David Andrews

The Background to Hawtrey's Ethics

The positive/normative distinction, in its modern form, was introduced into economics by Lionel Robbins. Robbinss discussion of the distinction was provoked in part by Ralph Hawtreys prior claim that economics cannot be dissociated from ethics. Robbinss argument has been quite influential, but Hawtrey himself was not persuaded and later explicitly reaffirmed his view but did not sketch out its basis in any published writing. This article offers an interpretation of the philosophical underpinnings of Hawtreys position. It argues that Hawtrey had a sophisticated, well-developed, and coherent position, with deep historical roots and based on the ethics of G. E. Moore and that rejected moral Robbinss moral skepticism. Hawtrey took the view that goodness is an objective property of the world and, as a result, he construed the relationship between ethics and economics in a manner quite different from that which prevails today.

Keynes and Christian socialism: Religion and the economic problem

Abstract Keynes rejected religion in his youth but embraced it later in his life. This essay addresses Keynes’ peculiar definition of religion, his description of his “religion,” and the sources of his religion. Keynes characterised religion as not only a personal experience of communion, but also as the pursuit of a better world for all people, although he showed some ambivalence about how this better world might come about, ultimately adopting a position similar to that of the nineteenth-century Christian Socialist Movement, to which he was connected through the Cambridge Apostles.

Error or absurdity? A non-cognitive approach to commodity fetishism

Abstract Karl Marx presented his theory of commodity fetishism as an explanation of the mysterious appearance of social relations in a system of commodity production as natural phenomena. The standard interpretation of this as a failure to perceive capitalist social relations correctly depends on a particular modern sense of ‘natural’. If classical political economy and Marx used ‘natural’ in the Aristotelian sense, commodity fetishism appears quite differently: not as a cognitive error but rather as a manner of living under commodity production, one that is not wrong but absurd, the word fetishism tying commodity production to pre-Enlightenment, preliterate peoples.