As the first century drew to a close, the historian Tacitus composed a short book, Germania. In it he tried to shame his fellow Romans by touting the superior morality of Northern barbarians. 

Thus with their virtue protected they live uncorrupted by the allurements of public shows or the stimulant of feastings. Clandestine correspondence is equally unknown to men and women. Very rare for so numerous a population is adultery, the punishment for which is prompt, and in the husband's power...  No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted. Still better is the condition of those states in which only maidens are given in marriage, and where the hopes and expectations of a bride are then finally terminated. They receive one husband, as having one body and one life, that they may have no thoughts beyond, no further-reaching desires, that they may love not so much the husband as the married state. To limit the number of their children or to destroy any of their subsequent offspring is accounted infamous, and good habits are here more effectual than good laws elsewhere. (Tacitus 1942)

A skeptical reader of “Clandestine correspondence is … unknown” might object that, being illiterate, ancient Germans could not correspond at all.  Such a reader would make a genre error.  In Germania Tacitus was using the already-ancient trope of contrasting louche, luxurious urban manners with simple rustic virtue.[1]  Though enlivened by second-hand ethnographic details, Germania is a work of didactic fiction.  It is important for what follows to remember that Tacitus’ fictional Germany was built against Rome, and that everyone who took it up later drew on this contrast.  Tacitus’ imaginary Germans were manly, independent, courageous, and self-governing.  Status differences were relatively small, ostentation discouraged.[2]  All these points were meant to rebuke Romans.

Germania was lost until 1425.  After its rediscovery, the first to make use of it were German Protestants who, whether from naiveté or opportunism, took its description of ancient Germans at face value.  The book let them “claim that they had once been not only the equals but even the superiors of their Italian tormentors” (Benario 2004).  This idea that an early and pure Christianity survived in the fastnesses of Northern Europe, uncorrupted by ever-decadent Rome, would come in handy later. 

In the 19th century a number of English historians appropriated Germania for similar purposes.  They decided that the English of late antiquity were German migrants and belonged to the same social and cultural pattern, which let them use Tacitus to supplement the extremely scant archive on English society and politics before the 1066 conquest.  John Mitchell Kemble’s The Saxons in England, first published in 1848, leans heavily on Tacitus to describe a society of free men who held “land within the limits of the community” in which each was “entitled to vote with his fellows upon all matters concerning the general interests of the community.”  “He is at liberty to make his own alliances, to unite with other freemen in the formation of gilds or associations for religious or political purposes” (Kemble 1876, 132–33).  John Richard Green’s 1874 Short History of the English People tells the story with more literary panache:

For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself… [to] the heart of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern seas. (Green 1895 10)

In their villages lay ready formed the social and political life which is round us in the England of to-day. .. the "township," … formed a complete and independent body... Within the township every freeman or ceorl was equal. It was the freeman who was the base of village society. He was the "free-necked man" whose long hair floated over a neck which had never bowed to a lord.  He was the "weaponed man" who alone bore spear and sword, and who alone preserved that right of self-redress or private war which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless outrage. (Green 1895, 10–12)

…  But even in the earliest forms of English society of which we find traces this right of self-defence was being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice. (Green 1895, 9)

“Never bowed to a lord” was the tendentious claim that, despite archaeological and literary evidence to the contrary, pre-Norman English were not really feudal.  “The eorl was distinguished from his fellow-villagers by his wealth and nobler blood … but his claim to precedence rested simply on the free recognition of his fellow-villagers.”  Green does describe two lower classes – landless agricultural workers and slaves – but his emphasis an idealized egalitarian society of free small farmers.[3]  Saxonism was an implicit, and sometimes explicit, rebuke of the Norman-descended feudal aristocracy that still exercised considerable power in Britain in the 19th century, and useful for a middle class that wanted to claim, however fancifully, descent from pre-Norman English. 

This freeman is most emphatically gendered.  Writes Kemble,

The natural divisions into which all human society must be distributed … are the Free and the Unfree, those who can protect themselves and those who must be in the protection of others. Even in the family this distinction must be found, and the wife and son are unfree in relation to the husband and the father; they are in his mund [protection]. From this mund the son indeed may be emancipated, but not the wife or daughter... Married to one free woman who shares his toils, soothes his cares, and orders his household, he becomes the founder of the family—the first unit in the state: the son who springs from this marriage, completes the family, and centres in himself the blood, the civil rights and the affections of his two progenitors. It is thus, through the son, that the family becomes the foundation of the state.(Green 1895)

Lest we miss the point, Kemble glosses this last sentence with “It is probably in this sense that the Hindu Institutes assert, “Then only is a man perfect when he consists of three persons united, his wife, himself, and his son.” Manu, ch. ix. 45.” 

It is worth pausing to consider the relations of authority here.  On the one hand, it is possible to understand these alleged Saxons as precocious moderns.  In other words if one of the problems of the British 19th century, broadly speaking, is how to build a coherent society as the glue of feudalism dissolves – widening suffrage, a mobile urban working class, the weakening confessional hegemony of the state church – then Saxonism provides a reassuring answer: yes of course we English can do it, because it is in our blood.  Feudalism, the argument went, was not the true pattern of English society, but a temporary French imposition.  In that connection we can link Saxonism to the ideological category of modernity, that is the ideal of a society of rational, independent individuals, held together only by broad, formal institutions like law and markets (in contrast, always, to “custom” or a “traditional society” in which people are tightly bound to kin, Lord, priest, and inherited practice).  This will be an important use for economist Alfred Marshall.  Up to this point, then, the independent, responsible, self-controlled Englishman sounds like the liberal ideal of John Stuart Mill, and could be easily extended to women in their capacity as competent adults.  But for many Victorian thinkers, men are only free when they rule women.  As we have seen this particular theme can be traced straight back to Tacitus, who celebrated the alleged fidelity of German wives.  Thus we cannot dismiss the gender politics of these writings as a mere reflection of antique Victorian prejudices.  The kind of society that Marshall had in mind did not so much scale relations of authority back as reorganize them: the category of the free man was most persuasive when he ruled a woman.  The later (and still routine) conflation of household with head of household in economics has a deep history.

Let us consider a few more examples to trace the political uses of Saxonism.  An influential example was Walter Scott’s 1820 romance Ivanhoe.  Set in 12th-century England, Scott imagined that a small Saxon gentry lingered a century after the Norman conquest, clinging to some of their former land and status.  A Norman knight kidnaps a Saxon noble and his beautiful ward in order to force a marriage with her and get her land.  An impromptu force of Saxon brigands rescues them, aided by a mysterious Black Knight.  The Saxon brigands are Scott’s reimagination of the Robin Hood story, casting the outlaw Robin as a virtuous Saxon.  After the rescue Robin, standing beneath an ancient oak before his approving men, arranges various affairs, deals with loot and captives, and otherwise dispenses justice and mercy.  As proceedings draw to a close,

The Black Knight, who had seen with no small interest these various proceedings, now took his leave of the Outlaw in turn; nor could he avoid expressing his surprise at having witnessed so much of civil policy amongst persons cast out from all the ordinary protection and influence of the laws. (Scott 1830)chapter 33

As the alert reader suspects, the Black Knight is really Richard the Lion-Heart, legitimate king of England.  He has returned in disguise from a European captivity engineered by his evil brother Prince John.  Both John and Richard are Normans.  John is the archetypal bad Norman: dishonest, rapacious, and haughtily contemptuous of the uncouth Saxons.  But Richard is a courageous and honest Norman, who has just fought with Saxons against bad Normans.  He now witnesses, beneath the oak, the innate Saxon love of justice and good government.  If there is a core to Saxonism, it is this: Robin’s outlaws are innately just and lawful, unlike the ruling Normans.  They are capable of ethical self-government.  The narrative presents the hope that Richard will regain his throne and rule with appreciation and justice for his Saxon subjects, instead of robbing and abusing them. 

Scott was a political conservative, who still imagined national integration as a matter of good nobles displacing bad nobles, constructing a new elite culture synthesizing Saxon practicality and Norman sophistication.[4]  Later 19th century versions, of which we have already seen two in the histories of Kemble and Green, tended to cast Norman culture in wholly negative terms and portray Saxons as quite able to manage on their own.  There seem to be several reasons.  The Napoleonic Wars sparked a reaction against French culture and encouraged many English intellectuals to deny the deep cultural overlap between the two countries and instead discover, or if necessary invent, a French-free Englishness.  Moreover Saxonism, especially dressed up as “Anglo-Saxonism,” became increasingly useful to justify the subjection of Ireland.  Writers imagined a three-layered society: over-sophisticated Normans, practical Saxons, and savage Celts, who were routinely portrayed as sub-humans in superstitious thrall to Catholic priests.  The anti-Catholic potentials of Saxonism also became useful to English writers seeking to roll back the slow progress of Catholic emancipation.  Here the typical claim was that the Saxons had kept a simple, manly, and true Christianity since their conversion in the 7th century, at a safe distance from the corruptions of Rome – hence Henry VIII’s breach with the Pope was not a break with the true Church, but a return to it!

A minor figure in this tradition, now obscure but well known to Alfred Marshall, was his father, William Marshall (1812-1901).  The elder Marshall was a stridently evangelical Anglican. “Evangelical” here signifies emphasis on individual conviction and enthusiasm, as opposed to the ritual, liturgy, and authority of “high church” Anglicanism, things that evangelicals thought scandalously similar to Roman Catholicism.  William Marshall made his living as a clerk at the Bank of England, but after retirement in 1877 he devoted himself to writing tracts against the Roman Church.  Anti-Catholic polemicists were not scarce in the 19th century.[5]  If the elder Marshall has a claim to originality, it is his effort to enrich the genre with Old English vocabulary.  His first published work, Lochlere, (1877) was an epic religious poem with the unusual feature that it used no words introduced into English since the Norman conquest.  Whenever Marshall could not find a suitable contemporary word, he consulted his Saxon lexicon and revived an Old English term.  Critics greeted the semi-intelligible result with a coolness that bordered on levity.[6]  Stung, William Marshall defended his innovation in an 1878 work, The Past, Present, and Future of England’s Language.

What a language is the English of King Alfred's time!  It is one more copious and richer than that spoken in Italy in the Augustan period.  It is full of flexibility and life, full of expression, nervous, terse, malleable; large as it is, yet capable of being expanded to ten times its bulk.  There is scarcely a single word in what I shall venture to call the Anglo-Latin, which we are all speaking, and in which I am ashamed to be obliged to write this Preface, which could not be replaced with advantage by a word from the [Old] English dictionary, or by a word drawn by natural growth from such a word. (Marshall 1878, 2)

Our grammar is a confusion of grammatical systems, our dictionary a confusion of languages; whilst the study of our learned men is given to the languages of aliens, of the dead, and even of the uncivilised, or else to questions of science, the most advanced of which take such forms as these, whether we may not derive our ancestry from tadpoles rather than from God; or as these, whether we should not give back the clouded daylight of the old Christianity of the Apostles in exchange for the starry darkness of the new Christianity of the Papal Fathers; or as these, whether we ought not to give the electoral franchise to women, and thus allow them, as being the more numerous sex, to utterly emasculate our councils… (Marshall 1878, 14–15)

Shall we go back to that [Old] English, or are we prepared to see our language lose almost entirely its English features, and become the basest of all the Latin dialects, the corruption of a corruption of Latin ? … What Englishman is there, not perverted by his classical-school education, who having a mind capable of being kindled and a spark of patriotism to kindle it does not feel his blood boil as, by the use of foreign words such as these in which I am writing this essay, he assists in speeding the progress of his native tongue to utter ruin? (Marshall 1878, 20) 

I beg pardon for such extended quotation, but there is a lot of ideological work packed into these paragraphs.  Language and race function as homologues.  A pure original culture, which he calls “English,” is threatened by Latin culture and language.  (Marshall does not even waste time with French, but goes straight to the Latin that underlies it.)  Latin is a threat because of the excessive refinement of its words and the corruption of its thought, manifest in Classical literature and in the doctrine of the Roman Church.  Men educated in Latin classics bring us tadpole ancestors and voting women.[7] 

So let us take stock.  First, Saxonism is always contrastive.  Tacitus used fictitious Germans to rebuke fellow Romans; later Germans and English readers claimed to be those idealized Germans, facing a variety of Rome-derived threats: Catholicism, the Irish, the French.  Saxonism thus drew together multiple ideological strands in the British 19th century: fears about exported Jacobinism and invasion by Napoleon, opposition to Catholic emancipation, and opposition to Irish home rule. 

Second, at the core of the Saxon myth is the claim to an innate capacity for self-government by free men.  Beyond the morally-shabby order we see around us, it says, another world is possible: solidaristic, manly, simple, and just.  Men’s authority over women is not just the only permitted despotism, it is a necessary despotism, the cultural glue that holds this imagined society together.  The linked notions of command and self-command are central to the ideology of Saxonism. 

[1] (Thompson 2006; Reusch 2008; O’Gorman 1993). In book 2 of Plato’s Republic, almost 500 years earlier, this move is so familiar it falls flat: Socrates describes an ideal rustic life in Book 2, Glaucon mocks it, and Socrates drops the gambit.

[2] They were not, in his telling, puritans: on the contrary they enjoyed feasting and drinking all day when the opportunity arose, a detail that later appropriations of Germania generally ignored.

[3] A splendid example of the ideological work being done here may be found in an unsigned review of Kemble’s book in the  , which writes, for  example, that “From our conceptions of the Anglo-Saxon king and noble it is essential to exclude most of the associations and phraseology derived from Normal feudalism. … the Anglo-Saxon king and earl held their dignity as well as their land, in the character of freement, or representatives of freemen…”(Anonymous 1849, 172)

[4] Scott’s Saxons are virtuous, practical, and courageous, the kind of person you want beside you in a tight spot.  But they are a bit thick.

[5] (Britten 1896)

[6] (Anonymous 1877; 1877; 1879)

[7] While the elder Marshall’s language is particularly intemperate, it points to a politics of Victorian scholarship that is worth naming.  Readers of George Eliot’s Middlemarch may remember that one of the marks of the fustiness of the Anglican scholar Casaubon is that his frame of reference is Classical.  He pursues his research at the Vatican library and is unfamiliar with the latest German scholarship.  Critical intellectuals like Eliot, by contrast, learned German and made a point of being current with continental thought.  The younger Marshall inherited from his father an antipathy to Classical scholarship and particularly to curricula dominated by it; he learned German at the first opportunity, holidayed frequently in Germany or Austria, and was deeply read in German philosophy, history, and economics.

Anonymous. 1849. “The Saxons in England (Review).” Edinburgh Review, no. CLXXIX (January).

———. 1877. “Lochlere.  A Poem, in Four Parts.” British Quarterly Review 66 (131): 262–63.

———. 1879. “The Past, Present, and Future of England’s Language.” British Quarterly Review 69 (138): 541–42.

Benario, Herbert W. 2004. “Arminius into Hermann: History into Legend.” Greece & Rome 51 (1): 83–94.

Britten, James. 1896. Protestant Fiction. London : Catholic Truth Society. http://archive.org/details/protestantfictio00brituoft.

Green, John Richard. 1895. A Short History of the English People,. New York: Harper & Bros.

Kemble, John Mitchell. 1876. The Saxons in England; a History of the English Commonwealth till the Period of the Norman Conquest. A new ed., rev. By Walter de Gray Birch. 19th-Century Legal Treatises ; No. 48905-48917. London: BQuaritch.

Marshall, William. 1878. The Past, Present, and Future of England’s Language. Longmans.

O’Gorman, Ellen. 1993. “No Place Like Rome: Identity and Difference in the Germania of Tacitus.” Ramus 22 (2): 135–54.

Reusch, Johann J. K. 2008. “Germans as Noble Savages and Castaways: Alter Egos and Alterity in German Collective Consciousness during the Long Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (1): 91–129.

Scott, Walter. 1830. Ivanhoe; a Romance. New York: George Routledge and Sons.

Tacitus, Cornelius. 1942. The Complete Works of Tacitus. Modern Library College Editions. New York: Modern Library.

Thompson, Maggie. 2006. “Primitive or Ideal? Gender and Ethnocentrism in Roman Accounts of Germany.” Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity and Classics 1 (1).

Mathematician Charles Babbage was one of the great theorists of the machine (Babbage 1846).  I want to pull out several features of his 1846 book, some of which Bizup’s Manufacturing Culture (Bizup 2003) has helped me see.  The book was the result of dozens of factory visits.  Contemporary accounts of factories tended to emphasize power and toil, smoke and noise, the uncanniness of large machines that appeared to be work on their own -- a sort of mechanical sublime.  There is none of this is in Babbage!  He disposes of power, force, velocity, and like mechanical capacities in short early chapters.  Two themes hold his interest.  An unusually long chapter, “Of Copying,” works through kinds of printing, casting, punching, stamping, and molding to produce precise copies.

THE two last sources of excellence in the work produced by machinery depend on a principle which pervades a very large portion of all manufactures, and is one upon which the cheapness of the articles produced seems greatly to depend.  The principle alluded to is that of COPYING, taken in its most extensive sense. Almost unlimited pains are, in some instances, bestowed on the original, from which a series of copies is to be produced; and the larger the number of these copies, the more care and pains can the manufacturer afford to lavish upon the original. It may thus happen, that the instrument or tool actually producing the work, shall cost five or even ten thousand times the price of each individual specimen of its power.” (51)

This is the only book I have ever read that includes a detailed description of its own physical (re)production.  That is, he does not just describe printing in general, but includes the book’s own accounts, including specific expenses for plates, revisions, paper, and so forth.  (At times, a certain tone of grievance creeps in.)  Babbage is throughout attentive to the difficulties in making precise copies of anything, and especially interested in all kinds of engraving, printing, and other technologies for reproducing images and words.

Second, he is deeply interested in mechanizing mental labor.  There is his famous chapter (XIX) on the production of logarithmic tables in France, in which skilled mathematicians generated the polynomials used to approximate logarithms, a second tier of workers produced the specific method-of-differences tasks used to calculate parts of the series, and then the actual calculation was handled by unskilled workers, many of them former hairdressers unemployed by the decline of the aristocracy, who needed only to perform successive additions.  Throughout the book Babbage attends to the ways mechanism can supplement or check mental labor.  For example Chapter VIII on “Registering Operations” begins:  “ONE of the most singular advantages we derive from machinery is in the check which it affords against the inattention, the idleness, or the knavery, of human agents” (39).  Here Babbage discusses mechanisms that count automatically, verify, and otherwise generate information.

Bizup points out that Babbage was throughout his life deeply interested in language, in systems of signs.  As an undergraduate at Cambridge he was a militant in support of Leibniz’s calculus notation, against the Newtonian notation that had university sanction.  Babbage developed his own mechanical-description language in order to design calculating machines.  His interest was always in precision and accuracy, in how to avoid error.  The question of error also shows up in another remarkable chapter, “On the Influence of Verification on Price,” which anticipates by 150 work in economics on the difficulty of ascertaining the quality of goods on offer, and the effect that difficulty has on prices.

I am led back to a theme I first saw in the popularization of mental testing in the early 20th century: that behind the discussions of work, efficiency, idleness, and breakdown is a larger argument about the intelligibility of the world.  Books like Babbage’s are not just important for their insights, deep though some of them are, but for the way they present a plane of analysis, a way that the world becomes visible to us, a perpetual campaign against error, against wrong copies, and bad numbers.

This also slightly complicates the machine-body relation.  While Babbage was alive to the rhetorical possibilities around “thinking machines,” he is pretty clear here and elsewhere that machines that do mental labor are not models of human minds, and that indeed they are intended to do things human minds are not good at, like repetitive additions with complete accuracy. 

Babbage, Charles. 1846. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. London, J. Murray. http://archive.org/details/oneconomyofmachi00babbrich.

Rabinbach, Anson. 1992. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. University of California Press.

In 1861, at the age of seventeen, Alfred Marshall gambled his future on mathematics.  He turned down a full scholarship at Oxford University that would have led to a comfortable career as an Anglican clergyman.  Instead he opted to attend Cambridge, on borrowed money, for the opportunity to spend three and a half years preparing for a week-long mathematical exam – the Tripos.  It would not be enough to pass this exam.  The success Marshall sought was placing among the very top finishers.  Cambridge was pre-eminent in mathematics in Britain, and attracted the most ambitious students, so this was like training for a chance at an Olympic medal.[1]  Passing up Oxford disappointed his father, William Marshall, an evangelical Anglican who wanted his son to pursue a career in the Church.  The younger Marshall borrowed money from an uncle to attend Cambridge.[2]

The gamble paid off.  Alfred Marshall placed second in the Tripos of 1865, beaten only by John Strutt, later known as Lord Rayleigh, the great physicist.  The result conferred an intellectual charisma that never wore off, got him the Cambridge fellowship that launched his career as an academic, and gave him entrée into the British intellectual elite.  If he had caught a cold before the exam and placed tenth, he might have spent his life as an obscure schoolmaster.  To understand this achievement, and why pursuing was attractive to a seventeen year-old boy, we need to step back and consider the strange history of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos.

With the establishment of the Church of England in the 16th century, Oxford and Cambridge universities became Anglican seminaries.  Their Fellows and Professors had to subscribe to the 39 Articles of the Church of England; their students needed to subscribe to take a degree.  The universities trained clergy and served as finishing schools for the well-born.  These purposes overlapped.  The distinguishing quality of  an Anglican clergyman, well into the 19th century, was that he was a gentleman: he had the social polish and confidence of speech conferred by university experience.  He needed to be scholarly enough to read ancient Greek, but Greek was a staple of elite secondary education.  A student at the universities could expect considerable exposure to religious themes, but there was no rigorous instruction in theology, and practical training in the work of ministry would have been unthinkable.[3] 

Both universities were composed of multiple smaller colleges with formal responsibility for instruction, but it was the university as a corporate body that conferred degrees.  How did you decide who qualified for a degree?  Up through the late 18th century, a degree required a public disputation.  This was also the general pattern in Europe.  A student presented himself for oral examination by a panel of university fellows.  The examination included presentation of an argument on a subject of the student’s choosing, followed by a ritualized combat in which an examiner attacked it and the student mounted a defense.  What was being tested in public disputation was not so much scholarly competence as poise: the ability to make a good impression, parry criticisms, recover errors, and stand your ground without getting flustered.  This, going back to the ancient Greek sophists, had long been the core purpose in training young men for elite public life. [4]

But at Cambridge University during the late 1700s, this began to change.  First, there was a move toward written examinations.  This may have been simply an economy, because oral disputations had to be held one at a time before a panel of fellows.  But once established, written examinations lent themselves to comparison, and hence ranking.  Second, perhaps because they were easier to mark, mathematical questions began taking up a larger part of the written examination.  Third, two tracks emerged.  Students who wanted an ordinary degree only had to pass a very easy written examination; they might also face a vestigial oral examination in the form of simple ritualized questions.  Noblemen were exempt from even this requirement.  Students in this category – around eighty percent – were called “pollmen” from the Greek οἱ πολλοί (the many) and graduating in this way was called “going out with the poll.”  It required minimal academic work and allowed a full social life.  By contrast “reading men” sought honors which required passing a much harder exam, and those passing were publicly ranked.  Reading men spent their days in diligent study, interrupted only by bursts of vigorous physical exercise. 

Cambridge was unusual in this regard.  Oxford did adopt written exams, but did not shift in this mathematical or highly competitive direction.  No other European university did this.[5]  By the time Marshall arrived, the exams were given in January, midway through a student’s fourth year.  After a qualifying exam in elementary mathematics that lasted three days, there was a pause of a week while papers were marked.  Passing candidates then took an examination lasting five consecutive days, with around eight hours of writing every day, divided into morning and afternoon sessions with one exam paper each.  Each exam paper included more questions than could possibly be answered in the time allotted, even by the very best student.  Success depended on being able to write as much of an answer as possible from memory, at top speed: the student who slowly worked out a proof would be lapped by a competitor who knew it by heart.  Success also depended on adroit choice of which questions to answer, because a question might have deceptively easy early stages before trapping you in fiendish difficulties in its last part, on which most of the points depended.[6]

Candidates who passed the Tripos were grouped in three categories: Wranglers, Senior Optimes, and Junior Optimes.[7]  Within each category, finishers were ordered: Senior Wrangler, Second Wrangler, and so forth.  Rankings were announced publicly and reported in national newspapers. Bookmakers offered odds.  To become a top wrangler, then, you had to be more than good at mathematics.  You had to out-compete the cream of the annual crop of mathematically-ambitious British undergraduates, all of whom had also spent the last three and a half years in assiduous preparation. 

While it was simply called “mathematical,” the Tripos was really an examination in Newtonian physics – a specific category of applied math.  Study was all book-work: there were no labs or experiments in.  This was a less arbitrary choice for a seminary than it might seem: Newton, it was argued, had revealed a simple order underlying all Creation and thus the benevolence and rationality of God, and teaching him to students would convince them of this.  Around the end of the eighteenth century the Tripos seems not to have been too taxing – the domain of knowledge tested was something like what a present-day undergraduate with a year each of calculus and physics would command.  But because top places were prized, students began studying harder and earlier, starting in secondary school, and some undergraduates began arriving at Cambridge with that kind of knowledge already under their belts.  As wranglers began teaching secondary-school students and coaching undergraduates, the quality of elite mathematics teaching shot up.  As the skills and mathematical sophistication of top undergraduates rose during the early and middle decades of the 1800s, examiners had to make the exam more difficult.  It got to the point that, by the mid-1800s, novel mathematical research could appear in examination questions.  This competitive spiral outstripped the teaching capacities of regular faculty, and students turned to private coaches.  After some ambivalence in the early decades of the 19th century, Cambridge University essentially privatized advanced mathematical instruction.  Reading men arrived in Cambridge and signed on with a private coach, whom they paid directly, who directed most of their undergraduate learning.  These students typically met twice a week in a small group with the coach, who taught the mathematics, gave them problem sets which he graded, and held regular practice examinations.  Unimpeded by university oversight, and driven by the incentive to have their students place well, coaches were free to innovate in instruction.[8] 

It is clear that part of what coaches taught was examination-specific skills.  A student who wanted to be successful had to learn a lot of material by heart so as to be able to write the elementary parts of Tripos problems rapidly.  And it is possible that in the lower strata of private coaching, which have drawn less attention from historians, rote memorization predominated.  But it is equally clear that at the top level, coaches genuinely taught mathematics, kept abreast of the latest research, and shared it with their best students.  Despite the drawbacks of this brutally elitist system, some of which we will get to in a moment, it produced dozens of well-trained mathematicians, encouraged mathematical research, and fostered a dynamic academic culture. 

Here we can come back to the young Marshall.  It was his luck that his secondary school, Merchant Taylor’s, provided excellent instruction in mathematics.  He was taught by the Reverend John Alfred Airey, Second Wrangler of 1846.  He found encouragement from a kind adult; a wrangler saw in him the requisites of top-level achievement.  When he got to Cambridge Marshall signed on with Edward Routh (1831-1907), a legendary private coach who taught most of the top wranglers from the 1850 through the 1880s.  Routh would have been a friendly but demanding teacher who required essentially full-time work.  Reading men organized their schedules carefully to get in at least eight hours of study and problem-working daily, with fixed times for physical exercise but very little recreation.  Added to the daily grind was the constant reminder of competition.  Routh gave his students an exam every fortnight, and posted the results.[9] 

This could put a lot of strain on a young person.  The lore of the Tripos, and the preparatory years of study, is filled with stories of illness, mental and physical breakdown, and deep emotional distress.  Typical of the genre is a letter by Francis Galton (1822-1911) to his father, dated November 2nd 1842:

My head is very uncertain so that I can scarcely read at all; however I find that I am not at all solitary in that respect. Of the year above me the first 3 men in their College examinations are all going out in the poll, the first 2 from bad health and the third, Boulton, from finding that lie could not continue rending as he used to do without risking it. … Joe Kay has left from illness produced by reading and won't come back till next term. I feel more convinced every day that if there is a thing more to be repressed than another it is certainly the system of competition for the satisfaction enjoyed by the gainers is very far from counterbalancing the pain it produces among the others.(Pearson 1914, 170–71)

By November 28 1842 Galton was reporting that “palpitations of the heart have lately come on when I read more than I ought to do,” (173) and by early 1843 he had made the humiliating decision to go out with the poll. 

The unremitting toil of more than three years of study, extending into vacations, and the constant focus on one limited area was hard enough.  Keeping your composure and focus during a multi-day, high-stakes exam was an added challenge.  In response, a Cambridge student culture developed around the body.  It was widely believed that success in the Tripos required regimented physical exercise.  Students who lacked this discipline, it was thought, risked illness during their studies and loss of nerve during the examination itself.[10]  The successful exam candidate kept his nerve, never panicked in the exam room, and slept soundly at night.  They were athletes.  Training for the exam paralleled training for sports: endless practice, repetition, learning to do complex tasks automatically, and learning to stay cool and focused under pressure.[11]  By mid-century it was widely accepted that we think with the brain and nervous system – that consciousness is not a disembodied spirit.  From this it seemed to follow, logically, that just as we can strengthen and condition our muscles we can strengthen and condition our minds, and just as we can damage our muscles and joints by over-straining them, we can damage our minds.[12] 

Marshall’s Tripos triumph was a test of character, in the sense that he had risen to a challenge.[13]  He had endured an ordeal that systematically inflicted mental distress, as the young Galton had pointed out, and that weeded out not only anyone with limited tolerance or for mathematical study, but also intellectually-adept undergraduates who buckled under psychological pressure.  The production of winners, with steady nerves and robust minds, required a stream of failures.  This will be a recurrent theme of this book: the way tests or trials became revelatory of inner characters on which basis people could be sorted; the quality of those tests was demonstrated by the number of people who failed them. 

What made this an even more impressive character test was that Marshall had turned down the easy option of a full scholarship to Oxford.  There he could have enjoyed a pleasant four years of undemanding classical studies followed by a genteel career as an Anglican priest.  He would have satisfied his father’s hopes and climbed a rung or two up the class ladder, because his father was a mere clerk at the Bank of England and his immediate family, though not poor, had little wealth and few useful social connections.  The young Marshall could not afford to be a dilettante like the young Francis Galton, with a wealthy and indulgent father and a fortune to inherit.   To throw up a sure thing in order to seek an unlikely Tripos success must have seemed foolish.  Here we may mark a distinction.  One way to think about Victorian “character” is through concepts like time discounting: are you willing to forgo present pleasure and ease in order to reap future rewards?  And you will frequently see arguments about providence versus improvidence made in these terms.  But it is rather artificial to imagine the 17-year-old Marshall calculating the net present values of two paths of life and picking the higher number.  It seems simpler to say that he was competitive and ambitious, and his choice of Cambridge was an act of will rather than cold calculation.  Elsewherse on this site I quote Charles Dickens on the qualities of the Saxon race: “patient, persevering, never to be broken in spirit, never to be turned aside from enterprises on which they have resolved.”  This is what Dickens had in mind. 

The Tripos ordeal produced not only elite individuals but an elite network, a community of champion mathematicians.  Coaching was not a makeshift but the core of the system.  The experience of being coached and then coaching others (as Marshall did for several years), was not only individually formative, but built ties.  The scholarly community in which Marshall wrote and gave his first papers was a group of Wranglers.  Competition formed a fellowship of those who flourished in it, reinforced by relations of authority.  Lord Rayleigh, who bested Marshall as First Wrangler in 1865, spoke of “writing it out for Routh,” (his and Marshall’s coach) as a practice that served him throughout his career as a scientist.  

---------------------

A couple of further points, as I'm coming back to this material after several months away:

(a) The move from examination by ritualized public ordeal (with a binary outcome) to a graded competitive exam that entails a more private, physical ordeal has obvious links to the ways Michel Foucault discusses shifts in the functioning of power.  There may be a further link to the biopolitical here but I can't see it yet.

(b) There's a persistent legend, started by Keynes, that Marshall suffered a mental crisis in the years after he finished his degree.  The lack of archival evidence for a mental crisis has not stopped numerous writers running with this theme, some imagining it involved religious doubts (Marshall seems to have passed painlessly into agnosticism).  What is interesting, though, is why the why such a break seems necessary to people, why it has to be part of the story.  Some of this is answered above.  But there is a larger theme that still puzzles me: in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an absolute epidemic of mental crises among prominent intellectuals.  Somewhere around mid-century it seems to stop, or at least people stop talking about it.  This is related to the popularization of neurasthenia, discussed below. But something more is going on.

[1] Leslie Stephen likened the Tripos to the Derby. (Stephen 1865, 35) 

[2] (Groenewegen 1998; Stevens and Stevens 2020; Keynes 1972)

[3] On the meager level of theological instruction at Cambridge see (Allen 1978, 14–20); also (Garland 1980, 1–12).

[4] The public disputation survives today in the Ph.D. defense, which serves a similar purpose. See (Clark 2006), also (Warwick 2003, 127–29) and passim, who theorizes the shift from oral educational culture to doing mathematics on paper.

[5] (Clark 2006) 109 – 117 is excellent on the 18th-century history of the exam and, passim, on setting it in the wider European context; see also (Gascoigne 1984).  (Crilly 2011) provides an overview of the 19th century history of the exam with useful detail; (Warwick 2003) is the most in-depth study.  Among more contemporary accounts (Ball 2004 [1889]) provides much detail including sample questions and (Forsyth 1935) is very rich.  For a hostile account of the Tripos, and its effects, in the author’s view, on Marshall see (Weintraub 2002, 11–25).  (Stephen 1865) provides a bitterly comic account.

[6] (Warwick 2003)

[7] These categories may have been premised on some absolute standard, as numbers in each varied significantly from year to year.  Total marks typical of candidates in the three classes differed by around an order of magnitude.(ref)

[8] (Warwick 2003) provides a compelling account of the development of coaching and the controversy around it, as well as the flourishing of an elite mathematics culture, including the cumulative process by which the exam became more difficult.

[9] Warwick.

[10] See also (Gillham 2001, 37–48)

[11] (Cook 2005) 

[12] Marshall reflected in 1917: “An epoch in my life occurred when I was, I think, about seventeen years old. I was in Regent Street, and saw a workman standing idle before a shop window: but his face indicated alert energy, so I stood still and watched. He was preparing to sketch on the window of a shop guiding lines for a short statement of the business concerned, which was to be shown by white letters fixed to glass. Each stroke of arm and hand needed to be made with a single free sweep, so as to give a graceful result; it occupied perhaps two seconds of keen excitement. He stayed still for a few minutes after each stroke, that his pulse might grow quiet. If he had saved the ten minutes thus lost, his employers would have been injured more than the value of his wages for a whole day. That set up a train of thought which led me to the resolve never to use my mind when it was not fresh, and to regard the intervals between successive strains as sacred to absolute repose. When I went to Cambridge and became full master of myself, I resolved never to read a mathematical book for more than a quarter of an hour at a time without a break. I had some light literature always by my side... Of course I often got excited by my mathematics, and read for half an hour or more without stopping: but that meant that my mind was intense, and no harm was done. (Marshall 1917 [Keynes 1972, 165])”

[13] Good character was not visible on the surface of the body.  Here is a 1908 letter by Marshall to biologist William Bateson:  “Every rowing man knows that character is as important as physique: the Johnian freshman of my year who, judged by physique, was easily first, turned out to be absolutely useless. After a  little while the captain of the sixth boat wd.. not look at him; & mere 'weeds' full of pluck made their way into the first boat. I have just been re-reading The Last of the Barons: the historical little Arab horse that carried the huge Warwick past all others was of course well put together, but his real strength lay in his character…”

Allen, Peter. 1978. The Cambridge Apostles, the Early Years. Cambridge, Eng. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ball, W. W. Rouse. 2004. A History of the Study of Mathematics at Cambridge. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Pub.

Clark, William. 2006. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10265990.

Crilly, Tony. 2011. “Cambridge: The Rise and Fall of the Mathematical Tripos.” In Mathematics in Victorian Britain., edited by Raymond Flood, Adrian Rice, and Robin Wilson, 17–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1073476.

Forsyth, A. R. 1935. “Old Tripos Days at Cambridge.” The Mathematical Gazette 19 (234): 162–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/3605871.

Garland, Martha McMackin. 1980. Cambridge before Darwin: The Ideal of a Liberal Education, 1800-1860. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gascoigne, John. 1984. “Mathematics and Meritocracy: The Emergence of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos.” Social Studies of Science 14 (4): 547–84.

Gillham, Nicholas Wright. 2001. A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. Oxford University Press.

Pearson, Karl. 1914. The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton. Cambridge [Eng.] University press. http://archive.org/details/lifeletterslabou00pearuoft.

Stephen, Leslie. 1865. Sketches from Cambridge. London and Cambridge: Macmillan and co. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001452745.

Warwick, Andrew. 2003. Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics. University of Chicago Press.

Weintraub, E. Roy. 2002. How Economics Became a Mathematical Science. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822383802.

A century ago, feeble-mindedness functioned as a legal and social-scientific term, with enough force that it could get you locked up or forcibly sterilized.  It was defined via the labor market: a person’s employability was its essential criterion of definition.  It was described as difficult to detect (many feeble-minded could elude lay detection and pass as adequate), and yet as a dire threat to the nation.  It was described both as a unitary phenomenon capable of being inherited according to Mendelian rules, and as a catch-all for a very large range of physical and mental illnesses and moral failings.  Why did this make sense to people?  Specifically (1) Why did it seem reasonable, after a century in which illnesses had been categorized with increasing care and insanity differentiated from mental incapacity, to lump these things back together?   (2) Why did it seem reasonable to understand this thing (or these things) not merely as a misfortune for those afflicted, but as a national catastrophe, an urgent danger to those not afflicted?

Feeble-mindedness has been defined as a "state of mental defect existing from birth or from an early age and due to incomplete or abnormal development in consequence of which, the person affected is incapable of performing his duties as a member of society in the position of life to which he is born." If we leave out those whom society has already recognized as idiots or imbeciles, we have the higher group, the specifically feeble-minded or moron, which has been defined by the Royal College of Physicians in the following terms : "One who is capable of earning his living under favorable circumstances, but is incapable from mental defect existing from birth or from an early age (a) of competing on equal terms with his normal fellows or (b) of managing himself and his affairs with ordinary prudence."  Goddard 1926, 4.

The term “feeble-minded” had two uses.  On the one hand it served as a catch-all for the entire alleged scale from the idiot, to the imbecile, and up to the mere moron.  On the other hand it applied specifically to the moron, the figure who had been grafted onto the top of this scale.  The entire scale, however, was defined in terms of the kinds of work a person could perform, and as we will see the judgment of the labor market was taken as evidence of that.   The moron, though, is key.  Goddard continues the above quote:

This definition, it is seen, would include a great many whom we have not thot of as feeble-minded ; this is because the characteristics of the moron are not those which are usually associated in the popular mind with persons of sub-normal intelligence.  Morons are often normal looking with few or no obvious stigmata of degeneration frequently able to talk fluently; their conversation while marked by poverty of thought or even silliness nevertheless commonly passes as the result of ignorance. If it is discovered that they cannot learn they are thot of as dull or slow but not as actually defective and incapable of learning. So strong is their resemblance to the normal person that altho they are well understood by those who have studied them and have dealt with them in Institutions, yet there are many people even to-day who refuse to admit that they cannot be trained to function like normal people. Yet they are the persons who make for us our social problems. (4-5)

Goddard’s essential claim is that categories that had previously been widely recognized (idiots and imbeciles) are only part of the reality of mental incapacity.  There are more of them and they are dangerous, especially if they can pass as normal.  It is widespread unemployment that has begun to render morons visible.  With this core concept built around employability, theorists then attributed a wide range of conditions and attributes: epilepsy, tuberculosis, syphilis, alcoholism, criminal tendencies, insanity to it, with the core concept was heritable.  There was a whole literature in the 1910s and 1920s on the relation between feeble-mindedness and unemployment.

Almost every discussion of feeble-mindedness comes around to prostitute women sooner or later, and the most prominent quantitative result brandished is that some large percentage of female prostitutes were feeble-minded – despite the fact, one is tempted to riposte, that they had by definition found gainful employment.  Their choice of work is invariably attributed to weakness of mind, and hence vulnerability to being taken advantage of.   Male prostitutes seem absent in the feeble-mindedness literature.  What does figure is the dissolute man who drinks in saloons.  Both genders of moron, of course, mark the emerging boundaries of respectable domesticity, built around reproduction (in all senses of the word) in stable bounded heteronormed families, a unit which organized pleasure and kept it off the market.  So one way to understand this category is that it is an effort to deal with the degree to which increasing proletarianization did not produce heteronormed nuclear families.

The discourse of feeble-mindedness, in turn, sat atop the story of modernity.  A common argument was that you could be a moron in an agricultural society, but you couldn’t get away with it in an industrial society.  In other words you have the standard story of modernity, whose core elements are that:

(a) Human history and geography can be understood in terms of two social conditions, traditional and modern.  That is, every society can be assigned to one or the other bucket, or to being in transition from one to the other.  This in turn lets modernists map time onto space.

(b) Traditional people are convention-bound, unreflective, and placid.  Modern people are free, reflective, and nervous.

(c) Traditional societies are solidaristic, and mix together household and business activities.  Modern societies are competitive and individualistic, and have split people’s lives into a warm and loving home, and a rational and businesslike market sphere.

From this standpoint, the moron marks a boundary.  The moron is a loser in the labor market because she or he is poorly equipped for the demands of the new industrial age.  Nor can she or he handle domesticity.  

Goddard, Henry Herbert. 1914. Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences. New York: Macmillan Company.

In 1881 U.S. physician George Miller Beard (1839-1883) published American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences in which he popularized the malady "neurasthenia."

Particularly during the past quarter of a century, under the press and stimulus of the telegraph and railway, the methods and incitements of brain-work have multiplied far in excess of average cerebral development. It is during this period that various functional nervous disorders have multiplied with a rapidity for which history gives us no analogy.  Modern nervousness is the cry of the system struggling with its environment.

(Beard 1881, 138)

The argument was partly a matter of  analogy: the human nervous system functioned like a telegraph network, and was thus vulnerable to overloading and electrical faults.  Modern urban life, said Beard, produced a deluge of disorienting stimuli: electric lights at night, fast railway journeys, rapid news.  Intellectual workers in the professions, finance, and business were especially vulnerable to neurasthenia because of the demands on their minds.  Businessmen suffered because "increased facilities for agriculture, manufactures, and trades have developed sources of anxiety and of loss as well as profit, and have enhanced the risks of business." (Beard 1881, 116)    

But it was not just analogy: the theory proposed that the modern urban economy was itself a fragile network of people.  Urban electrification was still relatively novel, and Beard and his followers fixated on electricity and electrical cures: one standard analogy was that the brain was a battery, capable of running down.  Therapies included wiring patients up to little generators to try and recharge them.  This was a theory that troubled the physical boundaries of the person. 

Neurasthenia also functioned as an identity, one Beard himself claimed.  To call yourself neurasthenic was to admit vulnerability, but also to proclaim your own status.  Manual workers were not vulnerable to it.  Nervous breakdowns became standard episodes in the biographies of intellectuals.  The nervous disorder also became part of the rhetorical toolkit for describing capitalist crisis and dysfunction.  Keynes’ delicate investor, who alternates between childish optimism and despondent inactivity, is neurasthenic.

The story shared by the discourses of neurasthenia and feeble-mindedness is that the shift from a placid rural agricultural economy to a fast-paced urban industrial economy has placed new demands on human bodies. To try and work this out:

Neurasthenics are intelligent and sensitive people, of the middle and upper classes, whose minds are temporarily overwhelmed by floods of information, crowds of people, and responsibilities to make decisions.  But they can be treated and, perhaps, cured. 

The feeble-minded, by contrast, are too stupid to handle factory work or the social and material requirements of modern life.  Their condition is incurable and hereditary.

Four points of similarity:

1. Both are, at least partly, disorders of the will.  Neurasthenics cannot get out of bed in the morning; cannot get their work done.  The feeble-minded are poor workers, and lack the self-control to avoid drink and idle pleasure.  These can function as alternate ways to diagnose the same behavior: that a person can't work.

2. Both are theories of society (and history) as well as theories of malfunctioning bodies.  Neurasthenia is a theory of a new, networked, fast-paced world, with rapid transport and instant communication (it bears uncanny resemblance to some late-20th century theories of globalization).  The neurasthenic are the nodes in that world, vulnerable components in the larger circuits hooking it up.  The feebleminded carry in their bodies the causes of a wide range of social ills, including crime and poverty.  Both are theories that challenge bodily autonomy.

3. Both are underlying conditions that generate a shifting variety of more visible individual ailments or failings.  The key theoretical move is to argue that the visible heterogeneity of ills conceals a deeper cause.

4. In consequence, both require experts, and tools developed by experts, to detect and address.  The tools and methods are internationally portable.

And two points of difference:

1. Neurasthenia was often characterized by over-literacy, sometimes to the extent of logorrhea and obsessive writing-down of symptoms.  Doctors had to sift through their extensive, contradictory statements.  Feeble-mindedness, by contrast, was often made evident through failures of literacy, particularly the inability or unwillingness to respond to test questions in the way examiners wanted.  It seems clear as you read the literature that many people diagnosed as feeble-minded had poor academic skills.

2. Neurasthenia functioned as a voluntarily-adopted identity, sometimes a badge of pride, among those who thought of themselves as suffering from it.  It could make you eligible for a holiday.  A diagnosis of feeble-mindedness could get you sterilized or locked up.

Economy features in at least two ways:

1. We are seeing the generation of the rational economic actor, set against people who fall short – in particular the feeble-minded.  Such people are good workers, and exhibit self-control sending their pay: essentially, by using it to raise the next generation of good workers, rather than on dissipation.  The neurasthenic is a sort of parody of rational economic man, always plugged in to changing market conditions, always recalculating.

2. The neurasthenic becomes in particular the pattern of the investor, and sometimes the entrepreneur: nervous, flighty, bipolar.  Keynes’ General Theory, for example combines a working class which is, if not exactly stupid, stolid and simple-minded, and an investing class prone to bouts of euphoria, depression, and nerves.

Beard, George Miller. 1881. American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences: A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia). Putnam.

Irving Fisher (1867-1947) was the most prominent U.S. economist of the first decades of the twentieth century, and a pioneer in mathematical economics.  He is often read as the U.S. equivalent of Alfred Marshall and one of the progenitors of neoclassical theory.  He was also a leading eugenicist and prohibitionist.  He campaigned against tobacco, caffeine, and meat, and promoted a range of other measures, public and private, that he thought would improve people’s health.  While many later accounts of his work (e.g. Schumpeter 1954) treated Fisher the economist and Fisher the “social reformer” as separable people, more recent scholarship (e.g. Mehrling 2001) has treated his work as a coherent system.  Fisher was the most significant economist to integrate body with economy since Malthus.  In 1836, Mill had tried to delimit political economy as a study that

does not treat the whole of man’s nature as modified by the social state, nor of the whole conduct of man in society. It is concerned with him solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end. (Mill 1844)

and it was left largely to romantic critics like Coleridge, Carlyle, and Ruskin to attend to bodily states and distinguish between elevating and degrading pleasures.  We do see some movement with Alfred Marshall, who does take these differences seriously and integrates them into a theory of economic growth.

From a purely social-science point of view, the integration of body and economy is a worthy goal.  Indeed, the way post-WWII economics has generally reaffirmed something like Mill’s boundary has been justly criticized by feminist economists among others.  Fisher’s particular integration drew no prominent followers, possibly because or his tiresome zealotry in matters of health.  But it remains a fascinating window into early 20th-century social thought, because he was a not only a great economist but a highly prominent public intellectual. 

Fisher taught that the final purpose of economic activity is “subjective income” or “psychic income.” 

We define subjective income, then, as the stream of consciousness of any human being.  All his conscious life, from his birth to his death, constitutes his subjective income.  Sensations, thoughts, feelings, volitions, and all psychical events, in fact, are part of this income stream.(Fisher 1906, 168) 

Such income is realized purely in the mind.[1]  The mind lives in the body the way the body lives in a house.  The house is useful because it provides services like shelter to the body.  The body is useful only as a provider of services that yield mental satisfactions.  We eat so that we may enjoy the mental sensation of being replete, plus the longer-term sensations of pleasure that are the result of good health.  “Desirable” conscious experiences increase psychic income, undesirable ones lower it.  The undesirable states he divides into (a) the irksome parts of work (b) the bad feelings produced by ill health or any other kind of bodily failure.  As he emphasizes repeatedly, good psychic sensations may be the result of investments in the body made long ago (education or healthy living) and people may not choose in the interest of their long-term happiness, whether out of weakness or ignorance.

Next, for Fisher “income” as commonly understood, that is money to buy things, is just the means to get things that are a means for the body to serve the mind.  More broadly, such income is the entire stream of services thrown off by “wealth.”  “Wealth” includes not only physical capital, but also natural resources and human beings (Mehrling 2001, 53).  That is, it is the all-embracing “stock” concept to match the all-embracing flow of “income.”  It includes things that cannot be bought or sold and thus emphatically includes free human beings.  Thus the quality of human beings matters: healthy and educated humans are better.  Fisher also makes a logical move here that is not explicitly defended, from the individual (the receiver of psychic income) to some larger group of people (race or nation) who make up this larger stock of wealth.  While he offers no measures, it appears from his discussion that he thinks the larger part of national wealth is in humans.

Once we have this system, laid out in his 1906 The Nature of Capital and Income, the logical shape of his health advocacy follows readily: we may intervene to encourage good experiences and head off bad ones.  But beyond raising individual happiness, the most important reason for intervening in bodies is to raise national wealth: “The true ‘wealth of nations’ is the health of its individuals.  A nation consisting of weak, sickly, and short-lived individuals is poor…”(176)  As Mehrling writes, this maps to his eugenics:

When Fisher insists that "this germ plasm, which we receive and transmit, really belongs, not to us, but to the race .... [and] we are under the most solemn obligation to keep it up to the highest level within our power" (1915, 165), he is talking as an economist about the national stock of wealth as he understands it. (Mehrling 2001, 55–56)

I want to flesh out a little more of Fisher’s health advocacy.  Fisher did pioneering work in mathematical economics as a graduate student at Yale and remained there to teach, but was stricken with tuberculosis at the age of 31.  He emerged from a sanatorium after three years fully recovered, and possessed by a zeal to fix other people’s health.  The 1906 Nature of Capital and Income is one of his first post-sanitarium works.  Among his many projects outside the academy was co-founding the “Life Extension Institute” in 1913, essentially a business although it took on philanthropic trappings.  Fisher sought to persuade life insurance companies to pay the institute to supply their customers with health information and offer free annual medical checkups, on the argument that these customers would live longer and pay more premiums.  It proved a tough sell to firms who took a conservative view of their business (Bouk 2018).  Nonetheless, he collected enough money to assemble a board of eminent medical people, start offering checkups, and even run a chain of gyms.  One of his first projects was the 1915 How to Live (Fisher and Fisk 1915), which went through multiple editions.  Let’s start from Fisher’s own summary:

The Fifteen Rules of Hygiene

1. Air.

1. Ventilate every room you occupy.

2. Wear light, loose and porous clothes.

3. Seek out-of-door occupations and recreations.

4. Sleep out, if you can.

5. Breathe deeply.

II. Food.

6. Avoid overeating and overweight.

7. Eat sparingly of meats and eggs.

8. Eat some hard, some bulky, some raw foods.

 9. Eat slowly.

III. Poisons.

10. Evacuate thoroughly, regularly and frequently.

11. Stand, sit and walk erect.

12. Do not allow poisons and infections to enter the body.

13. Keep the teeth, gums and tongue clean.

IV Activity.

14. Work, play, rest and sleep in moderation.

15. Keep serene.

(119-120)

Fisher provides a just-so story to tie this together: “ Like his cousin, the anthropoid ape, man is biologically an outdoor animal. (145)”  He lived outdoors, went naked, and “was primarily a frugivorous animal, whose ordinary diet consisted of fruits, nuts, and tender shoots.”  He chewed this vegetarian food thoroughly, shat several times a day, and consumed no alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, or narcotics of any kind – all of which Fisher unapologetically labels “poisons,” and whose use in any quantity he condemns. 

There is little to be gained from criticizing specifics: it is a genre convention of this sort of book to suppose a lost Eden of robust health, and the health fashions of any period look peculiar a century later.  It is interesting that Fisher chooses a very remote[2] time for his alleged period of good health, justifying a comprehensive critique of contemporary living, and worth noting the book’s didacticism: it is written with a tone of relentless certainty, assuming that most people are doing things wrong[3].  For example:

The injury which comes from the retention of the body’s waste products is of the greatest importance. The intestinal contents become dangerous by being too long retained, as putrefying fecal matter contains poisons which are harmful to the body. Abnormal conditions of the intestines are largely responsible for the common headache malady, and for a generally lowered resistance, resulting in colds and even more serious ailments. Constipation is extremely prevalent, partly because our diet usually lacks bulk or other needed constituents, but partly also because we fail to eliminate regularly, thoroughly, and often. (51)

People not only can choose badly, but do and on a massive scale, justifying government intervention.  Fisher was one of the most prominent intellectuals supporting Prohibition and arguing against its repeal, engaging in combative Congressional testimony and a considerable amount of political organizing.  Eugenic measures, including sterilizing or isolating the unfit, fell out of this too: these people should not be allowed to reproduce.  In all of these interventions Fisher was scornful of counter-arguments on classically liberal grounds.  Choices to drink or smoke were, to him, so obviously wrong that it was frivolous to think of them as reasonable decisions.

Behind the panics, quackeries, and cruelties of that age is the more basic move of instrumentalizing the body.  Once the body is split away from the mind and made merely the house in which the mind lives, it is cut loose from the civic person and made a potential object of regulation –  just as a house is subject to fire and building codes.  We do not trust people to do the right things with their houses.  The separation of body from mind made the individual body available for assimilation into a larger body, typically called the race, which fell under the care of the state.

[1] Using the stream of consciousness as the final “sink” for economic processes, the result that has no further result, can be understood in light of early 20th-century efforts to measure and delimit “personal” income in terms of flow of good things to people, part of a larger framework that sought to understand a national economy as a thing with the purpose of increasing people’s well-being.  Any effort to do that in terms of goods and services ran into double-counting or netting problems.  For example if my employer provides a bus to get me to work, we do not include that service in my personal income, but regard it as a cost the employer assumes to produce whatever it produces, just as it pays for a building to keep the rain off its workers.  So if I pay bus fare to get to work, should we also exclude that?  How to think about, say, dry cleaning to meet workplace dress expectations?  Coffee to keep you awake in staff meetings?  Once you think about your body as a machine for doing work, there is no clean logical break between “personal” consumption and spending, and personal spending as an input into some other productive process.  Even raising children can be thought of as dutifully preparing the next generation of workers.  That is, there is no obvious “sink” at which you might measure the flow of income, merely productive processes feeding other productive processes, some of which pass through our bodies.  On those grounds the only unambiguously personal consumption might be on, say, getting drunk, which unambiguously lowers your capacity to work.  Or you can think of the analogy to transfers of energy within an ecosystem, in which the only true “sink” is waste heat, energy that is not available to any other organism.  Needless to say, anyone who wanted to define personal income as a stream of good things was not going to define it as dissipation or waste.  Indeed Fisher is trying for the opposite move, a definition what will allow him to attack dissipation and waste.

[2] That is, he does not make the move of the popularizers of neurasthenia, who located problems in more recent events like the industrial revolution or electrification.  This is probably the influence of  Sylvester Graham (Comfort 2014).  Fisher’s understanding of the body focuses on food and digestion; the main non-digestive element is around ventilation and skin.

[3] See (Fisher 1909), which presents estimates of the amount of time lost to the nation through needless illness, fatigue, and human inefficiency.  National inefficiency became a transatlantic panic (Searle 1971), generally couched with an argument that an inefficient nation or race would be out-competed by more efficient nations or races.

Bouk, Daniel B. 2018. How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual.

Comfort, Nathaniel. 2014. The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine. Reprint edition. Yale University Press.

Fisher, Irving. 1906. The Nature of Capital and Income. New York, Macmillan.

———. 1909. National Vitality, Its Wastes, and Conservation. Arno Press.

Fisher, Irving, and Eugene Fisk. 1915. How to Live. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19598/19598-h/19598-h.htm#Fifteen.

Mehrling, P. 2001. “Love and Death: The Wealth of Irving Fisher.” Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology 19: 47–61.

Mill, John Stuart. 1844. Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy. John W. Parker.

Schumpeter, Joseph. 1954. A History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

Searle, G. R. Geoffrey Russell. 1971. The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chapter 12 of Keynes’ General Theory examines “The State of Long-Term Expectation.”  How, Keynes asks, do businesses decide whether to undertake long-lived, irreversible, investments in plant and equipment given “the extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made.” (Keynes 1936 p. 149)

If we speak frankly, we have to admit that our basis of knowledge for estimating the yield ten years hence of a railway, a copper mine, a textile factory, the goodwill of a patent medicine, an Atlantic liner, a building in the City of London amounts to little and sometimes to nothing; or even five years hence. (Keynes 1936, 149-50)

He then sets up a distinction:

In former times, when enterprises were mainly owned by those who undertook them or by their friends and associates, investment depended on a sufficient supply of individuals of sanguine temperament and constructive impulses who embarked on business as a way of life, not really relying on a precise calculation of prospective profit. (Keynes 1936, 150)

In this older, heroic age investor, owner, and manager were the same person.  But now

With the separation between ownership and management … the Stock Exchange revalues many investments every day and the revaluations give a frequent opportunity to the individual … to revise his commitments. It is as though a farmer, having tapped his barometer after breakfast, could decide to remove his capital from the farming business between 10 and II in the morning and reconsider whether he should return to it later in the week. (Keynes 1936, 150)

These frequent revaluations, though made in the course of buying and selling existing securities, affect future investment decisions.  The bulk of the chapter is taken up with an analysis of the psychology of securities markets, arguing that they rest on “convention,” on “assuming that the existing state of affairs will continue indefinitely,” but that such conventions are precarious.  Understanding how thin their knowledge is, investors are easily spooked and stampeded.  Then, in a famous passage, he deepens the analysis:

Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation... Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities. Enterprise only pretends to itself to be mainly actuated by the statements in its own prospectus, however candid and sincere. Only a little more than an expedition to the South Pole, is it based on an exact calculation of benefits to come. (Keynes 1936, 161-2)

This contrast – between the stolid, committed, far-sighted entrepreneur and the nervous, flighty, indecisive securities investor – tracks the turn-of-the century literature on neurasthenia and masculinity.  Neurasthenia was a nervous ailment caused by the more rapid pace of life and information of the late 19th century; its victims were mainly those privileged to enjoy city life, electric life, newspapers and telegrams, people responsible for “brain work” of making decisions amid the flood of news and stimulation.  Neurasthenics found their nervous systems overloaded, and broke down.  This is the origin of the “nervous breakdown,” the idea that overstimulation damages the nervous system, resulting in torpid inactivity. [1]  The hyper-performance of calculation is analogous to the characteristic loquacity of neurasthenics, the “hommes du petit papier” in Charcot’s slightly cruel label for his neurasthenic patients, who arrived in his office clutching lists of symptoms they had written down for fear of forgetting any (Rabinbach 1992, 160).  

As Tom Lutz describes, this produced a rich seam of turn-of-the-century literature in which weak, nervous men sought renewal by leaving the teeming metropolis and seeking wilder places, manual labor (usually only briefly!), and the company of manlier men (Lutz 1991).  The stock, stoic hero of Western novels represents a rebuke to effete Easterners: he speaks few words but means them; he acts; he chances; he accepts death when it comes.   The virtues Walter Scott imputes to Saxons in Ivanhoe are roughly similar: not too intellectual, but steady and brave.

“Animal spirits” are the marker of this difference in Keynes’ text.  Keynes ironically re-positions the whole apparatus of calculation, probability weightings, net present values, and the like – all the things that economists teach and that are supposed to go into investment calculations – as signs of weakness, a frantic, doomed effort to fill the gap caused by the will’s failure.  You can trace the phrase to Aristotle if you must, but an apt contemporary attestation is P.G. Wodehouse's 1909 novel Mike.  

There was, as a matter of fact, nothing much wrong with Stone and Robinson. They were just ordinary raggers of the type found at every public school, small and large. They were absolutely free from brain. They had a certain amount of muscle, and a vast store of animal spirits. They looked on school life purely as a vehicle for ragging. The Stones and Robinsons are the swashbucklers of the school world. They go about, loud and boisterous, with a whole-hearted and cheerful indifference to other people's feelings, treading on the toes of their neighbour and shoving him off the pavement, and always with an eye wide open for any adventure. As to the kind of adventure, they are not particular so long as it promises excitement.  (Wodehouse 1909, p, 222) 

A more elevated version of this distinction can be found if we pick up on Keynes' reference to polar expeditions.  In a lovely essay on British Arctic exploration, Russell Potter discusses the career of John Ross, who sailed in 1818 to the Canadian arctic and returned with his ship and crew intact:  “[A]lthough his 1818 voyage … re-charted vast swaths of Baffin Bay, and included the first visit to the Inughuit of Etah … he was roundly condemned on his return for not having risked more.”(Potter 2013)  Ross learned his lesson.  A decade later he sailed back and got stuck in an inlet.  Several crew died.

Further attempts to free the Victory met with failure, and Ross led his men on an overland retreat to a cache of stores from the earlier wreck of HMS Fury, abandoned by Parry in 1825. Sustaining themselves on these, they made it through to the following summer – their fourth – and were rescued by a passing whaler … The effect of Ross’s rescue and return was electrifying: he received not only a knighthood (in fact, several of them, from sundry nations), but all the public fanfare he had missed in 1818, including a Panorama of his expedition in Leicester Square, a vast outdoor pageant with 70-foot high papier-mâché icebergs at Vauxhall Gardens, and an exhibition of his own paintings in a London gallery.

Consider a century later the sacred status awarded Robert Falcon Scott’s 1913 Antarctic expedition, a succession of appalling bungles which cost the life of Scott and all four of his party, while losing the race to the pole by 34 days to a competent Norwegian team.  It is this single-minded pursuit of a plan, even a very bad one, that marks this particular steadiness of character.  

[1] In this moment he is close to Schumpeter, who makes an analogous distinction between an older, heroic age of capitalism and its current dreary condition (Schumpeter 1947)

Barens, Ingo. 2011. “‘Animal Spirits’ in John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: Some Short and Sceptical Remarks.” 201. Darmstadt Discussion Papers in Economics. Darmstadt University of Technology, Department of Law and Economics. https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/darddp/dar_49241.html.

Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory Of Employment, Interest, And Money. London: Macmillan.

Lutz, Tom. 1991. American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Potter, Russell A. 2013. “Introduction: Exploration and Sacrifice: The Cultural Logic of Arctic Discovery.” In , edited by Frédéric Regard, 11–28. Routledge. 

Rabinbach, Anson. 1992. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. University of California Press.

Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1947. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 2d ed. By Joseph A. Schumpeter ... New York, London: Harper & Brothers.

Wodehouse, P. G. 1909 Mike. London: Whitwell.

I spent  a week or so in the LSE archives in Fall 2018, mainly working on another Meade project, but I looked at boxes related to his work with the Eugenics Society.  What I find interesting, as described in the 1963 document below, are his efforts to refocus the Society toward research.  He put a lot of time into organizing its conferences.

I put some of the documents in a folder here for anyone interested: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/18mp2m3FBGz_Dyc3MZYEh9g9VgId9mnUw  I also include there a few documents from the box about the 1958-60 Mauritius study, which might deserve a paper of its own.