CHAPTER
3
The Social Development of Democratic Capitalism
The Communist Manifesto
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class
antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each
is the condition for the free development of all.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848[1]
The Democratic Capitalist Manifesto
The other mode in which cooperation tends still more efficaciously to
increase the productiveness of labor, consists in the vast stimulus given to
productive energies, by placing the laborers, as a mass, in a relation to their
work which would make it their principle and their interest—at present it is
neither—to do the utmost, instead of the least possible, in exchange for their
remuneration. It is scarcely
possible to rate too highly this material benefit, which yet is nothing compared
to the moral revolution in society that would accompany it; a new sense of
security and independence in the laboring class; and the conversion of each
human being’s daily occupation into a school of the social sympathies and the
practical intelligence.
John Stuart Mill, 1848[2]
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) were close to agreement on the economic-political system that could create so much broadly distributed wealth that material scarcity would be eliminated and all people would be elevated and unified. The definition and test of this social arrangement wherein each and all could reach their full potential had begun three-quarters of a century before Mill and Marx wrote their manifestos.
Society’s erratic search for comfort and justice was illuminated in the
late-18th century by the near simultaneous contributions of Adam
Smith (1723-1790) and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826).
Smith’s proposal of economic freedom through growing capitalism, and
Over the two centuries since Smith’s and Jefferson’s advocacy of
complementary freedoms, democratic capitalism has been tested, validated, and
refined. The society with the
greatest freedom during this time, the
The legacy of the 17th-century geniuses, Galileo (1564-1642),
Descartes (1596-1650), and
My view is that each particular mode of production, and the relations of
production corresponding to it at each given moment, in short the economic
structure of society, is the real foundation, on which arises a legal and
political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness, and that the mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political, and intellectual life.[3]
With the proposed elimination of scarcity, exploitation, and alienation, the human species seemed ready to reach its temporal potential. Academia, the media, politicians, and the ecclesiastical establishments might well have embraced the new system, offering it to students and citizens by way of education. New leaders, motivated by the social morality of democratic capitalism and trained in its protocols of governance, might have converted the ideal into the real. It did not work that way, however. The predatory forces of mercantilism and imperialism, with their economic logic based on government privileges, still prevailed. Much of the world veered off in tragic pursuit of Marx’s radical restructuring that derailed his mission of individual self-development in the process; meanwhile, academia, the media, the churches, and political governments failed to synthesize Marx’s and Mill’s contributions.
Because democratic capitalism as an integrated system never became part of either academic inquiry or public awareness, progress for workers eventually came instead from the pressure of the trade-union movement, collectivist action by liberal government, and the trial and error of self-taught entrepreneurs. The motivation was the urge towards more freedom; the power was growing democracy; the results were better wages and working conditions and a rising standard of living.
Before 1810, for an early example, working hours at New Lanark were
reduced by Robert Owen (1771-1858) from 14 hours a day to ten hours a day.[4]
Years later in
The
first and greatest necessity of the present, to free the laborer of this country
from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be
the normal working day in all states of the American union.[5]
In the 20th century, numerous corporations went further in their democratization of capitalism by adding job security, participatory management, profit-sharing, and equity-purchasing plans.
Because democratic capitalism has enjoyed little visibility during the first two hundred years of its existence, it has had to take a variety of imperfect, experimental forms, short of the ideal. Progress was made, but productivity and innovation from a cooperative effort were limited because democratic capitalism had to be reinvented by each succeeding generation instead of being researched and then taught and learned in the universities.
Before Adam Smith issued his fundamental vision of economics, the
mercantile system was unable to improve most lives.
In 1756, Edmund Burke (1729-1797), still in his twenties, asked:
Why has every human effort to structure society for peace and plenty been
a failure? Why does the only animal
capable of reason kill more of its own species than does any other animal?
It is an incontestable Truth, that there is more Havoc made in one Year
by Men of Men, than has been made by all the Lions, Tigers, Panthers, Ounces,
Leopards, Hyenas, Rhinoceroses, Elephants, Bears and Wolves, upon their own
several Species, since the Beginning of the World; though these agree ill enough
with each other, and have a much Greater proportion of Rage and Fury in their
composition than we have.[6]
Burke added up all of the humans killed by humans in history. The methodology leading to his total of 37 billion was probably flawed, and some have used it to argue that Burke’s book was satirical, but his conclusion that human history is about great failure is tragically correct. Burke included in his litany of civil society’s failures the exploitation of the poor, and the conclusion of the powerful, after viewing the poor in their demeaned condition, that ordinary people are not capable of participating in their own governance.
Burke’s summary of thousands of years of human failure was based on a
battle over finite resources between the predatory few and the exploited many.
The movement from the slave-based economy of
Adam
Smith’s Vision: Society’s Opportunity to Build Wealth, Distribute It
Broadly, and Eliminate Material Scarcity
In 1776, a diminutive Scottish social philosopher, Adam Smith, described an economic dynamic in which the new technology of the Industrial Revolution; involved, well-paid workers; and worldwide free trade, would combine to grow wealth and spread it widely.[7] As the volume of production increased, Smith reasoned, costs would go down. Free competition would insure that this reduction in cost would be passed to the consumer. With lower prices, others could afford to buy, and that would generate more volume, still lower costs, and yet lower prices; then, more wage earners would become consumers demanding greater volume, and so on. Smith’s vision was of an economic perpetual-motion machine. Smith knew that more units under production would lower the per-unit cost because the cost of tools, machinery, and set-up for production would be spread over more units.
A dramatic example in our time of Smith’s commercial dynamic is the
computer industry, in which each year new functions are added, the machines
increase geometrically in power, and prices tumble.
Another phenomenon of the Information Age is the extension of Smith’s
dynamic to service industries. The
power of microchips and distributed processing to work stations allow, for the
first time, major reductions of administrative expense, and they open up
additional markets from reduced cost and price.
Cost and price reduction that sustains growth in the Information Age has
now moved from the factory floor to all aspects of business.
Free competition and the innovative spirit of engaged and highly paid
workers, just as Smith said would happen, drive the system.
Smith wrote Wealth of Nations as an economist to describe the interaction of costs, prices, markets, labor force, and monetary policy; he wrote as a political scientist to show that the general welfare is served by the most efficacious commercial system; and he demonstrated as a moral philosopher that capitalism, as he defined it, functions best when trust rules in the workplace, and integrity in business dealings. Adam Smith was a pragmatist who saw social benefits being derived from the energy and ambition of people who enjoy the requisite freedoms. He was a realist who recognized exploitation and class conflict in the prevailing system, mercantilism. He was an optimist who anticipated the greatest success in North America, proportionate to its greater freedoms.[8]
Adam Smith criticized the English monetary system as an economic
impediment: It sacrificed growth and jobs to protect the asset value of the
wealthy. In Smith’s theory, money
is a medium of exchange that needs to be ample, low-cost, non-volatile, patient,
and free of its own influence on the economic process.
Smith did not think like the mercantilists who saw workers as a cost
commodity to be suppressed, as Marx later put it, “in order to extract the
maximum surplus value.” Smith saw
workers, rather, as a vital part of the economic process, with a capacity for
involvement:
It
is naturally to be expected, therefore, that some one or other of those who are
employed in each particular branch of labour should find out easier and readier
methods of performing their own particular work, whenever the nature of it
admits of such improvement. A great
part of the machines made use of in those manufacturers, in which labor is most
subdivided, were originally the invention of common workmen in order to
facilitate and quicken their own particular part of the works.[9]
Smith proposed the view, radical at the time, that as worker involvement
improves profits, so the workers involved must share in the improved profits, if
their motivation is to be maintained:
The liberal reward of labour, as it encourages the propagation, so it
increases the industry of the common people.
The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which like every
other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives.
A plentiful subsistence increases the bodily strength of the labourer,
and the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and of ending his days
perhaps in ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the utmost.
Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workman more
active, diligent and expeditious, than when they are low.[10]
Smith never used the expression laissez-faire, although he had
studied the French physiocrats who did use it.
He has also been badly interpreted to be an apologist for greed.
He was, in fact, clear about the tension between his system and
mercantilism, and he was opposed both to the mercantilists’ government
privileges and to their greed. Similarly,
he anticipated the conflict between mercantilists who think that wage
suppression improves profits, and others who see the opportunity for every
worker to contribute to the success of the enterprise and share in the improved
results. Smith reasoned that
financial capitalism’s only legitimate function is to support the productive
sector with low-cost, non-volatile, and patient capital.
He was emphatic that all financial machinations are a subtraction from a
nation’s wealth:
So the stock of money which circulates in any country must require a certain expense, first to collect it and afterwards to support it, both of which expenses, though they make a part of the gross, are, in the same manner deductions from the neat revenue of the society.[11]
These conflicts between mercantilism and finance capitalism on one hand,
and democratic capitalism on the other, continue to permeate every aspect of
political and economic life, from the mission of government, to tax laws
affecting capital formation, and to the application of surplus, job security,
and ultimately the growth-rate of the global economy, which, in turn, affects
the standard of living. Resolution
of these conflicts will determine whether the world will grow together in
economic common purpose or continue in violence.
Jefferson’s
Vision: A Democratic Structure to Sustain Each Citizen’s Natural Rights
Thomas Jefferson and his lifelong collaborator, James Madison, drew on the radical view of Englishman John Locke (1632-1704), that each person is endowed with inalienable rights. When Locke had proposed this theory of natural rights, particularly in the second of his Two Treatises of Government (1690),[12] the prevailing structure was tyrannical and static. Under the hierarchy of monarchs, nobles, and gentry, the idea that serfs had individual rights was revolutionary.
Jefferson and Madison also drew heavily on Montesquieu (1689-1753), a Frenchman who described the benefits of a mixed republic in which power is diffused among legislative, judicial, and executive branches.[13] Jefferson and Madison adopted the principle, ignoring Montesquieu’s caveat that such a government could be functional only in a small, homogenous society. Madison, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, fought hard for the balanced arrangement; he argued that a large country could use this principle of checks and balances of power among the three branches of government to avoid concentration of power in any one aspect of government, while counting on diversity in the large population to prevent a tyranny by the majority.[14]
Earlier, when the Anglican Church in Virginia, subsidized by the Colony,
was persecuting Baptists, Jefferson and Madison had both battled successfully in
the Virginia Assembly for religious freedom.
They also spoke against slavery as an institution, but neither of them
succeeded in breaking out of their cultural conditioning as Virginia planters
sufficiently to recognize for the slave population the same inalienable rights
enjoyed by their owners.
While Madison toiled away at the Constitutional Convention in hot Philadelphia, May to September, 1787, Jefferson was in Paris as ambassador to France. Jefferson continued, nevertheless, to argue by letter for specificity about individual freedoms, and his emphasis was honored later when the priority of the new Congress became the passage of the first ten amendments to the new Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The philosophical legacy of Jefferson and Madison is a belief in the wisdom and energy of ordinary people, given sufficient freedom, education, and rational leadership. The corollary of this first principle is the government’s mission to nurture the environment of participatory democracy by limiting the government’s intrusions. At the same time, the economic first principle of government as mandated in the new country’s new Constitution is that the government’s economic role is “to promote the general welfare.”
Jefferson viewed America of that time as a country of independent farmers. He was wary of a financial oligarchy similar to those in Europe, and also wary of manufacturing. This ambiguity was itself part of the North/South animosity that contributed later to the Civil War. Because of the dominance by finance capitalism that Jefferson and Madison feared, the government failed to control currency and credit to promote the general welfare, as prescribed in the Constitution. The mixed-republic design, with deliberate diffusion of power, did not prevent the left from abandoning Jeffersonian principles by introducing a suffocating and mistake-prone central administration. On the right, the republic’s structure failed to resist the corruption of financial capitalists who began substantially to direct the government’s fiscal and monetary policies for the benefit of a few.
By the turn of the 21st century, many United States citizens had lost
faith in a government that had become so polarized and superficial that it was
unable to address root causes. Some
suggested that Montesquieu had been right, that the diffusion of power among the
executive, legislative, and judicial branches was unworkable in a large state.[15] The
opposite argument was that an educated citizenry can still define a long-term,
non-adversarial, integrated program that does address root problems, and can
elect representatives to execute that plan.
Kant’s
Vision: The Human Condition Improving, Energized by Growing Freedom and
Supported by Ideals Common to Religion and Reason
Immanuel Kant, a German professor, spent most of his life at the University of Königsberg in East Prussia. Whereas Adam Smith, an empiricist, had described an economic and political system that could provide comfort for all, Kant, a metaphysician, reasoned about free, moral humans for whom secular perfection is both their opportunity and their obligation. He challenged the tradition in which it was assumed that the human’s exclusive goal is eternal happiness, and that a static structure of serfs, nobles, absolute monarchs, and church is God-given.
In Critique of Pure Reason (1781),[16] Kant gave credit to Adam Smith’s friend, David Hume (1716-1776),[17] for having defined the limits of reason not connected with experience, and he emphasized a philosophy oriented to the life of action. By attempting to integrate reason with experience and tradition, Kant tried to relieve the tension between science and religion. Writing before the French Revolution and the toppling of European monarchs, Kant shared Jefferson’s view that the human instinct towards freedom would lead to governments that ruled by free consent of the governed. He identified the human moral agenda, the human purpose, and the rules of secular conduct that are common to reason and faith.
Kant saw freedom, disciplined by morality, as the core for human progress. The ultimate moral duty, as Kant defined it, is the categorical imperative: “Act only on a maxim by which you can will that it, at the same time, should become a general law.”[18] This rational morality forced the individual to analyze how society can best organize itself. The product of human reason in control of human behavior, it is imperative: unconditioned by time and place or circumstance, it is categorical.
Kant was not the first to have sought simple rules as the basis of social ethics. Centuries earlier when Confucius (542-479 B.C.) was asked if there were one word that could improve society, the Chinese philosopher had answered, “Reciprocity.”[19] The wisdom traditions of many religions hold the same first principle of human conduct as Confucius’s reciprocity and Kant’s Categorical Imperative, including the Judeo-Christian Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”[20]
In 1784, Kant wrote his Idea for a Universal History,
having been stimulated by a student’s observation:
Professor
Kant’s favorite idea is that the ultimate purpose of the human race is to
achieve the most perfect civic constitution ... and to show to what extent
humanity in various ages has approached or drawn away from this final purpose,
and what remains to be done in order to reach it.[21]
In his “Eighth Thesis,” Kant elaborated upon “a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end.”[22] He concluded that whether one approaches with an understanding of history as a natural process or an effect of providence, humans can find the way to social perfection — for any other conclusion would make “man alone a contemptible plaything.”[23] Kant argued that this process would “force the states to the same decision (hard though it may be for them) that savage man also was reluctantly forced to take, namely, to give up brutish freedom and to seek quiet and security under a lawful constitution.”[24]
In 1795, Kant in his seventies wrote Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,[25] his first publication since the government of King Frederick William II had imposed a ban on Kant’s theological writings. Again Kant demonstrated his capacity to move from the most detailed metaphysics to the broadest challenges facing the human species. Kant proposed that a republican form of government is a precondition to the cooperation of nations in a federation whose only purpose ought to be the protection of peace; further, he argued, peace can be assured only when morality holds hegemony over politics. Kant demonstrated his grasp of governance by describing the separation and diffusion of power inherent in the republican form. The United States of America alone among the nations had recently adopted this formal separation of powers.
Kant expressed “a certain indignation” over the mixture of folly with
wisdom, and violence with peace:
One
sees men’s actions on the great world stage and finds, besides the wisdom that
appears here and there among individuals, everything in the large woven together
from folly, childish vanity, even from childish malice, and destructiveness.”[26]
In her study of Kant, Sissela Bok summarized the moral constraints that governments must adopt if they are not to face a war of mutual extermination. These Kantian constraints include prohibitions against violence, deceit, and breach of trust. Bok described the fourth constraint as a prohibition against state secrecy.[27] These seem obvious enough until compared to the still prevalent Machiavellian view that “national interest” is a political matter of survival that transcends morality.
In the system of economic and political freedom, constraints against
violence, deceit, treachery, and secrecy are all functional prerequisites.
The dilemma suggested by Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), that is,
replicating the morality of individuals in the collective, explains the failure
of nations to realize Kant’s vision of cooperation.
Niebuhr’s analysis reflects the historical failure of nations to stop
the violence, but Niebuhr did not address the opportunities for nations united
in economic common purpose. Despite the demonstrated capacity of economic
freedom to improve lives, Niebuhr pessimistically concluded that many were still
destined for misery caused by economic inequity:
Human society will never escape the problem of the equitable distribution
of the physical and cultural goods which provide for the preservation and
fulfillment of human life.[28]
A similar lack of idealism on the part of many contemporary philosophers
provides tacit support for politicians who pursue policies based on the
inevitability of continued violence. New
philosophers, inspired by the pragmatic idealism of democratic capitalism, could
instead make “national interest” become participation in interdependent
economic freedom. States combined in
that purpose would be the collective moral society that eluded Niebuhr’s
imagination. As the standard of
living and the quality of life go up, the violence goes down.
Condorcet’s
Vision: A Summary of the
Contributions of the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment toward a Rational Order
for the Organization of Human Affairs
The last philosopher of the French Enlightenment, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was a protégé of Voltaire (1694-1778); with this type of sponsorship, he became secretary to the Academy of Sciences at a young age. A mathematician like Descartes, Condorcet combined Descartes’s dedication to scientific truth-searching with Voltaire’s passion for justice. Condorcet summarized the work of the 18th-century Enlightenment with his vision of human perfectibility. While in hiding during the Reign of Terror, Condorcet wrote an extraordinary document, Esquisse d’un Tableau Historique des Progres de L’Espirit Humain. He borrowed heavily from the work of his friend, Turgot[29], who was both a philosopher and a statesman. If Louis XVI (1754-1793) had followed Turgot’s (1727-1781) reforms when Turgot had been his minister, instead of firing him, the King might have kept both his throne and his head.
Following a life of action, dialogue, and reflection, Condorcet proposed
this liberal agenda for social progress:
Free trade, freedom of speech, freedom of press, the end of censorship,
the end of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, universal free education,
equality before the law, the separation of state and church, religious
toleration, the adoption of a written constitution with a written declaration of
the rights of people embedded in the constitution to insure the recognition of
those rights, the establishment of a representative or parliamentary form of
national government, and local self-government to encourage the independence and
the participation of the peasants in government.[30]
Condorcet was a man of action as well as thought, having served in the French National Assembly. Condorcet’s agenda for social progress also benefited from his discussions with Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Condorcet’s wife, Sophie, translated into French Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments[31] and Thomas Paine’s speeches to the French National Assembly.[32]
Condorcet sustained his optimistic belief in human progress despite
having to hide and then be in prison. The
terrors that he experienced did not undermine his belief in human potential.
From his discussions with Thomas Jefferson, Condorcet was inspired by the
mission of the new republic, the United States:
One nation alone escapes the two-fold influence of tyranny and
superstition. From that happy land
where freedom had only recently kindled the torch of genius, the mind of man
released from the leading-strings of its infancy, advances with firm steps
towards the truth.[33]
In the final chapter of Esquisse, “The Tenth Stage, The Future
Progress of the Human Mind,” Condorcet laid out his blueprint for social
progress based on the elements of democratic governance, “believing that
nature has set no limit to the realization of our hopes.”[34]
Condorcet on imperialism and free trade:
The nations of Europe will finally learn that monopolistic companies are
nothing more than a tax imposed upon them in order to provide their governments
with a new instrument of tyranny. The
peoples of Europe, confining themselves to free trade, understanding their own
rights too well to show contempt for those of other peoples, will respect this
independence, which until now they have so insolently violated.[35]
Condorcet
on the template available for emerging nations trying to improve the lives of
their people:
The progress of these peoples is likely to be more rapid and certain than our own because they can receive from us everything that we have had to find out for ourselves, and in order to understand those simple truths and infallible methods which we have acquired only after long error, all that they need to do is to follow the expositions and proofs that appear in our speeches and writings.
Condorcet’s international vision:
When
mutual needs have brought all men together, and the great powers have
established equality between societies as well as between individuals and have
raised respect for the independence of weak states and sympathy for ignorance
and misery to the rank of political principles, when maxims that favor action
and energy have ousted those which would compress the province of human
faculties, will it then be possible to fear that there are still places in the
world inaccessible to enlightenment, or that despotism in its pride can raise
barriers against truth that are insurmountable for long?
The time will therefore come when the sun will shine only on free men who
know no other master but their reason.[36]
Condorcet
on wealth distribution:
It is easy to prove that wealth has a natural tendency to equality, and
that any excessive disproportion could not exist or at least would rapidly
disappear if civil laws did not provide artificial ways of perpetuating and
uniting fortunes; if free trade and industry were allowed to remove the
advantages that accrued wealth derives from any restrictive law or fiscal
privilege; if taxes on covenants, the restrictions placed on their free
employment, their subjection to tiresome formalities and the uncertainty and
inevitable expense involved in implementing them did not hamper the activity of
the poor man and swelled up his meager capital; if the administration of the
country did not afford some men ways of making their fortune that were closed to
other citizens.[37]
Condorcet
on a social safety net:
Here then is a necessary cause of inequality, of dependence, and even of
misery, which ceaselessly threatens the most numerous and most active class in
our society. We shall point out how
it can be in great part eradicated by guaranteeing people in old age a means of
livelihood, by securing for widows and orphans an income which is the same and
costs the same for those families which suffer an early loss and for those which
suffer it later; or again by providing all children with the capital necessary
for the full use of their labor, available at the age when they start work and
found a family. It is to the application of the calculus to the probabilities of
life and the investment of money that we owe the idea of these methods which
have already been successful, although they have not been applied in a
sufficiently comprehensive and exhaustive fashion to render them really useful,
not merely to a few individuals, but to society as a whole, by making it
possible to prevent those periodic disasters which strike at so many families
and which are such a recurrent source of misery and suffering.[38]
Condorcet’s vision was not a prediction of the perfect welfare state but rather a “calculus” designed to fashion a society capable and willing of helping those in need. Condorcet emphasized throughout not only the desired specifics for social progress but also the process, or “calculus,” by which society might systematically identify problems and arrive at their solution.
Condorcet
on capital formation:
We shall reveal other methods of insuring equality, either by seeing that
credit is no longer the exclusive privilege of great wealth, or by making
industrial progress and commercial activity more independent of the existence of
the great capitalists.[39]
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, cash to fund economic
growth no longer comes from “great capitalists” but is either produced
internally within the system or comes mainly from wage-earner savings and
pension funds. Despite this new,
democratic effect of capital, wealth is becoming more concentrated because
ultra-capitalists concentrate wealth for their own benefit from OPM (other
people’s money). Privileges
continue and wealth becomes more concentrated because Condorcet’s calculus has
not been refined and applied.
Condorcet
on education for a full and happy life and involved citizenship:
The degree of equality in education that we can reasonably hope to
attain, but that should be adequate, is that which excludes all dependence,
either forced or voluntary. We shall
show how this condition can be easily attained in the present state of human
knowledge even by those who can study only for a small number of years in
childhood, and then during the rest of their lives in their few hours of
leisure. We shall prove that, by a
suitable choice of syllabus and of methods of education, we can teach the
citizen everything that he needs to know in order to be able to manage his
household, administer his affairs, and employ his labor and his faculties in
freedom; to know his rights and to be able to exercise them; to be acquainted
with his duties and fulfill them satisfactorily; to judge his own and other
men’s actions according to his own lights and to be a stranger to none of the
high and delicate feelings which honor human nature; not to be in a state of
blind dependence upon those to whom he must entrust his affairs or the exercise
of his rights; to be in a proper condition to choose and supervise them.[40]
Although much of Condorcet’s vision has been realized, the educational process in the United States and elsewhere is failing, if Condorcet’s agenda be taken to be the mission and measure of education. Millions are not educated sufficiently to avoid a life of dependency. Most of the rest are not educated sufficiently to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens. Condorcet’s proposition on education should become a mission statement and challenge to all educators. A comprehensive curriculum is lacking, although an extraordinary delivery system using new communication technology is now available.
Condorcet’s
emphasis on integration of the variables in the social equation:
These
various causes of equality do not act in isolation; they unite, combine, and
support each other, and so their cumulative effects are stronger, surer, and
more constant. With greater equality
of education there will be greater equality in industry and so in wealth;
equality in wealth necessarily leads to equality in education, and equality
between the nations and equality within a single nation are mutually dependent.[41]
Condorcet
on freedom through education and the discipline of law:
We might say that a well-directed system of education rectifies natural
inequality in ability instead of strengthening it, just as good laws remedy
natural inequality in the means of subsistence, and just as in societies where
laws have brought about this same equality, liberty, though subject to a regular
constitution, will be more widespread, more complete than in the total
independence of savage life. Then
the social art will have fulfilled its aim, that of assuring and extending to
all men enjoyment of the common rights to which they are called by nature.[42]
Condorcet
on epistemology:
As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas,
simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity; so truths that were discovered
only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of
profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond
the reach of common intelligence. The
strength and the limits of man’s intelligence may remain unaltered; and yet
the instruments that he uses will increase and improve, the language that fixes
and determines his ideas will acquire greater breadth and precision and, unlike
mechanics where an increase of force means a decrease of speed, the methods that
lead genius to the discovery of truth increase at once the force and the speed
of its operations.[43]
Condorcet and his fellow French philosophers did not seek a detailed rationalized scheme for human affairs. They hoped for a truth-searching process by which each generation could make its contribution and build society’s momentum towards perfection. Condorcet outlined the building-block approach that has produced the extraordinary tower of knowledge in the natural sciences. Condorcet assumed that humans, the rational animal, would pursue the mission of perfectibility by using the same building-block approach to frame the social order. This seemed the obvious mechanism to intellectuals who were also people of affairs.
Academia, the natural place to assimilate, organize, and test the spectrum of knowledge necessary for the best conduct in human affairs, did not, however, either take up this challenge of the Enlightenment or assume the responsibility of rationally determining the best organization. This has been the great default, now compounded by the great paradox: At the most propitious time in human history, many leading philosophers in academia are not working on a truth-searching process that would lead to a world of peace and plenty; they have declared that ideal an impossible illusion.
Society’s destiny thus far had headed into catch-22 circularity:
When humans are not educated and trained to function within a rational
order, then the inevitable folly and violence convince many that no rational
order is possible. When the ideal is
not clearly presented for student examination and development, the consequence
is that more poorly educated citizens elect more equally poorly trained leaders
whose governance by default leads the world back into the same old folly and
violence.
Condorcet
on the eternal contract among generations:
Men will know that they have a duty toward those who are not yet born, that duty is not to give them existence but to give them happiness.[44]
Condorcet on women’s rights:
Among the causes of the progress of the human mind that are of the utmost
importance to the general happiness, we must number the complete annihilation of
the prejudices that have brought about an inequality of rights between the
sexes, an inequality fatal even to the party in which favor it works.
It is vain for us to look for a justification of this principle in any
differences of physical organization, intellect, or moral sensibility between
men and women. This inequality has
its origin solely in an abuse of strength, and all the later sophistical
attempts that have been made to excuse it are vain.[45]
Condorcet
on war, mercantilism, and the relations of nations:
Once people are enlightened they will know that they have the right to dispose of their own life and wealth as they choose; they will gradually learn to regard war as the most dreadful of scourges, the most terrible of crimes. Nations will learn that they cannot conquer other nations without losing their own liberty; that permanent confederations are their only means of preserving their independence; and that they should seek not power but security. Gradually mercantile prejudices will fade away, and a false sense of commercial interest will lose the fearful power it once had of drenching the earth in blood and of ruining nations under pretext of enriching them. When at last the nations come to agree on the principles of politics and morality, when in their own better interests they invite foreigners to share equally in all the benefits men enjoy either through the bounty of nature or by their own industry, then all the causes that produce and perpetuate national animosities and poison nations’ relations will disappear one by one; and nothing will remain to encourage or even to arouse the fury of war.
Organizations more intelligently conceived than those projects of eternal
peace which have filled the leisure and consoled the hearts of certain
philosophers, will hasten the progress of the brotherhood of nations, and wars
between countries will rank with assassinations as freakish atrocities,
humiliating and vile in the eyes of nature and staining with indelible
opprobrium the country or the age whose annals record them.[46]
What a wonderful vision! Two hundred years later, however, Condorcet’s optimism is difficult to reconcile with the events of the bloodiest, most violent century in human history, the twentieth century; and Condorcet’s optimism is difficult to sustain in view of the apparent continuation of this bloodthirsty violence into the new century following the new outburst of terrorism on September 11, 2001. How can the world in the grip of reciprocal atrocities find its way towards building economic common purpose?
The French Revolution also knew something of terror. Despite the beauty of Condorcet’s vision and the specificity of his means, most of the energy in the French Revolution went into rearranging the power structure among the monarchy, the church, the nobles, and the bourgeoisie, leaving the peasants to go on starving. Edmund Burke, by then a well-known British Parliamentarian, warned that too much infrastructure was being torn down too fast; he accurately predicted the dire results.[47] Reforms did not give priority to a better commercial way to improve miserable lives. In time, the Paris mobs and the starving peasants took over, and the Revolution went from tyranny to bloody anarchy to new tyranny. Despite this lesson, reformers since have repeated the error, changing the political structure rather than improving the commercial system.
Condorcet summarized on behalf of the Enlightenment an ideal, the means to attain it, and the intellectual process to validate the ideal and specify the means. His was a comprehensive and integral proposal, comprehensive in that all the working parts are included, and integral in that they are related in a logical way. Condorcet sketched the original liberal philosophy that we now term “classical liberalism” to distinguish it from its modern distortions of so-called “liberalism.” Condorcet sketched the democratic capitalist culture and protocols, including specificity on free trade, capital formation, and monopolies. If his advice on emerging economies had been followed in the 1990s, for example, then the post-Communism Russian economic disaster might have been avoided. If Condorcet’s specification for broad access to capital and broad distribution of wealth had been followed in the 1990s, for a further example, then ultra-capitalism would not have become dominant in the United States.
By 1800, the Enlightenment had raised the challenge to find the rational
order in human affairs, and enlightened minds had responded to the challenge
with great specificity. The Scotsman
Smith, the American Jefferson, the German Kant, and the Frenchman Condorcet had
all made enormous contributions. In
the 19th century, workmen like the Welshman Owen, and social philosophers like
the Englishman Mill and the German Marx, would validate and refine the vision of
a perfectible society.
Owen’s
Vision: A World without Scarcity,
People Educated and Motivated to Reach Their Potential
Robert Owen, a poor Welsh boy, left home at ten; in his twenties, he met the owner of a Glasgow textile mill, borrowed some money, bought the mill, and married the owner’s daughter. Owen then proved in practice that a commercial system based on developing the potential of each worker can produce better growth and profits than did systems that treated workers as an exploitable commodity.
Whereas Smith had speculated and Kant had philosophized, Owen actually took a final convincing step—experimental verification. Owen saw the potential in each individual, and he undertook to release latent human power through education from the earliest age, clean housing, sobriety, higher wages, and shorter working hours.
Owen was opposed to the mercantilists who made money from government privilege, while viewing urban workers as they were in their miserable social conditions, rather than seeing them as they could become. The mercantilists’ priority was cost containment, so they paid leading economists to lobby Parliament in support of employing lower-cost, eleven-year-old children on the night shift. They perverted Malthus’s theory of population, arguing that increased wages would increase population, thereby increasing wage competition and driving wages back down. One might as well, the mercantilists rationalized, institutionalize poverty and misery by keeping wages at a level of bare subsistence so that procreation would be limited in the first place.
Mercantilist policy precluded the involvement, innovation, and productivity of willing workers, and it did not provide sufficient spendable income to purchase products made by other wage earners in either one’s own or other countries. The resulting maldistribution of wealth aborted the wealth multiplication inherent in Adam Smith’s economic dynamic. Two hundred years later, this mercantilist economic impediment still continued, now called “downsizing” and “wage arbitrage.”
Owen verified that investment in the workers’ quality of life results in larger profits for the owners than does the mercantilists’ policy of cost containment. Owen believed in job security: He paid out £7,000 in wages during the four months his company was shut down by the American cotton embargo in 1806. Social benefits included free medical services, a contributory pension fund, schools, food and clothing at cost, and social and recreational facilities. “Owen calculated that during his 30 years at New Lanark (1799-1829), more than £300,000 in profit was divided among the partners over and above the 5% per annum paid on capital invested.” Owen reported: “The value of the mills increased between 1799 and 1813 from £60,000 to £114,000; profits of £160,000 were produced in the period 1809 to 1813.”[48]
In the preface to A New View of Society, Owen described his
obligation to invest both in equipment and people to maximize stockholder
returns. With his appreciation of
the workers’ potential, however, he emphasized the significantly greater
returns from the investment in people:
From the commencement of my management, I viewed the population, with the mechanism and every other part of the establishment, as a system composed of many parts, and which it was my duty and interest so to combine, as that every hand, as well as every spring, lever, and wheel, should effectually cooperate to produce the greatest pecuniary gain to the proprietors.
If, then, due care as to the state of your inanimate machines can produce
beneficial results, what may not be expected if you devote equal attention to
your vital machines, which are far more wonderfully constructed?
From experience which cannot deceive me, I venture to assure you, that
your time and money so applied, if directed by a true knowledge of
the subject, would return you not five, ten or fifteen percent for your
capital so expended, but often fifty and in many cases a hundred per cent.[49]
Building on his success at New Lanark, Owen became an evangelist for the development of each individual, advocating trust, cooperation, respect, and training to allow people to participate. In this environment, structure could be minimal, and execution could be simpler and more effective than in the command-and-control, adversarial approach. Owen was convinced that this value system and its associated protocols could solve more problems for less money. He repeatedly petitioned Parliament on behalf of working children, and he proposed job solutions after the 1816 food riots.
In 1818, this uneducated Welshman, speaking in his working-class accent,
addressed leaders from America and Europe assembled for a conference at Aix-la-Chapelle
following the Napoleonic Wars. Owen
described the way to social progress that he had developed while working with
ordinary people in his factories. His
extraordinary vision was that through his form of democratic capitalism, humans
need no longer starve or live in misery and despair.
In Owen’s Memorials, presented on behalf of the working class,
his “First General Result” was a promise of universal comfort:
The period is arrived, when the means are become obvious, by which,
without force or fraud of any kind, riches may be created in such abundance and
so advantageously for all, that the wants and desires of every human being may
be more than satisfied. In
consequence, the dominion of wealth, and the evils arising from the desire to
acquire and accumulate riches, are on the point of terminating.[50]
In the “Second General Result,” Owen addressed the education
necessary to develop each person:
The period is arrived, when the principles of political economy are
becoming obvious, by which without disorder, force or punishment of any kind,
the rising generation may be with ease and advantage to all, surrounded by new
circumstances which shall form them into any character that society may
predetermine. Such education will
enable each child to pass the barriers of error and prejudice.[51]
Many became eager to find out about a system that eliminated scarcity by
elevating people. Between 1815 and
1825, some 20,000 visitors, including Nicholas, Grand Duke of Russia, came to
Owen’s town, New Lanark, to view the working model.
The universities, with their mission to investigate and illuminate, unify
and elevate, might have recognized this coherent, workable system, and presented
it to their students for consideration. The
churches, concerned to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the
homeless, might have blessed Owen’s discovery.
Governments, dedicated to promoting the general welfare, might have built
on Owen’s capitalism as the best source of economic opportunity, the
prerequisite for benefiting from other freedoms.
It did not work that way, however.
Hegel’s
Vision: The Unified Human Spirit in the Process of Identifying and Attaining the
Secular Ideal
Building on Kant’s optimism about the improving human condition, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), professor at Heidelberg and Berlin, developed a new philosophy of history. He believed that nature is an organic whole in the process of growth and development, and that society is being drawn upward through contradiction and struggle to higher stages of development. He recognized the human duality of being both individual and social, one and one-of-many.
Hegel described “Geist” (spirit), the metaphysical equivalent
of Smith’s “invisible hand” of commerce, as that which moves the whole
towards perfection:
That
those manifestations of vitality on the parts of individuals and peoples, in
which they seek and fulfill their own purposes, are, at the same time, the means
and instruments of a higher and broader purpose of which they know nothing.[52]
Hegel
affirmed the motivation of this Geist:
The
nature of spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite —
matter. As the essence of matter is
gravity, so on the other hand we may affirm that the essence, the subject of
spirit, is freedom.[53]
Like Kant before him, Hegel reconciled the tension between freedom and
theological dogma by identifying the temporal human purpose and the means to
attain it as common to both reason and faith:
Freedom is its own object of attainment, and the sole aim of spirit.
This is the result at which the process of the world’s history has been
continually aiming, and to which the sacrifices that have ever and anon been
laid on the vast altar of the earth, through the long lapse of ages, have been
offered. This is the only aim that
sees itself realized and fulfilled, the only pole of repose amid the ceaseless
change of events and conditions. This
final aim is God’s purpose with the world; that is, His Nature itself is what
we here call the Idea of Freedom, translating the language of religion into that
of thought.[54]
Hegel, like Kant, added emphasis to the movement towards freedom that energizes social progress. This idealism was coupled with the proposition that the rules for human conduct are common to reason and religion, and prerequisite to attaining both secular and spiritual goals.
Tocqueville’s Vision: A World Moving towards Freedom
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), a young French nobleman, visited
America in the 1830s to observe democracy in action.
France was still working its way out of the tyrannical church/state
structure whose abuses had provoked the French Revolution.
The United States, during the same period, was enjoying the political
freedoms that had been advocated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
Anxious about France’s future, Tocqueville wanted to observe how
democracy was at work in America. Trained
in the law, like Montesquieu, Tocqueville was also a political scientist who
took the long view of history. He
recognized the same movement towards freedom that Smith, Jefferson, Madison,
Condorcet, Owen, Kant, and Hegel had seen:
The various occurrences of material existence have everywhere turned to
the advantage of democracy. The
gradual development of the principle of equality is, therefore, a providential
fact. It is universal, it is
lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as
all men contribute to its progress.[55]
This inexperienced young aristocrat then identified a motivation
important to successful democratic governance.
Although the movement towards freedom encourages humans to produce and
innovate, humans, however, instinctively give priority to equality of condition:
There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality that incites
men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the
humble to the rank of the great; but, there exists also in the human heart a
depraved taste for equality which impels the weak to attempt to lower the
powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to
inequality with freedom. Not that
those nations whose social condition is democratic naturally despise liberty; on
the contrary, they have an instinctive love of it.
But liberty is not the chief and constant object of their desire;
equality is their idol; they make rapid and sudden efforts to obtain liberty,
and if they miss their aim, resign themselves to their disappointment; but
nothing can satisfy them without equality, and they would rather perish than
lose it.[56]
Whereas Smith and Owen had both seen the elimination of scarcity and the
equality of opportunity achievable through the liberation of individuals to
produce and innovate, Tocqueville anticipated reformers with new political power
who would severely damage this freedom as a source of wealth in their eagerness
to redistribute wealth. Tocqueville
warned against a new governmental tyranny in the name of the general welfare:
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes
upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less
useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and
gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.
It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated
rules. The will of man is not
shattered, but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act,
but they are constantly restrained from acting.
Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not
tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people
till each national is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and
industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd.[57]
If Tocqueville could have re-audited the U.S.A. in the 1950s, he would have found a Federal Register 10,000 pages long “covering the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules.” By the end of the century, this bureaucratic bulk had accumulated over 90,000 pages of suffocating burden.
Tocqueville recognized two ingredients as necessary for democracy, namely
education and moral discipline. He
wrote of the priority of education, and he understood Jefferson’s vision of
sustaining religion’s role in civil morality after the uncoupling of the
tyrannical, or potentially tyrannical, church/state structure.
A generation after Jefferson and Kant, Tocqueville saw in practice the
interaction of freedom and moral discipline to which each had dedicated his
life’s work.
Religion perceives that civil liberty affords a noble exercise to the
faculties of man and that the political world is a field prepared by the creator
for the efforts of mind. Free and
powerful in its own sphere, satisfied with the place reserved for it, religion
nevermore surely establishes its empire than when it reigns in the hearts of men
unsupported by aught besides its native strength.
Liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and its
triumphs, as the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims.
It considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the
best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.[58]
Tocqueville had an optimistic view that free religion in the new American
republic would be an important contributor to a secular, unified purpose.
He hoped religion could help structure the new freedoms so that each
citizen would be educated to be sensitive to the rights and needs of others.
It did not work that way, however.
John
Stuart Mill’s Vision: A Superior Mode of Capitalism that Maximizes
Productivity and Innovation by Purging Exploitation and Class Conflict
John Stuart Mill published his Principles of Political Economy in 1848, the same year in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Mill and Marx shared the view that the state’s mission is to promote the general welfare, not deliver privileges to the few. They both believed in the worth and potential of each individual, that the development of society is the sum of the development of each person, and in broad wealth distribution through worker ownership. Marx observed, “The productive forces, too, have increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of shared wealth flow more abundantly.”[59]
Mill and Marx contrasted sharply with one another, however, in terms of
their proposals to achieve social progress on the basis of economics.
Whereas Marx, revolted by mercantilist exploitation, wanted to tear down
the whole structure, Mill proposed evolutionary development within Adam
Smith’s theory of free markets. Marx,
myopic in this view, had no interest in the contributions of Mill, whom he
described as a “bourgeois economist, a mere sophist, and sycophant to the
ruling class.”[60]
Mill developed his theory of democratic capitalism on the basis of his study of alternative systems. He recognized that socialists did not understand that the motivation from private ownership is fundamental to a successful civil society. Mill understood the importance of cooperation in any society, but he corrected the socialists by insisting that competition is also a vital function in the free commercial process. Up to this point, Mill was affirming Adam Smith’s point of vi