The Old Libel

History students persist in some strange ideas about the economic past. Thomas S. Ashton, professor of economic history at the London School of Economics, has come to this conclusion from reading student examinations. Last week, in an essay called The Treatment of Capitalism by Historians? * Ashton told what some of these ideas are--and roundly denounced them as a tired old libel of the capitalist system.

First of all, Ashton says, "there is a shadow . . . cast by the grievances--real or alleged--of workingmen who lived and died a century ago. According to a large number of the scripts [examinations] which it has been my lot to read, the course of English history since about the year 1760 to the setting-up of the welfare state in 1945 was marked by little but toil and sweat and oppression."

Wrong Cue. Economic historians have too often taken their cue from the reports of royal commissions, completely disregarding the fact that the commissions were dealing "with social grievances, and not with normal processes of economic development." The picture they painted of early Victorian society "has become fixed in the minds of popular writers and is reproduced in my scripts." Yet, says Ashton, a careful study of these reports should have revealed another picture--that it was not in the factories, but "in the garret or cellar workshops that conditions were at their worst."

Though such conditions date back to the 18th century, few historians, Ashton maintains, have bothered to make the comparison. "It was so much easier to pick out the more sensational evidences of distress and work them into a dramatic story of exploitation . . . Conditions in the mills and the factory town were so bad, it seemed, that there must have been deterioration; and, since the supposed deterioration had taken place at a time when machinery had increased, the machines, and those who owned them, must have been responsible."

The romantics among the historians not only overestimated the happy state of pre-industrial man, but also the misery of the industrial city. Actually, says Ashton, the industrial epoch brought a substantial increase in wages, and if the workers were jammed together in rickety "jerry-built" houses, it was not the fault of the capitalists. "The typical builder was a man of small means, a bricklayer or a carpenter . . . The jerry-builders were not capitalists but workingmen."

Super Force. But of all the mistakes the historians have made, "it is the stress on the capitalist spirit that has, I think, done the most harm." From being merely a phrase, "it has become an impersonal, superhuman force." The historians talk about "the inevitable decomposition of capitalist society." This has "introduced a new mysticism into the recounting of plain facts. Things happen because capitalism requires them to happen--even, it may be added, to an end not yet reached." Concludes Ashton: "I do not want to see history written as though its function were to simply exhibit the gradualness of inevitability ... I believe . . . that it is from the spontaneous actions and choices of ordinary people that progress . . .springs . . . that the creative achievements of the state have been vastly overrated, and that in the words of Calvin Coolidge, 'where the people are the government they do not get rid of their burdens by attempting to unload them on the government.' Men are learning by bitter experience the truth of these words. I used to cherish the hope that the study of history might save us from having to learn that way."

: * Published in Capitalism and the Historians, edited by F. A. Hayek (University of Chicago Press; $3).

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