Fidelidad de marca

(a) Ecclesiastical and Academic Politics

Anthony Waterman (1991a, 1994, 2001) has argued that the alliance between Christianity and political economy in the early decades of the 19th century represented by Malthus, Sumner, Chalmers and Whately was intimately connected with English ecclesiastical and academic politics of this period. He observed that political economy was seen to be “hostile to religion”, associated with Jacobinism, and was used by philosophical radicals Jeremy Bentham and James Mill to

promote “their own unashamedly atheistic program of reform”. However “It was the single-handed achievement of Richard Whately to defeat the philosophical radicals by showing that a defensible demarcation is possible between scientific and theological knowledge, thereby insulating each from illegitimate encroachment by the other”. Furthermore “by safeguarding the integrity of each, it validated the ideological alliance of political economy and Christian theology that Malthus and his colleagues attempted to create” (quotations from Waterman 1991a p10-11)

Waterman’s explanation of the separation between economics and theology was that changes in ecclesiastical and academic politics after the 1830s rendered Christian political economy obsolete, and so the alliance collapsed1. “The ideological purpose of Christian Political Economy was to refute Jacobinism and to justify the ancien regime. By the mid-1830s both Jacobinism and the

1 _{Waterman also suggests the demarcation between economic and theological knowledge is philosophically well}

founded, related to the positive/normative distinction, and justifies and enduring separation between economic and theological discourse (for instance Waterman 1991a p260, 1994, 2003).

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ancien regime were dead” (Waterman 1991a p257). He notes that the death of Malthus and the appointments of Copleston and Whately as bishops also contributed.

This account of the rise of Christian political economy is in my view persuasive, but the account of its demise somewhat less so. The interactions between Christian theology and political economy in this period were not confined to Waterman’s cast of Christian political economists, and so for my purposes the story needs to be broadened.

(b) Maturing of Economics as a Science

For many economists the explanation of the separation is straightforward. Theology and ethics are unnecessary baggage that economics needed to discard on the path to becoming a mature science, just as with other sciences2. A variant of this story that is particularly attractive to contemporary economists is that a separation between theology and economics is called for by the intellectual division of labour, and as an efficient solution will therefore eventually emerge in history.

The supposed philosophical and sociological necessity of separation of economics from theology calls for supportive historical narratives. Many economists would point to the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as the decisive moment in such a narrative; the composition of a work of economics as distinct from the moral philosophy of his earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments.

However (as argued in a previous chapter, and also by Ross 1995 2004a, Skinner 1996 and others) both the Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments were part of a larger Smithian system of which natural theology is an integral part.

In the history of economics literature, Schumpeter (1952) is an example of this narrative of throwing off ethics and theology as the science of economics or “economic analysis” matures. Similarly TW Hutchison (1988). Even Jacob Viner’s (1950) somewhat mournful account of the necessary marginalisation of what he calls “scholarship” in the economics profession, though he seems less sure of the separation in his unfinished great work on the history of the relationship between economics and Christian theology (Viner 1978). Mark Blaug’s (1996) technically

excellent history of economics doesn’t even bother with the theological and ethical prehistory of the discipline.

2 _{This argument about sciences throwing off religion as they mature is demolished by Brooke 1991a ch2. The}

relationship to Max Weber’s (1905) argument about certain forms of Calvinism contributing to the rise of capitalism, and then the original religious impulse falling away, is debatable. Durkheim (1893) is another sociological version this argument.

117 (c) Secularisation

Both Waterman’s account of the obsolescence of Christian political economy and the explanation of the separation of economics from theology as the inevitable maturing of a science can be fitted into a larger narrative of secularisation. There is a huge literature on secularisation, and I will comment only on Charles Taylor’s work as the major contemporary account and because he pays particular attention to the role of political economy3.

Charles Taylor (2007 p2-3) suggests there are three distinct meanings of the secular. Firstly, that of a public square emptied of religion, at least officially. Secondly, a decline in religious belief and participation in religious institutions. Thirdly, the conditions of belief and religious practice. What Taylor calls the ‘providential deism’ of the 18th century is the turning point in his story of the transition to the modern secular world. Secular in his third sense of it now being intellectually plausible, and socially possible, to abandon traditional Christian religious belief and practice. The idea of the economy as an objectified reality and designed for mutual benefit is central to

providential deism (Taylor 2007 p176-81). The doctrine of providence at this time takes an

anthropocentric shift from being about God’s purposes to being about human benefit, with political economy an important element in this shift. (Taylor 2007 p220-242).

This coheres somewhat with the account in of 18th century English thought in chapter 3 and Adam Smith’s natural theological economics in chapter 4, though I would resist the description of Smith as a deist because of his commitment, following his scientific hero Isaac Newton, to a God who was active in the cosmos and human affairs. None of my major figures from chapters 3 and 4 figure prominently in standard histories and anthologies of deist writings (such as Gay 1968). Taylor’s account also differs from mine in that he sees the idea of mutual benefit as a secularising force, whereas in my account it is an outflow of progress in the natural theologically framed discipline of political economy, and not necessarily secularising. The separation of economics and theology comes from the collapse of the natural theological framework, for various reasons including the failure to produce an adequate economic theodicy. There is nothing inevitable about this process, or about the collapse of natural theology which separates economics from theology.

3 _{The thesis of inevitable secularisation is still advocated by some sociologists of religion (for instance Steve Bruce}

2011), though heavily criticised (for instance Stark 1999, Smith 2014) and abandoned by many previous advocates (including Peter Berger 2005). Charles Taylor (1989, 2007) describes a much more complicated process. Gregory (2012) connects secularisation to the Reformation. Hunter (2015) offers another account of the concept of

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