Sociologists From England

"Government must keep the ring, and leave it for individuals to play the game."

"Theories of politics or of conduct that live long and retain influence have something more than theory behind them. They appeal to powerful instincts and interests, and the Hegelian philosophy is no exception. It appeals to the instincts and interests of counsellors and kings, of privileged classes, of Property and Order. ... It appeals to the slavishness which accepts a master if he will give the slave a share of tyranny over others more deeply enslaved. It satisfies national egotism and class ascendancy."

"To be effective men must act together, and to act together they must have a common understanding and a common object."

"The first condition of universal freedom, that is to say, is a measure of universal restraint. Without such restraint some men may be free but others will be unfree."

"The more the individual receives free scope for the play of his faculties, the more rapidly will society as a whole advance."

"If there is one law for the Government and another for it's subjects, one for noble and another for commoner, one for rich and another for poor, the law does not guarantee liberty for all."

"The modern state is the distinctive product of a unique civilization. But it is a product which is still in the making, and a part of the process is a struggle between old and new principles of social order."

"Both logically and historically the first point of attack is arbitrary government, and the first liberty to be secured is the right to be dealt with in accordance with law. A man who has no legal rights against another, but stands entirely at his disposal, to be treated according to his caprice, is a slave to that other."

"At all times men have lived in societies, and ties of kinship and of simple neighbourhood underlie every form of social organization."

"Thirteen months ago, Mr. , who had surprised the world by joining Mr. 's , surprised it still further by coming forward with a proposal which would have rendered the work of the Tariff Commission superfluous. The object of the Commission was to draw up a scientific tariff, the essence of which was to be a nicely graduated scale of import duties adapted to the needs of British industry, as conceived by Mr. Chamberlain and his followers. Such a scheme, whatever its merits or demerits, must necessarily be complex in the last degree."

"Great changes are not caused by ideas alone; but they are not effected without ideas."

"Excess of liberty contradicts itself. In short, there is no such thing; there is only liberty for one and restraint for another. If liberty then be regarded as a social ideal, the problem of establishing liberty must be a problem of organizing restraints; and thus the conception of a liberty which is to set an entire people free from its government appears to be a self-contradictory ideal."

"I argued more recently for a hypothecated wealth tax on very high earners to support the campaign against child poverty. Why shouldn’t the super-rich be obliged to help the super-poor?"

"This situation [alienation] can therefore [according to Durkheim] be remedied by providing the individual with a moral awareness of the social importance of his particular role in the division of labour. He is then no longer an alienated automaton. but is a useful part of an organic whole: ‘from that time, as special and uniform as his activity may be, it is that of an intelligent being, for it has direction, and he is aware of it.’ This is entirely consistent with Durkheim’s general account of the growth of the division of labour, and its relationship to human freedom. It is only through moral acceptance in his particular role in the division of labour that the individual is able to achieve a high degree of autonomy as a self-conscious being, and can escape both the tyranny of rigid moral conformity demanded in undifferentiated societies on the one hand and the tyranny of unrealisable desires on the other. Not the moral integration of the individual within a differentiated division of labour but the effective dissolution of the division of labour as an organising principle of human social intercourse, is the premise of Marx’s conception. Marx nowhere specifies in detail how this future society would be organised socially, but, at any rate,. this perspective differs decisively from that of Durkheim. The vision of a highly differentiated division of labour integrated upon the basis of moral norms of individual obligation and corporate solidarity. is quite at variance with Marx’s anticipation of the future form of society. According to Durkheim’s standpoint. the criteria underlying Marx’s hopes for the elimination of technological alienation represent a reversion to moral principles which are no longer appropriate to the modern form of society. This is exactly the problem which Durkheim poses at the opening of The Division of Labour: ‘Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being. one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism?’ The analysis contained in the work, in Durkheim’s view, demonstrates conclusively that organic solidarity is the ‘normal’ type in modern societies, and consequently that the era of the ‘universal man’ is finished. The latter ideal, which predominated up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in western Europe is incompatible with the diversity of the contemporary order. In preserving this ideal. by contrast. Marx argues the obverse: that the tendencies which are leading to the destruction of capitalism are themselves capable of effecting a recovery of the ‘universal’ properties of man. which are shared by every individual."

"To renew the energy expended in physical labour, the worker must be provided with the requirements of his existence as a functioning organism—food, clothing, and shelter for himself and his family. The labour time socially necessary to produce the necessities of life of the worker is the value of the worker’s labour power. The latter’s value is, therefore, reducible to a specifiable quantity of commodities: those which the worker requires to be able to subsist and reproduce."

"Every left of centre party that gets into power is doomed to disappoint – more so, probably, than governments of the right, since the left aspires more definitively to reshape society. It is a phenomenon found around the world in democratic countries. Once into the grind of day to day government, the left’s erstwhile supporters will be quick to say that the party lacks direction, or it has betrayed its values, or that its policies are not radical enough, or all three together. The 1945 Attlee government is fondly remembered by many activists as the most radical and accomplished of all Labour regimes. Yet at the time it was vociferously denounced for its timidity and its lack of purpose."

"Human consciousness is conditioned in a dialectical interplay between subject and object, in which man actively shapes the world he lives in at the same time as it shapes him."

"The main form of crude communism is based upon emotional antipathy towards private property, and asserts that all men should be reduced to a similar level, so that everyone has an equal share of property. This is not genuine communism, Marx asserts, since it rests upon the same sort of distorted objectification of labor as is found in the theory of political economy. Crude communism of this sort becomes impelled towards a primitive asceticism, in which the community has become the capitalist instead of the individual. In crude communism, the rule of property is still dominant, but negatively: “Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which re-establishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way.”"

"The expropriated peasantry are “turned en masse into beggars, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances.” This is met with fierce legislation against vagrancy, by which means the vagabond population is subjected to “the discipline necessary for the wage system.”"

"Political economy … founds its theory of society upon the self-seeking of the isolated individual. Political economy, in this way, “incorporates private property into the very essence of man.”"

"The main dimensions of Marx’s discussion of alienation are as follows: ... 1. The worker … has no power to determine the fate of what he produces. ... 2. The work task does not offer intrinsic satisfactions. ... 3. Human relations, in capitalism, tend to become reduced to operations of the market. … Money promotes the rationalization of social relationships, since it provides an abstract standard in terms of which the most heterogeneous qualities can be compared, and reduced, to one another. ... 4. Some animals do produce, of course, but only in a mechanical, adaptive fashion. Alienated labor reduces human productive activity to the level of adaptation to, rather than active mastery of, nature."

"It is usually assumed that, in speaking, in the 1844 Manuscripts, of man’s “being reduced to the level of the animals,” and of man’s alienation from his “species-being” under the conditions of capitalist production, Marx is thinking in terms of an abstract conception of “man” as being alienated from his biological characteristics as a species. So, it is presumed, at this initial stage in the evolution of his thought, Marx believed that man is essentially a creative being whose “natural” propensities are denied by the restrictive character of capitalism. Actually, Marx holds, on the contrary, that the enormous productive power of capitalism generates possibilities for the future development of man which could not have been possible under prior forms of productive system. The organization of social relationships within which capitalist production is carried on in fact leads to the failure to realize these historically generated possibilities. The character of alienated labor does not express a tension between “man in nature” (non-alienated) and “man in society” (alienated), but between the potential generated by a specific form of society—capitalism—and the frustrated realization of that potential. What separates man from the animals is not the mere existence of biological differences between mankind and other species, but the cultural achievements of men, which are the outcome of a very long process of social development."

"The concept of the “isolated individual” is a construction of the bourgeois philosophy of individualism, and serves to conceal the social character which production always manifests."

"Marx rejects as “absurd” the contention made by John Stuart Mill, and many of the political economists, that while production is governed by definite laws, distribution is controlled by (malleable) human institutions. Such a view underlies the assumption that classes are merely inequalities in the distribution of income, and therefore that class conflict can be alleviated or even eliminated altogether by the introduction of measures which minimize discrepancies between incomes."

"The main defect of idealism in philosophy and history is that it attempts to analyze the properties of societies by inference from the content of the dominant systems of ideas in those societies. But this neglects altogether the fact that there is not a unilateral relationship between values and power: the dominant class is able to disseminate ideas which are the legitimations of its position of dominance. Thus the ideas of freedom and equality which come to the fore in bourgeois society cannot be taken at their “face value,” as directly summing up social reality; on the contrary, the legal freedoms which exist in bourgeois society actually serve to legitimize the reality of contractual obligations in which propertyless wage-labor is heavily disadvantaged as compared to the owners of capital. … While ideologies obviously show continuity over time, neither this continuity. nor any changes which occur, can be explained purely in terms of their internal content. Ideas do not evolve on their own account; they do so as elements of the consciousness of men living in society."

"The constituency parties were frequently little unrepresentative groups of nonentities dominated by fanatics and cranks, and extremists, and that if the block vote of the Trade Unions were eliminated it would be impracticable to continue to vest the control of policy in Labour Party Conferences."

"The capitalist is very fond of declaring that labour is a commodity, and the wage contract a bargain of purchase and sale like any other. But he instinctively expects his wage-earners to render him, not only obedience, but also personal deference. If the wage contract is a bargain of purchase and sale like any other, why is the workman expected to toff his hat to his employer, and to say ‘sir’ to him without reciprocity?"

"Perhaps nothing illustrates better the diabolical character of the Stalinist regime than the 140-mile Belomor Canal, built at Stalin's instigation to link the Baltic Sea and the White Sea. Between September 1931 and August 1933, somewhere between 128,000 and 180,000 prisoners - most of them from Solovetsky, with Frenkel directing their efforts - hacked out a waterway, equipped only with the most primitive pick-axes, wheelbarrows and hatchets. So harsh were the conditions and so inadequate the tools that tens of thousands of them died in the process. This was hardly unforeseeable; for six months of the year the ground was frozen solid, while in many places the prisoners had to cut through solid granite. And, as so often, the net result was next to worthless economically: far too narrow and shallow to be navigable by substantial vessels. Yet when Shaw's fellow Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb were given a tour of the finished canal they were oblivious to all this. As they put it in their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), it was 'pleasant to think that the warmest appreciation was officially expressed of the success of the OGPU, not merely in performing a great engineering feat, but in achieving a triumph in human regeneration'."

"Just as every human being has an ancestry, unknown to him though it may be; so every idea, every incident, every movement has in the past its own long chain of causes, without which it could not have been. Formerly we were glad to let the dead bury their dead: nowadays we turn lovingly to the records, whether of persons or things; and we busy ourselves willingly among origins, even without conscious utilitarian end. We are no longer proud of having ancestors, since every one has them; but we are more than ever interested in our ancestors, now that we find in them the fragments which compose our very selves."

"It need hardly be said that the social philosophy of the time did not remain unaffected by the political evolution and the industrial development. Slowly sinking into men's minds all this while was the conception of a new social nexus, and a new end of social life. It was discovered (or rediscovered) that a society is something more than an aggregate of so many individual units—that it possesses existence distinguishable from those of any of its components. A perfect city became recognized as something more than any number of good citizens—something to be tried by other tests, and weighed in other balances than the individual man. The community must necessarily aim, consciously or not, at its continuance as a community: its life transcends that of any of its members; and the interests of the individual unit must often clash with those of the whole."

"The Webbs explicitly rejected the 'naive belief that. . . Soviet] penal settlements are now maintained and continuously supplied with thousands of deported manual workers and technicians, deliberately for the purpose of making, out of this forced labour, a net pecuniary profit to add to the State revenue.' Such notions were simply 'incredible' to 'anyone acquainted with the economic results of the chain-gang, or of prison labour, in any country in the world'. Slavery always has its apologists, but seldom are they so ingenuous. The thirty-six Soviet writers who, under Gorky's direction, produced the hyperbolic book The Belomor-Baltic Canal Named for Stalin at least had the excuse that the alternative to lying might be dying. The Webbs wrote their rubbish in the safety of Bloomsbury."

"On the morning after the German “election” [the Reichstag election of 29 March 1936] I travelled to Basle; it was an exquisite liberation to reach Switzerland. It must have been only a little later that I met Maynard Keynes at some gathering in London. “I do wish you had not written that book”, I found myself saying (meaning The Economic Consequences, which the Germans never ceased to quote) and then longed for the ground to swallow me up. But he said, simply and gently, “So do I.”"

"The central message is still that, as Keynes argued, fiscal policy is the answer to liquidity traps, financial or political. The arguments against fiscal policy in Japan, so far as I understand them are intellectually fallacious; they would receive failing grades in an undergraduate macro exam."

"Keynes did not challenge the efficacy of price adjustment mechanisms in clearing particular markets in the Marshallian partial equilibrium theory on which he had been reared. He did challenge the mindless application of those mechanisms to economy-wide markets. Founding what came to be known as macroeconomics, he was modeling a whole economy as a closed system. He knew he could not use the Marshallian assumption that the clearing of one market could be safely described on the assumption that the rest of the economy was unaffected."

"I liked him, but not much; he smelled of Bloomsbury... He seethed at "the Carthaginian peace of M. Clemenceau", thought the treaty [of Versailles] an offence comparable with the German invasion of Belgium, and blasted "the policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation..." From the start he got everything out of focus, even imagining that "the perils of the future lie not in frontiers and sovereignties but in food, coal and transport". ... He condemned the liberated states, and scouted further danger to France in measurable future... The poor chap's prophecies went all agley... "Those who sign this Treaty," said the Chief German Delegate, "will sign the death sentence of many millions of German men, women and children". And Keynes echoed him: "I know of no adequate answer to these words". Others were more imaginative. Ten years after signature European production surpassed pre-war levels, and standards of life were never higher. In Germany coal, iron and steel beat all records, savings increased hugely, national income was 60% higher than before the war... Small attention should therefore have been paid to Keynes' outburst or to the fits of ungovernable silliness which it incited. The outcome was however prodigious, for the book [The Economic Consequences of the Peace] was just what American dissidents needed to reject Wilson. It was used to prove by "the horrors of Versailles"... Keynes took the first step in reasoning the United States back into neutrality between good and evil."

"It wasn't really that they were put into effect as ideas by the New Deal or by anybody else. As a matter of fact, paradoxically, many of the policies of Nazi Germany were very much in line with Keynesian recommendations for overcoming a depression, and the German depression in general was overcome. Hitler's Germany came out of the depression long before the United States did, and that was because they spent a lot of money, deficit financing, controlled investment, on a war program. As a matter of fact, the Great Depression never was over in the United States until the war. The New Deal did not act on Keynesian policies at all. The history of Keynesian theory and policy is full of paradoxes. It is important that you really understand the complexities of the history of the period."

"Keynes's habit of treating the state as a deus ex machina to be invoked whenever his human actors, behaving according to the rules of the capitalist game, get themselves into a dilemma from which there is apparently no escape. Naturally, this Olympian interventionist resolves everything in a manner satisfactory to the author and presumably to the audience. The only trouble is — as every Marxist knows — that the state is not a god but one of the actors who has a part to play just like all the other actors."

"There is a nice story which is rather revealing about the power of Keynes's arguments and their political content. It is about John Strachey, a Marxist. He was a cousin of Lytton Strachey ― they both had the same skill in writing. John Strachey wrote a book called The Coming Struggle for Power. In the 1930s this book was so influential in Cambridge, England, that, when I got there, every person had it on his bookshelf, prominently displayed. It was an exciting book, intellectually exciting to read. It was the Bible of Cambridge students. In my last year at Cambridge Strachey was invited by the Marshall Society, which was the general undergraduate society for economics student, to give a talk. In this talk he argued that Marx showed us the way to make the system work, an argument that met a very, very strong favorable response ― as his earlier writing had done. I had been asked in advance to move a vote of thanks at the end of the lecture; say a few words, if I could, about his lecture, but essentially to move a vote of thanks. I did, except I took the occasion to say that there would appear ― this was in November 1935 ― within a few months a book that would set out a superior method of analysis. It had been written by John Maynard Keynes. I didn't know whether Strachey would know the name. He motioned to me and said, "I'd like to thank you for your vote of thanks," and so on; "I'd like to find out more about the book by Keynes." And I told him, and he took down the name. At the time, I did not realize the connection between Keynes and Lytton Strachey and Lytton and John Strachey. A couple of years later I received a new book by John Strachey in the mail from the Left Book Club. I was astounded; it was absolutely Keynes. I mean, he was so much influenced by Keynes ― he had been so strongly influenced by Keynes that he became an instant, overnight, follower. Strachey really understood Keynes; it's a brilliant exposition and application to the British situation. It's rather more interesting than Keynes and deserves to be reprinted. It shows how Keynes had refuted Communism and how John Strachey, an extreme Marxist whose life up to then had been devoted to Marx and the Marxian course, had been completely changed by Keynes. Given that history, the later attacks on U.S. Keynesians, accusing them of being Communists, were incomprehensible to me."

"Keynes, I am sure, often interpreted his role as that of the prophet and the politician, and it was in such a period, I presume, that he once wrote: "Words are to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking." I do not challenge this for prophets and politicians, for they have special occupational license to promote their objectives free from stodgy inhibitions on the exercise of all their rhetorical resources for persuasion. I believe in the virtues of professional division of labor, however, and I am troubled, therefore, when economists adopt the role and the tactics of the prophet or the politician, especially when there is any ground for suspicion that what is involved is false prophecy."

"Keynes saw himself as overturning ‘‘classical’’ economics. He was less revolutionary than he thought. Large chunks of Marshallianism – particularly to do with the importance of time (short and long periods), the technique of partial equilibrium analysis, and the cash balances version of the quantity theory of money – were central to his economics and distanced it from the timeless simultaneous-equation general equilibrium theory of Menger and Walras which Hayek regarded as the supreme achievement of the marginalist revolution."

"Like Odysseus, Keynes was a successful, not a tragic, hero. He heard the beautiful singing of the Sirens, but took precautions against being shipwrecked, keeping to the course for which his talents and the state of the world predestined him. Artfully, he strove for the best of all worlds, in his life and his work, and miraculously, came close to achieving it."

"In ethics Keynes was a Platonist, in politics he was an Aristotelian. His ethics pointed him towards the ideal; his politics towards moderation."

"The world in which we live today has been made much more secure by the economic wisdom that Keynes brought to us during the dark days of the Great Depression. When that wisdom is partly or wholly ignored in the making of economic policy, large numbers of people are made to suffer unnecessarily. I am afraid we have seen several depressing examples of that in the recent years, especially in Europe, with a huge human toll. Keynes was a great pathfinder, and it would have distressed — if not surprised — him to see how well-identified paths can be comprehensively neglected by policymaking that draws more on ideology than on well-reflected reasoning."

"Nature is wont to impose two distinct penalties upon those who try to beat out their stock of energy to the thinnest leaf. One of these penalties Keynes undoubtedly paid. The quality of his work suffered from its quantity and not only as to form: much of his secondary work shows the traces of haste, and some of his most important work, the traces of incessant interruptions that injured its growth. Who fails to realize this-to realize that he beholds work that has never been allowed to ripen, has never received the last finishing touch-will never do justice to Keynes's powers. But the other penalty was remitted to him. In general, there is something inhuman about human machines that fully use every ounce of their fuel. Such men are mostly cold in their personal relations, inaccessible, preoccupied. Their work is their life, no other interests exist for them, or only interests of the most superficial kind. But Keynes was the exact opposite of all this-the pleasantest fellow you can think of; pleasant, kind, and cheerful in the sense in which precisely those people are pleasant, kind, and cheerful who have nothing on their minds and whose one principle it is never to allow any pursuit of theirs to degenerate into work. He was affectionate. He was always ready to enter with friendly zest into the views, interests, and troubles of others. He was generous,and not only with money. He was sociable, enjoyed conversation, and shone in it. And, contrary to a widely spread opinion, he could be polite, polite with an old-world punctilio that costs time. For instance, he would refuse to sit down to his lunch, in spite of telegraphic and telephonic expostulation, until his guest, delayed by fog in the Channel, put in appearance at 4 p.m."

"Keynes's economic philosophy is thus made up of three interdependent parts: his technical macroeconomics, his embattled political philosophy and his ultimate ethical purpose."

"Of all economists, Lord Keynes was most sensitive to the conditions of the next moment—he was a Geiger counter of future headlines. This was a most extraordinary gift, and it may have extraordinary consequences for his theories."

"'Anything we can do, we can afford,' John Maynard Keynes declared in the midst of the Second World War. The pandemic reminded us of that principle; with climate change, the world might hope to actually enact it."

"Keynes's intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool. I was sometimes inclined to feel that so much cleverness must be incompatible with depth, but I do not think that this feeling was justified."

"There are still many people in America who regard depressions as acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occurrences does not rest with Providence."

"Yes, Keynes was a genius. Yes, some of his ideas were inchoate and would not have lent themselves usefully to diagramming and symbolic manipulation. Yes, by the time of the Radcliffe committee many of his British admirers were still frozen in the Model T version of his system. And yes, Keynes resented excessive simplifying of his paradigms. Nevertheless, in science it is not the incoherent, inchoate and ineffable that has a cash value. If that were so, Goethe would be a greater scientist than either Einstein or Newton. What matters is the Kuhnian paradigm that people who are not geniuses can use. That which so many scholars independently agreed upon cannot be independent of the text that Keynes wrote down for them to read. What is remarkable is not the cogency of the case that Leijonhufvud manages to muster, which is rather flimsy, but rather how strong was the latent demand in the 1970s for a work to debunk Keynesianism. Harry Johnson put the same point in a different way."