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The Role of the State in Shaping Things Economic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
Extract
I Have found it necessary to deal speculatively rather than historically with the subject assigned to me. The assembly and the organization of facts presuppose principles of organization and criteria of relevancy. As yet these have not been formulated. Until this lack is repaired, therefore, speculation is bound to swamp history.
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References
1 Maclver, R. M., The Modern State (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 22.Google Scholar
2 Idem, The Web of Government (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947), p. 193Google Scholar.
3 The argument in this and the two preceding paragraphs is based largely upon Maclver, The Web of Government, pp. 31–32, 46, 86–87, 192–208, 220–21, 225–26, 231–33; idem, The Modern State, pp. 22 ff.; idem, Community (London: Macmillan and Company, 1927).Google Scholar
4 See Sorokin, P. A.. Social and Cultural Dynamics (New York: American Book Company, 1937)Google Scholar, III, Pt. I, chap, vii, also chap. iii.
5 On value system, see Moos, S., “Laissez Faire, Planning and Ethics,” Economic Journal, LV (1945), 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar ff.; Parsons, T., Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1937), e.g., pp. 400Google Scholar ff. Parsons' approach is criticized by Feuer, L. S., “Ethical Theories and Historical Materialism,” Science and Society, VI (1942), 242Google Scholar ff. On freedom, see Knight, F. H., Freedom and Reform (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947)Google Scholar. Opinion polls frequently reveal beliefs that are conduct-determining even though invalid. On unfounded but policy-determining beliefs regarding the wage-affecting power of union bargaining, see Slichter, S. H., The Challenge of Industrial Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1947), pp. 20Google Scholar ff., 71 ff.; Schelling, T. C., “Raise Profits by Raising Wages,” Econometrica, XIV (1946), 227–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the influence of German errors regarding trade, see Hirschman, A. O., “The Commodity Structure of World Trade,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LVII (1943), 591 ff.Google Scholar
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7 On points covered in this paragraph see Maclver, Web of Government, pp. 16–17, 39 ff. 94–95, 127, 134, 142–43, 226, 283–84, 205, 217, 221, where it is shown how, in a democracy, the class struggle is transformed into the competition of parties for power; Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, III, 196–208; Northrop, F. S. C., The Meeting of East and West (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1946), pp. 109Google Scholar, 187, 299; and Commons, J. R., Institutional Economics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934)Google Scholar, passim. In western Europe and the United States, war has been the chief generator of public debt; in Latin America, utilities and public works. See papers of Hamilton, E. J., Ratchford, B. U., and Fetter, F. W., American Economic Review, Supplement, XXXVII, No. 21, 1947, pp. 118–50Google Scholar. On the Marxian theory of the state, see Sweezy, P. M., The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942)Google Scholar, chap, xiii; Chang, S. H. M., The Marxian Theory of the State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931)Google Scholar, passim. According to received Soviet doctrine, the “laws of capitalist competition” have been replaced by the “planned leadership” of the Soviet state which distributes the “means of production among the various branches of the national economy …. not on the basis of a fortuitous movement of prices and the pursuit of profits, but [by] making use of the law of value.” Labor, it is supposed; responds to “a stimulus such as material interest”; the “levelling tendencies,” survivals of “capitalist thinking,” are rejected. See Ostrovitianov, K., “Basic Laws of Development of Socialist Economy,” Science and Society, IX (1945), 238–42. 249.Google Scholar Cf. Lange, O., The Wording Principles of the Soviet Economy (New York: Russian Economic Institute, 1944)Google Scholar, passim.
8 On the forms, see Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), pp. 55–87Google Scholar. Whitehead's criticism of the doctrine of shift from custom to contract illustrates the role of the individual in transmitting social relationships such as the state implies. “The human being is inseparable from its environment in each occasion of its existence. The environment which the occasion inherits is immanent in it, and conversely it is immanent in the environment which it helps to transmit There is no escape from customary status. This status is merely another name for the inheritance immanent in each occasion. Inevitably customary status is there, an inescapable condition. On the other hand, the inherited status is never a full determination. There is always the freedom for the determination of individual emphasis.”—Whitehead, A. N., Adventure of Ideas (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), pp. 80–81Google Scholar.
9 On Mill's views, see Principles of Political Economy, ed. Ashley, W. J. (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1923)Google Scholar, Bk. V and Appendix K. Marshall's opinions appear in Memorials of Alfred Marshall, ed. Pigou, A. C. (London: Macmillan and Company, 1925), pp. 337Google Scholar, 339 ff., also 274 ff. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that, so soon as collectivist control had spread so far as to narrow considerably the field left for free enterprise, the pressure of bureaucratic methods would impair not only the springs of material wealth, but also many of those higher qualities of human nature, the strengthening of which should be the chief aim of social endeavor.”—Ibid., p. 334. Cf. Parsons, Structure of Social Action, pp. 129–79.
10 See Toynbee, A., A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), IV, 170Google Scholar ff.
11 Wealth of Nations, ed. Cannan, Edwin (New York: The Modern Library, [ca. 1937]), Bk. V, pp. 653Google Scholar, 669, 681.
12 “If our property and other civil-economic rights were such that each person or organization, in entering or refraining from any transaction, had to bear all the costs and could reap all the gains of so doing, we should probably be safe in assuming the coincidence of individual interests and the common welfare.”—See Copeland's, M. A. essay in The Trend of Economics, ed. Tugwell, R. G. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), pp. 114–15Google Scholar. See also Durbin, E. F. M., “The Social Significance of the Theory of Value,” Economic Journal, XLV (1935), 700–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Machlup, F., “The Division of Labor Between Government and Private Enterprise,” American Economic Review, Supplement, XXXIII, No. 1, Pt. II, 1943, 87Google Scholar ff.; and on the problem of external economies and diseconomies, Ellis, H. S. and Fellner, W., “External Economies and Diseconomies,” American Economic Review, XXXIII (1943), 510–11.Google Scholar
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14 Knight, Freedom and Reform, p. 387. That action toward an end rather than the achievement of the end is what counts is illustrated in The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947).Google Scholar
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16 Ibid., pp. 87–88, 319–22, 436–38. For a good account, see C. J. Hyneman, “Bureaucracy and the Democratic System,” Louisiana Law Review, VI (1945), 309–49; also E. A. G. Robinson, “John Maynard Keynes,” Economic journal, LVII (1947), 25 ff.
17 Knight, Freedom and Reform, chaps, v, vii, x-xv; Maclver, Web of Government, pp. 225–16, 231–33, 246. 249 262–65, 288, 295, 298–99. See also Barnard's, C. I. review of Wootton's, B.Freedom under Planning, Southern Economic Journal, XII (1946), 290–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; my review, ibid., pp. 48–55, of F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom; Ellis, H. S. “Competition and Welfare,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XI (1945), 558–61Google Scholar. For a somewhat different view, see Mannheim, K.Man and Society (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubuer and Company, 1940), pp. 364Google Scholar ff., 369–81; Lange, O. “The Scope and Method of Economics,” Review of Economic Studies, XIII (1945–1946), 19–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hutt, W. H.Economists and the Public (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936)Google Scholar, chap. xxii.
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19 I have treated in some detail the influence of some of the determinants of per capita income in “Aspects of the Economics of Population Growth,” Southern Economic Journal, October 1947, January 1948. On entrepreneurial organization, see A. H. Cole, “An Approach to the Study of Entrepreneuriship,” The asks of Economic History (Supplemental Issue of The Journal of Economic History), VI (1946), I ff. On location theory, see Dechesne, L.La Localisation des diverses productions (Brussels: Les Editions Comtables, Commerciales et Financières, 1945)Google Scholar, passim. On the influence of education, see the Monthly Review of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, XXXI (1946), 96Google Scholar; and Walsh, J. R. “Capital Concept Applied to Man,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, XLIX (1935), 255CrossRefGoogle Scholar ff.
20 “The fixed person for fixed duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.”—Whitehead, A. N.Science and the Modern World (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947), p. 282.Google Scholar
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22 See Commons, Institutional Economics, pp. 684, 697 ff., 751 ff. The first two quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., pp. 684, 751. See also Maclver, Web of Government, Pt. II, especially Chapter 4 on “The Firmament of Law”; Collingwood, R. G.The New Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942)Google Scholar, chaps, xxv, xxvii, xxxix; Sharfman, I. L. “Law and Economics,” American Economic Review, XXXVI (1946)Google Scholar, I ff.
23 See J. R. Hicks, Value and Capital (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 36 ff., and L. Robbins' study there referred to; also Galbraith, J. K. “The Disequilibrium System,” American Economic Review, XXXVII (1947), 287–302.Google Scholar
24 Based upon Bean, L. H. “International Industrialization and Per Capita Income,” in Studies in Income and Wealth (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1946), pp.141–42Google Scholar. See also Pigou, A. C.Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan and Company, 1932)Google Scholar, Pts. II—III; Robinson, J.Essays in the Theory of Employment (London: Macmillan and Company, 1937), pp. 82Google Scholar ff.
25 Beveridge, W. H.Full Employment in a Free Society (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1943)Google Scholar, Pt. IV.
26 Brady, Robert A.Business as a System of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943)Google Scholar. passim.
27 Clark, J. M. “Toward a Concept of Workable Competition,” American Economic Review, XXX (1940), 241Google Scholar ff.
28 An unconditional full-employment guarantee, in the absence of a “rigorous system of direct controls,” would permit “monopolistic groups” constantly to “raise wages and prices and reduce the quality of their service,” concludes., W. Fellner “Permanent full-employment, if it could be accomplished at all, would require far-reaching institutional changes of an abrupt (historically discontinuous) character.” See Monetary Policies and Full Employment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), pp. xi–xiiGoogle Scholar, also chaps, vi–vii. See also Ellis, H. S. “Competition and Welfare,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XI (1945), 555–61Google Scholar; Simons, H. C. “The Beveridge Program: An Unsympathetic Interpretation,” Journal of Political Economy, LIII (1945), 212–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lydall, H. F. “Unemployment in an Unplanned Economy,” Economic Journal, LVI (1946), 366–82.Google Scholar
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30 Wittgenstein, L.Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933)Google Scholar, sentences 6.363–3631, 6.37, 6.375. Hume's significance for social science is treated by Sabine, G. in his History of Political Theory (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1937), chap. xxix.Google Scholar
31 Science and the Modern World, pp. 63–66.
32 Northrop, F. S. C. “The Impossibility of a Theoretical Science of Economic Dynamics,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LVI (1941), 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Marschak, J. “Economic Structure, Path, Policy, and Prediction,” American Economic Review, Supplement, XXXVII, No. 2, 1947, 81–86.Google Scholar
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34 Nourse, E. G. in “Collective Bargaining and the Common Interest,” American Economic Review, XXXIII (1943). 1–20Google Scholar, states that “non-governmental organization for multilateral group bargaining interests, presents in the long run and over the major part of the economic field, the truest and fullest opportunity for universal self-expression combined with technical efficiency”; and outlines the preconditions of such bargaining. “By and large, economists do not know what the basic principles of cooperation are.” See ibid., pp. 8, 11, 17, also Nourse's writings on price policy, together with the criticisms they have evoked. J. M. Clark has taken up aspects of the problem in his forthcoming “Alternative to Serfdom,” a summary of which, by Sharfman, I. L. appeared in The Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review. LIII (1947)Google Scholar, 288–96. See also Clark's, “Some Current Cleavages Among Economists,” American Economic Review, Supplement, XXXVII, No. 2, 1947, pp. 1–11Google Scholar. That traditions of self-government guard against the evils of centralization is suggested by Durbin, E. M. F. “Professor Hayek on Economic Planning and Political Liberty,” Economic Journal, LV (1945), 357–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
35 Let us suppose that the choice made in a given time interval always influences the kind and number of choices open in the next time interval. If we have ten time intervals, ten choices in the first and one less in each succeeding time interval, with the particular choices open in each time interval conditioned by that made in the preceding time interval, we have a world that gives the outside observer the impression of an orthogenetic drift; for the series of ten choices appears to lead to a predetermined outcome. This impression, of course, is invalid. But it is meaningful to the extent that it indicates that there must be a drift in affairs when choices through time are interrelated and choice determining, and that this drift takes on in increasing measure the quality of being foreordained. Pearl's sequence of penny tosses illustrates effectively die narrowing of choice through time. See Medical Biometry and Statistics (3d ed.; Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1941), pp. 410Google Scholar ff. I treat the subject of the paragraph in the text above more fully in my “The Problem of Order in Economic Affairs,” to appear in the Southern Economic Journal, April 1948.
36 Samuel Pepys, Diary, July 21, 1662.