1 Economics, Politics, and Religion Scientific thought is a development of pre-scientific thought. --Albert Einstein Economic ideas are always and intimately a product of their own time and place. --John Kenneth Galbraith Seventeen seventy-six was a year of momentous events, not just in retrospect but in the eyes of those who lived through them. To Americans, the date speaks for itself: in January, Thomas Paine's stirring call to arms, Common Sense, followed at the end of the year by The American Crisis ("These are the times that try men's souls. . . ."); in March, the British driven out of Boston by Washington's army of raw recruits; and, to immortal effect, the new nation's Declaration of Independence on July 4. Nor were the year's significant events limited to the Revolution, or even to the thirteen small colonies hugging the continent's eastern shore. Three thousand miles away, in what is now California, a new structure arose on a bay of the Pacific Ocean. It became San Francisco's Presidio. Across the Atlantic, in Britain's lively world of ideas and letters, 1776 likewise saw a series of memorable events. In February, Edward Gibbon, a Member of Parliament, published the first volume of his monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The work eventually ran to six volumes, and it remains today one of the most familiar histories in the English language--a saucy account of ancient Rome's descent into decadence and corruption that many of Gibbon's readers took to be a commentary on Britain in their own day. In August, following a long illness, David Hume died at home in Edinburgh. Hume's contemporaries regarded him as the most stellar figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Their judgment has endured. In the meanwhile, in March, Hume's closest friend and intellectual protégé, another Scot, had published a book of his own. Adam Smith was never as prolific as his friend and mentor. At age fifty-two, he had produced only his second book. But The Wealth of Nations would prove one of the most influential works of all time, shaping Western ideas as well as the conduct of everyday life ever since. Its importance was evident almost immediately. By the time Smith died, fourteen years later, it had already gone through five editions in English plus translations into German, French, Danish, and Italian. Within another dozen years editions in Dutch, Spanish (delayed until then by opposition from the Inquisition), Swedish, and Russian had followed. The Wealth of Nations marked a fundamental ground shift in thinking about what underlies economic behavior, what consequences follow from it, and how governments might therefore act to foster the prosperity of their peoples and the vitality of their nations. Like a very few before him, Smith understood that private initiative, undertaken for no reason other than to advance a person's own economic interest, can nonetheless end up making other people better off too. His crucial insight was that the setting in which such beneficial consequences would follow was the market economy, and that the mechanism that delivered this outcome was competition. In time, following the publication of Smith's pivotal contribution, centuries of top-down direction of economic activity gave way to more individually propelled, competitive enterprise. Where it did not--the Soviet Union, for example, or Maoist China--those in power either altered course or were swept away. The few remaining holdouts, like Cuba and North Korea, stand as symbols of human tragedies that did not have to be. But where did Smith's ideas, and those of his immediate predecessors on which he drew, come from? Why did this all-important transition in thinking about such a central aspect of human activity take place mostly over the course of the eighteenth century, rather than a hundred years before or after? What change in the intellectual soil, or in the broader currents shaping the creative air that they breathed and through which they talked to one another, prompted Hume and Smith and many of their contemporaries to think in this new, so powerfully influential direction? One element of the story, widely understood and well documented, was Newtonian science with its emphasis on systematic laws of physical behavior and the mechanisms that stand behind them. A large part of David Hume's agenda, and Adam Smith's as well, was to construct a science of man comparable to what Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and other great scientists not so long before had achieved for the physical world. By Hume's and Smith's time Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687, had become part of the common intellectual property of educated men in both England and Scotland. Its influence was pervasive. By contrast, in his Treatise of Human Nature, written when Smith was still an undergraduate, Hume observed that studies of human behavior remained in the same condition as astronomy found itself before the time of Copernicus. A second powerful influence--much less understood, and mostly overlooked--was religious thinking. There were actually two transitions in thinking that culminated in the latter half of the eighteenth century. One, which we rightly associate with Adam Smith, was in economic thinking. The other was in the religious thinking of the English-speaking Protestant world. The movement away from the orthodox Calvinist doctrines that had dominated both English and Scottish religious life since the Reformation brought new ideas about human nature, about the purpose of men and women's lives on earth, and about their destiny after their mortal lives end. At the heart of this new thinking was a more expansive concept of human agency than under strict Calvinist precepts, implying a more optimistic view of the possibilities for the choices made and the actions taken by everyday people. At the same time, long-standing debates about the ultimate fate not just of individual men and women but the world as a whole also took new forms. By the time Smith and Hume reached adulthood, both theologians and ordinary clergymen preaching from their pulpits thought differently about these questions than they had a century before. Moreover, the fact that these new lines of religious thinking were inevitably controversial, and highly contended, made them all the more salient to thoughtful contemporaries not in the clergy. The coincidence in timing was not mere happenstance. The influence of the change in religious thinking on the Western world's crucial break in economic thinking was profound, and it has proved lasting. Not just the Smithian revolution of the eighteenth century, but the course of Western economic ideas ever since has reflected the continuing influence of the fundamental changes in religious thinking that were still in progress during Hume's and Smith's time. Especially in the United States, this influence is readily visible today in the country's ongoing public debate over economic policy. But why, and how, could changes in religious thinking have altered the trajectory of ideas in a realm as seemingly removed as economics? The creators of modern economics were not religiously dedicated men, nor did they seek to bring their personal theological orientation to bear on their secular thinking. Hume was an outspoken agnostic--many thought him an atheist--openly scornful of all forms of organized religion. His friend William Robertson, a prominent Scottish churchman, referred to him as "that virtuous Heathen." Smith kept his beliefs about religious matters to himself; but there is no evidence, in his writings or his known behavior, of any genuinely deep commitment. The answers must lie elsewhere. Albert Einstein, writing in 1918--three years before he won the Nobel Prize, but after he had published his theory of general relativity--set down his thoughts on how research scientists come up with their ideas. Einstein chose not to limit himself to scientists, however, because in this regard he saw them as no different from creative, thinking human beings more generally. The greatest need, he thought, was some way to see through complexity. To do so requires a simplifying mechanism, a ready reference framework that skips over distracting details to highlight what is important. "Man seeks to form for himself," Einstein wrote, "in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and easy-to-survey image of the world and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way." Einstein's notion of an image of the world--another translation from Einstein's German would be a "worldview"--that shapes an individual's thinking, especially at the frontier at which creativity confronts reality, has appealed to others as well. Erik Erikson, the psychologist who probed the depths of human motivation in his biographies of Gandhi and Martin Luther, referred to a person's "all-inclusive conception" of the world, or of life, or reality, in whatever respect matters most for the challenges to be faced. Gerald Holton, a historian of science and himself the leading late-twentieth-century authority on Einstein's thought, called it a "thematic presupposition." Importantly, the image of the world that shapes a person's creative thinking is often not that person's alone. Holton interpreted it as, more likely, a commonly shared aspect of the era in which someone lives. What matters is the thinker's cultural roots, the "milieu in which he and his fellow scientists grew up," the "internal architecture of a person or a period." Something about a particular time, or a place, or even a period of time in a particular place, pervasively influences the thinking of many people who inhabit it. In the same vein, Robert Merton, the historian of science who famously explored the intellectual atmosphere in which the English in the mid-seventeenth century founded the Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific institution in existence today and still one of the most distinguished, referred to the "cultural soil" that encourages new ideas to emerge, and then either flourish or not. Closer to the social sciences, the political theorist Eric Nelson described what matters for powerful new thinking as the "organizing assumptions" through which a person interprets the world. The consequence of these background beliefs is that a person acquires "habits of mind," a whole unseen mental world of meanings and associations. The idea of a shared worldview, common to a time and a place, is not particular to the sciences. Anticipating Einstein by three-quarters of a century, but emphasizing the origins of such a worldview outside one's self, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that any writer "needs a basis which he cannot supply: a tough chaos-deep soil," which the popular mind of the day supplies. The ideas of the time are "in the air," Emerson believed; they "infect all who breathe it." We absorb them "almost through the pores of our skin." They constitute the "spirit of the hour." Closer to Einstein's time, the British economist Alfred Marshall referred to "mysteries"--he had in mind industrial skills, but the idea applies much more broadly--that "become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously." In the same vein, the early-twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead spoke of assumptions that become so obvious that "people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them." Why might someone's worldview in this sense matter for the development of scientific ideas? Returning to the subject more than a decade later, Einstein was straightforward: scientific thinking does not emerge on its own. Thinking about scientific questions and thinking about other aspects of life, or the world around us, are intimately connected. In another of Gerald Holton's illuminating metaphors, "subterranean connections" provide a bridge connecting the humanistic parts of culture--what the inhabitants of a particular place at a particular time have in common--and the scientific parts. The result is a "coherence" of different elements of the person's, or the age's, worldview. Moreover, as Einstein saw the relationship, the worldview comes first and scientific ideas follow from it: "Scientific thought is a development of pre-scientific thought." Coming from Einstein, with echoes by these twentieth-century historians of science, the idea of a central role for some worldview behind creative thinking conjures images of physicists contemplating the fundamental nature of matter and energy, or chemists or biologists at work in their research labs. As Holton summarized the argument, a scientist's theory is just one part of his or her more general world image. But in pointing also to painters and poets and philosophers, Einstein made clear that in his view any line of creative thinking necessarily follows from, and is therefore coherent with, the worldview that underlies it. Emerson thought the same principle applied to writers, and Whitehead believed it applied to philosophers. There is no reason economics should be different. No doubt the idea will offend some economists. Economics, in many current-day practitioners' view, straightforwardly traces out the implications of theoretical assumptions and observed evidence, in whatever combination is apt for the question at hand. The cultural soil in which the economist has grown up, or his or her internal mental architecture, has nothing to do with the analysis put forward. Even less would Emerson's spirit of the hour. Anyone confronting the same evidence or making the same assumptions should think to carry out the same analysis, and therefore would arrive at the same conclusions. Most economists today understand that this idealized description is inaccurate. Individual researchers choose to work on one, or at most a few, among an astonishing variety of questions presented by the full range and diversity of modern economic life. More to the point, each chooses to frame whatever is the chosen question in a particular way. A researcher investigating any specific question picks one set of beginning assumptions, or another, or perhaps another (each consistent with some more basic underlying presumptions, like purposeful human behavior). What evidence to bring to bear, among all of the potentially relevant aspects of observable economic activity, is likewise a matter of choice. In short, economic analysis is a highly individualistic endeavor. There is no reason Einstein's insight should apply to economists any less than to physicists--or poets or painters. Paul Samuelson, one of the great economists of the twentieth century, certainly thought it did. "It is good advice," Samuelson wrote, "to always study the preconceptions of a science." He had in mind his own subject. Joseph Schumpeter, a twentieth-century economist who briefly served as finance minister of his native Austria following World War I and later taught for nearly two decades at Harvard, thought the relevance to economics was self-evident. Schumpeter took it as obvious that in order even to consider any question in a field like economics, we "first have to visualize a distinct set of coherent phenomena as a worth-while object of our analytic efforts." Whatever analysis we do, therefore, "is of necessity preceded by a preanalytic cognitive act that supplies the raw material for the analytic effort." Schumpeter's term for this preanalytic cognitive act was Vision (with a capital V). He meant by it what Einstein meant by a worldview. Excerpted from Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by Benjamin M. Friedman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
