Richard T. Ely's Critique of Capitalism

L. Bradizza

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137346179
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

This book examines the work and thought of Richard T. Ely in light of his rejection of capitalism and view toward individualism. It concludes that there are real problems with Ely's theories and the principles of Progressivism, and addresses the implications of this for current American political thought.

CHAPTER 1

Ely’s Progressive Individualism

In his self-understanding, Ely is an individualist who seeks the development of every member of society. His individualism is progressive in the sense that he would have the state assist in the positive development of all by means of reformed property and contract relations, and he would have men reshape their individual moral goals so that, especially in the case of the talented few, they might become directly responsible for the elevation of the lower classes of society. Ely’s notion of progressive individualism is teleological: it aims at a progressive goal of the comprehensive and maximal individual development of all. And, as subsequent chapters demonstrate, it provides the organizing moral principle and goal by which his other ideas can be understood and integrated. As I will show in this chapter, there are some theoretical difficulties with Ely’s notion of individualism, particularly with regard to his view of the natural rights individualism he would supplant and with regard to his plans to elevate the common man and morally reorient the talented few.

Scholars differ over whether Ely is an individualist. One group sees him as a collectivist who subordinates the individual to society or the state. Within this group, different scholars emphasize different aspects of Ely’s thought. Some argue that Ely sees man as radically dependent on and formed by society. For example, David Noble notes that Ely was taught by his German professors that “man was absolutely dependent on his society, that the individual was created by society. Ethics must take into account, then, this fact of the reality of society and the dependence of man upon it for his personality.... Ethics must be social not individual.”¹ David Anderson likewise argues that Ely makes the individual radically dependent on society. For Ely, “individuals are the particularization of the social forces around them, and... the social order is the generalization of the present social forces.”² In a discussion of the issue of taxation, Steven Cord and Robert Andelson claim that for Ely, “the individual has no rights apart from society.”³ Sidney Milkis and Jerome Mileur argue that

[p]rogressives celebrated the moral possibility inherent in the growth of human power over nature, that by transcending old limits, human beings might more closely approach the ideal. History, Richard Ely urged, had been virtually transformed; the expansion of knowledge had taken humanity beyond the limits of purely biological evolution. Society, not the individual, was now the primary unit in the process.⁴

Other scholars from this group focus on Ely’s statism. Jesse Gilbert and Ellen Baker second Noble’s view of Ely’s professors: they were “statist.” Gilbert and Baker argue that Ely absorbed their views while in Germany, and that when he came back to America, he “championed a collective form of democracy.”⁵ Eugene Lowe writes that for Ely, “[o]nly the state... could effect systematic reform”; only it “transcended human divisions.”⁶ Jean Quandt shares this general view: “In Ely’s eyes, government was the God-given instrument through which we had to work.... [H]e thought of government as God’s main instrument of redemption.” In her view, Ely “divinize[d] the state.”⁷ Still other scholars see in Ely’s thought an organic view of human society. Ely’s contemporary Sydney Webb bestows what he regards as high praise on Ely in a personal letter to him: “All your social reforms are based it seems to me on Collectivism, and so I agree with them.”⁸ Benjamin Rader has a similar view: “Ely tended to see [society] as a single unity in which all individuals were part of an organism.”⁹ James Dombrowski notes Ely’s view that society is an “organism.” Following Nicolai Bukharin, he interprets this to mean that for Ely, “the poor and servant classes were permanent and essential factors in society,” fated to be subordinate to the ruling class.¹⁰ However, Dombrowski does not take into account Ely’s subordination of each to all. In particular, he does not explain Ely’s desire to have the “ruling class” serve the lower classes. But more generally, none of these scholars adequately accounts for Ely’s great goal of the maximal individual development of each member of society. One might say that Ely’s collectivism, statism, and organic view of society are, paradoxically, in the service of his individualism. Because we should understand him as defined more by his goal than by the means he would use to attain that goal, we must see him as more individualist than these scholars allow.

A second group of scholars differs quite sharply with the assessment that Ely is a collectivist. They argue that Ely is really an individualist, that his collectivism is either highly qualified or nonexistent. Within this group, one set sees Ely as rejecting an organic view of society. Mark Pittenger believes that “[w]here [John Bates] Clark happily reduced the individual to a single unit, or ‘atomic portion,’ of the social organism, Ely stressed [German Historical School political economist Karl] Knies’s view that the individual must remain an independent entity, a conscious agent of social and moral development.”¹¹ This is true as far as it goes, although we must add here that Ely would highly qualify the “independent” action of the individual, so as to serve the social goal of the development of all individuals. According to Ralph Gabriel, progressives “looked upon society only as an aggregation of individuals. It has no meaning outside the individuals who compose it.... The collectivistic tendencies of the Progressives stemmed for the most part from the doctrine of the free and autonomous individual.”¹² But Gabriel does not account for Ely’s view that the state logically, temporally, and politically precedes the supposed “aggregation of individuals.” Furthermore, Ely objects to the notion of an “autonomous individual,” because the individual finds his purpose in service to others. Other scholars argue that Ely is not a statist. Sidney Fine claims that “Ely indulged in no Hegelian worship of the state and... his view of state action was essentially a pragmatic one.”¹³ In fact, Ely placed the state at the very center of his thought, elevating it even above the Church.¹⁴ Yet another set of scholars aims to blur the line separating Ely from more traditional American individualists. Bradley Bateman implies that after his 1894 academic “trial,” Ely became more compliant and started teaching “individualism, not socialism; the rights of private property, not the rights of workers to organize themselves.”¹⁵ But as we will see, Ely’s progressive individualism appears in such pre- 1894 works as Social Aspects of Christianity. And his 1914 Property and Contract very much argues against private property, as it had been previously understood in America. Frederick Bartol claims that Ely is not a collectivist but rather that “much of [his] thought... remained well within the parameters of the American liberal-republican tradition.”¹⁶ But curiously, Bartol later concedes that “Ely’s writings by the mid-1890s suggest an attempt to take [Henry Carter] Adams’s ideas in radically collectivist directions.”¹⁷

This chapter proceeds by exploring Ely’s rejection of the individualism of the Founders. It then argues that he positions his own progressive individualism between what he sees as the extremes of natural rights individualism and the subordination of one person for the sake of another. Subsequent sections detail his goal of elevating the lower classes and morally reorienting the upper classes to serve them. The chapter then turns to a critical examination of Ely’s views. The main difficulties with his progressive individualism are a defective understanding of the Founders, limited and even counterproductive effects of his program on the lower classes, and a problematical account of the defects of self-regarding actions and the prospects for general selflessness.

1. Ely’s Rejection of Extremes

Ely rejects what he regards as the two opposed extremes of atomistic, natural rights individualism and the subjection of one individual to another. He is thus able to propose his own progressive views as a moderate alternative to these extremes. Ely advances his revised progressive individualism in part as a response to and substitute for the natural rights individualism of the America of his day, which he rejects as irredeemably flawed. But the natural rights regime that undergirds the supposedly faulty individualism of his day was bequeathed to us by the Founders. And so, in preparation for advancing his own views, Ely rejects both the abstract political principles of the Founders (as noted in the Introduction, Section 5) and the practical results in the form of the grossly imperfect social development that is a consequence of these principles. Ely believes the Founders’ principles to be flawed in a few key respects. The Founders have an ahistoricist view of society, believing their ideas to be valid for all times and places. They rely on social contract theory, which, Ely believes, erroneously denies man’s full social and political nature by analyzing him apart from the state. The result of these two theoretical errors is, according to Ely’s analysis, a radical individualism that unleashes a major error at the level of political practice: an un-Christian and antisocial selfishness that is damaging both to oneself and to others. This selfishness produces what Ely regards as a further practical error: capitalism, which, he claims, materially and developmentally impoverishes and exploits the many, while materially enriching and spiritually impoverishing the few.

As a proponent of the Historical School,¹⁸ Ely’s analysis of America begins with the belief that there are no trans-historical or trans-cultural economic truths. He claims that “[n]o system of economics is applicable to all times and places.”¹⁹ In light of Ely’s view of the close connection between politics and economics, he must conclude that any political system that promotes an inappropriate economic system must itself be inappropriate.²⁰ Whatever the virtues of the Founding—and he acknowledges some—Ely rejects its principles as invalid in his own day and, insofar as the Founders believe their ideas to apply to all men at all times, simply invalid. For example, Ely praises the Declaration of Independence as “among the greatest and grandest documents of the world’s history,” but then goes on to criticize the Founders for what he regards as their “very simple psychology,” and in general their very poor understanding of human nature.²¹

Ely argues that, having accepted and adopted social contract theory, radical individualism, and capitalism, the Founders have a simplistic conception of human freedom. For the Founders,

[l]iberty is thought of as a unity, and not as a complex conception, or bundle of rights. Moreover, we find that liberty is presented in its negative aspects. Restrictions and restraints are found upon liberty, and it is thought that once we clear these away, liberty will assert itself as a benign force.²²

The stage of economic development at the time of the Founding partly accounts for their error: “The economic ties uniting men in society were relatively few and simple in 1776.”²³ On Ely’s telling, this lack of economic “complexity” led the Founders to believe that lifting political restrictions on liberty was sufficient in order to free men.²⁴ He allows that, intellectually and politically, these doctrines were useful in their day because they helped the colonists to break free of oppressive British rule: “mercantilism gave way in the eighteenth century to a philosophy of individualism, under the combined influence of the reaction against the restrictive policies of the British government and the natural antipathy of a frontier community to legal restraint.”²⁵ And in economic terms, he goes on to argue, the relatively equal status of the citizens of the new nation, and the broad and rich frontier open to all,²⁶ meant that economic inequalities were muted. He speaks well of the independence and resourcefulness of the frontier man, who was “unusually restless, mobile, and enterprising.” However, Ely also accuses him of being “partial to the spoils system, tolerant of ‘lynch law’ and labor violence, and indifferent to waste and weakness in the administration of his government,” all of which Ely blames on an “excessive individualism.”²⁷

Ely here uses the term “excessive” because he rejects a key premise of eighteenth-century individualism: the natural equality of all men. While Locke and the Founders claim that all men are created equal, Ely argues that such notions of natural human equality are demonstrably false: “The eighteenth-century doctrine of essential equality among men is, in my opinion, pernicious.... There is no more marked social fact, no one more momentous in its consequences, than the essential inequality of men. Men are unequal in power, capacity, requirements.”²⁸ Of course, as discussed in the Introduction, Section 5, the Founders also believe that men are naturally unequal in talents and abilities. But they hold that men’s unequal abilities—and consequent unequal holdings—must be equally protected in law because men have an equal natural right to their unequal holdings based on an underlying qualitative equality as imperfect rational beings. Ely rejects equal natural rights along with natural human equality.

For all this, Ely holds that natural human inequality does not manifest itself as equally bad in all circumstances. At first, the doctrine of human equality did more good than harm:

The sources of inequality of opportunity, as the Fathers of this Republic saw them, were largely political, and as a matter of fact in those days they were indeed largely political. Political inequalities were the most obvious inequalities, so political inequalities were abolished.

At the time, economic differences were not serious, because “our forefathers opened up the land to all and we had free land. It seemed for a time as if that must afford an approximation towards an equality of opportunity.” But industrialization changed this arrangement and produced new “inequalities in economic opportunity. These are the most serious at the present time.”²⁹ Industrialization increases the dependence of man on man; no longer can a person escape burdensome personal economic circumstances or isolate himself from national economic turmoil by becoming a self-reliant farmer. Ely tells us that the era of “independent farmers who tilled their own soil” has come to a close.³⁰ With its reliance on and rewards for natural talent and capital, industrialization has exposed and magnified the natural human inequalities that were masked by the farm economy of early America. He believes that America has become economically and politically divided between a few wealthy c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Ely’s Progressive Individualism
• 2. Ely’s “General Welfare” Theory of Property: Theoretical Problems
• 3. Ely’s “General Welfare” Theory of Property: Institutional Effects
• 4. Ely’s View of Historical Change: Means and Ends
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Significant Events in the Life of Richard T. Ely
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index