The Law of Progress and the Ironies of Individualism in the Nineteenth Century

"America is here and now--here, or nowhere"

Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885) ¹

In The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society, I analyzed a shift in the history of economic thought from a labor theory of value concerned with the social relations of production, reproduction, and distribution to a theory of consumption that made the individual's taste, choice, and preference its theoretical base. ² I also showed a simultaneous shift from the sociology of high Victorian literature to the individualism, psychologism, and subjectivism characterizing much literature of the fin de siècle. With the so-called "Marginal Revolution" in economic thought that began in the 1870s, the figure of Economic Man became more consumer than producer or Malthusian reproducer, and economic theory became more methodologically, causally, and politically individualist. Given that current critiques of Marginal or "neoclassical" economics, now the dominant disciplinary paradigm globally, often resolve into critiques of methodological individualism, this essay looks more closely at different models of Individualism as they developed in the course of the nineteenth century. The relation of the Individual to the State or collective has been a problem at least since Plato and exacerbated in the West since the seventeenth century. ³ I focus on some cultural manifestations of that problem in nineteenth-century Britain when fears of competitive individualism in market society began to be articulated and analyzed, occasionally in some sophisticated "Third Way" formulations. Herbert Spencer's influential idea that all Progress was progress toward individualism implied at the broadest cultural levels fears of anomie, isolation, and egoism that had gone well beyond Adam Smith's idea of self-interest leading to the social good. Today the issue is whether economics is in any sense a science of social relations of production, consumption, and distribution, or whether it takes as its domain merely the "choices" of individuals as revealed in consumption patterns.

I

Recall that what was essential to the story told in The Wealth of Nations (1776) was the manifold irony that yoked Hobbesian self-interested rationality and the altruism of the civic humanists to a theory of social Progress: the irony that selfish individuals could make an altruistic society; that the pursuit of profit could be an ethical failing in an individual but lead to the wealth of all; that saving could be good for the individual but bad for society; that the Individual was the basis for social understanding. In the course of the nineteenth century, this ironized theory of social Progress was enhanced by theories of individual development across the spectrum of knowledge. Individuation provided many "little narratives" of perfection that contributed to general flourishing, including but by no means limited to political economy's division of labor, Darwin's origins of different species, and the increasingly democratic polyphony of the novel, its increasing perspectivalism, and competing streams of consciousness.

To begin with political economy, in Smith the division of labor is the source of differences between people: "When [the philosopher and the street porter] came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were, perhaps, very much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to be employed in very different occupations. The difference of talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance." ⁴ Smith is clear that the distinctive "trucking" disposition, made possible by human language, gives rise to human differences: "without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange. . . . all must have had the same duties to perform, and the same work to do, and there could have been no such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to great difference of talent" (WN 16). Although nonhuman animals evolve...