Quakers & Capitalism – Persecution & Gospel Order (1661-1695)
January 4, 2011 § 2 Comments
I have published the next segment of my work on the history of Quakers and capitalism, available as a pdf file through a link on the page to the left: Quakers & Capitalism–The Book. The title is “Transition (1661-1695): Persecution & Gospel Order.” I’ll be loading it soon on the wiki QuakerCapitalism, as well.
The last posting in this series described how early Friends anticipated the radical transformation of the social order as a natural outcome of the Lamb’s War. This was a war of words and signs, rather than of outward weapons. The call to arms was a vivid experience of Christ’s presence and teaching, rather than a revolutionary ideology of social change. Although they challenged the social and economic status quo with their practices of hat honor and plain speech, they did not seek to remake the social order per se, but sought rather to be faithful to the Seed within them, to the Word who led them forth. In fact, they failed to develop a coherent testimony on social and economic institutions even as they absorbed the period’s most radical movements for economic reform, the Levellers and the Diggers.
This first brief burst of apocalyptic fervor faltered for a moment in 1656, when James Naylor reenacted Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem in the streets of Bristol and was tried and convicted of blasphemy. Then came the Restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, the return of the monarchy, and the collapse of the Puritan experiment in a haltingly theocratic republicanism. This begins a period of transition in which the external forces of persecution combined with forces of moderation within Quakerism, embodied in what George Fox called “gospel order,” to significantly transform Quaker culture and, especially, Quaker engagement with the outside world. Friends emerged from this crucible completely changed. The heat of persecution and the pressure of internal discipline had made of them a new and more durable alloy—albeit at a cost. At the same time, they played a key role in remaking Britain’s political economic culture, opening the way for the emergence of capitalism. Thus began an intimate relationship of mutual influence between Quakers and capitalism that would totally remake the social order after all.
By the way I can’t recommend Doug Gwyn’s book The Covenant Crucified enough. He brilliantly describes the forces at work in this period and their consequences and I’ve borrowed much of what I’ve written from his landmark contribution to Quaker history.
Seebohm Rowntree on NPR’s Marketplace
December 23, 2010 § 2 Comments
On Tuesday, December 21, American Public Media’s daily financial news radio magazine Marketplace featured a piece on Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1871-1954), a member of one of Britain’s three great chocolatier families. I feature this extraordinary man quite prominently in my book on Quakers and Capitalism and was tremendously excited to hear him profiled on this program. I highly recommend listening to it and/or reading the transcript of the story. Here is the link.
Rowntree exemplifies and was a major force behind momentous changes in both Quaker culture and in social, political and economic policy, especially in the UK. His book, published in 1901, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, literally changed the world, a little bit. And yet, as with John Bellers, whom I’ve mentioned in an earlier post about our economic history amnesia, Seebohm Rowntree is virtually unknown to Friends, at least here in the US. Poverty is available from Google Books for free as a download here.
Poverty launched Rowntree on an exceedingly prolific writing career; Amazon lists 26 books. (Here’s a link to Seebohm Rowntree – A Bibliography.) He resurveyed York in two follow-up studies to Poverty. Four main themes dominate his work: He returned again and again to the problem of unemployment and he wrote several books on housing. He wrote about the Christian and the Quaker responses to social problems. And he wrote several books trying to humanize business and industrial relations. He also applied for a patent in chocolate manufacturing.
This extraordinary man deserves our thankful remembrance for the following landmark achievements:
- Groundbreaking work—understanding poverty. Poverty is the second attempt in history to use a sociological survey (and statistical analysis) to understand a social problem (poverty) and to shape a meaningful policy response. The story on Marketplace claims that it’s the first, but this in incorrect. Rowntree based his own research on the methods first used in London by the early sociologist Charles Booth, who interviewed tens of thousands of people in London’s slums and wrote a massive, 17-volume report in the years between 1889 and 1893. (The new social science of sociology was just then being developed by a handful of thinkers.) Booth’s study was, however, too huge, too dense with statistics, and too ploddingly written for many people to actually read. Rowntree saw how important it was, as did some other intellectuals in London, and he decided to do something about it. He used the same survey methods in his own hometown of York (interviewing more than 11,000 people), where there were only two industries—the Rowntree chocolate factories, and the railroad. Where Booth’s work was unreadable, Rowntree’s book was short and compellingly argued, with just the right balance of facts, figures, and exposition. It became a huge best seller.
- Defining the “poverty line”. Rowntree is widely credited for inventing the idea of the “poverty line,” an income level below which a person or a family can no longer provide for the basics of food, clothing and shelter. I believe, however, that again we can thank Charles Booth for this innovation. However, Rowntree put it on the map and I believe he revised Booth’s calculations to make them reflect reality a little more accurately, though most economists today agree that it still needs to be redefined. The current formula for the poverty line (at least in America) comes originally from an American economist from the 1930s named Mollie Orshansky, who based her own work on Rowntree’s. The idea really caught on with the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Once a ‘scientific’ way to define poverty had been established, Rowntree (and before him Booth) came to a revolutionary and truly startling conclusion:
- Groundbreaking conclusion—the poor are poor through no fault of their own. Rowntree’s research proved that poverty was not primarily the result of personal moral failing, but was rather a systemic, structural problem endemic in the capitalist system itself. It proved that the vast majority of the poor actually worked, worked hard, too hard; they just didn’t make enough money to survive—their wages were too low. It was not indolence, drink, gambling, sex (too many kids), and general wantonness that had cast them into poverty, as most people believed until then, though these factors often made things worse. The real problem for the poor was not at its root moral; it was structural—it was low wages. The poor wanted to work, they did, in fact work. It just wasn’t enough to lift them up out of poverty.
- Groundbreaking paradigm—social science and technocratic solutions. This helped to usher in the modern social scientific approach to understanding and treating social problems. Poverty showed that scientific methods yielded results that you could not arrive at using moral philosophy, and it helped to pinpoint where and what the problems really were. This did not put an end to moralizing, as we well know. Conservatives, especially, have continued to cite moral failure as the cause of social ills up to the present day. Now, however, they must also downplay, discredit, bypass and obstruct scientific arguments that clearly point to structural evils in the system. Rowntree’s book ushered in an age of warring paradigms in social policy. One of them was rooted in 19th century evangelical theology and the political economics it had nurtured, focused on individuals, their choices and their ‘freedom’ from government intervention. The other paradigm was rooted in science and focused on communities, on systemic causes and solutions to social problems, and on the roles that only government was in a position to play in addressing these issues.
- Groundbreaking policy—the birth of the welfare system. The book led directly to the modern welfare state in England and, by extension, everywhere else in Europe and North America. Someone recommended it to Winston Churchill, then a young Conservative Member of Parliament, who could not get it out of his consciousness, calling it “a book which has fairly made my hair stand on end.” He wrote and spoke about it all the time, and ultimately joined the Liberal government that formed in 1906. Lloyd George became Rowntree’s friend and would brandish Poverty as he spoke to large crowds all over Great Britain campaigning for the New Liberalism that he, Churchill and others were inaugurating. In 1911, Parliament passed the National Insurance Act, providing state-funded insurance for unemployment, sickness and old age. The modern welfare state had been born and Poverty: A Study in Town Life had provided much of the prevailing argument for this earth-shaking advance in human welfare.
- The end of the ‘double culture’ period and the reengagement of Quakers. Seebohm Rowntree was part of the generation of modernist Friends that remade Quaker culture around the turn of the 20th century. They included his cousin John Wilhelm Rowntree, Rufus Jones and a number of others who had been energized by the Richmond Conference in 1887 and the Manchester Conference in 1891. They were the internal force for change within the Society of Friends that met the external forces that helped shape what I call the second great transition period in Quaker history, moving us from the double culture of religious and social withdrawal, on the one hand, combined paradoxically, on the other hand, with energetic engagement with the worlds of business, industry and commerce. They pulled us out of our isolation and insulation until both our feet were planted in the modern world.
- Quakers discover capitalism as a system. Seebohm Rowntree’s landmark book and methods opened Quaker eyes to capitalism as a system. Until then, Quaker testimonial life had regarded the ‘social order’ as a matter for individual attention; that is, on the one hand, as a matter for the discipline of personal behavior, of “right walking” over the world, while on the other hand, individual Friends and Friends’ meetings had focused their efforts to address social ills like poverty on individuals. Recall Elizabeth Fry’s work in Newgate Prison raising up the educational and moral levels of inmates. With Poverty, Friends became aware for the first time of structural evil, of the way that systems caused suffering. This new awareness took a long time mature. It got major reinforcement, at least in the UK, during the Great War, when London Yearly Meeting convened a Committee on War and the Social Order charged with trying to determine what underlying causes had led to the war and with proposing ways to act that would prevent such a cataclysm from happening again. The resulting Eight Principles of a Just Social Order stirred intense debate in the 1918 sessions of London Yearly Meeting, because the Committee had essentially blamed capitalism. The Principles carried over into the first Friends World Conference held in London in 1920. (We’ll revisit this fascinating moment in Quaker history in a future post.) Nevertheless, it was not until the 1960s that systemic thinking really began to shape Quaker testimonies in any meaningful way: Right Sharing of World Resources addressed global trade policy; AFSC turned increasingly from service to the suffering toward advocacy on behalf of the oppressed; and the War in Vietnam vividly illuminated the power and role of the “military industrial complex” in our economic life. The war also brought Marxism back to life; Marx and Engels had understood that capitalism as a system oppressed the working class way back in the middle of the 19th century. But Quakers never really warmed to Marxism, even though Das Kapital mentioned their own John Bellers by name, and even though a small, very active group of socialist Friends did emerge in the same period in which Rowntree was doing his work late in the 1800s.
After writing Poverty, Seebohm Rowntree continued to bring innovative thinking to industrial relations, social welfare and management. He became a true liberal. Nevertheless, he was himself a transitional figure. Liberal and forward-thinking as he was, he still held on to some of his paternalistic past. For instance, though he saw clearly that a labor movement was essential to economic reform on behalf of the working poor, he resisted the organization of unions in his own business. He took it personally. He also adjusted his company’s wage system to guarantee a ‘living wage,’ a wage above the poverty line that he had himself defined. But he also established a rigorous system of quarterly employee review designed to ensure that his workers were performing well enough to deserve it. Under-performing employees were counseled, reassigned, and/or dismissed.
For all these monumental contributions to the cause of a more just and compassionate political economy, Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree is one of my heroes. He also is one of the unsung heroes in the history of Friends. And so I have become one of his modern champions.
Quakers & Capitalism – the 1650s
December 17, 2010 § 2 Comments
Over the next few weeks, I plan to roll out much of what I’ve written already on the history of Friends and capitalism on two parallel tracks. On the one hand, I’ll be loading documents into the wiki, QuakerCapitalism (see my introductory post here), where Friends who are interested can become members and help to build the resource. (If you want to become a member, send me an email.)
However, because many more Friends may be interested in reading this material without working on the wiki, I plan to publish the same sections as pdf files. These I will publish to the back end of my professional website (stevendavison.com), with links to the files appearing only here in Through the Flaming Sword.
So far, two files are available from this blog, but only one on the wiki. On the wiki, I’ve omitted the introduction to the book as originally conceived, because it needed its own introduction. The files are:
Quakers & Capitalism – Introduction
Quakers & Capitalism – The 1650s: The Lamb’s War and the Social Order
Note also that I’ve created a new page for Through the Flaming Sword that will feature an ongoing list of links to these files, organized in one place: Quakers & Capitalism—The Book. This page appears in the navigation column to the left.
Please feel free to share this material, but please also respect my copyright. One of these days, I will probably want to publish this writing in some way, depending on how the wiki experiment goes. If we end up collaboratively building a more or less complete resource on Quakers and Capitalism through the wiki, then we’ll have to decide how to publish collectively. If the wiki project doesn’t take off, then I’ll be finishing the book on my own and looking for a publisher. In the meantime, I invite your comments on the sections published here.
Quakers & capitalism—a schematic historial outline
December 10, 2010 § 1 Comment
Here, finally, is the schematic or thematic outline that I’ve been using to organize my thinking about Quaker economic history. It’s sort of an annotated table of contents for the book I’ve been writing, and a proposal for how to organize the wiki on Quakers and Capitalism. I invite Friends to comment on it, and to contribute whatever they might know about our economic history during these various periods. I will try to get this and other material up on the wiki itself in the next couple of weeks.
I separate the history of Quakers and capitalism into three more or less distinct periods characterized by radical reversals in Quaker engagement with the world and especially, in how the religious ethos of the Quaker community found expression through outward engagement with the worlds of business, commerce and industry. Between these major periods in Quaker economic history lie periods of transition lasting about a generation, in which external forces driving changes in the wider economy and in the economic life of Friends have collided with internal forces driving change within Quaker culture. The middle period, from roughly 1700 to roughly 1900, was puntuated by a less radical transition in which evangelicalism eo-emerged with the new social science of political economy around 1800. Here is a brief overview of this historical scheme:
1 The 1650s: The Lamb’s War and the Social Order
The newly emerging movement of the Children of Truth preached and lived a vision of a radically reconstructed economy as a natural outgrowth of the Lamb’s War on behalf of Christ’s active return, though the economic dimensions of the anticipated renewal of the world remained only partially and vaguely articulated. As Doug Gwyn has described in The Apocalypse of the Word and A Covenant Crucified, Friends in the 1650s expected the ensuing second coming of Christ to make all things new, including the social-economic order. The religious vision of the Lamb’s War subsumed the more narrow vision of a redeemed ‘economics’ (the term ‘economics’ had not even emerged yet as a signifier of a distinct sphere of human activity). Some contemporary movements—notably, the Levellers and especially the Diggers—were very articulate on what we now call economics, and, as history (or God) would have it, the Children of Truth absorbed many of their members and leaders when they were disbanded, but did not absorb much of their political economic thinking.
Major transition: persecution and gospel order (1661 – 1695)
A transition period began with the Restoration (1661) and the ensuing persecutions and culminated with the Tolerance Act and the first Advices and Queries in the 1690s. The transition is characterized by the paradox of intense economic persecution of the Children of Truth, on the one hand, and their remarkable financial success, on the other. The external force of persecution met the internal imposition of gospel order. In this crucible, Friends completely restructured their community and its response to the outward world. As described in Doug Gwyn’s The Covenant Crucified, Friends cut a deal with the powers that be: you leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone; we will abandon our apocalyptic push for a remade world order and practice our religion as a private affair if you will practice a measure of religious tolerance. Friends withdrew from the world in virtually every sphere—except when it came to commerce and industry. With this sphere they engaged with incredible energy and intelligence. In this arena, they were, in fact, poised to remake the world order, after all, and they emerged from this transition period as one of the wealthiest communities on the planet. All these forces helped to shape the genius of John Bellers, the first important ‘political economist’ among Friends, who tried to lead his community into a deeper engagement with the structure and consequences of emerging capitalism, but Friends refused to respond.
2 The 18th and 19th Centuries: The ‘Double Culture’ Period
By the turn of the 18th century, these conflicting forces of thriving economic life in the face of active economic persecution had forged a singularly cohesive people, especially in their economic structures and relations, with a peculiar, schizoid cultural character. A long period of cultural dualism ensued, in which Friends withdrew from the world socially, politically and religiously while at the same time, they aggressively engaged the world in commerce and industry, the sciences and applied arts. With an effectiveness and intensity that attracted the world’s admiration, Friends made essential contributions to the newly emerging capitalist culture. It’s hard to exaggerate Quaker influence on industrial capitalism; certainly, the industrial revolution would have taken place without Friends—but it didn’t. In almost every area—finance, technological advances, the development of physical infrastructure, the creation or revitalization of essential industries, the invention of new modes of social organization—in all these areas, many of the key developments took form initially in Quaker hands. At the same time, Friends were responding to the downside of what they and their industrial contemporaries had wrought. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Quaker business people experimented with internal reforms that would improve the lot of their workers.
Minor transition: evangelicalism and political economy (1795 – 1829)
A second minor transition period began with the emergence of the Christian evangelical movement at the turn of the 19th century and the co-emergence of the discipline of ‘political economy’ in the work of moral philosophers strongly influenced by their evangelical faith. One of the first and most famous was Thomas Malthus of ‘Malthusian theory’ fame, an evangelical minister and early influential economic theorist. By the time of the Hicksite separations in 1828-29, evangelical thinking dominated discourse in both religious and economic policy circles.
3 The 19th Century—Fragmentation and Partial Reengagement
Evangelicalism and the intellectual discipline of ‘political economy’ co-evolved as the century progressed into the Victorian period. Evangelical theology dominated both economic thinking and policy and Quaker culture deep into the 19th century. Joseph John Gurney and his relationship with the political economist Thomas Chalmers illustrate the ties between these new ‘ideologies’ and how Quaker attitudes toward poverty and the economy were shaped by evangelicalism. In Great Britain, Friends continued to hold themselves apart from surrounding society until the mid-19th century, while they continued to amass their fortunes. While the juggernaut of industrialization in England continued to build vast Quaker fortunes, evangelicalism gradually called them out of their quietism and helped to renew Quaker engagement with social issues and to nurture benevolent ministry to the poor through a culture of philanthropy coupled with moralistic paternalism. Quakers took the lead in establishing paternalistic philanthropy as the signature response to capitalism’s excesses in the Victorian period. However, evangelicalism actually inhibited meaningful engagement with the causes of poverty and the effective management of an increasingly complex macro-economy. Meanwhile in America, the 19th century separations fragmented American Quakerism, where economic life had always been more diverse than in Great Britain, making the economic history of American Friends much more complicated than in England.
Major transition: corporate capitalism and liberal Quakerism (1891 – 1920)
A third transition period began with the Richmond Conference in Richmond, Indiana (1887) and the Manchester Conference in England (1891), which signaled the rise of a new liberal spirit in Quakerism. The great external forces of the period were the full legalization of the limited liability corporation, which gave rise to corporate capitalism, and World War I. Just as the transition to a radically new form of organization—the corporation—was gaining momentum, the Great War reinvigorated industrial production. At the same time, Friends faced persecution for their religious beliefs for the first time in two hundred years for conscientious objection to the war. By the end of the War and this transition period, Friends in England, at least, had reengaged with the world, had shifted decisively from an evangelical to a liberal culture, and, simultaneously, the great Quaker fortunes had begun their long decline, as one Quaker company after another went public. Seebohm Rowntree and Herbert Hoover exemplify two kinds of economic policy during this period. Rowntree helped launch and shepherd the welfare state in England at the beginning of this transition, even while he found it hard to abandon his own paternalistic instincts in his own chocolate business. Hoover combined the new technocratic vision of public management, which he applied with miraculous success to the incredible suffering caused by the Great War, with the vestiges of the evangelical ethos, which he applied with catastrophic results to the suffering caused by the Depression.
4 20th Century—Liberal Reengagement
The liberalization of Quaker culture at the turn of the 20th century brought reengagement with basic social issues. In fits and starts, Friends, at least in the liberal branches of the movement, focused more and more on the structure of the economy and systemic oppression, breaking with their two-hundred-year-old tradition of leaving ‘the system’ more or less alone. British Quaker demographics shifted throughout the century, sliding from the upper and upper middle classes to the middle middle class. The picture is more complex in America, but in general, English-speaking Quakers were increasingly employed in the ‘secular church’ of education, health and human services and were people of modest means. This led to a broad abandonment of leadership roles in the wider economic culture and greater willingness to consider institutional reforms of capitalism itself. Committees organized around concerns like peace and social justice emerge as the primary vehicle for this Quaker engagement, replacing the traditional culture of Quaker ministry. Only one of the widely recognized committees organized around a concern focuses specifically on economic issues (Right Sharing of World Resources) and Quaker meetings have articulated a specifically economic testimony only in the last decades of the century, if they have done so at all.
Quakers and Capitalism – announcing a wiki
December 4, 2010 § 8 Comments
One of the reasons I started this blog was that I have done a great deal of research and writing toward a book on Quakers and Capitalism, but I’ve still got a lot of work to do, and I don’t really want to wait to share some of the fruits of this work until I publish (assuming I can find a publisher); that would just take too long. Also, I am not a trained historian, nor do I have access to very many primary sources; I have been reading secondary sources and digesting and synthesizing what I learn. Taken together, these facts mean that I am liable to make mistakes in my analysis and to miss important information. Finally, one of my primary goals with the book is to stimulate a deeper and more sustained conversation about our economic testimony than we have had to date, and I don’t want to wait with that, either.
As we have seen so dramatically in the past couple of years, the economic system is now at a crucial point of (potential) transformation, and I believe that the economic problems we face desperately need a stronger moral voice than they are getting right now. One of my points with my own work in this area is that, as with prison reform, Friends stand in a unique relationship of responsibility for the capitalist system: just as we played a key role in the development of the modern penitentiary, so Quakers have done more than any other community to give capitalism, at least industrial capitalism, its shape and early momentum. Now that it’s running amok, I feel we have a special responsibility to address its problems.
So—with the blog, I am hoping to attract the expertise of others in this area, both as a supplement and a corrective, and to get this conversation going. Already, this has been a great success. Many Friends seem interested in the topic and some have already added valuable information. For instance, I am indebted to Isabel Penraeth for her comments on hat honor.
I have felt for a while that the way to proceed might actually be to try to write the book collaboratively on a wiki. So I’ve started one: http://quakercapitalism.wikispaces.com.
There are some problems, though. Wikispaces is not an open platform like Wikipedia. You can’t just go to the URL, log in and start writing. Participants have to be invited. You will have noticed, if you clicked on the link above, that the site is protected and there’s a Sign In link in the upper right hand corner, too. So if you wanted to contribute, you would have to let me know and then I would invite you and set you up with a login. I haven’t done this with anybody yet.
Also, it’s going to take some practice, I suspect, to learn how to use it. I’ve only begun to load the material I have written, so there’s still some work to do up front. Finally, I have been writing for a while now, and in a personal voice appropriate for a privately authored book, but not so appropriate for a collaborative effort like this. If I had known from the beginning that I was going to moderate a wiki, I would have started writing in a more neutral voice. Well, I’ve gone way too far to rewrite it all, so I invite contributors to use their own voice when writing, if they wish, and we will see what this stone soup turns into. If the project works out, the result will be colorful, at the least.
So this is an invitation to an experiment. I hope that some of my readers, especially those with knowledge of our history, will be interested in joining me in fleshing out our economic history. By “economic history,” I mean a history of Quaker economic fortunes and also a history of Quaker contributions to economics and to the structure and history of capitalism as a system. I mean to go beyond just a history of Quaker attitudes toward money.
I hope, also, that you will notify other Friends who might be interested. For instance, I know Larry Ingle a little bit (we were at Pendle Hill together in 1991), but not well enough to find him and invite him personally; but maybe some of you do. Also, Hugh Barbour has commented once; Hugh, I hope you would be willing to contribute also, if you’re still watching this blog’s progress. If any of you are interested, please email me at steven.davison@verizon.net. If you don’t feel like tackling a new platform and technology but want to contribute, I invite you to send me Word documents and I’ll publish them. I promise to keep track of contributors and their offerings and to report periodically, so as to honor and record copyright and attribution.
I’ve done most of my own research on our history up to about 1900 and that is as far as I’ve taken my writing, so it’s on the twentieth century that I’m weakest. Thus, some Friends will actually have first-hand experience of some of the history I most want to develop. For instance, was anybody there in Guilford at the Friends World Conference in 1967 when Young Friends introduced the idea of Right Sharing of World Resources? I’d love to cover that in detail. Any experts on A. J. Muste? Kenneth Boulding? Does anybody have copies of some of the pamphlets published by London Yearly Meeting’s Committee on Industry and the Social Order in the 1930s?
In my next post, I plan to publish the schematic outline I’ve developed for organizing the original book, so you can see how I’ve been thinking and identify where your own contributions might come in.
It’s going to take me some time to finish loading my own work into the wiki. There’s a lot, and I have to figure out how to organize it. Also, I have to master the style sheet and probably then publish a guide to style for contributors. Using the Wikispaces style tools will allow us to keep an updated and accurate table of contents, and without that, I’m afraid the project will soon fall into chaos.
So please contact me if you would like to participate and please spread the word. I think this might be the first such project for Friends and it will surely be a bit bumpy, but exciting, as well.
Quakers and capitalism – enigma & amnesia
November 4, 2010 § 15 Comments
Who would you say is history’s second most famous Quaker? I am assuming that William Penn is the first most famous Quaker, and that Richard Nixon does not qualify as a Friend, despite his nominal membership.
In the United States, it might be Herbert Hoover. He’s certainly famous enough. Problem is, so few people know that he was a Friend. When I ask this question at the beginning of my presentations, many people propose John Woolman, George Fox, Lucretia Mott or Alice Paul.
The answer I propose is John Bellers. A prominent British Friend around the turn of the 18th century (1654 – 1725), Bellers was well known to his contemporaries. Yet you would join an overwhelming majority of modern American Friends if you have never heard of this man.
So why do I say he’s the second most well-known Quaker in world history? Because some of his essays were required reading in Soviet schools throughout the Soviet period in the former Soviet Union—tens of millions of Russians have known who he is. Because he impressed Karl Marx and Friederich Engels so much that Das Kapital mentions him by name.
Here is a man who enjoyed the fullest respect of his own generation, who possessed a deep, compassionate heart and a creative and far-ranging mind, who brought these faculties to bear on the problems of his own time in searching moral critique and bold proposals for pragmatic solutions to the problems he so clearly defined—in some cases for the first time. With equal measures of insight and foresight, Bellers wrote about economics and the plight of the worker, medical research and education, international politics and domestic social policy.
He was the first person in the English-speaking judicial tradition to call for the abolition of the death penalty. He added his voice to that of William Penn in calling for a unified government for Europe. And Bellers was the first to propose a national health service and a number of other reforms in health care:
- standardized medical education, so that all doctors would be trained in the best treatment practices and the public would have some protection from quacks and charlatans;
- medical conferences and journals to keep doctors abreast of new developments in medicine; and
- testing and certification of medicines to guarantee their efficacy and protect patients and patient’s families.
But his most important contribution in his own eyes was his proposal for “colledges of industry”. These were working and educational communities of (ideally) 250 or so people, made up mostly of the working poor, built around profit-making businesses in a wide range of trades that also conducted industrial research. His model anticipated that a third of the time and profit from the college would be surplus and would be reinvested in the research and used for relief to the poor. He wrote several essays on this topic throughout his life, never giving up on it, writing to Parliament and to London Yearly Meeting (essentially a grant proposal). Parliament didn’t listen. London Yearly Meeting created a workhouse at Clerkenwell, but this frustrated him no end, because they had ignored the most important aspects of the idea: community, education, research, profitable contribution. Clerkenwell was a palliative, not a systemic solution.
So how has this important contributor to Quaker—and even Western—history fallen into such relative oblivion among his own people? Why did even his own contemporaries shy away from his genius? And what, if anything, does our amnesia say about Quaker culture and our testimonial relationship to the concern that most exercised him: the social organization of capitalist enterprise? Why do I start my exploration of Quakers and capitalism with John Bellers?
For me, our Bellers amnesia is a useful indicator of a bigger puzzle. Bellers is not the only important political economist whom we’ve forgotten; I would add Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1871 – 1954) and, more importantly, David Ricardo (1773 – 1823). (Will we forget Kenneth Boulding, too?) Moreover, while Quakers from their earliest days have had a disproportionate influence on capitalist culture, especially in Great Britain, as we shall see, nevertheless, we are only now beginning to develop a coherent, comprehensive testimony on economics. To my knowledge, no one has tried to write a comprehensive economic history of Friends, despite its obvious and enormous importance, until this leaky vessel you are reading right now, though there have been some marvelous treatments of specific people and topics. Friends are weird about money, too, as anyone who’s served on a finance committee well knows. Why?
Why, when we have for so long been in the forefront of efforts to reform prisons, stop war, serve its victims, advance the rights of women, and end slavery, have we been so tardy in addressing the social failures of capitalism? For years, I have felt led to try to answer these questions and John Bellers was my first poster boy, if you will.
I would like to start a new conversation along these lines.
Quakers and Capitalism — a lost history
October 29, 2010 § 11 Comments
I have been writing a history of Quaker contributions to capitalist culture and of the ways that Quaker fortunes have, in turn, shaped Quaker culture, with a commentary on this history’s significance. Most of the history portion of the book is basically done, up into what I call the third transition period, between the great conferences at Richmond and Manchester and the end of the Great War. My interest is not in how Quakers deal with money, in their personal lives or even their professional and business lives, but rather with how we as a community have related to the capitalist economic system itself, as a system.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate how important Quakers were to the transition from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism and to the progress of the industrial revolution itself. It is also almost impossible to exaggerate how unknown most of this incredible history is to most Friends.
This has always been a mystery to me and is, in fact, what got me started on this project in the first place: what is it about Quaker culture that finds this radical historical amnesia useful, given how obsessed we are with our own history?
I’m always on the lookout for new sources in this project and recently came across a great book published in 1953 and edited by John Kavanaugh, then Public Relations Director of AFSC (the edition available on Amazon.com was published in 1970). The Quaker Approach to Contemporary Problems is a collection of essays by Quaker luminaries of the time, including Henry Cadbury, Howard Brinton, Elton Trueblood, and Clarence Pickett, and includes chapters on Peace and War, Education, Race Relations, Health and Healing, and so on. But it was the essay by Kenneth Boulding, the Quaker economist, on Economic Life that caught my eye. Here are his opening paragraphs:
The history of the application of the Quaker experience in the realm of economic life presents a curious paradox. On the one hand we do not find the apparently clear-cut “testimony” which is found in the peace testimony, where a relatively simple standard of conduct has come down almost unchanged through three centuries. It is difficult to find any simple standard of economic conduct or judgment which deserves the name “Quaker.” Quakers have been both capitalists and socialists, bankers and civil servants. Friends have, of course, maintained a testimony for the “minor virtues”—honesty, truthfulness, fulfillment of promises, thrift, hard work, punctuality, and so on in their economic activities as well as in other aspects of daily life. Such testimonies, important as they are, do not, however, constitute a specific attitude toward economic institutions or systems. On the great question of socialism versus capitalism, for instance, the Quaker trumpet seems to speak with an uncertain sound.
In spite of—or perhaps even because of—this apparent weakness in the clarity of the theoretical position, the practical impact of the Society of Friends on the economic life of the world has been enormous, and quite out of proportion to the small number of Friends. Indeed, it can be argued that the greatest impact of the Society of Friends on the world has been precisely in this sphere of economic life where the theoretical contribution seems to have been small.
Boulding goes on to discuss how Friends have been “deeply implicated in the rise of the whole set of institutional and technical changes, which go under the name of ‘capitalism,’ in two of its essential aspects—the development of a wide ‘market economy,’ and in the initiation and propogation of technical change,” and to claim, as I do, that these contributions have been “a very direct consequence of [our] religious experience, and of the organization of [our] religious life.” He surveys the economic history of Friends up to his time and then turns to the future.
He also considers our shift—and his own shift—toward ever higher standards of consumption, after abandoning plain dress and speech. “In reacting against the censorious imposition of ancient and perhaps meaningless standards of consumption we have relaxed our mutual disciplining of each other to the point where there seems to be no machinery in the usual Meeting, even for the discussion of these problems.” He ends by saying that “separated from God, separated from the sensitizing of the spirit in worship and communion with the source of all love and truth, enterprise leads to damnation in pride, brotherhood leads to damnation in sentimentality. This remains the most important thing which the Society of Friends has to say, even in the field of economics.”
One of the things I want to do with this blog is to share this history of Quakers and capitalism and begin a conversation about our economic testimony and our amnesia: to try to understand why we no longer know who John Bellers was, or Seebohm Rowntree, or David Ricardo, and why these people matter; and to discern what a “clear-cut” economic testimony might be.
Through the Flaming Sword 