Political Culture and Political Economy: Interest, Ideology and Free Trade

Author(s): Frank Trentmann

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 217-251
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Review of International Political Economy 5:2 Summer 1998: 217-251
Political culture and political economy:
interest, ideology and free trade
Frank Trentmann
Department of History, Princeton University
ABSTRACT
This article explores the significance of ideas, values and collective repre-
sentations in shaping political economy by examining the case of free trade
in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Its aim is to tie a historical
perspective on the importance of political culture to the current method-
ological debate about political economy in the social sciences. The opening
critique of sectoral approaches is used to move the focus from material
interests and economistic method to cultural significance and the inter-
pretative framework underlying free trade. Shifting the attention to the
knowledge of historical actors themselves reveals the formative role of
ideology, historical memory and political language in constructing free
trade as a collective good. Free trade was associated with a historical vision
of national identity and societal self-development, and a moral ideal of
the consumer, rather than with free market capitalism. The discussion
concludes with some general thoughts on the importance of giving greater
attention to political culture in the study of political economy.
KEYWORDS
Political culture; political economy; free trade; ideology; interest; British
liberalism; radicalism.
Political economy
-
from its birth, the concept has been caught in tension
between its two component worlds. Whereas the 'classical' liberal para-
digm understood it as the science of economic laws of production and
distribution, radical and socialist critiques have argued for the socio-
political bases of economic systems. Politics of economy or economics of
politics? Between these rival traditions, trade has been a prominent bone
of contention. The recent struggle over GATT and NAFTA has generated
a fresh hothouse effect for the industry of trade policy studies.' At the
same time, 'new political economy' has emerged, challenging the ortho-
dox methodological divide between state and market, and its focus on
trade.2 Attention has shifted, on the one hand, to the transformation of
international relations and the influence of non-state international actors
?
1998 Routledge 0969-2290
ARTICLES
and transnational flows of capital, technology and knowledge. On the
other, revisionists have exposed the normative binary structures of
gender, progress and underdevelopment. This article is designed to con-
tribute to this ongoing debate by adding a historical perspective on the
cultural foundations of a subject central to political economy: free trade.
Free trade occupies a privileged position in liberal schools of political
economy. For economists it is a theory of welfare optimization: societies
specialize where they are most efficient according to comparative advan-
tage. For realist scholars it plays a central role in international relations,
expressed in concepts of hegemony. For public choice analysts, it informs
both the methodological application of economics to politics and the
political programme for eliminating the wasteful 'rent-seeking' activities
of producer interests. Inevitably, discussion of present models and future
policy has tumed to 'lessons of the past'. This has not been an unprob-
lematic exercise, for free trade appears simultaneously as both historical
subject and analytical method.
The aim of this article is to enter the debate about method from a
historical inquiry into the relationship between political economy and
political culture in free trade Britain. Free trade had been the pillar of
British political economy since the repeal of the Com Laws in 1846 and
withstood the international drift towards neo-mercantilism in the late
nineteenth century. Joseph Chamberlain's tariff reform crusade in 1903
put the future of free trade once again at the centre of British politics.
The ensuing 'fiscal controversy' culminated in the 1906 election, at which
the protectionist programme of imperial preference and a small duty on
foreign corn (2 shillings per cwt) and manufactures (10 per cent) was
decisively defeated and the survival of free trade secured. This article
takes the fiscal controversy as its starting point, using it in Section I to
problematize economistic arguments that explain trade regimes exoge-
nously, that is, by the location of trades or sectors in the world economy.
This general critique is illustrated through a discussion of the historical
and conceptual limits of a recent sectoral analysis of the 1906 election.
The discussion highlights two equally problematic dichotomies under-
lying conventional approaches to free trade: between state and market,
and between ideas and interests. In contrast to the universalist method-
ology of individualist rational agents or emphasis on cosmopolitan
interests, Section II outlines an alternative historical perspective, focusing
on the collective and ideological dimension in political economy. Section
III explores the political ideas, values and discourse that shaped group
interests and identities in the British debate about free trade. This
involves two related shifts in analysis: one from an exogenous to an
endogenous plane, the other from questions of cui bono to those of
cultural significance. The power of free trade, it is argued, depended on
the ideological construction of 'the consumer', on national identity, and
218
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
on moral and civic virtues, not on individual self-interest or the logic
of the free market. The article concludes in Section IV with a discussion
of the place of ideas and political culture in the study of political
economy. Politics and economy, far from separate, emerge from this
interpretation as overlapping spheres held together by webs of cultural
meanings and practices, a perspective that, admittedly, lacks the parsi-
mony of economistic models but may shed new light on the changing
historical place of economic ideas in political life.
I HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL DEFICITS OF
SECTORAL ANALYSIS
Victorian Britain was the only society to embrace a pure, unilateral
system of free trade after the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846). That Britain
did so naturally because of the prominence of export industries and the
City has long been a common notion.3 J. S. Mill maintained in 1868 that
'it would have been long before the Corn Laws would have been abol-
ished ... if those laws had not been contrary to the private interests of
nearly the whole of the manufacturing and mercantile classes'.4 Argu-
ments have come in stronger and weaker forms, invoking the power of
entire sectors or of smaller interest groups, trades and firms. In
hegemony arguments, for instance, the influence of the City has been
invoked to explain why Britain did not revise its internationalism in
response to relative decline after the 1880s.5 Public choice theorists have
presented the Anti-Corn Law League as a vehicle of the cotton industry,
seeking to abolish duties on its raw material and oppose factory reform.6
These different analyses share basic methodological problems. First,
the mode of argument often employs post hoc propter hoc reasoning:
because internationally oriented sectors benefit from free trade, a free
trade system reflects the power of these sectors. How economic inter-
ests translate into political power and popular movements is left vague.
Second, they cannot explain the specificity of policies, whether bilateral
and moderate free trade, as in the United States after the Second World
War, or unilateral and dogmatic 'Free Trade' in Victorian and Edwar-
dian Britain. The relationship between national economic structure and
tariff levels is left unspecified; Britain rejected a smaller dose of protec-
tion than that in force in more export-oriented countries like Denmark
or Switzerland.7 Today, the only genuine free trade country in the world
is land-locked Mongolia.8 This indeterminacy, finally, is mirrored at the
microeconomic level. The universalist assumptions of neo-classical
economics can tell us as little about the varied strategic behaviour of
firms and trades as about that of the varieties of capitalism, which are
conditioned by culture and institutions.9 References to a trade's general
interest do not explain the strategy chosen to attain it. If free trade does
219
ARTICLES
not serve their goals, export trades can turn to reciprocity, cartelization
or other forms of trade regulation.10
These problems are rooted in the methodological basis of economistic
argument. A strong illustration is offered by Douglas Irwin's recent
sectoral analysis of the 1906 election, 'The political economy of free
trade'.11 Irwin's model is predicated on methodological individualism.
Electoral behaviour is determined by self-seeking material interest alone.
It expresses an individual's sectoral position rather than ideology, social
position or cultural identity. In line with recent 'industry approaches',
this model presumes imperfect factor mobility, especially of labour.
In contrast to the classic Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model, which
assumed mobile factors of production, the decisive variable is a sector's
international location, not the relative abundance of capital or labour.
Irwin concludes that the election confirms the general thesis that 'all
factors employed in a given sector see their fate tied to the economic
fortunes of that sector. Consequently, voters would favour any policy
that increases the relative price of the output produced by the sector in
which they are employed.'12
To bring into focus the limits of the sectoral model for political econ-
omy, we will first examine historically its principal assumptions: sectoral
unity, economic knowledge and the deduction of political choice from
sectoral interest. Sectoral analysis hinges on two basic propositions:
united sectoral behaviour and labour support for protection in import-
competing sectors (and for free trade in export-oriented ones). Yet 'sectors'
have proved a problematic category for understanding protectionism in
Imperial Germany and the inter-war United States.13 In the British case,
the units used by Irwin, such as 'chemicals' or 'iron and steel', covered
such a variety of processes with different markets and import/export
ratios that any aggregate use is questionable.14 Few trades shared the
sectoral coherence of the cotton trade, which imported its raw material but
exported its manufacture, and overwhelmingly opposed tariffs. In many
industries the product of one trade is the input of another, and here firms
and their workers occupy different, often conflicting positions in inter-
national trade. Nor is the assumption of imperfect labour mobility
unproblematic. Seasonal labour and multiple occupations continued to be
widespread at the turn of the century. In Monmouthshire, for example,
three-quarters of field workers still worked also in the wood and mining
industries.15
These complexities are obscured in aggregate net export figures which,
according to sectoral reasoning, explain Liberal support from the iron
and steel, coal mining, engineering, shipbuilding, chemicals and woollen
trades.16 Yet in three of these
-
iron and steel, engineering and wool
-
owners, unlike their workers, had joined the growing chorus for fiscal
reform at the turn of the century.17 How shall we explain these opposite
220
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
trends among capital and labour? Did businessmen fail to understand
their sectors' 'real' interests?
The turn from unilateral free trade to reciprocity in sections of the busi-
ness community illuminates the danger of inferring a politico-economic
position from an export/import ratio. Rather, the crucial variable was
businessmen's perception of a changing international position and of the
best strategy to preserve competitiveness. Surrounded by new mercan-
tilist barriers and deprived of the lever of tariff bargaining, the woollen
trades - still exporting three times more than imports - called for retali-
ation to halt the closure of foreign markets.18 Other trades were deeply
divided about the nature of their interest. The tinplate industry was split
on how to respond to the loss of their principal US market after the
McKinley tariff. Steel-tinplate makers favoured tariffs. Smaller makers,
however, believed free trade guaranteed their autonomy by preserving a
range of alternative supplies of cheap steel.19 The absence of a united
trade profile extended to Chamberlain's Tariff Commission.20 Even in
the City of London, the heart of Britain's cosmopolitan power, a neo-
mercantilist mood was rising. The City had been divided during the
earlier movement to free trade. Now in 1903, the leading stockbroker
Faithfull Begg warned that
[j]ust in proportion as Great Britain built up the prosperity of
foreign nations under a system which gave equal advantages in
her markets, so she was creating a race of commercial rivals, who,
when the time came, would be attacking her with their ships and
destroying her commerce.21
Fiscal reform would benefit capital interests where unilateralism had
failed, a conclusion which commanded a majority in the London
Chamber of Commerce in a poll in 1907. These divisions undermine not
only notions of sectoral unity but also the picture of a united capital-
labour alliance for free trade in capital- and labour-abundant economies
(like Victorian Britain) painted in studies based on the Stolper-
Samuelson theorem.22
Labour's place in the political economy of trade conflicts with the
second sectoral assumption: the correlation between import competition
and protectionism. The Labour Party and trade unions rejected protec-
tion outright in 1903, in spite of cyclical depression and unemployment.
Can two million workers be 'wrong'? Opposition rallied together export
trades, like cotton and shipping, with those facing import competition,
like fine chemicals and the heavy sections of the iron and steel industry.
Support for protection was limited to a few marginal trades, like flint
glass making.23 Labour did not support tariffs in a single major trade
until the late 1920s; then, interestingly, support came first from the
woollen industry, which was still exporting four times the amount it
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imported.24 Even in agriculture, protection failed to win over workers.
In fact, the Liberal triumph in 1906 was most pronounced in pre-
eminently arable, import-competing rural areas like the south-east.25
The divisions within trades highlight the sociological deficit in the
sectoral approach. The hypothesis that capital and labour equate their
interests with their sector's does not take into account the asymmetry
underlying capitalist society. Modem industry is not an association of
free producers. The exchange of wage for labour places workers and
entrepreneurs in unequal positions. This makes for different associa-
tional practices.26 It also provides social groups with uneven knowledge
for collective action.
It is a long way from the world market to the local polling booth.
Vertical and horizontal divisions of labour deprive actors of the knowl-
edge necessary to make a uniform assessment of trade policy and its
effects on their work, firm or sector. They are separated not merely from
the end product of their labour, but also from information about origin
of input, destination of output, profit and productivity. Workers re-
rolling steel do not necessarily know whether the firm's ingots come
from South Wales or Westphalia, or whether their labour ends up in a
bridge across the Thames or the Hudson. All this, of course, raises
general questions about exogenous perspectives, which presume indi-
viduals' knowledge of the complex present and future state of markets
and its automatic translation into personal interests and political strat-
egies. Capitalism might be said to be no more prone to generate sectoral
unity than class unity. In the absence of transparency, protectionist entre-
preneurs tried to shape their workers' economic knowledge through
educational campaigns or later, more crudely, by exhibiting foreign
articles on the shopfloor.27
The conceptual and empirical problems involved in a sectoral expla-
nation of free trade are connected to a deductive treatment of politics.
To test the sectoral model, Irwin reconstructs the election into 'a case
of direct democratic voting on trade policy'.28 Political realities, however,
were more complex. Divisions among Conservatives between protec-
tionists, reciprocitarians and free traders, the number of contests
between Liberals, Labour and socialists, and the combination of free
trade with other significant issues, make it impossible to read the
election as a simple contest between Conservative protectionism and
Lib-Lab Free Trade.29 Arguably, it was the very combination of free
trade with other issues, such as education reform, Taff Vale and 'Chinese
slavery', that proved significant among key voting groups like Noncon-
formists and organized labour.30 To reduce voting to an individualist
act of assessing the sectoral costs and benefits of trade policy brackets
the collective dimension of politics: party allegiance, mobilization, social
solidarity and discursive practices.31 On a fundamental statistical level,
222
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
there is an "ecological fallacy" here: constituencies are not sectors.
Conclusions about the political outlook of an occupational group cannot
be drawn from the electoral returns and occupational structures of
constituencies.32
Finally, the analysis is complicated by the introduction of a non-
sectoral variable: consumption. Two-thirds of all employees worked in
non-traded goods sectors and spent nearly half the family budget on
food. Surely, their interest in cheap food made them natural free traders.
The problem with this reasoning is that it explains not too little but too
much. The only votes for protection should have come from the small
group of import-competing interests. Yet Liberals received less than 50
per cent of the vote.33 In any modern society consumers far outweigh
workers in import-competing trades.34 In a democratic vote, free trade
would be a natural winner emerging spontaneously from the ubiquity
of consumer preferences. Yet 'the consumer interest' is no more a natural
given than 'the producer interest'. It represents no unambiguous,
separate, group, but an interest in conflict with and part of other social
roles. 'Everyone and at the same time no one is a
"consumer"',
as Offe
has succinctly put it.35
Two dimensions therefore need to be sharply distinguished in political
economy. An economistic analysis models individual preferences as if
atomistic, fixed and universal.36 The collective meaning of 'the consumer'
and the changing social and political significance of untaxed food are not,
however, a simple aggregation of individual preferences. Its formation
is a problem of a quite different dimension concerning collective values
and the discursive construction of 'the public interest'. What needs
explaining is how free trade was of such significance to Britons that any
departure from it became a central subject of politics. What made it
possible for the diffuse public interest to defy the logic of collective action,
overcome the free-rider problem, and avoid the vicious cycle of rent seek-
ing predicted by public choice theory?37 How to account for free trade's
special historical significance in a society which enjoyed the highest
standard of living and had overcome systemic food shortages long before
its neighbours? The inquiry, then, must look beyond material interests to
the collective meanings and discursive practices that helped translate
individual interests into a broader conception of political economy and
assigned free trade an iconic position. In short, it is necessary to shift the
inquiry from economic function to cultural significance.
II IDEOLOGY AND INTEREST
This shift opens up three dimensions for political economy: economic
knowledge; the ideological nature of interest; and the constitutive role of
political languages. The interpretative framework of past actors is easily
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lost in reconstructions of interests through the lens of present neo-
classical theory. Recent social history has produced well-documented
doubts about the triumph of a differentiated market society and its social
reach in nineteenth-century Europe.38 The economy, like society or poli-
tics, is not a separate, self-explanatory universe that comes with an unam-
biguous interpretation attached. Rather than beginning with notions of
market rationale and social totality, economistic approaches would have
to show how historical actors came to know of the economic world and
of the material consequences of fiscal policy - and how groups could fail
to recognize their 'real' interest. Some in the City perceived economic
trends as supporting fiscal reform. Organized labour understood the
fiscal controversy in a national sociopolitical context as a battle between
democracy and reaction, between classes not trades, a battle over the dis-
tributive politics of taxation not sectoral interests. Tariff reform was not
dismissed only as a bad bargain for export trades. It was viewed as a con-
spiracy by capitalists and old elites to suppress social democracy and rob
the working people of their fair share of the national income.39
In theory, it is possible to weigh a tariff's direct impact on prices
against its more indirect influence on wages. Even if employers kept all
additional profits, a tariff might increase real wages through an increase
in demand for labour in the protected sector. Such reasoning, however,
never played a major historical role. Labour focused instead on the loss
to national welfare from tariff wars, declining competitiveness abroad,
and lower purchasing power at home. History, not trade theory,
provided the framework of analysis. The Trades Union Congress rejected
protection in one voice as
nothing better than a delusive and plausible fallacy; neither history,
observation, nor experience justifies it. The history of every country
proves beyond a doubt that just in proportion as protective tariffs are
heavy, wages are low, and where they are light, wages are high.40
The universal-historical association between protection and low wages
illustrates how far popular knowledge transcended strict economic
reasoning. Contemporaries would have been astonished to hear that
trade policy played only a marginal role in their economic lives and in
national development or to see it reduced to a 'secondary power struc-
ture'.41 Even at the height of the Great Depression and even in import-
competing trades, a belief in the collective benefits of free trade retarded
the advance of protectionism. Popular pamphlets offered historical read-
ings of the economy. Joseph Arch, the leader of the National Agricultural
Labourers' Union, emphasized in 1884 that
'[t]he
natural effect of
Protection is to restrict trade, and restriction means less of everything for
the working classes. This is proved by actual experience. The darkest days
in our history were those of Protection'42. Historical memory proved
224
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
stronger than an individualist weighing of short-term costs and benefits.
By the late nineteenth century, the long story of popular opposition to
liberal trade - from eighteenth-century food riots to early Victorian
Chartism - had fallen victim to a lapse in collective memory. Historical
and theoretical counter-examples alike vanished from the new 'progres-
sive' story of free trade. The complex relationship between tariffs and
wages, as in the high-wage high-tariff USA, was easily ignored. So too
were the more immediate reasons for the sharp drop in food prices, which
had less to do with fiscal policy than with the growth of Midwestern and
Russian farms and the revolution in intemational transport.
Such ideological readings of the economy raise fundamental method-
ological issues. Conventional political economy, though interested in
the interaction between politics and economy, is founded on their
conceptual separation into distinct, indeed opposed, systems of state and
market.43 This presupposes an economic sphere governed by instru-
mental rationality, naturalistic and free of ideology, a view that can be
traced back to Enlightenment notions of the market taming the passions
and that, subsequently, neo-classical economics developed into a scien-
tific paradigm. It has supported a liberal metanarrative separating free
trade, the pure agent of economic truth, rationality and progress, from
the many guises of protection: fallacy, ideology and reaction. Ideology
is reduced to a protectionist tool for capturing votes or deceiving
governments.44 Sound theory and cool-headed analysis, however, are
able to bring 'reality' into focus. 'Broad economic principles always in
the end defeat the sharp devices of expediency', the young Winston
Churchill reassured the Free Trade League.45 Free trade, in this confi-
dent liberal view, is already rational: it is non-ideological.
The view of separate systems has been a pleasant illusion. It has
allowed the reconstruction of interest from economic reality and their
clean separation from political culture, bracketed as epiphenomena. This
has made it difficult to interpret the changing location and meaning of
economic ideas like free trade, because it has tended to close an analyt-
ical space for the relatively autonomous role of ideas and discourse. The
economist framework leaves little room for exploring the formative role
of ideas in shaping interest, because it envisions an atomistic, fixed indi-
vidual, not a living member of a community, political culture or
preinformed world. With sufficient information, rational interest is the
direct expression of an objective economic position. Like functionalist
explanations in general, this approach looks to needs as the causal
motive for want satisfaction. As Luhmann has observed, the equation
between need and motive produces an equation between imagined effect
and its cause. It tends towards tautology. Moreover, the economy is not
immune to how it is observed and understood
-
in the past or present.46
We cannot reconstruct an economic reality separate from its past
225
ARTICLES
interpreters. Rational choice becomes a troublesome tool, at a time
when assumptions of social totality and correspondence theories of
reality have become questionable. Ideology and language, then, far from
being instrumental or epiphenomenal, are essential cognitive tools: they
turn an overwhelming, contingent world into controllable, meaningful
reality.47 In short, they help to constitute political economy.
The formation of interest is not an unmediated process by which the
economy imprints itself on the mental landscape of the individual.
Rationality stands for what social actors find plausible and meaningful at
a historical moment rather than for what might be theoretically 'true'.
Interest comes from inter-esse - to be between. Interest has had evolving
meanings and functions, from compensation in Roman law, a euphemism
for usury in the Middle Ages, to foreign policy interest of states in the
early modern period, when the concept came to embrace competing
economic and ideological groups as well as individual rational behaviour.
There was yet no inherent discursive conflict between ideas and interests.
For much of the modern period the concept remained ambiguous, still
referring to the interest of humanity in general as well as to particular
material interests or Sonderinteressen. In nineteenth-century politics, the
language of 'interest' functioned to maintain a conservative relation
between property and rights. A new language of 'organized interest
politics' only emerged in the early twentieth century, accompanied by the
growing importance of corporate organizations in defining as well as
mediating the 'interests' of their members.48 In Britain, this development
was retarded; the Federation of British Industries was not founded until
1916. Present narrow categories of interest may obscure the historicity of
'interests' and past systems of political economy.
The market speaks in many tongues. Economy and politics can be
viewed as interdependent, interpenetrative spheres, linked through
culture. The cultural foundations of economic theories have received
generous attention.49 In popular knowledge, too, different perceptions
have structured and read the economy in different ways. Free trade
was no exception, though its ideological power in legitimating itself as
common sense and a scientific fact as indisputable as gravity has helped
to dehistoricize it. The argument here is not that there may not be good
reasons in economics for liberal trade. But this view of political economy
is itself so clouded by the normative lens of economic liberalism that it is
bound to produce a distorted historical picture, blind to the changing
functions and meanings of free trade, from statism among Physiocrats
and the ideal of an agrarian republic in revolutionary France, to the divine
design of a 'stationary, self-acting, and unprogressive model' held up by
early Victorian Evangelicals,50 all the way to a modernizing engine of
growth, globalization and progress, more familiar from economic text-
books since.
226
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Liberal political economy in Victorian and Edwardian Britain ulti-
mately rested not on economic interest or theory but on a moral-political
conception of free trade. It is not possible to derive the historical signif-
icance of 'free food' from the size of the food bill. As a collective identity
and social movement, free trade culture, after all, was unique to Britain,
and not shared by societies then, before or since in which people spent
more than half their income on food. That it was unwise to rely on the
consumer as a natural champion of free trade was not lost on Cobden-
ites at the turn of the century. They feared that
when bad times come, the more ignorant classes will listen to any
quack who professes to have a remedy for the troubles they are
feeling. Moreover, as each year passes the number of those who can
personally remember the pinch of Protection grows rapidly less.
Therefore it is necessary that some agency should be constantly on
the watch to combat every [protectionist] attempt.51
Liberal 'enlightenment' did more than just overcome costs of infor-
mation for the 'ignorant classes' by communicating economic data. After
a summer of ministerial debate and resignations in 1903, the question
of free trade was thrown open to the public. Its survival now became
dependent on popular support. The fiscal controversy developed an
ideological momentum of its own that transcended the concrete
economic issues at stake. Informed foreign observers deplored the public
debate's lack of 'rational', 'scientific' analysis.52 Why was this? Liberals
then, and historians since, were quick to expose the distortions and
contradictions in Chamberlain's picture of fiscal reform as a panacea for
national decline. Yet the lack of 'rationality' was not all in one corner.
The battle was not one between 'Fact versus Fiction', as the Cobden
Club labelled it. Both sides worked with ambiguous statistics and prob-
lematic economic categories.53 Liberal language provided ideological
bonds for public mobilization, set the parameters of the public debate
over political economy, and relegitimated free trade as the only rational,
indeed natural, system.
Two discursive achievements need to be emphasized. For one, liberal
ideology quickly eliminated the space for rival policies, most impor-
tantly reciprocity, which Liberals attacked as protectionism in disguise.
Trade diplomacy was denounced in general declarations that any depar-
ture from unilateralism would end in tariff wars, a food tax and an
omnipotent executive. This was part of a larger ideological momentum
that polarized discourse between pure free trade and alternative regimes.
Complex relations of political economy were reduced to a stark choice
between two exclusive world-historical systems. Campbell Bannerman,
the leader of the Liberal Party, proclaimed in 1904:
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ARTICLES
[w]e
stand to-day at the parting of the ways. One road ... leads
to Protection, to conscription, to the reducing of free institutions
to a mere name.... And the other road leads to the consolidation
of liberty and the development of equity at home, and to treaties
of arbitration and
amity
... and the lightening of taxation, which
presses upon our trade and grinds the faces of the poor.54
The discursive construction of free trade into the sheet anchor of liberal
civilization deflected both from the (historically) limited influence of free
trade on life and from alternative orders of democracy, such as pluralist
corporatism.
Liberal bodies and radical movements like the Free Trade Union, the
Cobden Club, the Free Food League and the two million-strong Coop-
erative movement provided the public with the interpretative frame for
political economy through leaflets and rallies. It is more useful to view
these groups in terms of a social movement than interest-pressure
groups. They were popular and self-financing, with a diverse member-
ship that included women. Their roots in civil society and their defence
of universal free trade contrast with the more limited, recent 'anti-protec-
tion' campaigns led by narrow interest groups against trade-specific
restrictions; the Free Trade Union focused on 'the public interest' and,
significantly, only had one researcher preparing material on specific
trade interests.55 They helped to construct the public significance of free
trade by providing associations between the national economic interest
and political legitimacy. A liberal song rallied audiences against Cham-
berlain's campaign to 'Tax, Britannia!':
Tax, Britannia, if British commerce dies,
At least the prices that we pay shall rise!
But, if you think protection made
For dupes who cannot think or see,
Be this the charter of your trade,
The world our market and our people free!
Then, rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!56
Free trade was central to the 'structure of political discourse', to borrow
Peter Hall' s apt concept.57 However, in contrast to later economic theory,
like Keynesianism, free trade with its popular, ideological body played
a more constitutive, self-generating role in creating the very structure
and dynamic of political discourse. Rather than being differentiated as
'rational' economic discourse, public argument and political action
concerning trade were embedded in a cultural web of associations and
narratives that tied free trade to national liberty, social justice and inter-
national peace.
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POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
III COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF FREE TRADE
'The consumer' was at the centre of this web. The defence of free trade
depended on the defence of the consumer as the imagined guardian
of the public interest. The political nation was defined as a nation of
consumers, represented in Parliament. The state's function - represented
in the Treasury doctrine of taxation for revenue only - was to defend the
freedom of all consumers alike. A healthy body politic, in this vision,
depended on free consumers rather than the preservation, say, of
'national productive interests', classes or communities like farming. In a
period of limited democratic and socioeconomic rights, free trade served
as an alternative form of public inclusion, accountability and social jus-
tice, as radical and women's groups reminded voters and politicians.58 As
a language of indirect, passive inclusion it bridged the gulf between the
restricted equation of citizenship with property in the nineteenth century
and the more universal democratization of active political and social
rights in the twentieth, the Scylla and Charybdis of liberalism. Fiscal
equity and political legitimacy were interlocking: parliamentary sover-
eignty was believed to depend on free trade. Was a tariff not 'the mother
of trusts', giving birth to a new absolutism of vested interest, favouritism
and an overweight executive? Free trade was linked to a public ideal of
the 'purity of politics',59 which it insulated from the economy and private
interests. Politics and commerce, in Lloyd George's characteristic warn-
ing to businessmen, were 'like two chemicals ... all very well if kept
apart, but if mixed, there was an explosion'.60 By invoking the autonomy
of the market and by equating public and consumer, then, free trade
spoke directly to the liberal political elite, seeking to preserve the autono-
my of the political from the claims of socioeconomic groups and out-
siders. Liberals opposed even anti-monopolistic measures, such as the
countervailing of bounties under the Brussels sugar convention of 1902,
for fear of subjecting Parliament and consumer to a foreign tribunal.61 The
unifying influence of consumption made free trade an agent of inter-
national peace. 'It is through consumption', Hobson argued, 'that the
co-operative nature and value of commerce is realized. Production
divides, consumption unites.'62 'The consumer' here was a cultural con-
struct, signifying an inclusive 'public interest' rather than an atomistic
individual with given economic preferences
-
not to be confused with the
materialist, conformist 'consumerism' discussed today.
By transcending the language of economic utility, these associations
were flexible enough to connect with several strands in liberal political
culture. On one extreme was the individualist libertarian linkage
between economic and political freedom. An old liberal steelmaster, for
instance, condemned protection, because 'I shall be called upon to give
up my right to buy where I please and compelled to buy where the
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ARTICLES
Government wills'.63 On the other, liberal reformers were able to present
free trade as the natural complement of social legislation, a view well
captured in posters showing Asquith as a free trade John Bull, with one
hand giving cheap sugar to a little girl, and with the other giving old
age pensions to an aged couple.64
The popular connection between political freedom and consumer
freedom was no instant, automatic product. The Gladstonian marriage
between popular liberalism and radicalism65 pushed aside earlier asso-
ciations between freer trade and attacks by the rich on the rights of 'the
people'. The demand for the 'Free Breakfast Table' was an article of
faith to the National Agricultural Labourers' Union and helped to
preserve Liberal support in rural areas after the suffrage reform of 1884.
Edwardian free trade was able to draw on the radical milieu to recon-
struct the moral-political discourse against tariffs.
The past, however, provided more than just a direct line of political tra-
dition. The free trade defence also involved the dynamic reconstruction
of historical memory. While protectionists were prophesying decline, free
traders were legitimating their cause by refashioning the past. The repeal
of the Corn Laws here represented the crucial turning point in the story
of liberty and progress. It provided an essential movement narrative by
fusing individual memories with the larger public interest. Repeal had
given the labourer 'a more generally-recognized position in the State',66
in the recollection of Holyoake, the old Cooperative leader. The rewrit-
ing of history reached its most ambitious stage with the invention of the
'hungry forties'. In 1904, upon the initiative of Cobden Unwin, a collec-
tion of select labourers' memories of the 'hungry forties' was published.
A 'people's edition' was issued in 1905. By 1912 a penny edition had sold
110,000 copies, a bound copy another 100,000. Personal memories of
material misery under protection were interwoven with associations
between free trade, political liberty and social stability. The ambivalent
experience of the 1840s was crystallized into a simpler image of the
protectionist past to appeal to the present needs of liberal memory.
Edwardian free traders concluded for their readers that 1846 had deliv-
ered the English nation from 'an Egyptian bondage'; tariffs threatened a
return to social disintegration and civil war.67
The free trade big loaf and the protectionist little loaf
-
symbols already
employed by Cobden and prominent in the Hungry Forties collection and
Edwardian posters and propaganda
-
need to be read in the context of
these cultural associations. The 'cheap loaf' was an icon of national liberty
and progress. Fiscal policy here appeared central to the course of national
history, in contrast to economic historians' reassessments more recently
that it played at best a marginal role. Immediate material concerns fail
to explain this discrepancy, because on their own they do not turn indi-
vidual grievances into collective ideals or action. Whether, and to what
230
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
degree, a small 2 shilling duty on corn would increase the cost of
living
was hotly debated at the time - the price of bread in most towns had
remained unaffected by the short-lived corn duty (3d.) of 1902-3.68
The free trade vision was sustained by a contrast between British
progress and civilization and foreign reaction and backwardness. Imper-
ial Germany served as the principal 'other', a stereotypical counter-image
that is more revealing about British liberal culture than about contempo-
rary politico-economic realities; Germany was a low-tariff, autocratic
constitutional monarchy, France and the US high-tariff republics. The free
trade campaign amplified horror stories of starving and disempowered
Germans dependent on black bread and dog meat - even as Germany was
becoming a relatively more egalitarian society.69 Germany exhibited the
symptoms of the lethal 'poison' of protection that would inevitably spread
throughout the body politic. 'If this country wanted German tariffs', Lloyd
George warned audiences in 1905, 'it must have German wages...
German militarism, and German sausages.... They could not have British
freedom and British wages along with German Protection.'70 This view of
Germany, like the absolute rejection of reciprocity, reflected the dogma-
tism of the liberal Weltanschauung, unable to appreciate either the relative
autonomy of the state or the possibility of integrating corporate associa-
tions into modern democracy: it was feared that even a small tariff or trade
regulation would unleash a vicious circle of uncontrollable vested inter-
ests, ungovernability and autocracy. The 'cheap loaf', then, symbolized a
pillar of liberal society. It stood for the 'development of civilization' and
the spread of 'enlightenment of the masses', manifestations of free trade's
contribution to human progress under Britain's providential leadership.
Juxtaposed accounts of the German poor throwing themselves on horse
carcasses sent a sure warning to Britons of the uncivilizing process
unleashed by food taxes.71 In the close connection between national
identity and free trade, political economy moulded collective conscious-
ness through a diametric opposition between idealized British virtues and
traditions and 'false' and degenerate foreign cultures. This can be seen as
a continuation of an important dynamic in English nationalism, which had
been rooted in the construction of the Dutch and French as alien 'other' in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century popular political economy.72
The discourse of free trade provided the frames of meaning necessary
for a public movement. Some like Schuster in the City or Pigou, the econ-
omist, might have relied on economic concepts concerning the market,
comparative advantage and intemational differentiation familiar from
today's discussion. As noted earlier, however, far from being a separate
economic matter, this was embedded in liberal concerns about political
ethics. Neo-classical economists, as Supple has stressed, recognized theor-
etical justifications for state intervention but refrained from concrete pro-
posals out of political considerations.73 For many entrepreneurs, support
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ARTICLES
for free trade did not reflect support for the free market as a social model.
The steelmaster Hugh Bell, typically, rejected protectionism partly as an
agent of a more materialistic, selfish and degenerate society, associated
with US millionaires and trusts.74 For the mid-Victorian period Boyd
Hilton has shown how middle-class support for free trade was inspired
by a concern less for 'enrichissez-vous and social progress' than for 'leav-
ing providence to its own devices'.75 It would be wrong to assume that
the retreat of this evangelical vision of a moral economy in the second
half of the nineteenth century marked the triumph of a secular vision of
a market society.
There is no historical reason to presume that popular support for free
trade then has to be at one with the understanding of liberal trade theory
now. Radicals saw no problem in linking it to land reform and the return
of an independent peasantry to the land, a combination that indicated
how limited their vision of international comparative advantage was.
Free trade was often associated with community and cooperation rather
than market or competition. This took a number of forms, from Christian
ethics and visions of a cooperative society, all the way to 'new liberal'
ideas of welfare. One manual worker, for instance, concluded his
memories of 'the hungry forties' with a denunciation of tariffs as 'an
immoral policy because it substitutes "Do unto others as they do unto
you," for the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as ye would they SHOULD
do unto you." The former policy embodies the spirit of irritation and
revenge. The latter breathes of conciliation and good-will to all men'.76
At a national level, as McKibbin has stressed, free trade 'permitted
the relative autonomy and propriety of working-class politics'.77 To the
powerful cooperative movement the 'Free Breakfast Table' represented
an inalienable right of democratic society as much as cheap bread. Free
trade meant free exchange, not the economics of the free market, liable
to generate greed, poverty and hatred. As such, it stood for a wider
vision of 'self-dependence', cooperative internationalism and the auton-
omy of civil society from colonization by the state. It embodied a strong
contemporary belief in societal self-development and in civil society as
an important terrain of active citizenship.78
Most interesting, perhaps, was the evolving social and civic meaning
linked to free trade in the course of the debate. A leading voice of the
'new liberalism' was J. A. Hobson, an economic heretic who held as few
illusions about the pacific nature of cosmopolitan interests as about the
soundness of liberal economics. Free trade retained its anti-imperialist
appeal. But his discovery of 'underconsumption' shifted emphasis from
the economic function of free trade to an organic notion of its social
function. Rather than promoting an ever advancing industrial division
of labour, free trade plus social reform would overcome the growing
distance between production and consumption, seen to erode the
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POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
cohesion and freedom of civil society. In this vision a special place was
accorded to the 'citizen-consumer', whose economic actions would no
longer pursue selfish market-oriented interests but bring into harmony
the collective ends of society by promoting civic culture, democratic
spirit, taste and creativity. Consumption would become a cultural
agency for uplifting the social, political and economic ethics of the indi-
vidual. Individual and social interests would be reconciled while
promoting a virtuous, participatory civil society. This organic vision did
not look towards a market society or modernization, individual ration-
ality or bureaucratic organization, but to a community of creative and
individuated yet mutually dependent citizens who would develop their
productive talents alongside their tastes as consumers. All this was in
contrast to the individualistic vision of the invisible hand of the market
coordinating atomistic self-interests for maximum wealth. Not surpris-
ingly, Hobson demonized classical free trade economists as intellectual
spokesmen of Manchesterism, confederates of mercantile and producer
interests whose obsession with commercial gain blinded them to the
social utility of consumption.79
Whatever the different type of reforms advocated, for a growing num-
ber of liberals support of free trade went hand in hand with the rejection
of a natural equilibrium model and assumptions of a convergence
between individual and collective interests.80 Rather than beginning and
ending with 'the market' or economic self-interest, popular free trade
was embedded in ideas of political legitimacy, national history and civil
society.
IV IDEOLOGY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
This article has discussed free trade's sources of strength in late Victorian
and Edwardian Britain. The economistic account of the survival of free
trade as a natural alliance of internationally oriented trades or sectors
has been found empirically and methodologically unconvincing. Instead
of viewing interests as determined exogenously by location in the world
economy, the historical explanation here has argued that the power of
free trade was an endogenous construction shaped by political culture.
I would like to conclude by discussing some implications for the study
of the role of ideology in political economy.
The renewed attention to 'ideas' by some political scientists has been
a welcome move away from functionalism, but has been constrained by
its principal focus on official policy. This has distracted from the broader
discursive role of political economy. In Goldstein and Keohane's impor-
tant approach, ideas function as 'roadmaps' selected by policy makers
to chart their way through problems.81 While this approach goes beyond
rational choice, it continues to separate ideas from interests. Ideas might
233
ARTICLES
influence administrations by institutionalizing routines, but they remain
a secondary phenomenon, creating the occasional 'lag' behind the 'real'
primary forces of history rather than inherently shaping these forces.82
Yet interests are not pre-social but are embedded in society and culture.
Human beings enter a bounded, pre-interpreted world that their actions
and frames of meaning continuously reconstitute. Historical actors, to
paraphrase Giddens, are their own politico-economic theorists.83 As
reflexive agents, they interpret and help to create their political economy.
To emphasize culture as a constitutive aspect of political economy,
however, should not mean giving primacy to 'economic culture' as a
subject and method of explanation in the way recently suggested by
Rohrlich.84 Rohrlich is right in stressing the limits of behaviouralist and
realist analyses and the need for more cognitive approaches. But he is
less persuasive in presuming that a shared market 'economic culture'
was the key factor in the mid-Victorian adoption of free trade policy.
To conceptualize it as a Kuhnian paradigm raises well-known problems.
How useful is a model of a closed, internally unified system for under-
standing historical change? Human agents interact differently with the
economy, a social system, than with the natural world.85 Furthermore,
it is problematic to start out with notions of a shared, stable under-
standing of the economy or to presume popular convergence around
theoretical models. Far from supporting the idea that the early nine-
teenth century saw the rise of an optimistic belief system about the free
equilibrating market and growth through comparative advantage,
historical research has found a wide spectrum of ideas about the
economy among states and publics. Advocates of liberal trade often
understood the economy as stationary or were concerned with balanced
growth rather than differentiation. In nineteenth-century Europe, the
middle classes envisaged a variety of social systems, of which a differ-
entiated market society was only one among many.86
The temptation to look for market ideas in the past has been part of
the wider 'modern' framework of interpretation which tells the story of
modernity as a battle between the rise of the market and state regula-
tion. Polanyi's Great Transformation is, perhaps, its most popular and
ideal-typical narration.87 Free trade is presumed to have a fixed meaning
and becomes one chapter in the grand narrative of the rise of the market.
The public significance of free trade in our period, however, lay in its
moral-political conception, not in a shared economic culture. This was
important, this article has argued, because it could bring together
competing social and political groups. The liberal appeal to 'free food'
as a collective good was echoed in the trades union manifesto in 1903
thanking 'God that Englishmen who toil have a vote, without which
no capitalist can enter the House of Commons to commit the sin of
inc:reasing the cost of living'.88 Similarly, it was the civil and political
234
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
ethics of free trade rather than any agreement on laissez-faire economics
that held together the alliance between old and new liberals. For Conser-
vative free traders, too, opposition to tariff reform was inspired not by
a belief in the free market, but by the double fear of social anarchy
following a food tax and of the displacement of public virtue and parlia-
mentary liberty, guarded by 'disinterested, moderate independent men',
by the politics of class, interests and demagoguery.89 Labour leaders
like Hardie and Snowden, on the other hand, were sceptical about inter-
national economic integration and Britain's dependence on foreign
markets. Their economic thought shared socialist expectations that capi-
talist trade would lead to a global overproductionist crisis. At the same
time as attacking competitive exchange, however, they remained sympa-
thetic to radical views of the 'Free Breakfast Table' and free exchange
as a pacific, civilizing force. Traders, caricatured as non-productive
middlemen at home, underwent a metamorphosis in international
waters into 'great missionaries of a brighter day ... majestically coming
and going with their freights of barter, teaching the nations the much-
needed lesson of their mutual dependence one upon the other'.90 It was
the strength of such shared ideas that kept free trade at the centre of
public politics.
Consensus but not conformity. Rather than in terms of hegemonic
economic culture, the survival of free trade can be conceptualized as a
convergence of ideas about liberal politics and society sufficient to
generate collective allegiance and action. Free trade was tied to social
movements, like the Cooperatives, interested in sheltering civil society
as a democratizing terrain from colonization by the state. The relative
autonomy of civil society from state and market has recently been redis-
covered.91 Putting this dimension back into the analysis makes it possible
to step beyond the grand narrative of 'modernization'. Between the para-
digms of realist and economistic models that reduce socio-political
relations to either state or economic structures, this opens a space for
examining social groups as reflexive agents participating in the dynamic
process of debate and the construction of political economy.
Britain's position in the world economy was deteriorating from the
1880s. Yet, significantly, it was not until 'decline' became linked to a more
fundamental disillusionment with liberal views of political economy that
free trade lost its impregnable position. In early twentieth-century Britain,
a period marked by increasing socioeconomic regulation, industrial
concentration and structural unemployment, the nineteenth-century trin-
ity of freedom, cheapness and individual initiative finally lost its cultural
authority. What emerged was a new discourse of regulation, reorganiza-
tion and productivity. As labour and capital turned their attention to
production and internal rationalization, the cultural authority of con-
sumption and international exchange diminished accordingly. The view
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ARTICLES
that free trade guaranteed 'the purity of politics' and social justice faded
as devaluation and industrial decline were blamed on the power of
the City. Internationalists, too, moved away from the older ideal of self-
regulating commerce towards institutional sources of international inte-
gration.92 Freedom of trade lost its paradigmatic function as a source of
collective identity and social mobilization once socioeconomic demands
became articulated as proactive rights (employment, welfare) and class-
based organizations competed for control over the state and its regulatory
powers. This period marked a break in the meaning and function of
the idea, in which the economic one lived on, detached from the larger
cultural one. The introduction of a general tariff in 1931-2 completed free
trade's marginalization.
It may be interesting at this stage to look far ahead and briefly
compare basic features of British free trade culture with the resurgence
of trade in recent western politics, in the discussions about trade liber-
alization and globalization. At the level of cultural associations and
sociopolitical constituencies, free trade's position has been reversed.
Instead of its earlier association with democratic rights, communitarian
ethics, social justice and national identity in British radical and progres-
sive politics, free trade today is denounced by a range of radical and
social movements as an international corporate attack on participatory
democracy, hard-won social rights, consumer, labour and environmental
standards, and regional and national culture. Opposition to NAFTA
and GATT has extended from organized labour, social democrats and
consumer advocates to women's groups and ecological and cultural
movements.93
Neither the popular disenchantment with free trade as such, nor the
more general and frequently alarmist fixation on trade and globalization,
can be explained as a mere reaction to autonomous economic develop-
ments without reference to the formative influence of ideological and
political factors. As several critical economists and sociologists have
pointed out, it is difficult to correlate the present obsession with trade
with secular economic trends.94 While the world economy has become
more integrated in the last half-century, it is far from clear that it is
creating a unitary global system or that changes in trade are a signifi-
cant factor in national income and employment. In the advanced
economies of the European Union, Japan and North America trade is a
mere 12 per cent of GDP. For the USA it has been argued that the
economic lives of citizens are determined by technological changes
rather than changes in trade, for Germany that trade has been a positive,
not a negative, source of growth and employment.95 The share of foreign
direct investment and of the operations of multinational corporations
that reaches beyond the privileged north is too small to justify the
images of doom painted by the prophets of globalization. It would be
236
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
too simple, however, to explain discrepancies between economic trends
and public perception as the result of the fallacious reasoning and poor
statistical knowledge of certain commentators.96 Attention should be
given, instead, to the discursive construction of 'globalization'. Part of
its appeal, clearly, is that it offers different groups a meta-economic
language with which to communicate, think and reposition themselves
in contemporary politics after older political languages had been swept
aside with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of communism and
class ideology, and the crisis of the welfare state. 'Globalization' is inti-
mately tied to a debate about the future of the nation-state and politics97
after the categories of 'class', 'consensus' and 'corporatism' have lost
their purchase. For the right, the scenario of one converging system of
global market capitalism expresses a concern with national sovereignty
and identity, ideals positively associated with free trade in our period.
On the left, the apparent rise of neoliberal globalization provides an
attractive new frame of analysis for imagining 'postmodern socialisms'
that can combine ideals of multiculturalism, local industrial democracy
and mixed economy.98 In state and business, references to the unstop-
pable march of global competition at the same time reflect a loss of faith
in the regulatory powers of the state and hold out a strategy of re-
negotiating the post-war settlement between capital and labour.
All this does not mean there is no economic dimension to politico-
economic regimes. Material interest and state power are no linguistic
illusion. For the study of historical political economy, the argument here
has not been that interests can be entirely collapsed into ideas. Rather,
it has stressed the problems that arise from reducing political economy
to market or state relations at the expense of civil society and extrapo-
lating interests from their structural position in the economy. It is
problematic to view historical concepts, like free trade, from within an
economistic paradigm based on universalizing assumptions. By invoking
an objective representation of pure, 'natural' reality, liberal trade theory
necessarily invades public life as a normative ideal, resulting in an
'entanglement of problems', as already stressed by Max Weber.99 The
entanglement has become more complex, since notions of social totality
and post-ideological reality have been found to be troublesome, making
it even more questionable to read beliefs, values and politics directly
from a socioeconomic situation. Rethinking among social scientists has
offered a variety of new approaches, from those drawing on earlier
methods, like Peirce's pragmatism or Veblen's emphasis on institutions,
to a more 'open Marxist' view of states as forms of class relations, or
recent analyses of the economy as an autopoieitic social system.100
Part of this reorientation, this article has argued, needs to involve the
exploration of the cultural workings of politico-economic regimes.
Attention to the formative role of ideas in political economy can profitably
237
ARTICLES
draw on elements of Weber's cultural sociology as well as on studies
focusing on collective representations and symbols, memory or dis-
course.101 Weber's emphasis on the complementarity of ideas and interests
was, partly, concerned with an exploration of the social significance of
ideas through an analysis of their internal cognitive structure and their
relation to individual action. The Weberian cognitive, actor-oriented per-
spective can be complemented by a focus on collective representations
and practices, including the cultural resources and symbols, narratives
and languages that help to structure political economy by informing
collective identities and expectations, and the discursive boundaries of
debate. The story of 'the hungry forties' the 'cheap loaf', the vocabulary
of the consumer and parliamentary liberty, and notions of national
identity and civilized development are examples for the case of free trade
in Britain. Material circumstances and structures, while prior to language,
require language and communication to be shaped into meaningful inter-
ests by contemporaries and to be effectively bundled into collective action.
They are only accessible through a study of their language.102 Rather than
using free trade at the same time as a given neutral method and as subject,
such a more reflexive, historical analysis is sensitive to the concept being
itself an evolving phenomenon. How groups understand economic con-
cepts may be complex, ambiguous, indeed contradictory compared to
high theory. The inquiry into these values, meanings and language is a
proper province for historical political economy.
This approach, then, calls for a broader view of 'the political'. Two per-
spectives have been dominant. One has focused on the political conse-
quences of economic arrangements. The other has examined the political
and institutional foundations of the economy; it has ranged from the
nineteenth-century emphasis on the role of the state in national economics
to more recent works on the empire, the gold standard, trade policy,
Keynesianism and corporatism.103 But politics is more than just institu-
tional structure or a market-place in which interest groups compete. As a
political language, free trade did not always occupy the same public space
or carry the same meaning and significance. Political culture can usefully
complement the recent emphasis on the role of institutions, like states,
firms or associations, in shaping the collective interests of their members.
The debate about trade functioned as a cultural interface between
politics and economics. As such it also left its mark on national political
culture. National variations in trade regimes in Europe in our period were
less significant in terms of economic effects than in contributing to dif-
ferent patterns of democratization. The Meline tariff of 1892 or German
protection after 1879, Milward has argued, should be viewed 'not [as] a
regressive, atavistic response by conservative agrarian pressure groups
but a progression in democratic political participation'.104 Protection
brought the peasantry back into politics. And while it strengthened the
238
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
power of bureaucracy and business associations, in the long run it also
assisted the rise of more interventionist, corporatist systems that offered
new political powers and social rights to excluded or disadvantaged
groups like labour. For British liberals and radicals, by contrast, the demo-
cratic significance of free trade was defined in terms of parliamentary
representation, the autonomy of civil society from the state, and individ-
ual and collective freedom. The linear story of free trade and progress
narrowed the space for considering new developments in modern indus-
trial society (cartels, combinations, corporatism) as anything but unviable
aberrations tending towards overcapitalization and stagnation.105 Free
trade's political significance, then, lay not only in institutionally strength-
ening the legislature and Liberal Party at the expense of bureaucracy and
Conservatism. The equation of public and consumer interest and the
fiction of the purity of politics also left a mark on British political culture
by narrowing ideological and institutional spaces for the integration of
'private interests' and associations as effective and responsible social
partners in a modem democracy.
It is useful to distinguish between politico-economic regimes and
policy choices. The political economy of unilateral free trade in Britain was
a phenomenon altogether different in kind from the fluctuating policies of
liberal trade since that are the subject of contemporary studies of trade
policy. It was not only a stable policy regime of comprehensive, unilateral
liberal trade but also a cultural regime of perceptions of politics, society,
economy and nation. From a historical perspective, little is gained by
forcing interpretations back into the paradigmatic divide between state
and market or politics and economy, a divide that has been, perhaps,
more of an analytical utopia than a historical reality. As Holton and others
have pointed out, 'the differentiation of economy from society associated
with capitalism has not led to the suppression of culture in favour of a
"cash nexus", nor to the total subordination of culture to dominant
sources of economic power'106. We would do well to supplement the
renewed interest in material culture with an examination of the role of
political culture in the making of political economy. Accordingly, we
must broaden our analysis from the paradigm of the economic or politi-
cal market in trade politics to the changing languages and ideologies of
political economy themselves. Economic interests need to be relocated
within the wider matrix of ideas, values and discursive practices that
stabilize regimes over time. This calls for a shift in analytical terms from
choice and utility to ideology and cultural meaning. Free trade cannot
satisfactorily be viewed as merely a political manifestation of economic
rationality or an economic policy reflecting 'concrete' sociopolitical inter-
ests. Between these opposite approaches lies a third way to political econ-
omy, concerned with its changing ideological function in society and the
construction of economic rationality and political legitimacy. There is
239
ARTICLES
plenty of room to converge in this inquiry - for social scientists as well
as historians.
NOTES
This work has benefited greatly from generous discussion with many friends,
colleagues and scholars. I would especially like to thank Mark Bevir, Josef Esser,
Peter A. Hall, Colin Hay, Brian Hanson, Charles Maier, Patrick O'Brien, Susan
Pedersen, John Turner and the anonymous reviewers.
1 Robert Gilpin with the assistance of Jean M. Gilpin, The Political Economy of
International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Paul
R. Krugman, Rethinking International Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1990) and Paul R. Krugman (ed.) Strategic Trade Policy and the New Interna-
tional Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986); Helen V. Milner,
Resisting Protectionism: Global Industries and the Politics of International Trade
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Robert Baldwin, The Polit-
ical Economy of US Import Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986); Michael
P. Leidy, 'Trade policy and indirect rent seeking: a synthesis of recent work',
Economics and Politics VI (1994): 97-118.
2 Craig N. Murphy and Roger Tooze (eds) The New International Political
Economy (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1991); Susan Strange, 'Wake up,
Krasner! The world has changed', Review of International Political Economy
(RIPE) 1(2) (1994): 209-19; Stephen J. Rosow, 'On the political theory of polit-
ical economy: conceptual ambiguity and the global economy', RIPE 1(2)
(1994): 465-88; Geoffrey M. Hodgson, 'Some remarks on "economic imperi-
alism" and international political economy', RIPE 1(1) (1994): 21-8; Immanuel
Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: the Limits of Nineteenth-Century
Paradigms (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
E.g. S. B. Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade 1870-1914 (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1960); E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New
York: Pantheon, 1987), pp. 38ff.; Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times:
Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1986); Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English
Social-Imperial Thought 1895-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1960), ch. 7. Cf. Geoffrey Ingham, Capitalism Divided?: The City and
Industry in British Social Development (London: Macmillan, 1984).
4 Quoted in Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 207.
5 Stephen D. Krasner, 'State power and the structure of international trade',
World Politics XXVIII (1976): 341. Cf. Arthur Stein, 'The hegemon's dilemma:
(;reat Britain, the United States, and the international economic order', Inter-
national Organization (IO) XXXVIII (1984): 355-86; Paul Egon Rohrlich,
'Economic culture and foreign policy: the cognitive analysis of economic
policy making', IO XLI (1987): 61-92; Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan:
Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895-1905 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1988); Patrick K. O'Brien and Geoffrey Pigman,
'Free trade, British hegemony and the international economic order in the
nineteenth century', Review of International Studies XVIII (1992): 89-113.
6 Gary M. Anderson and Robert D. Tollison, 'Ideology, interest groups, and
the repeal of the Corn Laws', in C. K. Rowley, R. D. Tollison and G. Tullock
(eds) The Political Economy of Rent-seeking (Boston, 1988), pp. 199-215.
240
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Table 1 Levels of protection on the eve of the First World War
Exports as % of GNP Average tariff Tariff on manufactures
(%) (%)
Denmark 28 9 14
Switzerland 24 7 9
UK 17 0 0
France 15 18 20
Germany 15 12 13
Source: Adapted from Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes
(New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 24, 26, 40, 139.
7 See Table 1.
8 'Those free-trading Mongolians', Economist, 26 April 1997, p. 32.
9 Geoffrey M. Hodgson, 'Varieties of capitalism and varieties of economic
theory', RIPE 3(3) (1996): 380-433.
10 Richard Cobden, significantly, had no illusion about the superficiality of his
fellow manufacturers' conversion to free trade: see W. J. Ashley, The
Tariff
Problem (London, 1903), p. 43.
11 Douglas A. Irwin, 'The political economy of free trade: voting in the British
general election of 1906', Journal of Law and Economics XXXVII (1994): 75-108.
See also Irwin's comparable analysis of the 1923 election, 'Industry or class
cleavages over trade policy?', in Robert C. Feenstria, Gene M. Grossman and
Douglas A. Irwin (eds) The Political Economy of Trade Policy: Papers in Honor
of Jagdish Bhagwati (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), ch. 4.
12 Irwin, 'Political economy', p. 189. This follows recent models of rent seeking
through tariffs: Robert E. Baldwin, 'Rent-seeking and trade policy: an
industry approach', Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv CXX (1984): 662-77. Cf. Leidy,
'Trade policy'.
13 The older picture of an alliance between 'iron and rye' in Imperial Germany
has been found too monochromatic, ignoring the support for tariffs from
small farming communities and small towns as well as from the fiscal state.
Robert G. Moeller, 'Peasants and tariffs in the Kaiserreich: how backward
were the Bauern?', Agricultural History LV ( 1981): 370-84; Richard H. Tilly,
Vom Zollverein zum Industriestaat: die wirtschaftlich-soziale Entwicklung
Deutschlands, 1834 bis 1914 (Munich: DTV, 1990), pp. 109ff.; Hans-Ulrich
Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, III: Von der 'Deutschen Doppel-
revolution' bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1849-1914 (Munich: Beck,
1995), pp. 637-61; cf. Kenneth D. Barkin, '1878-1879: the second founding
of the Reich, a perspective', German Studies Review 10 (1987): 219-35. Students
of US tariff politics have also shifted emphasis from economic interest
and lobbies to party: Colleen M. Callahan, Judith A. McDonald and Anthony
Patrick O'Brien, 'Who voted for Smoot-Hawley?', Journal of Economic History
LIV (1994): 683-90. Heavy industrial districts, though opposed to Repub-
lican tariff proposals, returned Republicans in the 1928 election.
14 The usefulness of broad trade categories is further diminished by the
advance of vertical integration between trades. For a discussion of variables
in firm and industry level analysis, see Milner, Resisting Protectionism,
pp. 32ff.
241
ARTICLES
15 Raphael Samuel, 'Village labour', in Raphael Samuel (ed.) Village Life and
Labour (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 3ff.; cf. Patrick Joyce,
'Work', in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain
1750-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), vol. 2, pp. 143ff.
16 Irwin, 'Political economy', Table 5, and p. 98f.
17 Frank Trentmann, 'The transformation of fiscal reform: reciprocity, modern-
ization, and the fiscal debate within the business community in early
twentieth-century Britain', Historical Journal XXXIX ( 1996): 1005-48.
18 Public Record Office (PRO), London, C.O. 323/475: Commercial Intelligence
Report, 'Summary of replies', pp. 3f., 12. Also F.O. 881/7937 Board of Trade
to Foreign Office, 8 July 1901, and Gastrell's Memorandum enclosed in
Lascelles to Lansdowne, 9 June 1901. As in wool, the protectionist sections
in iron and steel suffering most from import penetration were still net
exporters at this time. What mattered was the deteriorating trend of the
export-import ratio, e.g. in pig and puddled iron from 40:1 in 1882 to 4.9:1
in 1902; B. R. Mitchell, with the collaboration of Phyllis Deane, Abstract of
British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962),
pp. 142, 147.
19 W. E. Minchinton, The British Tinplate Industry: A History (Oxford: Clarendon,
1957), pp. 74, 85, 89f. Following the McKinley tariff, production declined
from 586,000 to 500,000 tons between 1891 and 1900, while exports collapsed
from 448,000 to 273,000 tons. Forty-one out of ninety-one firms failed
between 1890 and 1895: Tariff Commission, I, The Iron and Steel Trades
(London, 1904), para. 900. Steel makers in south Wales continued to
complain about dumped steel and pig iron after the turn of the century,
British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES), Tariff Commission
MSS, TC3 1/3: 13, 20 April 1904, evidence by F. W. Gilbertson.
20 A. J. Marrison, 'Businessmen, industries and tariff reform in Great Britain,
1903-1930', Business History XXV (1983): 148-78; A. J. Marrison, British
Business and Protection, 1903-32 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
21 Chamber of Commerce Journal XXII (108) (April 1903): 80, speech at the fifth
monthly dinner of the London Chamber, 5 March 1903. For earlier divisions,
see Boyd Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory
Governments 1815-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), esp. pp.
173ff.; A. C. Howe, 'Free trade and the City of London, c. 1820-1870', History
LXXVII (1992): 391-410; Charles P. Kindleberger, 'The rise of free trade in
western Europe, 1820-1875', Journal of Economic History XXXV (1975): 20-55.
22 Ronald Rogowski, Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic
Political Alignments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). The
theorem says that trade liberalization benefits all owners of factors (capital,
labour, land) in which a society is abundant. Rogowski has argued that in
countries rich in capital and labour but poor in land, like modem Britain,
this creates an urban-rural rather than a class cleavage. This is historically
problematic. Not only was capital divided but liberals relied on rural support
in this period, see p. 222 above.
23 Working Class Leaders' National Protest Against Preferential Tariffs (London, 1903,
issued by the Cobden Club); TUC Annual Report, 1903, pp. 61ff.; Museum of
Labour History, Manchester, NEC minutes, 18 June, 30 October 1903, 30 June,
27 September 1904; Report of the Fourth Annual Conference of the Labour Repre-
sentation Committee (London, 1904), p. 21; [Arthur
Pugh],
Men of Steel: By One
of Them, A Chronicle of Eighty-Eight Years of Trade Unionism in the British Iron and
Steel Industry (London, 1951), p. 119; Kenneth D. Brown, 'The Trade Union Tar-
iff Reform Association, 1904-1913', Journal of British Studies IX (1970): 141-53.
242
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
24 PRO, Cab24/203, C.P. 137, 'Safeguarding of Industries. Report of the Woollen
and Worsted Committee', 30 April 1929. It advocated a 10-15 per cent duty
to countervail lower labour costs abroad. The main protectionist rationale was
to bridge the widening gap between capacity and demand by reversing
imports' growing share of declining home consumption. Import competition
was most pronounced in women's dress goods. Unemployment exceeded 15
per cent by the end of 1928. The rising import/home consumption ratio was
the crucial variable, see para. 28 of the Report given in Table 2.
Table 2 Women's dress goods (in million sq. yards)
1924 1928
British production 245.2 212.5
British exports 165.5 135.8
Production retained 79.7 76.7
Imports retained 20.2 33.3
Ratio of retained imports to 20.2 30.3
home consumption
25 Here alone they increased their seats from five to thirty-two, out of a total
of sixty-one seats. Nor does it explain the evenness of Liberal advances in
rural (ninety-nine gains out of 245 seats) and urban constituencies (113 out
of 308); A. K. Russell, Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906 (Hamden,
Conn.: Archon Books, 1973), ch. 6.
26 Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal, 'Two logics of collective action: theo-
retical notes on social class and organizational form', Political Power and Social
Theory I (1980): 67-115.
27 Modern Records Centre, Warwick, Federation of British Industries, 200/F/
1/1/74: Coordinating Committee on Fiscal Policy Minutes, 19 June 1931.
One strategy was to mark on exhibits the amount of foreign wages and
present tariffs as a cure against 'social dumping'. Its effectiveness is debat-
able. As a member of the Empire Industries Association, W. E. Wells warned
it might backfire by cementing popular associations of tariffs with low
wages.
28 Irwin, 'Political economy', p. 76.
29 There are several methodological problems here. First, it is unclear whether
votes cast for Balfourites were votes for the party leader, votes for retalia-
tion, or even perhaps votes against general protection and, if so, whether
they should be counted with votes for Chamberlainite Tariff Reformers.
Second, Liberals fought Labour in twenty-five constituencies, Socialists in
another thirteen. The Gladstone-MacDonald pact is incorrectly treated as a
solid 'united front' (ibid., p. 83). Cf. Martin Pugh, The Making of Modern
British Politics, 1867-1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 122f. Liberals further-
more withdrew from a contest with two Unionist Free Traders (Elliott and
Cavendish). Third, Irwin's sectoral data are based on districts, not constit-
uencies. Finally, the analysis does not distinguish between contested and
uncontested seats or turn-outs.
30 For instance, in Leicester, centre of the leather trades, support for Ramsay
MacDonald expressed a commitment to see the Trades Disputes Bill passed
243
ARTICLES
as much as sentiment against protection (Labour Leader, 12 January 1906).
Liberal propaganda was emphatic that a protectionist triumph would have
reactionary implications all round: '[a] Chamberlain victory at the polls ...
would involve no good thing for (1) The Middle Class, (2) The Artisan and
Labourer, (3) The Free Churchman, (4) The Temperance Reformer, (5) The
Lover of Peace, (6) The Advocate of Efficiency' (Liberal Publication Depart-
ment, Set of Leaflets on Preferential Tariffs and Current Political Questions (1903),
no. 1967). A statistical test for the economistic model would be to ask how
many Nonconformists in import-competing trades voted for protectionist
Conservatives. In Crosses on the Ballot: Patterns of British Voter Alignment since
1885 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), chs 5-7, Kenneth D.
Wald has made a strong case that electoral behaviour was still primarily a
function of religion, not class or material interests.
31 The only room accorded to long-term party allegiance in Irwin's regressions
is a 'dummy' variable for the 1900 election (Irwin, 'Political economy'). This
is insufficient by psephological standards. The 1900 Khaki election was
fought on a chauvinist platform during the Boer War and was not repre-
sentative. Moreover, the dummy makes it difficult to distinguish between
long-term sociological changes in party allegiance, disillusionment with the
record of an old government, and a vote on trade policy. In fact, by Irwin's
own figures, the dummy is responsible for an overwhelming share of the
econometric result, dwarfing occupational factors. The dummy variable is
given as making a 51 per cent contribution
-
cf. the largest occupational
variable of 4.4 per cent (engineering), Table 6, pp. 69f. I owe this observa-
tion to John Turner. For alternative statistical models, see John Tumer, British
Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict, 1915-1918 (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), ch. 11, appendix I.
32 It is not possible to infer individual relations (vote of occupation) from ecologi-
cal relations (vote of electorate). A large variety of individual correlations
might correspond to the same ecological correlation. W. S. Robinson,
'Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals', American Sociological
Review XV (1950): 351-7; Mattei Dogan and Stein Rokkan (eds) Quantitative
Ecological Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969),
Part One; E. Terence Jones, 'Ecological inference and electoral analysis',
7ournal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (1972): 249-62. Note that some of Irwin's
results are even statistically 'insignificant' and fail to show a correlation: see
'Political economy', Table 6, p. 97f: in column I coal and cotton are not
significant at the 10 per cent level. In column 6 agriculture, iron and
steel, shipbuilding, cotton, labourers and chemicals are not significant at the
10 per cent level.
33 Liberals 49.5 per cent, Conservatives 43 per cent, Labour 5.9 per cent, Russell,
Liberal Landslide, p. 166.
34 To treat workers in import-competing industries automatically as producers,
not consumers, is problematic, given the emphasis elsewhere on the high
percentage of working-class expenditure on food (45 per cent). There is no
reason to rule out the possibility that such workers might have voted for
free trade because of the proposed food duties. Irwin, 'Political economy',
p. 89, rejects this because it leads him to expect a unanimous vote for free
trade. This is a circular proof, because it has already excluded all other vari-
ables in voting behaviour and implied that the election was a referendum
on free trade. The literature is rich in short references to the role of cheap
food, but lacking in historical interpretation; Forrest Capie finds '[t]he simple
answer is, of course, that free trade attitudes were deeply ingrained in the
244
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
British consciousness' (Depression and Protectionism: Britain between the Wars
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 74).
35 Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1984), p. 228. For the cultural construction of consumer interests, see, e.g.,
Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
(Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1985); John Brewer and Roy
Porter (eds) Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993);
Anne McCants, 'Meeting needs and suppressing desires: consumer choice
models and historical data', Journal of Interdisciplinary History XXVI (2) (1995):
191-207.
36 Cf. the critique in Geoffrey Hodgson, Economics and Institutions: A Manifesto
for a Modern Institutional Economics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
37 The application of economics to politics has been useful for analysing rent-
seeking politics. The reduction of politics in public choice theory into little more
than a set of constitutional rules and arrangements, however, tends towards a
negative explanation of free trade: an open, democratic setting makes it more
difficult for organized interests to extract tariffs. See Rowley et al., Political
Economy, introduction; James M. Buchanan and Robert D. Tollison, The Theory
of Public Choice II (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1984)
Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1965). The historiographical focus has primarily been on the
divisive effect of tariff reform on the Conservative Party: Alan Sykes, Tariff
Reform in British Politics 1903-1913 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979); Wolfgang Mock,
Imperiale Herrschaft und nationales Interesse: 'constructive imperialism' oder Frei-
handel in Grossbritannien vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982);
E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism (London: Routledge, 1996). I do not
argue that protectionism in Britain was not hampered by party divisions,
domestic producers' lack of enthusiasm for imperial preference or by the
unwillingness of larger self-governing colonies like Canada to modify their
infant industry protection. But explanations for the weakness of protectionism
are not necessarily good explanations for the strength of free trade. To stress
democratic voting or Conservative weakness is to put the cart before the horse.
38 William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French
Society, 1750-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Patrick
Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class,
1848-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ira Katznelson
and Aristide R. Zolberg (eds) Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century
Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1986); Hans-Jiirgen Puhle (ed.) Burger in der Gesellschaft der
Neuzeit: Wirtschaft-Politik-Kultur (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991).
39 The proposed combination of a small, universal food tax with a moderate,
differentiated industrial tariff was central to the wholesale rejection of tariffs.
This eliminated protectionists' opportunities for vote trading and coalition
building stressed in public choice analyses.
40 TUC, Circular C, Daily News, 3 December 1903, p. 6. The Independent Labour
Party, however, stressed that free trade had not prevented a decline of real
wages; see, e.g., Philip Snowden, Socialism and Syndicalism (London, n.d.
[1913]), pp. 39-43,
77.
41 Bairoch, Economics and World History; Susan Strange, States and Markets
(London: Pinter Publishers, 1988).
42 Free Trade versus Protection or Fair Trade: Weighed in the Balances and Found
Wanting. Lessons
ftrom
English History for English Working Men (Coventry and
Leamington, 1884), p. 5.
245
ARTICLES
43 Gilpin, Political Economy of International Relations, Introduction.
44 Gordon L. Brady and Robert D. Tollison (eds) On the Trail of Homo Econom-
icus: Essays by Gordon Tullock (Fairfax: George Mason
University Press, 1994),
pp. 127ff. This instrumentalist view of ideology as a mere smokescreen for
interests has also at times informed the best economic histories, e.g. Sidney
Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe 1760-1970 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 263f. The contrast between free trade
'common sense' and the 'folly' and 'fallacies' of protection and its 'flawed',
'pernicious influence' remains prominent in today's economic literature
Jagdish Bhagwati, Protectionism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989),
pp. 114, 123). See now also Douglas Irwin's view that the success of the free
trade idea represents its superior theoretical account of 'true' economic
knowledge over rival theories: Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of
Free Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
45 Winston Churchill, For Free Trade (London, 1906), p. 74, speech of 19
February 1904.
46 Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufkldrung, I: Aufsdtze zur Theorie sozialer
Systeme, 6th edn (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1991), esp. pp. 10f.; to
invoke 'rational anticipation' does not overcome this dilemma, it merely
becomes a 'Theorie der Beobachtung der Theorie, die in ihren Gegenstand
hineinprojeziert wird - nicht eine Theorie ueber einen solchen Gegenstand'
(Niklas Luhmann, Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 125).
47 Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklarung, vol. 1, pp. 54-65; Terry Eagleton, Ideology:
An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991); Slavoj 2ilek (ed.) Mapping Ideology
(London, Verso, 1994); Hans Blumenberg, 'An anthropological approach to
the contemporary significance of rhetoric', repr. in Kenneth Baynes, James
Bohmann and Thomas McCarthy (eds) After Philosophy: End or Transforma-
tion? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 429-58.
48 See the entries on 'Interesse' by Ernst Wolfgang Orth and Reinhart Koselleck
in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart
Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), vol. 3, pp. 305-65; Albert. 0. Hirsch-
man, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its
Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), and his entry in
J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman (eds) The New Palgrave: The Invisible
Hand (London and New York: Norton, 1989), pp. 156-67; Willibald Stein-
metz, "'Property", "interests", "classes" und politische Rechte', in Gunthe
Lottes (ed.) Der Eigentums begriff im Englischen Politischen Denken (Bochum:
Brockmeyer, 1995), pp. 197-228; Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Suzanne Berger (ed.) Organ-
izing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism, and the Transformation
of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
49 Talcott Parsons, 'Economics and sociology: Marshall in relation to the thought
of his time', Quarterly Journal of Economics XLVI (1932): 316-47; Michel
Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences (London:
Tavistock Publications, 1970), esp. chs 6-8; Donald N. McCloskey, Knowledge
and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
50 Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce, p. 312; Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The
Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795-1865 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1988); James Livesey, 'Agrarian ideology and commercial repub-
licanism in the French revolution', Past and Present 157 (November 1997):
94-121.
51 Cobden Club, Report (1899), pp. 14f.
246
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
52 Richard Schiiller, 'Die Handelspolitik GrolBbritanniens', Zeitschrift fuir Volk-
swirtschaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung XVII (1908): 149-78.
53 Friedberg, Weary Titan, pp. 170ff.
54 At the Cobden centenary, quoted in Daily News, 6 June 1904, p. 7.
55 British Library, H. Gladstone MSS 46,061, L. T. Hobhouse to Gladstone, 30
October 1903. I. M. Destler and John S. Odell, assisted by Kimberly Ann Elliott,
Anti-Protection: Changing Forces in United States Trade Politics (Washington:
Institute for International Economics, 1987); A. Howe, 'Towards the "hungry
forties": free trade in Britain, c. 1880-1906', in E. Biagini (ed.) Citizenship and
Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles 1865-1931
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 212ff.
56 Free Trade Union, General Leaflets (London, 1910 edn), no. 89.
57 Peter A. Hall, 'Conclusion: the politics of Keynesian ideas', in Peter A. Hall
(ed.) The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 383ff.
58 Cooperative women sent resolutions to MPs: [Co-operative Union], Souvenir
of Co-operative Congress at Stratford (Manchester, 1904), pp. 68f.; 'We Plead
for the Women and Children' read a typical radical drawing comparing the
free trade loaf with the protectionist loaf in the Reynolds' News, 6 December
1903, p. 5. The Free Trade Union also had a women's branch.
59 A common liberal phrase, cf. A. C. Pigou, The Riddle of the Tariff (London,
1903), p. 27.
60 House of Lords Record Office, Lloyd George MSS, B/5/1/5, 28 January 1907
at the Walsall Chamber of Commerce.
61 See Spencer and Campbell-Bannerman at a Cobden Club banquet on 28
November 1902, in The Brussels Convention and Free Trade (1903); Asquith
saw the convention as proof 'that [the] Government wants some new
powers, over and beyond an appeal ad hoc to the Legislature', Bodleian
Library, Oxford, Asquith MSS, MS 47, ff. 114-32.
62 J. A. Hobson, The New Protectionism (London, 1916), pp. 6f.
63 Hugh Bell, 'The iron and steel trade', in Harold Cox (ed.) British Industries
under Free Trade: Essays by Experts (London, 1904), p. 284.
64 BLPES Coll. Misc. 519, No. 25: 'Bad for the quack doctors', c. 1909-10. The
poster's message was underlined by the acknowledgement of the despairing
'Tariff Reform Doctors', A. Chamberlain and Chaplin, shown in the back-
ground: 'That's very awkward for us. Here have we been saying that neither
of these things could be got without swallowing our Tariff Reform medicine.'
The 1908 budget which made provision for old age pensions had been
prepared by Asquith as Chancellor of the Exchequer; cheap sugar served as
a popular icon, next to the cheap loaf, attacking the provisions for duties
introduced by the Conservatives in 1902 as part of the Brussels convention.
65 Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the
Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
66 George Holyoake, 'In the days of protection', in H. W. Massingham (ed.)
Labour Under Protection: A Series of Studies (London, 1903), p. 112; this was
reprinted in the popular radical Reynolds' News, 29 November 1903, p. 3.
67 Cobden Unwin (ed.) The Hungry Forties: Life under the Bread Tax (London,
1904), p. 274. The 1840s had not been a decade of hunger in Great Britain. The
depression had been short-lived in 1840-2. The 1845-7 famine had been con-
fined to Ireland. In Britain, the Evangelical free trader Chalmers commented
on the "'wonted jollity and abundance" and "all sorts of luxurious and
even riotous indulgence"', quoted in Hilton, Age of Atonement, p. 109. Cf.
W. H. Chaloner, The Hungry Forties (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957).
247
ARTICLES
68 PRO, T. 168/93, 'Extract from Memorandum by the principal of the Statis-
tical Office, reviewing the Customs Revenue for the year 1902/3', p. 46; the
ld. increase in price for the 4 lb. loaf, the typical household bread, in London
was exceptional. It is doubtful whether the increase in imports of foreign
wheat can be blamed on the short-lived 1902 corn and flour duty. One
important factor was the bad harvest of 1902; memorandum by T.
J.
Pittar
(Customs) on 'Corn Duty', 11 May 1903, PRO, T 168/93. The Treasury, by
contrast, emphasized the increased price of wheat handled in Liverpool
relative to the
duty-free
Hamburg price, T. 168-54, 'Are Import Duties, such
as the Corn Duty, paid by the Consumer', 11 August 1903.
69 Lloyd George reported in North Wales Observer, 2 October 1903; Daily News, 12
June 1905; Westminster Gazette, 25 August 1905; The Manchester and Salford Co-
operative Herald, XV (178) (September 1903): 145; Tariff-ridden Germany: A Visit
of Enquiry by
J.
Ramsay Macdonald, M.P. (London, 1909), pp. 19-22, 61; Free
Trade Union, Tales of the Tariff Trippers: An Exposure of the TariffReform Tours in
Germany (London, 1910). There is little debate that British real wages remained
higher than German ones in this period. Such aggregate comparisons,
favoured by liberals, distracted from the decline or at least stagnation in real
wages in Britain (E. H. Hunt, British Labour History 1815-1914 (Atlantic High-
lands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), pp. 74ff., 109ff.). C. H. Feinstein's recent
statistical reappraisal suggests that British real wages merely stagnated after
1900 ('What really happened to real wages?', Economic History Review 2nd ser.,
XLIII (1990): 329-55).
70 House of Lords Record Office, London, Lloyd George MSS, A/13/1/4, 30
January 1905.
71 W. E. Downing, Two Great Tariff Trials of 1912 (London, 1912), p. 57; the
quotations are taken from Mond's introduction to the same volume, p. 4.
72 For different interpretations of the origins of British nationalism, see Gerald
Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830 (New
York: St Martin's Press, 1987); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation
1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1992);
Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in
England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. chs
2-3; Steven Pincus, The Anglo-Dutch Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996).
73 'Official economic inquiry and Britain's industrial decline' in M. 0. Furner
and B. Supple (eds) The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and
British Experiences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 328f.
74 'I myself see little or nothing that I wish to take from the Great Republic.
I do not desire to have a crop of millionaires; I do not wish for a popula-
tion striving for wealth at any cost; I do not value a political system which
... promotes corruption' (Bell in Cox, Industries, p. 282).
75 Hilton, Age of Atonement, p. 351.
76 William Glazier in Cobden Unwin, Hungry Forties, p. 212.
77 Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880-1950
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 edn), p. 32.
78 Typical for the importance of societal self-dependence, see Bolton Co-operative
Record XIV, 12 (December 1903): 27; Pat Thane, 'The working class and state
"welfare" in Britain, 1880-1914', Historical Journal XXVII (1984): 877-900.
Belief in social work and active citizenship did not necessarily mean outright
hostility to state services: see Jose Harris, 'Political thought and the welfare
state 1870-1940: an intellectual framework for British social policy', Past and
Present 135 (1992): 116-41. See also Frank Trentmann (ed.) Paradoxes of Civil
248
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Society: New Perspectives on Modem German and British History (Oxford
and Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, forthcoming).
79 See, esp., J. A. Hobson, Evolution of Modern Capitalism (London, 1897), ch. XIV;
J. A. Hobson, Work and Wealth: A Human Valuation (London, 1914), esp. chs
IX, X, XV; J. A. Hobson, The Economics of Distribution (London, 1900), ch. III.
80 J. M. Robertson, The Fallacy of Saving: A Study in Economics (London, 1892);
Alon Kadish, 'The non-canonical context of The Physiology of Industry', in
John Pheby (ed.)
J.
A. Hobson after Fifty Years: Freethinker of the Social Sciences
(London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 53-77.
81 Judith Goldstein and Robert 0. Keohane (eds) Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs,
Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
82 As Alexander Wendt has noted, this approach does not sufficiently distin-
guish between the more general claim that interests are always influenced
by ideas, and the more limited claim that ideas can influence behaviour,
which would leave intact the relatively autonomous role of material factors
in determining interests (review of Goldstein and Keohane, Ideas, in IO,
LXXXVIII (1994): 1040f.).
83 Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Inter-
pretative Sociologies, 2nd rev. edn (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1993), p. 160; Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the
Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See
also Mark Bevir on the mutual dependence of 'The individual and society',
Political Studies XLIV (1996): 102-14.
84 Rohrlich, 'Economic culture'.
85 For the different 'double hermeneutics' of social sciences, see Giddens, New
Rules, ch. 4. Alexander E. Wendt, 'The agent-structure problem in interna-
tional relations theory' IO XLI (1987): 335-70.
86 Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce; Hilton, Age of Atonement; Michael J Turner,
'Before the Manchester School: economic theory in early nineteenth-century
Manchester', History LXXIX (256) (1994): 216-41; Juirgen Kocka and Allan
Mitchell (eds) Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-century Europe (Oxford and
Providence: Berg, 1993); David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans (eds) The
German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class
from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century (London: Routledge,
1991); Dieter Langewiesche (ed.) Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Gottingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988); Puhle, Burger.
87 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time (New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).
88 TUC Circular A, repr. in G. W. Alcock, Fifty
Years of Railway Trade Unionism
(London, 1922), p. 350.
89 British Library, Cecil MSS, MS 51158, Robert Cecil to Sir Edward Clarke, 29
May 1906, condemning the tariff reform politics of 'shibboleths & excom-
munication' by an 'impulsive and unscrupulous demagogue' as 'a theory of
politics [which] would soon drive all self-respecting persons to other
pursuits. It is American Bossism in its worst form'.
90 Keir Hardie quoted in Frank Trentmann, 'Wealth versus welfare: the British
left between free trade and national political economy', Historical Research
LXX (171) (February 1997), p. 91.
91 Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); John Keane (ed.) Civil Society and the
State (London: Verso, 1988): references in n. 78.
92 Frank Trentmann, 'The strange death of free trade: the erosion of "liberal con-
sensus" in Britain, c. 1903-1932', in Biagini, Citizenship and Community, pp. 235ff.
249
ARTICLES
93 Ralph Nader, The Case against 'Free Trade' GATT, NAFTA and the Globali-
sation of Corporate Power (San Francisco: Earth Island Press, 1993); Tim Lang
and Colin Hines (eds) The New Protectionism: Protecting the Future against
Free Trade (London: Earthscan, 1993); "'Free-trade" fiasco', The Progressive
LVI (2) (February 1992); 'Free trade: the great destroyer', The Ecologist;
New York Times, 22 September 1993, p. A17, and 23 September 1993, p. B7;
'Free trade: women against the impact', Christianity and Crisis, 16 March
1992; 'How free trade fails: how GATT and NAFTA harm
democracy,
ecology, and the Third World', Dollars & Sense (October 1992); Le Figaro,
13 December 1993, pp. 1, 5, 7.
94 Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996);
Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question: The Inter-
national Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Oxford: Polity, 1996);
John A. Hall, 'Globalisation and nationalism' (forthcoming).
95 Krugman, Pop Internationalism, ch. 3; Paul Krugman, 'We are not the world',
New York Times, 13 February 1997, p. A 33; Wilfried Herz, 'Die grosse
Ausrede', Die Zeit, 8 November 1996, p. 9; cf. the debate between Krugman
and Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect 28 (September-October 1996),
29 (November-December 1996): 13-16.
96 Krugman, Pop Internationalism, ch. 5.
97 Vivien A. Schmidt, 'The New World Order, Incorporated: the rise of
business and the decline of the nation state', Daedalus CXXIV (2) (March
1995) 75-106; Richard Rosecrance, 'The rise of the virtual state', Foreign
Affairs LXXV (4) (uly-August 1996): 45-61. Cf. Hall, 'Globalisation and
nationalism'.
98 Roger Burbach, Orlando Nu'-nez and Boris Kagarlitsky, Globalization and its
Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms (London: Pluto Press, 1997).
Among 'New Labour' and Social Democrats, it might be noted, the embrace
of the term has been facilitated by the academic credibility provided for
the concept of globalization (especially its non-economic dimensions) by
progressive public intellectuals, like the sociologists Anthony Giddens and
Ulrich Beck. The diagnosis of globalization is foundational here for the
thesis of a 'life politics', of the breaking down of traditional bonds, and
of an advancing democratization in the local and intimate spheres of
individual lives. Globalization and transformations in self-identity, in
Giddens's view, stand in a dialectical relationship: Anthony Giddens,
Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); and now Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left
and Right: The Future of Radical Democracy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1996).
99 Max Weber, 'Der Sinn der "Wertfreiheit" der soziologischen und okono-
mischen Wissenschaften' (1918), in Gesammelte Aufsitze zur Wissen-
schaftslehre (Tiubingen: Mohr, 1988), pp. 536f. For recent philosophical
attempts going beyond the classic social-scientific distinction between fact
and value, and value rationality and instrumental rationality, see Hilary
Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), ch. 8; Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
100 Hodgson, 'Economic imperialism'; Hodgson, 'Varieties of capitalism'; Peter
Burnham, 'Open Marxism and vulgar international political economy',
RIPE I (1994): 221-31; Luhmann, Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft.
101 For the following see, esp., Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsitze zur
Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, 7th edn (Tiibingen, 1978); M. Rainer Lepsius,
250
POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
'Interessen und Ideen: Die Zurechnungsproblematik bei Max Weber', Inter-
essen, Ideen und Institutionen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag), pp. 31-43.
See also the interesting debate in the new social movements literature:
Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (eds) Social Movements and Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
102 Exemplary on this tension, see Reinhart Koselleck's work, e.g. Futures Past:
On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985),
pp. 231ff.
103 See Gustav Schmoller, Die drei Epochen der preussischen Finanzpolitik
(Leipzig, 1877); Alon Kadish, Historians, Economists and Economic History
(London: Routledge, 1989); Patrick O'Brien, 'The costs and benefits of
British imperialism 1846-1914', Past and Present 120 (August 1988): 163-200;
Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times; Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability:
Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1987). For an emphasis on the supply side in the 'political market
for protection', see Knut Borchardt, Perspectives on Modern German Economic
History and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; German
edn, 1982), ch. 1; Berger, Organizing Interests.
104 Alan Milward, 'Tariffs as constitutions', in Susan Strange and Roger Tooze
(eds) The International Politics of Surplus Capacity: Competition for Market
Shares in the World Recession (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 63.
Cf. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, esp. pp. 637-80.
105 Trentmann, 'Transformation of fiscal reform'.
106 Robert J. Holton, Economy and Society (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 177,
cf. Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism and the market', in 2i2ek, Mapping
Ideology, pp. 278-95.
251