Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk: Review of Three Works on England’s Social and Economic History (1885)

Böhm-Bawerk’s collective review examines Adolf Held’s posthumous social history of England, Lujo Brentano’s account of English Christian Socialism, and Gustav Cohn’s study of railway policy in 1873–1883. English economic history supplies their common subject; the review moves from the dissolution of inherited social institutions to voluntary reform and the limits of economic freedom under monopoly. Its judgments distinguish historical scholarship from partisan polemic, practical achievements from transformative aspirations, and nominal freedom from effective protection against concentrated power.

Held’s unfinished project receives the fullest structural description. Edited by Georg Friedrich Knapp, its two surviving books were intended as the introductory volume of a social history extending from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. They trace the foundations of modern conditions through democratic ideas and large-scale industry. The first surveys political and social literature from 1776 to 1832, reaching back to Locke and proceeding through individualists, economists, radicals, and socialists. The second follows the decline of the handicraft order, mercantilism, the ascendancy of large capital, factory industry, and workers’ conditions. Böhm-Bawerk presents Held’s governing problem as the destructive capacity of individualism: forces that cleared away obsolete institutions failed to establish a satisfactory social order in their place.

Beide Bücher enthalten an Material wie an Raisonnement des Interessanten genug, um sie auch als Torso lesenswert zu machen.

English translation: Both books contain enough that is interesting, in material as well as in reasoning, to make them worth reading even as a torso.

This endorsement separates the surviving books’ intellectual value from the incompleteness of the larger undertaking. Böhm-Bawerk nevertheless sharply objects to Held’s treatment of Ricardo, particularly the attribution of frivolous tendentiousness to a theorist holding a different opinion. His objection concerns the standards of scholarly dispute:

Solche ebenso wohlfeile als unschöne Mittel der Polemik wenden vor unparteiischen Lesern ihre Spitze gegen Denjenigen zurück, der sich ihrer bedient.

English translation: Such means of polemic, as cheap as they are unlovely, turn their point back, before impartial readers, against the one who employs them.

Brentano’s subject shifts the review toward reform efforts beginning in the late 1840s. The English Christian Socialists sought to replace selfish competition with Christian duties of mutual assistance. Böhm-Bawerk recognizes the danger that such a program might collapse into religious or confessional propaganda, but credits its advocates with tolerance and practical service to the poor. Their achievement must nonetheless be measured independently of their ultimate aim:

Zwar ihrem Hauptziele, die sociale Frage durch eine innerliche Reform der Menschheit in echt biblischem Geiste zu lösen, sind sie um keinen Schritt näher gekommen.

English translation: To their chief goal, indeed, that of solving the social question through an inward reform of mankind in a genuinely biblical spirit, they have not come a single step closer.

The movement’s contribution lay instead in workers’ associations and education, which improved workers’ material and intellectual circumstances. Böhm-Bawerk is more guarded about Brentano’s claim that it reconciled the upper classes and clergy with working-class interests, thereby bridging England’s class divide. He marks this assessment as possibly too optimistic and notes Brentano’s deliberate avoidance of comparison with German Christian Socialism. Moral intentions and useful institutional activity thus earn praise without establishing that the social question has been resolved.

Cohn’s continuation of his railway studies elicits the review’s strongest policy judgment. Böhm-Bawerk commends its evidence and exposition, then reconstructs a sequence in which attachment to economic freedom obstructs decisive state intervention while powerful railway monopolies dictate commercial conditions. Public complaints secure only partial measures, which the companies largely neutralize. The examples make “freedom” a question of actual power: one railway retaliates against a colliery owner’s complaint about freight charges by refusing coal carriage; another continues levying unlawful rates long after an adverse judicial decision.

Böhm-Bawerk accordingly endorses Cohn’s condemnation of the slogan “free trade in a free country” when invoked against firm intervention in railway affairs. His argument is specific to the institutional conditions described: monopoly can turn formal economic liberty into arbitrary private domination. The study’s relevance therefore extends beyond England:

Aus der tüchtigen Schrift ist nicht allein für englische, sondern auch für unsere eigenen Verhältnisse in vieler Hinsicht erspriessliches zu lernen.

English translation: From this able work there is much that is profitable to be learned in many respects, not only for English conditions but also for our own.

Across the three assessments, Böhm-Bawerk treats English experience as a resource for critical economic judgment. Historical explanation must not become imputations of bad faith; religious reform must be assessed by its tangible results; and defenses of freedom must confront the coercive capacities of monopolists.