The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Pamela J. Brown, Constitution Or Competition? Alternative Views On Monetary Reform
• I: Economics & Political Economy
• Mises On Money & Inflation
• British Free Banking & Monetary Theory
• Smith As a Monetary Economist
• Monetarism & Economic Ideology
• Political Economy & Economic Science
• Political Economy, Politics, & Paradigm Shifts
• Schumpeter and Papal Social Theory
• Political Economy & Geology
• The Economic Theory of Property Rights
• II: Law & Philosophy
• Individual Rights Vs. Utilitarian Consequences
• Shifts In the Meaning of Property
• Balzac On Natural Law Vs. Corrupt Law
• Aquinas and Natural Rights
• Man's End, Society & State In Aquinas
• Natural Law & Professor Finnis' Book
• Professor Finnis Replies
• 19th-century Tort Law & Industry
• The Letter and the Spirit of Contract Law
• The Limited Liability Corporation
• Corporations & Transaction Costs
• Corporation Law & the Progressive Era
• The Bureau of Investigation: Political Spying
• The First Amendment: 1918–1928
• III: Social Theory
• Locke, ‘property’ & Natural Rights
• Harrington Vs. Hobbes On Politics
• Jeffersonian Optimism Vs. Country Pessimism
• Rival Notions of Republicanism
• Charles A. Beard: Power Vs. Authority
• Marxist Historiography & the French Revolution
• Mill On Class and Ideology
• Mill On a Principled Political Party
• Tocqueville: On Prisons & Modern Despotism
• Harriet Martineau's Social Thought

III

Social Theory

The following set of summaries surveys a variety of topics pertinent to the liberal tradition, ranging from John Locke's 17th-century radical defense of property and individual rights (see the Richards-Mulligan-Graham opening summary) to Harriet Martineau's sociological thought. Other liberal social theorists covered include: Jefferson, Fisher Ames, John Stuart Mill, and Tocqueville. The second summary tellingly distinguishes James Harrington's political methodology from the geometric scientism of Thomas Hobbes. Harrington's liberal republican intellectual progeny (the “Neo-Harringtonians”) were the focus of a summary in the Summer 1982 Literature of Liberty, p. 87–88.

Locke, ‘Property’ & Natural Rights

Judith Richards, Lotte Mulligan, and John K. Graham

• La Trobe University, Melbourne

“‘Property’ and ‘People’: Political Usages of Locke and Some Contemporaries.” Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (Jan.–March 1981): 29–51.

The authors apply Quentin Skinner's and other new historians' methodology of the history of ideas to recover the linguistic context in which John Locke (1632–1704) began writing his Two Treatises of Government. Comparing Locke's use of property with his contemporaries', they conclude that his unique understanding of property led to a radically inclusive and democratic sense of who were the people endowed with full rights of participating in civil society.

Locke emerges as a far more radical theorist of universal popular rights than his fellow Whiggish republican authors of the Exclusion Crisis period (1679–1681): Algernon Sidney, James Tyrrell, and Henry Neville. Locke's radical commitment to universal natural rights and the “view that politics was indeed but a branch of moral philosophy” accounts for the relatively indifferent response to the Two Treatises in the years after their publication. The Tories' conservative and hostile silence is understandable. The Whigs, in turn, were embarassed by Locke's more radical pressing of the very principles of property and rights that they nominally supported; Locke, however, “echoed too much of the language and principles of the other Whigs easily to be repudiated by them.”

The Exclusion Crisis republicans reached back to the still living memory of the arguments over property, popular rights, and resistance to authority that were forged during the debates of the Civil War period (which involved such a mutual friend of Neville, Tyrrell, and Shaftesbury as the onetime Leveller, John Wildman). Locke and his three fellow republicans politically appealed to property as the anti-monarchical origin of civil society, but they understood property in widely divergent ways. Political society arose to defend the people's right to their property and, therefore, property limited the sovereign's power and the people's obligation to obey edicts which endangered their property. “The concept of the natural rights of all, and the property rights of some, had been one way of arguing that political power came from the people. These writers turned again to the argument that property-ownership predated civil society as a means of describing the stake that men had in society.”

Among these republicans Locke was the most radical in his widening the definition of property—like the Levellers—to mean property in each man's person (self-propriety) as well as land ownership.

Locke's widened definition of property as self-propriety tended to include all men in “the joint communal purposes of society—the protection of property.” Locke unobtrusively implied that all men had a claim to an active political voice, not merely those who owned property in the narrow sense of land ownership (and were thus economically independent in the Harringtonian sense).

Locke's distinctiveness from Sidney, Tyrrell, and Neville—who pragmatically restricted the franchise to those who met real estate qualifications—was “his consistent position that all men had a positive political interest through their non-material possessions, their self-propriety, and their natural rights.” Locke's moral absolutism in basing human rights in natural law led him to advance far beyond his fellow Whigs who generally preferred after 1688 a more narrow and status-quo interpretation of conventional property rights and a limited franchise.

Harrington vs. Hobbes on Politics

James Cotton

• University of Newcastle upon Tyne

“James Harrington and Thomas Hobbes.” Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (July–September 1981): 407–422.

James Harrington (1611–1677), English republican author of Oceana (1656), has been seen as borrowing heavily from Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), but whatever Harrington borrowed he stamped with his own personality which distinguishes him from Hobbes on many issues. Harrington, in fact, criticized Hobbes for conflating certain classical distinctions (for example, that between a government of laws and of men) and for attempting to discover ultimate political principles outside of history. As a republican, Harrington believed in a government of laws, not men, for he believed that government should be limited by a covenant, as in the Roman Republic. Like Hobbes, Harrington maintained that governments founded on riches may have power; unlike Hobbes, however, he believed that only governments founded on virtue have authority.

Harrington differed from Hobbes also on religion and human nature. In arguing for a popular, public, civic religion, Harrington was arguing against the possibility of using the allegedly monarchic character of religion to support a monarchic politics. Hobbes was far more ambiguous on religion. Also, Hobbes saw human nature as conflictful because of warring passions which were determined by external objects. By contrast, Harrington saw human nature engaged in a moral conflict between reason and passion, where reason ought to triumph. As a result, Harrington's perfect utopia, the commonwealth of Oceana, is one where reason triumphs in the lives of rulers and ruled.

Finally, Harrington's political methodology follows the model not of geometric science (like Hobbes), but of comparative human anatomy (as practiced by Harvey). Harrington engaged in a comparative political anatomy, which surveyed all the relevant types of government in order to ascertain an ideal commonwealth.

Jeffersonian Optimism vs. Country Pessimism

Joyce Appleby

• University of California (Los Angeles)

“What Is Still American in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (2) (April 1982): 287–309.

A great deal of scholarly effort has recently gone into construing the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and his followers as an American version of the English Country Party. This new interpretation rests on the foundation laid in Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. For Bailyn, however, the Revolution was an event which transformed traditional British concepts in the American colonies and gave them a distinctly American cast. The scholarship of the last ten years has, on the other hand, tended to delay this Americanization of politics more than thirty years. Thus, the celebrated clashes between Alexander Hamilton and Jefferson have been reinterpreted as a transatlantic replay of the battle between the great Court politician Robert Walpole and his Country opponent, Henry St. John Bolingbroke. Some historians have even pushed the continuation of classical politics in America back to 1815. Reacting against this trend, Prof. Appleby's article stresses the numerous sharp divergences between Jeffersonian thought and the agrarian conservatism implicit in classical republican (“Country”) principles.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference between Jefferson and the Country view lay in their divergent concepts of human nature. Country philosophy embraced the model of the eternal Adam with his penchant toward evil. Against this creature of dark passion, the forces of freedom and order had constantly to be on guard. The difficulty of guarding against him, of course, was that he existed in all of us. Jefferson, on the other hand, had adopted a conception of human nature that emphasized its benign potential.

Whereas traditional thinkers traced social evils back to wayward human propensities, Jefferson reversed the terms of this equation and ascribed man's lowly state to repressive institutions. The environment might create either vice or virtue. The innate qualities of man however held out great promise for the cause of virtue. The purpose of government was thus not to increase its power to check the power of the populace, but rather to ensure conditions for liberating man's self-actualizing capacities. Because of this positive view of human nature, Jefferson does not evidence the all-pervasive fear of the “mob” demonstrated by Country thinkers. As a result, he could write to Abigail Adams that his followers feared the ignorance of the people less than the selfishness of their rulers.

Jefferson reversed the priorities implicit in the classical tradition on another basic political question. For him, the private had primacy over the public. Country philosophy had regarded the public arena as the locus where men rose above self-interest to serve the common good. Jefferson, on the contrary, wanted government to offer protection to the personal realm, so that men might freely exercise their beneficent faculties.

In addition, Jefferson did not share the classical fear of “luxury” and its corrosive effect on republican virtue. On the contrary, he extolled his nation's enormous potential for plenty. In his writings, he described the enlightenment which would result from a populace comprised of comfortable, well-fed landowners, contrasting them with impoverished, ignorant masses of many European countries.

Finally, Jefferson dismissed Country-minded distrust of the large republic. Far from considering expansion as a danger to freedom, he encouraged it—provided that it was founded “not on conquest, but in principles of compact and equality.” Jefferson's optimism led him to believe that an enduring republic was “built much on the enlargement of the resources of life, going hand in hand with the enlargement of territory, and the belief that men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them.” This ebullient expression of hope helps us to judge how far Jefferson the American had moved from the crabbed pessimism and distrust of the British Country tradition.

Rival Notions of Republicanism

John W. Malsberger

• Dept. of History, Muhlenberg College

“The Political Thought of Fisher Ames.” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (Spring 1982): 1–20.

Fisher Ames (1758–1808), a Federalist representative from Dedham, Massachusetts in the first four Congresses, is mistakenly viewed as a paranoid conservative zealot. Ames' vitriolic anti-populism was rather an expression of “his political ideology which more closely resembled seventeenth century classical republicanism than the definition of republicanism which emerged in America following the Revolution.”

On several critical issues, including his pessimistic view of mankind's depraved nature, the chaotic condition of the pre-civil state of nature, and his insistence on a strong, centralized, and paternalistic government, Ames' political thinking differed from his chief enemies, the Jeffersonian Republicans. Growing increasingly pessimistic with the successes of Jefferson's version of populist republicanism, Ames feared for the survival of constitutional government. “In essence, then, Fisher Ames was a classical republican theorist attempting to deal with a political system which was no longer based on those ideals.”

The post-Revolutionary period witnessed the subtle transformation of Ames' classical republican ideal of a “mixed constitution” made up of a balance of social groups or estates (monarchical, oligarchic, and popular) into a predominantly democratic separation of governmental powers. This shocked such classical republicans as Ames who feared the undisciplined people as a mobocracy and who insisted on the rule of “virtue” through a “natural aristocracy” and powerful, paternalistic government.

Believing in the idea that liberty could be secured only by such a vigilant central government, Ames was baffled by the contrary Jeffersonian republican ideology which believed that individual liberty grew as government declined. Ames' classical republicanism also differed from the Jeffersonian approval of multiple factions, an optimistic view of human nature, and democratic populism. Republicanism as Ames understood it in the classical sense did indeed decline during the early national years under the pressure of a more modern and pluralistic republicanism espoused by Jefferson and Madison.

Charles A. Beard: Power vs. Authority

John Patrick Diggins

• Department of History, University of California, Irvine

“Power and Authority in American History: The Case of Charles A. Beard and His Critics.” American Historical Review 86 (October 1981): 701–730.

Reassessing Charles A. Beard involves understanding that his basic concern was the problem of authority and that he believed that legitimate government ought to be based on moral “ideas” rather than on class “interests.” It was the divorce between power and authority that led Beard, in the Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) and elsewhere, to criticize the framers of the Constitution and the historians who uncritically accepted its foundations.

Contemporary critics charge that Beard's Economic Interpretation reads into the 18th century a conflict between property and liberty that does not exist in the Constitution. However, the meaning of both these concepts changed between the Declaration (1776) and the Constitution (1789). Madison and Hamilton defined “property” less as a natural right than as a “present possession.” “Liberty” had also shifted its meaning, no longer signifying the collective will of popular majorities, but rather something that needed to be safeguarded by the Constitution's mechanisms.

Beard was also charged with erring in interpreting the Constitution as a violation of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. However, the meaning of “authority” had shifted from 1776 to 1787, from grounding rights on nature and contract to grounding the Constitution on power and interests.

The neo-Whigs criticized Beard for neglecting the concepts of virtue, independence, and deference, upon which the 18th century based its defense of property. However, neither Madison nor Hamilton believed that the demands of property stimulate independence. These constitutional theorists rather believed that property brought one into a whole network of power relationships, and in this respect, Beard followed their lead.

Another charge against Beard is that he failed to understand that the Founders were acting on the basis of “ideas” rather than “interests.” However, the authors of the Federalist Papers did not regard principles and ideals as controlling man's passions; rather, they asserted that ideas could not compel man's mind unless such ideas reflected the interests men were inclined to obey. Economic interests were primary in providing the motive for political obedience. Most of Beard's critics inferred that the Constitution's “framers were men of ideas because they cited the works of European political thinkers, and intellectual historians assume that they can overcome Beard's dualisms [between ‘idea’ and ‘interest’ or ‘theory’ and ‘practice’] by employing the analytic methods of language philosophy—a dubious assumption that avoids the whole issue of causation.” Professor Diggins charges J.G.A. Pocock (as a representative of this linguistic and contextualist school) with substituting linguistic determism for Beard's alleged economic determinism and with confusing description, based on semiotics and structuralism, for explanation and causation. He promises a fuller discussion of this issue in a forth-coming History and Theory article, “The Oyster and the Pearl: The Problem of Contextualism in Intellectual History.”

Finally, Beard has been charged with an uncritical commitment to a theory of economic determinism, but this ignores the attention he devoted to the thoughts and lives of the individual Federalists and their opponents. It also ignores the sense in which Beard wanted to deny that the Constitution had to be a necessary “stage” in America's history.

Ultimately, Beard believed that in attempting to disperse power, the framers also destroyed authority. He therefore assumed that the interests of those exercising authority must contradict the interests of those being ruled. It is this assumption that Prof. Diggins believes we need to question, for how can the Constitution have survived if American society is not based, in large part, on consensus?

Marxist Historiography & the French Revolution

Joseph I. Shulim

• Brooklyn College, CUNY

“The Continuing Controversy over the Etiology and Nature of the French Revolution.” Canadian Journal of History 16 (December 1981): 357–378.

New historiographical information requires us to objectively appraise the traditional Marxist interpretation of the etiology of the French Revolution. Marxist historians agree in viewing the causation of the Revolution as materialist: the Manifesto claims that the Revolution represented the growth of capitalism and the triumph of “bourgeoisie” since the ancien régime's “feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed (bourgeois) productive forces.” The essential cause of the Revolution, in Marxist materialist terms, was the newly asserted power of bourgeois productive forces translating themselves into law and property. Marxists also claim that the Revolution was preceded during the century by an aristocratic reaction which reached its climax in 1787–1788, in what Mathiez called the “revolte nobiliaire.” In other words, the Revolution that followed 1788 opened the way to untrammeled capitalism by changing the juridical and political superstructure of France in favor of bourgeois class interest.

This Marxist interpretation is shown to be invalid by the research of the past several decades. Prof. Shulim presents in summary form the evidence and facts which, he claims, undermine the Marxist preconceived theory of dialectical materialism as a historical framework for the Revolution.

Economic evidence does not support any sudden change in the means of production and exchange in eighteenth-century France. Agricultural wealth predominated and there was no “Industrial Revolution” in whose wake some allegedly homogeneous bourgeois class came to power. Nor was there any homogeneous antagonist “social class” called the “nobility” which was defeated by the emergent bourgeois “class.” The heterogeneous noble order had interlocking economic interests with their alleged “class” enemies. For both “classes” proprietary wealth was the stepping stone to higher status and power. “There was, between most of the nobility and the proprietary sector of the middle classes, a continuity of investment forms and socio-economic values that made them, economically, a single group. In the relations of production they played a common role.”

Likewise, recent historical studies debunk as exaggerated myth an alleged “Aristrocratic Revolution” of 1787–1788. The nobles were not a single class, had many rivalries among their grades, and did not unite to prevent the rise of a middle class. On the contrary, the middle-class Third Estate found entry into the noble Second Estate relatively easy. “The social history of eighteenth-century France thus reveals in general not an aristocratic reaction but rather the victory of wealth.”

Shulim also critically assesses evidence of the lower classes and peasantry, a “feudal reaction,” and the nature and role of the Enlightenment. He notes that the philosophes did not spring from a single class or social group and that the “consumers of the Enlightenment” came from every stratum of educated society. Finally, the author calls into question the alleged capitalist attitudes and motivations of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary legislators. Even some leading Marxist historians, he claims, now admit that the “bourgoisie” did not mature by 1789.

Mill on Class and Ideology

Eileen P. Sullivan

• Department of Political Science, Columbia University

“A Note on the Importance of Class in the Political Theory of John Stuart Mill.” Political Theory 9 (May 1981): 248–256.

The standard view of Mill, and of liberals generally, is that they assign the crucial historical role to ideas and ideology rather than to class interests. Sullivan argues that Mill always recognizes the crucial importance of class in historical interpretation and that over time he develops an increasingly sophisticated position on the relationship between class and ideology. The author supports her argument by analyzing Mill's articles on the liberal parties in France and England through the decade of the 1830s when he was the chief correspondent on French politics for the English radical press.

“Mill always regards a socially and economically powerful middle class as the necessary base for a successful liberal party. Over the course of his studies, Mill is forced to clarify his definition of this middle class and to recognize that the consciousness or ideology of the middle class does not always follow from its objective class position and interests. He is forced to conclude that there are two independent preconditions of liberal party success: a powerful middle class which is also aware of itself and of its interests.”

Mill defines the middle class, unlike Marx, by the amount rather than the source of income. The liberal constituency possesses moderate wealth (whether industrial, landed, or commercial) as against both its class enemy, the wealthy ruling minority, and its potential class ally, the working class. In his early thought Mill imagined that ideology follows from class position, and he was accordingly more sanguine about a liberal political victory in France than in England. The conservative wealthy minority, however, triumphed in France in 1830 contrary to Mill's analysis.

To explain the middle class' political victories in England as opposed to that same class' defeat in France, Mill revised his position. He now contended that “despite its important social and economic position, the French middle class is not sufficiently class conscious, is not sufficiently aware of itself as a separate group with distinct interests.” By contrast, Mill traces the success of the English liberals to both the socioeconomic class power and the correct understanding (ideology) of their middle class constituency. Class ideology does not necessarily follow from class position, but depends also on the political traditions and institutions within which a class develops.

Mill on a Principled Political Party

Bruce L. Kinzer

• McMaster University

“J.S. Mill and the Problem of Party.” Journal of British Studies 21 (Fall 1981): 106–122.

It is misleading to regard John Stuart Mill's (1806–1873) attitude to political party as simply negative either because of his scanty references to party in his Representative Government or because of some of his hostile comments.’ In reality, Mill's hostility was not directed against the principle of party but rather against the existing unprincipled party system in England. He offered a moral ideal of party and dedicated his intellectual and political activity to this moral ideal's aim: “the improvement and elevation of the individual's aesthetic, ethical, and mental faculties. For Mill, all thought and public activity, whether of a philosophical, economic, or political character, was to be directed towards the single end of making man better than he was by facilitating the full development of his potentialities.”

Joseph Hamburger, in Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (1965), has discussed the centrality of party to Mill's political activity during the 1830s when he tried unsuccessfully to form a genuine Radical Party which would abolish aristocratic government and work for the democratization of British institutions and society. Mill held the idealized view that party should be the organized political expression of principled ideological commitment. As he argued in his important 1839 essay, “Reorganization of the Reform Party,” there should be two principled and antagonistic parties—a Conservative Party and a radicalized Liberal Party—which would function dialectically to best advance the respective claims of tradition and progress.

British national politics, involving Whigs and Tories, during the quarter-century after 1840 did not live up to Mill's ideal of principled parties. Mill was disillusioned by the pragmatic and unprincipled politics of Palmerton's ascendancy. Finally, in 1865, Mill found an opportunity to create an “advanced Liberalism” by holding high the ideal of an intellectually principled party when he entered parliament as a highly independent member for Westminster. With Palmerstone's death, Mill held out the hope that Gladstone might be the rallying figure to create and lead “an advanced Liberal Party” dedicated to democracy and reform. But Mill's commitment was not to the de facto Liberal Party or its leader; it was to principle. He saw the large electoral victory of the Liberals in 1868 as just a “seeming victory” since Gladstone did not appoint to prominent positions any advanced Liberals.

Mill's ideal of a reform party subtly shifted, because of political circumstances, from 1839 to the late 1860s. His earlier “Reorganization of the Reform Party,” had claimed the motto of a Radical politician should be “Government by means of the middle class for the working classes.” Seeking a Liberal Party alliance to redress the practical grievances of the working classes in the 1860s, Mill now sought “government by the middle and working classes for the nation.” Meaningful political participation of the working classes would provide civic education and competence for their untested human potential.

Tocqueville: On Prisons & Modern Despotism

Roger Boesche

• Occidental College

“The Prison: Tocqueville's Model for Despotism.” The Western Political Quarterly 33 (December 1980): 550–563.

Alexis de Tocqueville's (1805–1859) idea of political despotism becomes clearer when we compare it to Tocqueville's (and Beaumont's) long ignored writings on Pennsylvania's prison system, a system he labeled “the most complete despotism.”

The ostensible reason that Tocqueville and Beaumont voyaged to the United States in 1831 was to study prisons. Upon returning to France, Tocqueville undertook Democracy in America only after he and Beaumont had written a book detailing prison reforms in the United States: On the Penitentiary System of the United States and Its Applications in France. Few critics have related this book on prisons to Tocqueville's political thinking, yet it might have as much to say as Democracy in America and the Old Regime, both of which works harbored the fear that modern democracy contains a tendency to a qualitatively and historically new kind of despotism, a despotism for which the Pennsylvania prison might serve as a prototype.

“Early in his political career, Tocqueville emerged as a sometimes passionate advocate of the prison reforms enacted by the Quakers in Pennsylvania in the 1820s and 1830s. Reformers during these decades in the United States attempted to solve the problems of insanity, poverty, and crime through incarceration—in the asylum, the poor-house, and the prison—isolating the recalcitrant and teaching industrial discipline to the able-bodied. The Pennsylvania prison system, embraced both by Tocqueville and the Quaker reformers, astonishes our twentieth century sensibilities, an astonishment mitigated only slightly when we grasp that these reformers genuinely believe that a thorough going rehabilitation and reform of many (certainly not all) prisoners was possible. The pivot on which this reform of the prisoners turned was thought to lie, strange as it seems, in the architecture of the prison, because the architecture alone made possible the one indispensable ingredient: the absolute isolation of the prisoner. The Quaker theory of prison reform can be summarized quite quickly: each prisoner was to be placed in solitary confinement, each would then experience tremendous anxiety and remorse, each would attempt to divert thoughts of despair by hard work, eventually each prisoner's anxiety would lead him to welcome the visits and conversation of priests and outstanding citizens, and finally the sheer force of isolation and anxiety would lead the prisoner to alter his ideas, habits and instincts—and the rehabilitation would be complete.”

The prison's predominant characteristics were a rigid isolation of prisoners, strict equality, productive labor, and the complete privatization of life. Tocqueville suggests that by using the terror created by this system, especially the despair generated by solitary confinement, the prison often succeeded in reshaping the prisoner's mind and reforming his very “instincts.” In a strikingly parallel fashion, Tocqueville chooses the same characteristics to depict the emerging political despotism. The new despotism, too, will rely on isolation, equality, an obsession with the private production and consumption of goods, the eclipse of public life, and the loss of a meaningful future—all of which will render men passive, dominated by a centralized government and a suffocating majority opinion.

Harriet Martineau's Social Thought

Paul L. Riedesel

“Who Was Harriet Martineau?” Journal of the History of Sociology 3 (Spring 1981): 63–78.

At one time more popular than Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) deserves reconsideration as possibly the first woman sociologist whose social analysis of institutions resembled that of the recognized precursors of modern sociology. Riedesel gives an overview of Martineau's life and writings; argues that key elements of sociological perspective (naturalism, empiricism, and objectivity) were evident in her thinking; and concludes by outlining the specific sociological hypothesis found in her work.

Born into a Unitarian manufacturer's family in Norwich, England (a provincial center of Dissent), Harriet Martineau imbibed the Enlightenment faith in empiricism, and despite deafness and a scanty education developed her writing talents. She judged Unitarian Christianity as too metaphysical and looked to natural science for understanding. In 1831, she embarked upon a series of didactic stories to teach the principles of economics and won a huge commercial success with her Illustrations of Political Economy (a popularization of James Mill's Elements of Political Economy). She next turned her impressions of a two-year visit to America (1834–1836), which included conversations with Emerson and Channing, into the popular three volume Society in America. Partly recovering from ill health in 1844 through mesmerism, she turned out a spate of writings which continuted after she became a recluse in the 1850s. In 1851 she began her well-received two-volume translation and abridgement of Auguste Comte's Cours de Philosophie Positive. Her Positive Philosophy (1853) was a tribute to Comte's “scientific” rather than “metaphysical” approach to the unification of knowledge.

Martineau's Positive Philosophy, Society in America, and Political Economy displayed naturalism, empiricism, and objectivity—three components of a sociological perspective. The world she inhabited was truly “disenchanted,” a naturalistic order governed by impersonal laws which fashioned institutions. She fused together Unitarian necessitarian doctrine with David Hartley's (1705–1757) early version of mechanistic behaviorism, which she learned from Joseph Priestley's edition of Hartley. Empiricism as opposed to idealism seemed to Martineau a sounder basis for science and progress in the social sciences. Finally, her Society in America evidences a sustained effort at objectivity in judging a foreign country by non-arbitrary standards.

Among the elements and themes of applied sociological analysis found in Martineau's works are: community, cultural integrity, structural sources of social action, and stratification. In regard to this last element, she rejected Marx's ridicule of orthodox political economy's view of society and social classes.

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