Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

75. Many eyes focused on the Dutch United Provinces, for here was a small country – which even had to create its own land – yet had established a leading place among nations due to its excellence in the arts and in commerce.

76. ‘Vital statistics’ is a Victorian term. Buchan, Op. cit., page 309.

77. Ibid., page 316.

78. Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, Oxford: The Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1995, page 17.

79. Ibid., page 133.

80. Ibid., chapter 11, pages 157ff, ‘The making of the theory of moral sentiments’.

81. Ibid., page 121.

82. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, page 447.

83. Ibid., page 3.

84. Ibid., page 391.

85. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 317.

86. Langford, Op. cit., page 70.

87. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 319.

88. Ibid.

89. Hawthorn, Op. cit., page 56.

90. Bernal, Science in History, Op. cit., volume 4, page 1052, says that for Adam Smith laissez faire was the natural order.

91. H. T. Buckle, A History of Civilisation in England, London: Longman’s Green, 1871, three volumes, volume 1, page 194.

92. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 333.

93. This has remained an influential form of pessimism, very alive in the twentieth century in the ecology movement. It also helped account for Thomas Carlyle’s description of economics as ‘the dismal science’. See Kenneth Smith, The Malthusian Controversy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951.

94. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 335; see also Hawthorn, Op. cit., page 80.

95. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 251.

96. The main difference between then and now, in the understanding of what we may call, for shorthand, sociology, was that in the eighteenth century they were less concerned with biology and psychology than we are, and more concerned with morality (virtue) and politics.

97. Cobban, Op. cit., page 147. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 198, considers him a masochist, always seeking a maman.

98. J.-J. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses (edited by R. D. Masters), New York: St Martin’s Press, 1964, page 92f. Cobban, Op. cit., page 149, for Rousseau’s ‘intellectual epiphany’.

99. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 278.

100. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 199. In arguing that feelings should guide man on how to live, Rousseau may be seen as one of the originators of the romantic movement. This also led him to his theory of education: he believed in childhood innocence, rather than the then-prevalent view that the child is inherently sinful and needs it knocked out of him.

101. Hawthorn, Op. cit., pages 14–15.

102. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 293.

103. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 258.

104. Barnes, Op. cit., page 826.

105. See Boorstin, Op. cit., page 161, for Bacon’s failure to recognise the advances of Napier, Vesalius and Harvey.

106. Cobban, Op. cit., page 51.

107. F. J. Teggar, The Idea of Progress, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1925, pages 110ff.

108. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 259.

109. Ibid. See Boorstin, Op. cit., pages 193ff, for the arguments over the use of the word and concept ‘civilisation’.

110. Teggar, Op. cit., page 142; Boorstin, Op. cit, page 219.

111. Barnes, Op. cit., page 824; and James Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy, London: Macmillan, 1893, pages 204–205.

112. ‘Tom Paine was considered for a time as Tom Fool to him’, said H. S. Salt. Deborah Manley, Henry Salt: Artist, Traveller, Diplomat, Egyptologist, London: Libri, 2001. See also: H. S. Salt, Godwin’s Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, Paternoster Row, London, 1796, pages 1–2.

113. As one observer put it, ‘this is the apotheosis of individualism and in a sense of Protestantism’. Barnes, Op. cit., page 836.

114. Barnes, Op. cit., page 839; and Boorstin, Op. cit., page 208.

115. Barnes, Op. cit., page 840 and Louis, duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires de Saint-Simon, edited by A. de Boislisle (41 volumes), Paris, 1923–1928; Boorstin, Op. cit., pages 207–212; Hawthorn, Op. cit., pages 72–79, who describes Saint-Simon as ‘an opportunist’.

CHAPTER 27: THE IDEA OF THE FACTORY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

1. Charles Dickens, Hard Times, London: Penguin, 2003, with an introduction by Kate Flint, pages 27–28. Hard Times was originally published in 1854.

2. Ibid., page xi.