Review Essay: Increasing Happiness by Thinning the Herd

David Levy and Sandra Peart mean to revise the history of nineteenth-century British political economy. And more. In their latest, fascinating installment, The Vanity of the Philosopher, Peart and Levy argue that the transition from classical to post-classical economics is best understood as a sea change in the way political economists regarded human nature. What happened? Well, in the beginning, the humane political economy of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who together are, for Peart and Levy, synecdoches for classical political economy, insisted that people are basically the same. Subsequently, the Smith-Mill view was, from 1850 to 1890, supplanted by a post-classical economics, which insisted that some human groups are inherently inferior to others, and which, as a consequence, ultimately endorsed eugenic thought and eugenic policy. Political economy’s turn from egalitarianism and sympathy to hierarchy and eugenics, say Peart and Levy, was the work of many hands. Levy’s Dismal Science had already put Thomas Carlyle in the dock (2001). Carlyle and other Romantic critics of capitalism, such as John Ruskin, defended plantation slavery as morally superior to factory work. For these Romantic reactionaries, the savage chattel slavery of England’s Jamaican plantations was preferable to the ‘‘wage slavery’’ of Manchester’s factories. Levy’s accomplishment was to show that Carlyle’s vigorous defense of racism and slavery was not anomalous, as some apologists have claimed, but of a piece with the larger Romantic critique of capitalism. For Carlyle, as for other Romantic critics of capitalism, inferior races like blacks and the Irish required tuition from their moral betters. In the present volume, Peart and Levy explain political economy’s turn to hierarchy with some additional explanators: the allure of natural selection and other new imports from biology, utility theory’s openness to the prospect that some have greater capacity for happiness than others, and, closer to the twentieth century, the temptations of expertise—the technocracy in charge of designating and improving