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LIBERTY, POVERTY AND CHARITY IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF JOSIAH TUCKER AND JOSEPH BUTLER
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 October 2017
Abstract
Josiah Tucker, who was the Anglican dean of Gloucester from 1758 until his death in 1799, is best known today as a controversialist, a political economist and a lesser contemporary of Adam Smith. Little attention has been paid, however, to the important relationship between his religious writings and his wider economic thought. This article addresses this lack of attention in two ways: first by demonstrating the link between Tucker's conception of civil and religious liberty and his “science” of political economy, and second by drawing sustained attention to his economic adaptation and reformulation of the moral philosophy of Bishop Joseph Butler, Tucker's ecclesiastical mentor from 1739 to 1752. Emphasizing Butler and Tucker's views on the traditional Christian virtue of charity, and the moral duty of the rich towards the poor, the article suggests that both clergymen were proponents of a sociability-based, neo-Stoic conception of human nature, which was not only compatible with, but also dependent upon, the established Anglican Church and state and the predominantly Whig commercial order. In consequence, Tucker's political economy was premised on the unavoidability of social subordination and economic inequality as necessary hallmarks of modern commercial society. Accordingly, the article closes with a brief discussion of Tucker's “Butlerian” assessment and rejection of the “anti-social” doctrine of individual natural rights, associated with the popular radicalism of the American and French Revolutions in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
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Footnotes
The present author is indebted to Iain McDaniel, Norman Vance, A. M. C. Waterman, Richard Whatmore, the late Donald Winch, Brian W. Young, and the three anonymous referees and editors of Modern Intellectual History, especially Tracie M. Matysik, for reading and providing helpful comments on various—often inchoate—drafts of this paper. Certain of its aspects was delivered at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, June 2013.
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80 Ibid., 23, 24.
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89 Tucker, Essay, 53–8. This proposal is repeated in greater detail in Josiah Tucker, The Manifold Causes of the Increase of the Poor Distinctly Set Forth (Gloucester, 1760), 12–16.
90 Bernard de Mandeville, An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools, in Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 2nd edn (London, 1723), 285–370.
91 Butler, Martyrdom, 6. Cf. Tennant, Butler's Philosophy and Ministry, 159.
92 Tucker, Josiah, Expediency of a Law for the Naturalization of Foreign Protestants: . . . Part II . . . Containing Important Queries relating to Commerce . . . and the Principles of the Christian Religion, 2nd edn (London, 1753) (henceforth NFP II), ix.Google Scholar
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94 Ibid., 18.
95 Tucker, Four Tracts . . . Two Sermons, 67. As Tucker elsewhere puts it, this was tantamount to a “Plan of good Œconomy,” ensuring economic progress from “Generation to Generation throughout an almost endless Progression and Variety.” Tucker, Seventeen Sermons, 156–8.
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103 Nieli, “Commercial Society and Christian Virtue,” esp. 581–4. Christian objections to wealth creation are articulated in such scriptural passages as Matthew 11:26: “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon,” or 1 Timothy 11:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”
104 Quoted in Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Political Thought, 165.
105 Cf. Waterman, Political Economy and Christian Theology, 109–12.
106 Donald Winch, “Adam Smith's ‘Enduring Particular Result’: A Political and Cosmopolitan Perspective,” in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue, 253–70, at 265.
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108 Butler, A Sermon Preached before the House of Lords . . . June 11, 1747 (London, 1747), 25–6.
109 Tucker, Elements, 81, 88.
110 Pocock, J. G. A., “Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke and Price: A Study in the Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Conservatism,” in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 157–91. For a broad survey see also Haakonssen, Knud, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar.
111 Tucker, A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq., Member of Parliament for Bristol . . . in Answer to his Printed Speech (Gloucester, 1775), 18–20; Tucker, Four Letters on Important National Subjects, Addressed to the Right Honourable the Earl of Shelburne, 2nd edn (London, 1783), 18, 20, 23.
112 Tucker, Four Letters on Important National Subjects, 23. Cf. Whatmore, Richard, “Shelburne and Perpetual Peace: Small States, Commerce, and International Relations within the Bowood Circle,” in Aston, Nigel and Orr, Clarissa Campbell, eds., An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain: Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737–1805 (Woodbridge, 2011), 249–73Google Scholar.
113 See note 85 above.
114 Tucker, Josiah, An Apology for the Present Church of England, As by Law Established (Gloucester, 1772), 14Google Scholar. This is similar to Hume's analysis, summarized by Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, 124 (emphases added), “that in a free constitution political differences could not be about the constitution; they had to be within the constitution.”
115 Tucker, Josiah, A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (Gloucester, 1781), 22, 23, 40Google Scholar.
116 Tucker, Letter to Burke, 12.
117 Tucker, Seventeen Sermons, 139–41. At 26 Tucker labels this the “divine Oeconomy.” Elsewhere he likens it to his “Plan of Christian Liberty.” Tucker, An Apology for the Present Church of England, 54.
118 Here Tucker was referring to his and Butler's frequent turns about the gardens of Bristol Cathedral during the 1740s, when, on one occasion, Butler remarked that it must be possible for “whole Communities and public Bodies [to] be seized with Fits of Insanity, as well as Individuals.” See Stephens, Alexander, Public Characters of 1798–9, 2nd edn (London, 1799), 171Google Scholar.
119 Tucker, Josiah, Cui Bono? Or, an Enquiry, What Benefits can Arise . . . from the Greatest Victories, or Successes, in the Present War? . . . Addressed to Monsieur Necker, 3rd edn (Gloucester, 1781), 32, 80–83, 137Google Scholar.
120 “Tucker to Mrs Jones, 12 Jan 1783,” Gentleman's Magazine 19 (1840), 19–20.
121 Connor, R. D. W., “Josiah Tucker or Cassandra Picks the Pocket of Mars,” World Affairs 103/2 (1940), 79–90Google Scholar.
122 Tucker to William Seward, 29 Oct. 1790, BL Add. MSS. 5419.
123 Tucker, Essay, 66.
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