A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Page 2

  The moral limitations of man in general, and his egocentricity in particular, were neither lamented by Smith nor regarded as things to be changed. They were treated as inherent facts of life, the basic constraint in his vision. The fundamental moral and social challenge was to make the best of the possibilities which existed within that constraint, rather than dissipate energies in an attempt to change human nature- an attempt that Smith treated as both vain and pointless. For example, if it were somehow possible to make the European feel poignantly the full pain of those who suffered in China, this state of mind would be "perfectly useless," according to Smith, except to make him "miserable"; without being of any benefit to the Chinese. Smith said: "Nature, it seems, when she loaded us with our own sorrows, thought that they were enough, and therefore did not command us to take any further share in those of others, than what was necessary to prompt us to relieve them."4

  Instead of regarding man's nature as something that could or should be changed, Smith attempted to determine how the moral and social benefits desired could be produced in the most efficient way, within that constraint. Smith approached the production and distribution of moral behavior in much the same way he would later approach the production and distribution of material goods. Although he was a professor of moral philosophy, his thought processes were already those of an economist. However, the constrained vision is by no means limited to economists. Smith's contemporary in politics, Edmund Burke, perhaps best summarized the constrained vision from a political perspective when he spoke of "a radical infirmity in all human contrivances,"5 an infirmity inherent in the fundamental nature of things. Similar views were expressed by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers:

  It is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellencies- ill as well as good propensities. This results from the imperfection of the Institutor, Man.6

  Returning to Adam Smith's example, a society cannot function humanely, if at all, when each person acts as if his little finger is more important than the lives of a hundred million other human beings. But the crucial word here is act. We cannot "prefer ourselves so shamelessly and blindly to others" when we act, Adam Smith said; even if that is the spontaneous or natural inclination of our feelings. In practice, people on many occasions "sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others," according to Smith,8 but this was due to such intervening factors as devotion to moral principles, to concepts of honor and nobility, rather than to loving one's neighbor as oneself.9

  Through such artificial devices, man could be persuaded to do for his own self-image or inner needs what he would not do for the good of his fellow man. In short, such concepts were seen by Smith as the most efficient way to get the moral job done at the lowest psychic cost. Despite the fact that this was a moral question, Smith's answer was essentially economic- a system of moral incentives, a set of trade-offs rather than a real solution by changing man. One of the hallmarks of the constrained vision is that it deals in trade-offs rather than solutions.

  In his later classic work, The Wealth of Nations, Smith went further. Economic benefits to society were largely unintended by individuals, but emerged systemically from the interactions of the marketplace, under the pressures of competition and the incentives of individual gain.10 Moral sentiments were necessary only for shaping the general framework of laws within which this systemic process could go on.

  This was yet another way in which man, with all the limitations conceived by Smith, could be induced to produce benefits for others, for reasons ultimately reducible to self-interest. It was not an atomistic theory that individual self-interests added up to the interest of society. On the contrary, the functioning of the economy and society required each individual to do things for other people; it was simply the motivation behind these acts- whether moral or economic- which was ultimately self-centered. In both his moral and his economic analyses, Smith relied on incentives rather than dispositions to get the job done.

  The Unconstrained Vision

  Perhaps no other eighteenth-century book presents such a contrast to the vision of man in Adam Smith as William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political justice, a work as remarkable for its fate as for its contents. An immediate success upon its publication in England in 1793, within a decade it encountered the chilling effect of British hostile reactions to ideas popularly associated with the French Revolution, especially after France became an enemy in war. By the time two decades of warfare between the two countries were ended at Waterloo, Godwin and his work had been relegated to the periphery of intellectual life, and he was subsequently best known for his influence on Shelley. Yet no work from the eighteenthcentury "age of reason" so clearly, so consistently, and so systematically elaborated the unconstrained vision of man as did Godwin's treatise.

  Where in Adam Smith moral and socially beneficial behavior could be evoked from man only by incentives, in William Godwin man's understanding and disposition were capable of intentionally creating social benefits. Godwin regarded the intention to benefit others as being "of the essence of virtue,"11 and virtue in turn as being the road to human happiness. Unintentional social benefits were treated by Godwin as scarcely worthy of notice.12 His was the unconstrained vision of human nature, in which man was capable of directly feeling other people's needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved.13 This was not meant as an empirical generalization about the way most people currently behaved. It was meant as a statement of the underlying nature of human potential.

  Conceding current egocentric behavior did not imply that it was a permanent feature of human nature, as human nature was conceived in the unconstrained vision. Godwin said: "Men are capable, no doubt, of preferring an inferior interest of their own to a superior interest of others; but this preference arises from a combination of circumstances and is not the necessary and invariable law of our nature."14 Godwin referred to "men as they hereafter may be made,"15 in contrast to Burke's view: "We cannot change the Nature of things and of men- but must act upon them the best we can."16

  Socially contrived incentives were disdained by Godwin as unworthy and unnecessary expedients, when it was possible to achieve directly what Smith's incentives were designed to achieve indirectly: "If a thousand men are to be benefited, I ought to recollect that I am only an atom in the comparison, and to reason accordingly."17 Unlike Smith, who regarded human selfishness as a given, Godwin regarded it as being promoted by the very system of rewards used to cope with it. The real solution toward which efforts should be bent was to have people do what is right because it is right, not because of psychic or economic payments that is, not because someone "has annexed to it a great weight of self interest."18

  Having an unconstrained vision of the yet untapped moral potential of human beings, Godwin was not preoccupied like Smith with what is the most immediately effective incentive under the current state of things. The real goal was the long-run development of a higher sense of social duty. To the extent that immediately effective incentives retarded that long-run development, their benefits were ephemeral or illusory. The "hope of reward" and "fear of punishment" were, in Godwin's vision, "wrong in themselves" and "inimical to the improvement of the mind."19 In this, Godwin was seconded by another contemporary exemplar of the unconstrained vision, the Marquis de Condorcet, who rejected the whole idea of "turning prejudices and vices to good account rather than trying to dispel or repress them." Such "mistakes" Condorcet traced to his adversaries' vision of human nature- their confusing "the natural man" and his potential with existing man, "corrupted by prejudices, artificial passions and social customs."20

  TRADE-OFFS VERSUS SOLUTIONS

  Prudence- the careful weighing of trade-offs- is seen in very different terms within the constrained and the unconstrained visions. In the constrained vision, where trade-offs are all that we can hope for, prudence i
s among the highest duties. Edmund Burke called it "the first of all virtues."21 "Nothing is good," Burke said, "but in proportion and with reference"22- in short, as a tradeoff. By contrast, in the unconstrained vision, where moral improvement has no fixed limit, prudence is of a lower order of importance. Godwin had little use for "those moralists"- quite conceivably meaning Smith"who think only of stimulating men to good deeds by considerations of frigid prudence and mercenary selfinterests," instead of seeking to stimulate the "generous and magnanimous sentiment of our natures."23

  Implicit in the unconstrained vision is the notion that the potential is very different from the actual, and that means exist to improve human nature toward its potential, or that such means can be evolved or discovered, so that man will do the right thing for the right reason, rather than for ulterior psychic or economic rewards. Condorcet expressed a similar vision when he declared that man can eventually "fulfill by a natural inclination the same duties which today cost him effort and sacrifice."24 Thus a solution can supersede mere trade-offs.

  Man is, in short, "perfectible"- meaning continually improvable rather than capable of actually reaching absolute perfection. "We can come nearer and nearer," according to Godwin,25 though one "cannot prescribe limits" to this process.26 It is sufficient for his purpose that men are "eminently capable of justice and virtue"27- not only isolated individuals, but "the whole species."28 Efforts must be made to "wake the sleeping virtues of mankind."29 Rewarding existing behavior patterns was seen as antithetical to this goal.

  Here, too, Condorcet reached similar conclusions. The "perfectibility of man," he said, was "truly indefinite."30 "The progress of the human mind" was a recurring theme in Condorcet.31 He acknowledged that there were "limits of man's intelligence,"32 that no one believed it possible for man to know "all the facts of nature" or to "attain the ultimate means of precision" in their measurement or analysis.33 But while there was ultimately a limit to man's mental capability, according to Condorcet, no one could specify what it was. He was indignant that Locke "dared to set a limit to human understanding."34 As a devotee of mathematics, Condorcet conceived perfectibility as a never-ending asymptotic approach to a mathematical limit.35

  While use of the word "perfectibility" has faded away over the centuries, the concept has survived, largely intact, to the present time. The notion that "the human being is highly plastic material"36 is still central among many contemporary thinkers who share the unconstrained vision. The concept of "solution" remains central to this vision. A solution is achieved when it is no longer necessary to make a trade-off, even if the development of that solution entailed costs now past. The goal of achieving a solution is in fact what justifies the initial sacrifices or transitional conditions which might otherwise be considered unacceptable. Condorcet, for example, anticipated the eventual "reconciliation, the identification, of the interests of each with the interests of all"- at which point, "the path of virtue is no longer arduous."37 Man could act under the influence of a socially beneficial disposition, rather than simply in response to ulterior incentives.

  SOCIAL MORALITY AND SOCIAL CAUSATION

  Human actions were dichotomized by Godwin into the beneficial and the harmful, and each of these in turn was dichotomized into the intentional and the unintentional. The intentional creation of benefits was called "virtue,"38 the intentional creation of harm was "vice",39 and the unintentional creation of harm was "negligence," a subspecies of vice.40 These definitions can be represented schematically:

  The missing category was unintentional benefit. It was precisely this missing category in Godwin that was central to Adam Smith's whole vision, particularly as it unfolded in his classic work The Wealth of Nations. The economic benefits to society produced by the capitalist, were, according to Smith, "no part of his intention."41 The capitalist's intentions were characterized by Smith as "mean rapacity"42 and capitalists as a group were referred to as people who "seldom meet together, even for merriment or diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."43 Yet, despite his repeatedly negative depictions of capitalists,44 unrivaled among economists until Karl Marx, Adam Smith nevertheless became the patron saint of laissez-faire capitalism. Intentions, which were crucial in the unconstrained vision of Godwin, were irrelevant in the constrained vision of Smith. What mattered to Smith were the systemic characteristics of a competitive economy, which he saw as producing social benefits from unsavory individual intentions.

  While Adam Smith and William Godwin have been cited as especially clear and straightforward writers espousing opposing visions, each is part of a vast tradition that continues powerful and contending for domination today. Even among their contemporaries, Smith and Godwin each had many intellectual compatriots with similar visions, differently expressed and differing in details and degree. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 was perhaps the most ringing polemical application of the constrained vision. Thomas Paine's equally polemical reply, The Rights of Man (1791), anticipated in many ways the more systematic unfolding of the unconstrained vision by Godwin two years later.

  Godwin credited Rousseau with being "the first to teach that the imperfections of government were the only perennial source of the vices of mankind."45 Rousseau was certainly the most famous of those who argued on the basis of a human nature not inherently constrained to its existing limitations, but narrowed and corrupted by social institutions- a vision also found in Condorcet and in Baron D'Holbach, among others of that era. In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill said that the "present wretched education" and "wretched social arrangements" were "the only real hindrance" to attaining general happiness among human beings.46 Mill's most ringing rhetoric reflected the unconstrained vision, though his eclecticism in many areas caused him to include devastating provisos more consonant with the constrained vision.47

  Much of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century liberalism (in the American sense) builds upon these foundations, modified and varying in degree, and applied to areas as disparate as education, war, and criminal justice. Marxism, as we shall see, was a special hybrid, applying a constrained vision to much of the past and an unconstrained vision to much of the future.

  When Harold Laski said that "dissatisfaction" was an "expression of serious ill in the body politic,"48 he was expressing the essence of the unconstrained vision, in which neither man nor nature have such inherent constraints as to disappoint our hopes, so that existing institutions, traditions, or rulers must be responsible for dissatisfaction. Conversely, when Malthus attributed human misery to "laws inherent in the nature of man, and absolutely independent of all human regulations,"49 he was expressing one of the most extreme forms of the constrained vision, encompassing inherent constraints in both nature and man.

  Godwin's reply to Malthus, not surprisingly, applied the unconstrained vision to both nature and man: "Men are born into the world, in every country where the cultivation of the earth is practised, with the natural faculty in each man of producing more food than he can consume, a faculty which cannot be controlled but by the injurious exclusions of human institution."50 Given the unconstrained possibilities of man and nature, poverty or other sources of dissatisfaction could only be a result of evil intentions or blindness to solutions readily achievable by changing existing institutions.

  By contrast, Burke considered complaints about our times and rulers to be part of "the general infirmities of human nature," and that "true political sagacity" was required to separate these perennial complaints from real indicators of a special malaise.51 Hobbes went even further, arguing that it was precisely when men are "at ease" that they are most troublesome politically.52

  The constraints of nature are themselves important largely through the constraints of human nature. The inherent natural constraint of the need for food, for example, becomes a practical social problem only insofar as human beings multiply to the point where subsistence becomes difficult to a
chieve for a growing population. Thus this central constraint of nature in Malthus becomes socially important only because of Malthus' highly constrained vision of human nature, which he saw as inevitably behaving in such a way as to populate the earth to that point. But Godwin, who readily conceded the natural constraint, had a very different vision of human nature, which would not needlessly overpopulate. Therefore, the possibility of a geometrical increase in people was of no concern to Godwin because "possible men do not eat, though real men do."53

  Malthus, on the other hand, saw overpopulation not as an abstract possibility in the future but as a concrete reality already manifested. According to Malthus, "the period when the number of men surpass their means of subsistence has long since arrived ... has existed ever since we have had any histories of mankind, does exist at present, and will for ever continue to exist."54 It would be hard to conceive of a more absolute statement of a constrained vision. Where Malthus and Godwin differed was not over a natural fact- the need for food- but over behavioral theories based on very different visions of human nature. Most followers of the unconstrained vision likewise acknowledge death, for example, as an inherent constraint of nature (though Godwin and Condorcet did not rule out an eventual conquest of death), but simply do not treat this as a constraint on the social development of mankind, which lives on despite the deaths of individuals.