ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 373 Thus, it would be impossible to find one's way in empirical reality without these economic formulae, and that would happen which happened when economic science was still in its infancy; namely, that by its means measures of govern ment were adopted, which were admirably suited to produce in the highest degree those evils which it was thought could be avoided by its help, a misfortune of which the Spanish government in Lombardy or in the Province of Naples in the seventeenth century, with its cries and its pragmatics in economic and financial matters, has left most excellent examples. Or what happens now, when ignorance, or deceitful interest, which profits by ignorance, proposes or causes to be adopted ruinous measures under the appearance of piiblica salus, arguing that they are good, or that they are good for different reasons than those for which they could be maintained. Such, for instance, would be the proposal for fresh expenditure on public works that are useless or of little use during a period of economic depression in a country, and instead of relieving, increase the general depression; or the increase of protective tariffs, when industrial progress is slow, which ought to encourage industry, but on the contrary produce an industry 374 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL n.
that is unstable and artificial, in place of one that is spontaneous and durable. comparison of The special form of application of mathematics, Economic "with Mechanics, and which we find in economic Science, has been reason for its excision from compared on several occasions with that which ethical, esthetic and takes piace m Mechanics. "The economic man " logical facts.
of the first has seemed to be altogether like the " material point " of the second, and Economy has been called " a sort of Mechanics," or simply " Mechanics." All this is very natural, for Mechanics are nothing but the complex of formulae of calculation constructed on reality, which is Spirit and Becoming in Metaphysic, and may be abstracted and falsified in Science, so as to assume the aspect of Force or a system of forces, for the convenience of calculation. Economy does the same thing, when it cuts off from the volitional acts certain groups, which it simplifies and makes rigid with the definition of the "economic man," the laws of " least means," and the like. And owing precisely to this mechanicizing process of economic Science, it is ingenuous to ask oneself why ethical, logical, or aesthetic facts are not included in Economy, and in what way they can be included. Economic science is the sum of abstractive operations effected upon the concept of Will n ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 375 or Action, which is thus quantified. Now since moral facts are also will and action, and since economic Science is not occupied with qualitative distinctions, not even with the quality itself of that economic fact which it employs as its material, it is clear that Science cannot lay any stress upon moral distinguished from economic facts, nor can it receive them in a special class, because its assumption is the indistinction of the two orders of facts, and they are included in that indistinction. As to aesthetic or scientific facts, these, taken by themselves, are not facts, but representations and thoughts of facts, and as such escape economic calculation: considered in the unity of the spirit, they are certainly facts, that is to say, volitional products, but as such are already found included with these in the indistinction of economic Science.
As a mathematical discipline, economic Science Errors of philosophism is ultimately quantitative^ and it remains so, even and historid in Economy.
when it makes use of the smallest possible number of numerical and algebraical signs (even when it is not mathematical Economy in the strict sense of the word). The attempts, both of philosophism and historicism, which claim to deny Economy, by criticizing its abstractness and its arbitrariness, and to make it philosophical 376 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
(or as they say psychological] and historical are therefore to be reproved. If Economy do not give the universal truth of Philosophy, nor the particular truth of History, Philosophy and History are in their turn incapable of making the smallest calculation: if Economy have not eyes for the true, Philosophy and History have not arms to break and to dominate the waves of fact, which would oppress man with their importunity and finally prevent him from seeing. Hence the absurdity of philosophism and histori- cism; hence too, the sound tendency of Economy to constitute itself pure Economy, free of practical questions, which are also, it is clear, historical, not abstract and scientific questions. The two But economy has in itself other enemies degenerations:.
degenerations:.
extreme ab- besides these that are external, in so far as it stracticism and empiristicai is certainly a mathematical discipline, but an disaggregation.
applied mathematic, that is to say, one that assumes empirical data. These empirical data can be infinitely multiplied, and hence result infinite economic propositions, each distinct from the other; and on the other hand, they can be regrouped, simplified and unified, so as finally to return to the indistinct x. If the first tendency prevail, we have what is called economic em piricism, a cumbrous mass of disaggregated ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 377 propositions; if the second, a very general formula, which sometimes does not even preserve the smallest vestige of that concept of human action from which it started, and becomes altogether confounded with the formulae of arithmetic, of algebra and of the calculus. Sound economic Science must be at once abstract and empirical, in accordance with its nature, connecting and unifying disaggregate propositions; but it must not allow distinction to be lost in unity, for the one is as necessary as the other. Those who are unacquainted with the generalities of Economic Science, and those acquainted only with its details, are alike incapable, though for different reasons, of calculating the economic consequences of a fact. The first see all the facts as one single fact, the second, all the facts as different, without any arrangement by similar ities and hierarchies. The question as to the relative proportion of generalities and particulars to be given in treatises, is one that has been much discussed, but since this has only a didascalic and pedagogic importance, it is only possible to answer it, case for case, according to the nature of the various scholastic institutions that are held in view. To maintain that Economy must stop short at this or that degree of abstraction, PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
Glance at the History of the various tendencies of Economy.
and for example be limited to what are called external goods or riches, excluding services; or to capital, as a concept distinct from land and human labour, without striving to unify these three concepts, is altogether capricious. Every unification, like every specification, can be useful, and haters of abstracticism are also abstracticists, but only half so.
All those acquainted with economic studies will have recognized in the concepts that we have explained, the logical motives of the history of Economy, the divisions, the polemics, the defeats and the victories of this or that school and the progress of that branch of studies. The quantitative character of economic science already appears in its classics; in the inquiries of Aristotle as to prices and value (Politic and Nichomachean Ethic); and this is apparent also in the rare mentions by Mediaeval and Renaissance writers. Economists have always been mathe maticians, even when they have not spoken of mathematical Economy. Our writers of the nineteenth century, Galiani, Genovesi and Verri, were mathematicians in their methods; Francesco Ferrara, the greatest Italian economist of the nineteenth century, was a mathematician. The economic principle, which is all one with the ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 379 excogitation of the economic man, was formulated by the head of the physiocratic school, Quesnay; and if the title of political Economy, first given to the discipline by Montchre'tien in 1615, prevailed, that of social Arithmetic also sometimes made its appearance. Its progress has consisted, not only in the discovery of new economic theorems, but also in the connection and unification of those that had previously been posited in isolation, of material and immaterial goods, of the cost of production and of rarity, of gross and net produce, of agricultural rents and of all the others that are not agricultural, of the pro duction, distribution and circulation of riches, of economic and financial laws, of social and isolated economy, of the value of utility and of the value of exchange. It has even been possible to unite with the body of admitted economic doctrines those of Marx, which seemed revolutionary, for these are only definitions of a particular casuistry founded upon the comparison of different types of economic constitution.
But to conquer empiricism was not enough; economic Science was menaced in its existence by the so-called historical School, which refused to recognize abstract definitions and set up against them the infinite variety of historical 380 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
facts; hence the strife with historicism conducted by Menger and the Austrian school. A con sequence of the struggle against the political degeneration of economic science was the constitution of Economy as a pure science (Cairnes). This was all the more necessary, inasmuch as by confounding the abstract with the concrete, and in the concrete itself, Economy with Ethic, there was a desire manifested upon several occasions among German economists (ethical school), and among Catholics of all countries, for an economic Science that should have as its base Ethic. The conception of Economy as a science deduced from the egoistic hypothesis, has been the extreme form of the reaction against ethicism (for example in the treatise of Pantaleoni). The dangers arising from philosophism have been less, because recent times, in which that discipline has most flourished, have not sinned through excessive philosophy.
Of late, owing to the works of Jevons and of other Englishmen, of Gossen, of the Italians of the school of Ferrara, and of the Austrians, Economy has become at once more and more complicated and more simple, owing to the applications, extensions, and reductions that ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 381 it has effected. But if with its progress it be able to become ever more exact and perspicuous, yet it will never for that reason become organic; its character of a quantitative discipline, of an applied mathematic, in which the atomism of the postulates and of the definitions is insuperable, does not allow of such metamorphoses.
In this connection and as the seal upon what signification . of the judgment we have just been saying, it is fitting to observe o/Hegeiupon the Science of that the phrase of Hegel referred to above can Economy. only have been interpreted as expressing admira tion for the degree of truth attained by Economy, owing to the ignorance of Hegelian philosophy that has become usual; as though Hegel meant that Economic science did much honour to the thought, that is, to the speculative reason. Hegel wished to say, on the contrary, that Economy does much honour to the intellect, that is, to the intellect alone, to that abstractive and arbitrary intellect which he hunted down in all his philosophy: that it is not indeed true and philosophical science, but a simple descriptive or quantitative discipline treated with much elegance. This praise also contained the demand for a delimitation, which, however, he did not expressly enunciate, develop and execute.
VI CRITIQUE OF THE CONFUSIONS BETWEEN ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMY Adoption of THERE is no disagreement, then, between the the method and of definition of Philosophy of Economy described by us and Economy by Philosophy. economic Science or Calculus, of which we have just defined the nature, since there cannot be any between two altogether heterogeneous forms, the one moving within the categories of truth, the other outside them, with objects of a practical order. This reciprocal tolerance can be disturbed only by Philosophy, when it compels itself, either to invade the field of economic Science, or to receive within itself, to a greater or less extent, the method and the formulae proper to the latter. We have already referred to the first, when we noted the inadmissibility of the economic attempts of philosophism and historicism, and we will say no more on the subject. But it is opportune to draw attention to the fact that we must distinguish among PT. ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 383 these attempts those that we are accustomed to meet with in many treatises on economy, pure or political, and in the Science of finance (especially in the prologues), which labour to discover what economic action may be, and in what way it differs from morality, what are pleasure and pain, utility and value; whether the State be rational will that levies a portion of the riches of the citizens for the ends of civilization, or a simple fact resulting from general economic laws and the like. In all these efforts of the writers of treatises, we have an example of the gradual passage from empiria to philosophy, which is to be observed in all the other fields of knowledge, and if it be only possible to say in general that the Philosophy of Economy is derived from economic Science, it is certain, on the other hand, that it finds no small incentive in the philosophical doubts and dis cussions which economic Science supports. On the other hand, the claim to resolve philosophic ally and historically the economic Science or Calculus is, as we have seen, altogether sterile, or contradicts itself in development.
From the second of the cases stated above, Errors that derive from it.
that is to say, from the mixture of economic with philosophic methods, arises a series of errors that are very common and very grave, and of 384 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
which it is opportune to take some notice here.
These errors can be divided into three groups, according as they consist of (a) considering economic Science or Calculus as a method ex clusive of every other, and alone capable of bestowing upon man all the truth that can ever be attained in the field of human actions; (fr) in attributing the value of universal thought to the empirical thoughts upon which economic calcula tion is based; (c) in changing into reality the fictions excogitated for the establishment of the Calculus.
ist, Negation Of the three groups, the first, which represents for economy, the most extended and radical form of the error, is, as usual, the least harmful, for the reason previously given, that the precise and loyal positions are those that are the most completely surpassed. Several cultivators of economic Science, among the most strict and mathemati cal, enter upon this desperate struggle against philosophy, which they ridicule as empty chatter and do not merely wish to subdue but altogether to destroy, substituting for it the methods of empirical observation and of mathe matical construction, thus favouring a particular empirical and mathematical philosophy of their ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 385 own, however much they may protest to the contrary. That the pretension is unsustainable, is to be seen, both from the contradictions in which they become entangled and from the very fury that animates them, which is, at bottom, vexation at not being able to free themselves from the contradictions in which they have become involved. For our part, we should like to say to those excellent economists, alike pure and mathematical, did this not appear to be pouring oil upon the flames: — Spare yourselves the trouble of philosophizing. Calculate, and do not think!
The other group is represented by a par- 2nd, universal value attriticular case of the empiristical error that we fated to empirical have already several times criticized, and many concepts.
J Example: propositions of the kind that one hears in Protecti™ and free trade.
ordinary conversation, against which simple good sense has often rebelled, are to be reduced to it. Thus the empirical consideration of certain human actions as constituting richness and happi ness, causes those individuals and peoples who possess property of that sort to be called rich and happy; but to this is opposed, with evident truth, that every one is happy in his own way and that external conditions are not proof of internal satisfaction, which is alone real and effective.
386 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
The great dispute on free trade is also to be reduced to the same misunderstanding, for when we undertake to demonstrate that wealth is destroyed by protection, the demonstration is efficacious only if the wealth, said to be de stroyed, is precisely that of which it was desired to assure the increase by protection; but nothing has been proved if it be a different quality of wealth that it may be desirable to acquire, even with the loss and the destruction of the other. For example, a people may find it advantageous from a political and military point of view to maintain in its territories the cultivation of grain or the construction of ships, even if that were to cost more than to provide itself with grain and ships from abroad; in this case, we should, strictly speaking, talk, not of the destruction of wealth, but rather of the acquisition of wealth (presumed national security), paid for with dear grain and dear naval construction. When the empirical ideas of free trade were raised to the dignity of laws of nature (reason), there was a rebellion against the economists, by which it was made clear that those laws of nature were laws, not absolute, but empirical, that is to say, historical and contingent facts, and that the economists who propounded them as absolute, ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 387 were not at all men of science, but politicians, and represented (if not seriously, at least by unconscious suggestion, or, if it be preferred, by mere chance) the interests of certain definite classes or of certain definite peoples. And the rebellion was right, although it afterwards degen erated into the inconclusiveness of historicism, and absolutely denied to those false practical applications the formulae and laws of Economy, which are natural in quite another sense, as nominal and therefore irrefutable definitions. Abstract principles, which are always inadequate to grasp the richness of reality, supply with a simple instrument him who passes from them to historical and sociological observation, which requires altogether different methods. Hence, for instance, the meaning of the school of Le Play, which in studying concrete economic conditions took note of religion, of family and political feelings, and of all the other things connected with the first; hence the admitted necessity of completing the analytic method (as it is called) with the synthetic, or (as it would be preferable to say) of neglecting abstractions when dealing with the problems of life and of directly intuiting life itself.
But what is particular to a philosophy that 388 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT. 3rd, Trans- enters into hybrid wedlock with economic Science, formation of the functions of is the transformation of those quantitative the calculus into reality. principles, of which we have seen the artificial origin, into effective reality. As a result, when this origin has not been observed, or has been forgotten, we may chance to hear the theories of Gossen on the decline of pleasures, as though they were " fundamental laws of human sensibility "; or that some komo economicus has appeared, constructor of diagrams and calculator of degrees of utility and of curves of satisfaction, as though these were real things. Some false con ceptions derive from economic principles trans ported into the philosophy of the practical, which we have already had occasion to refute, such as that of a scale of values, which the volitional man is supposed to have before him whenever he de liberates, and that other of the embarrassment he experiences in choosing between two equal goods; and finally the belief that man wills things, whereas what he wills in reality is not things but actions.
The comparisons, metaphors and symbols, taken from Economy and used in ordinary conversation, lead to the false belief that mathematical con structions and those of the economic calculus are the real processes of the psyche or of the Spirit.
ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 389 The quantification of volitional acts, taken The pretended as a real fact and introduced into philosophy, pleasures and pains, and the has given origin to the idea of a calculus of marines of optimism and pleasures and pains and of a balance of life, to be pessimism. established with the pleasures on the profit side of the account and the sorrows on the side of loss. And there have even been ravings about a double mensuration of pleasures, to be based upon their intensity and duration. But the real man, at the moment he enjoys, has before him only his own enjoyment, and at the moment that he suffers, only his own sorrow: the past is past and life is not to be described like the profit and loss account of a business. The true economic man says to himself what Fra Jacopone sang in one of his lauds: So much is mine As enjoyed and bestowed for the love divine!
The sophisms that assume consistency owing to this false conception, are most strange. Let the little dialogue of Leopardi with the seller of almanacs suffice for all. No one would wish to live his life again, not because the sorrows always exceed the pleasures, as that dialogue suggests, but rather because man is not, as he believes, a consumer of pleasures. He is a creator of life, and for this reason the idea of doing 390 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT. n again what has already been done, of retreading the same path, of reliving the already past, is repugnant to him, even were it all made up of pleasures as suggested, because he aspires only and always to the future. Optimism and pessimism, being each of them respectively unable altogether to deny pleasure and pain, are obliged to have recourse to these calculations and balances, in order to defend their preconceived conclusions: but in so doing they fall from Scylla into Charybdis and each reveals its own sophistical nature.
Indeed, a philosophy that calculates is a philosophy that toys or dotes, and if we have certainly advised the economists and mathe maticians to calculate and not to think, we must, on the contrary, cry to the philosopher: — Think, and do not calculate! Qui incipit numerare, incipit errare!
VII HISTORICAL ANNOTATIONS THE concepts of the useful and of the moral and the various attempts either to absorb the one in the other or to distinguish them, while recogniz ing their relations, are the problem on which has laboured the Philosophy of the practical as Ethic and Economic. Has this problem ever been fully solved? It will be permissible to doubt it, when we observe that a philosophical concept of the useful has been wanting until our own days; and that in consequence one of morality must also, strictly speaking, have been wanting, for it could not have been understood in its fulness and purity, owing to the obscure position of the term with which it is united.
I. The utilitarian character of Greek Ethic Greek E and its has been affirmed on several occasions; but one *• experiences a certain repugnance in applying so precise a term to the documents of ancient thought that remain to us. Socrates, it is true, 392 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
posited the useful as the supreme concept of morality, and identified the good life with eudaemonia; but for him that useful was never theless distinct from the merely pleasing, since it consisted in what is useful to man as man, and his eudaemonia bore much resemblance to the tranquil conscience of him who fulfils his proper duties. Plato (for example, in the Protagoras] expounds the doctrine that good things are no thing but pleasant things, and bad things painful; but this doctrine is enunciated in order to place in relief the thesis that man does not do wrong, save through ignorance, and because the bad seems to him to be the good; without saying that in other dialogues the distinction between pleasure and the good is recognized. Nor can the most systematic of the ancient philosophers, Aristotle, be called without reserve a hedonist, a eudaemonist, or a utilitarian, on the strength of his doctrine of happiness. Happiness is the supreme good, it is an end for itself; but virtue is already included for Aristotle in happiness, virtue which is found there, not as an adjunct, but intrinsic, for which exterior goods are indeed necessary, but only as instruments. The virtuous man must be a lover of himself ((friXavros), that is to say, just, temperate, liberal of his possessions, ,i ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 393 ready to yield honours and offices to his friends; lover of himself, then, in the lofty signification of the word (lover, not of the empirical, but of the metempirical ego), as opposed to the wicked man, who is his own enemy. Even Epicurus could not be included among the hedonists, since for him pleasure is not an end, but a means for calm, which is the true good, and calm is tranquillity of the spirit, which only the virtuous man can enjoy. It is therefore more exact to consider Greek Ethic in its general character, not as eudaemon- istic and utilitarian, but here also, in relation to the new problem that we now have before us (in the same way as was done above, in respect to practical intellectualism), as ingenuous; for in truth that problem did not constitute the centre of inquiries and discussions, as they present themselves in our times, nor were the different schools divided upon it. They were distinguished from one another (as has been already noted in respect to the doctrine of the passions), rather by the different rules of life respectively laid down by each as preferable. The antitheses of the Cynics and Cyrenaics, of the Epicureans and the Stoics, have but a superficial resemblance to those of the ethical rigorists or abstractionists, hedonists or utilitarians, which have appeared as the result 394 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
of the antithesis between pleasure and pain explicitly stated in modern times. It would be difficult to point out ethical rigorists and utili tarians among thinkers truly and properly so called. In order to discover the utilitaristic attitude at that period of history, it would be necessary to have recourse to some rhetorician, such as Carneades, ready to maintain indifferently the most opposed paradoxes, or to Callicles and Thrasymachus, so magnificently portrayed in the Platonic dialogues. These were rather men of the world than philosophers, giving the immediate and violent impression of the struggle for life, and for this reason they were at conflict with Socrates, the philosopher, whom they sometimes treated as a clown and utterer of paradoxes, sometimes pitied as a child, a " suckling " child, and objected to him that philosophers do not understand one iota about politics (as often has been and often will be objected by politicians, not altogether without reason). If it be wished, all the same, to find a reference to later utilitarianism among the sophists, the hedonists and the Epicureans, or among the Stoics, with their conception of life as a war against the passions, something of future rigorism and asceticism, or in certain discussions