Governmental Promotion of Economic Enterprise

Laissez-Faire and Social Darwinism

The antebellum ideology of individualism and laissez-faire composed an important part of the late-nineteenth-century legal response to the Industrial Revolution. These concepts provided that the greatest and cheapest productivity would occur only if the individual employer and employee were left to compete in a free market. Some economists waxed eloquent on the subject, describing the free market as the work of "God's laws" that not only benefited individuals on earth but prepared them "for the life that is to come." ² Governmental interference with the economy, so the argument ran, threatened production and, ultimately, the public interest. The concept of "freedom to contract" (the ability of individuals to arrange, free from government, their individual economic fates) became a catchword for the era. In 1887, President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, vetoed a small appropriation for drought-stricken Texas farmers with the remark that "though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."³ Senator Roscoe Conkling, a New York Republican, observed about the same time that all that the state could do was "to clear the way of impediments and dangers, and leave every class and every individual free and safe in the exertions and pursuits of life." ⁴

Free-market ideology and freedom to contract were complemented by the theory of Social Darwinism. Political and sociological philosophers, most notably in the United States the Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, applied the evolutionary biological theory of Charles Darwin to society. Social Darwinists insisted that the advancement of the economy depended on competition among human beings, with the fittest surviving. Hence, the role of government was strictly limited. "Minimize to the utmost the relations of the state to industry," Sumner urged. ⁵ In such circumstances the benefits of economic growth would shower on the most productive and therefore the most deserving.

There are problems in explaining legal development solely in terms of laissez-faire concepts. The question that stirred this generation was not whether there should be economic growth (there was a wide consensus that there should be), but how that growth should be managed and for the benefit of which social interests. Nor was the debate concerned with whether government should be involved in the economy, but instead whether government's role, both in Congress and state legislatures, should emphasize economic promotion or regulation. Industrialization and urbanization generated enough social pressure to cause a divergence of the theory of laissez-faire and the practice of lawmakers.

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Date: 2015-01-29; view: 725