"Who Are the Canters?" The Coalition of Evangelical-Economic Egalitarians

Much of the prejudice one finds in the postclassical period of economics ought to be read against the background of classical economics, which was, we argue, deeply unprejudiced and egalitarian in nature. In this essay, we study an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debate about human equality. The immediate question at issue was whether the human race was one or many "races"; if the latter, one might take an additional step by distinguishing between so-called "superior" and "inferior" races. It is here, we suggest, that prejudice began to infect nineteenth-century "scientific" thought.

The distinction between "higher" and "lower" races was made on the basis of a purported variation in the ability to theorize and to be guided by theory. We see this in Thomas Carlyle's "Shooting Niagara: And After?" which contains a dramatic, if wildly worded, statement about human hierarchy in a world without slavery:

Divine commandment to vote ("Manhood Suffrage,"—Horsehood, Doghood ditto not yet treated of); universal "glorious liberty" (to Sons of the Devil in overwhelming majority, as would appear), count of Heads the God-appointed way in this universe, all other ways Devil-appointed; in one brief word, which includes whatever of palpable incredibility and delirious absurdity, universally believed, can be uttered or imagined, on these points, "the equality of men," any man equal to any other; Quashee Nigger to Socrates or Shakspere [sic]. (1867, 321)¹

We ask why Carlyle's opponents would believe that "Quashee" was the equal to Socrates and, as such, would be entitled to full political participation. Our answer is that the coalition of political economists and the evangelicals of Exeter Hall were united in a belief that all people's behavior diverged from the ideal. All people knew the good, but they chose the pleasant. For the coalition of economists and evangelicals, the impossibility of the good in a fallen world did not make it any less a compelling obligation. For Carlyle and other critics of the coalition, an unrealizable good was nothing but "cant." The word cant was used to indicate hypocrisy long before Carlyle used it this way, and by those, such as Robert Fellowes, who differed from Carlyle on slavery and the subhuman status of "Quashee."

We note at the outset that "race" was rather ill defined in our period; arguments about racial differences played out in terms of the Irish and the former slaves in Jamaica (Curtis 1997). The "laboring classes" were included in racially charged discussions of inherited incompetence (Peart and Levy 2003a), and arguments concerning hierarchy and competence were mapped to gender and religion as well. This instability of "race" and "prejudice" invites us to take racism as the primitive for our analysis and to consider what distinctions were made by those we study.² What we propose by taking racism as the foundation for our analysis is very much akin to what Bishop Berkeley proposed by taking perception as the foundation for his work on vision. Just as one learns, Berkeley said, to perceive distance (Levy 2001), one learns to be prejudiced. John Stuart Mill's work on resemblance is even more sharply focused than Berkeley's on difference and similarity. We quote these unfamiliar words at length so that they might help clarify the issues:

I have two sensations; we will suppose them to be simple ones; two sensations of white, or one sensation of white and another of black. I call the first two sensations like; the last two unlike. What is the fact or phenomenon constituting the fundamentum of this relation? The two sensations first, and then what we call a feeling of resemblance, or of want of resemblance. . . . these feelings of resemblance, and of its opposite dissimilarity, are parts of our nature; and parts so far from being capable of analysis, that they are presupposed in every attempt to...