Joyce Appleby
Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s
1984
Appleby begins this series of (Phelps) lectures with an anecdote about an 1865 attempt to create a Cambridge University lectureship in American studies. It was defeated, she says, because the dons feared the republicanism undergraduates might spread among the general public, at a time when British republicanism in the form of the Reform League looked particularly unsettling to the ruling class. Richard Cobden remarked that no “Oxford of Cambridge undergraduate...could have pointed out Chicago on a map even though it was a city that indirectly fed a million Englishmen.” (1)
Appleby shares with Cobden a sense of the importance of economic facts that was probably lacking among educated Englishmen in 1865. She argues in these lectures that both the facts of economic change and the revolutionary changes in economic thinking pioneered by Adam Smith were more legitimately the property of Jeffersonian Republicans than of Hamiltonian Federalists. In spite of a tradition that would cast Jefferson as an anti-capitalist agrarian, Appleby says the real division was between a party that looked forward (with Smith and Jefferson) to progress based on natural, rational self-interest, and a backward-looking “classical” republicanism (she doesn’t mention Adams, but this seems to fit him like a glove) that believed a “virtuous” (in the old sense of politically-disinterested) elite was needed to balance the power of the interested democratic majority. This classical republicanism, she implies, was based on a no-longer-valid zero-growth (and therefore zero-sum) economy. Suspect in Europe, this Hobbesian/Malthusian vision was completely invalid in the U.S., where the frontier “stood Ricardo’s iron law of rents and wages on its head.” (99)
An interesting element of Appleby’s argument is that she’s talking about intellectual history, not economic determinism. While she acknowledges the influence of material changes, she’s really interested in the “Ideas [that] joined a group of established elite reformers to a network of political interlopers,” resulting in the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800. Appleby doesn’t completely sustain this point, I think; especially in the sense that she doesn’t identify the chicken and the egg. But it’s her characterization of the Federalists as upholders of the mainstream tradition that’s most interesting. The Federalist, she says, “never lost their posture of protecting known truths about civil society. They knew that it was their opponents who were treading unfamiliar paths and they appealed to history and common sense to prove them wild visionaries.” (6) Their problem, of course, was that something was really happening that changed the game and their opponents had a better grasp of it. But that may be more because they were conservatives than because they were elitists. A function of nostalgia rather than ideology.
“Classical theory,” Appleby says, “emphasized that civil society was fragile...that there were two orders of men -- the talented few and the ordinary many -- ...[and] a properly balanced constitution would balance the powers of these two groups.” (9) Colonial America, she says, experienced “pervasive Anglicization.” (10) While she admits there was a “large bulge in the center of the social pyramid,” Appleby suggests that the economic security, “stability and well-being of the great majority of colonists permitted resistance to turn into rebellion and ...revolution.” (13) A desperate, violent, starving mob, she implies, would have pushed the middle class toward the British.
Appleby makes an interesting observation about our use of words whose meanings have changed over time. Liberty, she says, had three “intellectual contexts,” and the one we’re most familiar with today (“liberty as personal freedom”) was the one American colonists would have been least focused on -- at least until 1776. “Before the Revolution,” she says, “liberty more often referred to a corporate body’s right of self-determination.” (16) This distinction seems to blur the difference between individual versus group rights on the one hand, and political versus economic concerns on the other. But maybe that’s part of the ongoing issue with these ideas: that we’re never that clear about how these various ideas about individual rights and group responsibilities ought to play together.
One of the things that distinguishes the “liberal conception” of liberty, Appleby says, is its a-historic nature. Rather than looking for examples in classical cultures, “Hobbes and Locke...reasoned from an imaginary account of man in the state of nature to an abstract definition of liberty.” (19) But this system-building impulse (of the empirical enlightenment? the scientific revolution?) wasn’t universally shared. Most people stuck to the old ideas of corporate liberty, so that “Only when it became clear that their interpretation of the imperial crisis was not shared in the mother country did colonial rebels shift ground from the historic rights of English subjects to the abstract rights of all men.” (22) But ultimately it was economic change, in the form of “freedom from the fear of dearth,” that enabled this change of attitude to become widespread.” (29)
I think I need to compare Appleby’s idea about this change to accounts of Americans in England and British support for the American cause. But she moves quickly on in the next chapter, to discuss the intellectual development symbolized by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. “The actual round of economic activities in early modern England was not at all suggestive of uniformities,” she admits. But “Despite its evident diversity, the newly extended commercial system nonetheless suggested order to those who observed and analyzed it.” (30) But did the urge to systematize and depersonalize “economic laws” really originate with Smith and Ricardo’s observations of British commerce, or with a zeitgeist that influenced intellectuals across a wide range of disciplines to seek global, scientific (and ironically non-empirical, a-priori) regularity in the face of increasingly diverse and often confusing data?
The new economic system (I almost want to say ideology) had a couple of hurdles it needed to get over: social beliefs formed by observation and classical tradition. For example, “Self-interest could only be accounted socially benign,” Appleby says, “if it could be demonstrated that all this incessant striving after private ends did not lead to chaos,” but in fact to social optimization. (33) Other standards of value and motivations for action had to be ignored or subordinated to those reflected by the only measurable quantity, money. “Homo faber, man the doer, took precedence in these writings over man the believer, man the contemplator, even man the sinner.” (35) There’s an interesting passage in Martin Bruegel’s Farm, Shop, Landing, which I’ve just started reading, where New York courts begin trying to enforce a uniform, impersonal “market” by banning preferential, relationship-based practices that had been the hallmarks of the older, physical market place (more on that in a couple of days).
Again, as I’m reading this, I’m wondering if it isn’t the explosive growth of the mercantile sector at this moment in history that allows for this reductive sleight of hand? If there wasn’t so much to see in the world of commerce, would all the things left out of economic thinking have been more obvious? Similarly, in the New Republic, are we seeing an increase in agricultural productivity based on expansion into fertile western lands and reduced population growth, and attributing these changes to a new rural capitalism, just because we know what happens later?
Appleby mentions Jefferson’s preference for wheat over tobacco in Notes on the State of Virginia, as a “benign conception of an economy of food production [that] was to have far-reaching ideological implications.” (42) I have a lot of trouble seeing Jefferson as someone with a clear vision of agricultural realities, but he was clearly the founder of a powerful agrarian, free labor ideology. But Jefferson’s agrarian vision (or at least the vision attributed to him) may hide more than it reveals. Albert Gallatin’s protest of the 1800 Bankruptcy Act may be more instructive. Appleby says Gallatin believed it favored merchants, when in fact “the same man [was] frequently a farmer and a merchant, and perhaps a manufacturer.” (43) Appleby quotes Louis Hacker’s complaint that American historians writing after the period of the robber barons always had an “anticapitalist bias.” (45) But Jefferson’s belief that wheat was a better crop than tobacco was based on the special case of early-cultivation bumper crops on an expanding frontier. And on the particular ways tobacco was cultivated in the south (slavery). The point is, we’re not talking about anything remotely resembling universal economic laws. We’re always talking about special cases.
Somehow, though, we’ve developed the idea that economic theories, which all developed in particular historic moments, represent some type of higher platonic reality. An expanding economy clearly leads to optimistic, laissez faire conclusions about opportunity, protection, and social responsibility that become the assumptions of the next round of theories. This seems so obvious that I’m a little embarrassed to be putting so much stress on it. But it doesn’t seem to be carried into the histories. We still say “the first capitalists were farmers and landlords,” as if we can recognize some universal definition of “capitalists” that applies equally to eighteenth-century farmers and twenty-first century investment bankers. (46) Appleby says Jackson Turner Main examined the issues dividing legislators, and then “worked back to the constituencies...and discovered that American voters were either localists or cosmopolitans,” depending on where they lived. (47) Main seems at least to complicate the economic issues by addressing locations and ultimately the sources of people’s money. (48) Maybe this type of approach allows economic events to influence historical change without letting economic theory determine it.
Appleby touches briefly on class, mentioning that the British Attorney General warned Thomas Cooper to “Continue if you please to publish your reply to Mr. Burke in an octavo form, so as to confine it probably to the class of readers who may consider it cooly: so soon as it is published cheaply for dissemination among the populace, it will be my duty to prosecute.” (Cooper probably deserves study. 60) British and American conservatives find themselves side by side in Appleby’s conclusion. Alexander Hamilton called “the belief that commerce might regulate itself a ‘wild speculative paradox,’ but Adam Smith’s invisible hand was warmly clasped by the Republicans.” (88) Thomas Cooper’s 1800 Political Essays encapsulate the libertarian creed Appleby says Jeffersonians endorsed. “Prohibit nothing,” Cooper said, “but protect no speculation.” (89) It’s ironic that the history of capitalism in America becomes mostly a story about businessmen and politicians preaching the first injunction while continually breaking the second.
