government by the Whigs under Earl Grey’s leadership (1830), saw

new legislation presented to Parliament enunciating reform of the electoral rolls and

the end of religious discrimination11. The final demise of the old system was swift. In

1832 the ancien regime in which the Noetics were powerful figures came to its end as

much at their hands as any. This expansion of the franchise and rights, destroyed for all

time the unique privileges of the aristocracy and the clerisy.

3.6 Economic reform – Corn Laws, Poor Laws and Currency Wars

The other great programmes for reform were economic in nature. These reforms were

driven by knowledge of Adam Smith’s science of the wise legislator as outlined in An

Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the WON (1776). It entailed opposition to the

mercantilist policies, like the Corn Laws, which served to protect domestic corn and

cereal growers from less expensive foreign competition12. David Ricardo’s doctrine of

comparative advantage was important here. Despite being reformist on electoral

matters, the Whig government of Earl Grey declined the call to repeal the Corn Laws and

they were finally repealed by the Duke of Wellington in 1846.

 The other major economic reform proposal driven by the Whigs was the amendment of

the Poor Laws. This will be examined as a collaborative project of the Noetics in chapter

5, section 5.8.

 

Chapter 4  Richard Whately “Whateley was beyond doubt the leading spirit of that rising party which never rose, but which for a short time appeared likely to do for the Church what Earl Grey had done for the State”.                       

Overton (1894)

4.1 Introduction

Richard Whately (1787-1863) was a leading light of his times13. He was a wide-ranging

thinker who made contributions to fields of knowledge, including logic, epistemology,

rhetoric , moral philosophy and political economy based on Aristotelian logic and

premises; a reformist educator in Oxford and Ireland; an Anglican priest who

ministered throughout his life; a widely-read populariser of economics, logic and moral

philosophy; a founder of political economy as a University discipline at Oxford and

Trinity College, Dublin; a pioineer of social science and statistical collections; a

theologian and, finally, the Archbishop of Dublin from 1831 until his death. In this

section, we will consider Whately’s origins, character, education and career. 

In the public rhealm J.S. Mill was so impressed with his contribution and intellectual

stature that in 1846 he urged the Edinburgh Review publish “a general estimate of the

man and his writings….W[hately] is certainly a very remarkable and even eminent man,

and one whose merits and faults are both very important to be pointed out” (Mill

quoted in Rashid 1977 p147). I will endeavour to building on the existing secondary

literature, contribute to this portrait of eminence, merit and fault.

4.2 Origins

Richard Whately was the fourth son of Joseph Whately of Nonsuch Park, Surrey and

Jane Plumer. He was born on 1 February 1787 in the home of his maternal Uncle,

William Plumer, in Cavendish Square. His family tree contained its share of vicars and

country parsons, including his father. Joseph Whately was also a lecturer at Gresham

College a centre of new ideas and debate in enlightenment Britain. Whately began life as

a “puny sickly child” so delicate that he was not expected to live (Tuckwell 1909, p. 51).

Despised by his elder brothers “as a sort of changeling”, he was left to his own devices

as he grew, displaying great curiosity, eager immersion in books and “theoretic flights in

ethics and politics” as well as stunning ‘feats of mental arithmetic’, which may have

pointed to some aspergic tendencies14. The penchant for “castle-building”, speculation

on abstract subjects and “Utopian schemes for ameliorating the world” and the conduct

of government was the result of highly developed powers of concentration to which he

believed “he owed everything in his life” (Tuckwell 1909, p. 51).

4.3 Character

Whately, “acute in mind, resolute in temper, robust in body, in society genial to the

point of boisterousness” was known, in the Oxford period, for striding through the

fields, dressed in white, with his dog ‘Sailor’ in tow, stunning passers-by (especially

under-graduates caught in the company of ladies) as the well-trained Sailor, dropped

from trees into the water (Tuckwell 1909, p. 59). “In Oxford of his day Whately’s was a

name to mention with bated breath” opines the author of the entry in the National

Dictionary of Biography (Rigg 1885). “Whately’s presence was enough to discomfort the

polite, anger the complacent, and embarrass the bashful” chimes another (de Giustino

1995, p. 220). He has variously been described as “brash”, “arrogant”, “alarming”,

“provocative”, “forensic”, “tender” and “optimistic”15. The elements of his character that

are certain and agreed are his forensic intellect, powers of concentration, abstraction

and racionation; his scrupulousness, integrity and consistency of position; and kindness

(Tuckwell 1909, p. 62).

His harsh manners and brusqueness with those of inferior intellect were considered

arrogant by some. His highly “analytical, rational-type, not tempered by any sympathy

with an emotional religion of any kind” (Overton 1894, p. 118) was considered much

more like Bentham and Mill than to the rest of his Oxford colleagues (A. Waterman

1991, p. 207). The Mandler (1990) reading is of a fundamentally optimistic belief in

human nature and society, and the power of providence to liberate the good for

mankind through increasing wealth as long as it follows ethical principles (Mandler,

1990, p81-103). 

Other more serious critiques made of him in his day include the charge by many of his

colleagues that he was “more provocative than profound”(de Giustino 2003, p. 56).

Some regarded him as more suited to “destructive rather than constructive

work”(Overton 1894, p. 118). Others, particularly those on the other-side to Whately on

the issue of Church reform,  saw him and his Liberal politics as “opportunistic”(Corsi

1988, p. 93). Whately is also recorded as lacking the moral weight of his protégé,

Thomas Arnold. Overton (1894), although not a contemporary, after examination of the

biographical records of both men, concludes that Arnold was “far inferior intellectually

(as it seems to me), but far superior in moral weight” (Overton 1894, p. 120).

Those close to him who knew Whately well record a character who balanced his

extreme acuity of mind with great tenderness in family-life, to his life-long friends; and

great fidelity to his religious faith and the practice of Christian kindness.

To give the last word to one of Whately’s closest friends, Thomas Arnold: “Now I am

sure that in point of real essential holiness, so far as man can judge of man, there does

not live a truer Christian than Whately; and it does grieve me most deeply to hear

people speak of him as of a dangerous and latitudinarian character, because in him the

intellectual part of his nature keeps pace with the spiritual – instead of being left, as the

Evangelicals leave it, a fallow field for all unsightly weeds to flourish in. He is a truly

great man – in the highest sense of the word – and in the safety and welfare of the

Protestant Church in Ireland depend in any degree on human instruments, none could

be found I verily believe, in the whole empire, so likely to maintain it”(Fitch 1901, p.

270).

4.4 Education and the Oriel Noetics

Whately cannot be understood in isolation from the community of scholars that both

formed and sustained him in his intellectual endeavours: the community of Oriel

College, Oxford.16 Under the leadership of first Edward Copleston (Fellow, 1789-1814;

Provost 1814-1828; Bishop 1828-1849) and then Whately himself (Fellow 1811-31),

Oriel College was a hive of intellectual industry, leadership and culture.

From his production of entire shelves of books on a wide array of subjects, some two

million words, we can infer that Whately was well-served in his educational formation.

Near age ten he was placed in a private school near Bristol. The school regime

strengthened his constitution and subdued his precocity. At Oxford he had the good

fortune to have been discovered by Copleston as teacher and tutor. For the first time,

Whately found someone who could understand his mental acuity in all its scope,

appreciate his abstract imaginative powers,  and “draw out the powers of his mind”

(Tuckwell 1909, p. 55). Whately would always give to Copleston the credit for the best

of his education.

Whately matriculated from Oriel College on the 6th of April 1805 and graduated with a B.

A. (double major second class) in 1808. This second class result was deeply

disappointing to him, despite being regarded as the fault of the examiners (Tuckwell

1909, p. 56). He did, however, win the prize for the English essay, “The Arts in the

Cultivation of Which the Ancients were less Successful than the Moderns”. The end of

his formal professional education was marked by his election, in 1811, as Fellow of Oriel

College. This was, in his view, “the great triumph of his life” (Tuckwell 1909, p. 57).  He

continued to study theology and, like most Oxford dons of the period, he took Holy

Orders in 1811, and in due course, the degrees of Bachelor of Divinity and Doctor of

Divinity.

4.5 Whately’s career

As a Fellow of Oriel, Whately first came to prominence through writing Christian

apologetics and on Church government. His first well known piece was an anonymous

tract, a witty Christian-apologist challenge to Hume and the other extreme skeptics of

religion of the day, Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (1819), which

compared the scant evidence for miracles with the scant evidence anyone who speaks of

Napoleon has of his existence. He published influential reviews of Jane Austen’s work in

the Quarterly Review in 182117.  In lauding her realism, social commentary and capacity

to capture the spirit and sensibility of the times, he sends us reaching for the pages of

Austen’s novels for clues to understand the society he lived in, as well as his views on

moral education and the development of moral imagination. Whately celebrated the

legitimacy of the novel as a genre. He argued that imaginative literature, especially

narrative, was more valuable than history or biography. The novel, as pursued by

Austen, offers profound insights into general human nature and experience thereby

expanding the reader’s moral imagination.

In 1820 he met his own life’s companion, his wife Elizabeth. After their marriage in

1822, they and returned to residence at Oxford where he continued on the theme of

Church governance delivering the Brampton Lectures On the Use and Abuse of Party

Spirit in Matters of Religion18. In 1823 they moved to Halesworth in Suffolk. Here he

acquitted his parish duties, which were not over-burdening, with more than customary

consideration. In 1825 he returned his residence again to Oxford as the principal of St.

Alban Hall. His head filled with plans for reform, particularly the centrality of teaching

logic and rhetoric as central discipline of the University curriculum and in the formation

of able minds, he succeeded in this task, with the assistance of his then friend and

protégé, J.H. Newman (Tuckwell 1909).

Oxford was the perfect soil for this “eccentric among eccentrics”  to drive his and

Copleston’s vision, of what was possible for Oxford, into existence. Whately was a

brilliant and enthusiastic teacher (Tuckwell 1909; Akenson 1981). He knew he was

teaching the statesmen and professionals of tomorrow and that ‘forming their minds’

was forming the future. He avoided dogmatism and employed the Socratic method by

“stimulus and suggestion”, aiming to “elicit the learner’s powers” (Tuckwell 1909). It

was said of Whately that “no Don was ever less Donnish” due to the oddity in his

manners and habits, and his defiance of convention. He is included in Annan’s study of

the great Oxford dons of the nineteenth century, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics, and

Geniuses (Annan 1999, pp. 40; 45-46). This un-conventionality increased rather than

diminished his influence. Of the Oriel Common Room it was said that it “stinks of

logic”(Tuckwell 1909, p. 59). It was here that Whately’s “cold, penetrating intellect” and

passionate reformist views, found their best expression. In this milieu, and wherever

else Church reformers congregated, in the first three decades of the nineteenth century,

Whately was afforded the audience of an “oracle” (Overton 1894, p. 119).

With time and maturity, his concerns and published writing moved beyond Christian

apologetics and Church governance. His contribution on logic first appeared as an

article in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (1826) and was ultimately published as a

stand-alone treatise with numerous editions of this text. It was read by hundreds of

thousands (Akenson 1981). Elements of Logic became a landmark piece of work in

Britain and the United States where it gave great impetus to the study of logic. J.S. Mill

remarked that Whately had “done more than any other person to restore this study

[Logic] to the rank from which it had fallen in the estimation of the cultivated class in

our country…..” (Mill quoted in Rashid 1977, p148).

Whately also contributed an article to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana entitled Rhetoric

which was also adapted into a book, Elements of Rhetoric, published in 1828. In 1831

Whately was elected to the recently established Drummond professorship of Political

Economy at Oxford in succession to his protégé Nassau Senior. The lectures delivered as

part of his duties, Introductory Lectures (1832) were highly influential and their impact

will be explored later in this narrative.

The economic and political debates of the day have been regarded by Moore & White

(2009) as a contest between two axes: the Christchurch based Charles Lloyd, who had a

great influence on Peel, (the Lloyd-Peel axis), and their combatants, the Oriel team

comprising, Copleston, Whately and Senior (the Noetics). It was in these debates, and

during this period, that Whately came to the attention of the Foxite Liberals of Holland

House “that busy and witty conservatory of liberal opinions” (de Giustino 2003, p227).

After the 1830 establishment of the Whig led Government, many of Whately’s Oxford

students won junior offices with the Whigs (Mandler, 1990). The Foxite Liberals

believed in the abolition of slavery, the extension of civil rights, Catholic emancipation

and religious toleration, improvements in the penal code (Whately’s was particularly

passionate about the end of Transportation) and Poor Law reform. All ideas Whately

both subscribed to, and promoted in his writing, teaching and preaching.

When the Grey government got to work on the reform of the franchise, it was the Lords

Spiritual who blocked the proposed legislation several times. (Ultimately culminating in

the Bristol Riots in which the mob attacked Whately’s carriage near Birmingham). The

Whigs planned to slowly change the character of the House of Lords by adding more

liberal Bishops to its ranks. This was no easy task given that most potential candidates

for Bishoprics were Tories, and, those few of a more liberal persuasion, often proved to

be unsuitable for other reasons, infirmity, age or lack of conscientiousness. Lord

Melbourne was head to remark on the news of the passing of a Bishop “Not another

Bishop dead!”– a far cry from the most famous exclamation in British history about

another Bishop, at another time (de Giustino 1995)19.

Added to the Whigs’s challenge of finding a healthy, scrupulous, liberal, potential

Bishop, was the need to find someone who could cope with the exigencies of Ireland;

Dublin was a Tory stronghold and the “Irish question” was one of the most important

political challenges of the century. The Earl Grey led Government wanted a real

reformer; someone capable of improving the tense situation: “If the constitution

required them occasionally to place men on episcopal thrones, the Whigs required

prelates to make the political and religious establishment, more rational, less expensive,

and somewhat more responsive to public opinion” (de Giustino 2003, p225). They had

found their man in Whately.

Several prominent Whigs of Whately’s acquaintance promoted him on intellectual

grounds, for they too were devotees of the new discipline of political economy and

admired his free-wheeling intellect. Lord Brougham recalled that he promoted

Whately’s appointment by recommending one of his books to Premier Lord Earl Grey,

who as a result gave his recommendation to Whately with “perfect confidence” and

looked forward to "sincere, zealous co-operation . . . in carrying into effect such reforms

as may be conducive to the Church itself20”. (Grey quoted in de Giustino, 2003). They

also promoted him on grounds of character. Whately was known to believe that the first

duty of a public official was scrupulousness and efficiency (de Giustino 2003).

News of his appointment to the Bishopric of Dublin was met with alarm and dismay on

both sides of the religious and political divide. The Tories thought him a Catholic-loving

latitudinarian, given his views on state endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy, and

free religious instruction; the Catholics thought they’d been sent a rabid pugilist. The

appointment of Whately as Archbishop had, in fact, been a shrewd and measured choice.

In fact, JS Mill was amazed they had made such a splendid choice, “One of the most

progressif men in this country is Dr Whately, lately appointed Archbishop of Dublin;

which is in itself equalent to a revolution in the Church (Mill 1831 as quoted in Rashid

1977 p149).

The Dublin period was not as happy for Whately as his Oxford years (Akenson 1981).

He was not well suited to the formality and convention of a divided Ireland.

Intellectually however, it was productive. He published only one course of economics of

his own, but one of his first acts was to endow a chair of political economy at Trinity

College. Established in 1832, the Whately Chair was modelled on the Drummond Chair

the founding of which he had negotiated, and been the second to fill. The Whately Chair

and Trinity College became the intellectual base for the rise of the economics discipline

in Ireland. There is a significant literature which traces this lineage and development

and the influence of the holders of the Whately Chair on Irish life and thought (Black

1945, 1947a, 1947b; Boylan and Foley, 1992; Goldstrom, 1996)21.

In Dublin Whately concentrated many years of study into an annotated edition of

Bacon’s Essays. In 1859 he produced an annotated edition of Paley’s Moral Philosophy.

This work was another particularly influential piece of scholarship to the debates of the

times and we will examine it later in the narrative.

In addition to writing directly for educated audiences, Whately also played a major role

in primary and secondary education in Ireland, creating the first joint Catholic and

Protestant Commissions of education with joint text books, including Catechism

(Akenson 1981). In fact, he became not only the head schoolmaster of the Irish people,

but through his school texts one of the chief instructors of the English working classes

as well (Akenson 1981, p. 172). As a populariser of economics education he was

extremely successful. His books were published in multiple editions, and translated into

sixteen languages, including Maori. Millions of school children, working class people and

others were introduced to the tenets of political economy through his work (Rashid

1977, p154-155).

 

 

 

Chapter 5  Whately’s Noetic intellectual inheritance 5.1 Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to illuminate the intellectual milieu in which Whately

thrived; the Oriel Noetics and Oxford. Several things will be considered: the derivation

of the moniker ‘noetic’; the members that constituted the group; a review the major

themes in their moral philosophy, illuminating their shared mental universe, and the

ideas that underpinned the development of their political economy and the reform

programmes they initiated; and an examination of one of these collective reform

programmes. This analysis will confirm that the Noetics were, like Adam Smith, both

mainstream political economists and bearers of the virtue ethics tradition. Finally, the

chapter will conclude by demonstrating that the Noetics can be regarded as a ‘scientific

community’ in the Kuhnian sense (Kuhn 1969).

5.2 Meaning of ‘Noetic’

To the student of Aristotle’s Ethics, as the Oriel men were in no small degree, a ‘noetic’ 

is a man who develops, through exercise, his highest mental faculties. There is no doubt

that the development of the capacity to reason and think was at the heart of the Noetic

programme, and framed each of their intellectual and cultural endeavours.  The name

was in common use during their lifetimes and has been confirmed in contemporaneous

sources (Tuckwell 1909, p. 2).

5.3 Membership of the group

In terms of who was in the group, Tuckwell includes: Eveleigh, (Provost 1781-1814);

Copleston; Whately; Arnold, (Fellow 1814-1819); Hampden, (Fellow 1814-1817);

Hawkins, (Fellow 1813-1828); (Provost, 1828-1874); Baden Powell, Degree, 1817. Died

1860; and Blanco White, Fellow 1826. Died 1841. To this group I would add Whately’s

protégé, Nassau Senior. Tuckwell does not include him as he was never a Fellow of Oriel

College, but, in terms of intellectual contribution, as Whately’s collaborator on Elements

of Logic (1828), and as his nominee for the inaugural Drummond Chair in Political

Economy at Oxford, he should definitely be in the frame.

It is appropriate to treat Whately as the lead spokesman of a group endeavour. The

nature of the intellectual product of the Noetics was collective. Some of Whately’s

writing was the product of decade long conversations, a point he made himself,

particularly in respect of his most influential work Elements of Logic (1826 ). While this

bore his name, he claimed its very existence was impossible to imagine, in the absence

of formation by, and continued dialogue with, Edward Copleston. Whatever merit

belonged to his very popular book, “at least half belonged to Copleston”(Whately 1826,

p. iii).

5.4 Beliefs: Reformist clerics, faith and reason

In terms of their religious faith, Moore (2009, p3), describes the Noetics as

“unconventional reformist clerics… [who] deployed logical processes to bolster their

religious beliefs, which they held in an unsentimental fashion, and thereby to some

extent practised that most contradictory of creeds, a logical faith”. Although the Noetics

sought to preserve continuity with the pre-enlightenment social orders and traditions,

where moral development was an essential pursuit of all classes, they accepted that

religion could not be at odds with science. These “clerical economists” (Hilton 1986,

p49), were men devoted to two masters: faith and reason. They “had to overcome a

widespread conviction that political economy was not only dry and repulsive but also

wicked and dangerous…threatening to open up Jacobinical enquiries into thrones and

altars” (Hilton 1986, p. 49).

5.5 The Noetics as a clerisy – filters of suitable knowledge

The primary intellectual challenge for thinkers in this religion-infused period is to

ensure that the canonical texts of late eighteenth century economic thought (especially

Smith, 1776) could be read as congruent with the theological assumptions which

prevailed in the contemporary Anglican orthodoxy (Waterman 1991). The Noetics

played the role of a ‘clerisy’, to employ again the Coleridgian trope. Coleridge’s

conception involved the learned of all denominations:

“which constitute the civilization of a country, as well as the Theological Under

the name of Theology, or Divinity, were contained the interpretation of

languages; the conservation and tradition of past events; the momentous epochs,

and revolutions of the race and nation; the continuation of the records; logic,

ethics, and the determination of ethical science, in application to the rights and

duties of men in all their various relations, social and civil; and lastly, the ground-

knowledge, the prima scientia as it was named, -- PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine

and discipline of ideas (Coleridge 1830, p47).

In this capacity, the Noetics were the arbiters of what would pass as knowledge and

how it would be transmitted to the elites, and then into the broader social landscape

5.6 Moral philosophy and natural theology

I suggest that there are five fundamental points of natural theology and Christian moral

philosophy that underwrote the Noetic political economy, which was a sub-strand of

what become known as “Christian Political Economy” (D Winch 1996; A. Waterman

1991; Hilton 1986). Each of these points which were embraced by Whately as a Noetic,

are discussioned in sub-section 5.6.1 to 5.6.5 inclusive.

5.6.1 Application of Newtonian science to moral questions

They were inheritors and proselytisers of the application of Newtonian natural theology

which, unlike in France, was a project “not perceived as subversive” (Berlin quoted in

Waterman 2008, p42). Newton, a devoted Christian, an enthusiastic student of scripture

(and alchemy!), imparted a cosmology which confirmed the existence of a God of first

causes; a cosmology where the laws of nature were the laws of God. Whereas in Catholic

countries, the metaphysics of Aquinas provided the intellectual machinery for the

formulation of economic thinking, the transition by the Scottish and English to

Newtonian natural philosophy and natural theology, allowed political economy to find a

path to establishment acceptance, with science as an ally not an enemy (Waterman

2008):“For not only does natural science demonstrate the unity, omnipotence and

omniscience and goodness of God…. It disposes us to wonder and revelation” (Newton,

as quoted in Waterman, p127). How attractive for a Jacobin haunted elite - a scientific

commendation of wealth by free exchange and God!

5.6.2 The existence of God: Argument from design.

Another essential component of the intellectual inheritance of the Noetics was the

teleological argument for the existence of God provided by Archdeacon William Paley

and Bishop Sumner amongst others22. God’s existence in this apology is grounded in the

evidence around us of his subtle craftsmanship. This is a remote deistic God, first cause

and creator of laws in which the complex world around us evolves, in which the

intricacy of the social world are revealed as the masterwork alongside that of nature.

This was an attractive half-way house God for a scientifically, rationalist yet believing

people. Paley and Sumner’s writing played a critical role in educating the minds and

morals, in politics and philosophy, of a generation of late eighteenth and early

nineteenth century members of the clerisy23.

While the Noetics valued Paley’s broader contribution, on other matters of moral

philosophy, they were more critical. In particular Paley’s denial of a moral sense they

regarded as error. This is an important dimension of Whately’s contribution - the

correction of Paley - to thwart its application by the utilitarians. We will explore this

further in section Chapter 6, section 6.6.

5.6.3 ‘Butlerian self-love’

The third element of Christian Moral Philosophy we will examine here is the important

role of the social benefits of self-love in solving the paradox laid down by Mandeville in

the Fable of the Bees – Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Mandeville had, as a rhetorical

device, created a conflict between the creators of wealth by commercial exchange and

the strictures of Christian morality. For this perceived paradox to exist, Christian

morality must exclude self-love which it patently does not (Waterman 2008). Joseph

Butler solved this riddle in his sermon (1726) which showed that private endeavours

and public good could coincide: “self-love is one chief security of our right behaviour

towards society,” and that “under providence there is seldom any inconsistency

between what is called our duty and what is called our interest” (Butler 1736, p. 27).

Smith’s TMS (1759) became the most influential of all the attempts to rise to the

rhetorical challenge set by Mandeville by employing these foundational concepts of

natural theology provided the theological and philosophical moorings for the WON

(Waterman, 2008).

5.6.4 Responses to Malthus theodicy

Malthus, another “man of the cloth”, wrote for polemical effect. He portrayed a world in

which human fertility was set against land scarcity; where rising population would

doom the lower orders of society to misery or vice. For the higher orders, life may no

longer be “nasty, brutish and short”, but for the poor, increased population with less to

go round would keep them in Hobbesian darkness. Malthus framed the negative

consequences rather than the sunlit uplands of trade and commerce creating quite the

storm (Winch 1996). Only an evil God would allow more children to be born than

providence could provide for24. The furore which erupted infected the perceptions of

economists more broadly with enduring consequences. It was at this moment that a

cultural fault-line between the Romantics, (as represented by Southey, Coleridge,

Wordsworth, Carlyle and, later, Dickens, Ruskin and Morris) and the political

economists appeared. The Romantics framed it as “the economists against the human

beings” (Southey quoted in Waterman 2008, p131; Winch 1996, p402, 418).

Malthus was a better economist than he was a theologian, and the more theologically

able rallied to save Christian Political Economy (Waterman 2008). Paley was one of the

first to solve this theodicy riddle implicit in Malthus work25. He argued that population

pressure could be reconciled with Butlerian “self-love” where duty and interest nearly

always coincided, and ‘moral restraint’ could provide a Christian solution that would

lead to higher survival rates. Paley and Sumner’s (1818) use of Butler’s ‘discipline and

trial’ and ‘moral restraint’ arguments, as the path to escape misery and vice, were used

by Malthus in his 1817 revision of the Essay. Copleston, founder of the Oriel Noetics,

used these themes, in his letters to Peel on the Poor Laws in 1819 (Waterman 1991).

5.6.5 Moral sense school

 

Man not only desires to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that which is the natural

and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be

hateful; but to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred.

Adam Smith, TMS, (1790) p113-114.

 

The Noetics were inheritors of the moral sense school26. Smith and Hume, influenced by

Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, are the best known members of this school which holds

that (i) human nature is grounded in a ‘moral sense’ prior to reason, and (ii) that it is

these natural moral sentiments which provide the basis for ordering human social

behaviour.

In terms of moral theory, the moral sense school hold that innate and pre-cognitive

social sentiments should not be supressed. Rather they need to be encouraged and

cultivated in order to be fully revealed. Perceiving humans as innately social and as

other centred as they are self-centred (self-love as well as love thy neighbour),

education involves an ongoing development and refinement of these innate social

sensibilities.

5.7  Smithian Virtue Ethics

The following section sets out how the Noetics inherited the virtue-ethics tradition from

both Smith as well as from Christian teaching. It illustrates my contention that Whately

is, like Smith, a mainstream political economist and a bearer of the virtue-ethics

tradition. Smith, Whately, and the Noetics, see humans as profoundly social, and that

social life flows from the social sentiments of benevolence and fellow feeling, as much

from the exigencies of survival. Whately defined a human as an animal which converses

and trades (Whately 1832, p. 41).  

The virtue-ethics tradition is a complete moral theory that commenced with Plato and

Aristotle, was inherited by the Romans and Stoics and was formally embraced by

Christianity in the 13th Century mainly through the writing of Albert the Great (1200-

1280) and his more famous student Aquinas (1225-1274). The foundation-insight is the

same as that which animates the moral sense school: that human nature is innately

social. The virtue- ethics tradition, however, is more explicitly Aristotelian, and departs

from a definition of the purpose, the telos, of a human life. The purpose is to contribute

to be good and to contribute to the development of a polity that pursues and achieves

the good. To do this, humans, as individuals, must develop characteristics that aid in the

achievement of that purpose; “excellences”or “virtues”. A virtue is “an excellence which

aids in the achievement of the common human social purpose”27. Character is developed

through habit forming practice so that these characteristics, virtues, become innate.

Important recent scholarship has reclaimed Smith as a bearer of the virtue-ethics

tradition (McCloskey 2008; Phillipson 2010). In Adam Smith, the Last of the Former

Virtue Ethicists McCloskey (2008) argues against the picture of Adam Smith as an

economist in what she calls “the anti-ethical sense”; that “Smith was a virtue ethicist

first and last” (McCloskey 2008, p. 65)28. The pursuit of wealth alone is not sanctioned

by Smith as a moral code, he describes the perfectly virtuous man as one who acts

according to “the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence”

(Smith as quoted in McCloskey 2008 p51).

The WON, McCloskey asserts, is a letter to a wise (or virtuous) legislator with ‘fit to

purpose’ rhetoric. The legislator’s role is not to teach morality, but to create a system of

laws of freedoms which enable the population to pursue wealth and happiness as

individuals with access to enlightenment and education (McCloskey 2008). This

complements the TMS (first published 1759), which was written to understand what

the moral development in societies depends upon.

Phillipson’s (2010) thesis is that Adam Smith can only be understood in the context of

the intellectual project which dominated his life, the development of a complete ‘Science

of Man’29. Phillipson argues that the TMS was written to provide the first part of the

analysis of: “how men and women satisfy their moral needs and learn to live at ease

with themselves in the world around them, a theory of sociability as well as ethics,

providing what was in effect, an account of the moral economy of a recognisably

modern civil society” (Phillipson 2010, pp. 2-3). Understanding Smith’s approach to self

and society are keys to understanding his purpose. To see Smith in this light is to see

that “the human beings who inhabit the types of societies about which he writes are

driven by moral, aesthetic as well as material needs” (Phillipson 2010, p. 7). Smith is

exploring the “human personality, and the customs habits and institutions which made

political life and the progress of civilisation possible, could be explained in terms of the

imaginative and sympathetic response of an indigent species to the never ending

pressures of need” (Phillipson 2010, p. 279).

Smith is a virtue ethicist as he examines the process by which we acquire the senses of

propriety, justice, political obligation and beauty, upon which our skills in the arts of

social intercourse and our character depend.  In doing so, he had introduced into his

analysis, a simple observation about the principles of human nature that had been

ignored by modern philosophy:

“that man’s natural indigence had somehow gone hand in hand with a love of

improvement which he would exercise whenever he felt secure enough to do

so…. it had allowed him to suggest that a reasonably stable society will follow a

material, moral, spiritual and political path of development, that was more

natural and more secure than one which was determined by the whims of its

sovereigns” (Phillipson 2010, p. 280).

The TMS offered a powerful conjecture on the nature of the civilising process, how

citizens set out to satisfy their moral needs and the way in which some acquire that

“sense of fitness and ethical beauty which makes it possible to aspire to a life of virtue”

(Phillipson 2010, p. 157).

This picture of Smith promoting moral outcomes is not in any way in conflict with the

Smith in the WON who promotes commercial society as the means to bring prosperity

which will aid moral improvement through liberating people from the pressing

demands of survival. Phillipson and McCloskey are clear Smith’s oeuvre is a testament

that human maturity relies upon the development of moral imagination at the

individual and collective level. The combination of Smith’s works explains the process

that best frees people from pressing need: a commercial society. This synthetic picture

of Smith promoting commercial society as the means to bring about moral outcomes is, I

would argue, the Noetic reading. For the Noetics, there was no Das Adam Smith problem.

In conclusion, while I agree with McCloskey’s conviction that Smith is a virtue ethicist

but he is not “the last of the former”. Whately, and his sometimes collaborator and

sometimes mouthpiece, Nassau Senior, were mainstream economists who nested

economics within a broader ethical framework focused on human development in a

social setting. In other words, Whately was clearly of the moral sense school as well as a

virtue ethicist. There are many examples in his writings to demonstrate that claim, and

these will be examined in the Chapter which follows.

5.8 The Noetic method applied: The Poor Laws

Whately and the Noetics responded to these intellectual currents in three main

collaborative projects: they increased the study of logic in the Oxford curriculum to

improve rigour (Moore & White 2009, pp. 3-17); they synthesized the moral philosophy

of the age (Waterman 1991 p206-215, 2008, p128, 132; Winch 1996; Oslington 2001,

p838-849); and they contributed to the reform of the Poor Laws (Offer 2006). For the

purpose of this paper, I will use the Noetic contribution to Poor Law reform as an

example to illustrate the application of the Noetic method to a joint endeavour.

The Noetics are credited with being a driving force, in the reform of the Poor Laws

(Mandler 1990 p82; Hilton 1986). Copleston had written a widely influential published

letter to Peel on the state and need for reform of the Poor Laws to cope with the

changing economic conditions and to update the system which had its origins in the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some parishes were being bankrupted by the

demand.

The Noetic conception, summarised by Offer (2006 p285), was that the provision of

relief should be done in such a way that it did not exacerbate the situation by

encouraging the able bodied to take it. They came early to the ‘principle of less

eligibility’. The Noetics saw the opportunity of improvement in the hands of the

individual who could pursue virtue (not happiness, or solely material goods). For them

the presence of scarcity encouraged prudence (delayed child-rearing), industry (work).

The accumulation of wealth would enable benevolence. Suffering could be overcome

through duty and virtue.

 

Copleston’s letters and behind the scene consultations were highly influential. Whately

also contributed letters and guidance to the reform agenda and promoted Nassau

Senior as the Noetic representative in the event of the establishment of a Commission of

inquiry. Following the Swing Riots, the Earl Grey Government set up the Royal

Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws (1832) and Nassau Senior was

appointed to the Commission. Edwin Chadwick, a leading Benthamite was the Secretary

and John Bird Sumner another member.

The Commission took a year to write its report. It painted generous outdoor relief to the

able-bodied as the tap-root of imprudence and dependency (Offer 2006 p286). Removal

was of paramount importance and it recommended sweeping changes to the eligibility

and management processes. The recommendations passed easily through Parliament,

as they were supported by both the Whigs and the Tories, gaining Royal Assent in 1834.

Until Mandler (1990) revised the historical record, it had been considered a triumph of

the Benthamite agenda. Mandler claims, however, it was more a case of a Noetic tail

wagging the Benthamite dog.

Once Whately went to Ireland, and saw conditions there, far worse than those in Britain,

we see a spectrum of views emerge among the Noetics. Whately argued that in the

absence of any demand for labour, there is no threat of work being discouraged by the

provision of relief. On the contrary, relief is the only thing that will keep people alive.

“the population are, not from any want of their own, in permanent need” (Whately

quoted in Mandler 1990, p101). Senior held the original line. Whately’s Irish experience

changed his attitude on the conditions in which poor people were responsible for their

own circumstances; when living virtuously would not trump destitution. The aim of

policy should be to maintain the incentive to improve where this was possible (Offer

2006, p283-302).

5.9 Noetic Political Economy – A mainstream economic school of thought

Having considered both their shared intellectual inheritance, as well as their shared

projects, we can regard the Noetics as mainstream, and as a formal school in the sense

defined by Kuhn (1969) and Lakatos (1973).

The Noetics who were occupied with political economy as one of their particular

contributions were Edward Copleston, Whately and Nassau Senior. Each have been

included in surveys of the development of economics in the Britain of the period. You

couldn’t get more mainstream than Oxford, in the early nineteenth century. The Noetics

formed part of what Coleridge (1830) described as the clerisy.  To a student of history

and culture, the Noetics are the mainstream. However, identifying the Noetic political

economists as mainstream on the doctrinal record requires an examination beyond a

tightly drawn doctrinal history of the discipline common to most textbooks. Recent

scholarship in the history of economic thought has, however, illuminated the diversity

of views and voices that comprised this three decade period between the publication of

Malthus’ first version of the Essay on Population (1798) and the end of the ancien

regime, which also parallels, the rise of the Philosophical Radicals (James Mill, David

Ricardo and J.S. Mill).

Christian Political Economy, while it did not win the day in the canon of the doctrines

that we pass on in undergraduate economics, was certainly a mainstream set of

opinions (Hilton 1986; Waterman 1991; Winch 1996). Reconciling the ‘science of

wealth’ with the tenets of Christian theology was an intention shared by all but the

Philosophical Radicals. Their project was a departure from the Christian project but still

mainstream, although over time, certainly by mid-century, they had won the debate in

the court of public opinion and become the mainstream current. Our question relates to

the earlier period (1798-1832) so our answer is: there are two schools in the

mainstream in this period, the Christian and the Radical. Later on, we will see Christian

Political Economy separate into three schools, the Noetic, the Evangelical and the

Realists focused at Cambridge.

As to whether they were a formal school, Copleston and Whately’s engagement and

influence on members of the broader group demonstrates the standards of a school

properly defined as “a community to an extent unparalleled in most other fields they

have undergone similar educations and professional initiations; in the process they have

absorbed the same technical literature and drawn many of the same lessons from it.

Usually the boundaries of that standard literature mark the limit of a scientific subject

matter (Kuhn 1969, p177)” (my italics). 

The Noetics certainly shared similar educations and professional initiations. They were

formed by the education they received over time at Oriel College with its common room

which “stunk of logic”. Secondly, they did absorb the same technical literature and draw

the same lessons from it. Their common grounding included five principal intellectual

sources: Aristotelian logic and virtue ethics; Newtonian natural philosophy; Chrstian

theology; Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy; and Smithian political economy.

They had all read Aristotle, Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, Butler, Tucker, Paley, Malthus

and Sumner. They shared intellectual touchstones, tacit knowledge and an approach to

the development and refinement of ideas. They were four successive generations of

teachers engaged in creating the shared professional initiations: becoming Fellows;

giving lecture series; preparing students for exams; co-writing books on logic, then

moral philosophy and ethics, then political economy30. Finally, they engaged in several

collaborative endeavors of philosophy and rhetoric, reform and intellectual endeavor31.

Within the mainstream history of economics canon, we find Nassau Senior, Whatley’s

protégé, who was selected as the inaugural Drummond Chair of Political Economy,

Oxford as Whately’s recommendation. His lectures in this capacity, which he held twice,

were influential. He rose to high office and was appointed to the Commission to review

the Poor Laws (1934) and was one of the principle re-drafters of the resultant

legislation. He became the main economic adviser of the Whigs and a political economist

to whom history has been kinder with her attentions than to our present subject,

Whately32. Senior was often acting as a conduit for Copleston and Whately’s views.

Waterman goes as far as to say that “in a nutshell, the essential Oxford contribution to

Christian Political Economy lay in Copleston’s correction of Malthus’ economics and

Whately’s correction of Paley’s ethics” (Waterman, 1991 p215).

5.10 Conclusions

This chapter has sought, using contextualist methods, to engage deeply with the

intellectual life of the Noetics. To understand the influences that formed their mental

universe, and how they applied this in their collaborations in the development of

theory, philosophy and reform programmes. The discussion has confirmed one of the

central contentions of this research paper: that the Noetics were bearers of the same

virtue-ethics-political-economy tradition as Smith.

A subset of the Noetics, Copleston, Whately and Senior, were a school of political

economy within the broader Noetic tradition. They existed within the rubric of Christian

Political Economy, but had their own identity and conception, as revealed by their

divergence from Paley’s Christian utilitarianism. They differed from the Evangelical

wing of Christian Political Economy in that they were rationalists to the core. They

agreed on the scientific value of deductive political economy, relying on the discernment

of the ‘good’ through other means, so they were hostile to the programme of the

Philosophical Radicals. They had a unique offering: a version of political economy

formed within a tradition of Noetic moral philosophy.

Chapter 6  The Whatelian ‘Cattalaxy - Virtue Synthesis’6.1 Introduction

This chapter builds toward the final presentation of the product of Whately’s

combination of political economy and moral philosophy, his ‘Catallaxy-Virtue Synethsis’,

which focused as much on virtue and knowledge, as wealth.

First, Whately’s grand strategy “war on two fronts” (Waterman 1991, p206), will be laid

out. Secondly, his newly named “catallactics, the science of exchange”, will be reviewed.

This will include: the scope he proposed for this science, the refocusing of political

economy based on a social understanding of human nature and the distinction between

scientific and moral knowledge; the promise and purpose of the new science; the

method for its conduct; and the deductively derived laws it yields. Finally, the dynamics

of knowledge and virtue creation: social desire; emulation; approbation; reason;

fairness and transparency. Within the small compass of this paper, only two of

Whately’s interventions are considered: (1) his mid-wivery of the science of economics

(covered in Introductory Lectures to Political Economy (delivered in 1831 published in

1832); and, (2) his direct attack on the utilitarians by correcting Paley’s doctrine of

Christian utilitarianism on whose coat tails they had ridden into mainstream

acceptance33.

6.2 A war on two fronts

Richard Whately was a pugnacious man, who charted a course through the Scylla of the

nostalgic evangelicals, with their “post Malthusian economics of sin”, and the Charybdis

of the ‘amoral’ utilitarians, who “sought to annex political economy to their own

subversive ends”(A.M.C. Waterman 1991b, p. 207). Whately’s ends were divine, but as

to means, he took the world as he found it; “political economy as natural theology”,

where the design of the universe reflected the munificence of the creator who had

endowed man with the social instinct for cooperation and reciprocity and therefore

exchange and commerce. He believed that the pragmatic consequence of this new

commercial society would be the capacity for virtue, moral restraint, benevolence and

generosity.

While optimistic by nature, Whately saw little hope of converting the radicals to

Christianity and instead sought to challenge the least tenable of their “avowedly

atheistic” doctrines. He thought better of his prospects of persuading the “high-church

men” of the concordance of political economy with natural theology and the

improvement of society (A.M.C. Waterman 1991a, p. 207). By 1820 the storm over

Malthus supposed theodicy had been met by the work-around provided by Paley,

Sumner and Copleston. Other than the most intransigent romantics (the Lake poets and

their circle), mainstream Christian opinion settled down. The real threat was now the

Philosophical Radical’s plan to hijack the new science for their utilitarian reform

programme. Having established the Westminster Review in 1824 and the University of

London in1826 to propagate their views, Bentham, James Mill and their allies (including

Ricardo until his death in 1823), were gaining the ascendancy in harnessing the new

science of political economy to the cause of ‘radical’ reform.

6.3  Whatelian political economy – a ‘Catallaxy of wealth, virtue and knowledge’  

 “As the world always has been, and must be, governed by political economists,

whether they have called themselves so or not, and whether skilful or unskilful; so,

there must always be a tendency, in a country where all stations are open to men of

superior qualifications – there must always, I say, be a tendency, in proportion to

intellectual culture spreads, towards the placing of his power in the hands of those

who have most successfully studied the subject” (Whately 1832, vi)

Senior’s appointment as the Inaugural Drummond Chair was Whately’s idea, and the

lectures reflected their shared views and aspirations for the fledgling science. Despite

Senior’s influential lecture series, the climate against the science remained stormy.

Whately was painfully aware that many regarded Political economy, in Senior’s words:

“with a mixture of dread and contempt – as a set of arbitrary and fanciful theories,

subversive of religion and morality” (Senior 1827, p. 171). Whately now sought to use

his considerable personal intellectual stature, that of the institution to which he

belonged, Oxford, and his religious vows, all in the service of the new science he

believed in so deeply and accepted the Chair following Senior (Whately 1832, vi).

Whately’s lectures were an apologia for economic science. In his introductory lectures,

he made the argument that political economy and theology are distinct,

incommensurable and non-competing fields of enquiry. This critical distinction for him

is that between theory and practice. Political economy as hypothetical learning was

valid and to be protected on the grounds that it can never have a negative moral impact

on society. However, when it came to the implementation of policy, far more careful

concern and investigation was required.

In these lectures, Whately’s also took the opportunity to create a bright line between

‘scientific’ and ‘religious’ knowledge. This line laid the foundation of methodological

orthodoxy in political economy and in what is now called ‘economics’. Precisely because

of Whately’s demarcation, deductive political economy came to be seen as a distinct and

non-competing inquiry from the moral philosophy and theology from which it derived.

Scripture now had a different role: “Scripture is not the test by which the conclusions of

Science are to be tried”, its purpose rather “is to reveal to us religious and moral truths”

(Whately 1832, p19-20). Scripture is one source, there are others, and one of the tasks

of education is to build the mind and the moral truths:

…must be admitted with considerable modification. God has not revealed to us a

system of morality such as would have been needed for Beings who had no other

means of distinguishing right and wrong. On the contrary, the inculcation of

virtue and reprobation of vice in Scripture are in such a tone as seems to

presuppose a natural power, or a capacity for acquiring the power, to distinguish

them. (Whately 1832, p 19-20)

Hypotheticals are one thing, real action another. Whately, like Senior, J.S Mill and

Malthus:

“In their different ways, all of these figures adopted a more restricted – or perhaps it

was simply safer and tidier – view of the scope of the ‘pure’ science of political economy,

one that made a firmer distinction between ethically neutral questions of the

hypothetical science and its far from ethically neutral applications to final goals or

policy” (Winch 1996, p399).

6.4  Reading ‘the great book of human transactions’

In these lectures, Whately sought to recast the scope of study of political economy, away

from its origins from the Greek for ‘household management’, oeconomia, to Catallactics,

a Greek word which simply translated to English means ‘exchange’34. A richer

translation, however, includes connotations of ‘reciprocity’, ‘mutual reward’ and it is

clear that Whately intended these (Whately, 1832, Levy & Peart, 2010). Whately sought

to restore the social to the frame and to evoke directly the spontaneous order,

conceived by Divine wisdom, which market-exchange represented. Whately defined

man as an animal that trades, which behaviour flowed from our profoundly social

nature: “there are few, perhaps none, who deny Man to be by nature a social Being,

incapable, except in community, of exercising or developing his most important and

most characteristic faculties” (Whately 1832, p59). He quotes Aristotle and Cicero in his

justification:

  “Both of these writers stood opposed to those, of their own times, who

represented the social union as expedient…. They both agreed that social union,

is not formed by men with a view to those advantages, but from an instinctive

propensity…that without society, though a man should possess all other goods,

life would not be worth living” (Whately 1832, p59)35.

Whately speaks of the new science which will teach people “to read the great book of

human transactions”, a science “concerned universally, and exclusively, with exchange”

(Whately 1832, p6). In fact, if there is no one to exchange with, a Robinson Crusoe

situation for example, then wealth creation and economising is outside the scope of

political economy (Whately 1832). For Whately man is a beneficiary of trade, not an

economiser: homo catallacticus not homo economicus.

Echoes of Newtonian natural theology abound in Whately’s treatise. Everywhere we see

the wisdom of providence in having made us social, rational and free, abounds:

the “marks of contrivance  with a view to a beneficial end, as we are accustomed

to admire (when our attention is drawn to the study of Natural Theology) …the

beneficent wisdom of Providence, to contemplate, not corporeal particles, but

rational free agents, co-operating in systems no less manifestly indicating design,

yet no design of theirs; and though acted on, not by gravitation and impulse, like

inert matter, but by motives addressed to the will, yet advancing as regularly and

effectually the accomplishment of an object they never contemplated, as if they

were merely the passive wheels of a machine” (Whately 1832, p54).

Self-love and benevolence commuted to public benefit, just as God intended. He also

analogises political economy with medicine, which would not have risen but for disease.

The new science rises to understand the impediments to “good health” to restore “full

liberty from “unjust interference” and “perfect freedom of intercourse between all

mankind” (Whately 1832, p54). Finally, like Smith (1776), he gives us the example of

the city, marvel of “supplying with daily provisions of all kinds such a city as our

metropolis containing above a million of inhabitants”. Whately challenges us to put

ourselves in the role of central planners and consider the “anxious toil which such a task

would impose on a Board of the most experienced and intelligent commissaries” and, as

history records, would achieve nothing like the same efficiency (Whately 1832, p60).

6.5  ‘In Virtue, True Wisdom and Happiness’

Whately made the consideration of virtue and moral improvement even more explicit

than Smith. Like Smith, he believed that the telos, the end of the human animal was

moral improvement; wealth its means. Whately supplemented the essential core of this

economistic theology with accounts of the human capacity for improvement, the

progress of civilised society, in knowledge and virtue, the benefits of emulation and

social sentiments. This is how he reconciled wealth and virtue.

Although Whately made clear that the “strict object of political economy is to inquire

only into the nature, production, and distribution of wealth; not, its connexion with

virtue or with happiness” (Whately 1832, p32) and that “such an enquiry would be

more suitable in an ethics treatise” (Whately 1832, p96), he also argued, like Smith

(McCloskey 2008; Phillipson 2010) that the purpose of all of the moral sciences was to

unlock the secrets of civil moral progress. His framework is the question, what advances

civilisation? That there is a hierarchy of civilisations, based on their moral attainment is

axiomatic: “the apparent design of Providence evidently is, the advancement of

mankind, not only as Individuals but as Communities” (Whately 1832, p67). That this

moral attainment and progress transcends wealth is essential to the Whatelian

conception. In a lecture entitled Progress of Society in Wealth:

“It appears that Society…has a tendency, so far as wars, unwise institutions,

imperfect and oppressive laws, and other such obstacles, do not interfere, to

advance, in Wealth and in the Arts which pertain to human life and enjoyment”

(Whately 1832, p104). 

As society’s increase in wealth, more energy is devote to nobler causes: “a devotedness

to temporal objects is no characteristic of a more wealthy and civilised, as distinct from

a more barbarian, state of society” and “in a civilised life [emulation] is frequently

directed (however seldom in comparison with what it should be) to many nobler

objects” (Whately 1832, p96). Whately argued for wealth as a good.

Just as science was not an enemy of God, so wealth was not an enemy of virtue but its

ally. “as the Most High has evidently formed Society with a tendency to advancement in

National Wealth, so, He has designed and fitted us to advance, by means of that, in

Virtue, and true Wisdom, and Happiness” (Whately 1832, p119).

6.6 The Catallaxy explained 

This section explains Whately’s proposed method for the conduct of the new science as

well as the key economic insights he affirmed in lectures I and III (Whately 1832).

Whately was a firm proponent of deductive theory. He believed the axiomatic principles

of political economy were few and could be gleaned from rational observation of the

world. The science required two things: data from which we are to reason; and

correctness in the process of deducing conclusions from the data. He invokes Bacon, and

describes a spectrum of sciences between mathematics, in which no induction is

required, and geology, which relies on the collection of information. Political economy,

he explains, is a branch of natural philosophy to be found half-way between the two. In

political economy, facts are few and simple. The challenge is the need to collect the

information on the context, before any policy prescription is applied. He compares this

to mechanics or geometry where knowledge of the laws does not suffice, measurement

of the site of work is all critical. The challenge of economics is the application of the facts

of political economy to the particular context in the real world, which must be measured

and understood.

In terms of economic analysis, and what drives the increase in national wealth,

Whately’s introductory lecture did not contain a great deal of new material. He affirms

the centrality of security of property and quotes extensively from Sumner (1818) and

elaborates in his own words:

‘I have spoken of security of property as the most essential point, because,

though no progress can be made without a division of labour, this could neither

exist without security of property, nor could fail to arise with it’ (Whately 1832,

86-7).

He quoted vast tranches of Smith (WON) about the division of labour, money and trade

and explains the power of each. (Whately 1832, p105).

Whately also emerges as an early opponent of the labour theory of value, “pearls fetch a

high price because men have dived for them; but on the contrary, men dive for them

because they fetch a high price” (Whately 1832, p167). He is also vociferous against war

and an advocate of ‘trade not war’ as the best means to national prosperity and security

through raising the gains of trade (Whately 1832 p112). It is also claimed he is the first

to consider rent, interest and wages reflect different aspects of the more general

problem asset pricing (Rashid 1977 p153)..

6.7  Progress of Knowledge

Where Whately’s political economy does add dimensions of new analysis, is in his

understanding of the psychology and economics of knowledge creation. He is acutely

aware of the heuristic impediments to decision making. If “logic is the grammar of

reasoning”, (Whately 1849, p5) then attacking the logical fallacies which had hitherto

linked poverty with moral goodness was correcting the vocabulary of ideas. He also

attacks the “noble savage” conceptions of the continent and he urges us to make wealth

and its products “goods to us, by studying to use them aright, and to promote, through

them, the best interests of ourselves and our fellow creatures” (Whately 1832, p38). 

Throughout the text he uncovers numerous other fallacies and errors of reasoning

which impair individual and collective decision making. This is Whately’s gospel, and it

applies to all classes, nothing will be as beneficent to the wealth of nations as good

reasoning. For Whately, logic itself is a social enterprise. Logic trades in meaning, and

meaning has a social context; passing bad arguments in the rhealm of ideas, is no

different from fraud in the material world (Levy & Peart 2010). In the Whatelian

catallaxy, fallacies are sinful. Whately, was no fan of long causal chains. Levy (2010)

describes his model for “kattalactic rationality” based on self-love “subject to a

reciprocity constraint” thus:

“a society of fair-minded individuals, each with their own presuppositions and

biases, as the nexus of fallacy detection stands in contrast to the platonic vision

of experts who free themselves from pre-suppositions and bias and consequently

have no need for fairness” (Levy & Peart 2010, p176).

This adds depth to the picture of the clerisy Whately had in mind which bears further

reflection beyond our scope here.

To summarise or our purposes now, knowledge is created, and fallacies cleansed

because of a mix of our self-love, and desire to win praise, and to be praiseworthy; our

desire to emulate those we admire and to receive their approbation; and because of our

sheer love of knowledge and truth. Whately:

“desire of gaining knowledge, a desire (found, I imagine, on sympathy) of

communicating it to others, as an ultimate end. This, and also the love of display,

are, no doubt, inferior motives, and will be superceded by a higher principle, in

proportion as the individual advances in moral excellences” (Whately 1832,

p106).

Here he highlights both the social dimensions of the desire to create knowledge, as well

as his vision of moral improvement that he assumes we attain as we, and the society

around us, know more; another virtuous circle.

6.8 Correcting Paley’s moral errors

We turn now to the war on the other front; smiting the utilitarians. The Philosophic

Radicals based their programme of reform on Bentham’s secularised version of Paley’s

utilitarian ethics (Crimmins 1989). Whately made a major contribution to virtue ethics

when he corrected the most influential moral philosophical tract of the day, Paley’s

Moral Philosophy: With Annotations (Whately 1859). This was Whately’s second most

influential book (after Elements of Logic 1826). Paley was the Christian orthodox vessel

on which the philosophical radicals entered mainstream waters. For the utilitarians, the

analysis of scientific reform sufficed, the only analysis to be done was of consequences

and these could be judged scientifically. Moral considerations had been thus eliminated.

For Whately they were correct in regarding political economy as a valuable instrument

for implementing the social values which should guide public policy, but they were

wrong to suppose “that the hedonistic calculus can be a reliable source of (or substitute

for) those values. Only a moral sense preferably illuminated by Holy Scripture can

determine those ends to which political economy is the only means” (Waterman 1991,

p210).

Whately’s battle was fought on the pages of his annotation of Paley’s text which he

thought laid the foundations of Moral Philosophy for “many hundreds – probably

thousands – of Youth while under a course of training designed to qualify them for

being afterwards the Moral instructors of Millions… therefore cannot fail to exercise a

very considerable and extensive influence on the Minds of successive generations”

(Whately 1832, preface i). His principal correction:

“man according to him [Paley], has no moral faculty, - no power of distinguishing

right from wrong, - no preference of justice to injustice, or kindness to cruelty,

excepts when one’s own personal interest happens to be concerned. ….The truth,

I conceive, is actually the reverse of this, viz., that Man having in himself a Moral-

faculty…by which he is instinctively led to approve virtue and disapprove of vice.

(Whately 1859, p. 77).

Whately describes the ‘calculations of utility’ which cannot discern goodness as being

unsurprisingly met with disgust (Whately 1859, p. 42). In a materialistic universe

presupposed by Bentham (Crimmins 1989) human pleasure and pain are reducible to

the interaction of ‘discrete physical objects’. The effect of this can be evaluated –

subjectively and provisionally - by each individual. But without some of the necessarily

theological understanding of a ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ to human life, it is impossible for

anyone to be sure about the value even of his own pleasures and pains, let alone those

of anyone else. This is Whately’s challenge to Paley:

“For as the believer in God is at a loss to account for the existence of evil, the

believer of no God is equally unable to account for the existence of good, or

indeed anything at all that bears the mark of design (Whately 1859, p68).

Absent an innate ‘moral sense’ men and women are impotent to discern good from evil

in their own lives, let alone comparisons with others, or between societies. The

Benthamite system “can afford no information about what ought to be in public affairs;

and his advocacy of political economy in policy formation is at best unhelpful and at

worst a mere fraud” (Waterman 1991, p 215). This inability to explain the good is the

central deficiency of utilitarian ethics and remains unanswered to this day.

Whately thought he had dealt a decisive blow against the Philosophical Radicals and

their utilitarian programme. Intellectually he had. But science doesn’t occur in a

vacuum, it is subject to the themes and currents of the culture in which it is set. One

wonders whether he was aware that it was the moral authority of the Christian clerisy

that was about to suffer the mortal blow. Whately’s critique of utilitarianism was

published weeks before the release of a book of epochal importance, Charles Darwin’s

(1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of

Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Whately and the Noetics had a lot riding on

Paley’s “argument from design” God, and the ‘Watchmaker’ was to prove no match for

the atavistic randomness of natural selection in the court of public opinion. Whately’s

critique of utilitarianism, flowing as it did from ‘argument from design’ theology, and

tainted by association as the product of the Christian clerisy, can perhaps be regarded

as collateral damage in the explosion of the Origin of Species onto the landscape.

6.9 The Whatelian Virtue synthesis – a virtuous circle

This chapter has presented all of the building blocks that now allow us to present the

Whatelian Cattalaxy-Virtue Synthesis in the formation of economic policy. In summary

terms:

End:     Increase in virtue - moral progress of society.

Means:    The catallaxy: the social system for exchange

Tenets:

1.     The human is a reciprocating social animal who instinctively engages in social

interactions driven by sympathy and survival including trade in goods and services,

sharing, knowledge creation and other forms of value creation.

2.     The focus of the science should be exchange, reciprocity and cooperation at the social

level, not economising.

3.     Divine providence and the social instinct combine to create this exchange dynamic.

The pursuits of individuals, through exchange, produce social benefits. Private property,

the division of labour and specialisation lead to increases in wealth. Free self-organising

exchange will lead to more international trade which will reduce the incentive for, and

benefits of, wars.

4.     Before applying deductively derived economic laws (science) to a particular context,

the dynamics and measurements of that context must be thoroughly understood, as well

as the moral consequences of the action. Science is one thing, policy another. 

5.     The end of each human life is moral improvement and there is a hierarchy of moral

states. The end of societies and communities is to reach states of higher moral

attainment and commercial societies which increase wealth are the means.

6.     Wealth and virtue are not in opposition. Increasing wealth which brings comfort will,

in the main, increase the proportion of human activity which is applied to higher

pursuits beyond survival. As wealth increases, the stock of knowledge and human virtue

will increase; a virtuous circle.

7.     At the individual level, as humans develop, there is a tendency as for them to do a

higher proportion of things that are beneficial beyond their own survival like create

knowledge. As they develop and mature, so do their motivations and moral attaintment.

Education and enlightenment of both spiritual and scientific truths (including political

economy) lead to practical and moral improvement (which are correlated in any event).

8.     All forms of knowledge – moral, reasoning power, scientific knowledge - are forms of

wealth. Humans can develop character which is developed through acquisition of

knowledge, reasoning power and moral imagination and the practice of the virtues until

they become innate.

9.     Distinctions between types of knowledge are important in the pursuit of truth. The

division of knowledge into ‘scientific knowledge’ from observation and

experimentation, and ‘moral knowledge’ from revealed religion and the human moral

faculty is essential. 

10.     A morally informed, elite clerisy is required to aid in the discernment of the good for

the society, and to guide the knowledge sets that individuals should attain. However,

there will be an open public contest for knowledge which will destroy fallacies in a free,

rational debate.

 

This is a unique conception and articulation of classical, Christian Political Economy

in the mainstream Smithian tradition. It highlights certain dimensions of social life

and human purpose, which are perhaps more implicit here, rendered more clearly

by this Noetic moral philosopher a generation or two post-Smith.

Chapter 7  ConclusionThis paper is designed to be both a portrait and an argument. A portrait of Richard

Whately in context, set against the intellectual and social landscape of his times. We

meet him with his collaborators at Oriel College, Oxford, drawing on their shared

intellectual inheritance and approach, engaged in the central philosophical contests of

the day.

It is an argument for a close reading of texts and exploration of their language and

meaning in their historical context. A reading which in this instance, frames Richard

Whately and the Noetic intellectual product, as in the mainstream Smithian and virtue

ethics traditions.

To summarise what we have learned. Firstly, that the Noetics were informed by a

Newtonian natural theology God whose handiwork is revealed in the working of

complex natural and social systems. Secondly, that they shared a Christian moral

philosophy that embraced self-love as an essential duty, which, when combined with

our natural social sympathy, transforms private benefit into public benefit. Thirdly, that

the moral consequence of society itself is virtue, as we seek to know, share and create

knowledge, goods and forward progress. An illustration of Richard Whately’s Catallaxy-

Virtue-Synthesis has been provided in some detail. This is a unique conception of

political economy and moral analysis, done in separate stages, but which together can

bear the weight of guiding policy. This product is in the Smithian, as well as virtue

ethics-traditions which allowed me to respond to Deidre McCloskey’s (2008) contention

that Adam Smith was “the last of the former virtue ethicists” with Whately as a later

writer in this tradition.

In concluding, I wish to don the hat, not of an intellectual historian, nor a student of the

history of economics, but that of a cultural commentator. I seek to illustrate the

philosophical implications of Whately’s model. Whately argues that it is against the

standards of virtue, not utility, which we should assess the efficacy of the economic

system. His contention, that an economic system can and that the determination of

these ends is not the work of a political economist, or economist, but the work of a

moralist.

An economic system can be set to achieve different ends, for example:

Virtue  Utility  Pain minimisation

This is consistent with Robbins (1945) position36. The efficacy of the economic system

then should be assessed against the attainment of the specified ends: virtue was the end

sought by the Oriel Noetics (and it is argued, by Smith), utility was the end sought by the

utilitarians and other philosophers have argued for pain minimisation.

My final argument is that we live in an age which fails to properly discern the ends; an

age which has mistaken the need for a separation between scientific and moral

knowledge, which has descended into an age of ‘value-neutrality’. I argue that this age

while born as a consequence of the economic and political debates of the early

nineteenth century, leaves out essential dimensions conceived in the mind of its

midwives. The distinction between scientific and religious knowledge upon which our

age is based, had been “altogether absent in pre-Enlightenment social theory”

(Waterman 1991 p262). I argue that those who created the distinction, Whately being

the first to apply it to political economy, had no intention that means and ends be given

such inconsistent weight in the practice of “the science of the wise legislator”. They

assumed, and their programmes and practice demonstrate, that moral philosophy,

deductive logic and theology, were essential capabilities of those who would develop

and implement policy.  It is indeed ironic that their distinctions became the scaffolding

for the present paradigm. Whether by design or unconsciously, in our age, the collective

moral discernment in which the Noetics passionately engaged, has been ‘crowded out’

in the polities of late modernity, in favour of endless disputes over means37.

Whatever the ends, the economic system is but the means.

Modern economists, Robbins in particular have been called to reassert the distinction

between means and ends (Robbins 1945). Robbins explains that the Classical Political

Economists professed the body of scientific knowledge they called ‘political economy’ to

have laws derived from systematic enquiry into the “nature of economic relationships

and their mode of development in different circumstances” (Robbins 1953, p174) and

that with the exception of Physiocracy, that this was the first time a reform movement

based its prescriptions on the basis of systematically derived, scientific laws. He goes on

to make a critical point, consistent with the view of Whately, a view sometimes lost in

our contemporary context:

“You need goals as well – a general objective, a criterion of the expected results of

action. It is all very well to know how the world works, why certain relations emerge in

certain condition, how these relations change when conditions are altered. But unless

you have some test whereby you can distinguish good from bad, desirable from

undesirable, you are without an essential constituent of a theory of policy. You are like

the captain of a ship equipped with charts and compasses and all the means of

propulsion and steering, but without an assigned destination. A theory of economic

policy, in the sense of a body of precepts for action, must take its ultimate criterion from

outside economics. (Robbins 1953, pp. 176-177).

From Whately’s starting point the observation of laws, when applied in the context of

the social world, meant context and consequences needed to be taken into account

against standards of social virtue, not utility.  Whately buttressed the importance and

need for political economy to deliver its value-free analysis of what actually occurs. On

the battle-front with the Philosophical Radicals, he exhorted that “political economy by

itself can be of no use in the formation of public policy, additional value premises are

necessary. Athiesm has as much difficulty supplying value premises (‘the good’) as

religion has in justifying evil and that knowledge of the good may come from scripture

but cannot be had from utilitarian principles alone” (Waterman 1991, p32). Whately

“explicated the scope and method of political economy” as a corollary of his

epistemology the dimension of science is value free including enquires into the nature,

distribution and production of wealth, but not its connection to virtue and happiness

(Waterman 1991, p13).

With the Evangelicals on one side and Philosophical Radicals on the other, Whately

conceived of this third way: Aristotelian in its social conception; Newtonian in its

dynamic complexity; grounded not in the scarcity of Malthusian gloom but in the gains

to be had by cooperation, reciprocity, exchange and trade. This is a vision of homo

catallacticus, not homo economicus and it which deserves a much closer reading in our

times.

For Whately, precisely because it is a value-free means and nothing more, a discernment

of ends is also required. Means are necessary, but not sufficient. They cannot be sought

by science, but must be sought among religious and moral truths, beyond the Bible, but

also from study by those in the clerisy, trained to play the role of moral philosophers in

society. Whately’s conception was perhaps more complete than ours. We are left with

the question for our times, who or what should comprise the clerisy, and what role

should economists play within it?

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1 Since the rise of the cities of Babylon four thousand years ago all societies have had, at the centre of political life, the ends to which they aspired and have celebrated the virtues best suited to attaining these ends. Macintrye (2007) starts the story with the Greeks.

2 Taken from T.B. Macaulay’s phrase (1829) and quoted in Collini, Winch, Burrow (1983 p v): “…that noble science of politics which, of all sciences, is the most important to the welfare of nations, - which, of all the sciences, most tends to expand and invigorate the mind, - which draws nutriment and ornament from every part of philosophy and literature, and dispenses in return, nutriment and ornament to all”. This ‘science of politics’ was interchangeable with “philosophy, which could prize systematic knowledge and objectivity in

the assignment of causal influences, but it did not entail anxiety to achieve what a late nineteenth century generation of social sciences would call ‘value-neutrality’” (Collini et al. 1983, p14).

3 This is the opening line in the novel The Go Between by Lesley Hartley (1953).

4 In Samuelson’s terms it could be called, ‘Whig history’.

5 Donald Winch is an intellectual historian of long standing who has produced several important studies of the political and economic debates of the nineteenth-century (Wealth and Life, 2009, Riches and Poverty 1996).

6 See Moore (2011) for an introduction to the “Sussex Three” who constitute the Sussex School. Donald Winch, Stefano Collini and John Burrows are at times, and in jest, known as ‘Burrincini” Their’s is a collegial enterprise since they shared a base at the University of Sussex between the terms of Prime Minister Wilson and Prime Minister Thatcher. Moore (2011) illustrates ten features of the Sussex school.

7  This is the term elucidated by Collingwood (1939, 1946)

8 In fact, when Coleridge coined the term ‘the clerisy’, in his influential essay On the Constitution of the Church and State, he was speaking of the Oxford dons who then acted as the filters of knowledge in the Britain of 1830. The leading figures amongst this class were of course, the Noetics. Here he conceived of “the support and maintenance of a permanent class or order…to remain at the fountain heads of the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical and moral science; (Coleridge, 1830) pp43-45.

9 This picture of a broadly popular monarchy and the role of the Church of England as a symbol of national unity was novel when presented in 1985. Clark sought to redress the excesses of both the whig and the Marxist interpretations of the early nineteenth century. Both of these portraits had excluded religion as a shaping force in the society of the period. Clark’s purpose was to clarify this critical understanding: “my aim throughout has been to reintegrate religion into an historical vision which has been almost wholly positivist; to discard economic reductionism; to emphasise the importance of politics in social history, and to argue against the familiar picture of eighteenth century England as the era of bourgeois individualism by showing the persistence of the ancien regime until 1828-1832, and the autonomous importance of religion and politics in its final demise” (Clark 1985, ppix-x).

10 These fears were not altogether unwarranted. The Cato Street Conspiracy (1820) was an unsuccessful attempt to kill most of the Members of Cabinet and overthrow the government and precipitate a French-style revolution. This widely publicised event contributed to the perception of precariousness

11 Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, (1764 –1845), also known as Viscount Howick was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 22 November 1830 to 16 July 1834. He was a member of the Whig Party and the leader of the group known as the “Foxite liberals”. For a character sketch see Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Warren Hastings’, Edinburgh Review LXXIV (October, 1941), pp. 160–255.

12 The laws were introduced by the Importation Act 1815 (55 Geo. 3 c. 26) and repealed by the Importation Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict. c. 22)

13 Whately was a major figure of the period. There are three principal biographies recounting his life and no autobiography. The first of these was William John Fitzpatrick’s Memoirs of Whately, 2 vols (London, 1864). The second was a biography and collection of correspondence written and edited by Whately’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth Jane Whately. This was published as The Life and Correspondence of Whately, 2 vols. (London, 1866). More recently, Donald Harman Akenson (1981) wrote A Protestant in Purgatory The Conference of British Studies biography series. (new series) 2. The National Dictionary of Biography, 1885-1900 by James McMullen Rigg contains a five thousand word entry on Whately’s life and work. This account identifies him as an “indpenedent liberal”, social science pioneer, anti-evangelical, advocate of the rights of dissenters, Catholics and Jews, outstanding teacher, social science pioneer and reformer of tertiary education. There is an entry on Whately in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, viii: 287-8 by Mary Prior and an entry in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Online), by R.D. Collison Black. The most felicitous of the available portraits of Whately is the chapter on him in Pre-Tractarian Oxford: A Reminiscence of the Noetics by Tuckwell (1909). There is a stipple-engraved portrait of him in the National Museum and he sat for a portrait by Catterson Smith which is in the Royal Hibernian Academy. We are left with all two million words of his writing. According to World Cat Identities, there are 765 works in 2,131 publications in 16 languages and 16,151 library holdings of his work. The largest single collection of Whately’s papers is held at the Library of Oriel College, Oxford.

14 There has been speculation in the literature as to whether Whately had a mild case of Asperger’s syndrome, or some other disorder of the autism spectrum (Moore, GC & White, M.2009)

15 Footnote one gives references for all of these.

16 Tuckwell’s book, Pre-tractarian Oxford – A reminiscence of the ‘Noetics’ (1909) is a first guide to the life and times of the Noetics. Winch’s opus, Riches and Poverty – An intellectual history of political economy in Britain 1750-1834 and the collaborative product of the “Sussex three” The Noble Science of Politics. A study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (1983) and Burrow’s A Liberal Descent Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981). Another hallmark book in this research is Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement – The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785-1865 (1986). It is an essential contextual

corrective to the prior neglect of evangelicalism in particular, and religion more generally, in the formation of intellectual currents through the nineteenth century. Hilton tells us that as the image of God morphed so too did the politics and political economy. In analysing this period, it is important not to fall for what Forbes (1975) referred to as the “fallacy of premature secularisation”.

17 He refers to Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (both published posthumously in 1818) , or to his personal favourite, Sense and Sensibility (1811). In these pages we can picture the society he perceived himself to be living in. The bumbling churchmen, scheming mothers, noble and ignoble aristocrats, precariously positioned lower-gentry, the changes in who was wealthy and the sources of wealth, the social ‘sudden death’ of financial (or moral ruin), and, importantly,  the triumph of the truly, not seemingly, virtuous.  We have it then on good authority, his own, that this was the world he perceived himself to be living in. Whately compares, favourably, Austen to Homer and Shakespeare and praises her capacity for drama and suspense.  The scholarly literature confirms that Whately’s review (along with the contemporaneous one by Walter Scott) was the most significant criticism published before the end of the nineteenth century. Whately and Scott had set the the tone for the view of Austen held by the Victorians. (Waldron2001,p 89–90, Duffy 1954p97, Watt 1963,p4–5).

18 Whately continued, throughout his career, to publish on religious belief and the right model of Church governance for Anglicanism. This writing was widely read and reviewed in the major periodicals of the day. They were not marginal concerns, but central political issues of the day. In 1825 he published a series of Essays on Some of the Peculiarities of the Christian Religion, followed in 1828 by a second series On some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St Paul, and in 1830 by a third On the Errors of Romanism traced to their Origin in Human Nature.

19 “Will no one rid me of this turbulent Priest” Henry the VIII of Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Cantebury (1162-1170).

20 The Foxites shared Whately belief in Erastianism (separate governance of Church and State), however, this was to be Whately’s great disappointment in life. He wrote many letters to Grey on models for Church reform and especially on the establishment of a Commission which would examine the options and plan a course. This was Whately’s principal desire, and in many respects he took the position of Archbishop of Dublin in order to advance this cause. Grey, who even here alludes to his intention for ‘zealous cooperation’ doesn’t deliver, and no Commission is ever called and there is no change in Whately’s lifetime to separate the governance of Church and State. (Akenson, 1981. de Giustino, 2003)

21 The span of this paper precludes proper treatment of this critical contribution by Whately to Irish events and debates. He is considered “the Father of economic science in Ireland” Black, RD 1945, 'Trinity College, Dublin, and the Theory of Value, 1832-1863', Economica, vol. 12, no. 47, pp. 140-148.. The first four Whately Chairs in Political Economy who he hand selected and whose salaries he paid – Mountifort Longfield, Isaac Butt, J A Lawson and W Neilson Hancock – have been called “the Dublin School” ibid.. Schumpeter said of them, they were “men who wrote above their time.  (as quoted in Hollander .  Hollander also links the “Longfield-Senior

group”, who, like Whately, rejected a labour theory of value and advocated a utility theory of value. Longfield’s exposition of diminishing degrees of intensity of demand laid the foundations for the formal doctribe of marginal utility theory prior to its presentation by Jevons, Menger and Walras ibid.. Later appointments to the Chair included John Elliot Cairnes and Francis Bastable. Cairnes published the influential The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy (1857), considered to have been produced under the influence of Whately and Senior ibid., Hollander, S 1977, 'Smith and Ricardo: Aspects of the Nineteenth-Century Legacy', The American Economic Review, vol. 67, no. 1, pp. 37-41..

22 Both drew on the earlier work of another Oriel man, Joseph Butler (1736) and his Analogy of Religion.

23 Paley’s principal writings on this theme were in Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy which first appeared in 1785 and had numerous editions, Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802). Whately challenges critical elements of the Principles while affirming its broader tenets. Bishop Sumner (1816) wrote A Treatise on the Records of Creation and the Moral Attributes of the Creator which was very influential.

24 Surely it was an “impiously blasphemous assertion, that the Almighty brings more beings into the world than he prepared nourishment for”. (Eclectic Review 1832as quoted in Waterman AMC (2008). Malthus a better economist than he was a theologian and his theodicy (the implication of 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population was that God let all these people be born in the world for which there was no sustenance and who would then suffer. Sumner re-introduced the orthodox Butlerian human life on earth as a “state of discipline and trial (denied by Malthus in 1798) that and then.

25 In fact, JM Keynes speculates whether or not it should really be Paley who is regarded as ‘the first of the Cambridge economists”. In an essay on Malthus he states:“I wish I could have included some account of Paley among these Essays. For Paley, so little appreciated now, was for a generation or more an intellectual influence on Cambridge only second to Newton. Perhaps, in a sense, he was the first of the Cambridge economists. If anyone will take up again Paley's Principles, he will find, contrary perhaps to his expectation, an immortal book”. (J. M. Keynes, Essays in Biography)

26 The moral sense school are a group of philosophers with a meta-ethics in which morality is grounded in moral sentiments and emotions. It commenced with the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), John Locke’s student who wrote in opposition to his famous tutor. Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) imparted the tradition to both David Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790). Major works of the school include: the works of Shaftesburty, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (first published in an unauthorized edition in 1699); Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good (1725, the works of, Treatise II of An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue) and An Essay On the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, With Illustrations Upon the Moral Sense (1728); Hume, Sections of Book 3 of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751); Adam Smith The TMS (1759) which explored various sentiments that make up the moral feelings that ground moral judgments, that combined provides the moral sense. This understanding was carried forward by Hutcheson, Smith, Hume and Burke in theory, and Wesley and other leaders of social movements of the nineteenth century, in practice26 (Himmelfarb, 2004)

27 Macintyre (2007) provides an account of how the virtue-ethics tradition was lived and embodied in societies from the Greeks until the 18th century when, for the first time in recorded history, a variation on the tradition ceased to be at the conscious centre of human societies through history, except our own.

28 Why was ethics taken out of Smith? Because virtue ethics represents an obsolete type of ethics which “somewhat mysteriously disappeared from academic circles after the 6th and final and substantially revised edition of Smith’s own favourite of his two published books, The TMS (1759, 1790)” (McCloskey 2008, p43-44). The replacement of virtue ethics in intellectual circles by: Kant (1785); and Bentham (1789); other programmes including the Natural rights tradition of Locke and Pufendorf; and the new contractarian theories of Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes; saw a crowding out of the far older ethical tradition, the virtue-ethical tradition.

29 Smith’s theory would be based on the observation of human nature and human history, “a science which would not explain the principles of social organisation to be found in different types of society, but would explain the principles of government and legislation that ought to be followed by enlightened rulers who wanted to extend the liberty and happiness of their subjects and the wealth and power of their dominions” (Phillipson, 2010, p2). Phillipson illuminates this ‘Science of Man’ project that Smith had learnt from Hutcheson and Hume.

30 We can confirm this from their various biographies and acknowledgements of one another. As we have seen, Whately acknowledges Copleston as co-author and creator of his most influential work Elements of Logic (1826). Whately also acknowledges the contribution of J.H. Newman in the drafting of this work. Furthermore, Newman claimed in his memoir, that Whately had left a deep intellectual impression on him (Newman, 1864). Finally, and perhaps with greatest long-term impact, Whately was the mentor and life-long friend of the most influential educator of the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Arnold. We have already heard of Arnold’s assessment of Whately’s character. To add to this, Stanley’s (1901) Life of Arnold profiles Arnold’s gratitude to his former teacher:  “And he used to look back to a visit to Dr Whately…as a marked era in the formation of his views, especially as opening to his mind, or impressing upon it more strongly, some of the opinions on which he afterwards laid so much stress with regard to the Christian Priesthood”. Arnold’s debt to Whately was also written into the preface of his first published book of sermons.

31 Although Thomas Arnold, for example, concentrated on the application of rigour in the study of history and classics; education more broadly including the preparation of minds for leadership;  issues of Church and State governance; he validated the pursuit of the laws of political economy by others in the group. Similarly with Hinds who pursued epistemology, and others in the group who were theologians and Biblical scholars.

32 Senior was the only professional economist of the group and he has left us his Drummond lectures including the influential Two Lectures on Population with a Correspondence between the Author and T.R. Malthus and numerous other manuscripts, letters and

contributions. Senior was a frequent publisher in the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review and he published a major work, Outline of the Science of Political Economy.

 

33 Whately’s Annotations to Paley’s Moral Philosophy (1849) although finally published after our study period, was conceived within it.

34 Interestingly, this proposal was taken up by many others over the years (Lawson 1843, Hancock 1849, Patrick Plough [Pseudonym]1842, Schumpeter 1908, 1954, Von Mises 1954,  The success of these various forays is sympathetically explored in Kirzner (1960).

35 Hes goes as far as to claim that if Aristotle had been trying to express his meaning, he would have been likely to employ the term as well (Whately, 1832, p4, 58-59).

36 It is not the least implied that economists should not deliver themselves of ethical questions, any more than an argument that botany is not aesthetics is to say that botanists should not have views of their own on the lay-out of gardens. On the contrary, it is greatly to be desired that economists should have speculated long and widely on these matters, since only in this way will they  be in a position to appreciate the implications as regards given ends of problems which are put to them for a solution (Robbins 1945, p149-150).

37 This critique is made by Macintyre (1981, 2007); Taylor (2008); Himmelfarb (2004).