Show notes
Richard Reinsch (00:19): Hello, I’m Richard Reinsch. Today we’re talking with Gregory Collins about his impressive new book, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy. Gregory Collins is postdoctoral associate and a lecturer in the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. Gregory, welcome to the program. Gregory Collins (00:43): Hi, Richard. Thank you for the opportunity to talk. Richard Reinsch (00:44): Excellent. So thinking about political economy, which is the term you used throughout the book, what is Edmund Burke’s political economy? And maybe also, what do you mean by political economy? I think that’s worth thinking about too. We usually just think about economics, and economics almost as a separate sphere of study, but I think you mean something more here. Gregory Collins (01:04): Yes, that’s a great question because much of my book really hinges on an appropriate understanding of what political economy meant in Burke’s time and what it means today. So as you suggested, in Burke’s age, statesmen, thinkers, they studied political economy, not economics. Economics today is more of a specialized narrow field with particular quantitative methodological approaches. While in Burke’s time, it was a more capacious, holistic understanding of the intersecting concerns of commercial activity, trade, both domestic and foreign, as well as the broader social/religious/ethical preconditions for commercial activity. It was in this wide sense that Burke understood and tried to study the implications of commercial activity, which included, certainly, a particular insight into trade, taxation of revenue, but also broader considerations about the role of commerce in the wider social order. Richard Reinsch (01:59): What did Burke… What was his approach to political economy? Gregory Collins (02:03): His approach was… I would characterize it as a resistance towards specialization, in the broadest sense. He used this premise to inform his understanding of commercial activity, both in regard to the free internal grain trade, which was the subject of his primary economic writing, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, and it informed his understanding of the political economy of the French Revolution and the political economy of European civilization as a whole. So, one of the core arguments in the book, which I’m going to jump to it right now, in the chapters on the French Revolution, and the great intellectual historian, John Pocock, the first, I believe, to recognize this in a pioneering essay he wrote on Burke’s political economy on French revolution. Burke grew out of particular ethical preconditions that predated the mass commercial economy. The prior religious and social and ethical traditions that were built up throughout the ages by what he called the ‘spirit of the gentleman and the spirit of religion.’ So British establishment, such as the Church of England, and the hereditary aristocracy, which provided and encouraged a culture of learning, patronage, moral and religious instruction, all furnished the conditions of stability, moderation, an element of courtesy, chivalry, of course, that provided the necessary environment for commercial activity to emerge. Commercial activity which was more prone to vicissitudes, vagaries, unpredictability, and then the more stable orders of religion and the landed aristocracy. So, for Burke, these two pillars were essential for applying this foundation for the emergence of the mass commercial economy. If those two pillars withered way, this is part of Burke’s argument on French Revolution, then social order would decline, which for him would include commercial activity. Richard Reinsch (03:49): You note in the book, this put him at odds with many Enlightenment theorists, including many in the Scottish Enlightenment, on the origins of markets and the perpetuation of markets as well. Gregory Collins (03:59): Yes, yes. This is really a distinctive quality of Burke, with regard to sovereignty at the time. Many of the Scots, who I have to be fond of them, David Hume, Amanda Smith, Adam Ferguson. Well, Adam Ferguson’s argument was probably closer to Burke than the other two. But the general tenor of their understanding of markets is not that they severed markets morality. In fact, as we know Smith’s was moral philosophy, and he wrote a great book on moral philosophy, but as I… I outline the book… And Pocock also mentioned this, they didn’t appear to draw Burke’s specific argument that commercial activity grew out of these preconditions prior to the Enlightenment. And so not only, for Burke was there a necessary moral foundation for markets. This moral foundation was not a modern moral foundation. It was a pre-modern moral foundation. This is not to say that Burke elevated a romantic shimmery, but he thought that the roots of commercial order could be discovered prior to the industrial revolution, prior to the available-hand concept, prior to the elevation of profits as a worthy human endeavor. And then in addition, Burke he held an interesting attitude towards the idea of the doux-commerce theory, which is embraced by the Scots, embraced by the French, Enlightenment theorists as well, Thomas Paine, famously. Richard Reinsch (05:08): What’s the doux commerce theory? Gregory Collins (05:10): So doux commerce theory is the idea, and this idea persists today that the increase in commercial relations between two parties, including two nations, tend to produce peaceful effects over time. Two trading partners, as opposed to invading one another for land or power, they will find mutual interest in trading goods and services from one another. And therefore they have an investment in each other that would discourage them from starting a war with one another. The reasoning goes, therefore, the enhancement of commercial relations will promote peace relations over time. Now, Burke, he does not dismiss this. And in fact, he adopts this reasoning in regard to Ireland and England in his most comprehensive statement on free trade when he wrote two letters to merchants of Bristol, the community who was representing that opposed the free trade measures with Ireland. Burke argued in favor of the free trade measures, for many of the reasons that advocates of doux commerce theory espouse today, that they do tend to promote peaceful social relations on their mutual interest and increasing trade with one another. And he also does this reasoning with regard to the American colonies in his famous speech on America. He lavished his praise on the Americans for their ingenuity, their industry, their intelligence, their hard-work, their commercial undertaking. And these are two of the clearest instances in which Burke does embrace this idea that the increase in commercial relations will tend to promote peaceful social relations, but he does not necessarily adopt this in his broader political thoughts. And the most glaring case was the French. There are a couple examples. In 1786, Anglo-French Commercial Treaty. I mentioned his speech on Traders’ Correspondence primarily 1790s, during the French revolutionary wars, which Burke, push back against this idea that increasing commercial relations with France, or pre-revolutionary France and France during the revolution, would not necessarily have peace relations. The simple idea is that if you are engaged in commerce with an avowed enemy or rival, that is not a guarantee that that rival will tend to adopt peaceful measures. For Burke, in that sense, commercial considerations should be subordinate to wider national aims of honor of national interest. And how I harmonize these various strands of his thoughts and doux commerce, and as has been said before, it was not necessarily systematic thinkers, not treatises mostly. So you have to piece together his different thoughts from various speeches and writings. I argue that, for Burke, even the doux commerce thesis, somewhat to his broader point about how modern commercial activity requires ethical preconditions. The doux commerce thesis, especially international relations, also requires pre-economic commitment, shared values, shared principles, which is why he thought that free trade between England and Ireland, England and the Americans best reflects the doux commerce. But in the case of France, which not have broad shared political principles, he did not think that increased commercial activity between England and France would have a peace relations. And so that’s the distinction I carve out in the book. Richard Reinsch (08:09): Okay. So you wouldn’t say Edmund Burke was a free trader, but you also wouldn’t say he was a mercantilist. You would say he is balancing international trade, or transnational trade, for its good effects and good consequences. But those aren’t its own justification. It has to also be balanced against national interest and the needs of the empire, and what’s going to best serve it, which… As I read your book, I heard you to be saying, “Generally, Edmund Burke favored pretty liberalized trade, but he made crucial exceptions.” And you’ve kind of articulated some of those here. And thinking about Burke’s political economy, I thought we might go to the beginning of your book and think about the arcane topic of Britain’s internal grain trade. You write at the beginning… Because I think it’s instructive in a lot of ways. You write at the beginning of chapter two, you say, “Burke discerned poetry in the elusive motions of England’s internal grain trade.” Gregory, talk about that poetry. Gregory Collins (09:14): Yes. The internal grain trade turned out to be one of the primary protagonists in this narrative. The internal grain trade was a subject of Burke’s primary arcane treatise, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, which really wasn’t a treatise. It was a private letter written for government officials that addressed the particular circumstances of mid 1790s England, which in the middle of French revolutionary war has experienced a number of difficulties, including spiking green prices, increasing normalization, population growth. There’s only a few years before Thomas Malthus wrote his famous book on whether the food supply would be able to sustain the population growth. And for Burke, however, his principle argument in this track, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, is that there was, what I call, poetry in order to their internal grain trade of England, that was delicate, that was fragile, but that nevertheless tended to work absent arbitrary meddling government intervention. And so Burke’s principle message in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, he wrote this in light of calls to intervene in and increase regulations of the labor contracts between employers, employees, laborers, and farmers, and impose harsh controls, published in the new public graineries. Burke argued for government restraints. He thought that there was this order that emerged from the private contractual arrangements and interactions between farmers and laborers in the grain economy. And particularly in times of scarcity, he was very suspicious of the idea that government meddling, suppress controls, wage regulations, coopered to more beneficial consequences than if the grain trade was left to its own order. Now, this sounds like, and it is, a defense of a free market, a free domestic market. Throughout the book, I decided that this was, for Burkes, the most comprehensive intellectual statement on the internal grain trade. He defended the internal grain trade a number of other instances in the early 1770s and later in 1787, when they were tends to revive bans on, what we today call, middlemen trading activities, forestalling, rebranding and engrossing, which were various ways in which traders would buy up provisions before the edge of the market, and then we sell them at a higher price. So in these various instances, including in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity work issued a robust defense of the middlemen in the grain economy or enabling the efficient distribution of resources, particularly those in need. And the other additional point is that Burke anticipated as it’s described in the book, as a Hayek insight into the limits of rationality in coordinating complex socioeconomic activities. In Thoughts and Details on Scarcity Richard Reinsch (11:55): So, in this period, that he’s writing the Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, you’ve got a crisis, we’ve got food shortages, we’ve got spikes in prices, we’ve got people not making enough money, it seems. You’ve got all of these conditions. We confront those periodically in our own economy in different ways. And he’s pushing back against this… And from what I could read, in a way that Hayek would agree with, that Milton Friedman would largely agree with, he’s emphasizing that in a time of scarcity of seemingly economic failure. And he’s confronting proposals like a minimum wage. As I think about it, they wanted to have the government take over granaries. So you could think about a public option for health care, as an analogy, there’s this desire to eliminate, as you were talking about middlemen, but those are just people who are making money, but they’re also providing an efficient way for grain to reach down-market buyers. And this is an efficiency thing. So he’s confronting all of this, and he’s saying, “Look, you’re actually going to make the situation worse. You’re going to depress the market for longer conditions. The recovery is going to take longer. It’s going to be less robust, but we’re not going to know what the real prices are.” So, all of these provisions are going to backfire,” as we say. “They will have unintended consequences.” And I thought that maybe you can tell us how successful he was in this debate. But I thought that was incredibly instructive. These things continue. These battles over market failure, not taking into account government failure, policy failure. All of this Burke is confronting here in a nice instructive way. Gregory Collins (13:32): Yes, this moment in the 1790s was the defining moment in England’s global economy, including its grain economy in the 18th century, really emerging for the more conspicuous presence, when Burke entered parliament, in 1760s. There were these periods in which there were food shortages, spikes in grain prices, instability in the grain market. And this was a constant subject of Burke’s concern of legislators concern about the time period. As exemplified in 1772, I should mention, when Burke led the repeal of the bans on middlemen trading activities, which were enforced… Not really enforced, but they’re still on the books. Edmund Burke or the repeal and parliament of these bans on the basis of what you just said, that these regulations tend to create conditions that were even worse for participants in the agriculture economy, when back in Burke’s judgment, they actually facilitated smooth efficiency of the distribution of goods and services. Burke provided a thinking, comprehensive rebuke of what he called the paper money despotism of the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries, they seized the property of the Gallican Church, which owned around one 10th of landmass, I believe, in France, at that time. They were going to sell the church property to help pay down France’s debt. They have a financial calamity and short France’s finances. In fact, last semester I taught a course on constitutional and business ethics. And antitrust cases, Standard Oil cases, it referenced this repeal of middleman trade activities. It didn’t mention Burke’s name, but it mentioned this repeal in the early 1770s, as an example of which the English grew to realize that these bans actually tended to help the operation of economic forces in the long run, as opposed to undermine them. And so Burke had an immediate impact on this debate. This is when Burke’s free markets really come out, and it could easily s…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
