Necessity, the Perpetual Mother

Perhaps there is nothing really earthshaking in claiming that seventeenth-century Englishmen in Virginia responded perversely to market forces. The birthplace of capitalism or not, empirven the most cursory reading of economic treatises from seventeeth- and eighteenth-century England would suggest that Englishmen would have expected such perverse behavior. Sir William Petty, whom Karl Marx called “the father of political economy,” wrote in his Treatise on Taxes (1662): “If you allow double [the wages], then he [the labourer] works but half so much as he could have done, and otherwise would.” ¹ Edgar Furniss, in his classic 1920 study of early modern English labor theory, found that “so many and positive are the statements of this effect of high wages that we are compelled to admit their truth and to conclude that the labor supply of England at this time did not increase but decreased as wages rose.” ² Indeed the standard line in most contemporary and historical accounts of early modern England accepts matter-of-factly that Englishmen in the pre‑industrial era responded perversely to changes in real wages. ³ Following the terminology of neo-classical economics, they speak euphemistically if obscurely about “backward‑sloping” and “backward-bending” supply curves of labor as shorthand characterizations of early modern England’s labor supply. ⁴

In the standard narrative of the transition to capitalism in England, such perverse behavior eventually gives way to “normal” behavior‑-a forward-sloping supply curve of labor‑-some time in the early modern era. This transformation in the nature of Englishmen was naturally accompanied by what Lujo Brentano called a “surprising transformation in theory.” ⁵ Thus by the late eighteenth century Adam Smith could claim in Wealth of Nations:

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. ⁶

Most of the many explanations offered for this dramatic change in behavior could be incorporated within a general modernization framework. The cake of custom is broken and traditional man gives way to modern man.

What broke the cake of custom? Max Weber believed the key lay in education, changing attitudes about work through the internalization of a work ethic. Historian E. P. Thompson stresses more the new time-discipline imposed by industrial capitalism that trained workers to respond to “‘normal’ capitalist wage incentives.” ⁷

But most scholars, even those who highlight industrialization, stress more the unpenting of consumer demand. ⁸ Whether this expansion in consumerism came about with the Industrial Revolution or some preceding “Consumer Revolution,” workers finally responded positively to market incentives when they wanted the things the market could provide. What had kept the worker back, according to Furniss, was that “his standard of life [was] caught fast in the clutch of custom and rigid tradition.” There was simply nothing they desired once they had acquired their basic needs. But the promise of a rising standard of living meant “that the average individual is spurred to greater effort by the promise of increased reward.” ⁹

Definitions of Terms

What I will argue is that all of these attempts to explain the “modernization” of English labor supply distort both the way contemporaries conceived labor supply as well as what Englishmen actually did. Perverse behavior did not disappear despite all the “revolutions.” Rather, to understand those revolutions, we need to rethink our notions of perversity.

To help clear up these distortions we first need to be a bit more specific with our terminology. The neoclassical concepts like “backward‑sloping” and “backward-bending” that are so popular among historians and economists alike as shorthand characterizations of pre-industrial England’s labor supply can prove quite useful for translating pre-classical political economy if we first establish what exactly we mean by the supply of labor. The aggregate “supply of labor” is defined as the product of “labor quantity” (the size of the labor force and amount of time worked) and “labor quality” (the “efficiency” of the labor provided). The labor force varies with net changes in population (births, deaths, migration) and the labor force participation rate (affected by custom, age structure, and other factors). The short-run supply of labor is usually measured over the course of a year (to allow evening out of seasonal and other fluctuations), while the long-run supply may comprise several generations of laborers. Labor efficiency, the most complex element and most difficult to measure directly, is a function of physiological and mental labor capacity, human capital (culture, education, experience), the work environment, and exertion while at work. ¹⁰

One might fairly question the usefulness of such an ahistorical concept as labor supply outside a particular sociocultural context. Social historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, following Karl Marx, have emphasized the difficulty of distinguishing between work and leisure in pre-industrial societies. ¹¹ For their part, neo-classical economists, following the work of Gary S. Becker and Staffan B. Linder, have rejected the dichotomization of work and leisure preferring all-encompassing terms like “activities” and “commodities.” ¹²

Nevertheless, adopting the common distinction between leisure and work based on the degree to which the activity is perceived as “obligatory or necessary to the maintenance of life” and/or “instrumental to other ends rather than ends in themselves,” the concepts still provide a useful common-sense framework for analyzing human behavior. ¹³ “Everyone,” says John Neulinger in The Psychology of Leisure, “knows the difference between doing something because one has to and doing something because one wants to.” ¹⁴ In the context of pre-industrial England, as historian Hugh Cunningham notes, “leisure itself, a harvest celebration for example, may have been inextricably bound up with work, but to pretend that participants were unaware when they were working and when they were not is sheer romanticism.” ¹⁵ Certainly pre-classical political economists recognized the degree of freedom and instrumentality inherent in the common distinction between voluntary idleness and work.

Analyses of “the total short-run supply of labor in terms of effort” (or simply, the supply of effort) involves aspects of labor force participation rate, time worked, and exertion while at work. The elasticity of the supply of effort measures the change in supply in response to an incremental change in the real price (or wage) of effort. For present purposes we may simplify potential responses to the four basic types, each with different implications for the combined rate of consumption and net saving along with work and leisure.

Table 1 Labor Supply Typology

		Wage	rise	Wage	decline
	Elasticity (e)	Effort	C/S	Effort	C/S
Target-income hypothesis (TIH)	e = -1	–	0	+	0
Backward-sloping	-1 < e < 0	–	+	+	–
Inelastic	e = 0	0	+	0	–
Forward-sloping	e > 0	+	+	–	–

Note: See text for definition of terms.

C/S = consumption/saving

+ = increase

0 = no change

– = decrease

(1) Economists and economic historians have labeled the backward‑sloping supply as perverse, “the antithesis of standard market theory,” because an increase in the demand for and price of labor induces a reduction in its supply and hence tends to generate an unstable market equilibrium. ¹⁶ Another common label, “leisure preference,” suggests merely that laborers will take at least part of any increase in real wages in increased leisure (thereby reducing their supply of effort) in addition to increased consumption/savings.

(2) The “target income hypothesis” (TIH) represents an extreme variant of the backward-sloping supply, where an incremental increase or decrease in price causes a proportional decrease or increase in supply such that total earned income and thus consumption/savings remain constant, implying a target income or a fixed material standard of living. The TIH is thus a special case of a backward-sloping supply curve. ¹⁷

(3) In the inelastic supply, supply of effort remains essentially fixed, insensitive to wage changes, with consumption/savings rising and falling proportionably with real wages.

(4) The forward‑sloping supply represents the economists’ normal response in which effort responds like any normal commodity, rising and falling (along with consumption/savings) with the price incentive. A backwarding-bending or backbending supply curve (in contrast to the backward-sloping supply curve) implies that at lower incomes a forward-sloping, “normal” response dominates and only at higher incomes does a backward-sloping, “perverse” response come into play. ¹⁸

The Problem

These more explicit definitions help us to identify the problem with traditional accounts of labor supply in early modern England. What these accounts are describing is the transition from TIH to a forward-sloping supply curve, the leap from an elasticity of -1 to positive elasticity of whatever degree.

What is wrong with such a picture? Firstly, there is little or no evidence that Englishmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth century behaved in either of these ways “extreme” ways. There are a few empirical studies of particular industries and regions which suggest a backward-sloping supply curve but nothing to suggest that the elasticity approached anywhere near -1. ¹⁹ Indeed most studies of consumption for both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show consumption for foodstuffs and manufactures‑-along with beer, gin, and tobacco‑-to have been positively income‑elastic. ²⁰ And there is absolutely no empirical evidence for a positive-sloping supply curve of labor.

But what about the statements by Petty and Smith we have already quoted, you might ask? Quite simply the traditional dichotomization is a gross distortion, with statements of both TIH and positive elasticity few and far between, inaccurate, and unrepresentative. ²¹ A handful of political economists like Petty did indeed make unequivocal TIH statements, at least with regard to the lowest classes. ²² But an inherent contradiction pervades the “mercantilist” literature if one assumes a strict TIH. ²³ For the very literature that criticizes the indolence, idleness, and sloth of the laborer, also criticizes his indulgence in luxury, superfluity, riot, excess, debauchery, spreeing, prodigality, extravagance, voluptuousness, and vice. ²⁴ William Temple (of Trowbridge), the premier eighteenth-century low-wage theorist, captured this logical inconsistency in graphic detail in two statements from his Vindication of Commerce and the Arts (1758). First: “If labourers could purchase the common necessaries of life for half the money they usually do, they would work but half the time they do now.” Second: “If a labourer can procure by his high wages or plenty, all the necessaries of life; and have afterwards a residuum, he would expend the same, either in gin, rum, brandy or strong beer; luxurize on great heaps of fat beef or bacon, and eat perhaps till he spewed; and having gorged and gotten dead drunk, lie down like a pig, and snore till he was fresh. This is the common consequence of high wages and plenty.” This is obviously a case of the laborer having his cake and eating it too. ²⁵

The target income hypothesis implies that if real wages rise, the wage earner simply works less but does not consume any more than he would have otherwise. On the other hand, spendthrift behavior suggests an inelastic supply of effort, since the individual spends his money as fast as he receives it, which does not allow him to take out any of the increased earnings in increased leisure. Indeed, many statements at this time suggest that although higher wages may have led to increased time and money spent in pubs on Monday and Tuesday, workers made up for the time lost in long work hours on Thursday and Friday. ²⁶ The tradition in London and elsewhere of paying wages in alehouses on Saturday nights suggests further that employers understood fully the link between labor supply and prodigality. ²⁷

As for Adam Smith, several scholars have contrasted his statement about “the liberal reward of labour” increasing “the industry of the common people”‑-highly suggestive of forward-sloping supply curve‑-with quite contradictory earlier statements. For example, in his Lectures Smith claimed that with tradesmen in the commercial parts of England “their work through half this week is sufficient to maintain them, and through want of education they have no amusement for the other, but riot and debauchery.” ²⁸ So did Smith believe in TIH or a forward-sloping curve?

One may assuredly agree with Jacob Viner that, despite pretensions to positive science, much of early modern political economy represented mere “special pleading for limited economic interests.” ²⁹ The language they employed reeks of normative dichotomies and class biases (indolence versus industry, necessity versus luxury, prodigality versus frugality) that modern analysts must treat with suspicion. Work, leisure, consumption, and savings scarcely existed as objective concepts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for all depended on subjective evaluations of the “proper station” of the individual. ³⁰ Furthermore, every tract had its political agenda directed toward some pressing issue like corn bounties, excise taxes, or interest rates. And although every writer aspired to an objective, rational argument in defense of his particular proposal, theory and description bent readily to political purposes. ³¹

Nevertheless, when one looks beyond the moralisms and political biases to tease out of the rhetoric psychological insights into the supply of labor, one finds a shared language that has gone relatively unnoticed by modern scholars. As J. G. A. Pocock found in his own intense examination of contemporaneous political thought “an intellectual scaffolding can be discovered in [their] thought, a language of assumptions and problems more consistent than [their] behavior and shared to a considerable degree by writers on both sides of the political divide.” ³² This language‑-what we will call the necessity consensus‑-while perhaps never achieving the status of economic theory, played a major role in shaping the arguments of British political economists from Thomas Mun to Adam Smith. And it is this intellectual scaffolding that provides the key to the bigger problem of trying to understand the seemingly perverse behavior of early modern Englishmen.

High-Wage/Low-Wage

Of man’s many sins none has attracted as much attention as avarice. There is certainly nothing modern or even bourgeois in the belief that man’s acquisitive instincts are unlimited. Whether due to a religious belief in man’s fallen nature or a scientific view of human nature, the same commentators who have through the centuries condemned chrematistics regularly did so in spite of or because of their blanket acceptance of man’s insatiable desire for wealth. Numerous early statements can be found in Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Plutarch, Epicurus, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. Thucydides, for example, recorded a Corinthian speech which criticized the Athenians as “so insatiable that ‘they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life, with little opportunity for enjoying’ because they are ‘ever engaged in getting.'” ³³

But avarice was only one of the seven deadly sins. If, over the centuries, avarice was more often considered the deadliest, next in line was sloth or indolence. ³⁴ Furthermore, whether at home or in the colonies, to early modern British writers with their overriding obsession with national wealth and power, one could fairly say that idleness, whether voluntary or involuntary, had become the “root of all evil.” As Francis Hutcheson observed: “‘Tis scarce necessary to shew the necessity of diligence and industry, since the wealth and power of a nation depends almost wholly upon them.” ³⁵

Just as contemporaries complained about the universal nature of avarice, so they condemned the basic indolent nature of man. Thus a very strong obstacle stood in the way of the endless pursuit of wealth: man’s unwillingness to expend the necessary effort. ³⁶ Indeed, a problem that has plagued economic science from is beginnings in the seventeenth century revolves around this very issue: which wins out, avarice or indolence? For the most part, classical and neoclassical economics leave the problem unresolved. According to the hedonistic foundation of modern economics, men seek to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain, which in terms of reward and effort many have translated as seeking to maximize reward and minimize effort. But this model of behavior tells us very little about what people would do in any particular situation since it is highly unlikely that the same action would both maximize their reward and minimize their effort. ³⁷

A textbook economic question reveals the present ambiguity: Given the freedom to choose their amount of labor, would workers in general respond to a modest increase in real earned income (due, for example, to a rise in nominal earned income, a decrease in the earned income tax, or deflation) by working more or working less? Neoclassical economic theory, however, as powerful as it is, has no answer to this question; the elasticity is theoretically indeterminate and can only be determined by empirical observation. ³⁸ In contrast, British political economists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries long ago reached a theoretical consensus on this vital issue.

Historians of political economy have captured the essence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century polemics on the issue of the supply of labor by dividing thinkers into black (mercantilist/anti-labor/low-wage) and white (liberal/pro-labor/high-wage) camps. Numerous scholars have quoted as typical of low-wage theorists Arthur Young’s famous line: “Every one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.” ³⁹ Furniss cites numerous examples of what he calls the “utility of poverty” theory, running an unbroken span from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Key low-wage theorists included, in the seventeenth century Sir William Petty, Thomas Manley, John Houghton, Sir William Temple, and Francis Gardiner, and, in the eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville, Joshua Gee, Henry Fielding, Sir James Steuart, William Temple (of Trowbridge), Arthur Young, and Joseph Townsend. ⁴⁰

High-wage theorists, on the other hand, regularly noted that low wages did not necessarily mean cheap labor, citing as evidence higher labor productivity and greater prosperity in high-wage regions and countries. Adam Smith, the premier high-wage theorist, believed the “liberal reward of labor” was the “necessary effect and cause” as well as the “natural symptom” of increasing national wealth. ⁴¹ Along with Smith, the more important high-wage theorists included in the seventeenth century, Thomas Mun, Sir John Cook, Sir Matthew Hale, John Collins, Sir Josiah Child, Sir Walter Harris, Charles Davenant, and John Cary, and, in the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe, Jacob Vanderlint, George Berkeley, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Matthew Decker, Malachy Postlethwayt, Josiah Tucker, David Hume, Nathaniel Forster, Richard Price, and James Anderson. ⁴²

As the traditional argument goes, conservatives attributed the behavior of the working classes to indolence, luxury, debauchery and other sins of the workers while liberals believed the behavior reflected poverty, malnutrition, involuntary unemployment, a lack of opportunity, insufficient reward, and various institutional constraints. Thus low-wage theorists believed that workers would respond with increased industry only if their wages were reduced, while high-wage theorists believed higher wages would promote increased industry.

Such high- and low-wage emphases did indeed color the work of these political economists, but strict dichotomies are too simplistic. For example, almost all seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British political economists presumed the right to employment, the duty to labor, a six-day, sunrise-to-sunset workweek, a normative “subsistence theory of wages” (wages should be at a level just sufficient to maintain one’s station), the existence of a “free labor” force (in descriptive if not perhaps normative theory), and the subsumption of particular interests within the common good. Furthermore, all political economists aspired to maximize national labor supply and productivity. ⁴³

More importantly for present purposes, when one focuses on evidence of expected behavior, a surprising degree of consensus emerges between the two “schools.” Both groups drew on psychological insights into human nature and applied these insights to political economy. They presumed all men “rational” in the sense that all men were self-interested and pursued their “perceived” self-interest (although not necessarily their “true” interest), a self-interestedness that proper policy could manipulate for the common good. And both “schools” also accepted a backward-sloping supply curve of effort as a general psychological maxim applicable to all classes. ⁴⁴

Scholars have missed this consensus as a result of a combination of technical misinterpretation of statements, simplistic presumptions about class bias, and a general failure to consider both schools within the historical context in which they lived rather than in the context of modern debates about labor relations. [For an expanded version of this critique, see Baird, “Necessity.”] First, as we have already noted, scholars have incorrectly conflated the low-wage position with TIH. ⁴⁵ Most conservatives aphoristically noted nothing more than a general link between high wages and/or cheap subsistence and indolence (along with its corollary of low wages and/or dear subsistence and industry). Both low- and high-wage theorists presumed higher wages would lead to increased consumption and lower wages would lead to reduced consumption.

Second, modern scholars also incorrectly define high-wage theory in terms of what modern economists would call “normal” market behavior or positive elasticity. ⁴⁶ The most important high-wage theorists throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century actually argued in favor of a backward-sloping supply of effort, a paradox noted by scholars since 1751 when Fielding chided Child for his seeming inconsistency. More recent historians of economic thought have expressed similar confusion over Davenant, Defoe, Franklin, Hume, Postlethwayt, and Tucker. ⁴⁷ Other statements suggestive of a backward-sloping supply curve of effort appear in the work of Harris, Vanderlint, Berkeley, Hutcheson, Price, Forster, and Anderson. ⁴⁸ Furthermore, in contrast to innumerable examples of negative elasticity, I can find no unambiguous example in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature of a claim for positive elasticity. ⁴⁹

Third, granted that low-wage theorists shared some bias against the lower classes, this neither disproves their interpretation nor proves the analysis of high-wage theorists. Indeed, if “bias” is the correct word, liberal political economists tended to be as biased against the middle and upper classes as the conservatives were against the lower classes, a point almost totally ignored by historians of political economy. Liberals far more often highlighted the “industrious” lower classes and “indolent” upper classes, although many also criticized the idleness, luxury, and debauchery of workers, blaming these vices usually on the poor laws, a general lack of employment, government policy (such as taxation and tariff), and concomitant hopelessness, rather than the high wages stressed by conservatives. ⁵⁰ In turn, the low-wage theorists frankly acknowledged the indolence of the landed gentry and aristocracy but downplayed or justified such idleness on the grounds of their wealth and position. ⁵¹

But we must move forward, beyond a mere critique of modern interpretations of pre-classical economics and build a positive case for an alternative interpretation. To do so we need to understand the intellectual context in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Englishmen conceived such problems and this requires going back to the classical roots of the idea of “necessity.”

Classical Necessity

Drawing on the classics, seventeenth-century English scholars began bandying about “necessity” as the motive force for all aspects of economic development. The maxim “Necessity is the mother of invention” first appeared in England in the mid-seventeenth century. Perhaps the earliest usage in print is in John Cook’s Unum Necessarium: or The Poore Mans Case (1648): “Necessity was at first the mother of inventions, and hunger taught the Parrat to speak, but we have now too many Cormorants.” ⁵² Indeed, this fascinating (yet unfortunately much ignored) tract, in adapting almost every classical maxim about necessitas to the study of early modern poverty, may have done more than any other single text to inject the entire idea of necessity in all its normative and operative connotations into the rhetoric of political economy. ⁵³

Numerous low- and high-wage theorists alike, including Cook, readily extended the concept of necessity to many other aspects of human behavior. Besides “invention,” writers frequently mentioned “industry,” “oeconomy,” “frugality,” and “parsimony,” as children of necessity. ⁵⁴ Throughout Western Europe similar proverbs of “necessity,” “want,” and “poverty” as the mother/mistress/teacher of invention/ art/industry/wit proliferated. ⁵⁵

But what exactly did they mean by necessity? Wrenching ancient maxims out of their particular context is a treacherous business. Indeed over the centuries, necessity undoubtedly had as many definitions as “nature” and “natural.” ⁵⁶ For our purposes, we must track the maxims they used to their source.

We can trace the origins of the concept of necessity as the primal force in nature to the work of Democritus and the Greek Atomists in their major “scientific” challenge to theological conceptions of the world. They identified ananke (“necessity”) as the basic motive force of atomic motion, “the ultimate controlling principle” that “everything follows the laws of its own being” which foreordains the history of the universe as “the inevitable outcome, step by step, of its original and eternal constitution.” ⁵⁷

When extended to human beings, necessity took on a more complex form, merging with elements of free will, animal instinct, utility, and custom. ⁵⁸ Furthermore, the Atomists often blurred the line between ananke (with its image as a universal unstoppable physical force) and chreia (man’s particular needs, whether for survival of the individual or race, or simply utility), often interchanging the two terms, suggesting that man’s needs (as commonly understood) provided the central motivation for his activities. This distinction became even more obscured when the two ideas were combined in the single Latin term necessitas, while chreia was alternately translated as usus (utilitarian needs) and egestas (absolute poverty). ⁵⁹

The connection between necessity and needs was clearest in descriptions of the invention of the first arts for the purpose of meeting man’s survival needs (that is to say, food, shelter, clothing). The Democritean explanations of the origins of culture, the germ of the basic conception of necessity as the mother of invention, attributed these inventions‑-along with the gathering of men into groups‑-to man’s need to protect himself from the environment and other wild creatures. For later needs, classical scholars often adopted highly ethnocentric interpretations based on Greek culture. And all scholars, including Democritus himself, accepted that beyond some unspecified (and highly ambiguous) level, necessity played less of a role and other factors‑-leisure, experience, time, education, imitation of nature, individual genius, pleasure, reason‑-came to the fore as the source of the more civilized arts such as music and astronomy. ⁶⁰ Thus Pliny the Younger, who claimed that necessity was the mistress of the arts, could equally claim that “honour is with us as keen an incentive as necessity with others.” ⁶¹

But this did not mean the abandonment of the concept of necessity in civilized society. Indeed, although necessity no longer implied man’s survival needs per se, for many classical scholars necessity continued to drive the course of civilization. Inherent in this “progressivist” (or, as Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas would say “anti-primitivist”) view lay a belief in the “psychic unity” of mankind, that all men are rational animals (albeit with reason only present as a germ in primitive man), share the same needs, and progress through the same stages through “independent invention”. ⁶² Thucydides noted that in the absence of obstacles, other societies would follow the same course as Greek civilization. ⁶³ Similarly, Aristotle believed that necessity taught men what was needful and then by degrees led them to refinements and superfluities which then took on a momentum of their own towards realization of man’s intrinsic nature, approaching the Greek ideal of “the good.” ⁶⁴ Cicero, who indeed equated necessity with reason, shared similar Aristotelian ideas of man’s perfectibility, with reason overcoming man’s weakness by using the arts to achieve the ultimate goal of the “good life.” ⁶⁵

While many classical scholars accepted this Democritean framework, others contested the assumptions as to what constituted man’s needs and the degree to which necessity played a role in cultural development. Although they shared the belief of the progressivists that much of technological evolution was of relatively recent origin, these “primitivists” disparagingly attributed most of this evolution to man’s avarice and luxury, his insatiable demand for superfluities far beyond primitive survival needs, and a perpetual search for novelties reflecting the perverse nature of man, never satisfied with what he has. ⁶⁶ “Soft” primitivists envisioned a Golden Age of abundance ended by man’s ambition and avarice, similar to the Judeo-Christian Fall. ⁶⁷ But as “soft” primitivism gave way to “hard” primitivism (stressing the harsh and virtuous conditions of early man) with the rise of the Cynics and Stoics, the regressive avarice model continued in force. While most could agree that man’s needs included clothing and housing, others noted that the earliest men went naked and lacked shelter, yet survived. ⁶⁸ Hard primitivists believed that greater wealth led to even greater wants, always outrunning income, with luxury and avarice perpetually feeding on each other. ⁶⁹ Seneca, the most important source for sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century hard primitivism, noted that “it is now a mark of boorishness or of poverty to want only what is enough.” ⁷⁰

These primitivistic views led to the widespread belief in the beneficial aspects of poverty and/or adversity for the promotion of the virtues. ⁷¹ As Arcesilaus summarized, “Poverty is the practical school of all the virtues.” ⁷² So often was the idea expressed that others began condemning the practice of making a virtue of necessity. ⁷³ However, other anti-primitivists suggested that the state could beneficially manipulate man’s avarice‑-Isocrates and Xenophon, for example, who believed public rewards for inventions would promote invention by harnessing self-interest to the common good. ⁷⁴

An intermediate position existed between these classical “progressivist” and “avarice” models of development which we will call the classical “indolence” model. Here the emphasis was on neither man’s progressive nor his avaricious nature, but on his inherent laziness. This view stressed, like the primitivists, that poverty promoted the virtues, but simply added the virtue of industry to poverty’s effects (downplayed by the primitivists who would hardly praise the role of poverty in stimulating despised economic development). This idea fed naturally into the view that poverty (penia) or man’s needs (chreia) continue to promote technological and economic development in the present era (which progressivists tended to downplay). The belief in man’s natural indolence traces back to Hesiod’s tale, later reflected in Virgil, that the gods terminated the Golden Age (in which man was satiated and indolent) by hiding the means of life to force man to toil. Inherent in this view was the idea that removal of needs, either through the spontaneous production of nature or the gifts of the gods, reduced the drive to discover new inventions. ⁷⁵ This view was seconded by the animalitarian belief that the gods purposefully made man physically weaker and more needy than the other animals to compel him to use his gift of reason to discover the arts which would allow him to survive, that indeed nature was a cruel “stepmother” rather than a caring mother where man was concerned. ⁷⁶ Similarly, numerous classical scholars followed Herodotus, Hippocrates, and Plato in stressing the enervating impact of “soft” environments of fertile soil, warmer climate, and natural abundance, to explain the natural rise of Greek and the decline of Egyptian civilizations. ⁷⁷

Although seldom applied to contemporaneous economic behavior, the indolence model did casually appear in a few matter-of-fact statements. Plato (quoting Socrates) stated the common-sense view that when a potter becomes rich he will certainly not take the same pains with his art as he once did, but rather “will grow more and more indolent and careless.” ⁷⁸ Demosthenes bemoaned the fact that poverty and the stress of the times compelled free men and free women to turn to menial work. ⁷⁹ Xenophon, although as a defender of public rewards for inventions hardly a defender of an indolence model, defended the redistribution of wealth on the assumption that increased income for the lower orders would naturally lead to greater leisure. ⁸⁰ In this way we can interpret many classical aphorisms which suggest that if not necessity, then interchangeably poverty (penia, paupertas, egestas) is the mother, mistress, teacher of the arts and industry, rousing man from his sloth. ⁸¹

Like the Stoics, the indolence theorists stressed the relative nature of wants but gave to relative poverty a driving force that the Stoics could only attribute to universal avarice. Along with most ancients, both groups equated unhappiness with a state of unsatisfied desire, but while relative poverty implies having less that what one thinks one should have (with the implicit assumption of satiability), universal avarice suggests wanting more than what one should have and thus wanting without limit. ⁸² That classical scholars understood the relative nature of poverty no less than medieval and modern scholars is supported by numerous aphorisms. To Democritus, “Greater wants produce greater deficiencies” and “Poverty [penia] and wealth are only other names for want [endeia] and satiety; therefore he who wants anything is not rich, nor is he poor who wants nothing.” For Xenophon, “There is less of hardship in not acquiring the good things of this life, than of unhappiness in being deprived of what we once possessed.” And to Manilius, “One’s poverty is proportioned to his wants.” ⁸³ The Romans distinguished necessitas and paupertas (relative poverty) and pauper (relatively poor) from egestas and penuria (absolute poverty), with relative poverty more a matter of “poor circumstances” and “straitened means” but still denoting a respectable class, far removed from a state of absolute poverty verging on starvation. ⁸⁴ Martial noted that “Straitened means [paupertas] and absolute destitution [habere nihil] are two very different things” and Seneca that “Poverty [paupertas] is not the enjoyment of little, but the lack of much.” ⁸⁵

There was much room for overlap between the indolence and progressivist models and scholars like Virgil, Manilius, and Thucydides, drawing upon elements from both, painted a far more complex picture of man. ⁸⁶ For example, Thucydides could claim that “men are much more dexterous in warding off adversity than in preserving prosperity,” while celebrating hope and ambition as the “greatest stimuli in every undertaking” and asserting that Fortune “incites even the faint-hearted to make an effort.” ⁸⁷ But the two models inevitably diverge on a critical assumption about the nature of the relationship between human nature and progress. In the progressivist model‑-which adopts a telic view of human nature‑-progress is only checked by obstacles. In the indolence model‑-which emphasizes man’s original, unchanging nature‑-obstacles serve to spur progress.

One last point: Classical scholars were far less concerned about determining causation than making judgments about the lessons which they could draw from such natural models for their present. ⁸⁸ None of the models involved highly developed theories of political economy. To the degree that prosperity and adversity, riches and poverty, represent unearned income accruing to individuals or the society, the indolence model really states nothing different from what all neoclassical economists would readily admit: any increase in unearned income will lead to a decrease in the drive for earned income. Not until the rise of modern political economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were these ideas refined enough to provide the basis of a necessity theory of political economy.

Necessity, the Mother of Invention

All three of these classical models of cultural development‑-progressivist, avarice, and indolence‑-show up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and indeed persist into the twentieth century) in one form or another with varying degrees of popularity. Avarice models persisted in Romantic celebrations of the “Noble Savage,” condemnations of the root of avarice behind economic developments (like enclosures), as well as in a more positive acceptance of avarice as a universal element of human nature which the state could manipulate. ⁸⁹ Progressivist models built around the temporalization of the Great Chain of Being and a “psychic unity” of mankind became highly popular during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. ⁹⁰

However, the indolence model emerged as far and away the dominant model of societal evolution in Western (especially British) political economy, revitalized and refined in what can be called the necessity consensus. Early modern scholars sided with those Greeks and Romans who believed that man’s natural indolence would inhibit development unless countered by corrective laws or natural obstacles engendering the relative poverty which would stimulate industry. With fairly universal support for development, these scholars feared that the triumph not of avarice but of indolence would kill the industry believed essential to progress.

This necessity consensus was reinforced by compatible Calvinist and classical republican views, best summarized by Francis Bacon in his essay “Of Adversity”: “Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.” ⁹¹ Puritans and their descendants believed that poverty and adversity fostered Christian virtues more effectively than wealth and prosperity which would only lead to the proliferation of the cardinal sins, including luxury, avarice, and indolence. ⁹² Furthermore, following Machiavelli, text after text echoed classical republican themes in condemning luxury as incompatible with political liberty and advocating a “Spartan model” to avoid the corruption of rich, luxurious nations. ⁹³ As in the classical era, so forcefully were such statements made that it gave rise to the accusation of making a virtue of necessity and thus confusing moral with natural law. ⁹⁴

The Renaissance had brought the revival of classical environmentalist ideas in the work of Botero, Bodin, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, echoing Plato on the softening effects of an abundant environment. These ideas continued to dominate geographic thought into the eighteenth century, as reflected in the later work of Montesquieu, Humboldt, and the Scottish Enlightenment. ⁹⁵ Increasingly, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political economists across Europe moved from environmentalist models to models stressing the beneficial effects of increasing population pressure on limited resources stimulating greater industry, economic development, and in general the progress of civilization. ⁹⁶

In British political economy, these ideas converged on a concept of necessity which continued to retain all of the connotations of relative poverty and a universal physical force embedded in human nature and man’s needs. (Indeed, “necessity” still retains all of its classical connotations even in the twentieth century. ⁹⁷) In the tradition of the classical indolence model, by necessity they meant that relative poverty which alone could motivate increases in human effort. The English had long accepted, on a normative basis, distinctions in the “needs” of individuals defining competency according to one’s station. With the Renaissance rediscovery of past ages and the discovery of the New World, stark exposure to differences in needs over time and across cultures simply reinforced the belief in the relative nature of needs. ⁹⁸

British political economists further refined this view of necessity to derive a concept akin to a universal backward-sloping supply curve of labor. Thus, regardless of whether individuals or societies were in positions of relative poverty or relative surplus, an increase in their real earned income would tend to lead to decreased effort or industry and vice versa. This necessity could take economic, demographic, or sociopolitical forms and the market, Malthusian pressures, and allocation of resources were not mutually exclusive elements in their analysis of political economy. Depending on one’s situation, necessity could equally arise from lower or higher market prices, increasing or decreasing population, or the laws of the state.

However, these political economists acknowledged that necessity, while necessary, was not sufficient since hope and opportunity were also important. Implicitly if not explicitly, they more specifically hypothesized that necessity, ceteris paribus, motivated all classes to greater efforts of mind and body, with the amount of increase tempered by the level of hope and opportunity.

Thus the necessity consensus incorporated important concessions to the classical progressivist and avarice models: Obstacles beyond a certain point prove counterproductive to economic development; too harsh an environment inhibits the rise of civilization; given two courses of action comparable in terms of effort, men will follow the course of greatest profit; opportunity channels the response to necessity; men will only pursue courses of action with at least some hope of increased income; common property or communism is less conducive to industry than private property; maximization of productivity requires both carrot and stick; absolute poverty to the point of physical deterioration does not promote increased effort. Necessity spurs an individual to undertake an opportunity requiring increased industry or frugality which otherwise the individual would not have undertaken. But both low- and high-wage theorists stressed that necessity would prove ineffective without hope and opportunity, although hope and opportunity were, again, insufficient. ⁹⁹

This balance between hope, opportunity, and necessity took some time to work out (and indeed has not yet been completely worked out). ¹⁰⁰ We can spot incipient development as early as 1549 in Sir Thomas Smith’s classic A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England. Heavily influenced by the classical avarice mode, Smith attributed the contemporaneous movement in England toward engrossment, enclosure, and pasturage to insatiable avarice and luxury. ¹⁰¹ “For every man, as Plato says, is naturally covetous of lucre and that wherein they see most lucre they will most gladly exercise.” However, like Xenophon and Isocrates, Smith believed that while the state could not reduce this avarice, it could redirect it through the manipulation of rewards and penalties to, respectively, encourage behavior beneficial and discourage behavior detrimental to the common good. Thus farmers would readily respond to price incentives (created by manipulating export duties or restrictions on export) causing them to shift between pasturage and tillage as needed by the commonwealth. ¹⁰² Following the belief of Solon that in a commonwealth “men should be provoked to good deeds by rewards and presents and to abstain from ill doings by pains,” Smith maintained that it was impossible to pass a law compelling men to be industrious in labor of either mind or body and that such labor could only be stimulated if rewarded and honored. ¹⁰³

But in line with the indolence model, Smith also noted that inflation, the decay of their revenues, and a general “lack of living” had forced the landed gentry either to reduce their households, “live but grossly and barbarously, as without wines, spices, and silks,” or “study” means to increase their revenues “to seek to maintain their countenance as their predecessors did.” ¹⁰⁴ Furthermore, Smith condemned the sloth and idleness as well as the luxury of Englishmen compared to other nations. Drawing upon the analogy of the role of luxury in Rome in the decline of the Roman Empire, he attributed the prevalence of luxury in London to the abundance of riches flowing into the capital, while outside of London “the law of necessity keeps men in good case for exceeding either in apparel or fare.” ¹⁰⁵

What Smith meant by “the law of necessity” is unclear, although he clearly sought to suggest that this “natural law,” like statutory law, could promote virtuous behavior. If he implied the notion of necessity as the mother of frugality, however, his failure to mention the “law of necessity” in his analysis of the alternative responses of the landed gentry suggests he did not know how far to extend the law of necessity and had not resolved the problematic relationship between necessity, indolence, and avarice. By attributing to avarice rather than necessity the observation that individuals would only respond to opportunity so long as their efforts proved profitable and opportunity carried the hope of betterment‑-whether gentry enclosing lands or tenants farming common land‑-Smith remained far more imbedded in a classical avarice model, albeit with strong transitional elements pointing the way to the later necessity consensus.

While later necessity theorists seconded Smith that laws enforcing physical or mental labor were generally counterproductive, they believed, like Machiavelli, that the state could stimulate industry by creating an atmosphere of artificial necessity. In such a situation, absolute poverty or self-preservation was not necessary to motivate increased effort, since indeed any change from the status quo decreasing real income (whether in reduced wages, higher taxes, or inflation) increased necessity. Indeed, necessity, when identified as the secret to Dutch commercial success‑-whether based on a populationist-environmentalist basis (a large population concentrated on a limited land area carved out of the sea) or a political basis (heavy taxation)‑-became an important tool of English political economy, stimulating what Furniss calls the “Dutch fetish” among both low- and high-wage theorists. ¹⁰⁶

Yet, despite the universal psychological nature of necessity and the cross-class implications of the Dutch model of development, conservatives and liberals did not consistently apply this model of man to all classes or situations. Low-wage theorists tended to apply the necessity model only to the lower classes and high-wage theorists only to the middle and upper classes. Indeed, John Collins, a high-wage theorist, chastised the class bias of conservatives who would apply necessity to others but not to themselves, a carrot for the rich and a stick for poor. ¹⁰⁷ The necessity model readily fits traditional interpretations of harsh mercantilist policies to force more labor out of the poor. In contrast, these same low-wage theorists frequently presumed that “industrious classes,” like merchants and farmers, would simply continue in their present line of employment if profitable, or else abandon that line for some other equally profitable line of employment (like farmers switching back and forth between tillage and pasture). ¹⁰⁸

In contrast, high-wage theorists regularly extended the necessity model to the middle and upper classes while shying away from applying the model to the poorer classes. As an early exemplar of high-wage theory, Sir Thomas Smith had noted that although the “lack of living” impacts rich and poor alike, this lack of living stimulates only protesting and rioting and not increased industry among the lower classes, whether displaced tenants, husbandmen without sufficient vent, or underemployed clothiers. ¹⁰⁹ On the other hand, high-wage theorists consistently argued that lowering the rate of interest would promote industry and thriftiness by forcing men who had been able to live upon unearned income to increase their industry and reduce their consumption. ¹¹⁰ Daniel Defoe extended the “necessity” approach to merchants and their insurers, attributing the rise of “The Projecting Age” in late-seventeenth-century England to losses inflicted by the war with France. Defoe noted that, “prompted by Necessity, [merchants] rack their Wits for New Contrivances, New Inventions, New Trades, Stocks, Projects, and any thing to retrieve the desperate Credit of their Fortunes.” ¹¹¹ While low-wage theorists examined the response of the working classes to changes in real wages and commodity prices, high-wage theorists examined the response of the employing classes, emphasizing the benefits of commercial competition. Henry Martyn believed the stickiness of wages and the pressure of lower prices resulting from foreign competition forced employers caught in a cost-price squeeze to search for innovations in technology and organization (such as division of labor) to improve efficiency. ¹¹²

But in the final analysis both high- and low-wage theorists reaffirmed the relative nature of necessity applicable to all classes. High-wage theorists, stressing that the wages of workers were already at subsistence levels, believed that reduced income would lead not to increased industry but only to physical deterioration. Low-wage theorists did not deny that absolute poverty would lead to a reduction in effort, but rather simply claimed that the present wages of workers were far above subsistence levels, even allowing English laborers a diet superior to comparable Irish, French, or Dutch workers. ¹¹³ That high-wage theorists went to the empirically and theoretically tenuous position of specifying wages at some absolute minimum suggests that they, like the low-wage theorists, accepted that at any wage above such a minimum the low-wage argument would hold. ¹¹⁴ Furthermore, although arguing over the alternative responses that the middle and upper classes might make to necessity‑-whether increased industry in the previous line of effort or a shift to an entirely new line of effort‑-both schools confirmed that necessity was applicable to classes far above levels of subsistence. The frequent assumption that induced wants had the same effect as necessity among all classes further affirms the belief in the relative nature of necessity. ¹¹⁵

Both high- and low-wage theorists, like classical scholars before them, recognized that just as necessity itself could take economic, demographic, or sociopolitical forms, so could responses to necessity. While we have focused here on the “positive” responses of industry and invention, in the same circumstances they easily visualized potentially “negative” responses. As Plato and Aristotle noted, if poverty promoted the discovery of the arts, it also bred crime, riot, and revolution, a view inherent in the maxim that “necessity knows no law.’ ¹¹⁶ High-wage theorists often tended to sidestep the issue of supply of effort when speaking of the working classes, focusing instead on the negative responses to lower wages. Low-wage theorists, on the other hand, did not deny these alternative responses, and indeed usually sought to check potential negative outlets through legal means in order to channel the response to necessity into increased effort. ¹¹⁷ More generally, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British political economists recognized that many factors affected how particular individuals (or countries) would respond to necessity, including level of wealth, health, age, and personality. ¹¹⁸ Among the multifarious responses they highlighted were: reduced consumption (including reducing the number of servants) ¹¹⁹; emigration ¹²⁰; long-distance trade ¹²¹; abandoning present trade for another (most prominently moving out of agriculture and into non-agricultural employments and rural-urban migration) ¹²²; resorting to poor relief ¹²³; delaying marriage and childbearing ¹²⁴; rioting and combination ¹²⁵; rebellion, revolutions, and civil wars ¹²⁶; warfare ¹²⁷; borrowing ¹²⁸; “begging or stealing” ¹²⁹; and prostitution ¹³⁰.

The Adam Smith Paradox

But what about the ultimate high-wage theorist, Adam Smith? Truly, Adam Smith reveals the complexity of argument brought to bear on the subject, but he ultimately proves quite a typical high-wage theorist. [For a more general discussion of these elements of high-wage theory, see Baird, “Necessity” 507-10.] Neither the positive elasticity nor the TIH interpretations discussed at the beginning of this chapter does justice to Smith’s argument. For the most part, Smith’s approach readily falls into a traditional “industry versus indolence” framework, a framework Smith originally developed from a philosophical perspective in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. ¹³¹ For Smith, “industrious man” in “continual motion” seeks to maximize his “industry”, “income”, and “wealth” due to “mutual emulation and the desire of greater gain” and “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of everyman to better his condition.” ¹³² “Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command.” ¹³³ Smith, however, recognized “natural” or “necessary” limits to the maximization of industry owing to physiological labor capacity and the need for leisure. ¹³⁴ “Indolent man,” on the other hand, reflects “the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can.” ¹³⁵ “It is better, says the proverb, to play for nothing, then to work for nothing.” ¹³⁶ As Nathan Rosenberg summarizes, “Smith attached great importance to the belief that the generality of mankind is intractably slothful and prone to indolence.” ¹³⁷

Although Smith often treated “industry” and “indolence” as habits formed early in life and changed only with great resistance, he also believed that “indolent man” might readily and rapidly transform into “industrious man” with institutional changes. ¹³⁸ Conditions promoting industry included a reward commensurate with one’s effort (as in self-employment or piece work), no restrictions on labor mobility, security in one’s reward, the division of labor, employment in “productive labour,” and a reward equal to the “natural price” of one’s labor. All of these changes promote “the hope of bettering one’s condition” and thus an increase in the per capita level of industry with no change in real wages. Reverse changes caused “industrious” men to revert to “indolent” men. ¹³⁹

But Smith seemed, in Wealth of Nations, to suggest that industry changes proportionably with real wages. To understand this seeming inconsistency, we need to see exactly what Smith meant by “industry.” Smith clearly distinguished four basic elements in “industry”: effort (loss of ease, liberty, and happiness), physiological labor capacity (health, strength, spirits), mental labor capacity (ingenuity, dexterity, spirits), and human capital (training, education, skill). Smith followed closely the high-wage argument that both labor capacities and human capital rise with real wages, while effort moves in the opposite direction:

The proper performance of every service seems to require that its pay or recompence should be, as exactly as possible, proportioned to the nature of the service. If any service is very much under‑paid, it is very apt to suffer by the meanness and incapacity of the greater part of those who are employed in it. If it is very much over‑paid, it is apt to suffer, perhaps, still more by their negligence and idleness. ¹⁴⁰

Smith tended to equate “industrious man” constrained by labor capacity with the lower classes and “indolent man” constrained by necessity with the upper classes. Rosenberg believes that Smith implied a backward-sloping supply of effort for capitalists in his opposition to high interest and profits and his emphasis on the pressure of competition. ¹⁴¹ Indeed, Smith noted as clear a statement of the “target income hypothesis” as any low-wage theorist:

In every profession, the exertion of the greater part of those who exercise it, is always in proportion to the necessity they are under of making that exertion. This necessity is greatest with those to whom the emoluments of their profession are the only source from which they expect their fortune, or even their ordinary revenue and subsistence. In order to acquire this fortune, or even to get this subsistence, they must, in the course of a year, execute a certain quantity of work of a known value. ¹⁴²

But although Smith did not normally apply this “necessity” framework to the lower classes, he did not exclude them. For lower and upper classes alike, reward incommensurate with effort breeds indolence, whether in slaves, servants, apprentices, soldiers, great landlords, public servants, or Oxford professors. ¹⁴³ The same individuals, “when they are liberally paid by the piece, they are very apt to over‑work themselves.” ¹⁴⁴ Even for “industrious man,” he notes, “great labour, either of mind or body, continued for several days together, is in most men naturally followed by a great desire of relaxation, which, if not not restrained by force or by some strong necessity, is almost irresistable.” ¹⁴⁵ Smith suggested as much in his contrast of the industry of poverty-stricken Chinese artificers with the indolence of relatively wealthy European tradesmen. ¹⁴⁶ Any difference between Smith and other “necessity” theorists thus reduces to a matter of semantics: whether necessity spurs industry or necessity reduces leisure.

This industry-versus-indolence framework helps explain the seeming inconsistencies in the evidence for the positive elasticity and TIH interpretations above. Firstly, the line from Wealth of Nations about “the liberal reward of labour” quoted at the beginning of this chapter does not suggest a forward-sloping labor supply curve so much as it simply conveys Smith’s image of “industrious man” increasing physiological labor capacity (“bodily strength”) with a rise in real wages (“plentiful subsistence”) within a proper institutional environment (“the comfortable hope of bettering his condition”) which causes him to maximize his effort (“exert that strength to the utmost”). While capacity might improve “in proportion to the encouragement it receives,” Smith suggested no degree of elasticity in effort, simply maximization. ¹⁴⁷ Secondly, whereas Smith, in his Lectures, attributed the rampant “idleness” in the working classes to the indolence rising out of a lack of proper education, in the Wealth of Nations he changed his mind, finding “idleness” restricted to a minority and reflecting rather the relaxation naturally concomitant with maximization of effort. This turnabout does not entail any change in Smith’s behavioral framework, but does imply a change in habit, institutional environment, level of necessity, or simply polemics.

His ambiguity over the supply of effort makes little difference in the Smithian framework. When Smith analyzed Vanderlint’s and Postlethwayt’s case of a “general mourning”‑-in which they had attempted to prove (albeit incorrectly) the case for a forward-sloping supply curve of labor by describing how tailors responded positively to extraordinary and/or temporary wages during “a general Mourning for the Death of a Prince”)‑-he made no mention of their main point that higher wages would lead to an increase in efort. ¹⁴⁸ Smith’s exclusive focus on the long-run labor supply (population growth) and his treatment of all factors of production as inelastic in the short run further suggest that he considered the supply of effort of little consequence. ¹⁴⁹ The absence of discussion perhaps suggests that Smith’s framework presumed both an inelastic supply of effort and inelastic short-run supply of labor. For example, Smith noted that only an increase in the number of “productive labourers” or a change in technology could increase agricultural productivity. ¹⁵⁰ But whether inelastic or backward-sloping, the supply of effort plays little role in Smith’s general theory, thus tending to confirm the conclusion of R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner that Smith was inconsistent but “the inconsistency was often consistent, because it rarely damaged the central analysis.” ¹⁵¹

In essence, Smith’s contrast between “industrious” and “indolent man” did not differ substantially from low-wage theorists like Petty and Temple in the seventeenth century; his eighteenth century high-wage compatriots like Hume, Forster, and Anderson; or his nineteenth-century followers like Thomas Robert Malthus, John R. McCulloch, Nassau William Senior, and Wilhelm Roscher. All stressed necessity along with habit, custom, hope, and labor capacity to some degree or other. ¹⁵²

Empirical Evidence

A framework based on this necessity consensus has much to offer an understanding of the seemingly perverse behavior of Englishmen in seventeenth-century Virginia and early modern England we have already examined. From tobacco productivity, demand for labor, and demand for land in Virginia to elasticities of labor supply and consumer demand in England, Englishmen were simply responding to necessity.

But the necessity consensus can help to bring into focus many other aspects of early modern English economic development. Although no modern scholar has attempted to develop a thorough “push” interpretation of the coming of the Industrial Revolution, certainly many of the elements of such an interpretation are already out there.

Whereas early English political economists only reluctantly extended the necessity framework to the landed class, twentieth-century scholars have made the impact of necessity on farmers and landlords the cornerstone of their interpretation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century economic development. R. H. Tawney identified the pressure of inflation as the prime cause for the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century enclosure movement, the shift to sheep‑farming, improved estate management, and industrial activities. According to Lawrence Stone, “landlords now had to run, simply in order to stand still.” Enclosure, consolidation, and engrossment continued into the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century as a response to the pressure of falling grain prices. ¹⁵³ Later scholars have found quite widespread examples of Arthur Young’s Norfolk landed class undertaking extensive agricultural improvements during the agricultural “bust” of the 1730s and 1740s, only to rest “upon their laurels” during the agricultural “boom” of the late eighteenth century. Farmers responded “perversely” to the lower grain prices following the Restoration by increasing grain production, thus outrunning demand and promoting even lower grain prices. Squeezed between “fixed, inescapable costs”, the “stickiness” of other costs, and falling prices for grain in a pre‑industrial society with “comparatively few attractive alternative occupations,” limited technological and organizational alternatives, and the relative immobility of labor and capital, farmers were forced by necessity to expand and/or intensify production to protect their incomes. ¹⁵⁴ Other historians have seconded the interpretation of Houghton, Defoe, and Martyn of a late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century “Projecting Age,” finding that manufacturers, caught in a cost-price squeeze (especially due to the relative shortage of labor and thus high wages), adopted technological and organizational innovations. ¹⁵⁵

What has become known as the “John‑Jones synthesis” of the coming of the Industrial Revolution, acknowledging the seminal work of Arthur H. John and Eric L. Jones, incorporates all these major findings, stressing the central role of cost-price squeezes in driving the economy which led to lower food and commodity prices and rising real incomes for the masses, all sparking an eighteenth-century consumer revolution. This synthesis represents the dominant interpretation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English economic development, readily reflected in recent historical overviews. ¹⁵⁶

Beyond Early Modern England

Again you might be questioning how far we can take such evidence. Having already admitted that much of early political economy was simply special pleading for limited economic interests, how far should we take any analysis of what people back then thought. And even if we found some hitherto ignored underlying intellectual scaffolding, that does not mean they actually understood any better than we can what motivated Englishmen back then. And certainly a scattering of modern historical interpretations that fit within some greater general framework does not serve to prove that framework is correct. Finally, even if one accepts the behavior and its interpretation, we could still fall back on the argument that we simply misjudged these Englishmen; either they valued leisure over additional profits (as Smithians might say) or they were pre-capitalists (as Marxians might say).

But again I will take the argument one step further and argue that in their common-sensical necessity consensus these early modern political economists were quite correct. Necessity is the mother of invention, industry, and frugality. The backward-sloping supply curve of labor, far from being perverse, is actually quite normal, indeed perhaps universal.

Cite this article as: Baird, Bruce C. "Necessity, the Perpetual Mother." Dr. Baird Online. July 9, 2017. Web. May 7, 2024. <https://www.drbairdonline.com/necessity-the-perpetual-mother/necessity-the-perpetual-mother/>.

Notes:

Sir William Petty, The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. Charles Henry Hull, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1899) 1: 87; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977) 384. ↩
Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (1920; New York: Kelley & Millman, 1957) 118. ↩
Lujo Brentano, Hours and Wages in Relation to Production, trans. Mrs. William Arnold (London, 1894) 39‑40; G. von Schulze-Gaevernitz, The Cotton Trade in England and on the Continent, trans. Oscar S. Hall (London, 1895) 16‑7; Furniss, Position of the Laborer 118, 123n1, 230-5; W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times: The Mercantile System, 6th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925) 565-9; T. W. Hutchison, “Berkeley’s Querist and its Place in the Economic Thought of the Eighteenth Century,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 4 (1953): 55-8; D. C. Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century, Economic History Review 2nd ser. 8 (1955): 291‑2; Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965) 160‑96; E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 81; E. L. Jones, “Agriculture and Economic Growth in England, 1660-1750: Agricultural Change,” Agriculture and Economic Growth in England 1650-1815, ed. E. L. Jones (London: Methuen, 1967) 170‑1; A. H. John, “Agricultural Productivity and Economic Growth in England 1700-1760,” Agriculture and Economic Growth in England 1650-1815, ed. E. L. Jones (London: Methuen, 1967) 175‑6; Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth 1688-1959 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) 93‑4; Anthony J. Little, Deceleration in the Eighteenth-Century British Economy (London: Croom Helm, 1976) 51-2; B. A. Holderness, Pre-Industrial England: Economy and Society 1500-1750 (London: Dent, 1976) 211‑2; Douglas A. Reid, “The Decline of Saint Monday, 1766-1876,” Past & Present 71 (1976): 79; D. C. Coleman, The Economy of England 1450-1750 (London: Oxford University Press, 1977) 103‑5; Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 1980) 22, 57-8; Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 103; W. A. Cole, “Factors in Demand 1700-80,” The Economic History of Britain since 1700, Vol. 1: 1700-1860, eds. Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 50-1; Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship 1603-1763, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1984) 345‑6; Krishan Kumar, “Unemployment as a Problem in the Development of Industrial Societies: the English Experience,” Sociological Review 32 (1984): 197; David Levine, Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Population History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 21-2. ↩
See, e.g., Furniss, Position of the Laborer 233-5; Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy” 290; William D. Grampp, Economic Liberalism, Vol. 1: The Beginnings (New York: Random House, 1965) 65; Richard C. Wiles, “The Theory of Wages in Later English Mercantilism,” Economic History Review 2nd ser. 21 (1968): 119, 124; Edward Joseph Hundert, “The Conception of Work and the Worker in Early Industrial England: Studies of an Ideology in Transition,” diss., University of Rochester, 1969, 67-70; E. L. Jones, “English and European Agricultural Development 1650-1750,” The Industrial Revolution, ed. R. M. Hartwell (New York: Barnes, 1970) 74; M. A. Bienefeld, Working Hours in British Industry: An Economic History (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1972) 24, 28; Marian Bowley, Studies in the History of Economic Thought before 1870 (London: Macmillan, 1973) 179-80; Samuel Hollander, The Economics of Adam Smith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973) 58, 251-2; Nathan Rosenberg, “Adam Smith on Profits‑-Paradox Lost and Regained,” Journal of Political Economy 82 (1974): 1179; Harry Landreth, “The Economic Thought of Bernard Mandeville,” History of Political Economy 7 (1975): 199-201; Ian Blanchard, “Labour Productivity and Work Psychology in the English Mining Industry, 1400-1600,” Economic History Review 2nd ser. 31 (1978): 4; Peter Mathias, The Transformation of England: Essays in the Economic and Social History of England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) 148; John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century English Industry (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981) 52-5; Henry William Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought, 2nd ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983) 130, 149, 251; Kumar, “Unemployment” 197; Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, “Policing the Early Modern Proletariat, 1450-1850,” Proletarianization and Family History, ed. David Levine (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984) 190; Joel Mokyr, “Demand vs. Supply in the Industrial Revolution,” The Economics of the Industrial Revolution, ed. Joel Mokyr (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheid, 1985) 108; Levine, Reproducing Families 21, 49; Colen Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987) 231-2n9; T. W. Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662-1776 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 39; Jan De Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 54 (1994): 263. E. P. Thompson, however, rejects the application of such neoclassical economic concepts. See Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” 80. ↩
Brentano, Hours and Wages 2-7; Schulze-Gaevernitz, Cotton Trade 1-17; Pollard, Genesis of Modern Management 190-1; A. W. Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 2nd ser. 11 (1958): 35-51; Wiles, “Theory of Wages” 113-26; Hundert, “Conception of Work” 240-97; Neil McKendrick, “The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England,” The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982) 19. ↩
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1937) 81. See, e.g., Simon Rottenberg, “Income and Leisure in an Underdeveloped Economy,” Journal of Political Economy 60 (1952): 95; Robert Sourdain, “La Courbe D’Offre Individuelle de Travail: Limites de L’Analyse Marganaliste”, Revue Économique 17 (1966) 603-4; Rosenberg, “Adam Smith” 1177-90; Neil McKendrick, “Home Demand and Economic Growth: A New View of the Role of Women and Children in the Industrial Revolution,” Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (London: Europa Publications, 1974) 183; Landreth, “Economic Thought of Bernard Mandeville,” 200-1; Joel Mokyr, “Dear Labor, Cheap Labor, and the Industrial Revolution,” Favorites of Fortune: Technology, Growth, and Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution, eds. Patrice Higgonet, David S. Landes, and Henry Rosovsky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) 186; Chris Nyland, “Capitalism and the History of Worktime Thought,” British Journal of Sociology 37 (1986): 516-7; Stanley L. Engerman, “Coerced and Free Labor: Property Rights and the Development of the Labor Force,” Explorations in Economic History 29 (1992): 7. ↩
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958) 61-2; Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” 81-2. See also Pollard, Genesis of Modern Management 161. ↩
Scholars emphasizing industrialization believe the severance of factory workers from their customary ways of thinking and acting gradually worked “a psychological change” akin to that which had created the capitalist employer but aimed at satisfying insatiable wants rather than endless profits. See Brentano, Hours and Wages 39-46; Schulze-Gaevernitz, Cotton Trade 46-9. Industrialization also made available goods that consumers wanted at a price they could afford. See Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy” 291; Coleman, Economy of England 103‑5. As Lujo Brentano summarized these new developments, “the race begins between the growth of his requirements, which leads to increased production, and an increase in production, which in turns leads to a growth in his requirements.” See Brentano, Hours and Wages 45‑6. ↩
Furniss, Position of the Laborer 234. See also Brentano, Hours and Wages 39; W. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry 565-6; T. E. Gregory, “The Economics of Employment in England, 1660-1713,” Economica 182 (1921): 50; Levine, Reproducing Families 21, 49; De Vries, “Industrial Revolution” 249-70. ↩
John Rae, “Efficiency of Labour,” Dictionary of Political Economy, ed. Sir Robert Harry Inglis Palgrave (London: Macmillan, 1910); D. H. Robertson, “Economic Incentive,” Economica 1 (1921): 231-45; Paul H. Douglas, The Theory of Wages (1934; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964) 72-3, 229-314; K. W. Rothschild, The Theory of Wages (New York: Macmillan, 1954) 36-48; Lloyd G. Reynolds, Labor Economics and Labor Relations, 7th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1978) 21-62; Richard B. Freeman, Labor Economics, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979) 16-35; Daniel S. Hammermesh and Albert Rees, The Economics of Work and Pay, 4th ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988) 1-100. ↩
Marx, Capital 611-2; Melville J. Herskovits, Economic Anthropology: A Study in Comparative Economics (New York: Knopf, 1952) 111; Keith Thomas, “Work and Leisure,” Past & Present 29 (1964): 51-7; Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” passim, esp. 80; Joffre Dumazedier, Sociology of Leisure, trans. Marea A. McKenzie (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1974) 9-16; Wanda Minge-Klevana, “Does Labor Time Decrease with Industrialization?: A Survey of Time-Allocation Studies,” Current Anthropology 21 (1980): 279-80; W. Peter Archibald, Marx and the Missing Link: Human Nature (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989) 182-3, 221-2n5. ↩
Staffan Burenstam Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) 89-114. ↩
George A. Lundberg, Mirra Komarovsky, and Mary Alice McInery, Leisure: A Suburban Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934) 2-3, 94. See also Herskovits, Economic Anthropology 111; Edward Gross, “A Functional Approach to Leisure Analysis,” Social Problems 9 (1961): 2-8; Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962); John Neulinger, The Psychology of Leisure, 2nd ed. (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1981) 15-8; Stanley Parker, Leisure and Work (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983) 3-10; John R. Kelly and Geoffrey Godbey, The Sociology of Leisure (State College, Penn.: Venture Publishing, 1992) 14-8, 33. ↩
Neulinger, Psychology of Leisure 15. ↩
Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution 57. ↩
Furniss, Position of the Laborer 86; Douglas, Theory of Wages 245, 257; Hutchison, “Berkeley’s Querist” 55-8; T. S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: The 18th Century (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1955) 205; Kenneth E. Boulding, Economic Analysis, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1955) 210, 223-5; James M. Buchanan, “The Backbending Supply Curve of Labor: An Example of Doctrinal Regression?,” History of Political Economy 3 (1971): 385; Mathias, Transformation of England 148-9; Hutchison, Before Adam Smith 232, 402n2. Most recently, de Vries has referred to “the backward-bending labor-supply-curve ailment.” See De Vries, “Industrial Revolution” 263. ↩
Elliott J. Berg, “Backward-Sloping Labor Supply Functions in Dual Economies–The Africa Case,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 75 (1961): 468-92; Henry Smith, “The Minimal Economy,” Economic Journal 75 (1965): 31-43; Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Analytical Economics: Issues and Problems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966) 376-7; Gene Ellis, “The Backward-bending Supply Curve of Labor in Africa: Models, Evidence, and Interpretation–and Why It Makes a Difference,” Journal of Developing Areas 15 (1981): 251-74; Charles Perrings, “The Natural Economy Revisited,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 33 (1985): 831-3, 848n22. See also further discussion of TIH in Appendix VI. ↩
Many economists and historians have developed the sloppy habit of interchanging backward-bending and backward-sloping as equivalent cover terms for any perverse labor response. Indeed, being the term most commonly found in economics textbooks, “backward-bending” seems to be the covering term. ↩
Bienefeld, Working Hours in British Industry 8-41; Blanchard, “Labour Productivity” 1-24. On lack of data, see E. L. Jones, “Agriculture, 1700-80,” The Economic History of Britain since 1700, Vol. 1, eds. Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 67‑72. ↩
Thomas Robert Malthus, The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, 8 vols., eds. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden (London: Pickering, 1986) 5: 185-6; William Roscher, Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols., trans. John J. Lalor (Chicago; Callaghan, 1882) 2: 47-8; Elizabeth W. Gilboy, Wages in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934) 222; Ashton, Economic History of England 60-2; Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (New York: Wiley, 1956) 35-6; T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England 1700-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) 42-4; A. H. John, “The Course of Agricultural Change 1660-1760,” Studies in the Industrial Revolution, ed. L. S. Pressnell (London: Athlone, 1960) 125-55; John, “Agricultural Productivity” 172-93; E. L. Jones, “Introduction,” Agriculture and Economic Growth in England 1650-1815, ed. E. L. Jones (London: Methuen, 1967) 45‑6; E. Jones, “Agriculture and Economic Growth” 170‑1; Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth 93; Peter J. Bowden, “Agricultural Prices, Farm Profits, and Rents,” The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. 4 1500-1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) 601-2, 625-9, 634-49; E. A. Wrigley, “A Simple Model of London’s Importance in Changing English Society and Economy 1650‑1750,” Past & Present 37 (1967): 51; D. E. C. Eversley, “The Home Market and Economic Growth in England, 1750-1780,” Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution: Essays presented to J. D. Chambers, eds. E. L. Jones and G. E. Mingay (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968) 206-59; Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880 (London: Routledge, 1969) 90; D. Whitehead, “The English Industrial Revolution as an Example of Growth,” The Industrial Revolution, ed. R. M. Hartwell (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970) 14-6; L. A. Clarkson, The Pre-Industrial Economy in England 1500-1750 (London: Batsford, 1971) 43-4; Richard A. Ippolito, “The Effect of the ‘Agricultural Depression’ on Industrial Demand in England: 1730-1750,” Economica 42 (1975): 298-312; Little, Deceleration 48-51; Holderness, Pre-Industrial England 205‑11; Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 158-98; Coleman, Economy of England 117‑22; Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Mathias, Transformation of England 161-3; N. F. R. Crafts, “Income Elasticities of Demand and the Release of Labour by Agriculture during the British Industrial Revolution,” Journal of European Economic History 9 (1980): 153-68; Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship 253; Margaret Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (London: Hambledon, 1984); R. V. Jackson, “Growth and Deceleration in English Agriculture, 1660-1790,” Economic History Review 2nd ser. 38 (1985): 339-46; Peter J. Bowden, “Agricultural Prices, Wages, Farm Profits, and Rents,” The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, 1640-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 61; Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760 (London: Routledge, 1988) 199; Carole Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Ann Kussmaul, A General Review of the Rural Economy of England 1538-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 173-4. ↩
See further Bruce C. Baird, “Necessity and the ‘Perverse’ Supply of Labor in Pre-Classical British Political Economy,” History of Political Economy 29 (1997): 502-4, 507-10. ↩
See, e.g., Thomas Manley, Usury at Six per Cent. examined (London, 1669) 19; John Houghton, Husbandry and Trade Improv’d, ed. Richard Bradley, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (London, 1728) 4: 388; [William Temple], A Vindication of Commerce and the Arts, A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Commerce, ed. John R. McCulloch (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966) 20; Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, ed. J. R. McCulloch (London, 1859) 15-16; Sir Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London, 1693) 19; Josiah Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which respectively attend France and Great Britain, with regard to Trade, 3rd ed., A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Commerce, ed. John R. McCulloch (1753; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966) 339-40; Malthus, Works 1: 14-5; 6: 256-7, 268. Although he rejects the target income hypothesis himself, Nathaniel Forster notes the contemporary belief. See Nathaniel Forster, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions (London, 1767) 60-1. See also Sourdain, “Courbe D’Offre” 603-4; Alessandro Roncaglia, Petty: The Origins of Political Economy, trans. Isabella Cherubini (Armonk, N. Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985) 68. ↩
Cf. Mathias, Transformation of England 1979, 155-6; Rule, Experience of Labour 54-5; Lis and Soly, “Policing the Early Modern Proletariat” 190; De Vries, “Industrial Revolution” 259. ↩
See, e.g., Manley, Usury 19; Houghton, Husbandry and Trade Improv’d 4: 384-5; Petty, Economic Writings 1: 274-5; Francis Gardiner, Some Reflections on a Pamphlet, Intituled England and East-India Inconsistent in Their Manufactures (London, 1696) 16-7; R. Dunning, cited in Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Social and Administrative History (1926; London: Routledge, 1969) 34; Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988) 80, 82, 92; [William Temple], An Essay on Trade and Commerce (London, 1770) 15-7, 50-1; James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, ed. Andrew S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) 2: 403, 691-2, 696; Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws 16, 48-9. See also Schulze-Gaevernitz, Cotton Trade 3, 7-8; William Kennedy, English Taxation 1640-1799: An Essay on Policy and Opinion (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913) 116; Furniss, Position of the Laborer 125n, 232; D. Marshall, English Poor 33-4; Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Shifting and Incidence of Taxation, 5th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927) 47-55; Douglas, Theory of Wages 229, 270-1; Gilboy, Wages 28-32, 222, 228-30; E. A. J. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British Economic Thought (1937; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965) 287; Edmund Whittaker, A History of Economic Ideas (New York: Longmans, Green, 1940) 578-80; M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd ed. (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1951) 269-322; Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2nd ed., 2 vols., ed. E. F. Söderlund, trans. Mendel Shapiro (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1955) 2: 165; Joseph J. Spengler, “Mercantilist and Physiocratic Growth Theory,” Theories of Economic Growth, eds. Bert F. Hoselitz et al. (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960) 22, 31; M. Bowley, Studies 179-80; Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) 93-5; J. E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) 78; Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 146; Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1982) 105-6; Ronald Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies (New York: Greenwood, 1986) 105. ↩
Temple, Vindication of Commerce 519, 515. ↩
Houghton, Husbandry and Trade Improv’d 4: 384; E. Lipson, The Economic History of England, 3 vols. (London: A. and C. Black, 1915-31) 2: 56-7; Ashton, Economic History of England 204-5; Pollard, Genesis of Modern Management 182; Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” 72-5; Bienefeld, Working Hours in British Industry 12; Reid, “The Decline of Saint Monday” 79. ↩
George, London Life 296-9; Reid, “Decline of Saint Monday” 79. Cf. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924) 1: 190-1; Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 41-2. ↩
Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, ed. Edwin Cannan (1896; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964) 257; Edwin Cannan, ed., An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (New York: Modern Library, 1937) 81n43; James O’Connor, “Smith and Marshall on the Individual’s Supply of Labor: A Note,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 14 (1961): 273‑5; Bowley, Studies 180, 184, 186, 197-8; Hollander, Economics of Adam Smith 163. ↩
Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937) 113-5; Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England 41. For a similar view, see Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Jared Sparks, 10 vols. (Chicago: Mac Coun, 1882) 2: 261-3. ↩
Joseph A. Schumpeter, A History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954) 267-8; William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought 1660-1776 (London: Methuen, 1963). ↩
D. C. Coleman, rev. of Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England, by Joyce Oldham Appleby, Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 106. ↩
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) 437. Cf. Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (1948; New York: Capricorn Books, 1960) 78. ↩
S. Todd Lowry, The Archaeology of Economic Ideas: The Classic Greek Tradition (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987) 317n19. See also Edwin N. Brown, Treasury of Latin Gems: A Companion Book and Introduction to the Treasures of Latin Literature (Hastings, NE, 1894) 78-9; Whittaker, History of Economic Ideas 63-8; Alfred F. Chalk, “Natural Law and the Rise of Economic Individualism in England,” Journal of Political Economy 59 (1951): 336-7; John W. Baldwin, “The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists, and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 2nd ser. 49 (1959) 12-6; Raymond De Roover, “The Scholastic Attitude toward Trade and Entrepreneurship,” Explorations in Economic History 1 (1963): 79-80; Keith Thomas, “The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” Hobbes Studies, ed. K. C. Brown (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965) 216; Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967) 125-6; Stephen Lofthouse and John Vint, “Some Conceptions and Misconceptions Concerning Economic Man,” Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Economiche e Commercialli 25 (1978): 587-8; Ramsay MacMullen, “Roman Elite Motivation: Three Questions,” Past & Present 88 (1980): 7; Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) 25, 101-3. ↩
Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (1952; Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967) xiv; Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) 153-4, 235, 302-9; Hundert, “Conception of Work” 43-4; David Macarov, Worker Productivity: Myths and Reality (Beverly Hills; Sage Publications, 1982) 11; Stanford M. Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins: Social and Evil, 2nd ed. (Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1989) 5-52, 232-68. ↩
Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, Collected Works of Francis Hutcheson, Vol. 4 (1747; Hildesheim: George Olms, 1969) 322; E. A. J. Johnson, American Economic Thought in the Seventeenth Century (London: P. S. King, 1932) 107-8; Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935) 170-200, 230-1, 256-7; Richard B. Schlatter, The Social Ideas of Religious Leaders 1660-1688 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940) 156-61, 238-9; Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946) 3-6; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization 1606-1865, 5 vols. (New York: Viking, 1946-59) 1: 5; Heckscher, Mercantilism 2: 154-5; Weber, Protestant Ethic 157-63; Kurt Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action: A Critique of Max Weber, ed. D. C. Coleman, trans. E. Geoffrey French (New York: Harper & Row, 1961) 81-2; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965) 199-231; Timothy Hall Breen, “The Non-Existent Controversy: Puritan and Anglican Attitudes on Work and Wealth, 1600-1640,” Church History 35 (1966): 279-83; J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) 12; E. J. Hundert, “The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke between Ideology and History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972): 3-22; De Vries, “Industrial Revolution” 258. ↩
This, of course, presumes some effort was necessary, which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political economists certainly did believe (as discussed below). ↩
Of course, neoclassical economists now eschew the hedonistic or even psychological basis of their utilitarian calculation, simply lumping all such concepts under the concept of utility maximization. ↩
See classic statements in W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 2nd ed. (London, 1879) 195; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1920) 527-8; Lionel Robbins, “On the Elasticity of Demand for Income in Terms of Effort,” Economica 10 (1930): 123-9. ↩
Arthur Young, Farmer’s Tour through the East of England (London, 1771) 4: 361, qtd. in Furniss, Position of the Laborer 118. ↩
Furniss, Position of the Laborer 117-56; Brentano, Hours and Wages 2-3; Schulze‑Gaevernitz, Cotton Trade 2‑4, 7-8; Kennedy, English Taxation 116-8; Gregory, “Economics of Employment” 37-51; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926) 269-70; Seligman, Shifting and Incidence of Taxation 46-55; Lipson, Economic History of England 3: 276-7; Gilboy, Wages 230-1; M. Beer, Early British Economics from the XIIIth to the middle of the XVIIIth Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938) 172-8; Michael T. Wermel, The Evolution of the Classical Wage Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) 3-14; Philip W. Buck, The Politics of Mercantilism (New York: Henry Holt, 1942) 88-93; Hutchison, “Berkeley’s Querist” 55-8; Heckscher, Mercantilism 2: 155-67; Bowley, Studies 179-80; Landreth, “Economic Thought of Bernard Mandeville” 198-201; Crowley, This Sheba, Self 42-3; Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology 146; Mathias, Transformation of England 150-1; De Vries, “Industrial Revolution” 258. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 73, 81. ↩
Marx, Capital 386n89; Roscher, Principles of Political Economy 2: 73-5; Brentano, Hours and Wages 3; Schulze-Gaevernitz, Cotton Trade 4-7; Furniss, Position of the Laborer 125-7, 176n; Gregory, “Economics of Employment” 45-6n; Seligman, Shifting Incidence of Taxation 55-62; Lipson, Economic History of England 3: 273-4; Viner, Studies 56-7; Wermel, Evolution 4-5; Buck, Politics of Mercantilism 93-4, 213; Hutchison, “Berkeley’s Querist” 52-77; Heckscher, Mercantilism 2: 168-72; Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 35-51; Spengler, “Mercantilist and Physiocratic Growth Theory” 22-3, 30-1; Grampp, Economic Liberalism 61-2; Wiles, “Theory of Wages” 113-26; Hundert, “Conception of Work” 240-97; Bowley, Studies 179; Thomas A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978) 69; Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology 147-8; Paul J. McNulty, The Origins and Development of Labor Economics: A Chapter in the History of Social Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980) 32-5. ↩
Grampp, Economic Liberalism 68-74. See also Jacob Viner, “The Intellectual History of Laissez Faire,” Journal of Law and Economics 3 (1960): 56; Warren B. Catlin, The Progress of Economics: A History of Economic Thought (New York: Bookman, 1962) 137-53; Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest 211-2, 234; Joyce Appleby, “Modernization Theory and the Formation of Modern Social Theories in England and America,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978): 263; David Harris Sack, “Parliament, Liberty, and the Commonweal,” Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War, ed. J. H. Hexter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) 85-121. ↩
Max Savelle, Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind (New York: Knopf, 1948) 185; George H. Hildebrand, “The Idea of Progress: An Historical Analysis,” The Idea of Progress: A Collection of Readings, ed. George H. Hildebrand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949) 10-6; Chalk, “Natural Law” 332-47; Heckscher, Mercantilism 1: 319-21; Grampp, Economic Liberalism 68-74; Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest 10, 29, 55-60, 110-26, 205-67; Crowley, This Sheba, Self 41-3, 49, 101, 106, 117; Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Appleby, “Modernization Theory” 267-8, 284; Bruce B. Suttle, “The Passion of Self-Interest: The Development of the Idea and Its Changing Status,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 46 (1987): 459-72; Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern 39. ↩
[See, e.g., Schulze-Gaevernitz, Cotton Trade 4-7; Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 35-51; Wiles, “Theory of Wages” 119, 124; McKendrick, “Consumer Revolution 19.] ↩
See, e.g., Douglas, Theory of Wages 229, 270-1; Whittaker, History of Economic Ideas 578-80; Guy Chapman, Culture and Survival (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940) 86-7; Hutchison, “Berkeley’s Querist” 55-8; Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 41-3; Grampp, Economic Liberalism 1: 71-2; Georgescu-Roegen, Analytical Economics 376-7, 383; Pollard, Genesis of Modern Management 190-1; H. Smith, “Minimal Economy” 31n; Sourdain, “Courbe D’Offre” 603-4; Blanchard, “Labour Productivity” 3-4; Mathias, Transformation of England 115-6, 161-2; Kumar, “Unemployment” 197; Lis and Soly, “Policing the Early Modern Proletariat” 190; Levine, Reproducing Families 21, 49. ↩
Fielding, Enquiry 115-8; Roscher, Principles of Political Economy 2: 73-4n; Seligman, Shifting Incidence of Taxation 50-2, 55-6; Gilboy, Wages 231; Viner, Studies 91n; E. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith 252; Hutchison, “Berkeley’s Querist” 56; Eugene Rotwein, ed., Writings on Economics, by David Hume (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955) xc; Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 36-46, 51; Wiles, “Theory of Wages” 119, 124-6. ↩
Sir Walter Harris, Remarks on the Affairs and Trade of England and Ireland (London, 1691) 53-4; Jacob Vanderlint, Money Answers all Things, ed. Jacob H. Hollander (1734; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1914) 29; Berkeley, qtd. in Hutchison, “Berkeley’s Querist” 55-6; Hutcheson, qtd. in Hutchison, “Berkeley’s Querist” 57n; Forster, Enquiry 56-62; Richard Price, Observations on Reversionary Payments, ed. William Morgan, 6th ed. (London, 1803) 2: 147-8; James Anderson, Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National Industry Chiefly Intended to Promote the Agriculture, Commerce, Manufactures and Fisheries of Scotland (1777; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968) 277, 293. See also Roscher, Principles of Political Economy 2: 73-4n; Furniss, Position of the Laborer 136, 173, 176n; Seligman, Shifting Incidence of Taxation 55‑62; E. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith 287; Hutchison, “Berkeley’s Querist“; Hutchison, Before Adam Smith 59, 232, 245-6. ↩
Baird, “Necessity” 509. I do not wish to claim that no seventeenth- or eighteenth-century political economist made a definite claim for positive elasticity of effort, but simply that any such statements were extremely rare, and high-wage theory did not specifically claim positive elasticity and, indeed, in general adopted a backward-sloping supply curve of effort. ↩
Charles Davenant, An Essay upon Ways and Means of Supplying the War, 2nd ed. (London, 1695) 87-8, 143, 148; Daniel Defoe, Giving Alms no Charity, and Employing the Poor a Grievance to the Nation, A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Economical Tracts, ed. J. R. McCulloch (London, 1859) 29-31; Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (1728; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1928) 24-5; Robert Nugent, Considerations upon a Reduction of the Landed Tax (London, 1749) 17, qtd. in Seligman, Shifting Incidence of Taxation 58; Josiah Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which respectively attend France and Great Britain, with regard to Trade, 3rd ed., A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Commerce, ed. John R. McCulloch (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966) 339, 351-2n; Josiah Tucker, Josiah Tucker: A Selection from His Economic and Political Writings, ed. Robert Schuyler (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931) 245; Sir Matthew Decker, An Essay on the Causes of the Decline of the Foreign Trade, 4th ed. (1751; Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley, 1973) 58, 66; Franklin, Works 2: 359, 368, 371, 402; Malachy Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved, 2 vols. (London, 1757) 1: 43; Forster, Enquiry 58-60; Thomas Mortimer, The Elements of Commerce, Politics and Finances (London, 1772), qtd. in Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 41-3; and Anon., Considerations, qtd. in Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 41-2. See also Schulze-Gaevernitz, Cotton Trade 5-6; Grampp, Economic Liberalism 71-2. ↩
Petty, Economic Writings 1: 270, 307-8; Mandeville, Fable of the Bees 1: 239; Fielding, Enquiry 80-4; Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws 10, 21. See also Kennedy, English Taxation 83-93; Furniss, Position of the Laborer 87, 145-56, 222-9; Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis 267n; Heckscher, Mercantilism 2: 166-7; Thomas, “Work and Leisure” 61-2. ↩
John Cooke [Cook], Unum Necessarium: or The Poore Mans Case (London, 1648) 70. Bergen Evans identifies the earliest use in Richard Franck, Northern Memoirs (1658). See Bergen Evans, Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968) 480. An early restatement of classical themes can be found in Francis Bacon, Colours of Good, and Evil: “Necessity… hath many time an advantage, because it awaketh the powers of the mind and strengtheneth endeavour.” Qtd. in W. Francis H. King, Classical and Foreign Quotations (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965) 372. Cf. John Taylor, The Penniless Pilgrimage (1618): “Wit’s whetstone, Want, there made us quickly learn.” Qtd. in W. Gurney Benham, Putnam’s Complete Book of Quotations and Household Words (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, n.d.) 356a. As far as I can tell, the Latin proverb Mater artium necessitas is a seventeenth-century creation, but its ubiquitous and simultaneous appearance in numerous countries along with its vulgar equivalents has not been fully explored or explained. Bartlett cites the Latin phrase as the source of the English phrase but it is quite possible the Latin phrase came originally from the English. See John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 15th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980) 134. In the margins of Cooke’s text there is a mixed Latin-Greek phrase which translates as “Necessity taught the Parrot [to say] ‘Hello,'” which he perhaps drew from Persius. See Thomas Benfield Harbottle, Anthology of Classical Quotations (San Antonio: Scylax Press, 1984) 240. The earliest mention of the Latin phrase so far discovered is a 1670 German collection of adages. See King, Classical and Foreign Quotations 194. The closest classical aphorism I have identified is Artis magistra necessitas, or “Necessity is the mistress of the arts,” attributed to Pliny the Younger. See Brown, Latin Gems 153. ↩
On Cook as one of the early proponents of interest politics, see Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest 7-8, 37n. ↩
For low-wage theorists, see Sir William Temple, The Works of Sir William Temple, Bart., 4 vols. (London, 1814) 1: 164, 180; 3: 2; Houghton, Husbandry and Trade Improv’d 4: 56, 382-93; John Houghton, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, 4 vols. (1693-1703; Farnborough, Hants., England: Gregg International, 1969) 25 Oct. 1695, 15 Nov. 1695, 20 Dec. 1695, 29 May 1696, 3 June 1698, 12 May 1699; Mandeville, Fable of the Bees 1: 183-9; Temple, Vindication of Commerce 18, 20, 31-2, 62; Temple, Essay on Trade and Commerce 9, 15, 26-30; Arthur Young, Political Arithmetic (1774; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967) 110-1; Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws 9-10, 21-2, 49. John Houghton links the concept to an old English phrase “Need makes the old wife trot.” See Houghton, Husbandry and Trade Improv’d 4: 387; Houghton, Collection 23 Apr. 1703; Benham, Putnam’s Complete Book of Quotations 814a. For high-wage theorists, see Cooke, Unum Necessarium 70-1; John Collins, A Plea for the Bringing in of Irish Cattel, and keeping out of Fish caught by Foreigners (London, 1680) 10; Sir Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London, 1693) 23-4, 42-3; Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce 25; E. P. Hutchinson, The Population Debate: The Development of Conflicting Theories up to 1900 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967) 54-5, 62-3, 68, 100-1; David Hume, Writings on Economics, ed. Eugene Rotwein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955) 17-18, 84-5; Tucker, Josiah Tucker 255; Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest 2: 367; Forster, Enquiry 56, 168-9; Anderson, Observations 277, 293. See also Viner, Studies 91n; E. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith 250-2; Grampp, Economic Liberalism 72-3; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore 587; Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) 157; Appleby 73-98; Drew R. McCoy, “Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of a Republican Political Economy for America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 35 (1978): 624-7. ↩
Cf. Benham, Putnam’s Complete Book of Quotations 814a, 826ab. ↩
On the multifarious definitions of nature in the classical era, see Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935; New York: Octagon Books, 1965) 11-3, 185-6, 447-56. ↩
Cyril Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus: A Study (1928; New York: Russell & Russell, 1964) 46-52, 120-1; Jonathan Barnes, “Reason and Necessity in Leucippus,” Proceedings of the 1st International Congress on Democritus, Vol. I (Xanthi: International Democritean Foundation, 1984) 151-5; Nikolai Iribadjakov, “The Philosophical-Historical and Sociological Views of Democritus,” Proceedings of the 1st International Congress on Democritus, Vol. I (Xanthi: International Democritean Foundation, 1984) 415-22; Henry Vyverberg, Human Nature, Cultural Diversity, and the French Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) 25. ↩
See, e.g., fragments of Democritus in Eric Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957) 115-24. ↩
C. D. Yonge, An English-Greek Lexicon (New York: American Book Company, 1870) 371, 416, Appendix xxvii; The Classic Greek Dictionary in Two Parts, Greek-English and English-Greek, 2 vols. (New York: Hinds & Noble, ca. 1896) 1: 48, 788, 2: 162; Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, comps., A Greek-English Lexicon, 2 vols., rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-40) 1: 100-1; 2: 2002-3; Gregory Vlastos, “Ethics and Physics in Democritus, II,” Philosophical Review 55 (1946): 54-5; Gregory Vlastos, “On the Pre-History in Diodorus,” American Journal of Philology 67 (1946): 56-8, esp. 56n21; Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951) 332-3; Havelock, Liberal Temper 117; Edelstein, Idea of Progress 23n6. Thomas Cole, in analyzing the wide-sweeping impact of Democritean anthropology, makes the subtle distinction between chreia-usus (utilitarian value) as man’s true teacher and chreia-egestas as “the impelling force behind his continuing efforts to find new usus for the various components of his environment.” However, in emphasizing the utilitarian aspect, Cole never clarifies what role egestas plays in the utilitarian calculus. See Thomas Cole, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology (1967; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990) 41n27, 47. Glacken’s work, the only monograph to attempt an analysis of the continuity of environmentalism over time, never clarifies these two distinct meanings of necessity, interpreting alternatively chreia and ananke as the mother of invention. Cf. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore 547, 607. ↩
Classical scholars employing this Democritean framework include Protagoras (a predecessor of Democritus), Isocrates, Aristotle, Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, Xenocrates, Vitruvius, Cicero, the Epicureans, Lucretius, Diodorus Siculus, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, Horace, and Livy. See Cicero, Livy, qtd. in Craufurd Tait Ramage, Familiar Quotations from Latin Authors (London: George Routledge & Sons, c. 1895) 119, 344; Bailey, Greek Atomists 122, 187-8; Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 192-221, 231-42, 244-59, 371-2, 375, 403; Havelock, Liberal Temper 115-24; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore 64-5, 73-4, 87-91, 95-6, 198; Edelstein, Idea of Progress 23-5, 83, 86, 88-9, 130-1, 136, 140; A. W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One: A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values, and Beliefs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970) 92-7, 113-4, 123-5; Annemarie De Waal Malefijt, Images of Man: A History of Anthropological Thought (New York: Knopf, 1974) 6-8; Michael Landmann, De Homine: Man in the Mirror of His Thought, trans. David J. Parent (Normal, IL: Applied Literature Press, 1979) 27-9, 42; T. Cole, Democritus 9, 28n5, 42-3, 50-22, 138-43. Although Plato stresses the role of chreia in the rise of the first arts, one should not make too much of Plato’s rather equivocal treatment of necessity which reflects many seemingly contradictory positions. See Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 155-64; George H. Hildebrand, ed., The Idea of Progress: A Collection of Readings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949) 6. ↩
Brown, Latin Gems 153; Harbottle, Anthology 154. ↩
Limited recognition of diffusion does not seriously affect this interpretation. See Edelstein, Idea of Progress 88; T. Cole, Democritus 57-8. ↩
Hildebrand, “Idea of Progress” 5; Kenneth E. Bock, The Acceptance of Histories: Toward a Perspective for Social Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956) 48-9. ↩
Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 174-9, 186-9. Lovejoy and Boas believe that Aristotle turned earlier ideas upside down stressing nature as a terminal rather than initial state, but I believe that Aristotle’s view was quite consistent with a Democritean view of necessity with its clear idea of “intrinsic” nature, neither initial nor final but evolving. For a similar dichotomization applied to medieval thought, see Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and Its Application in England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959) 30-1. ↩
Cicero, qtd. in Ramage, Latin Authors 149; Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 244-59, 376. The same points would later be emphasized by Gratius Faliscus and, after the Renaissance, by Gelli and Montaigne. ↩
Thucydides, qtd. in Craufurd Tait Ramage, Familiar Quotations from Greek Authors, 2nd ed. (1895; Detroit: Gale Research, 1968) 515; Solon, Pliny the Elder, qtd. in Harbottle, Anthology 60, 482; Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 9-11, 149, 392-3. Democritus, at least on a normative basis, stood with the primitivists. See Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 391; Harbottle, Anthology 478. The Cynics and Stoics as well as the Epicureans, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, defined “necessary” goods as those satisfied with little labor (since abundant in nature), suggesting that increased labor over time was due to demand for superfluities. See Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 152-4, 270, 417-8; Edelstein, Idea of Progress 137n12. ↩
Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 37, 41-2, 47-8, 58, 58-9n75, 69, 97; T. Cole, Democritus 1-2, 12. Dicaearchus in the first true appearance of four stages theory attributed the driving force to the desire for superfluities and craving for distinction. See Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 93-6. ↩
Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 119-22, 132, 268-74, 349-50, 392-3; Edelstein, Idea of Progress 42-3; T. Cole, Democritus 10, 22n16. ↩
See Livy, Horace, Cicero, Juvenal, and Justinian, qtd. in Brown, Latin Gems 31, 78-9, 92, 178-9, 190; Solon, qtd. in Harbottle, Anthology 481. ↩
Qtd. in Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 260, 271. ↩
Horace, qtd. in Brown, Latin Gems 81; Manilius, Virgil, qtd. in Ramage, Latin Authors 382, 743; Aristophanes, Herodotus, Plato, Thucydides, qtd. in Ramage, Greek Authors 63-4, 213-4, 427, 515; Lucan, Juvenal, Euripides, Antiphanes, qtd. in Harbottle, Anthology 68, 253, 400, 477; Ovid, Juvenal, Eur. Telephus, Menander, qtd. in King, Classical and Foreign Quotations 194, 235; Seneca, Silius Italicus, Ovid, Tacitus, in qtd. in Benham, Putnam’s Complete Book of Quotations 528b, 531a, 548a, 569a; Lucretius, qtd. in Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 228. ↩
Qtd. in Harbottle, Anthology 478. ↩
Benham, Putnam’s Complete Book of Quotations 564b; Evans, Dictionary of Quotations 480. ↩
Edelstein, Idea of Progress 99. ↩
Virgil, qtd. in Ramage, Latin Authors 742-3; Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 25-31, 371; Barry Gordon, “Aristotle and Hesiod: The Economic Problem in Greek Thought,” Review of Social Economy 21 (1963): 147-51; Hildebrand, “Idea of Progress” 33; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore 131-2; T. Cole, Democritus 9. ↩
This view was expressed in Epicurus, Philo Judaeus, Seneca, Cicero, Pliny, Virgil, and later in Origen and many of the Church fathers. See Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 397, 402; Edelstein, Idea of Progress 135-6; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore 185, 293-302; T. Cole, Democritus 51n12. ↩
Pitirim Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928) 588; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore 87-91, 95-6, 432-3. Several scholars have noted the similarity of the classical concept of “necessity” and Arnold Toynbee’s concept of “challenge,” particularly as applied to such environmental interpretations of the rise of civilization. But one should note that Toynbee believed the intermediate challenge (like a temperate climate) provided the most efficient challenge, a view more in line with Enlightenment thinkers than classical scholars who tended to ignore any negative impact of too harsh an environment or too severe a challenge. See Landmann, De Homine 29; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore 88, 91, 547, 597. ↩
Whittaker, History of Economic Ideas 66. ↩
Albert Augustus Trever, A History of Greek Economic Thought (1916; Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1978) 77-8. ↩
Edelstein, Idea of Progress 100-1. ↩
Curtius, Virgil, qtd. in Ramage, Latin Authors 164, 166, 743; Aristophanes, Theocritus, qtd. in Ramage, Greek Authors 63, 497, Harbottle, Anthology 478; Pliny the Younger, qtd. in Brown, Latin Gems 153; Apuleius, Plautus, qtd. in Harbottle, Anthology 207, 220; Appolonius, Persius, qtd. in Benham, Putnam’s Complete Book of Quotations 569b, 617b. Among the Church fathers, Arnobius attributed the arts not to reason or God, but “‘the inventions of paupers‑-necessity.'” Qtd. in Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore 180. Paul Rahe, noting the lack of interest in inventions in classical Greece (which he attributes to the distaste for all aspects of oikonomia), concludes that “in antiquity, to the extent that technical advances were made at all, necessity‑‑military necessity above all else‑‑does really seem to have been the mother of invention.” See Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern 95‑7, esp. 97. A cyclical view of progress built on necessity was excellently captured by an ancient Welsh round, ascribed to the sixth-century St. Cadoc: “Poverty begets Effort; Effort begets Success…” Qtd. Benham, Putnam’s Complete Book of Quotations 434b. ↩
Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 10, 119. ↩
Qtd. in Harbottle, Anthology 390, 452, 478; Brown, Latin Gems 185. Cf. Thucydides, qtd. in Ramage, Greek Authors 513; Epicurus, Plutarch, qtd. in Harbottle, Anthology 390. See also John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) 23-62. On medieval and early modern understanding of the relative nature of poverty, see further Bruce C. Baird, “Ideology, Behavior, and Necessity in Seventeenth-Century England and Virginia,” diss., University of Florida, 1995, 72-78. Cf. King, Classical and Foreign Quotations 261. Xenophon’s Socrates even noticed that “‘many private individuals who possess a great deal of money nonetheless consider themselves so poor that they subject themselves to every sort of toil (ponos) and risk (kindunous) in the expectation of getting more.'” Qtd. in Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern 101. ↩
King, Classical and Foreign Quotations 261. ↩
Qtd. in King, Classical and Foreign Quotations 225, 261. ↩
Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 371, 377. ↩
Qtd. in Ramage, Greek Authors 515-6. ↩
T. Cole, Democritus 2, 6. ↩
See, e.g., Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (1928; New York: Russell & Russell, 1961); Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1934; New York: Octagon Books, 1965); Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964) 371-2; Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, eds. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972) 3-38; Gaile McGregor, The Noble Savage in the New World Garden: Notes Toward a Syntactics of Place (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988); Stella Cro, The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990). ↩
See, e.g., J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (1920; New York: Dover, 1987); Whitney, Primitivism; Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960) 242-89; George H. Hildebrand, “Idea of Progress” 3-30; Arthur Alphonse Ekirch, Jr., The Idea of Progress in America, 1815-1860 (1944; New York: AMS Press, 1969); Bock, Acceptance of Histories 67-85; Charles Van Doren, The Idea of Progress (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967); David Bidney, Theoretical Anthropology (New York: Schoken Books, 1967) 185, 193, 204; Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress: History and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1968); John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970) 195-259; John Hurrell Crook, The Evolution of Human Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) 18-9; George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 26-7, 35-8, 114-7; David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). ↩
Benham, Putnam’s Complete Book of Quotations 9b. ↩
Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon, 2 vols. (1931; New York: Macmillan, 1949) 2: 641; John White, qtd. in Johnson, American 38; Schlatter 146-57; Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self‑made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954) 22-3, 177n6; Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 2nd ed. (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957) 168; Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967) 11-54; Edmund S. Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 24 (1967): 5-9; Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier 1629-1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) 15-6, 66-82. ↩
Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories 588; Joseph J. Spengler, French Predecessors of Malthus: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Wage and Population Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1942) 110-69; D. E. C. Eversley, Social Theories of Fertility and the Malthusian Debate (1959; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975) 23-35; Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Thomas, “Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” 218; Simeon M. Wade, Jr., “The Idea of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century England,” diss., Harvard University, 1968; Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli: A Dissection (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969) 216-37; Sekora, Luxury; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment 430-1, 443-5, 491-2; J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983) 99-101; Malcolm Jack, Corruption & Progress: The Eighteenth-Century Debate (New York: AMS Press, 1989) 3-4, 20. For American examples, see Crowley, This Sheba, Self 2-3, 44-5, 50-95; Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); James C. Riley, Population Thought in the Age of the Demographic Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1985) 55-6, 162n82. ↩
Cooke, Unum Necessarium 71; Benham, Putnam’s Complete Book of Quotations 77a, 78a, 312a, 806b, 861a; Evans, Dictionary of Quotations 480. Cf. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern 263. ↩
Whittaker, History of Economic Ideas 60; Leonard F. Dean, “Bodin’s Methodus in England before 1625,” Studies in Philology 39 (1942): 160-6; Spengler, “Mercantilist and Physiocratic Growth Theory” 323; Hodgen, Early Anthropology 275-88, 485-6; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore 370-1, 432-3, 449-56, 543-8, 572-6, 587, 596-8, 602-3, 608, 617-8; Fred W. Voget, A History of Ethnology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975) 79-80. For an early example, see “Polices to Reduce this Realme of Englande unto a Prosperus Wealthe and Estate,” Tudor Economic Documents, Vol. 3, eds. R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power (London: Longmans, Green, 1924) 328-9. ↩
Lewis J. Carey, Franklin’s Economic Views (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Dora, 1928) 47-8; Hutchinson, Population Debate 54-5, 62-3, 68, 76-7, 82, 84, 89, 99-103, 109; Meek, Social Science 88, 93, 101, 104, 117-9, 125, 133-4, 157-8, 194-6; McCoy, Elusive Republic 20-1. For continuing environmentalist influence on English political economy, especially among low-wage theorists, see, e.g., Petty, Economic Writings 1: 34; Temple, Works 1: 165, 180; Houghton, Collection 21 Feb 1695/6, 3 Jun 1698; Mandeville, Fable of the Bees 1: 182-4; John Hervey, Some Remarks on the Minute Philosopher (London, 1732) 48; Temple, Vindication of Commerce 21-2; Temple, Essay on Trade and Commerce 7-9. See also Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore 587, 596-8, 602-3, 608, 645. ↩
“Necessity,” OED. One should however distinguish this necessity consensus from late eighteenth-century “necessitarianism,” the theory that action is determined by antecedent causes, an idea which revolved around Democritean questions of determinism and free will. Although the two distinct ideas of necessity were undoubtedly as often confounded in the early modern era as in the classical era, and undoubtedly the power of logical necessity reinforced the power of necessity as an operative value, here we will only consider necessity as relative poverty. On the persistence of this mechanistic side of necessity through the seventeenth and into the twentieth centuries, see Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories 3-62. ↩
On the impact of knowledge of other cultures, see Hodgen, Early Anthropology 208-9, 373-5; John Howland Rowe, “The Renaissance Foundations of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 67 (1965): 1-20; De Waal Malefijt, Images of Man 47. ↩
For low-wage theorists, see Houghton, Collection 15 Mar. 1699/1700; Petty, Economic Writings 1: 201; Temple, Works 1: 164; Steuart, Inquiry 1: 310; Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws 9. For high-wage theorists, see Berkeley, qtd. in Hutchison, “Berkeley’s Querist” 59; Hume, Writings on Economics 85; Forster, Enquiry 37-9; Tucker, Josiah Tucker 245; Anderson, Observations 419-20. See also Crowley, This Sheba, Self 42-3. ↩
On the present status of the concept of necessity, see Appendix VI. ↩
For Virgil’s similar interpretation of an equally violent dispossession that ended the economic state of nature, see Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 272-3. ↩
Sir Thomas Smith, A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (1549; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969) 22, 42-3, 55-60, 80-2, 118. ↩
T. Smith, Discourse 58-60. ↩
T. Smith, Discourse 22, 42-3, 49, 80-2, 118-9. ↩
T. Smith, Discourse 66, 68, 80-2. However, Smith also noted the increasing demand for luxury imports touched even the lower rural classes, showing how fashion converted luxuries into necessities. Cf. T. Smith, Discourse 122. ↩
For low-wage theorists, see Petty, Economic Writings 1:lxxii, 59, 255-71; Temple, Works 1: 133-51, 164-80; Thomas Manley, Usury at Six per Cent. examined (London, 1669) 25; Houghton, Collection 25 Oct 1695, 1 Nov 1695, 15 Nov 1695, 20 Dec 1695; Mandeville, Fable of the Bees 1: 183-9. For high-wage theorists, see Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, or the Ballance of our Forraign Trade is the Rule of our Treasure, A Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce (1664; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) 61-2, 194; Davenant 144-5; Tucker, Josiah Tucker 63-4; Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest 2: 366; Forster, Enquiry 10-2, 23-4, 57-8; Franklin, Works 2: 373-4. See also Furniss, Position of the Laborer 101-4; Schulze-Gaevernitz, Cotton Trade 7; Seligman, Shifting Incidence of Taxation 50; Wermel, Evolution 3-4. Indeed, some scholars went so far as to speak of taxes instead of necessity as the primary motive force, following a classic statement of the Dutchman Pieter de la Court that excise taxes “will excite the commonality to ingenuity, diligence, and frugality.” Or, as William Temple of Trowbridge put it: “High taxes promote invention, industry and frugality”. See Pieter de la Court, The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland and West Friesland (1746; New York: Arno, 1972) 92; Temple, Essay on Trade and Commerce 9-11, 49-50; Houghton, Collection 23 Apr. 1703. For the influence of Machiavelli on de la Court, see Eco Haitsman Muller, “A Controversial Republican: Dutch Views on Machiavelli in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Machiavelli and Republicanism, eds. Gisela Bock et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 254-7. ↩
Collins, Plea 11. ↩
See, e.g., Houghton, Collection 4 Mar. 1697/8; Temple, Vindication of Commerce 66; Young, Political Arithmetic 27-31; Joshua Gee, The Trade and Navigation of Great Britain (London, 1730) 146, qtd. in Lipson, Economic History of England 2: 458. ↩
T. Smith, Discourse 49-50, 80-1, 87. ↩
Mun, England’s Treasure 62-3; Child, New Discourse of Trade 23-4; Franklin, Works 2: 255-6; Vanderlint, Money Answers all Things 32; Decker, Essay 65-6; Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest 1: 13. See also Whittaker, History of Economic Ideas 551-2. Henry Robinson more emphatically stressed both the normative and target income basis of such behavior, suggesting it was “much better for a merchant to retire directly he has won a competence in order that opportunity shall be always free and that wealth may not be canalized in a few families.” See Henry Robinson, Englands Safety in Trades Encrease (London, 1641) 48‑9; W. K. Jordan, Men of Substance: A Study of the Thought of Two English Revolutionaries Henry Parker and Henry Robinson (1942; New York: Octagon Books, 1967) 220. Schumpeter, critiquing Child, believed this concept, “though not quite indefensible, looks very much like an analytic blunder,” but clearly many early political economists accepted this “necessity” argument. See Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis 273. ↩
Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (1697; Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1969) 1, 6. ↩
Henry Martyn, Considerations on the East-India Trade, A Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce, ed. J. R. McCulloch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) 42-3. Sir Thomas Smith and John Cook had earlier argued that dear corn and inflation forced employers to reduce their number of menial servants, reduce consumption, and increase their own labor. See T. Smith, Discourse 81; Cooke, Unum Necessarium 5. Other high-wage theorists stressing anti-monopolistic competition include Tucker and Postlethwayt. See Tucker, Josiah Tucker 244; Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest 2: 387, 408, 415; Malachy Postlethwayt, Great‑Britain’s True System (1757; Farnborough, Hants., England: Gregg Intl. Publishers, 1968) 237. See also Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology 173. ↩
For explicit recognition of the high-wage argument, see Petty, Economic Writings 2: 592-3. Almost all high- and low-wage theorists supported higher standards of living for English workers compared to workers from other nations. See “Polices to Reduce this Realme of Englande” 328-9; Temple, Works 1: 146-7; W. Harris, Remarks 53-4; Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce 27-8; Arthur Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788 & 1789, ed. Maxwell Constantia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950) 311. Indeed Arthur Young, immediately after calling everyone an idiot who would doubt him, stated “‘I do not mean, that the poor of England are to be kept like the poor of France, but, the state of the country considered, they must (like all mankind) be in poverty or they will not work.'” Qtd. in Furniss, Position of the Laborer 118. See also Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 45-6. ↩
Some modern scholars attribute the regular observances of indolence to poor nutrition and thus reduced labor capacity. See, e.g., Herman Freudenberger and Gaylord Cummins, “Health, Work, and Leisure before the Industrial Revolution,” Explorations in Economic History 13 (1976): 1-12. Although little hard evidence is available from the seventeenth century, historical analyses of nutritional status (based on height data) from the late eighteenth century, while revealing some decline in living standards among English laborers, show no decline sufficient to affect daily work load. See Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 272-4, 303, 326; Stephen Nicholas and Richard H. Steckel, “Heights and Living Standards of English Workers During the Early Years of Industrialization, 1770-1815,” Journal of Economic History 51 (1991): 937-57. See also Mokyr, “Dear Labor” 185-6; Gregory Clark, “Productivity Growth without Technical Change in European Agriculture before 1850,” Journal of Economic History 47 (1987): 430-1. But even if malnutrition was important in the medium- and long-run it does not explain the phenomenon of reduced labor supply in periods of good harvests and vice versa. ↩
For low-wage theorists, see John Houghton, England’s Great Happiness, A Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce, ed. J. R. McCulloch (1677; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) 11-2; Husbandry 4: 56; Collection 1 Nov. 1695, 4 Mar. 1697/8, 19 Mar. 1702/3, 9 Apr. 1703; Petty, Economic Writings 1: 192; James Steuart, The Works, Political, Metaphysical, and Chronological, 6 vols. (London, 1805) 2: 159n; Steuart, Inquiry 1: 118; Young, Political Arithmetic 100-1n. In contrast to low-wage theorists who tended to stress the role of institutional intervention in stimulating new wants, high-wage theorists found new wants part of a more “natural” process and argued for removal of institutional constraints. However, both high- and low-wage theorists recognized the power of emulation and treated increases in “necessaries” and “conveniencies” as equivalent to an increase in “necessity” that promoted increased industry. See Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 48-51; Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology 169-72; Grampp, Economic Liberalism 73. ↩
Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories 588; Alvin W. Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1965) 238-41; K. J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) 109-12; Reuven Brenner, History‑‑The Human Gamble (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 41, 218n16; Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern 80, 95. ↩
See, e.g., Fielding, Enquiry 120. ↩
Cooke, Unum Necessarium 5, 27; Temple, Works 1: 164; Massie, qtd. in W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times: The Mercantile System, 6th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925) 577-8. ↩
T. Smith, Discourse 22, 42-3, 80-2; “Polices to Reduce this Realme of Englande” 329; Cooke, Unum Necessarium 5, 7, 24-5; Vanderlint, Money Answers all Things 28. ↩
Harrington, qtd. in James Bonar, Theories of Population from Raleigh to Arthur Young (New York: Greenberg, 1931) 57; Carew Reynel, The True English Interest: or an Account of the Chief National Improvements (London, 1674) 64-5; Collins, Plea 11; Child, New Discourse of Trade Preface 12; Houghton, Collection 22 Apr. 1698, 22 Nov. 1700; Vanderlint, Money Answers all Things 33; Sir John Barnard, qtd. in Kennedy, English Taxation 116n; Fielding, Enquiry 119; Decker, Essay 16, 70; Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest 1: 13-4; 2: 377; Temple, Vindication of Commerce 28; Franklin, Works 2: 258, 312, 444; Anderson, Observations 293; William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785; New York: Garland, 1978) 615‑6. See also citations in Wermel, Evolution 36-9, 57, 116; Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 44n3. Although definitely a low-wage theorist, Pieter de la Court worried that high taxes would lead to widespread emigration. See de la Court, True Interest 92-4. ↩
Samuel Purchas, qtd. in Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956) 117; Temple, Works 1: 164-5. ↩
Harrington, qtd. in Bonar 57; Vanderlint, Money Answers all Things 18-9, 33; Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest 1: 14; Temple, Vindication of Commerce 72; Steuart, Works 1: 205. ↩
R. Dunning, qtd. in D. Marshall, English Poor 29; Vanderlint, Money Answers all Things 33; Houghton, Collection 3 June 1698, 22 Nov. 1700; Defoe, Giving Alms no Charity; Decker, Essay 58-9; Franklin, Works 2: 358, 367-8; Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws. See also Furniss, Position of the Laborer 129n; Gregory, “Economics of Employment” 41-2. ↩
Child, New Discourse of Trade 29-30; Houghton, Collection 1 June 1692, 29 May 1696, 22 Apr. 1698; Vanderlint, Money Answers all Things 28, 71; Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest 1: 19-20; Franklin, Works 2: 311-21, 436; Forster, Enquiry 46; Young, Political Arithmetic 61-9, 77, 290-3; A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 70-3, 78-9, 146. For an overview, see Bonar, Theories of Population; R. R. Kuczynski, “British Demographers’ Opinions on Fertility, 1660 to 1760,” Political Arithmetic: A Symposium of Population Studies, ed. Lancelot Hogben (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938) 283-327. This idea has historically been most strongly associated with Richard Cantillon, although the idea clearly preceded him. See Richard Cantillon, Essai dur la Nature du Commerce en Général, ed. and trans. Henry Higgs (London: Macmillan, 1931). For the great influence of Cantillon’s ideas on the development of classical political economy, see Robert Legrand, Richard Cantillon: Un Mercantiliste Précurseur des Physiocrates (Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière, 1900); Edwin Cannan, A Review of Economic Theory (London: P. S. King and Son, 1929) 349-50; René Gonnard, Histoire des Doctrines Économiques (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930) 172-82; Arthur Eli Monroe, Early Economic Thought: Selections from Economic Literature Prior to Adam Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930) 246; Wermel, Evolution 48-53, 112-8; Spengler, French Predecessors 110-69; Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis 218-9; Eversley, Social Theories of Fertility 23-35, 50-1, 89; Letwin, Origins of Scientific Economics 221; Hutchinson, Population Debate 149-51; Bowley, Studies 181-2; Salim Rashid, “Political Economy as Moral Philosophy: Dugald Stewart of Edinburgh,” Australian Economic Papers 26 (1987): 153; Robert F. Hébert, “In Search of Economic Order: French Predecessors of Adam Smith,” Pre-Classical Economic Thought: From the Greeks to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. S. Todd Lowry (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987) 193-8; Peter D. Groenewegen, “The International Foundations of Classical Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century: An Alternative Perspective,” Pre-Classical Economic Thought: From the Greeks to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. S. Todd Lowry (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987) 215; Hutchison, Before Adam Smith 156-9; Jürg Niehans, A History of Economic Theory: Classic Contributions, 1720-1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 24-33. See also the special Fall 1985 issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies devoted to Cantillon, “the neglected founder of modern economics.” ↩
Cooke, Unum Necessarium 28; Houghton, Collection 11 Mar. 1697/8; Decker, Essay 130; Steuart, Inquiry 2: 400-1; Temple, Essay on Trade and Commerce vii-viii, 50; Anderson, Observations 293-4; Young, Political Arithmetic 35, 41. See also Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 44n3; D. Marshall, English Poor 29-30. ↩
Francis Bacon, The Essays; or, Counsels, Civil and Moral of Francis Bacon (New York, 1883) 91-100; Petty, Economic Writings 1: 22-3; Temple, Works 1: 23-30. ↩
Again echoing a position repeatedly taken by scholars from Plato to his own time, Sir Walter Raleigh in his Discourse of War in General stated: “When any country is overlaid by the multitude which live upon it, there is a natural necessity compelling it to disburden itself and lay the load upon others, by right or wrong, for (to omit the danger of pestilence, often visiting them which live in throngs), there is no misery that urgeth men so violently unto desperate courses and contempt of death as the torments and threats of famine. Wherefore, the war that is grounded on general, remediless necessity, may be termed the general and remediless or necessary war.” See Sir Walter Raleigh, Discourse of War in General, qtd. in Charles Emil Stangeland, Pre‑Malthusian Doctrines of Population: A Study in the History of Economic Theory (1904; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966) 112; Hutchinson, Population Debate 34. For similar statements by Machiavelli, Hobbes, de la Court, and Malthus, see de la Court 39; Thomas Robert Malthus, The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, eds. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1986) 1: 21-2; Bonar, Theories of Population 19; Hutchinson, Population Debate 17, 41. Another view, more commonly associated with Malthus’s “positive check,” treats war more as a symptom or one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rather than a “response.” See, e.g., Petty, qtd. in Hutchinson, Population Debate 49. ↩
Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism 44. ↩
Thomas More, Utopia, eds. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 15-6; “Polices to Reduce this Realme” 329; Cooke, Unum Necessarium 28; Collins, Plea 10; Sir Matthew Hale, A Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor (London, 1683) 15-16; Petty, Economic Writings 1: 475; 2: 475; Defoe, Essay upon Projects 32; Houghton, Collection 22 Nov. 1700; [Lawrence Braddon], Particular Answers to the Most Material Objections (London, 1722) 52; Fielding, Enquiry 78, 82; Franklin, Works 2: 367, 436, 476; Decker, Essay 16-7; A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 73. ↩
Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest 1: 20. ↩
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) 179-93. Laurence Dickey links Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations through analysis of comparable ideal types of “frugal and industrious man” and “prudent man,” showing how Smith at first equated industrious with prudent man and eventually came to reject industrious man as contrary to the common good by the sixth edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1790. See Laurence Dickey, “Historicizing the ‘Adam Smith Problem’: Conceptual, Historiographical, and Textual Issues,” Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 579-609. Many high- and low-wage theorists sometimes argued in similar terms of “industrious” and “indolent” ideal types with their seemingly inelastic response to changes in real earned income. See Baird, “Necessity” 504. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 81-4, 326. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 421. ↩
A. Smith, Lectures on Justice 179; A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 247-8. Both low- and high-wage theorists made such comments. Here Smith follows the work of Sir William Temple who noted the Dutch need for leisure and Postlethwayt’s opinion that “all work and no play” leads to reduced productivity. Cf. Temple, Works 1: 143-4; Temple, Essay on Trade and Commerce 33-5; Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour” 38-9. See also Forster, Enquiry 10; Fielding, Enquiry 81-2. T. S. Ashton finds the quality leisure argument the positive counterpart of the critique of the irregular work week. See Ashton, Economic History of England 205. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 718. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 319. ↩
Nathan Rosenberg, “Some Institutional Aspects of the Wealth of Nations,” Journal of Political Economy 68 (1960): 557. See also Rosenberg, “Adam Smith” 1187; Hollander, Economics of Adam Smith 169. ↩
On habit, see A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 8-9, 15, 122, 437. Smith also emphasized “frugality” as an inelastic savings habit. See similar analysis in Bowley, Studies 193-5; Rosenberg, “Adam Smith” 1185-7. ↩
Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, Glasgow ed., eds. R. L. Meek et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) 568-9; A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 7, 15, 33, 81-4, 122, 268, 278-9, 314-5, 319-21. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 766. Cf. A. Smith, Lectures on Justice 175-6. See also Hollander, Economics of Adam Smith 114. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 96-8, 565-6, 578; Rosenberg, “Aspects” 561, 569; Rosenberg, “Adam Smith” 1189. See also Hollander, Economics of Adam Smith 126. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 717. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 83-4, 122, 249, 365, 437, 678, 718. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 81-2, 122, 365. See also Rosenberg, “Aspects”; Engerman, “Coerced and Free Labor” 7, 19. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 82 (emphasis mine). Cf. A. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence 345-6, 568. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 72. The industry of the Chinese artificer appears very similar to Smith’s portrayal elsewhere of the behavior of “the poor man’s son, whom heavens in its anger he visited with ambition.” Cf. A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments 181. ↩
Smith further suggested the “labor capacity” interpretation by his own emphasis on nutrition, spirits, and health in assessing the impact of dear corn. See Smith, Wealth of Nations 82-3. Several scholars have interpreted Smith’s argument and high-wage theory in general in just such terms of increased labor capacity or efficiency. See Schulze-Gaevernitz, Cotton Trade 8-9; Gilboy, Wages 236-40. But the concept that labor capacity changes proportionably with real wages appears in the work of both high- and low-wage theorists. See Petty, Economic Writings 2: 592-3; Daniel Defoe, Mercator: or, Commerce Retrieved, Being Consideration on the State if the British Trade, &c. 20-22 Apr. 1714; Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce 26-33. ↩
Vanderlint, Money Answers all Things 119; Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest 1: 43-4; A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 59, 116. See further discussion in Furniss, Position of the Laborer 127; Robert M. Larsen, “Adam Smith’s Theory of Market Prices,” Indian Economic Journal 24 (1977): 230-2; Hollander, Economics of Adam Smith 118-22; Baird, “Necessity” 509. ↩
W. O. Thweatt, “A Diagrammatic Presentation of Adam Smith’s Growth Model,” Social Research 24 (1957): 227-30; Hollander, Economics of Adam Smith 120-1; Adolph Lowe, On Economic Knowledge: Toward a Science of Political Economics, 2nd ed. (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1977) 165-79; Larsen, “Adam Smith’s Theory of Market Prices” 224; G. Rosenbluth, “A Note on Labour, Wages and Rent in Smith’s Theory of Value,” Canadian Journal of Economics 2 (1969): 308-14. ↩
A. Smith, Wealth of Nations 328, 640-1. ↩
R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, eds., An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) 1: 59. ↩
See, e.g., Temple, Works 1: 141-4, 164; Anderson, Observations 419-25. On classical “necessity” statements, see Malthus, Works 1: 31; 3: 454, 471; 6: 257-8, 268, 320-1; J. R. McCulloch, The Principles of Political Economy (Edinburgh, 1849) 76-9, 116-8, 198-201, 238-41; Nassau William Senior, Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (London, 1827) 12, quoted in A. W. Coats “The Classical Economists and the Labourer,” Land, Labour and Population in The Industrial Revolution: Essays Presented to J. D. Chambers, eds. E. L. Jones and G. E. Mingay (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968) 115; Roscher, Principles of Political Economy 2: 198-9, 338. See also J. R. McCulloch, The Literature of Political Economy (1855; London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1938) 332, where McCulloch seconds analysis of Temple, Essay on Trade and Commerce, surely a tract as contrary to the Wealth of Nations as any contemporary tract. See also Warren B. Catlin, The Progress of Economics: A History of Economic Thought (New York: Bookman Associates, 1962) 262. ↩
R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1912) 195-200, 310; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) 273; Joan Thirsk, “Seventeenth-Century Agriculture and Social Change,” Agricultural History Review 18 (1970 suppl.): 155; Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982) 130-3. ↩
G. E. Mingay, “The Agricultural Depression, 1730-1750,” Economic History Review 2nd ser. 8 (1955): 328-9; John, “Course of Agricultural Change” 145‑7; J. D. Gould, “Agricultural Fluctuations and the English Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 22 (1962): 332-3; E. Jones, “Introduction” 42‑3; E. Jones, “Agriculture and Economic Growth” 167‑9; E. L. Jones, “English and European Agricultural Development 1650-1750,” The Industrial Revolution, ed. R. M. Hartwell (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970) 42-76; Thirsk, “Seventeenth-Century Agriculture” 154-5; Whitehead, “English Industrial Revolution” 14, 20-1; Little, Deceleration 481; E. Jones, “Agriculture, 1700-80” 85‑6; Patrick O’Brien, “Agriculture and the Home Market for English Industry, 1660-1820,” English Historical Review 100 (1985): 773-800; Holderness, Pre-Industrial England 74‑5; Coleman, Economy of England 111‑4, 122‑4; W. Cole, “Factors in Demand” 48; Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship 148‑57, 243‑53, 259‑61; Bowden, “Wages” 60-1; Jackson. “Growth and Deceleration” 333-51; Kussmaul, General Review 174-5; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550‑1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 40-1. ↩
Lipson, Economic History of England 3: 166; Thirsk, “Seventeenth-Century Agriculture” 176; Hollander, Economics of Adam Smith 220-1; Coleman, Economy of England 103, 151; Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship 235. ↩
Holderness, Pre-Industrial England; Coleman, Economy of England; Cole, “Factors in Demand” 36-65; Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship; C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500-1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). ↩