This paper will deal not with the development, but rather with the lack of development of laissez-faire thought in Massachusetts during most of the nineteenth century. A common misconception of American economic thought, as of American economy, ascribes a continuous laissez-faire bent to policy in the United States. This misconception will be found not only in the pretty publications of the National Association of Manufacturers where it might be expected, but also in the serious works of our most careful scholars into which it obtrudes almost automatically. Thus Mr. Nef recently referred to laissez faire as “part of our national heritage.” Yet, in general, and specifically as applied to Massachusetts, this is completely erroneous.

Nearly seventy-five years have elapsed since Henry Carey complained that the term laissez faire had become a meaningless symbol, an object, as he put it, of “word-worship.” If the task of definition seemed imposing in his time, it is not less so in ours. The concept has been used with abandon on various levels of political and economic discussion. It belongs to a whole category of catchwords in our social thought whose connotations, if they ever were precise, have become blurred through constant and polemical usage. They are dangerous labels for the historian. This paper seeks to analyze the ideas developed in Pennsylvania to oppose governmental action in economic life during the period from the Revolution to the Civil War. For the present purpose it is not a matter of significance whether one chooses to believe that any of these ideas are genuinely laissezfaire in character or not.

It is necessary to indicate at the outset the general character of the historical material with which this paper deals. I have been able to discover in this period of Georgia's history almost no advocacy or discussion of the doctrine of laissez faire as such. On the other hand, one finds much discussion of private and public enterprise which, if removed from the context of events, would seem to involve most of the commonly accepted tenets of laissez faire. Lastly, there are the main currents of social action, which, upon investigation, are found to have comprised a varying mixture of private and public activities. It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the logic of the social policy which directed these currents simply by observing the varying proportions of private and public action; it would be necessary first to go behind the action and study both the ends and the means. In the limited space allotted to this paper, it is possible to present only the barest outlines of the more important events and discussions in which the issue of public interference or of private versus public action arose. Interpretations and evaluations must be left, for the most part, to additional studies

German political empire building had a decisive and powerful influence not only on the making, but also on the writing of economic history. The initial effect upon the history of economic history was negative rather than positive. The so-called “political historians” of the midnineteenth century were inspired by the contemporary struggle for the enhancement of the nation's political power and for constitutional liberty. The subsequent formation of Imperial Germany by “blood and iron,” instead of broadening the historical perspective and social vision of Droysen, Duncker, Häusser, Sybel, Treitschke, and the more docile among their followers, merely knocked out their liberalism and intensified and militarized their nationalism. In the new Reich they felt irritated and annoyed rather than roused and shaken by the grave economic conflicts and social disharmonies which grew out of the rapid industrialization of the German national economy and the narrow social class structure of the Imperial government and its Junker personnel. The hypnotic spell emanating from Bismarck's leadership accounted for the sterility of the political historians' response. Although the work of these academic civil servants greatly improved in technical perfection and thoroughness and extended the boundaries of factual knowledge, including knowledge not always worth knowing, it lost vigor and fertility and deteriorated into staleness and irksome monotony as to fundamental ideas and social ideals.

German imperial expansion, begun under Bismarck, swiftly unfolded with the aid of industrial technology along lines that adapted it ideally for the organization, not of a national state, but of a continent or even the world. In this fact lies a major contrast between the neo-mercantilism which followed 1879 and the cameralism borrowed from the Burgundians by the German princes in the sixteenth century. The system extolled by Becher was designed to meet the power needs of dwarf states perpetually torn, by a mule-and-the-two-haystacks dilemma, between the fractioning particularism of the lay princes on the one hand, and the centrifugal pull of a meaningless imperial universalism on the other. The ‘new age’ for which, as Schulze- Gavaernitz once remarked, Bismarck played the role of ‘obstetrician,’ employed a machinery for internal unification that fitted the national—in particular the German—state almost as badly as it did the political fractions of which it was compounded.

When Hitler based so much of his campaign of 1936–1937 for the return of the colonies upon the Fatherland's economic need of them, he was reverting to the pattern of Germany's colonial history. It mattered not that the economic value of these colonies had been proven negligible or, at least, problematical so far as any advantage in trade and raw materials accruing to the empire was concerned. He and the Nazi leaders continued to stress the economic motive of expansion and aggression; to emphasize the close connection between commercial and colonial policies which had always characterized German imperialism.