ABSTRACT
Reading human prospects from the script given by natural order offers progress for humanity but also the sacrifice of some to its workings. This much we can see clearly in the previous chapters on Smith, Hume, Malthus and Jevons. But these thinkers could not bring themselves to accept fully this picture of natural order as an altar of sacrifice, an allusion to Hegel’s influence on Marshall. David Hume scrambles to secure progress for both poor countries and the continued dominance of rich countries, though certain racialized exclusions seem to apply. Smith’s orderly system of natural liberty and its invisible hands is weighted with ambiguity. On the one side, the visible hand of the state corrects for acknowledged faults in the workings of the social cosmos, just as Newton’s God corrected for the imperfect mechanics of the universe. On the other side, preserving the orderliness and goodness of the social mechanism requires Smith to ignore the extent of the social evils his careful analysis reveals. Social evils are simultaneously revealed and denied. Malthus performs political economy as an explicit theodicy. Consciously following both Hume and Smith, he vindicates natural order, despite its partial evils, though he also opens the policy universe to responses to poverty beyond any that Smith would countenance. Fully acknowledging social evils appears to call forth greater human action, not despair. Jevons mixes these two responses. He sees a natural order that promises efficiency, justice and economic advance as providential, but its attendant evils require social reform guided by the divine gift of human reason and, one of its fruits, economic science. Jevons also adds a new social evolutionary dimension to economics, only available to him with the work of Spencer and Darwin. Though supplemented by social reform, Jevons suggests that natural order must be allowed to do its work of competitively weeding out the less fit. Theodicy now encompasses the hard lessons of the survival of the fittest.
