Frankfurt School, 1935 (2): Charles Beard on the social sciences in the US

Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)

The 1/1935 number of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung features a short article by the Progressive historian Charles Beard, who was soon to become a bitter isolationist critic of Franklin Roosevelt and his pro-British, anti-German foreign policy.

But his article doesn't deal with foreign policy, but rather with "The Social Sciences in the United States" (the article was published in English). Beard refers to the controversy over to what extent social sciences can qualify as empirical disciplines of an equal scientific validity to the physical sciences. And he writes:

Whatever may be the merits of the controversy, it is certainly true that every student of the social sciences brings to his choice of areas for research, his
detailed investigations, his selection of data, and his organization of materials some more or less clearly developed assumptions and scheme of valuation. If anything is known about the human animal this is known. As Croce says, if some large, generous, and reasoned philosophy does not control the thinker, then some petty, narrow, class, and provincial philosophy will.

And what schemes of organization and valuation have generally prevailed among American scholars in the social sciences ? In the main the system of British Manchesterism has prevailed, with modifications in detail and with acquiescence in certain stubborn contradictions in American practice. For confirmation of this large generalization, the reader is referred to that excellent contribution to the history of social thought in the United States, Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America [1934; italics added]. The systems of Hegel, Marx, and the German socialists of the chair [academia] have had little or no observable influence on American studies in history, politics, economics, or sociology. Veblen may be cited as an exception that illustrates the rule. Even so-called institutional economists bent on „seeing things as they are" have not escaped the constricting influence of British Manchesterism. Nor have American Catholic writers in this field kept pure and undefiled the scheme of Thomas Aquinas.

Presumably by “the scheme of Thomas Aquinas,” Beard was referring to medieval Catholic social teachings which criticized practices like usury (lending at interest) which were a normal and even vital part of capitalist economies.

Manchester economics refers to the laissez-faire, anti-regulation, free trade policies of the classical economists favored by the classical liberal tradition of the 19th century. In America in Midpassage (1939), Beard and his wife and co-author Mary Beard described the prevailing conservative business wisdom in the years leading up to the Great Depression as follows:

Indeed thought in every age had seemed to flow in a kind of cycle, out of
current proverbs into erudite coverage and back again into common sayings. The process was illustrated in 1931 when Albert H. Wiggin, head of the Chase National Bank, engaged in instructing a Senate Committee at Washington, based his philosophy of finance on the maxim of "let us alone," therewith merely repeating a "truism" of the marketplace that had formerly got into the heavy pages of Adam Smith and David Ricardo and out again into the marts of trade.

In the effulgence of the golden glow, the most general system of American thought, upon which professors and nearly everybody else drew for inspiration, was that of smooth and ready acceptance of the prevailing order, from which Satan and nearly all evil had been effectively banished. Its central conception was that the United States of America was a pretty good place, just as constituted. Its special interests were comfort, convenience, pecuniary advancement, emulatory display, salesmanship, unbroken progress in the straight utilitarian direction, and efficiency, with education as a preparation for the realization and enjoyment of such interests. Its philosophy was on the whole "matter-of-fact" and pragmatic. Our world will go on very much this way forever; and if disturbances should arise, we can "recover" the past again by doing more of the same thing we had been doing. There will be no more devastating jars to the American social order, no more wars, revolutions, cataclysms, and national tragedies. [my emphasis]

The onset of the Depression, although it “spread desolation all around” For some of the plutocrats of the day, it didn't shake their basic dogmas much. Still, "economic and political practitioners began to search feverishly for explanations of the plight into which they had fallen and to wonder how they could get out of it."

Beard was a strange and puzzling character. The historian William Appleman Williams, to whom that description could also be applied, wrote an essay about Beard called “Charles Austin Beard: The Intellectual as Tory-Radical” (in Harvey Goldberg, ed., American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities (1957). If the general outlook of the Frankfurt School in 1935 were described as radical-social-democratic, Beard perspective shared much of their criticism of existing economic conditions but didn't embrace their broader ideas for an ultimate solution. Thus, the “Tory-Radical” label. Williams wrote of Beard’s understanding during the Depression years:

But the depression brought Beard up short. Here was deep and general crisis. And there is little doubt that his intellectual and personal outlook responded immediately. ...

Beard did not, however, launch any frontal attack on private property. His proposal [in 1931] was no more, in essence, than an intelligent and rather extensive development of the idea of a corporate society, previously advanced in America by such men as Herbert Croly and Herbert Hoover. This concept of a corporate society is based on the proposition that every individual holds membership in two of the three basic units of all industrialized societies. All people are citizens, hence are part of the government. And, in addition, they belong either to capital or labor. Thus the
state, in theory at least, is at once the common ground where both parties adjust their differences, and an independent power capable of enforcing judgments on both groups.

But corporatism is not a radical concept, for it is tied intimately to the principle of private property. And this weakens both its theoretical and its practical value. For unless the power to control investments, so vital to balanced economic growth, is exercised on the basis of a public choice between alternate programs and policies, one half of the economic life of society remains in the hands of a tiny minority.

Thus Beard's radical insights into the malfunctioning of the existing system were never matched by an equally fundamental program for its renovation.

I posted a sketch of Williams' own outlook here in 2009 What kind of reformist vision did William Appleman Williams have? 09/01/2009. I commented on his later neo-Confederate version of the American Civil War in 2007 William A. Williams on the Civil War 07/17/2007.

Tags: charles beard, frankfurt school, william appleman williams