I

Posterity has not been kind to Josiah Tucker. He is unknown to modern economists and demoted by economic historians, and to those who do know his name he has long been considered a mere forerunner to celebrated classical economists in the mould of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. Yet the injustice is severe, for, as he was to demonstrate on numerous occasions throughout his life, Tucker was more than capable of rubbing shoulders with some of the most profound intellects of his day. He was frequently engaged in debate with prominent members of the eighteenth century République des Lettres: men of the calibre of David Hume, Henry Home Lord Kames and Edmund Burke, to name but a small few. Moreover, he was regularly called upon by Britain's leading statesmen, and most notably Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, to advise them on the best course of British economic development. Consequently, in a large variety of writings, Tucker speculated on the consequences of North American independence for the global economy and for international relations; on the complicated relations between rich and poor countries; and on the related issue of whether low wage costs in poor countries might always erode the competitive advantage of richer nations, establishing perpetual cycles of rise and decline.Footnote ¹ A vehement critic of war in all its forms, Tucker was a staunch opponent of Britain's mercantile system—a pejorative term denoting the aggressive control of trade for the benefit of the mother country in order to encourage imperial expansion throughout the known parts of the globe. While Tucker is acknowledged primarily today, then, as a lesser pioneer of the anti-mercantilist free-trade school, little has been done to explore his views on the connections between civil and religious liberty. These themes are important, however, since they supplemented his wider economic ideas to a significant extent—far more so than historians have hitherto acknowledged.

Perhaps the most significant reason for Tucker's persistent neglect lies in what may be termed the “Tucker–Smith conundrum,” by which it is commonly argued that Tucker's economic ideas were pale anticipations of the eminent Scot's.Footnote ² There is some basis to this, however, for much that has come to be associated almost exclusively with Smith's seminal Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)—economic liberty, specialization, the division of labor and so on—was already present in Tucker's economic tracts, written well over two decades earlier.Footnote ³ These resemblances continue to pose problems, then, for the historian looking to extricate Tucker from Smith's substantial sphere of influence. The first and most obvious approach to this problem might lie in accentuating the religious dimensions to Tucker's economic thought and situating him within the parameters of a so-called “conservative” and “clerical” English Enlightenment.Footnote ⁴ This is intended to be contrasted with Smith's characterization as a paragon of a moderately secularizing Scottish Enlightenment, which saw the rise of political economy to a foundational place among the human sciences.Footnote ⁵ Yet while certainly useful as a first port of call, these explanations remain complicated by the historically ambiguous relationship between the English and Scottish varieties of Enlightenment, described by B. W. Young as a sort of “simultaneous kinship and distance,” in which Tucker and Smith continue to “sit uneasily alongside” each other.Footnote ⁶ For on the one side, Tucker's overtly Christian brand of political economy did not preclude the importance of what he called “our present secular Happiness,”Footnote ⁷ yet on the other, Smith's frequent metaphysical allusions to the “wisdom of nature,” or that “natural system of perfect liberty and justice” which underpinned his economic system, has prompted at least one prominent scholar, A. M. C. Waterman, to interpret Wealth of Nations as a work of English Newtonian natural theology par excellence.Footnote ⁸ How, then, are these ambiguities to be reconciled, if indeed they require reconciling?

Considering these long-standing difficulties, this article offers two possible answers to the query as a means of widening Tucker scholarship. The first is to assert that Tucker's economic ideas are distinctive enough to warrant investigation on their own terms—or at least independent of Smith's. It is important to note that Tucker was not writing in “anticipation” of, or “foreshadowing,” the famous Scottish philosopher, whom he would scarcely have known in the 1740s and 1750s when his economic tracts were formulated and published. If anything, Smith's reluctance to acknowledge Tucker's intellectual influence reveals far more about the dissimilarities in their personalities than about their similarities as economic theorists.Footnote ⁹ Having minimized the importance of the link between Tucker and Smith, the second suggestion this paper wishes to make is that Tucker's historical significance would be far better gauged via an examination of his relationship with Bishop Joseph Butler, Tucker's ecclesiastical mentor from 1739 until Butler's death in 1752.

Bishop Butler was born into a Presbyterian family, and he is often cited as one of the Church of England's most distinguished converts. His two major works, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (first edition 1726, second edition 1729) and The Analogy of Religion (1736), were hugely successful in their own day, achieving that rare feat of fulfilling the tests both of doctrinal orthodoxy and philosophical respectability. While Butler remains a towering figure, then, in the history of anglophone moral philosophy and Christian theology, it is with some puzzlement that acknowledgment of his influence on eighteenth-century economic thought is practically nonexistent. This is especially difficult to account for, given his considerable notoriety among the eighteenth-century Scottish literati so often associated with the advent of British political economy. We know, for example, that Butler was a major influence on the Ulster-born Francis Hutcheson, Smith's teacher and predecessor on the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow between 1729 and 1742.Footnote ¹⁰ The same may be said of Kames, who sought introductions to the bishop over a period of several years during the late 1730s, and finally referred to Butler as a “manly and acute writer” in 1751.Footnote ¹¹ Similarly, in the introduction to The Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume famously placed Butler alongside Bernard Mandeville, John Locke, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson as one of the “late philosophers in England who have begun to put the science of man upon a new footing.”Footnote ¹²

Admiration for Butler among the Scottish moralists reveals something more, then, of the aforementioned “kinship” between eighteenth-century metaphysicians, theoreticians and political economists north and south of Hadrian's Wall. This is reinforced by the fact that Tucker became a significant correspondent of Kames and Hume during the 1750s and 1760s, when his contemporary reputation as an economic thinker was all but assured. In many respects, this intellectual overlap between the two contingents should come as little surprise to us. One common thread uniting the Anglicans Tucker and Butler and the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers was, of course, the British context within which their ideas operated. As various studies have shown, eighteenth-century Britain was a uniquely pluralistic and heterogeneous society comprising several competing religio-political and philosophical factions, often running along bitterly contested party-political lines.Footnote ¹³ To a significant extent, this characterization of eighteenth-century British society was a result of the ambiguous legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 and the attendant Financial Revolution of the 1690s, both of which facilitated the growing “commercialization” of traditional forms of social organization. In turn, this phenomenon fundamentally altered the ways in which individuals and institutions interacted with one another in an increasingly fast-paced and transient world. What, many contemporaries therefore pondered, was the true meaning and nature of the British constitution and the British system of civil liberty in the commercial age? Moreover, who could claim legitimate ownership of it?Footnote ¹⁴

It is with these questions that we begin to discern the intellectual “distance” between Butler–Tucker and the Scottish political economists. Recent decades have witnessed a proliferation in the number of studies exploring the moral-philosophical, social-scientific and natural-jurisprudential foundations of the era's political economy, particularly in Scotland.Footnote ¹⁵ By and large, however, these works have tended to deemphasize the Christian contexts within which much of the historical development of political economy took place. Instead, they rely on what Ryan Patrick Hanley has recently called the “secularizing and sceptical tendencies in eighteenth-century epistemology and ethics.”Footnote ¹⁶ Hanley is certainly correct to suggest that skepticism and secularization were both important, some might say dominant, leitmotifs of the eighteenth-century intellectual mind (Hume, for example, is notorious on this point), and that this undoubtedly characterized much of the economic thinking of the era. However, the interpretation of Tucker and Butler presented in this paper demonstrates that this was not always straightforwardly the case. For one thing, these pages contend that both thinkers were proponents of an optimistic, neo-Stoic (or Christian Stoic) interpretation of human nature, which emphasized the harmonious relationship between God and man and the rational, sociable and benevolent human affections.Footnote ¹⁷ This exposition alone is significant in that, where the eighteenth-century link between religion and economics has been scrutinized in extant scholarship, this has typically rested on pessimistic Augustinian accounts of the Fall of Man. Accordingly, these studies augment rather than challenge conventional histories of economic thought based upon individual self-interest (or self-love) and the theory of spontaneous order.Footnote ¹⁸ Even more important for our present purposes, however, is the proximity of Tucker and Butler's brand of neo-Stoicism to the eighteenth-century church and state establishment and the predominantly (though by no means exclusively) Whig commercial order.Footnote ¹⁹ We know, for example, that Augustan-era writers such as Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele adopted the quasi-Stoic language of manners, conversation and politeness in moral defence of this order. However, Shaftesbury was a notable freethinker and deist, meaning that his intellectual and religious allegiances remained somewhat ambiguous. Conversely, while Addison and Steele argued that commerce should be utilized as a vehicle for, rather than destroyer of, Christian virtue, they stressed the importance of natural theology rather than revealed religion.Footnote ²⁰

Even among their English-based, let alone Scottish, counterparts, then, Butler and Tucker were atypical. As Anglican prelates first and foremost, their socioeconomic theories were shaped by a far deeper connection with the orthodox tenets of the established Church of England—particularly its basis in Athanasian Trinitarianism and Episcopalian hierarchical polity.Footnote ²¹ Consequently, while Butler and Tucker advocated various systems of social reform, drawing particular attention to the needs and rights of the poor, they acknowledged the fundamental reality that modern commercial societies augmented traditional forms of social subordination, rank, order and hierarchy. In so doing, Butler and Tucker developed a dual theory of civil and religious liberty modeled on a specific interpretation of 1688: one in which religion, reason, rationality, ethics and the benevolent and social affections were deeply intertwined.Footnote ²² As shall be seen, this enterprise entailed an unusual systematization of the traditional Christian virtue of caritas (charity/love), which was the practical and pastoral extension of Butler's pioneering treatment of the individual and collective social affections. Moreover, in so doing, the pair were directly at odds with the increasingly popular cynicism and skepticism of the day, most notably that of Thomas Hobbes's eighteenth-century popularizer Mandeville.

How, then, did these views impinge on the development of Tucker's science of political economy? Additionally, in what ways did Butler's ideas inform and guide them? These are two of the most important questions the following pages will attempt to address. In order to do so, the paper proceeds with a broad contextual outline of Tucker's political, religious and economic ideas, particularly his theoretical opposition to Mandeville (section II). At this point, Butler's influence on Tucker is reincorporated and highlighted (section III). Following this exposition, the paper explores the important links between charity, poverty and liberty in the wider Butlerian and Tuckerian scheme (section IV). Finally, the article closes with a brief outline of Tucker's “Butlerian” assessment and rejection of the “antisocial” doctrine of individual natural rights in the latter eighteenth century (section V).

II

Like the vast majority of his British compatriots, Tucker's opinions on the mixed constitution and the British system of liberty were nearly always expressed with one eye on, and in sharp contradistinction to, France: Britain's “sweet enemy” in whose authoritarian, despotic—and above all Catholic—government practically all Britons, irrespective of social rank, could find common cause against which to rally.Footnote ²³ Yet despite widespread nationalistic claims to British superiority on account of the state's purportedly free—because Protestant—form of government,Footnote ²⁴ many politicians and policymakers from within the British Isles remained wary of the prospect of a return to seventeenth-century French dominance. For as Richard Whatmore has shown, the anxieties of contemporary British authors rested on an anticipated reversion to the “natural order of politics,” when France's superior size, population and material resources had ensured French hegemony across the European continent.Footnote ²⁵ It was in this vein, then, and with these concerns in mind, that Tucker published the first of his two primary works in the (then embryonic) field of political economy, A Brief Essay on . . . Trade (1749).Footnote ²⁶ In it, Tucker beseeched men of “a liberal and learned education” to “engage in the Study” of political economy as if it were a “noble and interesting Science.” Since “every Country in Europe now begins to understand the Maxims of Trade, and apply themselves to Commerce,” he explained, it would therefore be prudent for those at the “Helm of government” to keep “an Eye upon the Practices and Proceedings of our Rivals, and take our Measures accordingly.” Arguing, moreover, from a neo-Stoic providentialist perspective that “there should be a mutual Dependence and Connection between Mankind in general, we find it almost impossible,” Tucker concluded, “for any particular People to live, with tolerable Comfort, and in a civilized State, independent of all their Neighbours.”Footnote ²⁷

The central line of reasoning that Tucker attempted to convey in the Essay was his belief that Britain had by far the greater economic potential compared to France. As things stood, however, the clergyman maintained that the latter was in the more advantageous position. Interestingly, Tucker attributed this disparity in large part to the differences in their respective forms of government. For in Britain, he observed, the poor were “left to do whatever is right in their own Eyes,” meaning that “the lowest” had now become the “ultimate Judges of public Affairs.”Footnote ²⁸ By contrast, France maintained an appropriate degree of subordination in the lower ranks of her people, enabling her to procure a large population of good, honest workers:

Tucker's solution to this problem lay, however, in British incentivization rather than French coercion, the latter's “Methods” being “for the most Part impracticable in our Circumstances and State of Things.” “Let us therefore have Recourse to such only as are consistent with our Constitution,” he reaffirmed, “and let us see what their Force and Influence might probably be, on the lives and Morals of our People.”Footnote ³⁰ In substantive terms, this meant bringing “Examples of Industry and the good Effects of it, before their Eyes.” Only by enlarging trade, Tucker asserted, thereby transforming commercial activity into a truly inclusive and dynamic free-trade enterprise, would the “deep-rooted” and “habitual Laziness of a People” be conquered.Footnote ³¹ As a first iconoclastic act, Tucker's plans required a complete abandonment of what he termed the “Spirit of Monopoly.” An unsavory, residual hallmark of the outmoded mercantile system, for Tucker, monopolization was the direct correlate of individual self-love writ large in the global commercial sphere, inevitably leading to transnational wars of conquest and empire.Footnote ³² Additionally, Tucker acknowledged that the “spirit of monopoly,” of unbridled acquisition and rapacious consumption, was just as problematic in the domestic context. For within the laboring classes, he argued, self-love manifested itself in profligacy, laziness, drunkenness and debauchery; while in the rich and even the growing middle classes it revealed itself in excess, extravagance and wasteful indolence. In either case, God made no distinction. “Luxury,” wrote Tucker, “even in high Life, and even in the most favourable View of it, is not that useful Thing to Society, which Moralists themselves have sometimes incautiously granted, and which the Advocates for Vice have pretended to demonstrate.”Footnote ³³

The “Advocates for Vice” that Tucker referred to here were a peculiar symptom of the simultaneous tolerances and excesses which defined eighteenth-century British liberty. On the more palatable side of things, for example, were moderate defenses of luxury exemplified by the likes of Hume and the Anglophile Montesquieu, both of whom spoke of the “innocence” and “pleasures” of luxury, accompanied by that doux commerce—or sweet commerce—which softened and polished the manners and mores of civilized nations.Footnote ³⁴ Far more insalubrious, however, was popular cynicism of the type associated with freethinkers, libertines, dissenters and general critics of the Whig commercial—and church and state—establishment, alongside its “courtly” ideology of manners and politeness, such as Bernard Mandeville.Footnote ³⁵ Grounding his ideas in a rival neo-Augustinian–Epicurean tradition derived from French Jansenism, Mandeville characterized humans as depraved, selfish and pleasure-seeking creatures.Footnote ³⁶ In so doing, he notoriously followed Hobbes in denying the innate sociability of humankind, alleging instead that human existence in the material world was nothing more than the product of artifice and convention. By appealing to the vanity, or self-love, of individuals, Mandeville claimed that politicians and policymakers merely coerced the state's citizenry into becoming, as E. J. Hundert has termed it, sophisticated “social actors” acting within a pre-constructed “theatre of moral sentiments.” According to Mandeville, all socio-commercial activity was therefore tantamount to the “reciprocal features of the dynamics of self-regard.” This explanation accounts for the Dutch native's well-known conflation of private vices and public benefits in the most infamous of his works, The Fable of the Bees:Footnote ³⁷

For Tucker, however, the Mandevillean variant of the “selfish hypothesis” was particularly loathsome, and, moreover, demonstrably false. Having read of rising infant mortality rates in the 1740s, for example, which inevitably hit the poorest hardest, he dismissed the Dutch native's scheme as mere legerdemain:

Tucker's broad stance on this score was far from unique.Footnote ⁴⁰ Wittily, and in general summation of Mandeville's contemporary reputation, the novelist and dramatist Henry Fielding earlier reconfigured the controversialist's name so that it read “Man-devil.”Footnote ⁴¹ Likewise chastising Mandeville as an outright hedonist and debauchee, in the 1720s the High Church mystic William Law criticized Mandeville's scheme for its exaltation of the “Animal Life” at the expense of those “higher Principles” which had triggered the Newtonian revolution. “That Reach of Thought, and strong Penetration, which has carried . . . Newton through such Regions of Science, must truly be owing to some higher Principle,” Law pointed out. “Or will you say, that all his Demonstrations, are only so many blind Sallies or Passions?”Footnote ⁴²

Yet by far the most influential in terms of its direct influence on Tucker came in the guise of Butler's Fifteen Sermons (1726). Hundert and Waterman described them as the most “important” and “powerful” of the rejoinders to Mandeville, and Waterman in particular has shown how it was Butler's “shrewd mind” in Fifteen Sermons which initially rebuffed Mandeville's position as an “improper construal of self-love as ‘vice’.” In so doing, this made it “possible for Hume so to generalise Mandeville as to produce the ‘theory of spontaneous order’ now seen as the characteristic contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment to social theory.” Moreover, it was Tucker, Waterman concludes, who went on to “view the unintended but beneficent economic outcomes of ‘interested’ action in a purely Butlerian way, as examples of divine Providence and as congruent with that Newtonian, natural theology which characterized the Scottish and English Enlightenments.”Footnote ⁴³ This said, we now turn to an examination of Butler and Tucker in tandem.

III

Butler drew on an optimistic neo-Stoic providentialist tradition,Footnote ⁴⁴ recently “Christianized” by such thinkers as Justus Lipsius, Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, which he had encountered at the dissenting academy in Tewkesbury under the tutelage of Samuel Jones. Accordingly, Butler's original intention in Fifteen Sermons had been to refute popular cynicism of the type associated with Hobbes and Mandeville, while also seeking to place the historical emergence of commercial modernity firmly within the Christian framework. Settling on an Arminian conception of human nature derived from his famous correspondence with the Newtonian Boyle lecturer Samuel Clarke (thus precipitating his conversion to the Anglican ministry in the mid-1710s), Butler emphasized free will as the overriding determinant of human motive and action.Footnote ⁴⁵ Conceding, therefore, that self-love constituted but one of a plurality of human affections rather than being their sum total à la Mandeville, Butler hypothesized that humans were evidently rational creatures created in the imago dei. In turn, this meant that God had imbued them with the “superior Faculty” of the conscience, which Butler otherwise termed “Reason and cool Reflection.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, “since no Passion God hath endued us with can be in itself Evil,” he wrote, it necessarily followed that self-love was not an evil either.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet by the same token, and crucially, this meant that the individual's oscillation between virtue and vice, or rather the disposition or propensity towards one or the other, was based solely upon human choice rather than fortune, fate or the passions.

Consequently, it was only when individuals abused or “frequently indulge[d] a Passion in such Ways and Degrees,” Butler surmised, that it became “quite another thing from what it was originally in our Nature.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Hence it was, too, that within the Butlerian scheme, even traditionally “unchristian” principles such as anger or hatred, which might typically be thought of as by-products of the worst excesses of self-regard, had their rightful place within the full range of affections requiring mediation via the conscience:

Because of situations like these, then—situations which arose naturally in a naturally imperfect world—Butler explained that the true path towards virtue and away from vice lay in balancing or harmonizing the individual (private) affections, in order to achieve a desirable state of good psychological health. This was the “true Meaning of that ancient Precept, Reverence thy Self.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet even more importantly, in a historically adolescent and yet increasingly complex and multifaceted commercial society, Butler wrote that “it cannot but be, that there will be different Opinions concerning Mankind, or more or less governed by Interest.”Footnote ⁵¹ Because of these antagonisms, Butler taught that the same appeal to virtue, and more specifically Christian virtue, ought to be sought in terms of the wider social (public) affections. For it was precisely in mediating the complex of affections within any given individual, Butler explained, and likewise again, though on a much larger scale when speaking of the body politic as a whole, that “love of self” and “love of others” could be said to naturally coincide.

Butler stood, then, at the vanguard of the early eighteenth-century “establishment turn” towards a type of English Protestantism increasingly labeled a “social religion.”Footnote ⁵² Accordingly, for Butler, it was this “organic” transition from notions of the self towards considerations about the collective which made the prospect of peaceable society inherently possible.Footnote ⁵³ From a broader perspective, this notion was analogous to the ancient Stoic concept of oikeiosis—a complex teleological term connoting, among other things, the cosmopolitan and universalistic potentiality of the rational human species.Footnote ⁵⁴ Interestingly, Butler rechristened the concept “the Cements of Society,” updating its significance for, and applicability to, a post-Newtonian commercial age:Footnote ⁵⁵

In so doing, Butler placed the theory of oikeiosis on equal parity with Scripture:

It was precisely this system that Tucker adopted as the basis for his own developing theories in political economy. In the “Preliminary Discourse” to the unfinished Elements of Commerce and Theory of Taxes (1755), for example, Tucker dismissed along strikingly Butlerian lines the notion that self-love was an evil in and of itself. Rather, he argued that self-love was “the great mover of created Beings,” a “vigorous and active Principle,” which “all Arts and Sciences, and the very Being of Government and Commerce, depend upon.” Similar to Butler's earlier contention, then, that individuals “frequently indulged” the passions in order to corrupt their true ends, for Tucker it was only when self-love was left with no “Direction or Controll” that it eventually “Defeat[ed] its own Ends” until “even Self-interest is a Loser.” “Hence it is,” he wrote, that “Monopolies are formed, and Charters granted, under the ridiculous and absurd Pretence of the Public Good, when, in Fact, private Advantage is the only Point aimed at”: “Hence it is, that unjust Combinations are sanctified by positive Laws, and those very Exclusions are stiled RIGHTS and LIBERTIES, by which other Men have their Rights taken from them, and are denied the Liberty of being useful to themselves, and serviceable to their Country.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Yet if the “Spirit of Monopoly” was the predictable consequence of what Tucker called “inordinate Self-Love,” on the other hand its Butlerian “Counter-Agent” was “social Love, or diffusive Benevolence.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Moreover, it was in harnessing the innate tension between these “two distinct Principles of Action in Society,” Tucker ventured, that the very “Rudiments of Commerce” had first been established in a state of nature.Footnote ⁶⁰ Accordingly, the “Aim of every wise Legislature,” Tucker wrote, was “neither to extinguish nor enfeeble Self-Love,” for that would be counterintuitive if not even “impossible.” Rather, its role was to give self-love “such a Direction, that it may promote the public Interest by pursuing its own.” Only in so doing, Tucker contended, would “the Spirit of Monopoly operate for the good of the Whole.” Calling, moreover, and consistently, upon the Butlerian tempering agents of “REASON and REFLECTION” in support of the “social and benevolent Principle,” Tucker advised that the resulting “System” would always function with superior efficacy if, and when, populated by “good Christians”:

It is highly notable that the “Preliminary Discourse” to the Elements, which is perhaps the only purely systematic account of Tucker's economic thought, is very short at only six pages. Yet there is a very good reason for this. Believing himself (with some justification) to be a far less capable metaphysician than his mentor, throughout his works Tucker felt compelled to secure his entire epistemology within Butler, almost without fail.Footnote ⁶² Indeed, five years after Butler's death Tucker praised his old bishop by describing him as “that deep, sagacious Author” who “pursues a Method the fittest in the World to put to silence the superficial, licentious Extravagancies of modern Times.” It was only owing to the fact that Butler's writing style was insufficiently “pleasing and alluring” that the less perceptible, or the fashionable “young” skeptics whose minds were “just tinctured with a smattering of knowledge,” tended to overlook them.Footnote ⁶³ As John Wesley similarly recognized, those that would “profit” most from Butler's words “must dilute his sense, or they will neither swallow nor digest it.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Indeed, even Butler's oldest dissenting friend and fellow Anglican convert, Archbishop Thomas Secker, recalled that he had taken “much Pains” in attempting to help make the meaning of Fifteen Sermons “easier to be apprehended. Yet they were called obscure.”Footnote ⁶⁵

The purported esotericism of Butler's scheme presents us with something of a quandary, then. For it was precisely the subtlety and penetration of the bishop's meta-ethical thought which proved so influential to some of the most lauded of the Scottish moralists: namely Hutcheson, Kames, Hume and Smith, each of whom concurred in various degrees with Butler's psychologically oriented analyses of human nature.Footnote ⁶⁶ On the other hand, Butler was a latitudinarian clergyman who had himself emerged from the socially modest climes of old Dissent. Consequently, throughout Butler's ministry one of his main concerns had been to bridge the gap between church and laity, learned and unlearned, philosophical and vulgar—and, above all, rich and poor. For as Butler had insisted in Fifteen Sermons at the precise point where he spoke of the “Cements of Society,” there he also maintained that it was the “lowest of the people,” rather than their “Governors,” who were the “inventers” and “maintainers” of the “ties” that bind society together:

IV

It was by means of expatiating upon the social responsibilities, or rather reciprocities, between rich and poor, then, that the Tuckerian system intersected all the more with the Butlerian. Their stance was borne out in particular via the emphasis both clergymen placed on the traditional Christian virtue of caritas (charity/love), which featured most prominently in Butler's final publications, the “six occasional sermons” (1739–48).Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1741, for example, Butler likened charity to liberty itself, defining it as the “perfect love which St. John speaks of [1 John 4:18] . . . an entire Coincidence of our Wills with the Will of God . . . a state of the most absolute Freedom” while we exist in this present life.Footnote ⁶⁹ Elsewhere, charity was described as that “hearty Love to our Fellow-creatures, as produceth a settled Endeavour to promote, according to the best of our Judgment, their real lasting Good, both present and future.”Footnote ⁷⁰

It has recently, and convincingly, been contended that “eighteenth-century epistemology tended to separate sympathy from theism,” since the “theistic foundations” of charity were “increasingly regarded as epistemically unavailable.”Footnote ⁷¹ Nevertheless, this should not blind us to the fact that many Georgian clerics remained optimistic about the role Christianity might play in guiding systems of social reform for the benefit of the laboring poor. As various studies have shown,Footnote ⁷² such optimism was often linked to broader attempts to enact a “farther Reformation” within Britain and her colonies.Footnote ⁷³ This was epitomized by increasingly institutionalized and state-administered forms of charity, such as charity schools, asylums, dispensaries and infirmaries. It was in this philanthropic spirit that the great Anglican reformation and missionary societies—namely the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), the Society for the Reformation of Manners (SRM) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG)—had been founded in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, greatly influencing Wesley and the Methodists in particular.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet be that as it may, Butler's uniqueness on this score lay in his philosophical insistence that pity, sympathy and empathy were in fact coterminous with the tenets of established Christianity. In so doing, Butler was at variance with a new breed of moral philosophers increasingly emphasizing corporeal-sensorial, as opposed to Christian-neighborly, reciprocity (or empathy/sympathy) between individuals.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Bob Tennant has shown, Butler's ideas were so influential—at least within clerical circles—that his Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1739) and Charity Schools (1745) sermons were held up as models for later anniversary sermons preached by the likes of Richard Terrick, Edward Bentham, William Warburton and Tucker himself.Footnote ⁷⁶ It was by these means, Tennant continues, that Butler's neo-Stoic “theory of ethics as circles of benevolence, expanding from the moral and legal centrality of the family and extended household,” essentially “redefined the Church's missiology for the next half century.”Footnote ⁷⁷

According to Butler, then, “Preheminence” of “Fervent Charity” was indeed the very embodiment of universal benevolence, by which means all persons could “even merit Forgiveness of Men.”Footnote ⁷⁸ For if, Butler argued, the social affections of each individual were to be properly utilized and/or fulfilled, particularly in the ethical sense, it was imperative that they attempt to offer practicable benefits to those in need, “in a Moderate Way of considering Things.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Consequently, towards the end of his life, Butler made clear his growing concern not only for the political or religious matters of the day, but “more particularly still,” he wrote just one year prior to the publication of Tucker's Essay in 1749, for those “Persons in Trade and Commerce.” In other words, these were those members of Butler's congregation whose “Duty” he believed it was to contribute to “the Relief of the Necessitous,” which were the “Obligations of Economy upon People in the highest, as well as in the lower Stations of Life.”Footnote ⁸⁰ For while “Benevolent instinct left to itself” might be “agreeable in Conversation,” Butler pondered in a veiled dig at the purported aristocratic narcissism of Shaftesbury, as well as some of the more baroque of the Augustan writers,Footnote ⁸¹ nevertheless this did not account for putting “Men out of a Capacity of doing the Good they might, if they could withstand Importunity, and the Sight of Distress, when the Case requires it should be withstood: Many instances of which occur, both in Publick and Private.”Footnote ⁸²

Accordingly, it was only in those societies which placed a combination of conscience, charity and commerce at their core, Butler surmised, that the inherent reciprocity and dynamism of human exchange relations could take root and flourish. Indeed, even as early as 1739 the bishop had already begun to discuss the direct application of caritas to economic activity, suggesting that “advantageous Commerce” was tantamount to the “Profession of Christianity” itself. Likewise anticipating Tucker's impending interest in the dynamics of international trade, Butler maintained that maritime “Navigation and Commerce should be consecrated to the Service of Religion,” to “spread its Light and Influence” across the then known parts of the globe.Footnote ⁸³ Based on such examples as these, it is not difficult to see why Butler's most recent biographer, Tennant, suggests that had the bishop lived beyond 1752 it is highly likely that he would have furthered these embryonic ideas to create a coherent and systematic set of principles revolving around them, just as in the case of Fifteen Sermons and The Analogy.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet since he did not, it is entirely plausible—indeed entirely probable—that Tucker's economic tracts, alongside a variety of auxiliary works he had published from the 1740s to the 1760s which were associated with them, were in large part intended to fill this vacuum.

In The Causes of the Dearness of Provisions (1766), for example, Tucker reiterated Butler's position with astonishing faithfulness to his mentor's vision. There he insisted that the “distresses of the poor . . . merit the attention of the legislature beyond all other subjects whatever.” Additionally, Tucker set down in unmistakeably Butlerian terms an account of the social obligations existing between rich and poor, and particularly the moral duty of the former towards the latter:

In a similar vein were Tucker's sentiments in A Sermon Preached in the Parish-Church of Christ-Church (1766)—an almost verbatim replication of Butler's homily preached on the same subject of charity schools over two decades earlier, both of which were delivered on behalf of the SPCK. There, Butler had placed particular emphasis on instilling within the state's citizenry a virtuous Christian education. This, he maintained, was a charitable enterprise consistent with a “Frame of mind and Course of Behaviour . . . which will bring us to our final good.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Likewise, for Tucker, the importance of charity and education was “an undeniable Truth, even were we to extend our Views no farther than the present Life.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Not only did it teach the “divine Principles of Christianity,” but also “those of common Honesty, of Sobriety, and Industry.” Furthermore, because Tucker recognized that the poor were often forced in desperation to ply their trade within the city municipalities, he speculated that charity and education might be the means of preventing them from ingratiating themselves within the so-called the “School of Corruption” which so characterized the “Streets of this great Metropolis.”Footnote ⁸⁸ This analysis accounts in large part for Tucker's proposal in the Essay to erect charity “Districts” throughout Britain's manufacturing regions, each to be manned by “hereditary, legal, and perpetual Guardians of the Poor.” As Tucker made clear, their duty would be to encourage “industry, Probity, and practical Religion” among the workers, and to discipline those who encouraged any “Temptations”—namely frequenting ale houses and participating in cockfighting and cudgel playing—which “draw people together.”Footnote ⁸⁹

As if to sharpen the contours, then, that divided the Mandevillean scheme from the Butlerian and Tuckerian, it is extremely notable that Mandeville himself had denied the intrinsic value of charity and education in his Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools (1723). There he claimed that even ostensibly “altruistic” acts of charity were reliant upon individual and collective self-regard, much like their commercial analogue. Moreover, for Mandeville, this was just as true for close familial ties as for any wider societal bond.Footnote ⁹⁰ In pointed contrast, however, Butler and Tucker preached that magnanimous acts of charity between individuals were the remedial means towards a healthier nation, both in the psychologically inward (private) and the socially outward (public) senses. For there is a “Law of Reputation,” wrote Butler, and by this he meant a type of emulation derived from education and the dissemination of knowledge, which enforced and upheld the “civil Laws” of society. In consequence, Butler speculated that these were the means by which the individual might choose to progressively shun the primacy of self-love in favor of those virtues which they did not, and moreover could not, possess on their own.Footnote ⁹¹ Correspondingly, Tucker claimed that the “Gospel Doctrine of Love and Charity, and mutual forbearance” was tantamount to one's “Duty towards Man”: a kind of buttress for the constitutional liberties of Britons in tandem with the promotion of the moral government of God.Footnote ⁹² Hence, by “laying a good Foundation,” he pointed out, “you act up to the true Spirit of the Protestant Religion: in so doing, you keep close to the Principles of Liberty, and the English Constitution: you display your Patriotism as Citizens; and your Humanity and Benevolence as Men, and the Friends of Mankind.”Footnote ⁹³

Crucially, then, according to Tucker, it was by means of the Butlerian system that the British constitution, and British liberty itself, might be better supported and maintained. This was intended in the very specific sense that Tucker believed that Butler's ideas on commercial sociability would cement that “Balance of Condition, which ought ever to subsist between Rich and Poor.”Footnote ⁹⁴ For as we saw earlier, in Fifteen Sermons Butler spoke of the complex of affections which comprised individual and collective human nature, and, concomitantly, of the importance of mediating between one's private and public personae in a contingently “messy” or “disorderly” commercial society. Extrapolating from this, Tucker later theorized—in overtly economic terms—about the “great Difference of Talents and, if I may be allowed the expression, a wonderful Variety of Strata in the human Mind.” Taken together, Tucker surmised that the resulting system would be a cyclical phenomenon, part epiphenomenal and part facilitative of economic activity itself.Footnote ⁹⁵

For Butler and Tucker, then, corporeal and material inequality between individuals was unavoidably the natural condition of humankind—even more so in civilized and modern commercial polities in which, as the latter put it, “Moral Obligations now constitute social Virtue, or relative Duty.”Footnote ⁹⁶ For as Tucker in particular recognized, this was an age of increasingly sophisticated, personal and monetized forms of exchange, economic specialization and the division of labor. Consequently, he maintained that differences in rank and authority emerged both naturally and legitimately, commensurate with those variances in individual personalities, talents and faculties which encompassed society as a whole. Accordingly, the Butlerian and Tuckerian conception of human society was premised not only on the commercial idealism of the eighteenth-century establishment order, but also on the insuperability of imperfect human existence within the present life. “It can surely be no Wrong to me, that I am not created an Angel,” Tucker therefore summarized in reference to the scala naturae doctrine. “Nor is it any injury to the Brute that he is not made a Man.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Nevertheless, Tucker did not “mean to say, that the Poor should be treated as so many Beasts of Burden,” or that they should be prevented from rising “gradually in the World by superior Industry or Skill, by greater Frugality, or better Oeconomy.” On the contrary, in Tucker's view, the purpose of Christian charity, virtuous learning and the prospect of economic progress—backed and mediated, that is, by “Free Government” and Butlerian “Liberty of Conscience”—was to assist the poor in clawing themselves away from a life of solipsistic isolation and moral destitution, and instead towards one of material, and thereby spiritual, contentment:

V

In extant studies of Tucker, much has been made of his influential ideas on the complex relations between rich and poor countries in an increasingly competitive and globalized eighteenth-century marketplace.Footnote ⁹⁹ A far less travelled path, however, is a consideration of Tucker's parallel attempts to grapple with the social tensions existing between rich and poor within individual modern commercial states, and the extent to which this impinged on his wider views in the field of international relations and global trade.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The role and status of the domestic plebeian population have long been considered a subject of primary importance to eighteenth-century British, and especially Scottish, political economists.Footnote ¹⁰¹ However, as these pages have shown, the Tuckerian variant was distinguished from the Scottish school because of its basis in an unusual and eclectic mix of Anglican social theory and neo-Stoicism derived from Butler, which viewed modern forms of commerce not only as civilizing, but also, more importantly, as moralizing or “Christianizing,” agents.Footnote ¹⁰² Deeming the temporal pursuit of moderate wealth creation to be contingent upon the traditional tenets of Christianity, Tucker rejected long-established theological objections to material acquisition here on Earth.Footnote ¹⁰³ In so doing, he attracted the ire of fellow Anglican prelates, most notably Warburton, who accused Tucker of making “religion his trade, and trade his religion.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Holding firm in his position, however, this article has demonstrated that the Tuckerian system in political economy augmented the Butlerian system in moral philosophy, in that the former was essentially the transposition of Butler's science of social psychology into the arena of institution building, social organization and—not least, of course—economic development.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Be that as it may, Butler and Tucker were well aware that ambitious domestic reform of the type they advocated required a profound reevaluation of the true meaning and nature of British liberty in what was an increasingly ephemeral, metropolitan and material world—“a world of hidden interdependencies,” wrote Donald Winch, “rather than of direct dependency, the leading characteristic of its feudal predecessor.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Considered by themselves, Butler and Tucker's speculations were nothing particularly new. Commentaries centering on the idiosyncrasies, and often the moral squalor, of the British state, its mixed constitution, and its extraordinary propensity to wage successful fiscal–military wars across the globe, abounded throughout the eighteenth century, both from within and without the British Isles.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Amongst these debates, however, the Butlerian and Tuckerian conception of civil liberty was unusual, bordering on eccentric, in that it rested on a dual interpretation of the British constitution that was at once political and ethical. Tied to Butler's belief in the preeminence of the collective social affections over and above individual self-interest, these were the means, he preached, by which “each of us” might “Transfer the Equity of this our civil Constitution to our whole personal Character,” not merely for the benefit of “Ourselves” but with equal regard to the “Will of Others.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Yet for Tucker, the next stage in regard to the Butlerian scheme was to turn one's thoughts to the “System of universal Commerce.” For “an Englishman,” he wrote in the Elements,

In Tucker's mind, such controversies were thrown into even sharper relief in the second half of the eighteenth century with the rise and diffusion of Rational Dissent.Footnote ¹¹⁰ At that time, he interpreted dissenting calls for Parliamentary reform, relief from the Test and Corporation Acts, and popular support for North American independence as marks of a single conspiracy. Above all, Tucker was concerned with those he disparagingly termed “modern new-light men” or “republican Doctors,” namely John Wilkes, John Cartwright and the anti-Trinitarians Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, all of whom he accused of propagating a distinctly Lockean-inspired language of individualist natural right. Likening (against Burke) such agitators and apologists for American civil and religious liberty to the “most inflexible” forms of seventeenth-century Puritanism, Tucker claimed that these men held no real principles whatsoever, beyond their “Antipathy to our established Religion, and their Zeal to pull down all Orders in Church and State”: “They are now MR. LOCKE'S Disciples; who has laid down such Maxims in his Treatise on government, that if they were to be executed to the Letter, and in the manner the Americans pretend to understand them, they would necessarily unhinge, and destroy every government upon Earth.”Footnote ¹¹¹

According to the dean of Gloucester, the central fallacy of individual natural right was thus that it positioned notions of the individual anteriorly to the formation of civil society. For in Tucker's mind, this resulted in a predictable elevation of unfettered self-love and self-rule: a sort of paradoxical universalism-cum-individualism, rendering notions of political community and public good alike expendable. Unsurprisingly, Tucker believed this to be a fundamentally antisocial conception of human nature, bearing far greater resemblance to the individual egoism of Hobbes and Mandeville than to the benevolent sociability of Butler. As Tucker put it to that noted patron of radical intellectuals Lord Shelburne, individual natural right was a spurious “System of metaphysical Politics,” within which notions of civil or religious liberty simply could not be vested.Footnote ¹¹² For while, as these pages have shown, Tucker acknowledged that all members of the body politic had an equal right to mutual assistance,Footnote ¹¹³ in his mind, this notion could only be legitimated within the parameters of an explicitly established political society, possessed of a “common Center of Union . . . governed by some Rule either expressed or implied, written or traditionary”: “For a Society without any Rule, and Connection, or any social Bond, is, to my Apprehension, no Society at all. And yet, if you admit of such Regulations, you must likewise admit of Creeds, Articles, and Subscriptions, under some Shape or other, or of something equivalent to them.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Accordingly, in the Treatise Concerning Civil Government (1781), Tucker's magnum opus, the dean adjoined his long-standing theories in political economy to his recent rejection of individual natural right. There he claimed that the two were irreconcilable precisely because the latter was both historically and economically archaic, and therefore suited only for humans in their earliest, rudest and most savage stages of development. Contrariwise, Tucker reiterated that modern commercial societies produced an inherent “Distinction of Orders, and a Difference of Ranks,” which were all hallmarks of humans simply “living and conversing together, as Neighbours and social Beings.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Seemingly logical when applied to the theoretical state of nature, in reality universal natural rights were impracticable and dangerous, a “plan of wild, Utopian liberty,”Footnote ¹¹⁶ not least because they circumvented the Butlerian foundations upon which Tucker erected his science of political economy, and upon which he intended its future progress:

Writing in Cui Bono? (1781) at the height of the American War of Independence, Tucker continued to invoke the moderatism of his old bishop by deploying the Butlerian analogy between psychological health and sickness. There he likened all wars to “Maladies, and Fits of Folly,” which at times aggrieved “whole Bodies of Men, large Societies, and even Nations.” Such was the case, indeed, in regard to the present war: a war of empire and conquest rather than of liberty, in Tucker's estimation, in which the “English, the French, the Americans, the Spaniards, and the Dutch” were equally “afflicted with a Deprivation of their Senses” and a “national Insanity.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ By contrast, it was the “mutual Circulation of Labour and Industry” which remained the only “fundamental Truth in the Science of Politics and Commerce, which never can be too much inculcated.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Nevertheless, in a private letter penned two years later in the build-up to the Treaty of Paris (1783), Tucker could not help but notice “that revolutionary principles” were “continually gaining ground.” For it was “all the mode at present,” he wrote, “for the ladies to ogle the gentlemen”; and this “confirms me more and more, that we may expect great changes in the public state of national affairs.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Ever the modern Cassandra figure, Tucker was indeed correct on this head.Footnote ¹²¹ Merely six years later, disaffected and increasingly hostile crowds would besiege, and ultimately sack, the fortress of the Bastille, the centuries-old symbol of royal authority in the French capital, precipitating yet another spell of internecine global conflict. Thus did Tucker write in resignation and old age to the anecdotist William Seward, in the same year that Burke published the famous Reflections on the Revolution on France (1790):

As ever, it was inordinate self-love, the interminable “Spirit of Monopoly,” that “watchful Dragon,” as Tucker had put it in the Essay of 1749, which was responsible for this state of affairs; and indeed, “nothing I can say,” he had prophesied all those years before, “will have Charm enough to lay him asleep.”Footnote ¹²³ The Butlerian variant of that which Hume had famously labeled the “science of man,” and which Tucker had attempted to enact faithfully throughout his long and distinguished public career, seemed further away than ever.