Joseph Cropsey

What is Welfare Economics

C ONTEMPORARY welfare economics has drawn so heavily upon mathematics, psychology, and moral and political science that it can scarcely be understood without reference to the extra-economic premises and procedures to which it has bound itself. The purpose of this paper is to inquire into the meaning of the levy that economics has made upon the other disciplines, to try to state the characteristics of present-day welfare economics as the common terminus of three convergent lines of developmenta mathematical, a psychological, and a moral-political.

On the Relation of Political Science and Economics

That politics and economic life have much to do with each other is a remark matched in self-evidence only by the parallel observation that political science and economics are of mutual interest. All the more striking then is the difficulty one meets in attempting to state with precision how politics and economic life, or how political science and economics are related. Consider for example the view that politics is the ceaseless competition of interested groups. Except under very rare conditions, as for instance the absence of division of labor, economic circumstances will preoccupy the waking hours of most men at most times. Their preoccupations will express themselves in the formation of organizations, or at least interested groups, with economic foundations. Politics, so far as “interest” means “economic interest” (which it does largely, but not exclusively), is the mutual adjustment of economic positions; and to that extent, the relation between politics and economic life seems to be that political activity grows out of economic activity. But the competition of the interests is, after all, an organized affair, carried out in accordance with rules called laws and constitutions. So perhaps the legal framework, the construction of which surely deserves to be called political, supervenes over the clashing of mere interests and even prescribes which interests may present themselves at the contest. Thus politics appears to be primary in its own right.

A Reply to Rothman.

Readers of Stanley Rothmans article “The Revival of Classical Political Philosophy: A Critique” will be aware that the title he has chosen does not indicate the full scope of his endeavor. He has in fact attempted to state and criticize the grounds of classical political and natural philosophy, and to state and in a certain measure defend the grounds of modern social and natural science. Exceptional resources of scholarship and analytic power would be needed to dispose of those tremendous themes, which I believe Rothman has not succeeded in doing. A prominent purpose of Rothmans paper is to criticize the work of Professor Leo Strauss and of some of his students, on the view that he, and after his instruction they, are the animators of the attempted revival of classical doctrines concerning natural right. The attempt to revive natural right is presented as complementary with a belief in the weakness of social science as now understood by the majority of academic and other professionals. The purpose of the present reflections on Rothmans article is to see how far he has made a valid criticism of the classics and of the men he regards as their attempted restorers; and to consider the soundness of his views on the received sciences.

Political Life and a Natural Order

OUR PROBLEM IS, whether political life is in some way guided by nature, and if so, in what way; or more particularly, whether nature is characterized by an order that affects the shape of political life. The question is suggested by the practice of the political philosophers, who have generally thought it necessary to make their doctrines reflect the order of nature, or consist with nature irrespective of order. At the same time, the difference between natural philosophy and political philosophy has long been honored in the great literature: whatever might be the inner continuity between the Republic and the Timaeus, or between Aristotles PolUtics and his Physics, the massive differences between the books on political life and the books on nature stand out, as they do also in the books of later ages. There is, indeed, some tendency for those differences to, be made less in recent times, and for the books on political life increasingly to resemble the books on nature. That tendency has developed concomitantly with the belief in the simplicity oif nature, as will be explained, or in the essentially unordered, homogeneous and unitary character of the natural whole; and in the simple, direct domestication of man in that whole. The relation of political life and nature proper thus appears in some respects to be remote, in other respects intimate, but is in every respect obscure. Our purpose is to clarify the relation as well as we can.