ECONOMIC SOCIAL VALUE (_continued_)
Back to the concrete whole, then, of social-mental life. The abstract
elements with which the Austrians and the pain-abstinence cost school
undertook to solve the value problem, have their place in this whole. The
"utility" of goods to individuals, growing out of the nature of their
wants, depends very largely on social causes. Mode,[175] fashion,
custom--how powerfully they mould our wants. And individual "cost,"
likewise: a university athlete could dig a ditch far more easily, so far as
bodily pain is concerned, than could an aged negro, and yet would suffer
much more in doing it than would the negro. A social standard would bring a
feeling of shame to him which the negro would not share. If we abstract
from the concrete forms which individual wants and "costs" take, and define
them in their lowest physical terms, we might leave out a social reference.
But men do not desire raw meat, and the skins of beasts, and caves in which
to live. Their food they wish to eat in accordance with the conventions of
their class, and of a sort that their fellows eat, their water, of late,
they wish free from germs, their houses and clothing must be "in
style,"--facts well enough recognized, though not in themselves enough for
a theory of "social value." These individual "utilities" and "costs" have
little meaning till we know the social ranking of the men who feel them,
till we know how much the men who have them count for in the scale of
fundamental _human_ values. And their effect on "supply price" and "demand
price"--the money measures of infinitely complex social forces, to which
the entrepreneur immediately looks for his "cue"--has absolutely no
constant relation to their intensity. The wants of slaves may count for
little. The utterly unattractive and inefficient man may starve. The gilded
parasite of a prerevolutionary French monarch may command untold resources,
while the useful and productive millions may barely exist. On the other
hand, with a changed set of legal and moral values, we may have men of
social influence and power striving constantly to increase the incomes and
relieve the sufferings of the poor and helpless. Our legislatures may be
busy with laws shortening the hours of all labor, laws prohibiting child
labor, laws restricting the labor of women, laws for the protection of
miners, laws relating to the conditions of pay for labor and to
compensation for accidents--which promptly reflect themselves in the values
of the goods produced in the industries affected, and in the increased
values--through increased "demand"--of the goods consumed by these classes.
The ideal of "no pay without function" may attain--as I think it is to-day
attaining--a value of increasing power. And it may lead men to strive for
the abolition of monopoly incomes, and the correction of the gross
inequalities in the distribution of wealth. If it do not succeed--and it
does not by any means succeed--it is because opposing values check it. At
any given moment, there is an equilibrium, usually unstable, between the
forces tending to correct, and to perpetuate, these inequalities. And it
need not be an evil force that is the real obstacle to the realization of
greater justice in distribution. The legal value of private property--one
of those social "absolute values" which do not readily lend themselves to
the "marginal process"--checks at an early stage many of our well-meant,
but badly planned, efforts at justice. Glad as most of us would be to
deprive plutocratic pirates of what they have not earned, we still do not
care to upset the fundamentals of our social system in the process. But the
conflict between these values brings them both into clearer light. We see,
and feel, the significance, the "presuppositions," the "funded meanings,"
of each. And while, for the present, there is a "mechanical haul and
strain" between them, which, if no more light comes, may ultimately lead to
the triumph of one and the complete defeat of the other, still, we may hope
to get a result like that which often comes in the case of conflicts
between values in the individual psychology--a fuller appreciation of the
significance of both values, which will get us away from the
"absoluteness" of each, and effect a marginal equilibrium between them, or,
perhaps, get a new value which will comprehend them both. Of course, the
thing is not so simple as this. It is not a conflict simply between two
values, both of which the same man may "participate" in. Our plutocrats are
also parts of the social will. They count! The economic value they control
may bribe lawmakers, may corrupt judges, may seduce writers and preachers
and teachers and others who have to do with the making of public sentiment
and the shaping of social values. And, in subtler ways, through the social
prestige which their mere wealth too often gives, through the ideals which
they themselves honestly feel, and communicate to those about them, do they
create values opposing the values making for a juster distribution of
wealth. Infinitely complex is the situation, many and varied are the
values, which reinforce each other, oppose each other, and come into
equilibrium with each other, in a given moment in the social will.
Older egoistic theories of political economy, which assumed perfect freedom
of competition, and gloried in the "harmonies" which result therefrom,
whereby the interests of the individuals and of society converge, and the
maximum of social welfare is attained by the individual's attaining his own
interests--these theories have been much attacked of late by those who
accept the premise of egoism, but reject the premise of freedom. To them
economic "friction" means simply an opportunity for the strong to prey
upon the weak, and the social outlook is gloomy indeed. The harmonies are
shattered and gone. If we reject the other premise also, however, as
necessarily a dominant principle, the outlook is changed or may be changed.
It is true that there are ignorance, helplessness, and passions among men,
and that wolves prey. But it is also true that there are forces of
righteousness alert and militant in the world, not merely in the pulpit and
cloister and missionary field. And the struggle between these contending
forces is pregnant with implications for value theory. An astute
corporation lawyer argues before a court; an honest attorney-general
defends the rights of the people; and the ticker on 'Change records whether
right or wrong has prevailed. Prices are big with the moral tidings they
would speak--shall we read in them only mathematical ratios between
quantities of physical objects?
It is by turning, then, to the concrete whole of social-mental life, and
especially to the moral and legal values of distribution, that we break the
circle[176] of our economic values. Economics has failed to profit by the
example of the other social sciences here. Ethics has frankly recognized
the tremendous import of economic values for ethical values. Jurisprudence
has frankly accepted the fact that law grows, in large part, out of
economic needs--even though it remains behind the needs of the present
economic situation. But economic theory has sought to make itself too much
a thing apart, to isolate its phenomena from other phases of social life,
and has busied itself exclusively with "utility" and "cost" and "prices,"
and the like. And where the economist has consented to consider the
relations between his own field and adjacent fields, he has done so with a
preconception of the priority of his own phenomena, and his results have
been an "economic" interpretation of history, ethics, jurisprudence, etc.
That the economic interpretation of the other fields has much to commend it
is certain, but it is equally certain that law and morality react on
economic values, especially in the higher stages of civilization. This has
been so fully and convincingly stated by Professor Seligman, in his
_Economic Interpretation of History_, that I forego further elaboration
here. One comment is necessary however: even though we might grant Marx and
Buckle that the physical environment and the progress of economic
technique are of ultimate ruling significance for the direction of social
progress, it is still a far cry from that doctrine to the doctrine that the
"utilities" and "costs" directly connected with the production and
consumption of economic goods, in the minds of individual men, are an
adequate explanation of anything.
Were we interested in ethical and political values for their own sake, it
would be easy to show that our conception of the nature of society and of
social values has a similar significance for politics and ethics. There is
no one distinctive emotion, as fear, or the love of domination, that lies
at the basis of the state; there is no one emotion, as sympathy, or the
love of pleasure, which constitutes the essence of the moral values, nor is
there any single type of mental activity, as imitation, or consciousness of
kind, which furnishes the peculiar theme of sociology. Social life is not
in water-tight compartments. It is one whole, of which the different
sciences study different aspects. And the principle of division of labor
among the social sciences is not that one science shall offer one theory of
society and another science another theory, but rather, that each science
shall take as its problem a phase of society, and explain it by reference
to a general set of facts which all have in common. The differentiation
comes not in the _explanation_ phenomena[177]--no science has any monopoly
on any set of forces which may be used for the purpose of explanation--but
in the phenomena to be explained, in the _problem_ phenomena.[178]
FOOTNOTES:
[175] _Vide_ Ross, _Foundations of Sociology_, chapter on the "Sociological
Frontier of Economics," and Tarde, _Psychologie Economique_, _passim_.
[176] It may be objected that instead of "breaking the circle," we have
simply widened it--that economic values, working through other forms of
value, affect other economic values still. In a sense, of course, this is
true. In any truly _organic_ situation, we have the phenomenon of
_reciprocal causation_. An organic situation _must_ be circular in this
sense. The parts are _inter_dependent. And our objection to the theories
criticized is based on the fact that they are essentially efforts to
describe a process in _rectilinear causation_--in the case of the
Austrians, _e.g._, the process is _from_ subjective utility, _to_ objective
value of consumption goods, then _to_ the values of the production goods of
the nearest rank, and then on and on to goods of remoter ranks, etc.
Boehm-Bawerk recognizes very well that the charge of circular reasoning, if
it could be brought home to the Austrians, would vitiate their system.
_Vide_ "Grundzuege," Conrad's _Jahrbuecher_, 1886, p. 516. And Professor
Clark likewise recognizes that value theory of the sort he is treating is
spoiled by circular reasoning, as indicated by his criticism of a certain
form of the labor theory in his _Distribution of Wealth_, p. 397. Whenever
a small set of abstractions is picked out, as _the source_ and _cause_ of
the rest of a movement, such a process of rectilinear causation is implied.
And a rectilinear process has no right to get into a circle!
[177] Pareto, in the introductory chapter of his _Cours d'Economie
Politique_, defines economics in terms of the narrow abstraction which he
has chosen for the explanation phenomenon, as the "science of ophelimity"
(p. 6), and ophelimity is "an entirely subjective quality" (p. 4). There
are two objections to this procedure: you neither completely explain your
problem phenomena, nor do you exhaust the possibilities of your explanation
phenomena--for the same sort of mental facts have bearing on ethical and
other social problems as well as on economic problems.
[178] I am indebted to Professor E. C. Hayes, of the Department of
Sociology of the University of Illinois, for this distinction.