Welfare and Amenity in the Work of Bertrand de Jouvenel

“In speaking of productivity, we think, no doubt, of gain in wealth as its end. But gain in wealth has in turn its end, and this is the good life.”

— A Better Life in an Affluent Society (1961)

With the possible exception of his 1949 lectures on “The Ethics of Redistribution,”¹ Bertrand de Jouvenel’s economic writings are not well known, even to those who are familiar with his work in political science.² Among political scientists, of course, he is known as one of the most astute analysts of the pathologies of modern politics. His great trilogy, which begins with On Power, and continues in Sovereignty and The Pure Theory of Politics,³ deals (among other things) with the tendency of the modern state to absorb more and more of society’s resources into its own hands, and to use the resulting booty for ends that are almost wholly destructive. This tendency is both politically dangerous and economically wasteful. Jouvenel stands, therefore, in the great tradition of the liberal economists, from Hayek and von Mises to Milton Friedman, in urging a smaller public sector, and he also stands within the older tradition of liberal political science, in defending constitutional, limited government.

It is tempting to view Jouvenel as something like a nineteenth century liberal transported through time—a Benjamin Constant or Alexis de Tocqueville deposited in the singularly unpleasant world of twentieth century Europe, just in time to see the final destruction of all that liberalism held sacred. Tempting, but misleading. It will be the burden of this essay to argue that de Jouvenel was more than a liberal economist, just as he was more than a liberal constitutionalist. The combination of his penetrating intelligence and the terrible events through which he lived gave him a unique and startling perspective on the problems of political economy and political science, leading to an orientation that is sui generis. This can be seen quite clearly by focusing on his economic essays, which manage simultaneously to praise the accomplishments of the classical economists while pointing to their profound limitations.

Welfare as We Know It

“The subjective appreciation of battleships is not nil. But it would not amount to anywhere near the value of the British fleet.

— The Idea of Welfare (1952)

De Jouvenel’s entry into the literature of professional economics was through his interest in national income accounting and welfare economics, whose pioneers were Simon Kuznets and A. C. Pigou, respectively. National accounting provided a method by which an entire nation could become aware, with increasing precision, of what it was (and was not) doing with its human and natural resources. Welfare economists sought more precise ways to measure consumer welfare, defined as the optimal satisfaction of consumer preferences. Both approaches assumed that increased productivity and greater consumer welfare were the central tasks of public policy, whatever political forms the state might take. Into this ongoing and highly technical discussion Jouvenel intruded with his characteristic gentility and guile—never confronting the conventional wisdom in an openly radical manner, but rather urging his readers to consider whether this way of thinking might not be leaving something important out of account, whether it could not in fact be improved upon, without being dismissed.⁴

Jouvenel therefore has high praise for what economists have been able to achieve, and he acknowledges that the economics profession has replaced political science as the chief advisors of the world’s statesmen.⁵ The “close relationship between live politics and academic work” that characterizes the economics profession (in the early 1950s, at any rate) guarantees that economists will always get a hearing, and he acknowledges that economists have replaced political scientists as the chief advisors of the world’s statesmen. This does not mean, Jouvenel hastens to add, that the problems faced by modern statesmen are exclusively economic in nature; far from it. But they are increasingly discussed in economic language. How should this powerful language and the assumptions underlying it be appraised?

Jouvenel first points to the unacknowledged and largely subconscious Hobbesian premises of modern economics: that man is a desiring creature, insatiable and opportunistic; that whatever he desires is necessarily good, and worth exactly what he is prepared to pay. This assumption encourages our public debate to focus only on those consumer preferences that can be measured by the yardstick of money. As the practitioners of an empirical and mathematical discipline, economists could hardly have done otherwise. But when it comes time to add up the national income accounts, all of the many desirable things in life that cannot be bought or sold disappear from view.

It is here, in fact, that the very precision of modern economics becomes a snare for the unwary: the great analytic power of economics disguises its limitations. Because the things that economists cannot measure are pushed aside, “social phenomena of the highest importance appear in national accounting on what seems to me the wrong side of the ledger.”⁶ Transactions that appear to increase welfare may actually leave society worse off.

For example, the shift from artisan to assembly-line labor is a clear gain in welfare to consumers because it increases the quantity of goods in the market while lowering their prices. But there is a loss to the laborer, who may suffer a degradation in working and living conditions that cannot be easily measured, and which does not, for this reason, show up in the national accounts. Its significance cannot be weighed.

Or consider the phenomenon of commuting. The modern economy has shortened the workweek, a clear gain in welfare that appears in the form of “increased leisure.” But many of the trends that increase productivity and make shorter workweeks possible (labor mobility, for example) tend to lengthen commuting times. Our system of accounting does not require us (or even permit us) to record the additional hours of commuting time as a subtraction from the “increase in leisure” made possible by shorter hours.⁷ In these and many other ways, our conventional understanding of welfare does not allow us to capture an accurate picture of our situation, either as consumers or as a society.

To this complaint the welfare economists have a ready answer, betraying once again their unacknowledged debt to Hobbes and to social contract theory more generally. Consumer welfare is increased, they maintain, as long as consumers choose one circumstance over another. The move from the artisan’s shop to the factory floor was a choice. The decision to spend fifteen hours per week commuting is also a choice. So long as consumers are willing to make such choices—”to move to preferred positions,” in the language of the economists—we must assume that their welfare has increased.

Jouvenel’s response to this claim reveals his own philosophic debt, not to Hobbes, but to the ancients, for whom “economics” denoted the art of using the household’s resources so as to produce the best possible way of life. An art implies a choice among materials and techniques, but also among ends. Properly considered, then, economics contributes to a “theory of political choice” conceived as “a theory of the best decision.”⁸

Jouvenel denies that consumer choices can reveal consumer preferences in any authoritative way, in the first instance because not all of the “choices” we make involve truly free choices at all. The man who can no longer teach Greek because no school offers such courses “chooses” to write commercial advertisements instead. Similarly, the peasants who “chose” to move to English factory towns because their landlords enclosed their commons cannot be said to have made a genuinely free choice.

The situation is different for consumers, of course, whose choices are not “forced” in the same way. But even here consumers can only choose from among the goods offered for sale, and they can only “demand” the goods that they have learned—through education or experience—to value highly. “Revealed preferences in fact reveal ignorances, the lack of intellectual and esthetic formation.”⁹ A more highly educated public, with elevated tastes, would demand a different array of goods. The prior question, then, concerns the weight that consumers have learned to assign to the goods and services already offered, as well as those that might be but are not for sale.¹⁰

A second objection is that consumer choice cannot be our sole guide to public choice. Welfare economists acknowledge this difficulty, but do not pursue the problem far enough. Because consumers, for well-known reasons, will not always choose the optimum level of spending on “public goods”—national defense or education, for example—under certain circumstances (as Pigou conceded) government must make decisions that will decrease consumer welfare as defined by the revealed preferences of the consumers themselves. It was recognition of this problem that led liberals in the West to champion a larger and more active public sector. Government must take income in the form of taxes, which might have been spent on consumer goods, and spend it instead on national defense, public schools, or highway construction.

But a larger public sector does not solve the difficulty presented by welfare economics, since once we have agreed that consumer preferences are not a reliable guide to public choice, we are tempted to accept whatever government decides to purchase as an addition to welfare. Yet we have no grounds for making such an assumption—any more than we have grounds for making the opposite assumption, that nothing government purchases is an addition to welfare. Like consumers themselves, governments too might undervalue certain “goods” and be completely oblivious to others. Governments might increase welfare by spending on national defense or education, or they might waste society’s resources on useless monuments to the nation’s grandeur. Governments might also spend unwisely on a legitimate end—as when public schools fail to educate. A “right” decision on public choices requires a correct conception of welfare: and this means a theory of the best way of life.

Furthermore, governments are obviously best not at improving consumer welfare but at restraining citizens—forbidding them to exercise their “consumer preferences” to (for example) use drugs or gamble: “things they would do and should not do,” as Jouvenel gently reminds us.¹¹ What this suggests very forcefully is that it makes no sense to pretend that government exists simply to increase the “subjective satisfactions” of consumers; it has the higher purpose of “preserving the existence of society”—the condition of any consumer welfare at all.

To deny consumer preferences in order to maintain “the social field” is a bit like foregoing consumption in favor of investment, and it presents the same difficulty. How can citizens be induced to give up their private, short-term satisfactions in order to promote a long-term general good? “You will note,” de Jouvenel reminds us, “how this welfare formulation resembles the old political formulation: to sacrifice a portion of liberty in order to ensure the rest.”¹² But to believe in this formula we must also believe in the assumption “that the individual could appreciate the value to his own interest of the general interests.”¹³

Yet we have now wandered far from the neighborhood of the economists, and must turn for guidance to the political scientists and philosophers—who have, alas, always stressed the great difficulty of teaching citizens the connection between their private good and the public welfare. (“How is it possible for men to be good?” Aristotle asked.) Even if the citizen acknowledges that the connection is vital in the long run, he can always make the rational calculation that in the long run he will be dead, and what will the public good matter to him then?

Economists have only added to these gloomy conclusions by proving the low marginal utility of “free goods” in abundant supply, such as social order or (once upon a time) clean air. “The citizen obtains what might be called a formidable consumer’s surplus in the maintenance of order at a far lower cost than he would give for it, if threatened. Consequently actual individuals are quite incapable of assigning due value to the activities that do preserve them.”¹⁴

The guiding principle of welfare economics, then, cannot generate criteria of choice for assessing the value of what government offers (or is asked) to provide. We might get too much of some goods and not enough of others—yet the national income will be said to have increased no matter what the state purchases. And because “individuals as such are quite incapable of weighing rightly or meaningfully the value of government activities,” it follows that “public policies cannot be made to rest upon what people desire in their private capacities.”¹⁵ Neither the private will nor the wills of all private citizens summed is the same thing as the public good.

The greatest possible success in obtaining those things, which constitute “Felicity of this world” sive subjective economic welfare, can be a goal only if other things being equal, the solidity of the commonwealth maintained, the moral attitude of men maintained, the social affections maintained, all those things which go to making a society and the best possible society are taken care of.¹⁶

Other things are seldom equal, however, because many of the ways in which we pursue our private satisfactions will affect “the structure and working of society.”¹⁷ When alterations “for individuals” also result in “alterations of society” we must be able to state whether the alterations are for good or ill. But we cannot so judge, “because we have no criteria for appreciating the value of these changes.”¹⁸ And we cannot rely on the criteria of welfare economics or income accounting because “the criteria of welfare”—i.e., that other things are equal—”rests precisely upon the nonalteration of the framework which is in fact being altered.”¹⁹

To remind his readers of the ancient problem to which this discussion has now returned, Jouvenel offers a “pictorial representation”: a ship at sea. Maximizing the welfare of the passengers and crew is clearly a benefit to them, but only if the ship does not sink. Yet welfare maximization provides no guidance to those responsible for the ship’s safety; it does not tell them how to sail the ship. It only tells them that, other things being equal, they should maximize the welfare of those on board. Yet “it has been shown, I believe,” that incorporating the goal of safe navigation into the private desires of the crew “is unmanageable: because these individuals have no means of comparing this basic advantage with others in subjective terms.”²⁰

Welfare calculations must therefore be supplemented by political calculations, but of a rather special sort. Welfare economics requires a “previous formulation of the objective conditions of social survival”—and not even political scientists have accomplished this essential task.

The obstacles are of course daunting; perhaps the task is impossible. But the danger this situation presents is that in studying the “conditioned values” with ever greater precision while ignoring “the conditioning values,” the former will come to be overstated “and first things therefore may come to be lost in the pursuit of last things.”²¹

So how can the pursuit of the first things be reintroduced to the science of political economy? And what does all of this have to do with liberty?

Rediscovering Amenity

“I am quite willing to regard poetry as a frivolous occupation as against the tilling of the soil but not as against the composing of advertisements.”

—Efficiency and Amenity (1960)

The great fact about the modern world is the enormous gain made in the productivity of labor since the Industrial Revolution. “The thought that practically everybody can get somewhat richer continuously” has led to profound changes in the way we judge governments, and in what the public expects of government. Our most conventional distinctions—between “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations, or between the “advanced industrial states” and the “Third World”—are based, essentially, on the ranking of nations according to their higher or lower standards of living. All of our aid efforts, whether through national governments or international agencies, are directed to the achievement of what our ancestors would have believed to be an impossibility: the general enrichment of all mankind. If this is the possibility that now lies before us, how are we to make the best use of it?

As Jouvenel reminds us, the possibility of greater wealth raises two objections, one ancient and one modern. We have always been taught to distrust the desire for ever-increasing material wealth, because such desires are either wicked in themselves (a view shared by classical philosophers, Christianity, and utopian socialists), or because they encourage us to place a lower value on ends that deserve greater respect (preservation of the natural environment, for example, or the pursuit of intellectual attainments).²²

The second objection arises from the modern embrace of relativism. By what right do we presume to denote “better” or “worse” uses of our additional wealth? “If every man be the only judge of his own interest, if we can ascertain what makes him better off solely by observations of the preferences his actions reveal, then however society develops under free choices, we must assume that whatever is, is the best possible world at the moment.”²³

To surmount these difficulties, we must first of all reject the ancient suspicion of material wealth, on the ground that the moral problem which led the ancients to renounce ever-increasing wealth is not the moral problem that we confront today. In an age when the productivity of labor did not increase, the enrichment of one man necessarily required others to have less. At some point, the greater comfort of the few required the impoverishment of the many.²⁴ The great fact of modern times is that this ancient problem has disappeared. As Locke points out, the man who “engrosses” unused land is not necessarily a threat to his neighbors, because under the right conditions, his use of the land to produce more than he needs to feed himself will result in more food in the marketplace. Rather than beggar his neighbors, he will provide them with steady employment and more to eat. A growing economy is a general good. Therefore, whatever other grounds might be found for the moderation of wealth and desires (there are obviously many others) this oldest of reasons no longer applies, because productivity gains open the door to a general (though not necessarily equal) enrichment.

What is true of material wealth is also true of gains not easily measured or stated in monetary terms. We have no way of measuring, Jouvenel points out, “the great lessening of the physical labor involved in work,” or the greater social understanding made possible by a shrinkage in the number of people condemned by the absence of better jobs to lives as domestic servants.²⁵ Even a seemingly trivial thing like mass-produced clothing has social consequences, among them the lessening of visible class distinctions. All of this must be reckoned as good.²⁶

Those things which improve the life of society—by elevating tastes, or by promoting social friendship, the exposure to beauty, the softening of manners: these are the “amenities” that tend to disappear from our accounting of the “goods” that comprise our standard of living. The law has long recognized such a concept, attempting to compensate “the loss of amenities” which results from the transformation of a pastoral neighborhood by industrial uses.²⁷ But the concept has generally disappeared from our public reckoning, and plays only a very narrow role in the discussions of economists.

But from what point of view can a “condition” be judged “good”? What makes a condition into an “amenity,” and not just the “preference” of a few eccentric intellectuals with old-fashioned tastes? What account of the “social good” lets us say that such things as blurred class distinctions or greater social understanding—or clean air and social order, for that matter—are themselves good things? Do we have a general theory of human happiness that can tell us how well or how badly we have used the additional wealth made possible by the modern economy?

Most moderns would reply that this question makes no sense, since no man can say for another what is good and what is bad, outside the narrow boundaries of the social contract by which I agree not to harm you if you agree not to harm me. The great value of a free market is that it lets consumers decide what is good and bad by letting them offer high prices for what they want the most and lower prices for what they desire the least. Once again, Jouvenel answers a question by supplying an image—this time, the picture of Homo Felix as he has been conceived throughout the ages:

Homo Felix moves against a background of beauty, delights in his workmanship, is benefited by the company he keeps, and his song of joy praises his Creator. Most often he is shown in a landscape mellowed by the human hand, with a nice balance of trees, meadows and streams; a graceful temple however testifies to urbanity…. Homo Felix is not idle, but the enjoyment of doing things so overcomes the awareness that they must be done so as to exclude any sense of drudgery…. He opens his eyes at dawn, eager for the activities of the day, and closes them at dusk; free from worry he exerts no pressure on any other man nor does he endure any.²⁸

Over against this charming picture (“maybe…a fanciful one”) is the reality of modern life. The “man of our day lives steeped in ugliness, injured, whether he be aware of it or not, by ugly sights, ugly sounds, ugly smells…. It is a long way indeed to the Golden Age.”

There is, of course, the hope that got us this far: namely, that our increasing wealth will buy us, somehow, a better life, perhaps by shortening the hours of work and providing us with greater leisure—with longer vacations, away from the dreariness of our daily lives. Jouvenel doubted in 1960, as an economist, that this was in fact a realistic hope: the workweek cannot continue to shrink forever, especially in a society with an aging population.²⁹ Yet is there any reason to believe, in the absence of a deeper understanding of what is the best way of life, that we would use our leisure more wisely even if we could manage to double it?

Imagine that an eighteenth-century philanthropist, say the Marquis de Mirabeau or Thomas Jefferson, were resurrected and briefed as to the increase in labor productivity and wealth which has occurred since his day. He would certainly imagine a world where beauty and culture prevailed, where the setting of life would immediately manifest the social wealth….³⁰

What we find instead is that “our society is the most deficient in culture which has ever been seen.” It is therefore hard to believe “that the man of our society has a high standard of life.”³¹

Liberty, Education, and the Good Life

“Although an individual has an immediate interest in serving the desires of another, irrespective of their quality, he has, of necessity and in the long run, an interest in the quality of the kind of life his contemporaries lead.”

— “A Better Life in an Affluent Society” (1961)

At the beginning of “The Idea of Welfare,” de Jouvenel observes that “all of political theory can…be ranged under [the] two headings of who and what. Who is the legitimate authority? … What is the proper decision?” That is, by what “assumptions as to man’s nature and summum bonum” do we say that decision A should be preferred to decision B?³²

It is no answer to reply that, in a liberal democracy, this is a question that only the people may decide, either directly or through their chosen representatives. The people—each individual person in his role as a citizen—needs a framework within which such questions can be deliberated. “However eager modern political science shows itself to take choices as given, these must in fact, at some stage or other, be made.”³³

Political science has gotten very good at describing the evolution of choice—the movement of public opinion from one position (opposition to increased taxes) to another (support for taxes to reduce a budget deficit). Should political science also turn its attention to the problem of distinguishing between a good choice and a bad choice, or between better and worse choices? This would involve a constant examination of the way in which public estimates of what is good and what is bad (“values,” in the conventional jargon of social science) are brought to bear on questions of public policy. In what way do higher or lower taxes affect the greater public good? What estimate can we make of the policies and programs that higher taxes purchase—or that lower taxes require us to forego?

The result of such public discussion would be a continual stating and testing of propositions about good and bad outcomes that would contribute to a general “methodology of political choice.” And Jouvenel laments the decision by the political science of the time (1952) to reject such a mission.³⁴

Meanwhile, the economists seized the ground abandoned by political science. To the question “What is the right decision?” the economists answered, forthrightly: “Increase the national income and arrange for the optimal distribution of satisfactions.” That is, they answered with “revealed consumer preferences.” But this turns out, on closer inspection, to be no more satisfactory than the appeal to popular sovereignty. “Let the people [consumers] decide” does not help the people/consumers determine what is the right decision, what are the right objects of their desires, or how to rank possible decisions on a scale from better to worse.

How can we harness our great productivity gains to a better way of life than the one we see at present? That “increasing amenity” is an imprecise goal does not, Jouvenel reminds us, mean that it is a “senseless” goal. It is rather a matter for more careful thought, about two dimensions of the problem in particular: education for leisure, and decisions about the best uses of our productive resources.

In “Toward a Political Theory of Education,” published in 1964 in a festschrift for Robert M. Hutchins, Jouvenel attempts to clear away the clutter and start afresh. If “the fundamental purpose of society is to rear the young,” then the challenge of education will change dramatically in a society, such as ours, in which more and more young people are not condemned to lives of unceasing toil for the benefit of the few. Ours is a society of free men and women whose necessary labor leaves room for sufficient leisure to make the right use of leisure a matter of concern. Yet most educators speak about education as if its main purpose were only to improve the productivity of labor.³⁵ Certainly this must be one of the purposes of education, as well as the related purpose of keeping workers technically literate enough to stave off unemployment. But to the extent that education contributes to greater national wealth, higher productivity, and the material well-being of citizens, workers in general will be in school longer, work shorter hours, and live longer beyond retirement. They will spend a greater percentage of their total lives not working than previous generations could have imagined.

Whatever the details of working hours turn out to be, it is clear that just as the “gentleman of leisure” vanished along with the titled nobility, so the “laborer who was nothing but laborer” has also disappeared. “The man of our day is part laborer, part gentleman of leisure.” And if our system of education leads to further productivity increases, we will succeed in lengthening the period of our lives in which we can be “gentlemen” rather than “laborers.” How will we spend this time? “What will we do with ourselves?” The answer to that question will depend on the kind of education we are able to receive at an early age: “future generations [with] an increasingly lighter burden of work [and] an increasing share of free time, require a liberal education.”³⁶

The aim of such an education is clear: it is to improve “the human plant” by exposing the young to culture (“something done to us for our improvement, and something we do to ourselves for improvement”). Can this great purpose safely be left to the free expression of consumer preferences in an unregulated market? No—for the simple reason that it is precisely the purpose of such an education to elevate the tastes of the many so that they will be able to appreciate the purposes of a liberal education. “We live in majority societies where beautiful things will be wiped out unless the majority appreciates them.”³⁷

That a liberal democracy will require an educated citizenry is a truism on the lips of every candidate for office. Few have worked out the implications of this truth as relentlessly, and as honestly, as Jouvenel. One of the most alarming of these implications is that a modern economy, in addition to promoting greater material welfare for the many, creates new forms of inequality based on educational attainment, leading to unequal status in an increasingly hierarchical and organizational society. We live, and will continue to live, in an elaborately graded world. Such a world is not necessarily incompatible with greater private liberty; in fact, to the extent that a modern economy enhances productivity and material comforts, private liberty is enhanced as well. (For a current update, see David Brooks on the “Bo-Bo” phenomenon.) But the modern world also creates new and perhaps galling forms of inequality based on unequal access to organizational resources.³⁸ This combination of greater private liberty with a more elaborately graded meritocracy could prove fatal to a liberal democracy. Thus, the urgent need to think more clearly about how all citizens will learn to spend the time liberated by shorter hours and longer lives.

We might, of course, dream up a conception of the good life and impose it by force. This is the fatal temptation of modern intellectuals and one of the sources of modern tyranny. Having been burned more than once, we now insist—understandably, but wrongly—that discussions of the good life no longer have a place in politics. Thus, the increased prestige of economists, who have offered a benign substitute in the “revealed preferences” of free consumers.

An irreducible element of liberty is, to be sure, the freedom to choose. All aspects of modern government that seek to eliminate choice are to be greeted with a healthy skepticism, and it will ordinarily be the right policy to let markets, i.e., consumers, decide. But a liberal government has a role to play in the way such choices are made. Government can promote a greater awareness of what our real choices are, and what costs are attached to those choices.³⁹ It can build into its national income accounting a fuller range of factors, to give citizens a more realistic picture of the true “bottom line.” Fuller information results in an increase in our freedom to choose.⁴⁰ And there are some tasks—the regulation of the most dangerous “nuisances,” such as nuclear power plants, for example—that only governments are equipped to perform because they require the coercive power of the law.

The most important function of government, however, is not accounting but governing. What does Jouvenel’s economics contribute to a specifically political science? Through this body of work we begin to see more clearly what the legitimate ends of public action are—and how to think more clearly about those ends. This is the necessary beginning of any realistic effort to tame the modern state, for citizens cannot make prudent judgments about public policy without an intellectual framework to guide them.

Take, as an example, an issue that was being vigorously debated when Jouvenel wrote “Technology as a Means” in 1969: the supersonic transatlantic plane being developed jointly by Britain and France. This project was hailed by its supporters for its technical brilliance, allowing travel times between Europe and North America of 3½ hours or less. Jouvenel was not impressed—despite his frequent transatlantic journeys. “I have never felt happy about this: it is of course an achievement, nor can its usefulness be denied. But usefulness in the case of resource applications is comparative: is this the best that could be done for people with that amount of endowment?”⁴¹ Surely economists could turn their impressive tools to such homely calculations.

Note that this is not the usual criticism of the supersonic plane. Opponents of the project usually stressed two other lines of attack. First, the plane was said to be a typically bloated public works boondoggle, good only for the public agencies that would be able to harvest vast tax revenues in order to support it. Second, the plane was attacked on environmental grounds because of its excessive noise and its inefficient fuel consumption. Jouvenel instead raises the problem of opportunity costs: what improvement in the lives of people could be achieved by spending the same amount of money on reducing average commuting times, for example? In this case, as in others, we might conclude that “the social benefits…conferred by an alternative use of equivalent resources” are greater than those conferred by the more spectacular “feats” generated by technical endeavors.

A feat in any sector of technical endeavor rightly attracts praise and moral credit, and this moral credit lends force to demands for further and larger support. Thus public funds get channeled toward what is most exciting and impressive rather than toward the more serviceable in terms of people’s daily lives. As more talent gets involved in that direction, more political weight is acquired in the elite circles where the process of distribution takes place.⁴²

In this way, our greatest improvements in technology are conscripted to the service of the most trivial, and even harmful, ends—incidentally creating new powers for the public agencies that generate the most spectacular feats.

Devoting more thought to improving the way of life experienced by the majority does not necessarily lead in the direction of a larger state. To “maintain the social field” so that the human plant can flourish does not require programs, agencies, or income transfers.⁴³ It requires only that government exert its influence intelligently, regulating the social field without controlling it directly. As we have seen, this means more than enforcing a neutral set of rules by which free markets are kept open and functioning smoothly. The state’s salutary influence can be—it must be—directed by a vision of the political good, the subject of the second volume in Jouvenel’s great trilogy.⁴⁴

In this task, however, the state will, as always, need to be guided by the wise—and not only by the economists, but also by a political science that once again sees the elucidation of the best way of life for the city as its principal responsibility.

Dennis Hale
Boston College

NOTES

1. Published under that title in 1952 by the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by Liberty Press (1989) with an introduction by John Gray.
2. Some of Jouvenel’s economic essays in English have been collected in Bertrand de Jouvenel, Economics and the Good Life: Essays on Political Economy, edited by Dennis Hale and Marc Landy (Transaction Publishers, 1999).
3. On Power: Its Nature and the History of its Growth (1945); Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (1957); and The Pure Theory of Politics (1961), have all been reissued by Liberty Press, with introductions by Daniel J. Mahoney.
4. He takes a similarly devious approach to American political scientists in The Pure Theory of Politics, op. cit.
5. An example of Jouvenel’s guile: by referring in this way to the new prominence of economists, he manages to give the entirely misleading impression that there was a time when political scientists were routinely consulted by heads of state, thus flattering two professions at once.
6. “The Idea of Welfare,” in Hale & Landy, Economics and the Good Life, 30.
7. Of course, if we were smart, we would read Pascal on the subway, in which case commuting would provide an opportunity for the right use of leisure, but that raises another question, to be dealt with below. See “Toward a Political Theory of Education,” in Hale and Landy, Economics and the Good Life, 77–97.
8. “The Idea of Welfare,” 21. Needless to say, this is a very different conception of political choice than the one which has been advanced by contemporary “public choice” scholars in political science, who reject the very idea of a “best decision.”
9. “Efficiency and Amenity,” in Hale and Landy, Economics and the Good Life, 48.
10. In my lifetime, two different kinds of automobile have suddenly conquered the market: fuel-efficient compacts (in the 1970s and 1980s) and vans and SUVs (since the 1990s). We “learned” to demand the first kind of car because of the external pressure of the “oil shocks” of the early 1970s. How did we “learn” to value the second?
11. “The Idea of Welfare,” 33.
12. “The Idea of Welfare,” 31.
13. “The Idea of Welfare,” 34.
14. “The Idea of Welfare,” 34.
15. Ibid.
16. “The Idea of Welfare,” 35.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. “The Idea of Welfare,” 36.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. “A Better Life in an Affluent Society,” in Hale and Landy, 98.
23. “Efficiency and Amenity,” 39.
24. “A Better Life in an Affluent Society,” 99.
25. “Efficiency and Amenity,” 39–40.
26. Always honest, Jouvenel also points out that rising wage levels have decreased living standards for the large class that once employed domestic servants and can no longer afford to do so. “Efficiency and Amenity,” 40.
27. “A Better Life in an Affluent Society,” 115.
28. “Efficiency and Amenity,” 40.
29. His pessimism seems to have been confirmed by recent evidence that, in the United States at any rate, greater consumption (not just of SUVs and vacations, but of college tuition and homes) has required more hours of labor rather than less. And commuting times continue to grow, adding hours to the workweek that are seldom compensated in any way. “And therefore I believe that we should regard the amenity of work as a much more interesting goal than the shortening of work hours.” “Efficiency and Amenity,” 51.
30. “Efficiency and Amenity,” 50.
31. “Efficiency and Amenity,” 48–49.
32. “The Idea of Welfare,” 21.
33. “The Idea of Welfare,” 23.
34. “The Idea of Welfare,” 24–25. It seems to me that much of the best public policy literature since the 1960s is an attempt to do what Jouvenel was urging—to help go beyond the mere description of how policies are made to an assessment of what policies are good, better, or worse.
35. It is a mark of how far we have slid that the current debate about education is perhaps even more off the mark than it was in 1964. Nothing as useful as increasing labor productivity seems to occur to the present guardians of the public schools, who worry about “self–esteem” and multicultural awareness.
36. “Toward a Political Theory of Education,” 87.
37. Ibid.
38. “While people are still discussing the abolition of Lords by birth, they are but faintly aware of the new lordships.” “Toward a Political Theory of Education,” 92.
39. A simple example: government regulations that require fuel economy information to be displayed for all new cars offered for sale.
40. Much of this discussion anticipates developments connected to the growth of environmentalism in the 1960s. Unlike most environmentalists, however, Jouvenel’s focus was always on the way in which the stresses placed on the natural world affected the “social field”—the natural home of the “human plant.”
41. “Technology as a Means,” 133.
42. “Technology as a Means,” 134.
43. The removal of industrial nuisances and other negative externalities will, however, lead to the creation of “gigantic public utilities”—a reason why the “friends of free enterprise” should urge their voluntary reduction in advance. “Efficiency and Amenity,” 45.
44. Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into the Political Good.