David Levy Says Historians Have Misread 19th-Century Laissez-Faire Ideas

The image on the cover of David M. Levy's new book is certainly arresting. A man astride a winged steed -- he's bearded, and noble of visage -- holds a lance, poised to skewer an opponent. The sprawling victim is a grubby businessman in formalwear, who grasps a bag of money even as he falls. The merchant, however, has just dropped a book. Its title: The Dismal Science. In contrast to the lance-bearer's Aryan features, the businessman has a bit of a monkey face. And he's screaming.

The image comes from an issue of a late-19th-century literary journal devoted to the work of the art and social critic John Ruskin. The figure on the horse represents Ruskin. And the illustration represents the high-minded, culturally attuned Ruskin's thwarting of the dingy, narrow worldviews of the economists and utilitarians of the day.

It is a well-known confrontation of philosophies. In the familiar cultural narrative, Ruskin and a few other humanists, including Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, served as lonely, heroic voices while laissez-faire economics swept through England like an unholy gale. They humanely dissented as their green country transformed itself into a land of satanic mills -- a place where human relations were shaped by the cash nexus.

Mr. Levy, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, reverses the usual story. In How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Classical Economics and the Ur-Text of Racial Politics (University of Michigan Press), he argues that it was the utilitarians and social scientists who were the good guys in the 19th century -- not the poets.

It was the economists, Mr. Levy contends, who offered a universalist moral philosophy that extended concern to those at the bottom of the social scale. Their mission was to shake up a class-bound, static, all but feudal society. The humanists, in contrast, defended stability, hierarchy, and -- strikingly and especially -- racial oppression. "All of this, I claim, is rather easy to see if one bothers to read the debates of the time," Mr. Levy writes. "But most of this is impossible to find if one reads the modern scholarship on classical economics and its Victorian literary critics." His argument, in short, is that Thomas Gradgrind, the cartoonishly narrow-minded utilitarian in Dickens's Hard Times, got a bum rap.

"Why," Mr. Levy asks at another point, "is this war between the economists and the poets in the mid-19th century so hard to get right?"

Selective Quoting

Raymond Williams is probably the most famous modern critic to have mined the 19th-century debates. In his 1958 book Culture and Society: 1780-1950, he used them to demonstrate the vitality of the English anti-market tradition (as did, in a more literary way, his rough contemporary F.R. Leavis). The Victorian period is still often taught along the lines suggested by Williams and Leavis. Yet modern leftists have had to quote the humanists very selectively in order to make them sound remotely progressive, Mr. Levy argues. That's because the humanists' work is shot through with a reverence for order and a fatal attraction to authority. "If there be any one point insisted on throughout my works more frequently than another," wrote Ruskin in 1860, in a passage unlikely to be quoted by those who hold him up as a hero, "that one point is the impossibility of Equality."

At the same time, Mr. Levy argues, the thrust of the economists' and utilitarians' theories was revolutionary. Yet their subversiveness is all too easy to miss from our modern perspective -- particularly because their insights are now accepted as truisms. ("Classical economics remade the world," Mr. Levy writes.) Adam Smith, for instance, had argued that the differences among men are "much less than we are aware of." Those that did exist he chalked up to the division of labor. It was this brand of "market egalitarianism" that exercised the humanists, Mr. Levy contends. And it was the "egalitarian" part of the equation that offended them as much as the idea of markets.

As he sees it, the debate over the humanity of black people crystallized the differences in outlooks. He notes with disciplinary pride that when the Victorian intelligentsia split, in the 1860s, over the colonialists' brutal treatment of black people in Jamaica, the economists sided with religious radicals. They condemned the island's notorious Governor Eyre, who had suppressed a budding protest movement, killing hundreds and maiming many others. John Stuart Mill was chair of the anti-Eyre Jamaica committee. The "literary sages," meanwhile, defended Eyre. Carlyle led the defense team.

Carlyle was a notorious reactionary. Raymond Williams made a point of noting, and dissenting from, his fetishism of hierarchy and calls for "great" men to lead the benighted masses. But Mr. Levy points out that Hard Times, by the almost universally respected Dickens, is dedicated to Carlyle, and he argues that you can read considerable support for Carlyle's conservatism and racism into that homage. (Dickens's stated view was that black people should be slowly trained for freedom, not immediately emancipated. Ruskin, meanwhile, ridiculed agitation for black emancipation and protection as a distraction from the far more significant problem of the exploitation of white workers.) During the debates in the 1860s, a "terrible clarity came on the world," Mr. Levy writes. And the humanists were not on the side of humanity.

Another View of Cultural Studies

As a nonhistorian, Mr. Levy seems an unlikely source for revisionism on this scale. Yet he has been writing about the history of economics since his graduate-student days at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s. His previous book was Economic Ideas of Ordinary People: from Preferences to Trade (Routledge, 1992), which argued that classical economists had a better grasp on trade theory than modern neoclassical thinkers. He affirms his preference for the classical thinkers in this volume.

Mr. Levy's current "shocking account," in the words of his publisher, includes a chapter-long exploration of the image on his book jacket. Because the English banker has swarthy skin and those rather simian facial features, Mr. Levy sees racial implications in the illustration of Ruskin's triumph. (At one point, he goes so far as to refer to the merchant figure as "the slain Other.") His interest in cultural artifacts, in tandem with his sprucely jargon, has led some of his friends to joke that his work amounts to right-wing cultural studies. But while the book does possess that distinctive cultural-studies tone, its politics are of the "free markets equal free minds" genus.

"This book to me is what cultural studies claims to be -- it crosses a lot of boundaries and disciplines," says Martine Brownley, a professor of English at Emory University who knows Mr. Levy and has followed the book's development. "I think scholars of Victorian literature are going to have to answer these arguments."

Is Mr. Levy on to something? Certainly Raymond Williams, not to mention Ruskin, had a blind spot where race was concerned. Yet the economics professor's thesis depends on the setting up of two crisply defined, distinct camps: righteous economists and nefarious humanists. And tellingly, the career of one of Mr. Levy's heroes, John Stuart Mill, belies such an easy dichotomy. Mill was, famously, reared as a strict Benthamite political economist, yet he later embraced the thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other Romantics. Mr. Levy "has just chosen his examples tendentiously," suggests Martha Nussbaum, the University of Chicago classicist and ethicist, one of the many scholars Levy criticizes for having peddled the standard interpretation of the Victorian debates.

Ms. Nussbaum argues that Mill arrived at his social-policy positions not via economic theory but largely through discussions with his wife, Harriet, a noted radical lacking a background in economics, and through contacts with her radical, and often humanist, friends.

"My general view is that if you read enough about the radical circles of the day, you will see that the real division is between radical and conservative, not between ‘literary sages' and economists," Ms. Nussbaum says.

Liberal Obfuscation?

Mr. Levy just hears more liberal obfuscation in her comments. He says, for example, that Mill's rebuttals of Carlyle drew heavily on the theories laid out in his Principles of Political Economy.

He even has a ready answer for why the war between the economists and the poets is so hard to get right. The explanation draws on rational-choice theory. Given ideological self-interest, he argues, it is simply rational for left-leaning scholars to stress the historical views they like, and to play down or malign the views they don't like. Those who argue that scholars are objective truth-seekers, he contends, are naive or blind.

Which opens the door to an obvious response: Wouldn't a libertarian scholar be open to the same charge of "rational" bias? "I expect to get criticized for that," Mr. Levy concedes. But he adds that he has made his own politics transparent. "Okay, Levy is a right-wing crazy," he says, imagining a typical response from academic readers.

"Fair enough," he adds. "But do I quote correctly?" It's all too clear, he says, that leftist historians and critics have not.