Читать книгу A Herstory of Economics - Edith Kuiper - Страница 12

Going back to the early days of political economy, to when the rise of the new middle class became increasingly evident, we are looking at a time period during which there was a lot of social turmoil. The old moral regime supported by the aristocracy and the Roman Catholic Church came under pressure as new forms of production emerged. Middle-class or bourgeois men opened up a new space where “men were equal” and where their debates were based on rational arguments and empirical research. Although in early Enlightenment France it was women of the aristocratic class who created these spaces at their dinner tables, they themselves were excluded from the academies where scholars and artists presented their work and explored the latest scientific discoveries, philosophies, and moral considerations. This newly emerging morality that evolved and accommodated the experience of bourgeois men would become part and parcel of the new science of political economy.

Political economy, and later economics, has always had a complicated relationship with moral reasoning, with explicit or implicit judgments about what is right and what is wrong. Aiming to be a “real” science, most political economists and economists tried to stay away from claims about, for instance, what a preferable income and wealth distribution would look like. The moral content of economics was and continues to be a highly contested topic. From the early days of political economy, however, female economic writers contributed to the debates about the newly emerging morality, reflecting on their own experiences, articulating their views, presenting their moral philosophies and critiques on contemporary economic ideas. Let us meet some of the women who made such contributions in France and England.

Émilie du Châtelet (1706–49) – her full name was Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet – grew up in the highest echelons of French aristocracy to become a natural philosopher, famous mathematician, physicist, essayist, and the French translator of Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714). Over the course of her life, she engaged in various academic debates, among which were those on the origin of fire, the morality of pursuing happiness, and commercial society more broadly. She frequented dinners in Paris and hosted her own gatherings in Cirey, her husband’s country house. Her salons were attended by aristocrats and bourgeois, philosophers and artists. Judith Zinsser (2006), du Châtelet’s biographer, describes her life at Cirey and the community of prominent mathematicians and philosophers she brought together. In the conversations during gatherings, dinners, and walks, people such as the mathematician Pierre Louis Maupertuis, the famous novelist, playwright, and philosopher Voltaire, salon host Madame de Graffigny, and the Italian philosopher Francesco Algarotti reported on their studies of nature and mathematics, the laws of nature, and the right to happiness. As in other salons where political issues came to the table and “le querelle du femme” (the woman question) was discussed, those present often critiqued the status quo and those in power, even at the risk of receiving a “lettre du cachet” that would send them to prison. Voltaire and Diderot, among others, experienced that more than once (Zinsser, 2006).

When Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) claimed that Christian moral behavior is not a good basis for a flourishing economy, but instead would probably mean the end of it, du Châtelet was intrigued. Mandeville, a doctor born in Leiden, the Netherlands, who lived in Scotland, made the daring point that you cannot have it both ways; that is, a population of all good people living by the teachings of the Bible and, at the same time, a thriving economy. His poem The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (first published in 1705, and as a book in 1714) caused a shockwave in intellectual circles. Here was an educated man, who claimed that private vices – like greed, indulging in luxury, drinking, etc. – are actually public benefits, as they are the basis of a thriving economy. His poem was widely read and became hugely popular, causing a ripple effect all over England and beyond.

Du Châtelet decided to translate Mandeville’s poem into French, as, in her words, “it is, I believe, the best book of ethics ever written, that is to say, the one that most leads men to the true source of the feelings of which they abandon themselves almost without examining them” (Zinsser, 2009: 50) In her article on this translation of Mandeville’s poem, Felicia Gottman (2011) mentions that du Châtelet did much more than just translate this text and that “transformation” would be a better term to describe what she does with Mandeville’s poem. Her own philosophical stance, according to Gottman, was informed by the ancient Greek philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius, who had claimed that man by nature becomes a social being by loving a woman and having a family, and by living in mutual dependence with his neighbors. Mandeville, on the other hand, considered man first and foremost an autonomous and solitary creature, who is oftentimes driven by his passions. These passions were seen by Mandeville in a negative light. In her translation and comments, du Châtelet shifted the balance in Mandeville’s reasoning, reimagining humans as capable of rational reasoning and of seeing passions as a positive and necessary part of being human. Her ideas about a secular ethics would inspire Voltaire’s work as well. Du Châtelet and Voltaire were involved in an intimate relationship for a period of time, which is how most people first learn about and are introduced to Émilie du Châtelet.

In “transforming” Mandeville’s text, du Châtelet stood in a broader tradition. Women writers often engaged in translating academic texts; in addition to this, they would write their own introductions, and many would also provide comments on the translation itself, expressing their personal views. In her introduction to Mandeville’s text, du Châtelet addresses both the role of the translator of a work of genius, and also gender as being a possible issue for some. In the Translator’s Preface, which is as beautifully written as it is critical, du Châtelet claims her voice and the right to contribute to scientific reasoning and to further develop her capacity to think: “I feel the full weight of prejudice that excludes us [women] so universally from the sciences, this being one of the contradictions of this world, which has always astonished me, as there are great countries whose laws allow us to decide their destiny, but none where we are brought up to think” (Zinsser, 2009: 48).

Besides a comment on the Bible, du Châtelet also wrote Discours sur le bonheur (Discourse on Happiness) (2009 [1779]) in which she elaborated her views on a secular ethics (see also Kuiper and Springer, 2013; Zinsser, 2006). Implicitly contradicting the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, du Châtelet shares Mandeville’s recognition of the importance of passions and the pursuit of happiness in one’s life. The Discourse is an intriguing essay in which the author starts out making a set of rational arguments for the right to live a happy life, followed by some instructions of how to achieve happiness and arguments about the importance of love. The text ends in what can be read as a reflection on her relationship with Voltaire.

Du Châtelet’s major work, however, was the translation of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), or the Principia in short, into French. As this work contained complex mathematical arguments, no French translation had yet become available. Where others tried and failed, du Châtelet completed the work, while pregnant with her second daughter. Zinsser (2006) recounts the pressure du Châtelet was under to finish it in time. Time was limited, since du Châtelet, informed by her doctor, knew for a while that there was little chance that she would survive having a second child. She completed the work just days before dying in childbirth in 1749. Her contribution to the Enlightenment and to a new bourgeois perception of morality that would come to be part of the foundation of political economy remained, was lost sometime in the nineteenth century, only to be recovered in the twenty-first century.

The debate on a secular ethics, or the new morality of commercial society, also took place on the other side of the Channel. In Scotland, an important center of the Enlightenment movement, David Hume (1711–76) published A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). He was known as an atheist, which prevented him from ever holding an academic position (Carlyle, 1973). Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Adam Smith’s predecessor at the University of Glasgow, stressed the tendency in human beings to engage in benevolent actions. The second part of his An Inquiry into the Original of our Idea of Beauty and Virtue (2004 [1726]) addressed “the moral good and evil” and described benevolence as a driving motive in human behavior. These discussions were all part of the larger debate on “the nature of man” that evolved around David Hume at the time. Although they did not have access to academic institutions, women writers made substantial contributions to these debates anyway. Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), for example, critiqued and compared Shakespeare’s and Voltaire’s works and the morals ingrained in them, deciding – of course – in favor of Shakespeare. So, who was this Elizabeth Montagu?

Elizabeth Robinson was born into a gentry family in Yorkshire in 1718 and was the older sister of Sarah Robinson Scott, author of A Description of Millennium Hall (1762). Elizabeth was a smart, spirited young woman who obtained most of her education from her grandfather, a librarian at the University of Cambridge (Kuiper and Robles-García, 2012). In her early twenties, she married money: the 54-year-old landowner and scholar Edward Montagu, owner of several coalmines and large estates. Elizabeth Montagu would become a well-known member of London society. Until a few decades ago, we only knew her as the Queen of the Bluestockings. The Bluestocking Society was a group of women and a few men who gathered over dinner to discuss culture, politics, and their writings. After the death of her husband in 1776, Elizabeth took over the management of the coalmines and estates, which she ran successfully for the rest of her life; indeed, so successfully that, at her death, she was the richest woman in England.

Elizabeth Montagu wrote a few essays that brought her literary and academic recognition; her main work was an Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, published in 1769. Her arguments go back to Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher (and yes, the same philosopher who influenced Émilie du Châtelet), who was also popular in cultured circles in London at the time. Montagu is merciless in her criticism of Voltaire, French’s most famous and respected philosopher and playwright. According to Montagu (1769), his “translations often, and … criticism still oftener, prove he did not perfectly understand the Words of the Author; and therefore, it is certain he could not enter into its Meaning.” She counterpointed Shakespeare’s historical approach to drama, the wide range of characters that figure in his plays, and his use of language, to the French theatric tradition in which, according to Montagu, the characters used eloquent but often pompous rhetoric and the historical accounts tended to be romanticized. Her daring essay caused a diplomatic row between England and France. It also brought her an invitation from the Académie Française to attend one of their meetings (on the balcony – as a woman she did not have full access) during which her essay was read out (Kuiper and Robles-García, 2012).

Montagu stressed particularly Shakespeare’s extraordinary ability to let the audience sympathize with his main characters, rich or poor. She did this against a background in which sympathy was a widely discussed concept and the authority on the topic was Adam Smith. The two had met on a trip to Scotland in 1766 and both had pleasant memories of their conversations, but they did not keep in contact.

At that point in time, Smith had already completed his work on morality, the result of his years of teaching moral philosophy to the students (all male) at Glasgow University. It was his perception of moral behavior that precedes in terms of both time and argument his Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776]). In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1984 [1759]), Smith describes and reconstructs the process through which individual middle-class men and boys develop self-consciousness and begin to achieve independent moral standing, and thus obtain the right to moral judgment and decision-making. Smith conceptualizes this process as an internal and rational process in which sympathy, or the ability to place oneself in another person’s shoes, plays a crucial part, as does “the impartial spectator,” the imaginary independent bystander through whose eyes one can reflect on one’s own behavior. Smith saw sympathy as the means for the individual to obtain insight into his own passions and to understand the behavior of other humans, or not – in the latter case passing a negative judgment. To make a well-based judgment, the individual would need to fully identify with the impartial spectator. In the absence of God and the Bible, the individual had to imagine how an impartial spectator would look at any given situation and then take that judgment into account when assessing his own behavior and that of the other in the situation, and thus be guided in deciding what to do. By identifying fully with the impartial spectator, the individual could also obtain a strong sense of self-command and suppress his personal passions, particularly his fears and anger. Women do not play a role in this treatise on moral behavior and only incidentally figure as foil for Smith’s arguments on the development of the moral behavior of men.

In articulating his moral philosophy, Smith applied and defined a specific conceptualization of masculinity. Both Stewart Justman (1993) and I (Kuiper, 2003) have analyzed Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as a gendered text, a text that is structured by a specific definition of masculinity and femininity. Justman sees Smith’s reasoning as an attempt to retain male autonomy in the context of the emerging commercial society, which was generally perceived as feminine. Applying a psychological framework, I describe Smith’s reasoning throughout his book as a way to construct a masculine identity by identification with an imaginary father. For Smith, who never met his father since he died a few months before his son was born, it is the identification with the impartial spectator that provides a man with the moral authority to make decisions: “The man of real constancy and firmness, the wise and just man who has been thoroughly bred in the great school of self-command … He does not merely affect the sentiments of the impartial spectator. He really adopts them. He almost identifies himself with, he almost becomes himself that impartial spectator, and scarce even feels but as that great arbiter of his conduct directs him to feel” (1984 [1759]: 146–7)

Although Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is an impressive account of the process through which men develop a conscience, the perception of this process is limited to modern standards, and women play hardly any role in the book. It is, nevertheless, Smith’s understanding of human nature and his perception of masculinity or “manhood” that would become ingrained in political economy as the moral basis for economic decision-making – or rational choice, which is how individual economic behavior came to be defined. In the context of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, women were neither considered rational nor legally able to make contracts (see, e.g., Folbre, 2009).

Smith’s book found its way across the Channel where it was widely read in intellectual circles in France. A leading salonnière in Paris, Sophie de Grouchy de Condorcet (1764–1822), translated the treatise into French, and this became the standard French translation for the next two centuries. Like Émilie du Châtelet’s comments on Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, Sophie de Grouchy articulated criticism on the text she worked on, and these were added as a set of eight letters to the 1798 edition of her translation. These letters contain remarkable comments by a central figure in French society at the time, but it would take until 2008 for them to be fully translated into the English language (see Brown, 2008).

De Grouchy started her work on the Theory of Moral Sentiments after the death of her husband, the famous philosopher and mathematician Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. Sophie de Grouchy de Condorcet organized her salons and befriended radical thinkers such as Thomas Paine, whose letters and speeches she also translated into French. After the French Revolution broke out in 1789 and turned sour a few years later, her husband fled persecution, and moved to live in hiding. De Grouchy visited him in secret and they discussed his work on Sketch for a Picture of the Historical Progress of the Human Mind (published posthumously in 1822). After nine months of hiding, Marquis de Condorcet was arrested in 1794; he died in his cell a few months later (Brown, 2008). Sophie de Grouchy was thirty years old at the time, and it was in the years that followed that she focused her attention on translating Adam Smith’s treatise on moral behavior.

In her Letters on Sympathy (1798), de Grouchy entered into a conversation with her brother-in-law, P. J. G. Cabanis, about Smith’s ideas on the origins and nature of moral behavior and her own views on political economy. She criticizes Smith for not fully seeing his conceptualization of sympathy through. In her view, sympathy is not only a rational process of the imagination, but also has a physical basis; she describes the physical response and connection from one human to all other beings – men, women, children, and animals. Where Smith stops short of discussing policy implications in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, de Grouchy, a social reformer and feminist, points out that society should design its institutions in such a way that, instead of normalizing self-interested behavior, behavior based on sympathy should be supported by the way institutions are built. Social institutions, according to her, are built on the presumption of self-interested behavior, thereby supporting and condoning such behavior, which makes it hard to pursue a life of merit and sincerity. De Grouchy ends her last letter, Letter VIII, with a striking and timely attack on social institutions that create and reproduce class and other social divides, and argues that “by means of the unnatural needs institutions have created, they have weakened a powerful motive that can lead to upright conduct, namely the lure of domestic tranquility” (1798: 181).

Although constrained, due to their gender, women like Émilie du Châtelet, Elizabeth Montagu, and Sophie de Grouchy de Condorcet had the means and support enabling them to write, get their work published, and receive acknowledgment. Elizabeth Montagu may have provoked substantial criticism because of her outgoing personality, but her wealth and connections provided her with opportunities to make substantial contributions to cultured life in London and to the communities on her estates. For most women writers, however, including economic writers, life looked rather different. Some self-taught intellectuals, like Mary Hays (1759–1843), raised their voice against the gender hierarchy and the dark sides of capitalism that brought moral decay to thousands of women. Hays spoke from an economic and political position that was impacted by economic insecurity and poverty. Speaking to the better selves of those in power, she wrote an Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (1798), arguing forcefully that women had little or no possibility of pursuing their ambitions and improving their own economic situation. She argued that women faced a limited set of professions that were, therefore, overcrowded and thus underpaid. As a result, “want of fortune, and want of appropriate employment, leave them open to the attempts of those who can afford to bribe them from the paths of virtue” (1798: 279). Hays is referring here to the many women who ended up so destitute that prostitution was the only way they could earn a living for themselves and their children. She stresses that the behavior of such women was driven by dire circumstances rather than by “moral weakness,” and she argues that, given their financial circumstances, these women were forced to pursue their economic self-interest in this way. Middle-class political economists, however, neglected these women and their circumstances and failed to include them in their academic economic theorizing, limiting themselves to making moral judgments and rejecting alternative arguments, such as those presented by Mary Hays.

Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), a contemporary of Hays, lived in better circumstances. She received a decent education and her social environment provided her with support and acknowledgment of her writing. Edgeworth wrote first with her father on education matters, and later, on her own, a number of novels. Famous for her writing and experienced in managing her father’s estate, the circle of people around the political economist David Ricardo (1772–1823), including Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), James Mill (1773–1836), and Jane Haldimand Marcet (1769–1858) (Heilbroner, 1999 [1981]: 86; Kern, 1998), opened up to her. Edgeworth engaged in an ongoing discussion and correspondence with Ricardo on the causes of rent increases, which she saw as based on lack of innovation in agricultural methods and mismanagement by landlords. Her most famous work, Castle Rackrent (1800), contains an entertaining story about the shift in culture from the patriarchal, agricultural setting, in which landlords had a moral obligation to their tenants, to a world in which relations became impersonal, and in which profit-seeking and personal enrichment became more important than moral obligations. Edgeworth describes here the era in which landlords left their estates to go and entertain themselves in cities like Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London, appointing stewards in their absence. Often, these stewards, while their boss was away, would suppress and exploit the tenants and even manage to keep large parts of the revenues for themselves. In other words, it was a world where economic relations ceased to be modeled after the family, but became rational, transactional, and driven by self-interest and the pursuit of profits. Although an insightful description of the changing economic relations and morals of her time, Castle Rackrent did not address the shifts in gender relations that were part of this process.

The role of implicit moral and value judgments in economic theory was dealt with in various way by economists. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), for example, aimed in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) to stop political economists from making moral judgments by adopting, instead, quantitative reasoning. On the other hand, economists like John Stuart Mill (1806–73) described political economy as partly a positive and partly a normative science. Neoclassical economists like William Stanley Jevons (1835–82) and Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) explicitly claimed that their science was, or at least should be, a positivist one. According to Marshall, “political economy or economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life” (1890: 1) and economics should be based on observations, definitions, classification, induction, and deduction to “reach the knowledge of the interdependence of economic phenomena” (1890: 29). By basing themselves on rational reasoning and facts, economists were able to provide answers to policy issues and analyses of topics that were the subject of heated political debates, claiming scientific status and objectivity for their studies and solutions.

Other economists pointed out the particular morality implicit in economic concepts and theories that had long been taken for granted by economists. Women economic writers and economists can predominantly be found in this last group (see Madden, 2002). Feminist economists in particular criticized the implicit gender notions, male bias, and other value judgments that structure economic theorizing. Sandra Harding, a feminist philosopher, published “Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective?” (1995) in the first issue of the Feminist Economics journal. She made the point that value neutrality based on shared values do not make for an objective statement. The fact that these values are shared only makes them invisible. One way to counter the invisibility of shared values is by bringing in a wider and more diverse set of voices, as this introduces different views that will contest – and as such make visible – the formerly shared values. Taking a feminist perspective, for instance, brings to light patriarchal values implicit in mainstream economic thinking.