Quakers & Capitalism — Evangelical Political Economy
March 9, 2011 § 2 Comments
How evangelicalism shaped 19th century Quaker economics – Part 1
In 1825, Great Britain entered an economic depression comparable in severity to the crash of 1929 in America. Hundreds of firms went bankrupt and the Bank of England itself came close. The collapse came out of the blue. Thomas Robert Malthus, of ‘Malthusian theory’ fame, an evangelical cleric and pioneer economist, had predicted cyclical collapses, but no one had seen this one coming. Theories about its causes and ideas for its cure buzzed in the parlors of the business and intellectual elites and occupied the journalists and pamphleteers.
In his journal, Joseph John Gurney recorded “feeling the Lord to be near to us” during that time. (Descended from Hugh de Gournay, one of the Norman nobleman who came to England with William the Conqueror, his family had started with huge land grants from William in Norwich and Suffolk. They founded the Bank of Norwich in 1770, which was for a time the second largest bank in England after the Bank of England. Around 1809, the family bought a large billbrokering business, a firm that either lends money or finds lenders for borrowers; for forty years, Overend, Gurney and Company was the largest broker of loans in the world. In 1896, Gurney’s Bank merged with Backhouse’s Bank and Barclays Bank of London and several other Quaker provincial banks to form what is now Barclays Bank.)
The two schools of political economy current at the time—classical and evangelical—approached these cyclical downturns differently, in terms of how they analyzed their causes, how they would manage the system in times of crisis, and how they treated those who suffered from their fallout. In 1825, evangelical thinkers dominated this economic discourse.
Gurney himself believed, along with his evangelical peers, in a providential God who watched human events and sometimes intervened according to a divine plan. Like them, mindful of judgment, he watched out for temptation and hoped for atonement. The financial crisis of 1825-26 was surely a moral test; but mostly it was seen as a judgment against those who had already surrendered to avarice and ambition. Gurney no doubt experienced God’s nearness as, first, the searing heat of financial losses, which naturally turned him inward to reflect on his own moral character; and then, when his fortune ultimately survived, as the cool refreshing draught of escape from ruin and at least partial reassurance of his moral uprightness. His fortune was saved; he was saved. Many of his fellow capitalists were not.
For moderate evangelicals like Gurney, God’s providence was systemic: both nature and markets ran according to God’s plan for the world’s government and for human judgment, but not every little event was an act of specific divine intervention. Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand”—the natural tendency of markets to efficiently set prices on their own, without government interference—this was actually the invisible hand of God at work. The fact that the actions of individuals powered the mechanisms of the market and gave it direction made the system an inherently moral one. Market policy therefore required a moral philosophy and this evangelical philosophy required not only that you leave God’s mechanisms alone but also that you leave individuals to choose their actions and suffer their judgment.
Such a moral philosophy naturally encouraged moral speculation, especially when bad things happened: cholera epidemics and market downturns pointed toward sins as causes, so the evangelical economists would search for the culprit sins behind these events. As the system tended to be general in its chastising effects, hurting lots of people and society in general, so the more moderate evangelical political economists tended to be somewhat general in their attributions of moral cause and they tended to differ when they got down to specifics.
More radical evangelicals believed, however, that God micro-managed the system, intervening directly and with specific purpose in virtually all events. Thus, they saw every outbreak of cholera or market downturn as a deliberate visitation for some specific sin(s) and this emboldened them to get serious and specific with their condemnations and exhortations.
All evangelical political economists agreed, though, that, squirming under God’s plan, and always defying its purposes, lurked human sin. Every human problem had its ultimate root in sin. Social ills, like poverty and economic recessions, personal problems, like poverty and bankruptcy—you could trace them all back to sin, not just sinfulness in general, but often a particular act, trait or policy. Sin and its consequences for the immortal soul gave evangelical political economists a sense of emotional urgency that heated the discourse up far more than the rational theories of the classical economists.
The sins behind economic downturns were clear: greed, primarily, ambition, and pride. Bull markets encouraged borrowing and speculation. Encouraged by their winnings, investors got overextended. Then, when everyone realizes that they are sitting on a bubble, panic ensues, people start calling in their notes, and the system collapses. Chastised for a time, businessmen (sic) recommit themselves to prudence. But then they forget the pain, greed plants its seeds again, and the cycle starts over.
The sins behind poverty were also clear: improvidence and licentious habits—laziness, gambling, drinking, wantonness of all kinds—and, of course, sex. Sex led to overpopulation among the working classes, which led to poverty.
The cure for both poverty and what we now call the business cycle was moral tuition. The cure for economic depressions was collective repentance and a nation that hewed more closely to God’s law. The cure for poverty was personal repentance and strengthened moral character. The evangelical worldview rejected most practical approaches to poverty relief and turned instead to moral paternalism. Poor relief was actually cruel in its consequences because it encouraged idleness, and suffering was actually salutary, because it led to repentance. Far better to suppress vice and encourage industry, economy and discipline. Their material charity thus tended toward things like good clothing that could support self-respect, rather than grants of money. And, of course, Bibles, plus enough education to enable the poor to read their Bibles. One thinks immediately of Elizabeth Fry, Gurney’s sister, ministering to the inmates of Newgate Prison.
In the next post, we’ll return to Gurney and his friendship with the greatest evangelical political economist of the age, Thomas Chalmers, as a window into the distinctive evangelical mutation in the Quaker double culture of religious withdrawal and economic engagement—how it drew Friends back into the world of social and political action in crucial ways without seriously threatening the distinctives of Quaker culture.
Quakers & Capitalism — The Evangelical Transition
March 3, 2011 § 7 Comments
In this series of posts and in my book on Quakers and Capitalism, I have divided Quaker economic history into three major periods defined by the ways that Friends engaged with the world around them. These major historical periods were separated by major periods of transition, in which external forces and internal forces collided to produce a new Quaker alignment. In the first transition period, brought on by the persecutions in England in the last decades of the 17th century, the external pressures of persecution and the internal imposition of gospel order closed a period of intense apocalyptic engagement with the world and opened a period of cultural dualism, in which Friends withdrew from the world socially, politically and religiously, but channeled incredible energy outward into the world of business, commerce and finance.
Over the course of the 18th century, Friends played key roles in creating modern capitalism and the industrial revolution in England and they continued to build the new economy throughout the 19th century. The turn of the 20th century brought a second major transition, in which the rise of corporate capitalism, liberal thought and new persecutions during the First World War collided with a liberalizing movement within Quakerism. The result was a decisive turn outward, away from quietist withdrawal and into much more vigorous and creative engagement with the world and its problems, including the social fallout and political responses to capitalism’s darkside.
Right in the middle of the double-culture period, however, around 1800, Friends went through a minor period of transition brought on by the rise into cultural prominence of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism opened a door in the wall that Friends had built around themselves and allowed them to reengage with the world in certain ways without giving up their distinctive and even insular culture. More importantly with respect to a study of Quakers and capitalism, the new evangelicalism emerged and co-evolved with the new ‘science’ of economics, though the term ‘economics’ only came into use a hundred years later. Then it was called ‘political economy,’ and focused on the ways that production and consumption were organized in nation states. The first political economists, including its putative ‘father,’ Adam Smith, held chairs in moral philosophy. The first professor of political economy in England was Thomas Malthus (1805).
Malthus was an evangelical minister. Like other evangelical political economists of the time, Malthus’s moral theology shaped his economic theory and this combination gave rise to a second major school of economic thinking that stood in some opposition to the ‘classical’ school first defined by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (published in 1776). Together, these two schools shaped the issues and discourse that defined early modern economic thinking and this dynamic dialog found embodiment in two extraordinary men: Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Malthus and Ricardo were friends but friendly rivals intellectually, and their publishing duel helped define the field of political economy as it matured.
Ricardo was the second great classical economist, after Adam Smith. He was born Jewish and had emigrated to England with his family from Holland. But then he eloped with a Quaker, Priscilla Anne Wilkinson, and his family disowned him. He made a fortune in the stock market and ‘retired’ to write at the age of 43. He converted to Unitarianism.
(One of these days, I plan to research Ricardo more thoroughly, hoping to clarify his relationship with his wife’s family and her meeting and with Quakerism in general. Was she herself disowned for marrying out of meeting? Why did he become a Uniterian instead of a Quaker? What affect, if any, did his new religious identity and his exposure to Quakerism have on his economic thinking? If political economy was, in that time, essentially moral philosophy, and if theology was shaping the work of his primary intellectual correspondent, and he himself had undergone some kind of religious transformation, how could these factors not have helped to inform his own ideas?)
No Friends, evangelical or otherwise, contributed significantly to this new discipline of political economy until the second major transition around 1900, and evangelicalism did not alter substantially the momentum or direction of Quaker wealth-building. But it did help to shape the way that Friends approached poverty and other negative consequences of capitalist expansion during the 19th century. And Joseph John Gurney, the great evangelical Friend of his time, was a close associate and a deep admirer of one of the preeminent evangelical political economists of the age, Thomas Chalmers (1740-1847).
Evangelical political economy dominated economic policy and politics in Great Britain throughout the first half of the 19th century and its moral philosophical approach to social problems has returned to favor periodically ever since. In subsequent posts, I want to
- talk about Chalmers and explore his relationship with Gurney as a window into how evangelical thought helped to shape social and political responses to the structural violence of capitalism;
- look at how evangelical Quakerism adopted and adapted this moral philosophy;
- examine the rise and fall and periodic resurgence of evangelical political economy and the role of some Friends in that history; and
- look briefly at the different course that these issues took in America, where Friends had always been more diverse, not just theologically, but also in terms of social class, social and political geography, economic development, and relative influence over social policy.
Jesus the Christ and Quaker Economic Testimony — The Fulfillment
February 22, 2011 § 10 Comments
How does a covenantal community focused on debt relief and ministry to the poor work?
I said in the earlier posts in this series that, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God by declaring a Jubilee, a general redemption of debt and of debt slaves. How did he plan to make good on his claim to be fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy? Jesus himself raises this question in the course of the story, but he doesn’t answer it. Luke shows us how the first disciples implemented the economics of redemption in the common-wealth of God in Acts, chapters two and four. Presumably they did so according to Jesus’ teachings. There are hints elsewhere in the gospels, notably in the story of Zacchaeus and of Mary and Martha, that Jesus had already begun to organize his household churches along the lines described in detail in Acts. In Acts four and five, Luke actually gives us two case studies of how this was supposed to work, one positive and one negative. In the positive case, Barnabas “sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the apostle’s feet” (Acts 4:37).
The negative case study (Acts 5:1-12) is an astounding story much overlooked by everybody, I suspect because it’s so bizarre. Ananias and his wife Sapphira, like Barnabas, sell a piece of property, but instead of bringing all the proceeds to the apostles, they agree to secretly withhold half the proceeds. They naturally, I think, fear that they’ve joined a cult whose future looks pretty shaky—their leader has already been executed, their present leaders have already spent time in jail, the secret police are hunting them down. We can speculate that Ananias and Sapphira are hedging their bets, leaving themselves an exit strategy.
Peter knows what’s going on and challenges Ananias. Ananias denies the fraud, and then Peter says he’s lied to God and the man drops dead. Young men wrap him up, carry him out and bury him. Later, Sapphira shows up and Peter challenges her to own up to the subterfuge, but she lies too, and she drops dead. She’s buried next to her husband.
What’s happening here? What’s their crime? Was the punishment really death? Did Peter utter a death-curse? Did God really strike them dead? And what is Luke trying to tell us with this incredible story?
I believe this story encodes the first excommunication in Jesus’ community, defining both the rationale for taking action and the process for expulsion. We know the Essenes excommunicated members by performing a burial ceremony, and even today, some very conservative Jews will say that relatives who have married Gentiles are “dead to me”. This rests on the passage in Deuteronomy that famously says, “choose life”—a theology of life in the covenant and death outside the covenant (Deuteronomy 30:11-20). The first few chapters of both of Luke’s books are full of Essene influence; especially relevant in this context is the mass conversion on Pentecost recounted in Acts 2, which was also the holy day used by the Essenes to admit new members and expel unwanted members. Especially suspicious as a detail in the story is the note that the young men wrapped up Ananias’s body and then carried him out for burial—did they really prepare the body for the grave right there in the midst of the day’s ritualized distribution of money to the poor? Or was this part of the ritualized ceremony for expulsion, which would have been a public event?
So why were Ananias and Sapphira excommunicated? For filing false financial statements. More specifically, for “putting the Spirit of the Lord to the test” (Acts 5:9) by undermining the community’s commitment to care for the poor. That is, for defying the Spirit of the Lord that had anointed Jesus as the Christ, whom the Father had sent to bring good news to the poor.
So, to answer our question about how our meetings would function if we tried to follow Jesus’ intention with the good news, we would first seek to find out who among us suffers under a crushing burden of debt and who among us possesses surplus wealth that could be used to relieve this suffering. This would probably mean that financial disclosure would be an obligation of membership, for this would be the most transparent way to know who has need and who has resources. And we would set up a system for distributing the welfare.
Several of Paul’s “gifts of the spirit” (ministry, giving, leading, and showing compassion—Romans 12:6-8) seem to represent various offices in the welfare distribution system that he had set up in his churches, each one inspired by the same Spirit that Ananias and Sapphira had defied. These offices are only hinted at in the gospels and Acts, specifically, Acts 2:42: “They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,” all of which took place, if I’m not mistaken, at the time of the day’s main meal. “Fellowship” here is the Greek word koine, which means sharing, the sharing of food and money as well as each other’s presence.
Can you imagine organizing your meeting around these principles?
Such a radical covenant of governance, in which discipleship meant this kind of disclosure and discipline, would need to stand on a sure and clear foundation of authority. For Jesus himself and his followers—and for the early Friends—that authority was the Holy Spirit and the teachings of the Christ. Where would today’s liberal, mostly post-Christian meetings turn to for a foundation of authority that could carry such a weight? More importantly, perhaps, why would liberal meetings organize themselves this way, having mostly abandoned the teachings of Jesus as authoritative? Without the authority of the gospel, without the example of the first disciples, a meeting would realign itself toward the poor in this way only if deeply moved by the Holy Spirit—as, indeed, the first Christians were. But this is no less true for mostly Christian meetings. Would they be willing to recover the economic heart of the Christ’s teachings? Would they be any more willing to reorganize their meetings around the good news for the poor?
I propose that the gospel message of Jesus the Christ does, in fact, offer us a powerful place to start in experiencing, articulating and proclaiming a revitalized testimony on economics. But would such a testimony languish at the doorstep of action?
Here the traditional faith and practice of the Quaker testimonies comes into play. The testimonies are not, properly speaking, social action positions to which we are encouraged to subscribe as Friends. They are in theory the natural and even inevitable expressions of movements of the Spirit within and among us. The ‘written testimonies’ are the shadow and not the substance of a testimonial life, empty forms without power, until and unless the spirit of God anoints us. Once we are in-spired with compassion for the poor, the actual words of the testimony and the concrete actions of the testimonial life will follow. Without the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the good news for the poor is just a notion, an intriguing radical ideology, a matter for study and discussion.
When it comes to the poor, I myself hold only a shadow in my hands. I am the rich young man who walked away (Luke 18). I could not live in such a meeting, for a bunch of reasons. I have not surrendered authority over my life to Jesus the Christ (though he hasn’t yet come to claim it).
We believe—I believe, having experienced it myself—that each of us is called to direct inspiration by God, and that the meeting as a community is also so called, and that God is always trying to reveal to us new truth and lead us into renewed life (and by ‘God’ here I mean the Mystery Reality behind our experience of being inspired and led, however that experience manifests). This much I can do: try to open myself to God’s inspiration and revelation and guidance. Try to be faithful to the call when I hear it.
I have answered several calls; I have tried to remain faithful to them. One of them has led me to spend decades studying Jesus’ economic teachings, to write a book about them, to become something of an authority on them. Yet I’ve never let them overwhelm my own desires. I have never truly sought the fellowship of the Spirit in the sharing of wealth and the ministry to the poor. I am Ananias. I guess I am running from the shadow of the cross.
Jesus the Christ and Quaker Economic Testimony — The Proclamation
February 9, 2011 § 10 Comments
I said in my previous post that I think the Bible, and specifically, the gospel of Jesus should be one of the places we go for guidance and inspiration when trying to develop an effective and spirit-led testimony on economics. The good news is that the gospel of Jesus is, at its very heart, an economic message. Jesus defined his role as “the Christ” in specifically economic terms. To see this, though, you have to let go of our traditionally Pauline christology and even the testimony of the evangelists, and turn directly to Jesus himself. You have to ask, what did “the Christ” mean to Jesus?
Nowhere in Christian scripture does Jesus forthrightly claim, “I am the Christ, the Messiah” (christos in Greek and messiah in Hebrew both mean “anointed”). In every passage in which these words are used—but one—someone else is speaking confessionally, proclaiming Jesus as the Christ, or simply assuming it. There is one place, however (Luke 4:18), where Jesus does say the word. Moreover, though he does so indirectly, nevertheless he quite plainly claims the title for himself. Yet this passage is almost never used to define what “Christ” actually means. Why in the history of christology (the theology of who and what the Christ is) do theologians so rarely turn to Jesus himself as their starting point?
I think it’s because of how Jesus defines his ‘christ-hood’. He mentions nothing about sin or salvation. Rather, he defines the role of the messiah in terms of liberation from poverty. The Christ is a redeemer—but in the economic sense of releasing someone from their debt. Though we must add that, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus equates sin and debt (forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors), and this, in fact, reflects a deep and far-reaching connection between spiritual and financial redemption, not just in his teaching, but in the very DNA of the religion of ancient Israel.
Here’s what Jesus said in Luke 4:
Jesus has just returned to his home town after being tested in the wilderness. Barely six weeks have passed since he heard his call to prophetic mission at his baptism. He is invited to give a guest sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth. These will be the very first words of his public ministry in the gospel according to Luke. He reads from the 61st chapter of Isaiah, the first couple of verses: (I’m quoting from Isaiah below, rather than from Luke, since Luke quotes the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Torah in use in his time; but Jesus and his synagogue would have used either the Hebrew text or an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew, a Targum; the Hebrew and Septuagint versions of these verses differ a little, but without changing their substantial meaning.)
The spirit of the Lord Yahweh is upon me,
for Yahweh has anointed me (christos, messiah),
he has sent me
to bring good news (evangelion) to the poor/oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to captives
and release for the prisoners;
to proclaim the year that Yahweh favors.
After reading these verses, Jesus sits down and begins his discourse: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” That’s all he says. He has claimed: “I am the anointed one that Isaiah foretold and my mission is to bring good news to the poor—to end their poverty and oppression; specifically, to proclaim the year that my father favors—a Jubilee.”
The year of Jubilee refers to the practice defined in Leviticus 25 in which, every fifty years, all debts are cancelled, all debt slaves are set free, all families who have been alienated from their family farms due to bankruptcy and foreclosure are returned to their ancestral inheritance, and the land is to lie fallow for a year’s rest. (Actually, for a second year’s rest, since the fiftieth year follows the 49th, the end of the last of seven sabbatical years—Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15 established seven years as the maximum term for debt slavery, for paying off short-term debts with your labor, and the land was also released from labor every seven years. The Jubilee was for long-term debt.)
There is no evidence that the Jubilee was ever practiced at all, let alone every fifty years. But it was not too uncommon for kings in the ancient Near East to proclaim a Jubilee, often upon accession to the throne. It was in this context that Jesus, the anointed prophet king, claimed the authority of God’s own spirit to proclaim universal redemption—release from debt.
In the paralellism of Isaiah’s and Jesus’ poetry, in which the second line of a poetic couplet reiterates and develops the idea of the first, “the poor” are the “brokenhearted—men who have lost their family farms and must rely on day labor to support their families; the “captives” and the “prisoners” are people whose debts have completely overwhelmed them, so that they now have no prospect of paying off their debts through their labor, even in seven years; they have become permanently dependent on the holders of their notes as their servants.
Jesus’ claim to be able to fulfill all these things was laughable on its face, as he well knew: “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’” he said, for he was himself as poor as you could get. He had just spent six weeks living off the land in the desert. He must have been emaciated, his cloak full of dust and thistles, his hair matted, his eyes burning with that praeternatural shine that comes from extreme fasting. He must have looked like like that other nut, John the Baptizer.
We have to wonder ourselves how Jesus planned to pull off this outrageous claim. Luke gives us the answer in Acts, chapters two and four—new rules for community in which those with surplus wealth liquidate it for distribution to the poor (see specifically, Acts 4:34-37 for how this was supposed to work). Jesus’ answer to how he planned to fulfill such a radical promise was: that you will do it for each other. You will organize the community around the principle of koine, of fellowship, of sharing what you have to relieve each other’s suffering.
A Quaker testimony that rested on the gospel of Jesus as its foundation would likewise organize community around this kind of fellowship, offering good news to the poor and those in debt.
This has profound implications for community dynamics. It requires a completely new approach to the testimony on community, not just a new faith, but new practices, as well. Here also, the gospels (the Synoptic Gospels, anyway) and Acts offer clues as to where to start. Material for another post. . .
Renewing Friends’ Testimony on Economics
February 7, 2011 § 2 Comments
One of the reasons I’ve been writing on Quakers and capitalism is that I hope to invite Friends to consider more deeply our testimony on economics (and I don’t mean our testimony on money, but on the structure and institutions and worldview of our economic system) with a fuller appreciation of our economic history as context. I believe we stand in some ways in the same relationship with capitalism as we do with penitentiaries: our ancestors played key roles in the emergence of capitalism (industrial capitalism, anyway) and its early evolution, just as we did with the penitentiary. And just as the penitentiary was, in its inception, an advance in human welfare, a positive solution to a problem, and now has become part of the problem, just so industrial capitalism brought tremendous improvements to humankind, only to become in some ways a new source of suffering and oppression. In both cases, our historical role lays upon us some kind of obligation to reform the system and minister to the victims of our legacy.
Where to start? We have four paths to walk, I think. They are somewhat independent of each other and each deserves careful consideration. In my initial thinking, anyway, these four paths to a renewed testimony on economics are:
- Starting with divine inspiration. The first impulse, of course, is to turn to our Teacher, from whom we have learned to expect continuing revelation. Spiritual renewal comes from G*d (using G*d as a placeholder for the Mystery Reality behind/within our personal and corporate religious experience, whatever that experience is). So, in addition to study, thought and discussion, we need to pray and worship and support those who are called to ministries of witness in this area.
- Starting with secular progressive thinking on political economics. The vitality of our economic testimony depends on being Spirit-led. Its effectiveness depends, to a great degree, on knowing the science of economics and the work of its progressive thinkers and critics. There’s lots of material here, and therefore lots to learn and lots of work to do.
- Starting from our present testimonies. We can work our way ‘laterally’ across our testimonial life from the other testimonies. This is a common and natural tack. I’ve done this myself, turning the light of the testimonies on peace, integrity, simplicity and equality on economics. This yields great fruit and I will return to this approach in some future posts.
- Starting from our foundational traditions, including, especially, the Bible. I think a lot of ‘liberal,’ ‘post-Christian,’ ‘post-traditional’ Friends overlook the Bible, partly because they just don’t know it and partly because, in some folks’ hands, they have experienced the Bible as a weapon of regressive thinking. This extends to the sphere of economics no less than other areas social and political life. In fact, I devote a lengthy section of Quakers and Capitalism to the often, though not exclusively, negative influence of evangelical thinking on progressive political economics. Nevertheless, our Christian Friends are in a position to lead the way here, because the gospel of Jesus is, at its core, a powerful progressive economic message.
I’ve been writing another book on the gospel of Jesus whose sections on his teachings on ‘economics’ have grown so much that it now looks like it needs to be its own book. The new book’s tentative title is Good News for the Poor: The Economics of Redemption in the Common-wealth of God. I’ve explored some of this material in my other blog, www.biblemonster.com, including a series on the Beatitudes, which, when you know enough about the ‘economic legislation’ in Torah, turn out to be midrashim on inheritance law and, specifically, on bankruptcy.
In fact, Christian scripture—the synoptic gospels, anyway (Matthew, Mark and Luke)—are totally saturated with economic testimony. Jesus was preoccupied with the poor and the people and social, political and religious institutions that oppressed the poor. (It’s worth noting that in Hebrew and Aramaic (Jesus’ native tongue), the word is the same for “the poor” and for “the oppressed”—ani, as in Bethany (beth ani, house of the poor/oppressed), the little town not far from Qumran where Martha, Mary, Lazarus and Simon the Leper lived.)
Jesus healed the poor and I believe that several of these healings included a social welfare dimension in the healing itself—that we too narrowly define these ‘miracles’ as medical cures of disease, and miss the innovations and reforms in community life that serve as context for his healings. Several of his other miracles also have an economic dimension. Several parables deal directly with poverty. Many of our favorite sayings of Jesus are essentially teachings about economics or have economic elements, including not just the Beatitudes, but also much of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, and the two love commandments. The Lord’s Prayer has economics at its core. But more importantly, Jesus defined his ministry, his role as the Christ, the Messiah, in economic terms. Economic justice was the very foundation of Jesus’ ministry.
These are far-reaching claims, I know, and to some, all the more startling because these teachings often are virtually invisible to the ‘untrained eye.’ We know so many of these passages so well that it’s hard to believe such a different and radical meaning could be hiding in there. So it takes a while to make the case. I hope you’ll bear with me.
Nevertheless, I believe that Jesus’ teachings on ‘economics’ are comprehensive, far-reaching, radically progressive and totally relevant to our situation today, notwithstanding their original context in an agrarian economy very different from our own. The gospel is a great place to start when reconsidering out testimony on economics. I think I’m going to pursue this mostly in BibleMonster because that blog is dedicated to the Bible, but it will take time. For one thing, I have another theme I want to take up there, as well—what I call “spiritual ecology”: a look at how Jesus used the landscape of Palestine in his own spiritual practice (where he went in Palestine to do what and why); and also a look at the role that ecology and technology have played in the emergence and evolution of the Western religious tradition more broadly.
In the meantime, I want to lay out in BibleMonster the “economics of redemption” as I see them and bring these principles into Through the Flaming Sword as planks in a platform for a more fully developed Quaker testimony on economics. More to come . . .
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—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.
Through the Flaming Sword 