Wealth As Fulfillment?

Sir Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College and former President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.  A former trustee of the National Gallery and the British Museum, he is an Honorary Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society and was President of the British Academy between 1993 and 1997.  His most recent book, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England, asks a very important question, “how should we live?”. Thomas explores the history of early modern England to reveal the ways in which people sought to lead fulfilling lives, illuminating the central values of the age, while casting incidental light on some of the perennial problems of human existence.  In the excerpt below, Thomas considers an ancient question, “can material wealth make us happy?”.

What a contrast between this new acceptance of limitless desire and the sixteenth-century doctrine that needs were fixed and that superfluities should be given away!  How did the belief in the desirability of ever more wealth and possessions come to supersede the older notion that riches were a spiritual danger and their pursuit and unworthy preoccupation?  How was it that religious leaders eventually ‘acquiesced in the popular assumption that the acquisition of riches was the main end of man’?

Those questions were first posed by the great German sociologist Max Weber, and asked again over eighty years ago by R.H. Tawney, in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)…What he did show was that Puritan clergy (along with others) legitimized a business career as an acceptable calling for a godly person to follow.  But they never regarded it as more than one of many such acceptable callings; and they continued to believe that the pursuit of wealth for its own sake was reprehensible.  Riches were to be employed for the good of all, not for private advantage.

To explain how moneymaking came to be thought a desirable human objective, we have to look beyond Puritanism.  Some weight should be given to the influence of a legal tradition which upheld private property and the individual right to lawful acquisition.  As a Jacobean recorder of London remarked, the law allowed every man to go his own way and accumulate wealth.  Hence the belief of a Tudor rack-renting landlord

That with his own he might

always do as he list.

A similar report was made by a recalcitrant offender before the Court of Star Chamber in 1599: ‘My goods are mine own…I will do what I list with them.’  Legal individualism of this kind, reflecting a strong sense of personal property, had been visible in late medieval rural society.  Ubiquitous in the early modern period, it was forcefully expressed in 1656 by the Leicestershire minister Joseph Lee, who, in defense of enclosing landlords, defiantly asked: ‘may not every man lawfully put his commodity to the best advantage, provided he do it without prejudice to others?’

Also important was the influence of classical notions about the indispensability of worldly goods for the pursuit of the good life.  Just as, in late medieval Italy, scholastics, mendicant friars, and humanist scholars justified moneymaking and agreed in extolling the more potentialities of material wealth, so, in fifteenth-century England, Bishop Reginald Pecock followed Aristotle and Aquinas in describing riches as ‘the instruments of virtue’.  Sixteenth-century writers, from the Henrician humanist Thomas Starkey to the Elizabethan divine George Gifford, argued that worldly prosperity, though undoubtedly a temptation, could, when properly used, positively assist men to do good in this world and to achieve the life to come.  Provided it was put to good purposes, the acquisition of wealth was morally acceptable, even desirable, for poverty could have degrading effects.  Xenophon’s praise of the industrious householder was invoked to prove that men had a duty to provide for themselves and their children.  Only if it became a single, overriding aim, was the pursuit of riches unacceptable.

Seventeenth-century religious writers continued this theme, arguing that riches were good in themselves, whereas poverty, far from being a holy state, enfeebled the mind and made it unfitted for any generous enterprises.  It was, however, in secular economic literature that the justification of moneymaking was most fully formulated.  Between the mid-sixteenth and the late seventeenth centuries, a succession of economic writers developed the model of what we now think of as economic man, buying in the cheapest market, selling in the dearest, relentlessly pursing his limitless desires.  From the Discourse of  the Commonweal (written in 1549) to Dudley North’s Discourses on Trade (1691), two guiding propositions were uppermost: first, that people would always seek to maximize their own self-interest, regardless of what legislators or moralists might wish; second, that the pursuit of selfish interests could, more or less, be made to harmonize, to everyone’s benefit.  These doctrines were particularly prominent at certain periods: they were tentatively articulated in the reign of Edward VI; they emerged again in the economic debates of the 1620s; they were vigorously advanced by radical defenders of the Commonwealth in the 1640s and 1650s; and they were extensively propagated by John Houghton, Nicholas Barbon, and other late seventeenth-century lobbyists.  In the eighteenth century, they would reach their apotheosis in the writings of Adam Smith…

…So it was that the quest for wealth and possessions came to be represented as an acceptable goal, increasingly free from guilt and moral censure, and a legitimate route to human fulfilment.  When Daniel Defoe visited Norfolk around 1720, he found every man ‘busy on the main affair of life, that is to say getting money’.  Commerce, noted the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson in 1767, was now ‘considered as the great object of nations, and the principle study of mankind’.  ‘Getting of money,’ agreed the cotton manufacturer Jedediah Strutt, ‘whatever some divines would teach us to the contrary…is the main business of the life of man.’

Yet a nagging doubt remained.  Could money and goods really bring happiness? Adam Smith himself concluded that the pleasures of wealth were a deception.  They produced ‘a few trifling conveniences to the body’, but they left their owner just as exposed ‘to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death’.  ‘In what constitutes the real happiness of human life,’ he wrote, ‘in ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level…’.

Of course, this was too bland a view.  It discounted the wretchedness of the poor, their lower expectation of life, and the human deterioration which accompanied poverty and rejection.  Yet Adam Smith’s salutary warning that money and possessions did not guarantee felicity interestingly anticipates the view of those modern economists who suggest that, to the comfortably placed inhabitants of developed societies, additional riches can bring, at most, only a trivial amount of extra happiness…