Schooling, Human Capital and Civilization

SCHOOLING, HUMAN
CAPITAL AND CIVILIZATION
This book explores the formation of human capital in education, interro-

gating its social and ethical implications, and examining its role in generat-
ing policies and practices that govern curriculum studies as an academic
field.
Using an inquiry approach and offering an intellectual history of human
capital theory through a genealogical methodology, the author begins by
contextualizing the formation of the theory and explores its correlation
with the history of imperialism. Tracing the concept of human capital from
ancient slave societies to colonial empires, the book arrives at the modern
formulations of the concept in education systems and explores its impact
on curriculum and pedagogy in the digital age. Asking whether an ap-
proach that represented slaves, machines, animals, and property in its his-
tory is appropriate for forward-looking democratic societies, the author
then uncovers crucial implications for educational equity and teacher de-
velopment. Presenting a unique genealogy of schooling humans as eco-
nomic resources and offering a descriptive and critical analysis of its impact
on education as lived experience, the author excavates ideas and mentali-
ties by which we think about modern schooling processes. This approach
supports the intellectual development of teachers and offers a critical as-
sessment of power–knowledge relations in curriculum studies. Discerning
associations between the human capital theory of education and techno-
logical progress with implications for ethics in the digital age, it will be an
outstanding resource for scholars and graduates working across compara-
tive and international education, the history of education, curriculum stud-
ies, digital education, and curriculum theory.
Bruce Moghtader is an instructor in the Department of Educational Stud-

ies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada.
Studies in Curriculum Theory Series
Series Editor:
William F. Pinar
University of British Columbia, Canada
In this age of multimedia information overload, scholars and students may

not be able to keep up with the proliferation of different topical, trendy
book series in the field of curriculum theory. It will be a relief to know that
one publisher offers a balanced, solid, and forward-looking series devoted
to significant and enduring scholarship as opposed to a narrow range of
topics or a single approach or point of view. This series is conceived as the
series busy scholars and students can trust and depend on to deliver impor-
tant scholarship in the various “discourses” that comprise the increasingly
complex field of curriculum theory.
The range of the series is both broad (all of curriculum theory) and lim-
ited (only important, lasting scholarship)—including but not confined to
historical, philosophical, critical, multicultural, feminist, comparative, in-
ternational, aesthetic, and spiritual topics and approaches. Books in this
series are intended for scholars and for students at the doctoral and, in
some cases, master’s levels.
South Korean Education and Learning Excellence as a Hallyu

Ethnographic Understandings of a Nation’s Academic Success
Young Chun Kim, Jae-seong Jo, Jung-Hoon Jung
Currere and Psychoanalytic Guided Regression

Revisiting the Kent State Shootings
Karl Martin
Schooling, Human Capital and Civilization

A Brief History from Antiquity to the Digital Era
Bruce Moghtader
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/Studies-in-Curriculum-Theory-Series/book-series/LEASCTS
Schooling, Human Capital and
Civilization
A Brief History from Antiquity to the
Digital Era
Bruce Moghtader
First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2024 Bruce Moghtader
The right of Bruce Moghtader to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-1-032-42227-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-42671-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-36373-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
Notes 5
Bibliography 7
1 To rule with justice 9

1.1 The beginning of school and empire 10
1.2 Ancient imperialism 13
1.3 Socrates as a model 20
1.4 Ancient economics and education 23
1.5 Ancient slavery and pre-modern progress 28
1.6 Threshold 32
Notes 32
Bibliography 39
2 Humans as property 44
2.1 Monasticism and secular state 45
2.2 Thomas Aquinas: the church and the political community 49
2.3 William of Ockham: a right beyond the law 54
2.4 Tension in the late medieval state 59
2.5 John Locke: liberating property 63
vi Contents
2.6 Liberty after Locke 70

2.7 Constitutional (un)freedom 73
Notes 74
Bibliography 84
3 Human-God-Machine 89
3.1 The divine and the artificial life 90
3.2 Francis Bacon: revising nature 97
3.3 William Petty: valuing each head 99
3.4 Scepticism: the animal–machine economy 103
3.5 (A)political economy 110
3.6 Instrumentalizing nature 114
Notes 115
Bibliography 122
4 Utilitarianism and market divinity 127

4.1 Nature and justice 128
4.2 The benevolent market 135
4.3 Market reformed morality 138
4.4 Revising liberty: Bentham’s society 145
4.5 Bentham and education 149
4.6 Behavioural technology 153
Notes 154
Bibliography 163
5 Human capital theory 168

5.1 Labour and capital 170
5.2 Capital, desires, and education 174
5.3 Economists dreaming of education 181
5.4 Human capital and (ir)rationality 185
5.5 Human capital: contradictions 193
Notes 194
Bibliography 204
Contents vii
6 Understanding the present 210

6.1 Education reform and data politics 211
6.2 Datafication and de-localization 215
6.3 Reconsidering 219
6.4 Education vs. schooling human capital 222
6.5 Transgression 224
Notes 226
Bibliography 231
Index 236
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to William F. Pinar for his mentorship, intellectual

generosity, and support for this book. I am thankful to Peter Grimmett and
Peter Taubman who graciously read and provided invaluable advice on the
initial draft of the manuscript. I would like to express my heartfelt grati-
tude to David G. Smith, Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur, and André E. Mazawi
for providing insightful comments and thought-provoking conversations.
This book was written on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded terri-
tory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. The land is and has al-
ways been a place of learning for the Musqueam people, who for millennia
have passed on their culture, history, and traditions from one generation
to the next. I am grateful for learning and living on this land and am com-
mitted to work towards decolonization. I owe my deepest gratitude to my
family, aunts and uncles, friends, teachers, and many kindred spirits I have
met along the way. I thank Kate Porter, Firouzeh Peyvandi, Richard Porter,
Hans Troelsen, Blaire Steinwand, Anthony Clarke, Taylor Webb, Kshamta
Hunter, Nicole Lee, Sam Rocha, Anne Phelan, Penney Clark, Ido Roll,
Adriana Briseño-Garzón, Susan Grossman, Elise Chu, and Alan Jay for
their support and encouragement. I am grateful to Ian Hacking, James
Tully, Wendy Brown, Bernard Harcourt, Walter Mignolo, and Colin Koop-
man who have influenced my thinking. Moreover, I extend my thanks to
the team at Routledge and Straive for assisting the publication of this
book.
This research has been supported in part by funding from the Social Sci-
ences and Humanities Research Council, Canada, for which I am thankful.
There are excerpts and ideas expressed in this book that were previous
published in:
Acknowledgements ix
Moghtader, B. “Human capital and education of desires after Michel Foucault.”

Journal of Self-
Governance and Management Economics 5, no. 4 (2017):
35–52.
Moghtader, B. “Pastorate power, market liberalism and a knowing without know-
ing.” Knowledge Cultures 6, no. 01 (2018): 18–35.
Moghtader, B. “Schooling humans as a form of capital: The national and imperial
context.” In World Yearbook of Education 2022, pp. 103–118. Routledge,
2021.
Introduction
Today, it is impossible to say precisely what we mean when we call persons

forms of capital. Throughout history, capital has represented slaves, ma-
chines, animals, and property. How is it that in forward-looking demo-
cratic societies, capitalists and socialists alike, schools are focused on
developing human capital? Concerned with the historical present in which
human development is subsumed by economic development, this book is
an invitation to deliberate on how we have arrived at the present and re-
think the values that are transforming education systems.
In modern education, the ancient question of “Who are we?” is evaded
in the painted humane, liberal, and economically reduced notion of human
subject.1 The question invites reviewing the assumptions that as humans
we ought to be something. Seventeenth-century Europe reformulated the
ancient question by reliance on science and technology. As the production
of systematic knowledge, science grew from an orientation to “singular
experiences or observed particulars” collected as evidence and understood
as accumulation of “useful facts.”2 Transfiguring life experiences into use-
ful facts influenced reasoning about wealth and society. This is the context
of the scientific thoughts of William Petty (1623–1687) who developed the
application of money into economic policy. Petty’s monetary valuation of
each individual directed legislators to consider the economic value of hu-
mans as part of the national wealth in imperial Britain.
The valuation of humans as part of national wealth remained relevant to
Adam Smith’s accommodation of liberal individualism in the reworking of
mercantilist state control. In the 20th century, the economic valuation of
human life intensified: After the second world war, a theory on human
capital formulated a return on investment approach to human develop-
ment. Michel Foucault, who identified the proponents of the theory as
American neo-liberals, diagnosed that the renewed emphasis of human
capital accompanied an adaptation of “the legal order” as well as “scien-
tific discoveries to the progress of economic organization.”3 The primary
neo-liberal proponents of human capital theory were Milton Friedman,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-1
2 Introduction
Theodore Schultz, and Gary S. Becker. Targeting education policies, they

diverged from classical political economy by conveying a notion of human
subject who exchanges liberties, rights, and self-interests to self-maximize;
thus, self-maximizing becomes an economic enterprise.
During the Cold War, the integration of human life within the economic
domain at once un-tied and united the geopolitical duality of communism
and capitalism. Human capital theory prescribed an economic approach to
human development that transcended political ideologies and used educa-
tional infrastructures for production of economic outputs. However, in in-
strumentalizing human development for social and economic production,
human capital theorists failed to make a distinction between education and
schooling. “Education is, first and foremost, the education of persons,” Sug-
arman emphasized: “Schooling is never an impartial instrument in human
development”; schooling follows from what societies desire of people to be
and do.4 In this context, human capital theorists thought of knowledge
based on its transferability to economic returns and social utilities.5 The
proposal for generating economic growth from schooling demoralized hu-
man learning and labour. It posed the possibility of disinvestment in humans
when returns on investment do not secure the expected outcomes. Valuing
knowledge by market rationality harbours conditions of ignorance, makes
self-development subject to economic valuations, and consequently demeans
liberty by subjecting self-knowledge (a necessary element of freedom) to
economic cost and benefit calculations. In proposing an economic approach
to human development, human capital policies and practices continue to
facilitate the internalization of economic principles in education systems.
Although there are multiple ways to excavate the history of a concept,
this book offers one approach to the study of human capital with attention
to the geography of reason.6 In redeploying Foucault’s method of geneal-
ogy, I attend to the contribution of certain historical figures to show trans-
formations in human capital conventions and examine the conditions and
effects that render certain thoughts and experiences possible. In this con-
text, tracing the history of Western rationality contributes to the better
understanding of the institutional structures and practices that informs per-
sonhood. “Genealogies start with the present in order to trace the condi-
tions of the emergence of the present in which we are present.”7 Koopman
describes genealogy as an approach to investigate the conditions of possi-
bility of the present to transform this present. With little understanding of
the traditions and forces by which we are oriented to live as human capital,
transforming the present proves to be another project lacking self-aware-
ness. This book draws on historians and historical texts not to discover a
truth about human capital but to work towards layered understanding of
ourselves. As a synoptic text,8 it explores historical contingencies to invite
deliberations on ways of being and knowing ourselves.
Introduction 3
As a guiding approach, genealogy enables self-examination of knowledge

by looking into the formalization of thought. Knowledge is not merely in-
formation. For an educated person, knowledge is, inalienable property, re-
flected in living a certain life. And so, the present study is an analysis of the
games of truth by which it became possible to think and experience our-
selves as certain subjects, irreducible to a form of capital. Foucault informed
my inquiry into knowledge production and detaching power from truth:
Let us not, therefore, ask why certain people want to dominate, what
they seek, what is their overall strategy. Let us ask, instead how things
work at the level of on-going subjection, at the level of those continuous
and uninterrupted processes, which subject our bodies, govern our ges-
tures, dictate our behaviours etc.9
Let us ask how economic conceptions are made, reinforced, and normal-
ized to govern human life among economic things. The need to control
human capital is reconfigured in emerging data economies where machine
learning directs human learning and automation replaces human labour.
According to the political economist, Harold Innis, technological inven-
tions harness forces that reform civilizations. Historically, the shifts in the
system of communications introduce “monopolies on knowledge” that di-
rect human reflexivity and secure the rise and fall of empires.10 Innis
showed that the advancements in information communication technolo-
gies altered science and polity with local and global magnitudes. Educa-
tional institutions are not exempted. They continue to evolve in tandem
with social practices and values that lead humanity into a way of life.11
Situating human capital in a broader historical context elucidates the
role of science and technology in introducing uniformity to human life. It
also deliberates on philosophical and theological assumptions that inform
the apprehension of freedom, agency, and wellbeing as central values of an
education. Each chapter threads the needle between contrary and comple-
mentary concepts that contributed to the formation and reformulation of
the construct of human capital. The study begins in agricultural econo-
mies, where adults and children are integrated in the economy of the
household. Chapter 1 outlines the development of social organization,
marks the contribution of ancient Greek to Western culture, and exposes
historical associations shared between schooling and empire that will
shape global futures. It demonstrates how ancient rationalization, much
like modern economic rationality, utilized hopes and fears in schooling
humanity in a mode of liberty and government.
Chapters 2 and 3 examine the notions of “property” and “machine,”
invoked by Milton Friedman and Theodore Schultz to characterize the hu-
man person as a form of capital.12 Chapter 2 relays that the legal
4 Introduction
underpinnings for property and ownership aimed at social order—their

initial aim was not to cherish a culture of accumulation and privatization.
The legitimization of ruling and consuming another’s life for increasing
profit (private or social) is associated with a notional progress rooted in
genocide, slavery, and colonization dating from the occupation of Ameri-
cas to (covert and overt tactics of) militarization of Africa, Asia, and the
Middle East. Chapter 3 contextualizes the accommodation of Gnostic
movements by modern science in exploring how the metaphor of human–
machine increased acceptance of moral sentiments that welcomed unre-
strained economic commercialism. At the roots of the political economy of
self-interest and self-management rests a conception of human nature and
society under the spell of automata.
Chapter 4 attends to the formalization of the science of wealth as the
industrial elites of the class-based societies free themselves from social re-
sponsibility by reliance on market divinity. While competition and surveil-
lance became justified as means to greater good, education became a
response to social and economic problems.13 These processes implied a
challenge to the idea of natural growth as a metaphor for social progress.14
In this context, utilitarianism prescribed the use of scientific control in
schooling to produce citizen-workers governed by the prospects of rewards
and punishments. However, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to John Dewey,
the recognition of the interdependence of individual and social dimensions
brought forth the argument that the education that exploits the malleabil-
ity of humans (manipulating and schooling them by economic incentives)
violates agency, liberty, and civility. Nevertheless, the moral and legal jus-
tifications for the human capital theory in the 20th century grew from the
19th-century utilitarian rationality and market freedom.15
There was no “theory” of human capital before the Cold War. Chapter
5 demonstrates that the early proponents of the theory introduced educa-
tion reforms to meet the economic and military demands inside and out-
side of the United States. Aside from instilling national unity and
harmonizing private and public interests, human capital theory advanced
globalization by the way of the World Bank, the United Nations Educa-
tional, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the Organisa-
tion for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Today,
human capital policies uphold the marketization and privatization of
schools on a global scale and destabilize local education governance.16 Ac-
cording to Foucault, the theory had micro and macro implications from
attending to a child to interventions in the Third World economies. It fur-
thered “the Western economic take-off in the 16th and 17th century” by
the “programing of the processes.”17 The cultural and ethical connotation
of the new practices concerns the incentivization of social processes and
the production of “homo economicus” as “someone who is eminently
Introduction 5
governable.”18 In 2012, Gary Becker agreed with Foucault’s overall evalu-

ation. Becker commented that the human capital theory was a “useful fic-
tion” and added, “maybe, 20 years from now, we will have a different
fiction that will be better.”19 Derived from the Latin word fictio, fiction
means to shape, mould, or form. Fictions are potent teaching materials.
They institute narratives and establish consequences. They participate in
making meaning, help others to look into the world for evidence, and in
the case of human capital theory, interpret and produce other fictions.20
Human capital fictions have had the power to reformulate social under-
standing of education and life. The book concludes by marking the
transgressive impact of human capital theory on social and personal
development.
As a fiction, human capital continues to offer a scientific approach to
training humans in competitive individualism. The fiction has been essen-
tial for advancing economic conventions of the digital age and commer-
cialization of the flesh by transforming life into data. Ian Hacking has
investigated “the ways in which scientific classification may bring into be-
ing a new kind of person, conceived of and experienced as a way to be a
person.”21 Hacking asks, “how do we change in virtue of being classified
… and how do the ways in which we change have a sort of feedback effect
on our system of classifications themselves?” 22 According to Hacking, the
first instance of such efforts was carried out in Mesopotamia where inhab-
itants of various districts were classified and administered under the Per-
sian Empire created by Cyrus. Hacking generalized: “[e]mpires can succeed
only if they foster quasi-autonomous local administrations that are run by
the peoples themselves.”23 I begin in Mesopotamia and the Persian Empire
of Cyrus to showcase a model of government explored in modern
globalization.
Notes
1 William F. Pinar and Madeleine R. Grumet, Toward a Poor Curriculum, 3rd
ed. (Kingston: Educator’s International Press, 2014), 194.
2 Mary Poovey, The History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Sciences of Wealth
and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8.
3 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France
1978–79 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 161–62.
4 Jeff Sugarman, “Neo-Foucaultian Approaches to Critical Inquiry in the Psy-
chology of Education,” Psychology in Education 1, no. 1 (2014): 53.
5 Theodore Schultz, Origins of Increasing Returns (Cambridge: Blackwell Pub-
lisher, 1993), 27.
6 Walter Mignolo. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, De-
colonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
7 Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Moder-
nity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 25.
6 Introduction
8 William F. Pinar, The Synoptic Text Today and Other Essays: Curriculum De-
velopment After the Reconceptualization (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). Pinar
has called for a type of research that includes consideration of the “pedagogical
processes” and “the psycho-social and intellectual development of the subjec-
tively existing individual” (p. 3). For an example see, William F. Pinar Moving
Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technol-
ogy (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2019).
9 Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Fou-
cault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 35.
10 Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1971). Harold Innis, Empire and Communication (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1972). Innis has developed the term “monopolies on knowl-
edge” in his work.
11 Peter M. Taubman, Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of
Standards and Accountability in Education (New York: Routledge, 2010).
12 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962), 100; Theodore W. Schultz, “Capital Formation by Education,”
Journal of Political Economy 68, no. 6 (1960): 571–83.
13 Daniel Tröhler, “Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educational-
ization of the Modern World,” in Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and
Theory, ed. Michael Peters (Singapore: Springer, 2016): 8-1.
14 Bernadette M. Baker, In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational
History and the Child (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). Baker acknowledged that
“the idea of natural growth as a metaphor for progress in some form emerged
in Greek and Hebraic thought, was modified through Christian theology, and
was secularized through the sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries” (p. 480).
15 Jimena Hurtado. “Jeremy Bentham and Gary Becker: Utilitarianism and Eco-
nomic Imperialism,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 30, no. 3
(2008): 335–57.
16 David G. Smith, Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization,
Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2006); Susan
L. Robertson, “Placing Teachers in Global Governance Agendas,” Compara-
tive Education Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 584–607; Joel Spring, Global Impacts
of the Western School Model: Corporatization, Alimentation, Consumerism
(New York: Taylor & Francis, 2019).
17 Foucault, Lectures of the Biopolitics, 232–33.
18 Ibid., 294.
19 Gary S. Becker, François Ewald and Bernard E. Harcourt, “Becker on Ewald on
Foucault on Becker American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 ‘Birth
of Biopolitics’ Lectures,” Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Work-
ing Paper, no. 614, (2012): 15.
20 For an example, consider Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the
Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2018). By the way of signalling theory, Caplan claims the employers
should decide on what sort of education choices are needed. For him, education
has been a “private profit and social waste” (p. 5). As a professor, he wonders
why “spend over a decade learning piles of dull content” that students “won’t use
after graduation” (p. 288). For signalling theory, see Michael Spence, “Job Mar-
ket Signaling,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 3 (1973): 355–374.
Introduction 7
21 Ian Hacking, “Kinds of People: Moving Targets,” Proceedings of the British

Academy 151 (2007): 285.
22 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004), 99.
23 Hacking, “Kinds of People,” 289.
Bibliography
Baker, Bernadette M. In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History
and the Child. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Becker, Gary S., François Ewald and Bernard E. Harcourt. “Becker on Ewald on
of Biopolitics’ Lectures.” Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Working
Paper no. 614, 2012.
Caplan, Bryan. The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste
of Time and Money. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Foucault, Michel. “Two Lectures.” In Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/
Habermas Debate. Edited by Michael Kelly, 17–46. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1994.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France
1978–79. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008.
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1962.
Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Hacking, Ian. “Kinds of People: Moving Targets.” Proceedings of the British Acad-
emy 151 (2007): 285–317. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/
2043/pba151p285.pdf
Hurtado, Jimena P. “Jeremy Bentham and Gary Becker: Utilitarianism and eco-
nomic imperialism.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 30, no. 3
(2008): 335–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837208000321.
Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1971.
Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1972.
Koopman, Colin. Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/
book/21123.
Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Deco-
lonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Pinar, William F. The Synoptic Text Today and Other Essays: Curriculum Develop-
ment after the Reconceptualization. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
Pinar, William F. Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time,
Teaching, and Technology. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2019.
Pinar, William F. and Madeleine R. Grumet. Toward a Poor Curriculum. 3rd ed.
Kingston: Educator's International Press, 2014.
8 Introduction
Poovey, Mary. The History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Sciences of Wealth
and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Robertson, Susan L. “Placing Teachers in Global Governance Agendas.” Com-
parative Education Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 584–607. https://doi.
org/10.1086/667414.
Schultz, Theodore W. “Capital Formation by Education.” Journal of Political
Economy 68, no. 6 (1960): 571–83. www.jstor.org/stable/1829945.
Schultz, Theodore W. Origins of Increasing Returns. Cambridge: Blackwell Pub-
lisher, 1993.
Smith, David G. Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization,
Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy. Rotterdam: Sense Publisher, 2006.
Spence, Michael. “Job Market Signaling.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no.
3 (1973): 355–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010.
Spring, Joel. Global Impacts of the Western School Model: Corporatization, Ali-
mentation, Consumerism. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2019.
Sugarman, Jeff. “Neo-Foucaultian Approaches to Critical Inquiry in the Psychol-
ogy of Education.” Psychology in Education 1, no. 1 (2014): 53–69. https://brill.
com/view/book/edcoll/9789462095663/BP000005.xml
Taubman, Peter M. Teaching by Numbers; Deconstructing the Discourse of Stan-
dards and Accountability in Education. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Tröhler, Daniel. “Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educationaliza-
tion of the Modern World.” In Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and
Theory. Edited by Michael Peters. Singapore: Springer, 2016. https://doi.
org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_8-1
1  To rule with justice
The neolithic period is marked by the development of social and techno-

logical innovations as hunters and gatherers experimented with living to-
gether. Humans’ identities began to form in the process of domesticating
natural instincts and social ties of other mammals.1 These early develop-
ments provided humans with a degree of protection against nature but
subjected them to their dealing with each other. Mesopotamian cities,
Uruk, Akkad, Assur, and Babylon, of Western Asia (Iraq, Syria, and Iran)
were the forerunner geographical places of thriving human population
along rivers (Tigris and Euphrates for Mesopotamian cities and Nile River
in Egypt). The agricultural settlements saw the development of city-states
as a collective cooperative form of associations. “With the city came the
centralized state, the hierarchy of social classes, the division of labour, or-
ganized religion, monumental building, civil engineering, writing, litera-
ture, sculpture, art, music, education, mathematics and law.”2 However,
this is an epoch in which plants and animals played a central role in cul-
tural production.3 Human agency was contained by what sustains life
rather than any notion of economic growth.
The historical perspectives explored here are, indeed a generalization,
focused on the conditions of conceiving humans as economic resources.
“Whatever the origin and nature of the evidence at hand, history is simul-
taneously both explanation and interpretation.”4 This chapter begins
with three paramount attributes of economy invented by the Ancient
East: (1) A system of recording and accounting, (2) a system of laws and
authorities, and (3) a system of evaluating goods for exchange incorpo-
rated in future civilizations. Next, I turn to ancient Greece and review the
political and economic thoughts that continue to inform modern civiliza-
tion. The governance of humans as a form of capital is not an advent of
modernity but was also an essential element of sustaining and growing
ancient empires.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-2
10 To rule with justice
1.1 The beginning of school and empire

Agricultural societies were designed around toil and sacrifice. They intro-
duced a basic model of specialization and exchange as well as “a definite
polarization of society into those who controlled resources, such as land,
manufacturing or trading enterprises, and those dependent on them.”5 The
early agricultural societies nurtured the beliefs in supernatural powers and
deities in maintaining their communities. These beliefs often informed
norms around health and fertility associated with the recognition that the
higher number of abled men meant more harvest. Susan Pollock’s study of
Ancient Mesopotamia demonstrated that patriarchal political roles and
economic conventions of the household were not two separate domains.6
Such a conception produced by agricultural society lived on in the institu-
tional, political, and judicial formations that followed.
Familial relations and identities were transported and restructured into
the communal norms. “People came to believe that city states were aborigi-
nal creations of their gods, and that the gods had decreed all aspects of
human society from the beginning.”7 Social hierarchies within the cities
were not solely based on managerial requirements to support agricultural
production. They governed the inequalities of large-scale irrigation farming
by managing beliefs. In this context, Wengrow explained that the early civi-
lizations did not develop autonomously but rather in relation to each other:
It was through contact with their gods that the societies of Egypt and
Mesopotamia expressed their uniqueness, their distinct attachments to
land, locality, origins, and place. Yet the earthly bodies of the Egyptian
and Mesopotamian gods were ritually manufactured, nourished and
cared for in similar ways, using similar materials that could not be
found locally in either area.8
Manufacturing truth integrated human flesh into rituals. The formation

and emergence of dynastic elites relied on the power of those long dead to
establish power within the Mesopotamian households. “As with modern
banking, the accumulation of capital involved—not just bureaucracy—but
also a strong element of faith and trust, reinforced by ritual.”9 Over time,
faith, trust, and rituals transformed fabrications into reality as authorities
fastened spiritual and material conceptions together in sacrifice and credit.
The hierarchical authorities protected economic relations and served cen-
tralized economies organized by the temples. The temples were sources of
religion and law. They also oversaw and supported the economic activities
of households (by providing a workforce and the material needs) and as-
sisted the circulation of goods among the citizens.10 The governance of the
material affairs of towns necessitated systems of record keeping. Clay was
To rule with justice 11
used for pottery, packaging goods for transportation, and also record keep-
ing. Clay seals, tokens, bullae, and numerical tablets were used to maintain
information about economic exchanges. Protocuneiform scripts, ideographs,
and pictographs on clay represented objects or ideas by depicting them natu-
ralistically. As record keeping improved, so did the ability to represent things
in signs; these ranged from seals and tokens of the 8th millennium to nu-
meric tablets of the 3rd millennium BCE. The representational abstraction
emerged from accounting and led to a development in writing.11
In tracing the evolution of writing, Dominique Charpin noted that “as
time passed, it came to be recognized that not only did the written docu-
ment serve to transmit information through space, it could also allow the
spoken word to survive the person who had uttered it.”12 The development
of writing began to surpass its initial planned aims from managing eco-
nomic transactions to the reprogramming of social and personal cognition.
In the case of economic exchange, writing made accountability possible
among the overseeing organizational bureaucracy. The uncovering of the
clay tablets has provided evidence that the “taxes were often paid in agri-
cultural products and certain royalties were related to land tenure.”13 Re-
corded taxation is one example where writing led to securing systems of
bureaucracy. “There are still disagreements about whether the advent of
writing made possible the emergence of the state or whether it was simply
an enabling factor.”14 Because writing assisted with the management of the
material world, it instituted rules that brought further stability to social
conduct. It introduced multitudes to the reward systems of kings and
priests and those loyal to them. In Egypt and Babylon, writing aided the
maintenance of dynastic rule and religious “universal ethical standards.”15
Writing facilitated “education and training that gave literate members of
society a source of power that was denied to others [and] also served to
indoctrinate them deeply in the prevailing ideology.”16 The will to write
and read made it possible to form and inform understanding of human
alterity. There is a relevancy of ancient clay tablets that transfigured those
who invented them—after generations strengthened the existing principles
of authority in political, economic, and judicial systems of Mesopotamia—
to modern digital tablets. As clay tablets surpassed their initial aims and
conveniences, they became instruments of social organization.
Among Mesopotamian cities, Sumer thrived in the development of cu-
neiform writing and established schools for training scribes. The Sumerian
schools served to fulfil the “economic demands of the land, primarily those
of the temple and palace” but over the years they expanded to include
“scholar-scientists, the men who studied whatever theological, botanical,
zoological, mineralogical, geographical, mathematical, grammatical and
linguistic knowledge that was current in his day.”17 The existing norms
determined that schools excluded women and poor citizens. Writing was
made affordable to the sons of administrators and those active in economic

affairs. This by itself was a lesson to those excluded. And the rewards of
education required the learned to serve their elites. The schools’ obliga-
tions, to those they received, were to equip them with competency in the
Sumerian language. According to Kramer, the “curriculum” was divided
into “two primary groups: the first may be described as semi-scientific and
scholarly; the second as literary and creative.”18 Kramer continued by not-
ing the lack of evidence of the degree the students were expected to become
specialized in what they studied. Specialization may be the added element
conceived by measures of modern industrial schooling.
Not only did memorization and clay textbooks play a significant role in
early learning but the ancient Sumerian schools point to an organizational
body: a school father for teaching, a big brother for mentoring, and a dis-
ciplinary figure for whipping. Whipping as a technique to correct students
was the initial system of efficiency to shepherd humans into learning a way
of life. Punishment seemed to have been introduced into schools from
training animals in the field. The practice of whipping and flogging dealt
with identity formation, Pinar noted, its lessons contained claims on an-
other’s body and such lessons stayed relevant and became regimented dur-
ing the European Renaissance.19 Physical punishment derived from
primitive societies was given social functions and cultural rationales in Eu-
ropean history long before the rise of behaviourism as part of educational
technology in the 20th century.
Despite the primary purpose of training scribes to fill certain administra-
tive or civil service posts, the Sumerian school known as edubba left be-
hind a number of legacies:
[E]dubba was instrumental in the dissemination of knowledge and lit-

erature throughout Western Asia. The early growth of trade—and later
march of empire—carried the Sumerian system of cuneiform writing
and with it some imitation of the Mesopotamian school, from Sumer to
Iran, Syria and Asia Minor.20
The “march of empire” that Oates cites references the Akkadian king Sar-
gon, who conquered Sumer and all the other Mesopotamian city-states. He
became a personification of Assyrian and Babylonian imperialism. The Ak-
kadian model of authority necessitated a centralized legal system to manage
disputes in the geographical areas and the king’s officials acted as judges.
From the Akkadian period onward, land, the immovable resource, was
the subject of appointed elects who directed the livelihood of the people.21
Not only did the elites and officials make decisions regarding the ownership
of resources and drew economic boundaries but they also asserted their
dominance over productive means, thereby weakening and ruling the
indigenous. “The temples, palaces, and estate—collectively referred to as

oikoi,” according to Pollock—“formed large socioeconomic units with a
dependent (and unrelated, in kin terms) workforce, managerial personnel,
flocks of animals, pastures, fields, orchards, storage facilities, and artisans’
workshops.”22 The scope conveys large corporate units that by their exis-
tence necessitated the creation of social strata. Those impoverished indi-
viduals who worked in “varying states of servitude” included those of local
birth and slaves (who lacked family connections or were prisoners of war)
and the distinction “may not have been entirely clear-cut.”23
Early legal conceptions based on an authority’s rule developed and facili-
tated a shared system of value for exchange. “Silver was used in Acadians
Mesopotamia as standard of valuation, as a medium of exchange, and as a
form of stored wealth.”24 Only through wide dissemination and transfor-
mation could silver become valued as such. Metallurgy, begun in fifth mil-
lennium BCE, was later developed in standardizing the values of silver and
gold and to build luxury goods. Technology, social values, and cultural
authorities united to erect a system of valuation (i.e., money).25 Before the
coin system was invented, Mesopotamians had established a system similar
to modern-day money. But this did not discourage barter. “Barter must
have taken place everywhere and often in ancient Mesopotamia and is
probably the major reason we have so little evidence for exchange of cheap
commodities—especially in small amounts—in cuneiform documents.”26
Silver, gold, barley, lead, copper, and bronze constituted different value cat-
egories and were used in exchanges; other moveable properties (capital)
such as cows, sheep, and horses also had money functions.
However, economic activities were not governed by sole reliance on
material valuation of life forms. Mesopotamian and Egyptian commerce
were accompanied by a cosmology that mediated the status of living
things. Similar to modern-day technology and science, cosmology allowed
certain groups to profit and impose orders.27 The productive force of elit-
isms occupied the sacred and the profane as “parallel worlds.” Wengrow
continues: “The contrast between these two categories of object,” sacred
or profane, “was maintained through contrasting of moral and behav-
ioural norms that cause the same materials—usually drawn from outside
society itself—to move within different spheres of exchange.”28 These two
distinct but parallel realms of meaning making directed moral and behav-
ioural norms.
1.2 Ancient imperialism
William Ferguson defines an empire as a rule of one state over another. He
noted that an empire accepts any form of government (monarchy, oligar-
chy, or democracy) and is compatible with any form of constitution:
The relation of inferiority and superiority is, however, essential in any

empire. In modern times this is acknowledged with the utmost frankness.
Upon the higher capacity for government claimed by the Christian peo-
ples, the Western cultures, or the Angelo-Saxon, as the case may be, mod-
ern pride, greed, or conscience bases its right to control inferior races.29
Ferguson is using his words with care and clarified that what the modern
West knows of imperialism comes from Romans and as well as what they
learned from the costly errors of Greeks and Macedonians. Roman success
was due to a mode of accumulation of military knowledge learned from
their predecessors. Before the Romans, the Greeks of the 5th century
learned about rulership during peace and rivalries among city-states within
ancient Greece. The rivalry between Athens and Sparta, for example, was
initiated by the elites’ fear of domination of one city by the other and led
to civil stasis.30
At the root of the rivalry, one can find incompatibility of values that
influenced socialization. Where in most Greek states education was the
province of family, in Sparta, vocational training separated boys at a young
age from their families; its planned curriculum included military endeav-
ours and survival skills. This was interwoven with social values, demon-
strating courage and obtaining virtues, and practices that governed Sparta’s
citizens as hoplites (military and economic agents) to support the luxurious
lives of their leaders. Athenians, led by their general, Cleon, objected to the
overall Spartan way of life. Ferguson references Thucydides’ account of the
Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) (between the Athenians and Spartans),
with a cautionary note:
No form of government, or profession of political idea, saves the state

from imperialism. Even this country, …which uprears [sic] the structure
of its state upon a belief in the essential equality of men, and treats, or
at least aims to treat, as comparatively negligible the differences created
by birth and race, education and religion, property and occupation; —
even this idealistic republic has become empire in our own time and al-
most without our perceiving it.31
Ferguson writes aware of the inequalities of race, education, religion, and

occupation of his time in the United States. He documented the impact of
ancient Greece history and philosophy on Renaissance England illuminating
the historical consciousness that informed modern science and literature
were present at the turn of the 20th century in his country, the United States.
In ancient Greece, prior to the war between Athens and Sparta, the
Athenian democracy offered “a new social pattern,” while Sparta’s consti-
tution perpetuated an old one of kings and oligarchs.32 Athens’ liberal
democratic constitution was established based on a moral pride that was

productive in protecting it against Spartans. Love for knowledge, partici-
pation in the city government, and conceiving wealth for use led Athenians
to judge that they “exhibit a more fully developed personality than man
elsewhere.”33 Athenian democracy excluded the women, the workers, and
the enslaved populations. However, democracy made Athens a force to be
reckoned with; ancient historian Herodotus concluded that the Athenian
growing military and economic strength was due to their democracy:
[W]hen freed of rulers they [Athenians] became very much the leaders,
while they were the subjects of a ruler they refused to do their all, since
it seemed that they were fighting under the compulsion of a master; but
once freed, each man was eager to do his job, knowing that his efforts
were on his own behalf.34
Democracy placed the responsibility for freedom on the Athenian citizens.

War and peace were central to the Athenian pride in their models of gov-
ernment that included kingship. They believed those who made sacrifices
for the city-state and adhered to its value profited from honour and re-
spect. They were said to be “happy.”35 Their bravery, courage, and ambi-
tion satisfied citizen-soldiers and statesmen alike.
Thucydides began his History of the Peloponnesian War claiming his
identity: an Athenian, a citizen of a modern city of his time. Thucydides
found that it is at times of war that the inhabitants of the city-state are
forced into conformity and pushed to do anything against their will.
Thucydides stated that “war, which removes the comforts of daily life,
runs a violent school and in most men brings out passions that reflect their
condition.”36 And it was “the pursuit of power driven by greed and ambi-
tion, leading in turn to the passion of the party rivalries” that supplied the
war he was writing of.37 The war at stake was a civil war, brought after
Greece defended their freedom against the Persians’ invasion, which was
charged by the Ionian revolt against the Persians.38 Besides learning from
internal wars among the city-state, the Greeks also learned from the an-
cient Near East. The Persian kings became archetypes of imperialist tri-
umphs. In my references to the East and West, I am not endorsing the
common belief of separate cultures, people, and civilizations. Such a pre-
conceived separation flies in the face of the ancient intellectual history that
demonstrates cultures and people evolve by contact with each other.39 The
East and West are imaginative entities and continue to be in intimate rela-
tion and influence of each other.40 For example, Alexander’s (331–323 BC)
expansion into the East reflects a history of living with perceived dangers
and fears of the Persians empire. To overcome centuries of rivalry, the per-
sonal and political were intertwined in Alexander’s arranged marriages of
his Greek and Macedonian commanders to Persian brides. In Alexander’s

attempt for alliances, gender played a major role in having Greeks and
Macedonians as husbands and Persians as wives. The Greeks often re-
ferred to the Persians, as they did to any other enemy, as barbarians in
antiquity. For Aristotle who served as Alexander’s tutor, barbarians by
nature were to be slaves.41 Although these marriages aimed to defuse ten-
sion, they pointed to the assimilation of Greeks and Macedonians mascu-
line citizenry norms. The marriages to Persian women, however, nullified
the claim that the Persians were barbarians since in marriage it is “men as
‘barbarians’ who must be ‘tamed’ by women who create ‘civilization’ by
‘transforming male lust into love.’”42
Alexander’s attempt was more than symbolic and served political aims
to end rivalries that had origins in myths and epic poetry. However, the
myths materialized when Cyrus the Great, in 546 BC, defeated the Lydian
king, Croesus. According to Herodotus, “Persians had no luxuries of any
sort before they conquered Lydia,” and they did not conquer Lydia for
luxury. It was Croesus who sought alliance with Sparta and launched
against the Persians.43 After losing the battle to the Persians, Croesus served
Cyrus. Herodotus’ history clarified that the intent to attack Persians had its
origins in misinterpretations, greed, and fear. Over time, the Persian em-
pire extended its geographical, political, and economic dominance. By
drawing on historical and archaeological evidence, Warwick Ball con-
cluded that the Romans “suffered an inferiority complex. It was towards
the East that conquerors cut their teeth,” Ball continued “[t]he East was
also the source of wealth above all others, and the endless round of civil
wars in the Roman Republic was costing money that easterner coffers
could recoup.”44 And “Iran was the greatest power to oppose Rome, so
there is understandable Roman preoccupation with eastern policies.”45
Such a preoccupation sustains itself in the West, to define military and
economic positions and forming identity politics against the background
of an external threat, not limited to Iran.46 The prospect of warfare carried
moral and political lessons and the misery they brought were both public
and private.47 Warfare often produced social unity against fictional or real
enemies and expanded the borders of imperial power.
Wars were not the only teachers in antiquity. The intellectuals and his-
torians of the Greek civilization educated the public. Among these intel-
lectuals was Xenophon, whose texts offer a window to a connected web of
government, politics, and economics.48 Xenophon’s oeuvre presents what
may have lived, transformed, and survived. His writings served as educa-
tional texts enduring cultural changes throughout Western civilization. For
example, Tim Rood noted that Xenophon’s Anabasis (The expedition of
Cyrus) was a school text and played a major role in the Victorian educa-
tion system. He added, Anabasis informed the “personal narratives of
participants in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.”49 Xenophon did not write to

legitimize imperialism, violence, and conquest but to document and often
narrate political approaches to government.
Xenophon’s texts were reinterpreted by Machiavelli and contributed to
his “view that government requires the prudent alternation between moral
virtue and moral vice.”50 The re-appropriation of Xenophon’s text by Ma-
chiavelli in the Renaissance signals distancing from Socrates as the founder
of pre-modern political thought and beginning modern political science.
For Machiavelli, the ideal ruler seeks stability to rule by variable means.
This was coupled with Machiavelli’s admiration of Rome’s expansion to
rule the world. “What is generally referred to as ‘Republican Rome,’ from
around 500 B.C. through the changes in the 1st century B.C., was never a
democratic republic as we usually think of it today,” Atkinson noted, “it
began as an aristocracy, and ended in a kind of oligarchy in the hands of
the senate.”51 However, Atkinson noted a balance between the consuls, the
senators, and the tribunes of the people conveyed a notion of democracy.
Machiavelli focuses, however, on the social and political inventors such as
Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus as rulers emerging during unstable
times.52 They reform constitutions and establish norms of conduct.
In contrast to Xenophon’s clear objection to tyranny, Machiavelli’s The
Prince is “characterized by the deliberate indifference to the distinction be-
tween king and tyrant,” evident in Machiavelli’s reliance on Education of
Cyrus (Cyropaedia) and Xenophon’s other text on tyranny, Hiero.53 By con-
fronting the teachings of the Prince with those transmitted through the Hiero,
the decisive difference between Socratic political science (society cannot be
just unless the ruler is just) and Machiavellian political science (society is
managed by ends pursued) surfaces.54 One of Machiavelli’s examples, Cyrus,
balanced justice and imperialism while looking after the good of his people.
Cyrus’s desire for ruling for the sake of ruling casts justice as an instrument
of the exercise of power not an end in itself. Cyrus is a model of strength,
discipline, and endurance. He also befriended, praised, and rewarded his
subjects for their strength and obedience. When Cyrus conquered a territory,
he would collect the military artefacts to ensure he ruled the colonized people
peacefully. He eased the existing tax system and gave liberty by incorporat-
ing a system of gifts to the ruling class and rewarded those thriving in their
occupations, so the prospect of incentives kept his people at work.
The re-examination of the example of Cyrus did not single-handedly set
in motion the observed discontinuity in Renaissance from the Classical
tradition. However, it contributed to Machiavelli’s political philosophy.
Machiavelli subscribed “to the notion of ‘oriental despotism’ elaborated
by Greek thought” and considered “freedom conducive to both power and
flourishing of a political community.”55 He wrote at a time that colonizing
tendencies, maximizing wealth, and the growing self-assertion of the elites
sought to decode history for political expediency. In this context, Cyrus

provided an archetype—at times he was compared to Alexander—focused
on the management of material goods inclusive of human bodies. The pre-
served account of Cyrus conveys that, while he lived similarly to the peo-
ple, he expected courage, forwardness, “strength and boldness”56 from
them. Cyrus governed by sharing with those loyal to him profits earned.
There are two accounts of Cyrus in Antiquity, neither written by Persian
people. For example, Herodotus’ Histories advanced a slightly different
account of Cyrus than did Xenophon in his Cyropaedia. The two accounts,
however, are consistent in Cyrus’s natural abilities to rule (by utilizing free-
dom as an instrument for imperialism) and his education in two different
climates: Medes, where the laws were designed for people by a monarchi-
cal authority, and Persia, where the laws were made by people for their
commonwealth before he claimed power.57
Xenophon’s biography of Cyrus, Cyropaedia, began by describing the
circumstances in which Cyrus was raised. Xenophon referenced a dialogue
between Cyrus and his mother. Cyrus is attempting to show his maturity
to gain autonomy and stay in the kingdom of his maternal grandfather,
Medes, instead of returning home, Persia. This is young Cyrus speaking of
how he settled a judicial dilemma to justify to his mother that he has ad-
vanced in the learning of justice, a sign of maturity:
A great boy, having a little coat, did unclothe a little boy, having a great
coat, and caused that the one did wear the other’s garment. I being [the]
judge in this matter did give [a] sentence that was best for both parties,
either to have his coat meet for him. At which sentence my master did
beat me, saying, “When you are [the] judge in a controversy of fitness
and convenience, then must you judge after this sort. But when you
must determine whose is the coat, then you must consider who had
right possession, whether he that taketh away a coat by violence, or he
that hath caused it to be made for him, or else hath bought it. For that
is just, which is lawful, that that is not lawful, is violent. Wherefore
sentence must be given always of the judge according to the law” [sic].58
Cyrus’s judgement gave priority to suitability where both parties get not
what belonged to them but what they are to be fitted for. The “right pos-
session” accompanies a judgement to decide fitness for others.
Xenophon explained that Cyrus interpreted his verdict as a case for his
understanding of justice; Cyrus conveyed to his mother the things he does
not know he would rather learn from his maternal grandfather in Medes.
Persians learned about justice in school and attendance was required for
holding political office. In the case of Cyrus, the beating he received may
not have been effective. Cyrus’s mother insisted that Cyrus should return
to Persia: “the justice of your grandfather, and of the Persians do not agree.
For he here, in Medes, had made himself lord of all; among the Persians to
have equality is thought just. [sic].”59
In ancient Persia, laws applied to all citizens equally and those who
made laws had to obey them. Cyrus’s mother recognized that the land of
her father was different. Instead of accepting his mother’s objection, Cyrus
took it to be the strength of his grandfather, “that he can teach men to have
rather less than more” and prove to others “to have less than himself.”60
The power of the grandfather rested in teaching his subjects a mode of ac-
ceptance of inequality. Cyrus convinced his mother to return to Persia
without him, and in the remaining sentences, Xenophon described young
Cyrus’s liberal talk and gentle behaviour by which he won over admirers
and friends, including his grandfather. Failing to comply with a mode of
justice where the law is applied to all equally, Cyrus became a model for
justice to some—and eventually continued his education upon returning to
Persia—whether that is attributed to being truly just or because he taught
others to be and have less than himself, we do not know.61
Cyrus’s justice could be derived from the notion of transcending justice and
examining things from “the point of view of the good as distinguished from
that of justice.” However, this is Strauss’s claim for Socrates who put forth
that “all good things belong to the wise man, and only to him [sic].”62 Unlike
Socrates, Cyrus rewarded those who thrived and by rewarding them kept
them in subordination and preoccupied with hard work. He was the Prince
intimately close to his subjects and concerned with equal treatment among
them. As a Prince, Cyrus was “a good father, the father always providing that
the child should not never lack.”63 This came from Cyrus’s spokesman, Chry-
sants, to the Persians in an assembly. Chrysants praised Cyrus for protecting,
providing, and imposing laws to govern the will of his people, but this Prince
also looked after maximizing happiness for his subjects. Chrysants associated
the task of ruling with happiness and obedience. Those who are governed in
Cyrus’s Persia are not “servants” for servants obey from “fear” and Persians
obey Cyrus “from love,” as a gratitude for their liberty and security.64
Obedience is associated with liberty and liberty with salvation and secu-
rity. This praise for Cyrus’s reign should be taken in the context of his ap-
proach to virtue and politics. Cyrus did not question traditional virtues. He
questioned the “good” virtuous citizens acquired “being such” and by this
questioning; according to ancient political philosopher Robert Bartlett,
Cyrus scrutinized “the idea that virtue must be practiced for its own sake
alone.”65 Cyrus did not transcend the law and virtuosity but set contingent
outcomes to them. In contrast, Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Apology
demonstrated that Socrates submitted to the law, for its own sake, and in
this way, Socrates transcended not only justice but injustice, submitting to
death, for the sake of lawfulness.
In antiquity, Xenophon’s text, “Education of Cyrus (Cyropaedia) seems

to have been frequently paired with Plato’s Republic, either as its comple-
ment or rival”; in the Renaissance, it held “an equal importance.”66 Jane
Grogan noted that “in bringing the Persian Cyrus to England, Xenophon’s
humble translators made bold bids for favour of royalty and aristocracy.
Conjuring up identifications with Xenophon, these disenfranchised peda-
gogues sought to realize the humanist dream of power through education,
however vicarious.”67 For Xenophon, Cyrus offered an exemplary con-
trast to Socrates’s ethical justice for the good of the persons and the
community.
1.3 Socrates as a model
In contrast to Cyrus, Socrates’s politics was devoid of politics, at least in
terms of how we now understand politics. Xenophon’s Memorabilia gave
numerous examples of Socrates’ dialogue with his interlocutors: one was
the exchange between a sophist, Antiphon, and Socrates. In response to
Antiphon’s challenge that Socrates’s knowledge is not worth anything since
he doesn’t charge, Socrates responded that he is making friends with those
who are gifted to be good citizens. Socrates does not want anything except
“good friends” (he is avoiding the phrase students), and he teaches “them
all the good” he can, not for the sake of power or profit but for that “they
[his friends] will get some moral benefit.”68 This response is challenged by
Antiphon: “How can you suppose that you make politicians of others,
when you yourself avoid politics…?” and Socrates responded: “[S]hould I
play a more important part in politics by engaging in them alone or by tak-
ing pains to turn out as many competent politicians as possible?”69 Socrates
thereby disrupted and reversed values and norms perpetuated in his cul-
ture. By being an exemplary friend, Socrates teaches his interlocutors about
a way of life, a life devoted to friendship. He did not instruct but played a
role in the lives of those who learned from him. Those who followed him
were inspired to not become subjected to misrule nor bring others to eco-
nomic and political subjection.
Socrates orientated others to love knowledge. “[K]nowledge is not just
plain knowing, but knowing-what-ought-to-be-preferred, and hence how
to live,” Hadot continued, “the content of Socratic knowledge is thus es-
sentially ‘the absolute value of moral content,’ and the certainty provided
by the choice of this value.”70 It was this orientation to knowledge that in
Republic and Statesman Plato posed: that the law must be subordinate to
knowledge.71 Plato’s Republic begins by defining justice. The reliance on
love for knowledge is necessary but insufficient for justice. There are no
prescriptions discerning why justice is to be chosen over injustice. Those
who are just are capable to rule over themselves and manage their desires
and interests. Philosophers present such a character and unlike the oli-
garch, democrat, and tyrant, the philosopher does not sacrifice justice for
short-term pleasures. “In order to live well we must break away from the
confining assumption that ordinary objects of pursuit—the pleasures,
powers, honours, and material goods that we ordinarily compete for—are
the only sorts of goods there are.”72 Following Socrates as a model, Plato
required that those seeking power concern themselves with justice in pri-
vate and public life.73 Men and women are equally competent to rule; they
spend most of their time in contemplation of knowledge and the cultiva-
tion of virtues; they find it a privilege to guide and serve their fellow
citizens.
Plato’s guardians are distinct from the imperialism of the Near East.
Plato conveyed the guardians were learned in the goals of life and common
happiness. In his allegory of the cave, Plato begins by considering “the ef-
fect of education or the lack of it—in our nature.”74 Prisoners kept in a
cave from early childhood become accustomed to shadows; they take
shadows as true forms. They conceive themselves as learned actors, not
finding their activities limiting. One of the inhabitants stands and turns
towards the light outside of the cave. Following the light he sees the reality
outside. The person then returns to the cave to lead others out. Re-entering
the cave to educate others, the person lacks the sufficient sight in compari-
son to those accustomed to the cave. Seeing this, the inhabitants of the cave
discover the dangers associated with being freed. They “kill” anyone who
attempts to take them outside.75 The allegory begins with educational re-
sponsibility and ends with ethical and political risks.
Socrates who outlined the allegory in Republic continued by mentioning
disciplines worthy of teaching to the guardians; he rejected arithmetic and
geometry, for example, have other utility rather than directing those re-
ceiving this knowledge towards truth of existence.76 Socrates enacted his
care for truth and for persons with whom he came to contact. There is a
distinction between Socrates who did not seek power over others and Pla-
to’s Socrates, the philosopher advocating a model of ruling according to
natural fitness. However, both Socratic love for truth and Platonic ratio-
nalism offered no signs of utilitarian maximization (of efficiency and
profit), nor reasoning solely based on representations drawn in figures and
tables. Plato trusted the knowing faculty within each citizen to rule and be
ruled.77 And his valuing of the good and beautiful—the conception that the
beautiful approximates with the useful—brought together the state and the
citizen.
There was no trace of depersonalization of human actions to markets as
Plato condemned the neglect of public good for the pursuit of profit. And
wealth was neither a signifier of liberty nor an end to itself. For example,
in Eryxias, Socrates showed that wealth serves feeding, clothing, and
protecting oneself and those in need, and its usefulness is limited to secur-
ing health and wellbeing. The dialogue, depending on who wrote it, may
clarify that Plato (prior to Aristotle) distinguished between wealth and
money.78 This differentiation of wealth from money began by mentioning
that money, as a possession in one context, is valueless in another context.
In the dialogue, Socrates questioned, “what kind of useful thing is wealth,”
“[w]hat is the use of wealth and to what end has the acquisition of wealth
been invented as drugs have been discovered to counteract disease?”79
Socrates developed the metaphor that wealth is a remedy to expel disease
and poverty and explained its use to cease suffering. Knowledge is com-
mensurable with wealth.
In another example, Alcibíades I, Socrates offered an alternative to the
moral and social problem of pursuit of knowledge for the sake of prestige
and power over others. This dialogue demonstrates the necessity of educat-
ing a person desiring to hold public office. Socrates reminds his interlocu-
tor, Alcibiades, he must not only learn about justice and injustice but also
about peace and war. By alleging that Athenian politicians are ignorant,
Alcibiades justifies his ambition to hold power. Socrates reminds Alcibia-
des that he has to contend not only with Athenians but also with those
outside of Athens. To remedy his inadequate education, Alcibiades learns
he must give primacy to knowing himself. He must take care of his soul
and the forces that direct his will and actions.80 This dialogue is consistent
with two other Socratic dialogues: Apology and Republic. In Apology,
Socrates “conscious of knowing practically nothing” sought “the greatest
benefit, by trying to persuade” his interlocutors to “not care for” their
“belongings before caring for” themselves and “not to care for the city’s
possessions more than for the city itself.”81 Socrates’s concern for human
beings transferred to conventions of an ideal state. “In Greek states, the
purpose of education was to socialize the young people and to inculcate in
them the values of their elders—particularly their fathers—and of the com-
munity,” Jennifer Roberts explains, adding that “this persisted until teach-
ers like the sophists (‘intellectuals’) came along toward the later part of the
5th century, urging the young to question authority.”82 Questioning au-
thority formulated and reformulated the intellectual history of education.
Questioning authority and speaking truth to power occurred before
Socrates. However, Socrates challenged social conventions that neglected
the care of the self and others—and defended the examined life above sac-
rificing one’s body and soul to obtain political and economic power.
Socrates also rejected the use and misuse of the body of the youth for
pleasure and profit. Athenian democracy left the young men at the mercy
of older men who subjected the young in their effort of training them in
manliness. Socrates offered a model for a ruler who did not subject young
and old. He activated Plato’s critique of the democracy of his time. And
Plato’s critique of unequal freedom in democracy may enable a reflection

on modern democracy centred on private interests that indoctrinate the
next generation into a preconceived economy.83 Plato’s rulers were de-
prived not only of private property but also of self-interest. Their monastic
life was devoted to community and higher truth.84 Those who took on the
role to rule were expected to function as “father and family, Captain and
ship, general and army, shepherd and flocks, doctor and patient, farmer
and plants, ….”85 The metaphors represented the relationship of actors to
steer others to safety, health, prosperity, and peace. According to Des-
mond, the metaphors informed the fundamental ontology of governing.
While Desmond designates kingship as Homeric, it is worth considering
that “[o]n the basis of the evidence available it is impossible to determine
to what degree Greek epic and myth was indebted to the Near East.”86 The
references to the ancient Near East did find themselves not only in the writ-
ings of pre-Socratic thinkers and in Plato but also in the iconography of the
European Middle Ages.
1.4 Ancient economics and education

It was by Socrates’s precepts that Plato sided with lovers of knowledge,
who understood the balance between pain and pleasure, pleasure and free-
dom, and freedom and discipline. The philosopher monarch, the lover of
knowledge, is admired over the profit-loving monarch and over the mon-
arch as the lover of power and honour. Thirty years after Republic, in Laws,
Plato referenced the Persian king, the monarch concerned with honour and
profit, as someone who is admired for his ability to strike a balance “be-
tween subjection and liberty,” and this allowed the Persians to become
masters of numerous peoples. Plato noted the king’s willingness to allow
free speech “at the disposal of the public service. Hence the combination of
liberty with amity and generally diffused intelligence led, for the time, to
all-round progress.”87 The progress was not sustained, and this praise is
accompanied by Plato’s critique that Cyrus, in particular, paid little atten-
tion to the education of his state due to his perpetual preoccupation with
wars. Herodotus, at the time of Cyrus’s growing power, explained that the
state of education of Persian was “three things only: to ride, to shoot the
bow, and to tell the truth.”88 Here too, the complexity of education is not
solely in the service of imperial and economic success; it is an initial and
integral element sustaining a balance between subjection and liberty.
In place of externalizing psychic power towards materiality, Socrates
sought harmony within individual persons with the city-state. Socrates
lived as a philosopher and a teacher of just Politeia. His justice came from
him being conscious of the limits of knowledge. In Xenophon’s Oeco-
nomicus, Socrates is presented as a model student and teacher conversing
on affairs of managing the household. Once again, Cyrus is referenced; this

time during the dialogue of Socrates and two interlocutors, Kritoboulos
and Ischomachos, the former needing to learn about the management of
his possessions and the latter a gentleman, successful manager of his estate,
and in modern terms an economist. According to Strauss, even when Cyrus
was not referenced during the conversation, he was present in the sug-
gested comparison by Xenophon: “Socrates could have taught the art of
generalship as well as the art of managing the household but, as is shown
by the Oeconomicus, he taught only the peaceful art of managing the
household as distinguished from warlike art.”89 Socrates is depicted as the
recipient of knowledge and by learning, Socrates aspired to help others,
including Kritoboulos.
In ancient Greece, farming, like military training, was perceived as a
physical and moral training. Oeconomicus indicated that Cyrus did con-
cern himself also with agriculture. Cyrus not only rewarded those who
advanced the art of cultivating the land but also took part in it.90 He was a
model commander of an army and of a household, rewarding hard work
and sacrifice. Cyrus’s reward system is noted when Xenophon mentioned
the slaves needed “stimulus” of good hopes “even more than free men, to
make them steadfast.”91 Xenophon proceeded to Socrates’s conversation
with Ischomachos, where it becomes evident there are similarities between
managing the households and the armies. Both households and armies
consist of humans, animal, and artefacts in need of order. The role of gods,
their help, in place of sole reliance on human manipulations and formulas
in the operation of army and husbandry, is also acknowledged. According
to Strauss, the difference between Ischomachos and Cyrus, as model man-
agers, is diminished in the dialogue.92 If it is agreed the best economist ac-
quires and preserves the greatest wealth, then the Persian king is a model:
“the Persian king devotes himself most effectively to both arts [peace and
war]. If the Persian king is then the model for the economist, the economic
art would be identical with the kingly art.”93 Since peace and destruction
are both productive means of ruling, economics (as a field of knowledge)
begins by examining examples of those who conduct life and death.
Oeconomicus also conveyed ethical concerns regarding diligence, obedi-
ence, order, and justice. These moral lessons were aimed at maintaining
and maximizing the production of the estate (e.g., the ordering of material
objects and directing the workers). The lessons are twofold: One unfolds
in the form of dialogue between Ischomachos and Socrates, the other on
how Ischomachos teaches the members of his household. The first con-
cerns the relationship and the modality of teaching and learning. During
the conversation, Socrates questions the “how to” of carrying out the ad-
ministration of the house. Concerning the second, the exchange between
Ischomachos and Socrates itself served as a teaching method on obtaining
knowledge. “The lessons offered by the Oeconomicus extend beyond eco-

nomics, to include the very processes of learning…. In sum, Socrates looks
and learns.”94 During the conversation, Socrates is not observing Ischoma-
chos’ household, as the two men are sitting outside, but Socrates by the
way of the conversation imagines how the household operates. This imag-
ining is orientated towards the nature of beings and not solely to the per-
formance of tasks. This, akin to other texts on Socrates dialogues, follows
from question- and-answer, “dependent upon the observations of the
learner and the skill of the instructor, whose questions generate knowledge
in the student.” Hobden continues: “the translation of visual experience
into practical know-how through interrogation might be applied to other
areas of knowledge,” and in this, “Oeconomicus encourages the very
mode of learning it promotes.”95. Oeconomicus is an educational text. It
teaches those who create and transform educational institutions to teach
others how to manage themselves.
Xenophon’s Oeconomicus focused on administration as a priority for
growth of the estate. The text “remained at the base of European society
well into the 18th century,” Moses Finley observed, as “there is not one
sentence that expresses an economic principle or offers an economic analy-
sis, nothing on efficiency of production, ‘rational’ choice, the marketing of
corps.”96 The text offered lessons on techniques for the direction of self
and others as it describes dispositions. During the conversation with
Socrates, Ischomachos spoke of training the members of his household,
starting with his wife and then the slaves. The exchange between Ischoma-
chos and his wife are detailed accounts about what they spoke about. But
when Ischomachos referenced the education of the stewards and slaves, no
dialogue is provided. Ischomachos noted the importance of self-control in
them and only by observing this self-control he would be able to educate
them by praise and punishment. While in educating his wife Ischomachos
relies on reason and persuasion, the primacy in the education of slave in-
volved inspection and surveillance, by which Ischomachos could punish
negligence and reward diligence, extolling his slaves to toil and profit.
I am not suggesting gender was not at stake. In the book, Ischomachos
explains to his wife that God has made women for indoor tasks and man-
agement of the household. Ischomachos’ teachings extend beyond the ob-
jects and their material use and placement in the house. His teachings
demonstrate compliance to a tradition, where both Ischomachos and his
wife are beneficiaries of the same virtues. Acknowledging Oeconomicus is
“a text devoted to ‘masculine’ art of governing,” Foucault noted that the
“virtuous virility of women—strength of character” and “the high mind-
edness”97 relied not only on obedience to man but also on shared virtues
(self-control, sacrifice, and care) communicated by the husband for the
common goal of maintaining their household. Xenophon considered a
basic unity of virtue in men and women. In contrast to Xenophon, “Aris-

totle explicitly rejected the Socratic argument for a basic unity of virtue
which implied that this was identical in men and women.”98 The funda-
mental dissymmetry of gender in Aristotelian conception of man and
woman is “‘political’: it is the relation of ruler and ruled.”99 Foucault sug-
gested that Aristotle initiated the politicization of the household. The an-
cient household served as a model for the construction of the modern state
as the legitimizer of economic conditions.
In Xenophon’s text, Ischomachos’ wife learned through listening and
speaking, in contrast to the education of slaves, who, from an early age,
were taught by surveillance. Ischomachos’ wife also reaps the benefits of
the same virtue of moderation as him, not immediately, but over the years.
The more she invests herself and is invested in the work of managing the
house, the greater her honour.100 Part of her education is to “establish a
relationship of superiority over herself” that reflects “strength of character
and dependence on the man.”101 In her didactic education, she is also
praised for her memory (mnḗmē) of the order of what is taught and the
care (epimeleia) she exercises towards the common purpose of maintaining
the household. In contrast, the education of slaves is centred on rewards:
promotion to stewardship, better meals, and clothing. Examining the edu-
cation of slaves and stewards enables discerning the spirit in which training
for various vocations was operationalized. For Ischomachos, slaves who
have exhibited self-control (enkrateia) are more disposed to care (epimel-
eia) for the household. As a result, they are to profit, both as individuals
and as part of the corporate house. The modality of self-control was hier-
archical, first exhibited by the man who marries willing to act as a head of
a family, then exhibited by the woman who willingly performed the re-
quired tasks within the household, and then by slaves who were under the
command and surveillance of the master. The common purposes of pros-
perity moved the master and slave to be self-governed in search of honour
and respect. The institutions that governed the life and the work of the
slaves prevented their children from becoming decision-makers in the po-
litical and economic affair.
In antiquity, estate management was often approximated with the art of
statesmanship. “The perfect gentleman is an educator,”102 Strauss writes,
differentiating between Socrates and Ischomachos. The latter found he is
capable of instilling benevolence and “good will” towards himself and in
anyone he wished. Socrates asked Ischomachos how. Once again, Ischoma-
chos’ response references Cyrus as an exemplar who did not resort to co-
ercion but to diligence and benevolence, noting these traits are not taught
by force, nor sufficient for a slave to become a steward, leader of slaves.
Here, Socrates pressed, asking how Ischomachos taught his stewards to be
“masters of human beings” because “who can make men fit to rule others
can also teach them to be masters of others.”103 In response, Ischomachos

likened human beings to other animals, noting that “animals learn obedi-
ence in two ways—by being punished when they try to disobey, and by
being rewarded when they are eager to serve you.”104 However, Socrates
posed that if “men” are rewarded and punished it is “to train men for
corporate effort” such as protection of their freedom “against an enemy
and the cultivation of soil” to sustain themselves.105 Socrates emphasized
the use of reward and punishment for preservation of life and protection
of freedom instead of serving political and economic interests, for if the
city was taken, the citizens become slaves. The rewards and honour that
encourage the risk of one’s life to avoid slavery served the individual and
collective freedom. Ischomachos suggested there are additional capacities
in humans, noting that humans also become obedient by word of the
mouth and by being shown that they would profit by being obedient. These
two interrelated precepts offered by Ischomachos are connected to learning
about justice and hard work. Slaves and stewards who are more ambitious
for praise and reward learned that there is justice: reaping a profit from
their hard work. Slaves learned that their obedience often results in better
food and clothes. They learned to serve the economy of the household dili-
gently and without question. Self-control, ambition, and courage were re-
warded as long as they were in line with honest labour.
There are echoes of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus in Aristotle’s Oeco-
nomicus. Aristotle opens chapter one of Oeconomicus by asserting that the
main difference between governing the nation and household is that a na-
tion is in the hands of many, whereas the household is in the hands of a
single ruler. But he continued by noting the management of household is
also similar to statecraft, as a nation is an assemblage of houses. Aristotle
removed ambiguities about the held views on gender by noting: “Divine
Providence has fashioned the nature of man and of woman for their part-
nership. … For Providence made man stronger and woman weaker…. It is
the mother who nurtures, and the father who educates.”106 In contrast to
Xenophon’s narrative approach, Aristotle preached axiomatic positions
that focused on “craftsman analogy” to associate “maleness with activity
and form” and “femaleness with passivity and matter, and in so doing
displaced any notion that the female is the procreator.”107 Aristotle also
found children were a form of investment for the parents. In old age, par-
ents would receive benefit from the toil they underwent to raise their chil-
dren. However, an expected return for parents from children was first and
foremost a moral precept, irreducible to economic calculations.
Aristotle went as far as perceiving politikē as the highest science to which
other sciences are subordinate.108 Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics readdressed
Platonic ideals and integrated reason and virtues in statecraft, offering an
analytic conception of economics as a science of wealth. According to
Joseph Schumpeter, even though Aristotle continued to view economic ac-

tion as bounded by moral philosophy and natural law, he considered the
problem of individual interests in public economy. However, Aristotle
“fought against a purely individualistic approach” and “laid the founda-
tions for the theory of the inherent sociability of men living together.”109
Paradoxically, those who (e.g., Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, and Adam
Smith) later relied on Aristotle’s contributions to politics and economics
gradually positioned the individual at the centre of economic analysis.
Over time, recognition of the Socratic unity of virtue and knowledge and
self and society were reformulated.
1.5 Ancient slavery and pre-modern progress

Although Xenophon and Aristotle present differing treatments of slaves,
their commonality rests in perceiving that the master and slave serve the
same ends and interests.110 This did not mean that the statesman, and the
economic elites, had the analogous power over ruling citizens. Finley
stressed this symbolism and paradox:
the cities in which individual freedom reached its highest expression—

most obviously Athens—were cities in which chattel slavery flourished.
The Greeks, it is well known, discovered both the idea of individual free-
dom and the institutional framework in which it could be realized.111
The use of humans as economic resources continues to both exploit indi-

viduals and shape institutional frameworks. Today too, it is articulated
that the elite and the free poor share the same national (economic growth)
and legal (liberal and democratic) interests. This stands in contrast to the
Ancient East, a world without free men: Persians recognized their freedom
not as a standard for political practice but in relation to a common good.
However, it was in Mesopotamia and under the Hammurabi Code (2250
BC) that commercial treatment of humans gained legal emphasis and gov-
erned free and unfree persons (including women and children). By the time
of Aristotle, when a human slave is called property by law, it is demonstra-
tive of the “inescapable contradiction, which compelled Aristotle to ac-
knowledge that a dichotomy existed between the freedom of man in nature
and the enslavement of man in law.”112 Against the political and economic
hierarchies, the Aristotelian dichotomy of nature and law enabled Enlight-
enment thinkers, such as Locke and Rousseau, to argue for individual
rights as political rights. Such rights, not always derived by consent, were
judged as fitted by the elite powers to institute societies that accepted not
only slavery, peasantry, feudalism, and mercantilism but also socialism
and capitalism alike.
In the case of antiquity, it would be a mistake to assume slavery as the

background for programming freedom and/or assume the relationship be-
tween a slave and a master was solely an economic relation. The education
of slaves reflected the self-mastery of the master and there was not one
overarching formula to treat slaves. For example, Epictetus cited Diogenes,
whose only slave, Manes, had ran away. When Diogenes “was informed
where” Manes was, “he did not think it worthwhile to have him brought
back. He said, it would be a shame if Manes could live without Diogenes,
and Diogenes could not live without Manes.”113
The morality of the master was expected to be a form of internalized
self-reliance, not solely limited by certain contractual judicial rights to use
and control other beings. Diogenes expressed a moral relation to himself
as he indicated his relation to his slave. In reference to Epicurean and Stoic
schools that followed Socrates, Foucault noted, “a slave, after all, may be
more free [sic] than a free man if the latter has not freed himself from the
grip of all the vices, passions, and dependences.”114 Self-control was associ-
ated with the notion of freeing the self from unexamined desires by way of
reason. Here, reasoning was not reduced to a cognitive capacity, manipulated,
and evaluated under (un)certain conditions or instrumentalized by an eco-
nomic doctrine for optimization or predictability. Reason (Pneuma) is what
human beings share with divinity. Unlike other animals, “it is this share that
allows us to make right choice about our perceptions and impulses” providing
us with the capacity to “deliberate about how to act.”115 This power for rea-
son and deliberation became ever more connected to divine providence
after Christianity. And later to the exercise of individual rights and free-
dom after the European Enlightenment.
In antiquity, the status of being free was not a sufficient condition for
economic liberty. Land ownership, as the main form of wealth, played a
major role in the maintenance of ancient societies, situating the landless
citizen below the slave—at times, devoid of political rights due to their
debts to a landowner. “Free men were found in all occupations, but usually
as self-employed workers” and their “labour was casual and seasonal.”116
This did not create a “feeling of competition between slave and free la-
bour.”117 The slave “had a more secure place in the world thanks to his
attachment to an oikos, a princely household, an attachment more mean-
ingful, more valuable, than the status of being juridically free, of not being
owned by someone.”118 As slavery became institutionalized, it was com-
mon to find highly educated physicians, teachers, and merchants as slaves,
who, by the defining features of freedom, did not own land nor participate
in civil decisions. During the Roman Empire, the boundaries were further
complicated as the poor citizens sold their children as slaves, and some
slaves after generations of subordination were liberated. The replacement
of the city-state by an authoritarian Roman monarch dictated a notion of
citizenship where the majority lost their role in the selection of officials and
found their place in the army, by then professionalized where the untrained
faced inequality and competition.
“The path to American slavery began in Rome, not Athens,” William
Phillips asserted, noting that slavery’s main defining element was margin-
alization.119 The transformation of slavery within society through time re-
volved around economic reliance on free poor. There was also a
counter-movement to the Roman Empire, not to slavery but its economic
imperialism. There were certain elements of the ancient Greeks, those in
particular orientated towards the whole of which the individual is a part,
that were reawakened and intensified in the formation of Christian com-
munities. Referencing Didache, Aaron Milavec noted that such a commu-
nity also “offered an alternative way of doing business. This alternative
roundly condemned the exploitation and aggressive aspects of Roman
commercialism as unacceptable to God.”120
The metaphors of the father and the kingdom were transmuted to tran-
scend worldly desires. The spiritual kingdom provided mental distancing
from the commercial Roman kingdom and its impositions. Initially, Chris-
tianity was a cultural, social, and behavioural transformation by initiation
into a way of life:
This Way of Life cut members off from banquets, festivals, and associa-
tions calculated to serve their commercial interests. Having partnered
together in defense against the economic exploitation and expansion in
their society, they fashioned new bonds of reciprocal aid and service
that effectively placed the resources of each to the disposal of all.121
This way of life was revolutionary, animated by knowledge and rituals

(fasting, feasting, and baptism) aimed at cleansing the private and public
body.
Christianity grew in the 1st and 2nd centuries alongside Jewish practices;
gradually, it moved out of Jewish communities, shaking the Roman Em-
pire at its centre, Rome. “The growth of the Christian community was
matched by an expanding organizational presence, as the bishops of Rome
expanded their control over different aspects of Christian life in the city,”
with the church “extending and centralizing its administrative and ritual
control.”122 The growing number of Christians was unsettling to Emperor
Decius, and in 250 CE, he decreed that the Christians follow and make
sacrifices to the gods. Several years later, his predecessors resumed their
attacks, this time on the increasingly powerful Persian Christians. Both ef-
forts produced intractable results. The cultural shift in beliefs was transfor-
mative, Stephen Dyson observed, it intersected with one of the greatest
construction projects in Roman history: Aurelian Walls. Noting the fiscal
and defensive motives for building the walls, Dyson pointed out that it
served to extend the sacred bounds of the city. Only half a century later,
the walls no longer represented Roman “pride” but were instead “inter-
preted as an indication of a new defensiveness and of imperial insecu-
rity.”123 Construction projects (bridges, monuments, and bathhouses)
spoke of instability and fears of the Empire’s internal divisions, eventually
accepting Christianity in the 4th century.
Given that the emperor was the largest landowner, the church of the 6th
century accepted imperial power and provided a legal foundation to slav-
ery.124 Slavery flourished in the Roman world and in Christian and Is-
lamic societies as well: everywhere divine providence was believed to
legitimize it by law. Slavery progressed because the slave trade became a
vocation for profit seekers. By 700–900 CE, slaves exported to the Is-
lamic world played an important part in generating income.125 Eventu-
ally, slavery provided limited means to economic development in late
medieval Europe; the rise of agriculture and sugar during the early Re-
naissance foreshadowed the decline of human trafficking. In its place,
serfdom, free and paid labour grew.126 However, slavery continued
through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment. It was not the poor
of the same city but the Africans—perceived to be strong in body and
spirit—who faced subjection. Slavery, then a legal trade, justified sepa-
rating African children from their parents by force and selling them for
profit. The monetary value of younger slaves was higher since they were
more easily controlled and teachable in comparison to the elders. Hu-
mans as a trainable form of capital were not a consequence of modernity.
However, in Children Slaves in the Modern World, Campbell, Miers, and
Miller elaborate on the significance of history to the modern era when
they note:
[T]he key issue in the modern era is not whether children are literally
bought and sold…. The crucial issue, notably in the contemporary
world, is how children in servitude are treated—the multiple forms and
degrees of coercion used to enslave, trade, and control and thus deprive
them of freedom of choice and movement.127
Treating children as a form capital points to the multiplicity of forms and

degrees of coercion that has been normalized and centred on seamless con-
nectivity to platforms that exploit their attention. The deprivation of free-
dom of choice and movement is materializing in schooling processes that
optimize the production of human capital by incorporating technologies
that better enable monitoring the behavioural, social, and emotional out-
puts of children and enculturating the next generation to surveillance as
they move in space and time.
1.6 Threshold
The Greeks were preoccupied with the problem of political rule; many
thought it is by nature (phusis) that humans do not rule their kind. The
political problem reflected the dissimilarity between humans and animals
by nature. “Cyrus proved to be the exception to the problem of the politi-
cal rule because he knew how to rule in a knowledgeable way. Cyrus’s
knowledge enabled him to rule over human beings.”128 Those ruled by
Cyrus obeyed him willingly. In ancient references, Cyrus was depicted as
the king of Persians and not as the king of Persia; he governed the people
and not just the territory. His benevolence towards his friends and subjects
did not solve the problem of political rule. Xenophon showed that the
power of Cyrus rested in blurring the distinction between politics, city life,
and the economy of the household. According to Whidden, Cyrus treated
those under his rule as women, children, and slaves. Xenophon’s Cyropae-
dia offered a “critique of imperial ambition” instituted by Cyrus.129 Unlike
Machiavelli, who held up Cyrus as a model for princes, Xenophon re-
mained ambivalent towards Cyrus’s authority. The ideal political leader
for Xenophon, as for Plato, remained Socrates, treating the citizens not as
material objects but as his friends.
Renaissance philosophers wrestled with the intellectual history of antiq-
uity. Imperialism gained new impetus when European global expeditions
colonized land and bodies in nation-building efforts. “Xenophon’s book on
Cyrus, on how a diverse society might be managed, remained popular well
into the Enlightenment, inspiring the Founding Fathers of the American
Revolution.”130 Imperialism evolved. Scientific and technological advance-
ments supported military expeditions to increase economic gains and en-
compassed rationalities that granted the use of humans as resources.
Imperialism continues by reconstructing reason, freedom, and faith as the
military and economic destruction of what is now known as the Middle East
continues to erase almost everyone’s memory of the first global empire.
Notes
1 Alan H. Simmons, The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East: Transforming
the Human Landscape (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007).
2 Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 20.
3 Linda M. Hurcombe, Perishable Material Culture in Mrehistory: Investigat-
ing the Missing Majority (New York: Routledge, 2014), 164.
4 Pierr Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire,
trans. Peter T. Daniels (Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2002).
5 Joan Oates, Babylon (New York: Thomas & Hudson Ltd. 1986), 14.
6 Susan Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden That Never Was (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
7 Henry W. F. Saggs, Babylonians (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2000), 35.
8 David Wengrow, What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the
Future of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 31.
9 Ibid., 98.
10 Lauren Ristvet, Ritual, Performance and Politics in the Ancient Near East
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The temple’s communal ori-
entation not only served religion and kingship but also provided an orienta-
tion towards urbanization.
11 Kristina Sauer, “From Counting to Writing: The Innovative Potential of Book-
keeping in Uruk Period Mesopotamia,” in Appropriating Innovations, ed.
Philipp Stockhammer and Joseph Maran (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017).
12 Dominique Charpin, Reading and Writing in Babylon, trans. Jane Marie
Todd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 176.
13 Odette Boivin, “Agricultural Economy and Taxation in the Sealand I King-
dom,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 68, (2016): 46.
14 Charpin, Reading and Writing in Babylon, 247.
15 Harold Innis, Empire and Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1972), 44.
16 Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, 169.
17 Samuel, N. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-nine Firsts in Recorded
History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), 4.
18 Ibid., 6.
19 William F. Pinar, Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Al-
terity: Selected Works of William F. Pinar (New York: Routledge, 2015),
165/170.
20 Oates, Babylon, 163.
21 Benjamin Foster, The Age of Agade (London: Routledge, 2016). “Sales, loans,
and transfers of moveable property were written out and witnessed, as were
sales of real state and significant changes in social status” (p. 38).
22 Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, 118.
23 Ibid., 121.
24 Foster, The Age of Agade, 117.
25 Jack M. Weatherford, The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1997).
26 Marvin A. Powell, “Money in Mesopotamia,” Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 39, no 3 (1996): 228.
27 Gwendolyn Leick, “Sexuality and Religion in Mesopotamia,” Religion Com-
pass 2, no. 2. (2008): 119–33.
Cosmological texts insist that the gods had created human beings to pro-
vide them with sustenance and to alleviate the drudgery of having to main-
tain the world. Although the gods withheld immortality from humans, they
made them from their own substance. This common nature that binds to-
gether creators and their creatures includes the divine force of sex as the
generative principle.
(p. 120)
28 Wengrow, What Makes Civilization, 111.
29 William S. Ferguson, Greek Imperialism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Com-
pany, 1913), 2.
30 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Charles Forster Smith

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
31 Ibid., 38.
32 Moses I. Finley, Thucydides (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942),
155.
33 Athenian Statesman, Pericles cited in Jennifer T. Roberts, The Plague of War,
80.
34 Herodotus, On the War for Greek Freedom: Selections from the Histories,
trans. Tamuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), 94.
35 Ibid., 11. Croesus set in motion the military rivalry with Persia in 600 BC
asked Solon: “Who is the happiest man you have ever seen?” Solon’s exam-
ples were virtuous man devoted to their family and the public service.
36 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Martin Hammond (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2009). Book III, 82.
37 Ibid, 82.
38 Andrew R. Burns, Persian and the Greeks: The Defense of the West, c. 546–
478 B.C. (London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1940).
39 Warwick Ball, Towards one World: Ancient Persia and the West (London:
Olive Branch Press, 2011), 12.
40 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Since the 18th
century the study of the East is integrated with “broadly imperialist view of
the world” (p. 12).
41 Ernest Badian, “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind,” Historia:
Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 7, no. 4 (1958): 425–44.
42 William F. Pinar, The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America:
Lynching, Prison Rape, and The Crises of Masculinity (New York: Peter
Lang, 2001), 948.
43 Herodotus, On the War for Greek Freedom, 17.
44 Warwick Ball, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (London:
Routledge, 2016), 1.
45 Ibid., 1.
46 Said (1979) demonstrates that the modern colonial aggressions inverted the
European’s inferiority by ethnocentrism in literature and science.
47 Finley, The Ancient Economy, 205. Profiting from war was an “unintended,
by-product, not essential to the motivation of war and conquest,” Finley ex-
plained that “the profits of empire in antiquity are well enough understood
today, but the profits of war remain insufficiently examined” (p. 205). The
large empires such as Persia and Rome eventually came to the place where
they could no longer increase their financial and military force. They also suf-
fered from growing self-assertion of their elites.
48 Flower (2017) notes that Xenophon’s Anabasis, Hellenica, and Cyropaedia
are, respectively, microhistory, macrohistory, and biographical. An examina-
tion of these texts highlights cross-references to Xenophon’s other writings.
Both Anabasis and Cyropaedia were used as pedagogical texts in the Euro-
pean Enlightenment and contained lessons on leadership and loyalty (Flower,
2017, 301–22).
49 Tim Rood, “Introduction,” in Xenophon the Expedition of Cyrus, trans.
Robin Waterfield (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), xi.
50 Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 57.
51 James B. Atkinson, “Introduction,” in Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince, ed.
James B. Atkinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976), 34.
52 Cyrus is referred to as a model ruler in Machiavelli’ Prince (Chapter 6). The

ruler does not rely on God for fortune. He relies on his own virtues and ac-
tions. In this context, Strauss (1978) noted, “fear of God is desirable or indis-
pensable in soldiers and perhaps in subjects in general, while the prince need
merely appear religious” (p. 73). For Machiavelli, both Cyrus and Moses
demonstrate an ability to disrupt the existing beliefs and initiate a new order.
53 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Virto Goure-
vitsh and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000), 24.
54 Ibid., 24.
55 Giovanni Giorgini, “The Place of the Tyrant in Machiavelli’s Political Thought
and the Literary Genre of the ‘Prince’,” History of Political Thought 29, no.
2 (2008): 235/237.
56 Xenophon, The School of Cyrus: William Barker’s 1567 Translation of Xeno-
phon’s Cyropaedeia (The education of Cyrus), ed. James Tatum (New York:
Garland Publishing Inc., 1987). This sentence comes in reference to “The insti-
tution of Cyrus” (p. 85). Instead of adopting the modern translations, I choose
William Baker’s 1567 as the first published English translation of Renaissance.
57 Cited in Xenophon’s The School of Cyrus.
58 Xenophon, The School of Cyrus: William Barker’s 1567 Translation of Xeno-
phon’s Cyropaedeia, 20. There are multiple recent and modern translations of
Xenophon’s text; the reliance on a Renaissance edition and translation is in-
tentional and in line with the argument put forth.
59 Ibid., 20.
60 Ibid., 20.
61 The ancient understanding of Persia is derived from “overwhelming reliance
on Greek historiography” (Briant, 2002, p. 8). Few to no written account by
Persians have survived and so there is an appropriation of Cyrus in the West
by Western authors.
62 Leo Straus, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse; An Interpretation of the Oeco-
nomicus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 97.
63 Xenophon, The School of Cyrus, 182.
64 Ibid, 182–83.
65 Robert C. Bartlett, “How to Rule the World: An Introduction to Xenophon’s
The Education of Cyrus,” American Political Science Review 109, no. 1
(2015): 146.
66 Christopher Nadon, “From Republic to Empire: Political revolution and the
Common Good in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus,” American Political Sci-
ence 90, no. 2 (1996): 361–74.
67 Jane Grogan, “Many Cyruses: Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’ and English Renais-
sance Humanism,” Hermathena 183 (2007): 63.
68 Xenophon, Memorabilia, I. vi (13), 73. The practice of virtues concerning
common good for the Persians were not only associated with taking pleasure
in being “good” and “noble” but also associated with moderation in plea-
sures and accompanied training the soul in self-restraint.
69 Xenophon, Memorabilia, I. vi (15), 75.
70 Pierer Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge: Belknap Harvard,
2002), 33–34.
71 Socrates even knowing that he was wrongly sentenced to death still followed
the law. The relationship of law and knowledge is complicated. In order to
know, the human being must conform to a system of rules and be led by a set
of norms, beliefs, and behaviours.
72 Richard Kraut, “The Defense of Justice in Plato’s Republic,” in Plato’s Re-

public: Critical Essays, ed. Richard Karut (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 1997), 205.
73 Plato, Republic, V.473c-e.
There is no end to suffering, Glaucon, for our cities, and none, I suspect, for
the human race, unless either philosophers become kings in our cities, or the
people who are now called kings and rulers become, real, true philosopher.
(p. 175)
74 Plato, Republic, 514a, 220.
75 Plato, Republic, 517a, 223.
76 Plato, Republic, 527c, 233. Pointing to the benefit of “contemplation of the
nature of numbers by means of thought alone,” Socrates explained: “it should
not be for the sake of buying and selling, like tradesmen and deals” (p. 223).
77 Plato, The Republic, 415a, 108. The order mattered for it distinguished if one
ruled by truth or by desire. After mentioning that all citizens are brothers,
Socrates is quoted saying when god
used a mixture of gold in the creation of those of you who were fit to be
rulers, which is why they are most valuable. He used silver for those who
were to be auxiliaries, and iron and bronze for the farmers and the rest of
the skilled workers.
But Socrates clarifies if a child of iron and bronze is born to fathers of gold
(the guardians) “they must feel no kind of pity” for their child, sending them
to “join the skilled workers or farmers.” Mentioning this, Socrates asked
whether his interlocutor thinks people would believe this. The reply was “Not
the actual people you tell it to. But their children might, and their children
after them, and the later generations” (pp. 108–110). This example reflects
the power of ideologies in social organization.
78 If Eryxias is not a Platonic dialogue, the views on wealth and knowledge it
presents are in line with Xenophon’ Memorabilia account of Socrates—and in
line with Herodotus’s account of Salon’s defining feature of happy and moral
life. According to Eichholz (1935), the dialogue attracted the “eighteenth cen-
tury” thinkers “as a work of enlightened ethical purpose,” where the “nine-
teenth century” thinkers condemned “it as an inept imitation of Plato’s early
writing” (p. 129). This conveys a shift in historical consciousness and scholar-
ship of two different centuries in approaching an ancient text.
79 Max L. W. Laistner, “Dialogue called ‘Eryxias’,” in Greek Economics, ed. and
trans. M. L. W. Laistner (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923), 55.
80 Plato, “Alcibiades I,” in Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1892). Alcibiades became aware he does not know the art of
ruling. Socrates responded that Alcibiades should not despair for he is young
and can learn: “In taking care of what belongs to you, you do not take care of
yourself… the art is not one which makes any of our possessions, but which
makes ourselves better” (p. 3372). It is the soul that rules and directs the
body. Respectively, Socrates is talking to Alcibiades’ soul.
81 Plato, “Apology,” In Five Dialogues: Euthephro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Pha-
edo. Edited by M. A. Grube, 21–44. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2002, 40.
82 Jennifer T. Roberts, The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta and the Struggle for
Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2017), 28.
83 Alain Badiou, Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters, trans. Susan
Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
84 Michael Jackson, “Philosopher-Kings and Bankers,” Theoria: A Journal of

Social and Political Theory 107 (2005): 19–35.
85 William Desmond, Philosopher-kings of Antiquity (London: Continuum Intl
Pub Group, 2011), 6. The image of the ruler has transfigured through times.
Emphasizing the dominant Greco-Roman understanding of kings is Homeric,
William Desmond noted, “the king is the best of his people…. In valour, elo-
quence, birth and wealth, he shows that human beings are not equal, that he
is better than most and that he should lead therefore and others follow” (p. 5).
86 Carol G. Thomas, “The Roots of Homeric Kingship,” Historia: Zeitschrift
Für Alte Geschichte 15, no. 4 (1966): 391.
87 Plato, The Laws of Plato (III, 694), 76.
88 Herodotus, On the War for Greek Freedom, 40.
89 Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 87.
90 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, IV, 15–25. Cyrus not only sets the example for his
people but also publicly rewards those who obey him (and follow his exam-
ple) willingly.
91 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, V, 14–18, 405.
93 Ibid. 114.
94 Fiona Hobden, “Xenophon’s Oeconomicus,” in Cambridge Companion to
Xenophon, ed. Michael A. Flower (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017), 165.
95 Ibid, 168. The projectors, electronic devices, and artificial intelligence are the
common tools of modern classrooms. What do they promote to the next gen-
erations about how to live a human life?
96 Moses I Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999), 19.
97 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 84.
98 Ibid., 84.
99 Ibid., 84.
100 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, VII (42), 429.
101 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 84.
103 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 473.
104 Ibid., 473.
105 Ibid., 405.
106 Aristotle, “Oeconomia,” in Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes, XVIII: Meta-
physics Books x–xiv, Oeconomica and Magna Moralia, trans. H. Threden-
nick and G. C. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Book
I (4), 333.
107 Maryanne C. Horowitz, “Aristotle and Women,” Journal of the History of
Biology 9, no. 2 (1976): 196. The context of the analogy of craftsman was
first offered by Plato in Republic and was changed to the biological reproduc-
tion theory by Aristotle. “While Aristotle’s Politics was a standard textbook
in medieval and early modern universities, Plato’s Republic was not widely
read in the West until its translation from Greek to Latin during the early fif-
teenth century” (p. 187).
108 Aristotle, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Politics makes use of remaining
sciences, Aristotle continued, “because it legislates what one ought to do and
what to abstain from,” and by this, it encompasses other knowledge of “hu-
man good” (p. 3).
109 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch

(London: Allen & Unwin, 1954), 13.
110 Paul Millett, “Aristotle and Slavery in Athens,” Greece & Rome 54, no. 2
(2007): 181.
111 Moses I. Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1981), 114.
112 William L. Westermann, “Slavery and the Elements of Freedom in Ancient
Greece,” in Slavery in Classical Antiquity, ed. Moses I. Finley (New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1968), 18.
113 George Long, The Discourses of Epictetus (London: George Bell & Sons,
1890/2000), 294.
114 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1981–82, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Pica-
dor, 2005), 118.
115 Peter J. Anderson, “Introduction,” in Seneca: Selected Dialogues and Conso-
lations (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2015), xxi.
116 Finley, The Ancient Economy, 73.
117 Ibid., 185.
118 Ibid., 66.
119 William D. Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic
Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 4–5.
120 Milavec Aaron, Didache: Faith, Hope and Life of the Earliest Christian Com-
munities (New York, Newman Press, 2003), 176.
121 Ibid., 227.
122 Stephen L. Dyson, Rome. A Living Portrait of an Ancient City (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 341.
123 Ibid., 342–45.
124 Finley, The Ancient Economy, 86–89.
125 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byz-
antium and the Islamic World. (Ontario: Broadway Press, 2014), 141. Cor-
doba and Baghdad were at the centre of slave transactions.
126 Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times, 106–07.
127 See Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller, Children in Slavery
Through the Ages (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009). The quote is from the
second volume of Children Slaves in the Modern World (Ohio: Ohio Univer-
sity Press, 2011). (2011, p. 10).
128 Christopher Whidden, “Cyrus’s Imperial Household: An Aristotelian Reading
of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia,” The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Po-
litical Thought 25, no. 1 (2008): 32.
129 Ibid., 32.
By using the household as a blueprint for his empire, Cyrus discovers an
incredibly effective means by which to create an empire the sheer size of
which the ancients had never seen and to avoid the problem of political rule
that other less visionary rulers had, according to Xenophon, always faced—
at least until Cyrus.
(p. 58)
130 Niedl MacGregor, “The Many Meaning of Cyrus Cylinder,” in The Cyrus
Cylinder and Ancient Persia: A new Beginning for the Middle East, ed. John
Curtis (Hong Kong: The British Museum Press, 2013), 11. Cyrus’s religious
toleration situated him enjoying the protection of many deities.
Cyrus Cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah speaks in
words very similar to those used by Marduk. … It is impossible to know
whether the Jewish and Babylonian writers are merely attributing to their
own gods the action of the king, or whether the Persians themselves en-
couraged the different people to see Cyrus as enjoying the particular protec-
tion of the many deities of the empire.
(p. 13)
Bibliography
Aaron, Milavec. Didache: Faith, Hope and Life of the Earliest Christian Commu-
nities. New York: Newman Press, 2003.
Anderson, Peter J. “Introduction.” In Seneca: Selected Dialogues and Consola-
tions, edited by Peter Anderson, xi–xxx. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Com-
pany, 2015.
Aristotle. “Politics.” In The Politics of Aristotle. Translated by Ernest Barker. Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Aristotle. “Oeconomia.” In Aristotle in Twenty Three Volumes, XVIII: Metaphys-
ics Books x–xiv, oeconomica and Magna Moralia. Translated by H. Thredennick
and G. C. Armstrong. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Aristotle. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert C. Bartlett and
Susan Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. https://webcat.
library.ubc.ca/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=5032545
Atkinson, James B. “Introduction.” In Niccolò Machiavelli’s the Prince. Indianap-
olis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976.
Badian, Ernst. “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind.” Historia:
Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 7, no. 4 (1958): 425–44. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/4434588.
Badiou, Alain. Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters. Translated by Susan
Spitzer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Ball, Warwick. Towards One World: Ancient Persia and the West. London: Olive
Branch Press, 2011.
Ball, Warwick. Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire, 2nd ed. Lon-
don: Routledge, 2016.
Bartlett, Robert C. “How to Rule the World: An Introduction to Xenophon’s The
Education of Cyrus.” American Political Science Review 109, no. 1 (2015): 143–
54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055414000550.
Boivin, Odette. “Agricultural Economy and Taxation in the Sealand I Kingdom.”
Journal of Cuneiform Studies 68 (2016): 45–65. https://doi.org/10.5615/
jcunestud.68.2016.0045.
Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Trans-
lated by Peter T. Daniels. Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2002.
Burns, Andrew R. Persian and the Greeks: The Defense of the West, c. 546–478
B.C. London: Edward Arnold, 1940.
Charpin, Dominique. Reading and Writing in Babylon. Translated by Jane Marie
Todd. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Charpin, Dominique. Writing, Law and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopota-

mia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Desmond, William. Philosopher-kings of Antiquity. London: Continuum Intl Pub
Group, 2011.
Dyson, Stephen L. Rome: A Living Portrait of an Ancient City. Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Eichholz, D. E. “The Pseudo-Platonic Dialogue Eryxias.” The Classical Quarterly
29, no. 3/4 (1935): 129–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/636604.
Ferguson, Frances. Pornography, the Theory What Utilitarianism Did to Action.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Finley, Moses I. Thucydides. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942.
Finley, Moses I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. New York: Viking Press,
1980
Finley, Moses I. Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, edited by Brent Shaw and
Reichard Saller. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981.
Finley, Moses I. The Ancient Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999.
Flower, Michael A. “Xenophon as a Historian.” In Cambridge Companion to Xe-
nophon, edited by Michael A. Flower, 301–22. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2017.
Foster, Benjamin. The Age of Agade. London: Routledge, 2016.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol 2.: The Use of Pleasure. Translated
by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de
Franc 1981–82, edited by Frederic Gros. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Giorgini, Giovanni. “The Place of the Tyrant in Machiavelli’s Political Thought
and the Literary Genre of the ‘Prince’.” History of Political Thought 29, no. 2
(2008): 230–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26224004.
Grogan, Jane. “‘Many Cyruses’: Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’ and English Renaissance
Humanism.” Hermathena 183 (2007): 63–74. www.jstor.org/stable/23041680.
Gwyn, Campbell, Miers, Suzanne, and Miller, Joseph C. Children in Slavery
through the Ages. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009.
Gwyn, Campbell, Miers, Suzanne, and Miller, Joseph C.. Children Slaves in the
Modern World. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011.
Hadot, Pierre. What is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 2002.
Herodotus. On the War for Greek Freedom: Selections from the Histories. Trans-
lated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003.
Hobden, Fiona, “Xenophon’s Oeconomicus.” In Cambridge Companion to Xeno-
phon, edited by Michael, A. Flower, 152–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017.
Horowitz, Maryanne C. “Aristotle and Women.” Journal of the History of Biology
9, no. 2 (1976): 183–213. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4330651.
Hurcombe, Linda M. Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory: Investigating the
Missing Majority. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1971.
Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

1972.
Jackson, Michael. “Philosopher-Kings and Bankers.” Theoria: A Journal of Social
and Political Theory 107 (2005): 19–35. www.jstor.org/stable/41802289.
Kramer, Samuel N. History Begins at Sumer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1956.
Kraut, Richard. “The Defense of Justice in Plato’s Republic.” In Plato’s Republic:
Critical Essays, edited by Richard Karut, 199–221. Lanham: Rowman & Little-
field Publishers, 1997.
Kriwaczek, Paul. Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 2010.
Laistner, Max L. W. “Dialogue called ‘Eryxias’.” In Greek Economics, edited and
translated by Max L. W. Laistner, 41–64. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923.
Leick, Gwendolyn. “Sexuality and Religion in Mesopotamia.” Religion Compass
2, no. 2. (2008): 119–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00063.x.
Long, George. The Discourses of Epictetus. London: George Bell & Sons,
1890/2000. https://archive.org/details/discoursesofepic033057mbp.
MacGregor, Neil. “The Many Meaning of Cyrus Cylinder.” In They Cyrus Cylin-
der and Ancient Persia: A New Beginning for the Middle East, edited by John
Curtis, 9–15. Hong Kong: The British Museum Press, 2013.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Translated by James B. Atkinson. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976.
Millett, Paul. “Aristotle and Slavery in Athens.” Greece and Rome 54, no. 2 (Oct.
2007): 178–209. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383507000150.
Nadon, Christopher. “From Republic to Empire: Political Revolution and the
Common Good in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus.” The American Political
Science Review 90, no. 2 (1996): 361–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/2082890.
Oates, Joan. Babylon, 2nd ed. New York: Thomas & Hudson, 1986.
Phillips, William D. Jr. Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic
Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Pinar, William F. The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching,
Prison, Rape, and The Crises of Masculinity. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Pinar, William F. Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity:
Selected Works of William F. Pinar. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Plato. “Alcibiades I.” In Dialogues of Plato, edited and translated by Benjamin
Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892.
Plato. The Laws of Plato. Translated by Alfred Edward Taylor. London: J. M.
Dent, 1934.
Plato. “Apology.” In Five Dialogues: Euthephro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo,
edited by M. A. Grube, 21–44. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2002.
Plato. Five Dialogues: Euthphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, 2nd ed. Trans-
lated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002.
Plato. The Republic, edited by G.R.F. Ferrari. Translated by Tom Griffith. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Plato. Theaetetus and Sophist, edited and translated by Christopher Rowe. Cam-
Pollock, Susan. Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden That Never Was. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Powell, Marvin A. “Money in Mesopotamia.” Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient 39, no. 3 (1996): 224–42. http://www.jstor.org.
Ristvet, Lauren. Ritual, Performance and Politics in the Ancient Near East. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Roberts, Jennifer. The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta and the Struggle for Ancient
Greece. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Rood, Tim. “Introduction.” In The Expedition of Cyrus. Translated by Robin Wa-
terfield, vii–xxxiv. London: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Saggs, Henry W. F. Babylonians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Sauer, Kristina. “From Counting to Writing: The Innovative Potential of Book-
keeping in Uruk Period Mesopotamia.” In Appropriating Innovations, edited by
Philipp Stockhammer, and Joseph Maran, 12–28. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch.
London: Allen & Unwin, 1954.
Simmons, Alan H. The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East: Transforming the
Human Landscape. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007.
Strauss, Leo. Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse; An Interpretation of the Oeco-
nomicus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970.
Strauss, Leo. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago. University of Chicago Press,
1978.
Strauss, Leo. On Tyranny: Revised and Expanded Edition, edited by Virto Goure-
vitsh and Michael S. Roth. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000.
Thomas, Carol G. “The Roots of Homeric Kingship.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für
Alte Geschichte 15, no. 4 (1966): 387–407. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.
ubc.ca/stable/4434948.
Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Martin Hammond. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
Weatherford, Jack M. The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace. New
York: Crown Publishers, 1997.
Wengrow, David. What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future
of the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Westermann, William L. “Slavery and the Elements of Freedom in Ancient Greece.”
In Slavery in Classical Antiquity, edited by Moses I. Finley, 17–32. New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1968.
Widden, Christopher. “Cyrus’s Imperial Household: An Aristotelian Reading of
Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.” The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political
Thought 25, no. 1 (2008): 31–62. https://doi.org/10.1163/20512996.
Xenophon. “Memorabilia.” In Xenophon IV: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Sym-
posium, Apology, edited by E. H. Warmington. Translated by E. C. Marchant
and O. J. Todd, 3–359. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968
Xenophon, “Oeconomicus.” In Xenophon IV: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Sym-
posium, Apology, edited by E. H. Warmington. Translated by E. C. Marchant
and O. J. Todd, 363–525. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.
Xenophon. The School of Cyrus: William Barker’s 1567 Translation of Xeno-

phon’s Cyropaedeia (The education of Cyrus), James Tatum ed. New York: Gar-
land Publishing Inc., 1987.
Yolton, John W. and Jean S. Yolton. “Introduction.” In Some Thoughts Concern-
ing Education by John Locke, edited by John W. and Jean S. Yolton, 1–74. Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
2 Humans as property
What factors initiated the transition from oikonomia to the divine econ-
omy and eventually to the political economy? One facilitating element was
the shift in the political and legal conceptions interdependent with the rise
of commercial and imperial expansion from the 13th to the 18th century
in Europe and the formation of nation states concerned with liberty and
equality. Discourses on property rationalized this transformation and were
connected to wider networks, conventions, and themes concerning human
agency in relation to divine will. Such a notional agency was contingent on
learning from historical events, including the decline of the Byzantine Em-
pire, the rise of Islam in Asia Minor, and the rise of the Normans in
Europe.
This chapter explores the shifts in positioning the human person in rela-
tion to property by examining the contribution of Christian thought to
modern economics. In this respect, Weber’s examination of the role of reli-
gion in economics argued that transcendental ends were “rationalized” for
the advancement of worldly pursuits and organization of bureaucracy in
support of capitalism.1 Weber did not compare the rationality of the Re-
formed against Catholicism but identified the contribution of “Western
monasticism” in developing “a systematic method of rational conduct
with the purpose of overcoming the status of nature to free man from the
power of irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on na-
ture.”2 With this came a mode of “self-control” that “trained the monk,
objectively, as a worker in the service of the kingdom of God, and thereby
further, subjectively, assured the salvation of his soul.”3 The association of
self-control and living a happy life was the connecting link between the self
and the ancient household management. Christian thinkers revised that
link and contributed to the legal and political conceptions of modern indi-
vidual and nation-state.4 Under religious practices, self-control developed
methodically in relation to rational conduct and advanced in association
with property and labour. Conceiving the self as a property is a central pil-
lar of human capital theory. This chapter examines those ideas proceeding
DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-3
Humans as property 45
to political economy, where the apprehension of the individual person un-

derwent transformation and the reason of the state became focused on
worldly government.
2.1 Monasticism and secular state

The Roman Empire “never had displayed sufficient regard for the peasants
and slaves at the bottom of the social pyramid,” Brian Tierney reminds; it
was a system in which the richest men were exempt from taxation and
enjoyed opportunities to grow richer while “a crushing burden was laid on
the poor.”5 This misuse of political and economic power, attributed to cor-
ruption and political civil war, does not necessarily explain the fall of the
Roman Empire but contextualizes its gradual weakening and the growth
of religion. The Christian Church at first diverged from the Roman state
but gradually by the privileges it was granted—legal (allowing bishops to
act as judges in civil disputes involving Christians) and economic (tax ex-
emption for the clergy)—became integrated into the imperial government.
Constantine was the first Roman emperor that welcomed the church. In
return for his support, he required “that the bishops would conduct them-
selves as loyal servants of the imperial government.”6 The church’s teach-
ings on love and the heavenly kingdom were reformulated over time by the
demands and impositions of the empire.
According to Tierney, the Western world endured a long period of
chaos after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century. This was fol-
lowed by further acceptance of the role of the Church in government.
Siedentop explains that “the ancient family had provided the building
blocks for an entire society underlying the ancient polis”; by the 6th cen-
tury, Christian beliefs and practices had “destroyed the ancient family” as
a religious association.7 Strengthening the ecclesiastical order had both
direct and indirect impacts on economic organization. It provided control
to the lay lords who exploited the common people by the way of the
church.8 During the early Middle Ages, regulations and orders made by
the ecclesiastical authority of the church became integrated with the Ro-
man legal system and codes of conduct. One impacted area concerned the
attitudes and laws towards wealth and poverty. From the Church’s teach-
ing, “voluntary poverty was a form of asceticism good in itself, a state
pleasing to God,” where “involuntary poverty gave rise to strong tempta-
tions to theft and perjury.”9 Even though idleness was condemned, the
medievalists did not perceive poverty as an individual responsibility. Pov-
erty had a spiritual and economic currency within the intertwined univer-
sal order normalized for the rule of lords.10 Property and poverty slowly
became central to the theological, legal, and philosophical debate. Theo-
logians thought through worldly management by the way of charity
towards those who decidedly abandoned the world for spiritual transcen-
dence. The early Christian monasteries developed their practices perpen-
dicular and parallel to the feudal society. They were private foundations
of the proprietary class endowments, and landlords retained a large mea-
sure of control over them. By the 9th century, monasteries were expected
to produce revenues for the founder or his family. The growth of the
monastic life was not solely an economic calculation at first.11 The monas-
tic life was a retreat from military and economic commands. Its educa-
tional and communal benefits were aimed at higher goods beyond the
material world.
Monasteries provided those who were inclined to study and serve with a
shelter from the outside world. Feudal conditions influenced these mis-
sions. According to Thompson, the “founding of a monastery in the Mid-
dle Ages was a lucrative form of investment,”12 with the only restriction on
landlords and their heirs being that the monasteries could not be secular-
ized or abolished. By the 13th century, however, not only monasteries
served certain economic ends but the mixture of religious and worldly mo-
tives provided them with a degree of control beyond a “tract of land, but
entire villages” in some cases obtaining rights such as “right of market,
right of collecting tolls and tithes, toll and tithe exemptions, coinage privi-
leges, right of administering justice.”13 Obtaining such rights made some
monasteries richer than bishoprics, since they were not hampered by mili-
tary and financial burdens. Even though there were costs associated with
the daily support of the inmates and the maintenance of schools and hos-
pitals, the wealth generated from monasteries was disproportionate to the
practical benefits they provided to the society. “The ‘dead hand’ kept much
of their surplus wealth from free circulation for the advantage of soci-
ety,”14 Thompson explained, adding:
The incongruity between the enormous wealth enjoyed by many mon-

asteries and the vow of poverty taken by the monks is apparent. … In-
dividually the inmates possessed nothing; as a group their incomes were
very great and—unless a stern abbot rigidly enforced the Rule—the
monks lived in luxury.15
Monasteries were not solely a place of learning, devotion, and meditation.

The stern abbots as managers kept the monks in poverty and at work,
while benefiting landlords (the modern equivalent of shareholders). Mon-
asteries and the livelihood of the monks were also influenced by the poli-
cies of the church.
The later medieval church was a complex organization with evidence
suggesting that “through usury and other monopoly-maintenance policies
may have inadvertently and unintentionally encouraged temporal market
developments.”16 Its effect, according to Tierney, was to establish the

“doctrine of the just price.”17 Such power accompanied the acceptability of
ecclesiastical orders as the institutions responsible for private and public
welfare. This plentitude of power underwent reassessment by the scholas-
tics. After the Germanic and Viking invasions, Europe was fractured and
divided on “every dimension: between church and state, and within them
between multiple layers of authority from emperor and pope through
baron and bishops”; Harold Perkin explains that the rise of universities in
France and England was a response to society’s “demanded allegiance of
two systems of law, canon and civil, with equal jurisdiction over the faith-
ful.”18 With this orientation came a discontinuity and blending of monas-
teries and universities. According to Willinsky, medieval learning
encouraged the development of “intellectual property transactions” in
three steps:
First the nobility transferred deeds of property to the monastery to en-

able monastics to devote their lives to prayer. Second, monastics trans-
formed these lands, through skilled management and husbandry, into
sources of sufficient wealth that enabled some to devote time to learn-
ing… Third, as monasticism gradually accepted and acknowledged
learning as pious practice, the monastery’s production of learned text
could be thought of as transposing the original gift of property.19
These transformations brought the acceptance of and devotion to learning

as they also transposed human understanding of property and ownership.
At the time universities were taking shape, there was a gradual merger of
the old aristocracy (landlords) and the commercial families (owners of
moveable capital) across Europe.20 Janet Coleman associated this with so-
cial and economic changes that carried debates over dominion and prop-
erty from the 12th to the 17th centuries. According to Coleman: “The
increasing use of money and the development of an elaborate structure of
financial credit in the new market economy… gave rise to impersonal
transaction unaffected by considerations of the status of buyer and seller”
producing early conventions of “capitalism.”21 Even though natural law
trusted reason to justify the conventional uses of property between theo-
logical and legal tenets, there existed a gap in specifying how private prop-
erty should be obtained. Ecclesiastical power had grown in its administration
of private and common property and used its authority to direct worldly
affairs. The question of dominium became an avenue to conceptualize the
limits of authorities concerned with temporal and spiritual government.
Within the economic feudal system and its theological dominance, domi-
nium served as an entry point to clarify the natural law and those legal
rights derived from it.
Objection to the Church’s power grew from scholastics’ commentary on

the jurisdiction of the Pope and Emperor and their exercise of authority in
God’s kingdom. The rediscovery of the text of Aristotle and Arabian think-
ers at the end of the 11th century presented an intellectual challenge to
Christian worldviews and theological dogmas. Aristotelian ethics, politics,
and metaphysics stimulated the development of a theory of the state that
had no requirement for the involvement of Church and papacy.22 The im-
plication was an inchoate conception of acting authority in accord with the
reason for worldly management. In the integration of Christianity with
Aristotelian philosophy, scholastics’ conceptions of civil codes developed
with attention to the growing power of the church. The relationship be-
tween papacy and empire as the central subject of political debate precipi-
tated reflections on the notion of human and divine agency, a relationship
with no need of a mediator. “Whereas many ancient thinkers held that
reason and passion are alternative sources for action, medieval thinkers
hold that the agent has an underlying rational faculty that chooses between
different alternatives.”23 This underlying rational faculty was theological
and moral rather than economic and epistemic. It imposed limits on hu-
man actions, desires, and passions.
Aristotelian philosophy and its eventual integration with Christianity
had a great effect on conceptions of human will (and agency) emphasized
during the Renaissance and modernity. For example, the Aristotelian no-
tion of time as infinite and the world as permanently governed by the laws
of nature stood in contrast to the Augustinian time as finite.24 “Time,”
according to Ernst Kantorowicz, gradually “became the symbol of the
eternal continuity and immortality of the great collective called the human
race:”
It gained, through its connection with ideas of religious and scientific

progress, an ethical value when one recognized that ‘the daughter of
Time was Truth.’ Finally, the unlimited continuity of the human race
itself bestowed a new meaning on many things. It made meaningful, for
example, the craving after worldly fame, the perptualdi nominis desid-
erium, which increasingly became a decisive impulse for human
action.25
The conceptions of time as continuous and nature as an inner principle

challenged Christian assumptions. With its clear stance on creation and the
Last Day, the church objected to Aristotelian conceptions of nature and
time. This new apprehension of time influenced the Western civilization
and its scientific, legal, and political approaches to describe the human
race.
2.2 Thomas Aquinas: the church and the political community

The cultural and theological circumstances determined the interpretations
of Aristotle. For example, Thomas Aquinas adjusted Aristotelian philoso-
phy to align it with the hierarchical view of the natural order in Christian
theology. For Aquinas, “the most important aim was to promote the teach-
ing and work of the Church. The result was that Aquinas did all his writing
as a theologian, not as a philosopher.”26 This is to say that the natural
philosophy of Aristotle underwent a synthesis of Christian philosophy.
Aquinas thought: “since the very act of free choice is traced to God as the
cause, it necessarily follows that everything happening from the exercise of
free choice must be subject to divine providence.”27 Human nature was a
participation in divine laws and operations. Aquinas conceived “the law
directs man in his actions” but is ordained to look after the “common
good” and certain “particular ends.”28 In this rested a commensurability of
the common good for its own end and also with particular ends that direct
human action. Michel Villey noted the classical doctrine of natural law
“attributes a transcendental end” in “the service of justice. It does not rec-
ognize in it any other end, neither ‘utility’, nor ‘wealth’, nor ‘order’, nor
‘security’.”29 However, Aquinas’ philosophy had implications for herme-
neutics of utility and private property. The material world fulfilled tran-
scendent ends and private property ruled worldly affairs. As Aquinas lays
the foundation for natural rights outlining the ethics of the preservation of
humans and the worship of God, the notion of dominium natural took
precedence over private property. Aquinas thought:
… in the state of innocence man had mastership [dominium] over the

animals by commanding them. But of the natural powers and the body
itself man is master not by commanding, but by using them. Thus, also
in the state of innocence man’s mastership [sic] over plants and inani-
mate things consisted not in commanding or in changing them, but in
making use of them without hindrance.30
Human ownership is for use of things and this right of use is governed by
reason and will. This notion of use did not leave out human use of other
humans who were conceived as animals, but its primary aim was the pres-
ervation of individuals and their communities. By the same logic, when
Aquinas reasoned about the relationship and superiority of the monarch
over others, it was for the sake of trust that “one” instead of many should
“look after the common good” and ensure that those trusted with “knowl-
edge and virtue” act in “benefit of others.”31 The order is relevant here, as
one can, regardless of knowledge, care for the common good in the
Aristotelian sense, but it becomes necessary to benefit others when one has
the knowledge and virtue to do so.
Drawing from Aristotle, Aquinas had also argued “that private property
is not merely legitimate but essential to the satisfactory conduct of political
life.” He feared that “if all things are instead held in common, everyone
will avoid working and in consequence help to bring about a state of gra-
tuitous poverty.”32 The construct of private property was a functional ele-
ment in preventing confusion and disorder in the state; just as the monarch
was given the right to exercise power over a specific domain, so were his
subjects entitled to certain rights. This notion of right (jus) had God as the
primary owner and humans as the secondary owners of natural property.
The antithesis of private property was justice. Placing justice above other
virtues, Aquinas found “equality” as the central element directing human
relations, where “right is the object of justice.” And “justice implies equal-
ity.”33 The circular logic is hierarchical as it positions humans in relation
to God. The divine law (fas) transcends human law (jus).34 This distinction
clarified that positive rights are created by common consent and are de-
creed from the Prince (above the people) who acted as the administrator of
rights for each person in accordance with their military, magisterial, and
priestly position.35 Aquinas situated the King’s persona from a religious
constitution to a legal administrative body, and the position that the legal
authority trusted by divine will to the King was to defend and preserve the
body politic.
The human will and intellect are derived from nature; they are insufficient
by themselves or together to ensure “the good of another and thus act in
accordance with the right of others.”36 Not only administered justice also
ought to be a cultivated habit—that is, it should act in control of the per-
sons. Natural faculties are at the mercy of dispositions but directed by will
and capacity for action. Habits are not conditioned in a behavioural-science
sense. On the contrary, they are part of human development and preserva-
tion as well as measures for the exercise of self-control. Habits are distinct
from that which they are disposed of, meaning they are not based on asso-
ciations eliciting a desired response but prompt human potentiality to act or
to forbear an act. This is the first condition of forming good habits, which
enable movement towards self-perfection. “The second condition is that
what is in potency in regard to something else, should be capable of deter-
mination in several ways and to various things.” The third condition of
Aquinas’ good habits (such as prudence) is to “direct us to the proper means,
and as a result, to the true end.”37 Moral virtues and disposition are fine-
tuned by living in accordance to the principles of reason. Accompanied by
making decisions, acts are prerequisite to forming habits; habits can be di-
minished and strengthened by acting in the world. Humans are not to be
controlled or manipulated so they develop the right habits and arrive at
their welfare. Noting that the definition of virtues is incorporated into the
idea of a morally good habit, Nicholas Austin differentiates Aquinas’ under-
standing of habit from a reductive modern psychological understanding by
noting its goodness is oriented towards wisdom and love—a caring act to
another as well as to one’s self.38 For Aquinas, virtue ethics dominated moral
precepts. He clarified: “Things referable to oneself are referable to another,
especially in regard to the common good. Wherefore legal justice, in so far
as it directs to the common good, may be called a general virtue.”39 The
common good is not solely shaped by legal institutions but also by virtue
and by fair treatment of one and another. This individualism elaborated
the need for “particular justice” oriented “to the good of another individ-
ual.”40 The notion of the common good and the good of another were in-
tegral to virtue ethics’ affirming good for others.
Coleman emphasizes that Aquinas’ philosophy had “twofold and inter-
related” aspirations: “to know the truth about God and to live in soci-
ety.”41 Aquinas brought the common good closer to the individual
concerned with salvation. This notion of common good relied on reason
and prudence; it derived from Aristotle. The individual’s reliance on reason
was no calculation for solitary self-preservation. Coleman noted that ius
naturae/ius naturale reflected “every person has an obligation not only to
sustain his own life but also that of others once his own needs are met,”
noting that “Aquinas does not have a notion of subjective rights.”42 Within
this tradition of natural law, the self-exercise of reason is moral. The move-
ment towards subjective rights—corresponding to a person’s use of reason
as a private entity—came later. “We are masters of our own actions by
reason of our being able to choose this or that. But choice regards not the
end, but the means to the end….”43 Centuries later, choice became rede-
fined in terms of economic freedom, focusing humans’ will in this world on
manipulating nature as a commodity. Choice also became the metric for
(ir)rational behaviour. For Aquinas, choice was not economic and psycho-
logical nor was it induced by preferences for and manipulations of observ-
ables. His writings demonstrate the person as primarily a moral being,
where the notion of dominium only applied to material things and slaves.
The divine laws that were expected to transcend human laws failed to
extend equality to the slaves—as it is today, justice was contorted to justify
inequality. Slavery was “the only case in which” that “natural right” and
“universal equality” were inconsistent, as noted by Buckland: “the slave
was not only rightless, he was also dutiless.”44 The underlying logic
stemmed from the conception that the slave was an object (Res)—“No
taming or educating process was necessary to give their owner control over
them”45—but by the time of Aquinas, commercial relation had led to a
conception of slaves as human in need of learning, still without natural
rights, after certain training to meet the needs of their masters. Aquinas
thought that being a slave is not based “on natural reason, but on some
resultant utility, in that it is useful to this man to be ruled by a wiser man,
and to the latter to be helped by the former.”46 Aquinas maintained and
affirmed the Aristotelian dissymmetry of power (between slave and master,
father and son, and wife and husband) and justified it by utility. The dis-
symmetry was now facilitated by the logic of a mutual benefit. Both the
slave and the master were to find utility in Aquinas’ reason. Perhaps simi-
larity can be detected to today’s corporate elites looking after consumers,
workers, and taxpayers, and to the acceptance of the mutual benefit argu-
ments that sustain wealth inequality.
The legal and social views based on natural rights crisscross with eco-
nomic views throughout the Western history, where the same elements can
be perceived differently by the prevailing sentiment of a given culture. For
example, the medieval views on “fair prices were much less rigid than is
often supposed,” and among value theories based on “utility, scarcity, or
cost of production,” the “most commonly accepted doctrine” was that of
“Thomas Aquinas, [who] held simply that a ‘just price’ was one fixed by
fair bargaining on an open market.”47 Market was a trusted place for the
exchange of human consumables; it brought the merchant and the shopper
into direct physical contact to negotiate measurable valuation. Even though
Aquinas, unlike Aristotle, found moderate profit justifiable “to support a
family, the poor, or to contribute to the public good,” he was against “im-
moderate accumulation” that came with the society in which increase of
money transactions increased “the range of avarice.”48 For Aquinas, mar-
kets were not instruments for liberality nor were they to indoctrinate pop-
ulations by the logic of salvation. “Liberality” was perceived as that
“attitude of indifference towards one’s own possessions, creating an inner
freedom which alone allows them [humans] use rather than the enjoyment
of material goods. This liberality is the founding virtue of a good soci-
ety.”49 One’s liberality consisted not in consumption or accumulation of
possessions but in the capacity to be indifferent to them.
Liberty was not centred on the enjoyment of material goods. In the Mid-
dle Ages, Coleman clarifies, the “material goods were taken to be means to
a higher end … [and were] to be used rather than enjoyed in their own
right.”50 After the Middle Ages, material goods gradually became inter-
preted as a means for transcending human consciousness via science and
systematic categorization of nature (see Chapter 3). Later conceptions of
liberty suppressed the theological view that only God has dominium, and
humans have a natural dominium for their use.51 Aquinas and his contem-
poraries saw the right use of property as precedent over the right of acqui-
sition for profit. This required rational judgement and just elaborations of
the laws of “civil society” that were concerned with “equality” wherein
the role of law was to maintain the dignity and the rights of persons
affected by injury and uncovered losses brought by another.52 According to

Finnis, Aquinas’ attention to the “inability of the state rulers to succeed in
supervising movements of the human spirit” underpins modern concerns
for “status of freedom” and “self-possession.”53 Finnis’ account leads one
to ask: what led humans to think about freedom and self-possession in-
stead of virtues and charity?
In contrast to Aquinas, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) explicitly argued
for a secular state and limiting the role of the Church in worldly affairs.
Dante attacked the churchmen and the papacy for their greed and corrup-
tion. He found papacy a political hindrance to the emperor who looks af-
ter God’s will on earth. Dante’s “image of the Prince or Monarch—though
composed of innumerable mosaic tesserae borrowed from theology and
philosophy—reflects a concept of Man-centered kingship and of a purely
human Dignitas.”54 In his book Monarchy, Dante, following Aristotle,
made the argument that the best form of government is monarchy. “[M]
ankind is most like God when it is ruled by one ruler, and consequently is
most in harmony with God’s intention; and this is what it means to be in a
good (indeed, ideal) state.”55 These words provide a glimpse at the over-
lapping of Aristotelian trust in the intellectual faculty and Platonic and
Christian ideals for a ruler. They also hint at the conception of human as-
pirations to be like God, as divine will guides nature and human purpose
(elaborated in the next chapter). Although “the will of God in itself is in-
deed invisible, … the invisible things of God are clearly perceived by being
understood through the things he has made.”56 According to Dante, the
divine “will” that positioned the Romans “by right” to possess the world
was for the sake of protection of the world rather than domination. Such
misconceived beliefs continue to contribute to modern imperialism. For
Dante, this was not only a matter of reason but faith that God’s judgement
passed on to a monarch is in harmony with nature’s intentions and that
humans are sacrificed to defend it. Dante asserted that the authority of the
Roman Empire was independent of the authority of the church. In his out-
line of the relative autonomy of the pope and emperor, Dante was exposing
the “Church[’s] pretence of justice” as it no longer helped the poor.57 In
order to delimit the Church’s influence in worldly affairs, Dante reclaimed
the authority of the monarch, noting that monarchical authority derives
directly from God.
The monarch’s authority was thus rationalized on moral philosophy,
commanding the monarch to fight the “waves of seductive greed” (in
Dante’s language) and to guide humankind in temporal happiness. Whereas
the dutiful monarch is concerned with freedom and peace, the pontiff is
tasked with immortal happiness.58 Wicksteed noted: “the systematic paral-
lelism between the sacred and secular examples of virtue and of vice” is
complimented by “Dante’s steady assertion of the intrinsic worth of the
secular life.”59 Whereas for Aquinas, the humanity’s work rests in contem-
plation of God; for Dante, contemplation is not sufficient. By “training of
the intellect,” humans will fortify themselves “against false inferences”
and “against the seduction of the pretenders who declare themselves guides
to blessedness.”60 Before the constitution of modern state, the main con-
cern of freedom was not an individual whose rights can be affirmed (and
hence violated) by the state but the limits to the exercise of power by way
of educating the intellect. Education could ensure that humans do not take
axioms as givens. That said, the notion of individuality and accountability
in Dante’s optimus homo is held for those trusted to public office. In
“Dante’s general concept of the final ends of mankind, it was quite indis-
pensable that imperial and philosophic authorities should coincide and
ultimately unite to lead mankind to the blessedness of the present life.”61
The emperor and the pope belonged to the same species of mortal beings,
measured not only by the standards of God or angel but also by their
worldly conduct.
2.3 William of Ockham: a right beyond the law

William of Ockham (1287–1347) continued working under the shadows
of the Aristotelian objection to the omnipotence of God and the existing
theological corpus. He challenged Aquinas’ proposition that Christian the-
ology is a successor to classical metaphysics and ethics. Ockham rejected
the
prototypically Catholic intellectual project of unifying classical philoso-

phy with Christian faith in such a way as to exhibit the latter as the
perfection of the former, and yet that stops short of disdaining the light
of natural reason in the manner of radical intellectual separatism.62
Although the works of Aquinas were viewed within the rationalist tradi-
tion, proposing that natural laws are normative, binding, and discover-
able by reason, Ockham’s voluntarism situated natural law as an
imperative, to be accepted on faith as an expansion of divine will. His
theological perspective assigned a more predominant role to the will over
the intellect. He emphasized the separation of will from natural inclina-
tion.63 Thus, Ockham contributed to a “notion of freedom that does not
understand freedom in terms of a pre-established order of goods, but
rather in terms of an ability to choose indifferently between alternatives in
spite of natural teleology, reason’s dictates, or the objects’ goodness.”64 In
moving in the direction of the contemporary notion of freedom, Ockham
was grounded in the tradition of the Franciscans and their renunciation of
ownership.
Working within the Aristotelian syllogism, Aquinas and Ockham each

reached different conclusions on human freedom. Aquinas thought free-
dom was rooted in the ability to reason about what is good and specify
different acts; Ockham challenged the intellectual determinism in Aristotle
and objected to Aquinas’ cooperative causality—of divine and natural rea-
son in human action—since God is the ultimate nature and cause of reality,
human will is derived from God. Aquinas’ intellectualism began with God
as a maker that by the way of analogy was extended to humans, who were
connected to His nature and reason. Ockham’s emphasis on free will led
him to distance reason from will; the implication spilled into increased ac-
ceptance of the activity of the will and the separation of the moral from the
natural. Osborne points out that the “increasing tendency toward a dual-
istic view according to which the mind’s causal structure can be described
in terms that also apply to mechanistic causality in the physical world”
accepted by “modern philosophers of mind” may have origins in Ockham
and his contemporary, Duns Scotus.65 These tendencies, of the medieval
philosophers, have to be contextualized in the form of monastic life that
abandoned all claims to possession and ownership and was coming under
scrutiny by the Church.
As a member of the Dominican order, Aquinas’s theory of natural domi-
nium threw doubt on the life of apostolic poverty of the Franciscan order
of Ockham. The doctrine of apostolic poverty would allow the Franciscans
to use all the commodities necessary for their lives without dominium.
Such a right to poverty situated the Franciscans outside of the network of
commercial exchange. On the other hand, Aquinas had considered the ma-
terial object in two ways:
One is with regard to its nature, and that does not lie within human
power, but only the divine power, to which all things are obedient. The
other is with regard to its use. And here man does have natural domi-
nium over material things, for through his reason and will he can use
material objects for his own benefits.66
Ockham presented an argument for the right to poverty (no dominium).

His theory of right affirmed the life and dignity of the Franciscan order and
also affirmed a mode of human existence outside of commercialization.
This view, however, was problematic, as the church and monasteries had
gained positions of influence and power due to ownership of land and
property.
For Ockham, according to Oakley, “[w]ill not reason, is found to be at
the heart of law,”67 and this idea was strengthened by disputes over the
metaphysical and legal stand of the Church in relation to the conception of
dominium and jus (right). In 1323, Pope John XXII made the claim that
there could be no just use without the right of using it. Stressing this “is a
moral right, not a legal right,” John XXII neglected that the use of some
things (for example, food) requires consumption.68 The pope’s interpreta-
tion of the scripture and situating Christ’s life within the Roman law was
an attack on the foundation of the Franciscan life: Christ’s life as exem-
plary of life lived in the human world. Christ
came into the Roman world but lived outside of its structure, … this
included both lack of property and the lack of any temporal rulership.
The life of Christ represented a return to or reliving of the original natu-
ral life of the state of innocence.69
John XXII’s interpretation was not only an attack on Franciscans but also
a heresy as it relocated the life of Christ into the condition of dominium.
“Ockham’s thesis, that property did not exist in the Garden of Eden and
is an institution of human law, was the standard view of theologians before
John XXII (Aquinas included).”70 Ockham’s refutation of the Pope’s posi-
tion carried “on an established tradition of juristic discourse, sometimes in
new and interesting ways.”71 His objection—relying on existing Franciscan
literature and canon law—defended the right to poverty by distinguishing
between consumable and corporate poverty.72 Ockham was objecting to
the separation of positive law and morality, focusing on licence to use (or
consume): “A license to using, then, which is ‘permitted’ under natural
law, could be licit just outside of the concerns of positive law.”73 Ockham’s
aim was not to establish an active ius (right) above active dominium. The
licence to use pointed to the preservation of one’s life as a sufficient case for
taking consumables such as food when one had no dominium. Agamben
observed that the distinction was “to realize a human life and practice
absolutely outside the deamination of the law,” for “neutralization of law
with respect to life.”74 Beyond the divine and state laws for property, the
Franciscans offered the thesis of abdication of ownership and this was in-
tegral to their monastic form of life. Once again, the legal and political
arguments that followed from the medieval idea of “ius” derived from
canon law and were in service to human preservation and remained dis-
tinct from the legal laws.
According to Tuck, the “medieval natural rights theories undoubtedly
grew out of” the property-and-poverty controversy.75 Property rights elic-
ited further arguments against the plenitude of the power of the Church.
The dominion of the pope and clergy belong first to God and second as
common goods belonging to the emperor. This further limited the church’s
jurisdiction on secular matters.76 Ockham was clear that worldly posses-
sions were subordinate to the faith and spiritual duties the church was
obligated to honour. He wrote:
… for papal power regularly in no way extends to temporal, nor does

the pope have the power of taking away the rights and liberties of oth-
ers, …this would be against the liberty of the evangelical law, by which
each ought to enjoy his own rights and liberties, unless he himself should
have spontaneously renounced them or should be deprived of them be-
cause of some fault of his own or from reason and manifest cause.77
Ockham’s analysis of the spiritual power in relation to liberties was a pro-

test against papal power. It called for differentiating the role of spiritual
and worldly government. For Franciscans, this was not a protest for better
rules or norms to be imposed on life. On the contrary, according to Agam-
ben, it was so they can renounce even the ownership of laws and in doing
so neutralize the distinction between rule and life, affirming their aim to
follow the life of Christ.
Ockham’s affirmation of the connection between divine law and posi-
tive law exhibits the influence of medieval canonists in the history of in-
dividual rights. Situating the notion of “jus” in Ockham’s theology,
however, suggests the notion of right was not to be understood in exclu-
sively individualistic and subjective terms or even as a law. The individu-
alized and subjective will were fashioned gradually and emphasized
centuries after. Right-based individualism would have little grounding in
the ecclesiastical order of charity and fraternalism.78 Following Robin-
son, my point concerns the legal and scholastic tradition and the diffi-
culty of transportation of Roman “jus” to “modern ‘choice’ theories of
right” that Brian Tierney and John Finnis induced from Ockham.79 Mod-
ern choice theories are devoid of transcendence. Their approach to devel-
oping and sustaining human life gravitates towards cost–benefit
calculations and investment–return rubrics. As long as there is a mone-
tary value for human life and development, natural rights of equality and
freedom are recycled for utilities, functions, and/or profits (see Chapter
5). Ockham was not proposing a choice theory or an elaborated human
rights theory. According to Robinson, there is little pertaining to Ock-
ham’s notion of ownership and use that can by itself be taken as setting
in motion the modern understanding of rights: “An important difference
between medieval and modern conceptions of rights, then, lies not in
whether rights are ‘subjectively’ possessed, but in the medieval belief that
rights were from ‘ius’ rather than against it.”80 The right at stake in its
natural conception was supplemented by Ockham’ nominalism and de-
fended by his objection to universals.
“Ockham and the poverty controversy in general are often, and with
good reason, singled out for their role in the long history of individual
rights,” Robinson continued, the lessons drawn from Ockham “has less to
do with the inviolability or sanctity of these rights, and more to do with
how much the justice of the established political order… has in common
with the ethics of one’s actions.”81 If there is a rights theory to be uncov-
ered in Ockham’s, it began with differentiating the right to use from the
right to ownership derived from Roman law. Following the Franciscans’
commitment to the life that renounced possessive desires, Ockham main-
tained the de facto use of things. The “idea of separability of use from
ownership” was “an effective instrument” giving Franciscans legitimacy to
“living without property.”82 It also provided a negative argument to reduc-
ing life to a property governed by laws.
It was the anti-Franciscan argument that helped the transition to a fully
fledged natural right theory, and Jean Gerson (1363–1429) was a para-
mount facilitator. Not only did Gerson attack apostolic poverty he also
offered “a modification” of Aquinas’ position by his development of “non-
natural dominia.”83 Richard Tuck stated that the relation between Ger-
son’s rights theory and his theology rested in the “belief that man’s
relationship to the world is conceptually the same as God’s,” and although
Gerson acknowledged the distance between God and human, this distance
“was not a categorical break between two different kinds of being, as it
was to be in Luther’s theology” but underlined “the similarity in the domi-
nium which God and men possess over the world.”84 While Renaissance
thinkers often challenged Gerson’s assimilation of God into the human,
Gerson’s influence remained, giving impetus to the movement against both
the church and scholastics’ interpretations. Acknowledging that Gerson’s
theology radically differed from Ockham, Tuck noted, “like Ockham… he
elevated the free wills of both man and God together” removing the “op-
position between them.”85 There was a coupling effect in Gerson’s mysti-
cism and Ockham’s nominalism that moved in the direction of the modern
science. Emphasizing contingency, Ockham’s materialism directed reason
towards propositions characteristics of physical science86 and his logical
bent often emphasized experience and observation, functioning to delimit
theological authority. Seen “as a forerunner of [Francis] Bacon,” Rychlak
noted, that “Ockham placed the greatest possible emphasis on the sense
organs by claiming they were the root of all knowledge.”87 Firmly situated
in Christian beliefs and a world that is governed by God, Ockham’s orien-
tation is far from the utilitarianism introduced by Bacon. For Ockham,
human knowledge is “completely dependent on the divine choice,” Oakley
notes, explaining that “from Ockham’s fundamental insistence on the om-
nipotence and freedom of God follow, not only his nominalism, not only
his ethical and legal voluntarism, but also his empiricism.”88 Oakley
stressed that Ockham’s interpretations “carry over into a positivist inter-
pretation of law in general” as his “metaphysical presuppositions” were
“necessary for the development of an empirical or quasi-empirical natural
science” and legal positivism.89 Ockham’s nominalism and his emphasis on

observation harbour doubts about ancient science and examinations of
natural theology in the next centuries.
Ockham’s influence ought to be measured against other historical move-
ments and also the influence of Gerson’s mystical theology concerned with
human use and ownership of the world. Foreshadowing the Reformation,
Gerson’s thoughts went beyond property and natural rights. Situating this
mystical theology in the context of personhood, “the affective powers of the
soul” were extended by Gerson as “the means of purifying and redeeming
the whole soul and so of providing not only the means of mystical union
but ultimately of salvation.”90 Gerson acted as an organizer and an educa-
tor of spiritual wisdom for a broad audience. He “addressed his peers and
students at the university” and also “the parish priests, monks and nuns…
the increasingly literate laity, including women; [and the] bishops, popes,
nobles, and the royal family.”91 His method of teaching and his approach
to property proposed a unity in human will and activity in the world.
2.4 Tension in the late medieval state

“Gerson developed a sophisticated model of ‘scholastic’ reading, accord-
ing to which scholars mined old books for arguments and gave little
thought to style or historical context”; Hobbins continues by noting that
Gerson selected “books that could safely guide theology students in their
studies” and “shared a common theological vocabulary.”92 As a teacher,
Gerson endeavoured to correct the common mistakes in instructions that
had become routine. He modelled a theologian as a defender of faith—
Hobbins stresses that the common vocabulary proposed by Gerson was
central to both the establishment of reading and writing as educational
activities in the following centuries and the proliferation and preservation
of orthodox teachings.
Gerson’s mystical humanism found its imprint on learning and the mo-
dality of “schola monastia” by which “theology was first of all experiential
rather than intellectual.”93 Contemplation remained central to Gerson’s
experiential exercises; his teachings influenced Luther, Erasmus, and other
theologians across Europe, as Hobbins describes:
Looking ahead to mid-fifteenth-century Germany, we find Gerson’s pro-

gram receiving its warmest reception among early humanists, who pro-
foundly admired and revered him as a doctrinal and spiritual authority,
who prized clear expression, and who saw no contradiction between
eloquence and piety… This was the century of Gerson, and we must
make room for it in the stories we tell.94
Gerson distinguished his works from other scholastics. He did not incor-
porate the complexities of existence into a system: “Gerson wrote no
summa.”95 However, as a precursor of the Reformation, Gerson’s approach
to theological systems set directions for the next generation of clergymen.
His interpretive form of rationality influenced the culture of teaching the
laity.
During Gerson’s lifetime, the idea of learning was becoming connected
to gaining political and social status across Europe. By the middle of the
13th century, the notion that “educated citizenry was advantageous to
government was gathering force.”96 Although learning remained centred
on Ancient Latin and Christian doctrine, its aims were moving away from
the monastic life and the theological debates towards advancing aristo-
cratic positions at court. However, the monastic way of life, even though
subjected to desires for power and control, continued to offer guiding prin-
ciples for organization of social life in line with Plato’s Republic. Thomas
More’s (1478–1535) Utopia is reminiscent of the order of monasteries and
their approach to commonwealth. Written as fiction, Utopia depicted mo-
nasticism and communistic orientation as a possible mode of government
against the escalating competitive norms for accumulation of wealth. The
monastic “distrust of personal possession,” according to John Hale, was
seen as a viable avenue in “avoiding extremes of poverty and wealth as
being the chief thread of civilized order.”97 More’s humanistic attempt was
to decentralize nobility based on “lineage and inherited wealth.” Quentin
Skinner explains, More did not aim to “abolish the institution of private
property” but rather show that “private property” rights “do not necessar-
ily avoid the twin dangers of poverty and disorder.”98 The attention in
monasteries given to the role of the rulers continued to be accompanied by
reflections on human nature and place in the cosmic system. Meanwhile,
the presumably natural categories of humans (lords and peasants) were
becoming gradually subject to the development of the cities and the affir-
mation of bureaucracy that played a central role in transforming the agri-
cultural feudal societies.
The expansion of commercial activities necessitated changes to commu-
nitarian visions of agrarian society. The nature of reason for government
moved further away from Plato’s political philosophy and a parallel be-
tween just city and just soul shifted to management of dominion. The Ital-
ian jurist, Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), offers an example of this
development in The Reason of State. Although criticizing Machiavelli’s
amoral Prince, Botero followed Machiavelli’s practice of advising the
Prince in self and public management. Under the influence of Jean Bodin
(1529–1596), who had witnessed the Bartholomew Massacre (1572) and
found the solution to civil and theological unrest in the unlimited power of
the despotic monarchy,99 Botero offered a model of rationality for state.
Botero wrote: “State is a stable rule over a people and Reason of state is
the knowledge of the means by which such a dominion may be founded,
preserved and extended.”100 The people were the dominion and the reason
of the state was the knowledge of the means for governing them. The natu-
ral dominions constituted those governed willingly and the acquired do-
minions constituted those bought by money, won by arms, or negotiated
through treaty. These are Botero’s classifications of dominion as the Italian
explorer-colonizer, Christopher Columbus led the European colonization
of the Americas. “The wealth of the ruler,” Botero explained, “depends
upon that of his individual subjects, which comprises property together
with the actual commerce in the fruits for the earth and of industry,” in-
cluding imports, exports and transportations.101 This state as a material
reality was based, then, on rational economic management. It was no lon-
ger limited to geographical space. Here, “‘reason’ has an instrumental
sense, meaning the capacity to calculate the appropriate means of preserv-
ing the state.”102 Not only reason gained an instrumental sensibility but
also the reconfiguration of Aristotelian politics offered Renaissance’ politi-
cal thinkers a common language of reform for rewriting ancient and Ro-
man civil philosophy. Machiavelli was one of the robust defenders of this
new notion of politics.103 However, Machiavelli’s intentions were more
complicated than simply instructing an amoral and calculative Prince. His
writings can be interpreted “to instruct the nations under pretext of in-
structing the Prince.”104 Botero’s writings offered a reversal to this. Botero’s
politics is an exercise of control based on allocation of values by the knowl-
edge of the material world. And those who produced this knowledge (poli-
cymakers) act on the political subjectivity of the governor and governed
alike.105
The Prince does need to learn the fluctuations in his estate and whether
and how (not) to manage them by the way of knowledge.106 This is not
contemplative knowledge. It is knowledge of “geographical situation, age,
fortune, and education” that is concerned with “man’s nature, characteris-
tics and temperament.”107 The ruler is to surround himself with those
learned in such a profession. Religion receded in this notion of politics and
is placed in the service of the state. The spiritual order is utilized to the
management of the people as the Prince must “make every effort to propa-
gate it, because… a people devoted to religion and piety is much more
obedient than one without a guiding principle.”108 This represented the
economic advice that continued to draw from the Romans’ integration of
Christianity into the institutionalized life of the empire. By Botero’s terms,
the Prince is not exempt from his responsibility. As a distributor of “bread
and circuses,” Paul Veyne noted, “an eternal relation of obedience or de-
politicization … unites” the governor and governed.109 In this unity, while
the Roman law and the Roman thinkers continued to be influential, on
various occasions, Botero drew from the Persians, Turks, and Chinese civi-
lizations to show the range of the knowledge he saw useful for the ratio-
nalization of state. Meanwhile, the two principal foundations of discipline,
“reward and punishment,” remained. The Greco-Romans rewarded en-
thusiasm, virtue, and courage, encouraging self-sacrifice by conferring
worldly gains as well as honour. However, even those incentives were in-
sufficient for those soldiers who feared not death but pain and disability.
Noting the bravery exhibited by “the knights of St. John” who “never
abandoned the struggle against the infidel,” Botero taught the Prince that
the soldier’s “fear can be removed by the certain knowledge that a benevo-
lent ruler will provide for him, will help and acknowledge responsibility
for him.”110 Thus, promises and rewards became useful in encouraging
sacrifice for the sake of the state.
For example, the people were also to be given certain liberties in learn-
ing and studying. Botero thought that the act of learning not only reflected
the individual’s discipline and obedience but it also contributed to the
greatness of cities. According to Botero, the “commodity of learned
schools” brings the young in pursuit of wealth, promotion, and honour to
the cities a prerequisite to an individual’s liberty. Botero wrote: “Study is
a matter of great labour, both of the mind and body… And therefore, it
stands with good reason that all convenient privilege and liberty be granted
unto scholars.”111 At the University of Paris, for example, Botero noted
that the aim of scholarly work was not solely directed to industry and
production but also to leisure and to the development of human spirit,
mind, and body.112 Although Botero focused on the usefulness of knowl-
edge, he did not assign particular ends to it. Botero emphasized that the
power of the ruler resides in “valorous people, money victual, munitions,
horses and weapons of attack and defence.”113 However, he stressed that
although the ruler should manage his wealth and increase it, the accumula-
tion of wealth should not be the end of government. Since people, money,
and land are contributing factors, the aim is the proper management of
these; their preservation means the preservation of the state. On numerous
occasions throughout The Reason of State, Botero notes that the Prince
shepherds his people by encouraging them through education and support-
ing them in various industries. It is not the soul and the afterlife but the
“numerical strength of a people”114 that demands the attention of the ruler.
An early economist, Botero advised the Prince to assist the poor, help the
needy, and “provide employment for those who are able to work and
means of subsistence for those who are not.”115 Botero’s state was no lib-
eral state, nor was it a neo-liberal state in which the individuals were left
to compete, manipulated by behavioural techniques and misinformation
to secure National Domestic Growth while transnational corporations in-
creased their dominion.
Political rationalities were derived from natural rights that were inter-
mingled with divine laws. They were becoming dependent on a particular
mode of reason and subject to systems of bureaucracy for the sake of the
state. By the start of the 17th century, Skinner reports, a tension existed
resembling the historical “accounts of Rome’s early transition from mo-
narchical to consular government”:
Roman Law had laid down, however, to depend on the will of another is
what it means to be a slave. If you wish to preserve your freedom under
government, you must therefore ensure that you institute a political or-
der in which no prerogative or discretionary powers are allowed.116
Political arguments further pressed that the monarch ought to respect the
will and desires of the people. The state ceased solely as a dominion of the
monarch as property rights affirmed the scholastics’ conception of human
making as an extension of God’s making. God creates man “after his own
likeness, makes him an intellectual creation, and so capable of Domin-
ion.”117 This gained wider expression in the philosophy of John Locke
(1632–1704), who argued for a theological conception in placing humans
as “the middle link”118 between God and the rest of creation.
2.5 John Locke: liberating property

Locke was writing in relation to the works of two influential predecessors,
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Robert Filmer (1588–1653). Hobbes’
philosophy marked a distancing from theological conceptions of natural
law. He is often credited for his scientific approach to moral theory based on
observation of human behaviour. This he learned from his teacher, Francis
Bacon (whose ideas will be examined later). In Hobbes’s writing, human
nature is categorized, whereby “passions, characters, temperaments, inten-
tions, and motives, become central interests. Knowledge of these phenom-
ena is provided not by (traditional) philosophy, but by history.”119 The
invocation of history served to construe a particular notion of human na-
ture. Fear and pride were seen as sufficient motives for human behaviour;
they also served as justifications for human submission to an overseeing
authority. Hobbes’s natural laws are contingent to humans’ desires and
“hope” for “peace,” but if they “cannot obtain it,” they “may seek, and use,
all helps, and advantages of war [sic].”120 Hobbes renounced the tranquility
of the Stoics in achieving happiness and the self-control required to maintain
it. Ethics became a “science of passions”121 instead of a way of life.
What continued to be at stake, as it had been for the scholastics, was the
differentiation between right and law; in this, Hobbes saw liberty as a right
that each person was obliged to protect. Rights became commodities
governed by contracts “as in buying and selling with ready money; or ex-
change of goods, or lands: and it may be delivered some time after.”122 This
notion of right anticipates human capital theory, as it eroded the Aristote-
lian notion of the human as political and rational. Fear also played an in-
tegral role in Hobbes’ liberal state that looks after securing itself by
promising security to its people. “Fear, Hobbes first insists, is what prompts
us to subject ourselves to government.”123 Not servitude by force but fear
prompts individuals’ willingness to seek the protection of the state. In this
manner, the state too becomes an economic agent in Hobbes’s conception
of society. According to Bobbio, for Hobbes, “the state of nature becomes
a faithful mirror of (private) economic relations, that it may appear as the
idealized description of mercantile society.”124 Hobbes facilitated the tran-
sition of the Aristotelian notion of household as the nucleus of economic
life to a type of society organizing relations of production and everything
else relating to it. The conceptual model of natural law was reconstructed
and with it “the distinction between domestic society and political society”
and “the distinction between state of nature and civil society.”125
Although Locke revised the contractual rights of Hobbes, his main criti-
cism was directed at Robert Filmer. In Two Treatises of Government, Locke
refuted Filmer’s historical argument for monarchical paternalism and pri-
vate dominion. Filmer’s book Patriarcha put forward that all evidence of
human society came from the Bible. His interpretation proposed that God
positioned Adam to naturally possess and populate the world, and by this,
society as a family was descended from one man. Adam being the first au-
thority had other implications besides the patriarchal values it established.
First, “the concept of a free human being subject to no authority but his
own will was absolutely impossible… All men were born unfree and un-
equal.”126 Second, Adam’s sons have lawfully inherited the private domin-
ion of the world, and no other mode of property ever existed, except private
property.127 This proposition, which constituted an absolute monarchy, re-
jected other forms of governance and postulated that the common laws of
the political society did not derive from intellectual and rational agreements.
They come from the King who is the “author, interpreter and corrector of
the common law.”128 Filmer’s society was governed by the exercise of power
as naturalized as unavoidable. Such a reasoning resembles modern behav-
ioural economics: Because the people are inefficient decision-makers and
quasi-rational economic agents to look after themselves, and because their
superiors are constituted by scientism to look after their wellbeing, an exer-
cise of power in designing choices for people is normalized. Modern pater-
nalistic conventions of behavioural economists defend libertarians. Filmer
defended the King. Filmer’s declarations represented an archetypal applica-
tion of the use of divine law to the sovereign power. His natural law accom-
modated a familial hierarchy analogy to justify inequality.
In the face of Filmer’s argument “[t]that no man is born free,” Locke, in

his Two Treatises of Government, argued for “a right to natural free-
dom.”129 Locke began his objection to absolute monarchy by noting that
the Princes do not have a divine right to absolute power. Scrutinizing Film-
er’s analogies drawn from scripture to justify patriarchy and absolute do-
minion, Locke drew on natural law to argue that God constituted private
dominion to all in place of making them dependent upon the will of one
person or group for their subsistence.130 He did, however, accept that “Re-
gal power is founded in property of land, and follows private dominion,
and not in paternal power or natural dominion.”131 Locke’s challenge to
paternalists of his time was aimed at claiming autonomy, freedom, and
equality for the person and found the bases for its support in theology.
“Locke’s natural law is a species of divine law,” Steven Forde explains, “for
natural law to be natural rather than revealed, unassisted reason would
have to be able to establish these underpinnings, the existence of the provi-
dential God it postulates.”132 Locke reconstructed the morality of self-
preservation as well as reward and punishment within this providential order.
Locke’s moral theory positioned God as the ultimate administrator of
reward and punishment, a position that delimited the authority of the
state. In the civil government of Locke, the state of freedom and equality is
shared by birth, “unless the lord and master of them all, should by any
manifest declaration of his will set one above another.”133 This lord and
master is God, and humans constitute his workmanship. The workman-
ship of God served as the model for moral relationships. And Locke
thought that when humans’ “own preservation comes not in competition,
… [he/she] tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb or
goods of another.”134 Protection of human life in a society required placing
liberty and health outside of the competitive markets. This was also em-
phasized by Dante: regardless of nobility, humans also have an animal-like
nature, and their greed would have them “like horses, prompted to wander
by their animal nature, not held in check ‘with bit and bridle’ on their
journey.”135 For Locke, competition hinders the second law of nature: the
preservation of the life of others. He was also clear that if one designed an
argument for the exchange of political freedom for market competition,
everything else is undermined. “He that in the state of nature, would take
away the freedom, that belongs to any one in that state must necessarily be
supposed to have a design to take away everything else.”136 This account
differs from future economic monetary devaluation of human nature by a
market mindset and technologies that would manipulate apprehension of
freedom, both unfamiliar to Locke’s culture and time.
Civil society was not to be established by competition but by laws that
united individuals “for mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and es-
tates, which,” Locke “call[ed] by the general name, property.”137 The
referenced unity is reflected by human society as a collection of rational

creatures who conduct themselves under the law. This, for Locke, was not
conceived as a source of nationalism. According to Locke: “we are born
free, as we are born rational; not that we have actually the exercise of ei-
ther; age that brings one, brings with it the other too.”138 This rather devel-
opmental perspective complemented Locke’s evaluation of the individual
when he wrote of labour and its associative values. According to Locke,
“labour makes the far greatest part of the value of things.”139 Labour, as-
sociated with the notion of securing one’s industry, accompanied the right
to own the product of one’s work. The role of law had political underpin-
nings: “the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and
enlarge freedom.”140 The context here is that Locke was advising the mon-
arch in establishing “laws of liberty to secure protection and encourage-
ment to the honest industry of mankind against the oppression of power
and narrowness of party will.”141 Industry is coupled with a right to trans-
form nature into useful goods. While there is little to support the capitalist
and individualistic conventions of profiting in Locke’s theory, in the next
two chapters, I shall explore the ways in which industrial progress directed
his political individualism towards economic individualism, including the
commodification of human nature.
In Essays on the Law of Nature, Locke claimed that the theory of nature
is not some “inward moral principle written in our mind”—rather “reason
and sense perception” make it possible “to teach and educate the minds of
men [sic] and to provide what is characteristic of the light of nature.”142
Reason directs humans to inquire into nature and without the senses reason
cannot apprehend anything. Meanwhile, sensory data by itself cannot dis-
cover or prove anything true and relies on reason’s operations, general prin-
ciples, and axioms. Axioms are not matters of general consent; they are a set
of beliefs, I add, helping humans to reinterpret their world in time and place.
Locke’s rejection was aimed at Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) who argued that
general consent served prior to natural law. Instead, relying on Aquinas,
Locke claimed since self-preservation is the first law of nature, natural law
is prior to consent.143 Secondly, Locke rejected the idea that self-interests
can be taken as the basis of the law of nature. In doing so, he was defending
natural law against the proposition that “living creatures are driven by in-
nate impulse to seek their own interests,”144 reducing law to utility. He ar-
gued that natural law provided the standard and measure of creation for
other laws, including human obligations beyond self-fulfilment. Locke’s the-
sis was later revised by François Quesnay and Adam Smith who insisted
that self-interest was a functional element of economic governance.
Noting that utilitarian laws bent towards constituting self-interest as the
basis for moral judgement, Locke pointed to their insufficiency as a bind-
ing force in recognizing another’s needs. Utility and self-interest, together
and separately, cannot serve to protect private property, a concept that

included, for Locke, human actions and rights. Utilitarian laws subordi-
nate action and virtue to certain outcomes (ends) and thus limit human
liberty at the start. Locke thought that “utility is not the basis of the law or
the ground of obligation, but the consequence of obedience to it.”145 Prom-
ises and duties are of little relevance since as soon as they become hin-
drances they are recycled. This idea was associated with the rejection of a
right to control the freedom of others based on social utility and/or indi-
vidual welfare arguments. Although moral good in natural law is advanta-
geous to the agent, an act cannot be morally good because it is
advantageous.146 In this context, similar to Filmer, Hobbes, and Bentham,
Locke accepted the state’s responsibility for security and happiness of peo-
ple but added that these are conditions (not ends) that must be available to
all. Altering someone’s action, liberty, and life then requires consent even
if it were in service to their security and happiness. Tully explained:
The condition that man can act in the state of nature without the con-
sent of others is an analytical feature of natural liberty. It is met, with-
out developing a Hobbesian state of war and without infringing the
liberty of others, by deriving the range of liberty from natural law.
Man’s [sic] freedom to act with respect to earthly provisions is the ‘Lib-
erty to use them, which God has permitted’147
The natural condition of freedom is to be protected by laws. And protec-

tion of liberty and autonomy in human affairs discouraged misrule by
those in power.
Liberty and freedom rested on capacities for reflection and judgement. If
there is a rational choice theory in Locke, it concerns the capacity to exam-
ine human will and desires as he worked under the Hobbesian justification
for integration of desires in government. However, Locke’s notion of lib-
erty rests not only on the ability to act freely in relation to what is desired
but also to freely examine desires and to judge good and evil for oneself. If
Locke is regarded as a proponent of individual choice, it is because he was
an opponent of paternalism, the administration of individual choices by
authorities. No scientific, political, or theological authority is justified to
interfere with human reason and liberty to obtain their consent. When
judgement and examination are hindered and manipulated by the authori-
ties “the nearer we are to misery and slavery.”148 There is in Locke an ob-
jection to “hasty compliance to desires” and an advocacy of “moderation
and restraint of passions,” together setting direction for conduct and “true
happiness.”149 Happiness rests in the capacity for free examination—free
in a sense that the will, thoughts, and actions are not elicited by manipula-
tion. Free examination was a matter of care and effort, not utility,
convenience, or efficiency. Locke acknowledged that free examination and

true happiness are at the mercy of misinformation and lack of access to
knowledge; they are also subject to the pain and pleasure inflicted by the
self or another.
In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke developed the idea
of freedom in relation to power in its active and passive forms. He ap-
proached power from two angles: to act and to forbear from an act. In this
context, understanding, examination, and judgement protect humans against
the settling of “irregular desires which custom has made natural to us” to
attend to a “remoter absent good.”150 Locke warned: “Repeated trials often
reconcile us to that which at distance was looked on with aversion, and by
repetition wear us into a liking of what possibly, … displeased us [at first].”151
It is difficult to reject something that we ourselves practice. The ongoing
actualization of certain practices and habits can, over time, limit human
agency. For Locke, the liberty to forbear is an important part of freedom
to choose one’s happiness. Here, happiness was not based on the notion of
collective “greater good” and/or individualized pleasure.152 Making choices
is not a signifier of rationality. They are equated with an exercise of free-
dom for the sake of individual autonomy from misrule, suggesting that a
free person has the capacity for self-making. The necessary element of de-
liberation on choices and courses of action rested in aligning oneself with
the workmanship of the creator. Liberty and freedom are not ideological
tools but portals to self-actualization: “the idea of liberty is the idea of a
power in any agent to do or forbear any particular action, according to the
determination or thought of the mind,” and this power is in accord with
each person’s “volition”153 to be left un-manipulated. Locke’s position on
liberty implied a broad definition of property, as he questioned the powers
that defined the right to one’s self.
The notion of property, public and private, was to extend and secure
human freedom and civility. When it was referenced as one’s right to ac-
tion and willingness, it was distinct from the ownership of physical goods.
Capitalist conventions, such as integration of health and education within
markets, undermined Locke’s notion of political self-ownership and au-
tonomy.154 Three centuries after Locke, steeped in the logic of wealth ac-
cumulation as a good, Milton Friedman reconstructed Locke’s liberal
ideals. Individuals are a form of property, thanks to Locke, and “invest-
ment in human capital [is] precisely analogous to investment in machinery,
building or other forms of non-human capital.”155 This investment was to
be made through an education that ensured there was an economic return
on humankind. In the next chapter, I explore the history of approximation
of humans and machines. For now, the distinction between human life and
non-human is obliterated by the misuse of the notion of property. Fried-
man’s state is not the authority of civil society; its interventions were
justified so far as to remove obstacles, strengthen the operation of the mar-

kets, and ensure “the individual who received the training would in effect
bear the whole cost.”156 Here, the person (not his/her labour) is analogous
to an object, with no power to forbear either the cost or the investment
logic applied to their education—Friedman’s logic moves humanity to-
wards slavery. In contrast, Locke had not only placed humans above other
species but he also claimed their work was analogous to God’s.
For Locke, education was moral and developmental. It undid customs
that hinder human power and freedom. There is no foreshadowing of a self
that is directed by heuristics, standardized rubrics, and information pro-
cessing machines to pass tests as 21st-century education compels. “Nature,
not custom, has put into man a desire of happiness, and an aversion to
misery” and “[t]he role of custom and habit in the breeding of children is
to use those desires as motives, as well as to free the faculty of reason from
the control of those desires.”157 Locke’s theology “grant[ed], that good and
evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature,”
he warned that, “misplaced reward and punishments sacrifice their vir-
tue.”158 For Locke, there is no discipline without hope and fear, and disci-
plining comes by constant observation and correction so there would be
little need for physical punishment. While Locke relied on shame and dis-
pleasure to keep the child in order, he emphasized, “children are to be
treated as rational Creatures.”159 Here, hope and fear served as guiding
curricular instruments for the internalization of expectations and the ide-
alization of the rational human adult as the product of childhood.
While advocating for play and leaving children to unrestrained activi-
ties, Locke developed a technology for correction of the child’s behaviours
and inclinations. Parents were to observe their children, detect their natu-
ral dispositions, and intervene later. Idleness was to be corrected to culti-
vate the image of the child as a maker. The parents’ role was to direct the
child’s desire towards goals that ensured development, for “where there is
no desire, there will be no industry.”160 Locke objected to buying games for
children. Purchased games “teach the mind to wander after change, and
superfluity” and constitute a practice in “perpetually stretching itself after
something more still, and never to be satisfied.”161 He continued to note
that the point of play is not only variety but also the exercise of the will, so
children “seek for what they want, in themselves, and in their own endeav-
ours: whereby they will be taught moderation in their desires, application,
industry, thought contrivance, and good husbandry.”162 This aspect of
play engaged children with material life that had implications for develop-
ing political and economic habits. Education was not reduced to factual
knowledge but also, as Locke cited Seneca, it was about learning how to
live.163 For Locke, what was at stake was learning to govern oneself, adopt-
ing virtues that enable self-sufficiency. Education should foster the capacity
to assess reality and to work towards self-improvement. Such education

constituted an apprenticeship in freedom, actively developing dispositions
while taking pleasure in learning, living in relation to an authority who is
benevolent to liberty and understands liberty’s limits. Locke is a proponent
of instilling reverence in the child by love and fear whereby authority be-
comes internalized through constant practice, producing habits of civility
and respect.
Locke noted there is something that children love more than liberty
“and that is love of power and dominion,” the “two roots of almost all the
injustice and contention, that so disturb humane life,” and these need to be
“weeded out.”164 Possession, in particular, is a pleasing power to children
seemingly giving them a right. The actual “right,” Locke emphasized, is
the ability to abandon one’s possession as the exercise of liberty. By prac-
tice of such a right, children learn they have lost nothing from acts of
“kindness,” and “good nature may be settled in them into habit, and they
may take pleasure… in being kind, liberal and civil to other.”165 Locke
emphasized that rules and duties were to be avoided for true learning to
take place. If he had discouraged disciplining children by stressing duties,
it was because comprehending right and wrong is insufficient for justice—
justice can only be cultivated by improved reason and serious meditation.
Locke did resort to punishment should shame prove insufficient to deter
children from unjust possession of another’s property. Did Locke practice
what he preached?
2.6 Liberty after Locke

From the 17th century to the 20th century, English society entertained a
number of partly competing and partly complementary approaches. Jona-
than Clark explained that the providential orders survived during and after
Locke:
Filmer’s origin of government is exemplified everywhere: Locke’s scheme

of government has not ever, to the knowledge of any body, been exem-
plified any where (sic). In every family there is government, in every
family there is subjection, and subjection of the most absolute kind: the
father, sovereign, the mother and the young, subjects. … Under the au-
thority of the father, and his assistant and prime-minister (sic) the
mother, every human creature is endured to subjection, is trained up
into a habit of subjection.166
According to Clark, “Filmer’s use of patriarchy was intended to deny that

naturally-generated social forms provided coherent and legitimate struc-
tures alternative to those of the State, and here Locke and most
Englishmen until the 1790s agreed.”167 Family was more than an anthro-
pological notion but a proof for linear succession of masculine authority in
homes, schools, church, state, and society. Gender, race, and class were
embedded in the familial order that sanctified, trusted, and maintained
power and knowledge for the elites in administering the body politic. Sup-
port is found in Bentham’s claim that, “in the language of the Aristocratic
School, property and virtue are synonymous terms.”168 By a certain mea-
sure, Locke restructured this order but left open reason “as the capacity to
obey law of private property” and those who do not follow the law placed
themselves “into a state of war.”169 The global powers who prescribe and
universalize the law of private property themselves do not obey it. They
wage into the state of war as part of their imperialism.
Locke’s notion of the state of nature was utilized against the Aboriginal
peoples, as hunters and gathers (and therefore in the first economic stage),
who presumably would benefit from systems of private property and com-
merce. Locke bypassed the law of private property. He even justified tor-
ture and murder. Tully quoted Locke:
Since the Amerindians have no governments to deal with and no rights

in their hunting and gathering territories, they violate the law of nature
when they try to stop Europeans from settling and planting in America
and Europeans or their government, may punish them as ‘wild Savage
Beasts’ who ‘may be destroyed as a Lyon’.170
The discourse of divine right and property ownership further legitimized

European violence during the 18th and 19th centuries when other cul-
tures lacking constitutional government and systems of commerce unfa-
miliar to Europeans were deemed primitive. Locke and his like-minded
contemporaries were possessive, incapable of obeying the law of private
property. Their love of dominion rapidly moved through the stages of
colonization from military forces to disciplinary techniques of schooling
the Indigenous people by force and violence. Living in accord to nature
contrasted with European theological commercial faith on private prop-
erty and love for possession. Imperialistic expansion and land claims were
based on “economic argument in the justification of planting European
constitutional systems of private property and commerce around the
world and in justifying the coercive assimilation of Aboriginal and other
peoples.”171 Economic arguments often carried an air of theological hu-
manism to improve the lives of Aboriginal peoples. Improvement was
possible by land grabbing as well as military force and repressive dis-
course of development to align the Aboriginal people with the European
ideals. Economic improvements often resulted in genocide and overrode
the right to self-government.
From the Aboriginal perspective, “the land they had lost was more than
simply occupied by others. They had become defined by bundles of rights
and values that were foreign to their ways.”172 Although Aboriginal people
resist(ed) with humility and intelligence, the aggressors continue(d). Euro-
peans utilized various strategies to demand conversion. In this context, the
theological underpinnings of the universal European economic system of
value become even more visible only when it comes against other forms.
Consider the colonization of India, a place with diverse faiths, which, after
centuries of trade with the Roman Empire, came to be subjected to Portu-
guese, Dutch, and British hegemony. The elites could reflect on Locke’s
thoughts on property, liberty, and education and contemplate the divine
rights they drafted for themselves, while destroying the lives of those they
claimed as property. Hobbesian contractual rights, the missionaries, mili-
taries, and schools continue to be in play in the global restructuring of
value systems today. The subtext of modern globalization has embedded in
it those theological and economic undertakings173 that historically installed
a particular form of reason.
Locke’s effort to balance individual freedom and the demands of politi-
cal authority influenced the individualism of the 18th century. Locke’s in-
dividualism coincided with “emerging capitalist society” that “does not
exclude but on the contrary demands the supremacy of the state over the
individual.”174 Liberalism’s humanistic tenets offered a modality of the
state authority that at once freed individuals and subjugated them to laws
of private property.175 The construction of individuation as a response to
absolute authority, by a way of discourse on property, served to safeguard
freedom only for certain groups.
The crucial point for Locke in any distribution of property is twofold:

that everyone has the means necessary for comfortable subsistence; and
that everyone is able to labour in, and enjoy the fruits of, his calling in a
manner appropriate to man, and analogous to God’s activity as a maker.176
Such universal notions, Tully notes, neglected the equality of non-Euro-

pean people. The development of individual rights of ownership had impli-
cations for the particularities of the liberal state. Liberalism developed as
both an economic and political ideology to assert the autonomy of the in-
dividual—defended by the state’s laws. The state did not obstruct freedom
but utilized it for the frugal government. Modern liberalism reflected a
triangulation of Hobbes’s economic sentiments, Filmer’s patriarchy, and
Locke’s individualism.
The notion of a person as property legitimized both chattel slavery and
colonization in economic imperialism. Locke’s involvement with slave
trading companies and his justification of the imperial system177 point to
the ideals he left behind. Locke was an “heir of Puritan rationalism,” and
his rejection of the Christian state “was not to affirm the notion of secular
state.”178 The economic logic that promoted violence, as natural, was imag-
ined as preventing anarchic competition for resources at the dawn of politi-
cal economy.179 The resources of African nations continue to be exploited
by economically and militarily advantaged nations with their rationalizing
contractual right theories, and the colonial aggression of Locke’s time
strikes a resemblance to the colonial presence in the invasion of Afghani-
stan, Palestine, and Iraq. Examining the militarization of the Middle East,
Derek Gregory points out that “the supposedly secular world of modernity
had not triumphed over religion but, on the contrary, was now reaping the
whirlwind of ‘God’s revenge’ in the form of global religious revivalism.”180
After the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Nel Noddings suggested that
such disturbances found their trace in education181 endorsed by religious
and economic extremism, nationalism, and support for violence.
2.7 Constitutional (un)freedom
According to Siedentop, the papal claim to act as a sovereign authority in
spiritual and temporal matters made individuals (souls) the unit of legal
jurisdiction and initiated arguments for moral equality. “The example of
the church as a unified legal system, found on the subjection of individuals,
gave birth to the project of creating states.”182 The papal claim to plenitude
of power also awakened the defence of the secular state and after Reforma-
tion led to the creation of nation-state as a sovereign authority. However,
“[t]he Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over
everyday life,” Max Weber explained, “but rather the substantiation of a
new form of control for the previous one.”183 One element that Weber sets
as central to the spread of Protestant ethics is the change in value of educa-
tion, within homes and communities, towards administrative and indus-
trial roles.
Writing in the early 20th century, Weber noted that legal power “has in
many respects grown weaker rather than stronger as compared with earlier
conditions.”184 This decline has led to the realization that “legal guaranty
by the state is not indispensable to any basic economic phenomenon.”185
Moreover, the disintegration of tradition has led to the state’s declining at-
tention to fairness as market conventions give centrality to the concept of
private interests and ownership. Here too, in relation to Locke, the modern
state is reductionist in its approach to protecting the public by assuming
that the protection of private interests and properties are sufficient for the
constitution of civil justice. Thirdly, Weber observed that the “economic
life by its very nature has destroyed those other associations which used to
be the bearers of law and thus of legal guaranties.”186 As shown above,
these transitions had psychosocial concomitants; legal rules became stan-

dard measures for subjective rights. Although Weber did not overlook le-
gal factors, his “rigorous canons of factual objectivity in historical
research” and his “emphasis on economic rather than formal legal factors”
complicated understanding his aims.187 The progression of the state as a
regulator of freedom minimized its power in the face of monopolistic capi-
talism, gradually relocating it within markets. Weber did not foresee the
entrepreneurial state188 as a rational authority.
The emphasis on property drove the Europeans’ rationality, installing
imperial rule and legitimizing cultural hegemony by the way of modern
constitutionalism. As later chapters demonstrate, the state became an ac-
tive partner in economization schemes while science and technology in-
formed reasoning about private and public. Initial discourses of ownership,
rights, and freedom accompanied a discourse of active self-dispossession to
ensure that personal freedom did not become reducible to another form of
property and at the mercy of the economic sentiments of the elect. Over
time, the conceptual frameworks of property allowed commercial prac-
tices to include human development as part of the economic system. As
humans become defined, categorized, and treated in terms of property,
they become ever more in need of protection against the possibility of be-
ing dispossessed.
Notes
1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott
Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 118.
2 Ibid., 118.
3 Ibid., 119. Weber credited Puritanism with carrying “the ethos of the rational
organization of capital and labour” found in modernity (p. 166).
4 Max Weber (1966) noted that across Europe “the military, judicial, and in-
dustrial authority was taken away from the cities. … The separate states had
to compete for mobile capital, which dictated to them the conditions under
which it would assist them to power. Out of this alliance of the state with
capital, dictated by necessity, arose the national citizen class, the bourgeoisie
in the modern sense of the word. Hence it is the closed national state which
afforded capitalism its chance for development…” (p. 249).
5 Brian Tierney, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 300–1475 (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1970), 18.
6 Ibid., 29.
7 Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 115.
8 Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and Its
Application in England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 6.
9 Ibid., 11. Tierney noted: “While, however, idleness was condemned and pov-
erty was not automatically equated with virtue, there was no disposition to go
to the opposite extreme and assume that a state of destitution was necessarily
indicative of moral turpitude.” (p. 12).
10 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A History of an Idea (Cam-

bridge: Harvard University Press, 1933).
11 James Westfall Thompson, Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages
(300–1300): Volume II, (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966), 603.
“The remedy for monastic corruption always was more Monks,” noted James
Thompson, “[i]t rarely seems to have struck the medieval mind that perhaps
the proper remedy was not more, but fewer monks.” Thompson showed the
number of monasteries grew from 11 in 4th-century France to 710 in the 12th
century.
12 Westfall Thompson, Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages (300–
1300), 608.
13 Ibid., 622.
14 Ibid., 623.
15 Ibid., 627.
16 Robert B. Ekelund, Robert F. Hébert, and Robert D. Tollison, “An Economic
Model of the Medieval Church: Usury as a Form of Rent Seeking,” Journal of
Law, Economics & Organization 5, no. 2 (1989): 330. The authors noted
that the “institutional framework of the medieval church provided many op-
portunities for rent seeking and created numerous problems of enforcement
for ecclesiastic authorities” (p. 228). The monasteries often found a way
around the bureaucratic and financial strains.
17 Tierney, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 226. “According to medieval
doctrine, any interest charged for the loan of money was sinful,” this changed
in the 13th century by the development of a money economy which influenced
the social codes of the 12th and 13th centuries (p. 226). Tierney notes the
“civilizing influence of the Church” in “warfare” and “business” (p. 226).
18 Harold Perkin, “History of Universities,” in International Handbook of
Higher Education, ed. James J.F. Forest and Philip G. Altbach (Netherlands:
Springer, 2007), 159. According to Perkin, the university went through five
stages. With the first stage concerned with the “role in the destruction of the
medieval world order at the reformation (12th century–1530s)” to the fifth
stage concerned with “the transition from elite to mass higher education and
the role of the university and its offshoots in post-industrial society (1945–
present)” (p. 161).
19 John Willinsky, The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from
Saint Jerome to John Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 85.
20 Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). “They [merchants] had capi-
tal, extended credit and promoted their business through market research” (p.
124).
21 Janet Coleman, “Property and Poverty,” in The Cambridge History of Medi-
eval Political Thought c.350–c.1450, ed. James H. Burns (London: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2008), 608.
22 Brian Tierney, The Crises of Church and State 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1964), 159.
23 Thomas M. Osborne, Human action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus
& William of Ockham, (Washington: Catholic University of American Press,
2014), xvii.
24 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political
Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 275.
25 Ibid., 277.
26 Joseph Owens, “Aristotle and Aquinas,” in The Cambridge Companion to

Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cam-
27 Thomas Aquinas, Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: God and
the Order of Creation, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Hackett, 1997), 234.
28 Thomas Aquinas, On Law, Morality and Politics, ed. W.E. Baumgarth and R.
J. Regan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 13–14.
29 Michel Villey, “Epitome of Classical Natural Law,” Griffith Law Review 9,
no. 1 (2000): 82.
30 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part I,
QQ. LXXV. –CII, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Q. 96,
2. (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1938), 334.
QQ. LXXV. –CII, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Q. 96,
4. (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1938), 331.
32 Quentin Skinner, “Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the language of Renais-
sance Humanism,” in The Language of Political Theory in Early Modern
Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
138.
33 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part II,
QQ. XLVII–LXXIX, trans.by Fathers of the English Dominican Province
(London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1929), 105.
34 Ibid., 106.
35 Ibid., 112.
36 Henry Renard, “The Habits in the System of St. Thomas: Prologue,” Grego-
rianum 29, no. 1 (1948): 89.
37 Ibid., 97.
38 Nicholas Austin, Aquinas on Virtues: A Causal Reading (Washington:
Georgetown University Press, 2017). Austin drew on Nel Noddings’ philoso-
phy of care in interpreting Aquinas: “Virtue, she [Noddings] says, ‘is built up
in relation. It reaches out to the other and grows in response to others’” (p.
206).
QQ. XLVII–LXXIX, trans.by Fathers of the English Dominican Province
(London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1929), 122. Because nature and rea-
son are not independent and innate, nor instruments, Aquinas suggested that
one faculty (reason or intellect) by itself does not dominate the operative po-
tency of humans.
40 Ibid., 126. Aquinas equates injustice to a mortal sin and contrary to charity
(p. 142).
41 Janet Coleman, “Are There Only Individual Rights or Only Duties?” in
Transformations in Medieval and Early Modern Rights Discourse, ed. V.
Mäkinen and P. Korkman (Netherlands: Springer, 2006), 8.
42 Ibid., 22. According to Coleman, Aquinas promoted a sense of autonomy to
humans “as the master of his [her] own affairs” that stood in contrast to neo-
Augustinians tendency “to use recta ratio primarily as an authoritative com-
munication to Christ’s vicars and not to all men” (p. 23).
QQ. LXXV. –CII, trans.by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Lon-
don: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1938), 137.
44 William W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave
in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1908), 3. During the reign of Romans, the laws of manumission,
contract, and debt were to establish a system of dependency to one’s master.
Buckland showed that the legal system improved the relation between the
Dominus (owner) and slave.
45 Ibid., 11.
QQ. XLVII–LXXIX, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province,
(London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1929), 110.
47 Tierney, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 226. This was based on the as-
sumption that merchants “did not misrepresent their quality [of the goods]
and had not distorted the market by creating an artificial scarcity through
hoarding” (p. 226).
48 Janet Coleman, “Property and Poverty,” in The Cambridge History of Medi-
eval Political Thought c.350–c.1450, ed. James H. Burns (London: Cam-
49 Coleman, “Property and Poverty,” 624. This early orientation to liberality
continued to be Platonic in considering the freedom of individuals within a
community.
50 Ibid., 622.
51 Ibid., 622.
QQ. XLVII–LXXIX, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Lon-
don: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1929), 175. According to Aquinas, there
are two kinds of losses: first, one is deprived from what he actually has lost
and justice acts for repayment. The second kind is when one prevents another
“from obtaining what he was on the way to obtain.” And in this “he is bound
to make some compensation, according to the condition of person and things”
(p. 175). This second loss is virtual or potential loss in which the profit and
loss may have hindered another person in many ways.
53 John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 241.
54 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 453.
While admitting the dangers of both isolating a single strand of Dante’s
thought and reading into his work doctrines which, though perhaps im-
peccable all by themselves, could never have crossed his mind, it will be
possible nevertheless to indicate a theme which illustrated Dante’s mode
of apportioning theological thought to the secular world and which is
inextricably intertwined with the duality of his fundamental concepts of
mankind and man, and of man’s ultimate goals in this world and the
other.
(p. 454)
55 Dante Alighieri, Monarchy, trans. and ed. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996). Dante saw “since it is greed alone which perverts
judgment and obstructs justice, it follows that he [the monarch] alone, or he
more than anyone else, can be well disposed to rule” (p. 23). Because the
monarch has this sober judgement, it was believed that God wanted the peo-
ple to abandon their own judgement and accept him as an executor of the
laws.
56 Ibid., 33. For Dante, “God wills in human society must be considered true
and pure right” (p. 33). Roman’s nobility by race, their deserved rightful do-
minion of the world was affirmed by God’s judgement, since nature does not
act contrary to God’s will.
57 Ibid., 58.
58 Ibid., 92–94.
59 Philip H. Wicksteed, Dante & Aquinas (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1913),
134. While Aquinas’ Contra Gentiles had argued that human blessing rested
in contemplation of God, Dante’s orientation to actualization of human po-
tentials aimed at “spiritualizing of the secular order of things” (p. 134).
60 Ibid., 139.
61 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 455. See page 461–464 for the concept
of Homo Optimus in relation to ethical, natural, and supra-natural goals.
62 Alfred J. Freddoso, “Ockham on Faith and Reason,” in The Cambridge Com-
panion to Ockham, ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 346.
63 Francis Oakley, “Medieval Theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and
the Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition,” Natural Law Forum, 60,
(1961). http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/nd_naturallaw_forum/60
64 Ibid., 59.
65 Ibid., 225–27. Ockham thought, “that merit is entirely a result of God’s
choice” (227).
66 Thomas Aquinas cited in Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Ori-
gin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 19.
67 Oakley, “Medieval Theories of Natural Law,” 70.
68 John Kilcullen, “The Political Writings,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Ockham, ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 308.
69 Annabel S. Brett, “Introduction,” in On the Power of Emperors and Popes,
edited by Annabel S. Brett, 7–51(Virginia: Thoemmes Press, 1998), 17.
70 Kilcullen, “The Political Writings,” 309.
71 Brian Tierney, “The Idea of Natural Rights-origins and Persistence,” North-
western Journal of International Human Rights 2, no. 1 (2004): 9.
72 Jonathan Robinson, William of Ockham’s Early Theory of Property Rights in
Context (Boston: Brill, 2013), 225. Ockham “offer[ed] a richer account of
what a license [to use] was and how it worked” and “Ockham’s version
would be useful for maintaining the Franciscan desire to use goods licitly
without any connected property right…” (p. 203).
73 Ibid., 374.
74 Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-life
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 110–11. The Franciscan principle
articulated “the idea of the life of Christ as model and image of life… [this]
complete and total equation of rule and life of Christ [offered] a radical trans-
formation in the way of conceiving both life and rule” (p. 99).
75 Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The controversy continued “even
into the early seventeenth century” (p. 20).
76 William Ockham, “Whether a Prince can Receive the Goods of the Church,” in
Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-century England: Treatises by Walther of
Milemete, William of Pagula, and William of Ockham, ed. Cary J. Nederman
(Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 166.
Ockham wrote, “for the sake of his own person… more special than others in
need” the king has to be given access to “the goods of the church” (185).
77 Ockham, On the Power of Emperors and Popes, 133.
78 John Finnis (2011) agreed with Tierney in his objection to Villey: the “defini-
tion of ‘jus’ developed by Ockham can be seen from his definition of ‘jus
utendi’”:“A jus utendi is a lawful power of using an external object; a power
which one ought not to be deprived of against ones’ will except for fault or
other reasonable cause; a power such that, if one is deprived of it, one can
institute legal proceedings against the person so depriving one” (p. 228).
79 John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 228. Brian Tierney, “The Idea of Natural Rights-origins and
Persistence,” Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 2, no. 1
(2004):1–13.
80 Jonathan Robinson, “Ockham, the Sanctity of Rights, and the Canonists,”
Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 31 (2014): 157. This may be due to inter-
preting St. Thomas’ argument that everyone has a right to the law’s equal
treatment as everyone has the right to justice. Robinson continued to note
that “modern conception of rights have lost sight of this connection to ‘ius,’
or confused it with ‘lex’ [the law]” (p. 157). This may be due to interpreting
St. Thomas’ argument that everyone has a right to law’s equal treatment as
everyone has right to justice, but in a modern individualized society, it also
has led to personal notions of rights against the laws of civil society.
81 Jonathan Robinson, William of Ockham’s Early Theory of Property Rights in
Context (Boston: Brill, 2013), 318.
82 Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-life,
137.
83 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development, 29.
84 Ibid., 30.
85 Ibid., 30.
86 William Ockham, Philosophical Writings William of Ockham: A Selection,
trans. Phiotheus Boehner (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub, 1990).
87 Joseph F. Rychlak, Philosophy of Science for Personality Theory (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 268. In the domain of political theory, Tully (1980)
noted Ockham’s position stood in contrast to “Bacon’s logic which would
mitigate” scepticism and from Descartes’ argument “that the real essences of
substances can be known” (p. 23).
88 Francis Oakley, “Medieval Theories of Natural Law,” 82.
89 Ibid., 83. Ockham’s writings contributed to the work of influential figures
such as Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Thomas Hobbes.
90 Jeffrey Fisher, “Gerson’s Mystical Theology,” in A Companion to Jean Ger-
son, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Boston: Brill, 2006), 223. “Gerson would
like to retain affirmative and negative, affect and intellect, but in the context
of their mutual relativity—a relativity based ultimately in a radically negative
understanding of the mystical project. Gerson’s efforts in this respect reflect
his typical pastoral concerns and his ‘conservative progressivism’” (p. 248).
91 Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the
Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 2009), 148.
92 Ibid., 15. Gerson’s aims were educational: “In Gerson we see a more humanist
approach to books and to reading, but in the service of preserving the ortho-
dox teaching” (p. 15).
93 Yelana Mazour-Mauservich, “Gerson’s Legacy,” in A Companion to Jean

Gerson, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Boston: Brill, 2006), 364.
94 Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print, 218. At the outset of
his book, Hobbins wrote: “My point here is not to overthrow the schoolman-
humanist opposition but to complicate it and to suggest that the standard
view moves too rapidly from 1200–1500” (p. 20).
95 Ibid., 218.
96 John R. Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (Toronto: Mac-
millan Canada, 1994), 398.
A combination of personal ambition for self-improvement at a time of en-
hanced but competitive job opportunities, and of the humanistic emphasis
on education, meant that more pupils were in any case going to schools
whose teaching methods became less lackadaisical.
(p. 398)
97 Ibid., 416.
98 Quentin Skinner, “Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the Language of Renais-
sance Humanism,” 140/155–6.
99 Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973).
According to Bodin, despotic monarchy, like slavery, was a derogation
from the law of nature usually arising from an act of conquest… Yet in
admitting its legitimacy, Bodin observes that it is a kind of power that is
liable to abuse, and that it is associated with barbaric times or place.
(pp. 84–85)
Franklin elaborated it is by the way of private property rights that Bodin ex-
plained some limitations to the exercise of absolutism with exception of pun-
ishment for crime.
100 Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, trans. P. J. Waley and D. P. Waley
(London: Routledge, 1956), 3. Botero praises Jean Bodin, who like Hobbes
had extended .the role of absolute sovereignty.
101 Ibid., 21. Here, Botero did not disagree with Bodin’s proposal that the
“Princes and other governors have an obligation not to inconvenience but to
protect both ‘the subject in particular’ and ‘the whole bodies for the state’”
(Skinner, 2010, p. 327) and to impose on the prince a responsibility to those
who come under his rule.
102 Viroli Maurizio, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Trans-
formation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge
103 Ibid., 9.
104 Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 314. Stacey cited Diderot: “It was very
much the fault of the reading and not of Machiavelli, that they mistook ‘a
satire for eulogy’” (p. 315).
105 Harald E. Braun, “Knowledge and Counsel in Giovanni Botero’s Ragion di
Stato,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 270–89.
106 Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, trans. and ed. P. J. Waley and D. P.
Waley (London: Routledge, 1956), 34. Knowing “many things,” including
“wide knowledge of all that pertains to human feelings and behaviour,” gains
primacy in conceptualization of the ruler (p. 34).
107 Ibid., 34–38.

108 Ibid., 67.
109 Paul Veyne, “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” in Foucault and His Interlocu-
tors, ed. by Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997),
154. Veyne elaborated that
[t]he governed is too vague a term, and it does not exist as an entity…. The
object [of reason of the state] is only the correlative of the practice; prior to
practice there exists no eternal governed that could be targeted more or less
accurately and with respect to which one could modify one’s aim so as to
improve it.
(p. 155)
110 Botero, The Reason of State, 192.
111 Giovanni Botero, The Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificency
and Greatness of Cities, trans. and ed. P. J. Waley and D. P. Waley (London:
Routledge, 1956), 251.
112 Ibid., 252.
113 Botero, The Reason of State, 131.
114 Ibid., 153.
115 Ibid., 156.
116 Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” in Proceedings of the
British Academy, 162 (2010): 344.
117 James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 37.
118 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 186–91. Lovejoy cited John Locke and
William Petty who conceived that between God and humans might be other
creatures more intelligent than humans. The “link” was based on the “spiri-
tual beings and successive hierarchies above human” (p. 190).
119 Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 108. Strauss found in Hobbes:
there is no real good outside sensual goods and the means to acquire them.
Even science—however great the pleasure it may afford the individual—has
no other publicly defensible aim than the increase of human power and
human well-being. Well-being is achived mainly by labour and thrift. The
gifts of nature are less important for its acquisition than trade and
industry.
(p. 119)
120 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1962), 67.
121 Donald Rutherford, “In Pursuit of Happiness: Hobbes’s New Science of Eth-
ics,” Philosophical Topics 31, no. 1/2 (2003): 369–93.
122 Hobbes, Leviathan, 69.
123 Quentin Skinner, “On the Liberty of the Ancient and the Moderns: A Reply
to my Critics,” Journal of History of Ideas 73, no. 1 (2012): 134.
124 Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans.
Daniela Gobetti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13.
125 Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, 13–14.
126 Peter Laslett, “Introduction,” in Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir
Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), 12. The state of
the Middle Ages was gradually separating its reliance from the church by
other analogies. And family is upheld as an example to define the domestic
obedience for the patriarchal state of Robert Filmer and his contemporaries:
Bellrmine, Suarez, Arnisaeus, and Grotius (p. 27). The idea had its root in
ancient Greece.
127 Ibid., 12.
128 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed.
Peter Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), 106.
129 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1967), 160.
130 Locke was aware of the equivocity of the Latin terms such as ius and domi-
nium, according to Tully (1980), who noted Locke’s notion of property in its
broad sense was in line with scholastics’ conception of property as a “right to
something which belongs to all” (p. 60). Locke follows Aquinas by affirming
that natural law is given by God; it applies to all human beings.
131 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 216. Natural dominion is referred to
human access directed by reflection and reason, a right “to make use of those
things that were necessary or useful to his [their] being” (p. 223).
132 Steven Forde, “Natural law, Theology, and Morality in Locke,” American
Journal of Political Science 45, no. 2 (2001), 397.
133 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 287.
134 Ibid., 289.
135 Locke is affirmative of Dante’s observation that humans need “two guides,”
worldly and spiritual. They are guides not controllers—see Monarchy (p. 92).
Tully (1980) observed for Locke “[m]oney disrupts the natural order,” gov-
ernment is required to reconstitute this order and bring human action inline
with God’s intentions (p. 154).
136 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 297.
137 Ibid., 368. A few pages later, Locke wrote of the legislative powers that look
after properties, peac,e and safety of the society by the positive laws they es-
tablished and they too are governed by the fundamental natural law of pre-
serving the society (p. 374).
138 Ibid., 326.
139 Ibid., 314.
140 Ibid., 324.
141 Ibid., 316.
142 John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1954), 147. Here, Locke drew from both natural law and natu-
ral right theorists.
143 Ibid., 161. Locke added “the power of custom and opinion based on tradi-
tional ways of life is such as to arm men even against their own selves, so that
they lay violent hands upon themselves and seek death as eagerly as others
shun it” (p. 173).
144 Ibid., 205.
145 Ibid., 215.
146 Ibid., 215. Locke wrote, “the rightness of an action does not depend on its
utility, on the contrary, its utility is a result of its righteousness” (p. 215).
147 Tully, A Discourse on Property, 128. Does this “liberty to use” give human
beings a right to use other human being? Not in Locke but see Chapter 5 and
the conclusion.
148 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton
(New York: Dutton, 1968), 218.
149 Ibid., 221. “Free examination” and “care and endeavour” are Locke’s phrases
(pp. 220–22).
150 Ibid., 216.
151 Ibid., 232.
152 Locke had noted earlier in his Essay that although some pleasures (for ex-
ample, security) are commonly held, there is great variety in finding certain
things agreeable among each person. The greatest good rests in the condition
in which humans exercise their judgement and experience whether they find
pleasure in excess of eating and drinking or in study and moderation.
153 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 197.
154 Harry Braveman, Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work
in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998). Brave-
man highlighted that the notion of freedom and equality became slowly ab-
sorbed in “social division of labour” in 18th century’s revision and uptake of
Locke’s civil society (pp. 72–75).
155 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962), 100.
156 Ibid., 105. If the government is to intervene and subsidies are provided, it
should play a contractual role to ensure returns are repaid by taxation.
157 John W. Yolton and Jean Yolton, “Introduction,” in Some Thoughts Concern-
ing Education by John Locke, ed. John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1989), 23.
158 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education by John Locke, ed.
W. John and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 114–15.
159 Ibid., 115. Locke explained the need of open air, exercise, sleep, clothing, and
diet before he turned to education as a way of caring for “Children’s mind”
and the idea that children must be treated with “dignity and excellency of a
rational creature” (p. 103).
160 Ibid., 188.
161 Ibid., 191.
162 Ibid., 192.
163 Ibid., 157. While Locke’s concern was the training of the sons of “gentle-
men,” their education would prove to be useful also to those around them.
164 Ibid., 164.
165 Ibid., 170.
166 Jonathan C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832. Ideology, Social Structure
and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 174.
167 Ibid., 175. The French and American Revolution and the transformation of
Patriarchal state to multi-layered bureaucracy centred on individual freedom
were facilitated by the control over information production by the elites.
168 Ibid., 178.
169 John McMurty, Value Wars: The Global Market vs. the Life Economy (Lon-
don: Pluto Press, 2002), 66.
170 James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 73.
171 Ibid., 75.
172 Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Edge of Empire,” Annals of
the Association of American Geographers, 94, no.1 (2004): 177–78.
Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy (Rotterdam: Sense Publisher, 2006).
174 Crawford B. Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Ox-

ford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 256.
175 According to Locke (1967) humans “give up all their natural power to the
society which they enter into, and the community put the legislative power
into such hands as they think fit, with this trust, that they shall be governed
by declared laws, or else their peace, quiet, and property will still be at the
same uncertainty, as it was in the state of nature” (p. 377).
176 Tully, A Discourse on Property, 169.
177 William Uzgalis, “John Lock, Racism, slavery and Indian Lands,” in The Ox-
ford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, ed. Naomi Zack (Cambridge: Ox-
ford University Press, 2018). Uzgalis explained that, Locke’s legitimate and
illegitimate theoretical constructs of slavery and his “extraordinary involve-
ment with the slave trade” and colonial administration reflects a contradic-
tion in Locke and some of his contemporaries (p. 29). See also Brad
Hinshelwood, “The Carolinian context of John Locke's theory of Slavery,”
Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013): 562–90.
178 Winthrop S. Hudson, “John Locke: Heir of Puritan political Theorists,” in
Calvinism and the Political Order, ed. by George L. Hunt (Philadelphia: The
Westminster Press, 196), 127. “In the one realm God was known through the
light of nature that was common to all mankind. In the other realm, God was
made known in Christ, an apprehension peculiar to the elect” (p. 127).
179 David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Govern-
ment,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–27.
180 Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 56.
181 Nel Noddings (2011), in her examination of American culture, noted that
“there is a surprisingly large volume of literature on peace education. How-
ever, not much of it appears in the standard school curriculum, and we are left
to wonder where it would fit” (p. 141).
182 Ibid., 221.
183 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, 36.
184 Weber, On Law in Economy and Society, 37.
185 Ibid., 39.
186 Ibid., 39–40.
187 In his introduction to Weber’s Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
Talcott Parsons differentiates Weber’s approach to economic history from
Karl Marx.
188 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public Vs. Pri-
vate Sector Myths (London: Anthem Press, 2015). The triumph of financial
market over commercial market has left “risk taking” to be “an increasingly
collective endeavour… while the returns have been much less collectively dis-
tributed” (p. 195).
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-life. Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Alighieri, Dante. Monarchy. Translated and edited by Prue Shaw. Cambridge:
Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas Part I, QQ.
CIII-CXIX. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Lon-
don: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1922.
Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part II, QQ.
XLVII-LXXIX. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Lon-
don: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1929.
Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part I, QQ.
LXXV –CII. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London:
Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1938.
Aquinas, Thomas. On Law, Morality and Politics, edited by W.E. Baumgarth and
R. J. Regan. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988.
Aquinas, Thomas. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: God and the
Order of Creation, edited by Anton C. Pegis. New York: Hackett, 1997.
Austin, Nicholas. Aquinas on Virtues: A Causal Reading. Washington: George-
town University Press, 2017.
Bobbio, Norberto. Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition. Translated by
Daniela Gobetti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Botero, Giovanni. The Reason of State. Translated and edited by P. J. and D. P.
Waley, 3–224. London: Routledge, 1956a.
Botero, Giovanni. The Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificency and
Greatness of Cities. Translated and edited by P. J. and D. P. Waley, 227–80. Lon-
don: Routledge, 1956b.
Braun, Harald E. “Knowledge and Counsel in Giovanni Botero’s Ragion di stato.”
Journal of Jesuit Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 270–89. https://doi.
org/10.1163/22141332-00402007.
Braveman, Harry. Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the
Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998.
Brett, Annabel S. “Introduction.” In On the Power of Emperors and Popes, edited
by Annabel S. Brett, 7–51. Virginia: Thoemmes Press: 1998.
Buckland, William W. The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in
Private Law from Augustus to Justinian. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1908.
Coleman, Janet. “Dominium in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Political Thought
and Its Seventeenth-century Heirs: John of Paris and Locke.” Political Studies 33,
no. 1 (1985): 73–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1985.tb01562.x.
Coleman, Janet. “Are There Only Individual Rights or Only Duties?” In Transfor-
mations in Medieval and Early Modern Rights Discourse, edited by V. Mäkinen
and P. Korkman, 1–34. Netherlands: Springer, 2006.
Coleman, Janet. “Property and Poverty.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval
Political Thought c.350–c.1450, edited by James Henderson Burns, 607–48.
London: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Robert Filmer. Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer. Edited
by Peter Laslett. Oxford: Blackwell, 1949.
Finnis, John. Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press,1998.
Finnis, John. Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011.
Fisher, Jeffrey. “Gerson’s Mystical Theology.” In A Companion to Jean Gerson,
edited by Brian Patrick McGuire, 205–48. Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Forde, Steven. “Natural Law, Theology, and Morality in Locke.” American Journal
of Political Science 45, no. 2 (2001): 396–409. https://doi.org/10.2307/2669348.
Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory. Cambridge:
Freddoso, Alfred J. “Ockham on Faith and Reason,” in The Cambridge compan-
ion to Ockham, edited by Paul Vincent Spade. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1999.
Hale, John. The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. Toronto: Macmillan
Canada, 1994.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1962.
Hobbins, Daniel. Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the
Transformation of Late Medieval Learning. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2009.
Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theol-
ogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Kilcullen, John. “The Political Writings.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ock-
ham, edited by Paul V. Spade, 302–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999.
Laslett, Peter. “Introduction.” In Ptriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert
Filmer, edited by Peter Laslett, 1–48. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949.
Locke, John. Essays on the Law of Nature, edited by W. von Leyden. Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1954.
Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Edited by John W.
Yolton, New York: Dutton, 1961.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge:
Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education by John Locke. Edited by
John W. and Jean S. Yolton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Lopez, Robert S. The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350. New
Maurizio, Viroli. From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transfor-
mation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1992.
Mazour-Mauservich, Yelana. “Gerson’s Legacy.” In A Companion to Jean Gerson.
Edited by Brian Patrick McGuire, 357–99. Boston: Brill, 2006.
Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public Vs. Private
Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press, 2015.
Noddings, Nel. Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War. Cam-
Oakley, Francis. “Medieval theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the
Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition.” Natural Law Forum 60, no. 1 (1961):
63–83. https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/nd_naturallaw_forum/60
Ockham, William. Philosophical Writings William of Ockham: A Selection. Trans-

lated by Phiotheus Boehner. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub, 1990.
Ockham, William. On the Power of Emperors and Popes. Translated by Annabel
S. Brett. Durham: Thoemmes Press, 1998.
Ockham, William. “Whether a prince can receive the goods of the Church.” In Politi-
cal Thought in Early Fourteenth-century England: Treatises by Walther of Mile-
mete, William of Pagula, and William of Ockham. Edited by Cary J. Nederman,
153–97. Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002.
Osborne, Thomas M. Human action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus &
William of Ockham. Washington: Catholic University of American Press, 2014.
Owens, Joseph. “Aristotle and Aquinas.” In The Cambridge Companion to Aqui-
nas. Edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, 38–49. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999a.
Perkin, Harold. “History of Universities.” In International Handbook of Higher
Education. Edited by James J.F. Forest and Philip G. Altbach, 159–205. Nether-
lands: Springer, 2007.
Renard, Henry. “The Habits in the System of St. Thomas: Prologue.” Gregoria-
num 29, no. 1 (1948): 88–117. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23569757.
Robinson, Jonathan. William of Ockham's Early Theory of Property Rights in
Context. Boston: Brill, 2013.
Rutherford, Donald. “In Pursuit of Happiness: Hobbes’s New Science of Ethics.”
Philosophical Topics 31, no. 1/2 (2003): 369–93. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/43154419.
Rychlak, Joseph F. Philosophy of Science for Personality Theory. Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin, 1968.
Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.
Skinner, Quentin. “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the language of Renaissance hu-
manism.” In The Language of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe. Edited
by Anthony Pagden, 123–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Skinner, Quentin. “A Genealogy of the Modern State.” Proceedings of the British
Academy 162 (2010): 352–70.
Skinner, Quentin. “On the Liberty of the Ancient and the Moderns: A Reply to my
Critics.” Journal of History of Ideas 73, no. 1 (2012): 127–46. doi:10.1353/
jhi.2012.0010.
Stacey, Peter. Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2009.
Strauss, Leo. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis. Ox-
Thompson, James Westfall. Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages (300–
1300): Volume II. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966.
Tierney, Brian. Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and its Applica-
tion in England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959.
Tierney, Brian. The Crises of Church and State 1050–1300. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1964.
Tierney, Brian. Western Europe in the Middle Ages 300–1475. New York: Knopf,
1970.
Tierney, Brian. “The Idea of Natural Right-origin and Persistence.” North-western
Journal of International Human Rights 2, no. 1 (2004): 1–12. https://scholarly
commons.law.northwestern.edu/njihr/vol2/iss1/2.
Tuck, Richard. Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development. New
Tully, James. A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries. New
Tully, James. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. New
Uzgalis, William. “John Lock, Racism, Slavery and Indian Lands.” In The Oxford
Handbook of Philosophy and Race. Edited by Naomi Zack, 21–30. Oxford:
Veyne, Paul. “Foucault Revolutionizes History.” In Foucault and His Interlocu-
tors. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson, 146–82. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997.
Villey, Michel. “Epitome of Classical Natural Law.” Griffith Law Review 9, no. 1
(2000): 74–97.
Weber, Max. General Economic history. Translated by Frank H. Knight. New York:
Collier Books, 1966.
Weber, Max. On Law in Economy and Society. Edited by Max Rheinstein. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1954.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by
Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958.
Westfall, Richard S. “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Christian-
ity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes, and Newton.” In God and Nature: Historical
Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity. Edited by David C Lindberg and
Ronal L. Numbers, 218–37. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Wicksteed, Philip H. Dante & Aquinas. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1913.
Willinsky, John. The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint
Jerome to John Locke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
3 Human-God-Machine
The notion of property played a central role in conceptualizing human al-

terity and rationality. Property had ontological implications in the age of
conquest. The promise of missionaries to the Aboriginal people, dispos-
sessed from their way of life, was to make them human. “In the Judeo-
Christian tradition, human nature was treated not as a fact or as a bundle
of potentialities, but as a problem.”1 Colonization and commercialism led
by the Europeans made property part of the mental furniture of humanity.
“Property makes capital ‘mind friendly,’” de Sato Polar has stated, and
“capital results from the ability of the West to use property systems to
represent their resources in virtual context.” Only then “can minds meet to
identify and realize the meaning of assets for humankind.”2 Certain con-
ventions of property strengthened the grip of control for those who made
claims on knowledge to unleash a particular truth about human nature.
Truth-making about human nature intensified instrumentalization of faith,
myths, and procedures by modern science.
The scientific desire to know did not deviate from religious approaches.
It broadened its techniques to define, refine, and minister Nature. Euro-
pean Enlightenment conceived liberty as a matter of acting in the natural
world, by no means was the surrendering of religion possible. For the En-
lightened thinkers, “light was not just an attainment of individual minds;
it was something to be disseminated through collective activity. They were
concerned with the transformation of social practices and institutions
through knowledge—with putting knowledge to work.”3 Putting knowl-
edge to work meant putting bodies to work. The ideas of autonomy, hap-
piness, freedom, and responsibility became embedded in scientific
interpretations and organizations of human activity. According to Lloyd,
there were “conceptual shifts with regard to providence” rather “than a
succession competing definitions of a unitary idea.”4 As the ideas of provi-
dence underwent reconfigurations, the conception that we ourselves were
in possession of divine substance and connected to universal reason
DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-4
90 Human-God-Machine
gradually made room for other analogies. Such analogies often animated
human agency and activity in the world by the desire for knowledge.
3.1 The divine and the artificial life

According to John Watson, the ancient religions continued to inform Chris-
tians as they appropriated certain myths. For example, Philo of Alexandria
(20 BC to 40 CE) elaborated on the conception of God as a creator by the
analogy of God as an architect. It was not that God was a human creation—
even though Philo’s analogy implied as much. Presumably, humans were
made “after the image of God,” not in the “sense that man shares in a mea-
sure the nature of God, but in the sense that man is a copy of the ideal man,
which, like the whole ideal world is a product of Divine Reason [sic].”5 The
activity of God is impressed upon the visible universe. It is this impression
that may become knowable to humans. For Philo, God is diffused in time
and space—although he “is above both”—and his “creative will is mani-
fested in every part of his creation,” as his “infinite goodness” is commu-
nicated to “the finite as much as it is able to conceive it.”6 The ancient
Greek method of allegory was appropriated by Philo in a new way that
rejected the “modern distinction between scientific and religious truth, …
the world is first produced in the Divine Mind, and is thus the archetype of
the visible universe.”7 Philo drew from the Jews, Palestinians, and Alexan-
drians who conceived of God as transcending all finite existence. Humans
were to contemplate His nature. It was impossible to know God. Philo’s
conceptualization of God as an architect, “upon the analogy of a human
artist,”8 was reworked by St. Paul to say that while the nature of God is
unknown it reveals itself.
After Philo, patristic fathers reflected on Imago Dei and the Incarnation
through Platonic ideas and forms. Gregory of Nyssa’s Making of Man out-
lines the distinctions “between mind and body, spiritual and material,”
making the claim that humans have been “created to be ruler and beholder
of the divine manifestation in the universe.”9 The mind, not the soul, gradu-
ally became the primary mover of man. This shift reflected a reality when
human life was conceived as having been created to behold and enjoy the
world. However, asceticism asserts that mind and body are not separate
dualities. “Just as a musician depends on the form of his instrument for the
production of his music,” humans rely on “bodily parts to be a rational ani-
mal,” Hudson explains, referencing Gregory that giving the mind “self-
expression through the body is evidence of an understanding of the unity of
the mind and the body, intellectual and physical existence that anticipates the
philosophy and psychology of a later age.”10 In Gregory’s historical context,
these attempts to define the scope of human agency were not for the purpose
of self-gratifications but in service of attunement to the nature of God.
Human-God-Machine 91
Human apprehension of God would be achieved by grace and not by

intellect. According to Lossky, the “Fathers of the Church, … agreed in
seeing a certain co-ordination, a primordial correspondence between the
being of man and the being of God in the fact of creation of man in the
image and likeness of God” but took different paths in expressing this
truth.11 For example,
St. Augustine takes as his starting point the image of God in man and
attempts to work out an idea of God, by trying to discover in Him that
which we find in the soul created in His image. The method he employ-
ees is one of psychological analogies applied to the knowledge of God,
to theology. On the other hand, St. Gregory of Nyssa, for instance,
starts with what revelation tells us of God in order to discover what it is
in man, which corresponds to the divine image. This is a theological
method applied to the knowledge of man, to anthropology. The first
way seeks to know God by starting from man created in His image; the
second wishes to define the true nature of man by starting from the idea
of God in whose image man has been created.12
Later, when discussing the notion of divine light, Lossky clarified that
“union with God is a mystery worked out in the human persons,” enabled
by “awareness” and “growth in consciousness.”13 Those in power dictated
to what ends this mystery could be oriented and by what means it can be
operationalized so that some humans govern their own kind.
In Catholic doctrine, the primitive Church—having no claim over repen-
tance—gradually changed its practices from the 6th century onward. Ac-
cording to Henry C. Lea, St. Augustine’s “vaguest possible conception of
what was the nature of [the] mysterious power”14 left open the delegated
power of the Catholic Church to conceptualize confession as a key to
knowledge and sacerdotal control. Lea asked:
Who can deny that Catholic theology is a progressive science, and who
can predict what may be its ultimate development? Yet the satisfaction
with which modern teachers may well regard their conquests over the
infinite must be tempered with regret that for the greater part of its ex-
istence the Church misled the faithful as to the extent of the gifts be-
stowed upon it by God.15
Lea elaborated that this science managed by the scholastics maintained

“human impotence in its attempt to act for the Omnipotent” while it was
“conducive to the peace of mind of those who paid money or mortification
for salvation.”16 God’s judgements were made irrespective of the action of
the priests. Objective facts ruled medieval society as people accepted the
active function of another human being in penance. In mystical practices,

God was the archetype of a desired self-determining agent breathing life
into spiritual and material bodies. What God did was deemed natural;
what humans did was follow His archetype. These symbolic–mystical as-
pirations gradually translated obtaining mastery over oneself to obtaining
mastery over nature—including human nature—owing this too, to infer-
ences made based on the archetype of God and His exercise over his
dominion.
Prior to Gnosticism and Christianity, gods were artificers with super-
natural abilities. These higher powers made their existence knowable in
myths and stories of transformations of the inanimate and the animate.
Although the exact nature of artefacts varied—divine or human, imagined
or real, magical or technological—they all dealt with hybrid entities. I am
drawing from Kang’s documentation of Daedalus, the architect of Laby-
rinth and the creator of Homeric automaton, Minotaur, half-man half-
bull. Daedalus was “as famous for his construction of self-moving statues
as he was for his winged escape from the labyrinth of King Minos.”17
Kang noted that the image of Daedalus persisted in time, was reactivated
in the late Middle Ages, and played a role in setting in motion the arts and
sciences of the Renaissance. “The persistent use of the automaton for con-
ceptual purposes” during the 14th to 16th centuries “points to two major
continuities: the elevation of mechanics as a respectable field of scholar-
ship and the further elaboration of the experimental methodology in the
study of nature.”18 During the scientific revolution, the word machine,
derived from mechanics (relating to manual labour), was established in
direct opposition to the magical and preternatural conceptions of
automaton.
The gradual transformation of “the artificial wonders” and their sep-
aration from myth, theology, and magic during the late medieval period
highlights their “significant intellectual role in the early modern period”
and their “direct and indirect” influences in “mathematics, mechanics,
[and] natural philosophy” as well as in the literature of the Enlighten-
ment.19 Daedalus affirmed another dimension of human consciousness.
“He was the first to demonstrate that the scientific worker is not con-
cerned with gods.”20 Was this interpretation of Daedalus, accepting sci-
ence as separate from the God the West knew? “The scientific worker of
the future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus,
as he becomes conscious of his ghastly mission and proud of it”; John
Haldane explained: Christianity has the “most flexible morals of any
religion” and since “Jesus left no code of law,” “a loophole has been
left for moral progress” which did not exist “in other religions.”21 Writ-
ing after Darwin, Haldane’s statement confirmed that mythology and
religion continued to play a role in directing and reforming morality
even though the scientific workers were presumably not concerned with
God or gods.
The gap between the symbolic–mystical aspirations and literal–scientific
endeavours, reflects a “partial dichotomy between technology and mysti-
cism.”22 They were interwoven when desires to achieve “technical mas-
tery” of nature became desires “to become as one of the gods, …
transcending” both matter and the self.23 It had been ancient civilizations
that taught medieval scholars about the existence of (real or fictional) ob-
jects that brought humans to awe and wonder. The possibilities of self-
moving artefacts developed and were sustained in the face of theological
rejection of sorcery and magic. However, from the beginning of Western
thought a notion has persisted that if one grants life, even a semblance of
it, to what began as a lifeless thing, there is always a possibility that it will
go beyond one’s control, to flee or to revolt, Kang noted that “Adam and
Eve disobeyed their creator, and many of their descendants went on to
defy, offend and challenge God.”24 Paradoxically, the desire for revolt con-
cerns human’s likeness to God. Humans defy Him so as to breathe life into
the inanimate.
The mystical approach offered intervening conceptual links of the
capacity to “animate lifeless matter using the spirits—benevolent and
malevolent—of the universe: this is the accomplishment attributed to
ancient Egyptian priests, who brought statues to life.”25 The West’s con-
ception of automata is also indebted to the Eastern science. The earliest
documentation of the man-made automation was that of the Philo of
Byzantium (280–220 BC) who, inspired by the Iliad, “invented an au-
tomaton in the form of a woman who served wine.”26 The creation of
self-moving objects resembling the work of human beings had political
and economic implications. Aristotle thought that “servitude might be
abolished, if every tool could perform its own work when ordered to do
so or in anticipation of the need.”27 The conception of servitude based
on labour did not mean the desire to exert power over others would
disappear if labour disappeared. The ambiguities in the Aristotelian
theory of slavery left open the use of bodies to the master. The body of
the slave acted as an extension of the body of the master. “The body of
the slave is situated in a zone of indifference between the artificial in-
strument and the living body”; in the context of the Aristotelian phi-
losophy, the slave “is the human being without work who renders
possible the realization of the work of the human being, that living
being who, though being human, is excluded—and through this exclu-
sion, included in humanity….”28 The “use” of the body did not belong
to “a productive nor a praxis but neither assimilable to the labour of
moderns.”29 Agamben’s distinctions supplement Mayer’s insight that
the ancients were also thinking of artificial devices to replace the
human slave. However, a value on humanity existed by the distinction

of being born not made.30 Today, being born may no longer grant suf-
ficient cause of differentiation.
In her book In Our Own Image: Building an Artificial Man, Maureen
Caudill noted that we have given birth to artificial intelligence in the 20th
century that can see, hear, remember, speak, reach, learn, and sense the
world. Caudill suggested that today it is the soul, not the ability to give
birth, that separates humans from their metallic children. If the difference
between living and nonliving is the ability to reproduce, then what do ge-
netic algorithms modelling asexual reproduction portend? “Genetic algo-
rithms” enable “adaptation of a system to an environment,” evolving over
the course of generations.31 The distinction between human and other self-
ministering entities no longer occupies the realm of myths and magic.
Twenty-first-century self-learning machines are directing the potentials and
problems of human life. Artificial intelligence is changing the scope and
boundaries of machines’ capacity to learn and teach. Caudill is cognizant
that “economic, legal, political and social pressures” need to be “exerted
to keep our creations as property rather than as partners who share our
world,” while nonetheless acknowledging the self-making machines are
able to “redefine the measure of human species.”32 Caudill suggests that
considering ourselves as creatures with souls can distinguish us from our
creations.
The soul was a relevant concept, in ancient Greek civilizations, at the
time when Heron of Alexandria (10–70 BC) expanded on the work of
Philo of Byzantium, and when the Alexandrian school and later the Mus-
lim scholars, such as Ismail Al-Jazari (1136–1206), contributed to the de-
sign of the self-moving objects. As the automaton moved from myth to
reality, attention to human soul diminished. Automata enabled the Byzan-
tine Empire and the Islamic world’s advances in military, art, and luxury.
Introducing and incorporating the intellectual frameworks of Persian, San-
skrit, and Hebrew traditions had a double effect. While the produced
power over natural forces and advancement in material wealth was desir-
able, “automata originated in a place that Latin Christians viewed with a
mixture of envy and suspicion.”33 According to Truitt, 12th and 13th
century fictional and factual manifestations of the automata did not privi-
lege mechanical knowledge. But “[b]y the middle of the fourteenth cen-
tury, artisans and engineers began to create richly ornamented self-moving
machines that incorporated human and animal figures as centerpieces for
courtly pageantry for the glory of the Church.”34 Truitt acknowledged the
contribution of the Muslim scholar Al-Jazari to mechanics. Al-Jazari’s in-
vention of the mechanical water clocks was transported to Christian mon-
asteries. The clocks reinforced an orderly life and regulated the monk’s
daily routine.
Mechanical objects forced the Latin West to reflect on natural laws and
to interrogate human identity and actions. Truitt referenced the influence
of the 13th-century empiricist, Roger Bacon (1214–1292). In his Discov-
ery of the Miracle of Art and Nature, Roger Bacon had written of moving
ships and flying machines as well as of the technologies that led to the
creation of telescopes. Bacon’s conception of astral science disclosed a
form of knowledge man-made with the ability to harness celestial forces to
powerful ends. Further attempts to make the inanimate speak were made
by scholastics such as Robert Grosseteste and Albertus Magnus.35 The cre-
ation and possibility of the existence of these objects, although at times
associated with sorcery and fiction, gradually found acceptance in the arts
and mathematics of the Renaissance.
The transition from the workmanship done by scholastic magicians to
that of scientists expresses that “the attractive as well as disturbing power
of the automaton is derived from its capacity to go beyond mere represen-
tation.”36 For the scientifically minded early Renaissance scholars, giving
representations autonomy continued to be considered idolatry. However,
the utility of knowledge gradually overruled this concern. “Puritans
judged the study of nature to be an act of worship, revealing the glory of
the Creator,” Lindberg explains, “[t]hey believed that one might also glo-
rify God by engaging in utilitarian activities that would contribute to the
material betterment of the human race.”37 Devotion to utilitarian activi-
ties became one of the hallmarks of Puritanism, Lindberg suggests, as
Christianity and science became more intertwined in 17th-century Eu-
rope. The “idea of the Divine Architect, who created a smoothly running
world machine and left to itself, was more appealing theologically than
the image of a Divine Repairman, forced from time to time to fix his im-
perfect creation.”38 During the scientific revolution of 17th and 18th cen-
turies, natural forces became increasingly subject to human-centred
interpretations that encourage human interference and control in the
world. Fragments such as the following by Thomas Sprat (1635–1713)
provide examples of how scholars, bishops, and clergies began to concep-
tualize (human) nature:
Such is the dependence amongst all the orders of creatures; the animate,
the sensitive, the rational, the natural, the artificial; that the apprehen-
sion of one of them, is a good step towards the understanding of the
rest. And this is the highest pitch of the human reason… This is truly to
command the world; to rank all the verities and degrees of things so
orderly upon one another; that standing on the top of them, we may
perfectly behold all that are below, and make them all serviceable to the
quiet and peace and plenty of Man’s life. … thereby to look the nearer
into heaven; an ambition, which though it was punished in the old
World by an universal confusion, when it was managed with impiety

and insolence; yet, when it is carried on by that humility and innocence,
which can never [be] separated from true knowledge; when it is de-
signed, not to brave the creator of all things, but to admire him the
more; it must needs be the utmost perfection of human nature.39
Among all the creations in the first sentence, the presence of the artificial is
noteworthy. The boundaries for perfecting human nature needed both am-
bition and humility in the conceptualized scientific “command.” The telos
continued to be accompanied by recognition that the human place in na-
ture is not by choice—affirming the human being’s likeness to other ani-
mals. However, the pursuits of happiness began to be defended in terms of
the future as human beings made nature serviceable to themselves. Sprat
was acquainted with John Wilkins, the author of the Mathematical Magick:
Or the Wonders that May Be Performed by the Mechanical Geometry, a
two-volume text, the first of which began by acknowledging the Greek
mathematician, Archimedes. At the outset, Wilkins categorized human
studies of divine, natural, and artificial knowledge. From the mechanical
powers of the wheel, lever, and screw, Wilkins demystified the construct of
primitive engines. In the second book of Mathematical Magick, called Dae-
dalus, Wilkins discussed fixed and movable automata as well as the utiliza-
tion of wind for movement.
The English churchmen were writing of new desires for applications of
knowledge. Wilkins and Sprat were working under the shadows of Francis
Bacon and René Descartes’ proposed methods of inquiry informed by
faith. Bacon got to God through Nature. Descartes got to Nature through
God. Their approaches were supplemented by a shift in the study of me-
chanics at the time of Galileo. “Whereas throughout antiquity and the
Middle Ages mechanics was the science of artificial objects, that is, objects
fabricated by human beings to force nature to act in mankind’s service,”
Hadot observed:
[W]ith Galileo, physics and mechanics began to be definitively identi-

fied. On the one hand, mechanics consists in application of the laws of
nature, and on the other, in order to study nature, Galilean physics
made use of the calculations and mathematical notions that ancient me-
chanics used to build artificial objects. The scientist therefore operated
like an engineer, who had to reconstruct the gears and functions of the
machine known as Nature.40
The new modality of scientific endeavour claimed to extend the religious

ambivalence towards nature by a new methodical approach. For Bacon,
Descartes, and Galileo, the theological standing that on the one hand
advocated the imitation of God and on the other hand located humans in
a separate realm than His, encouraged human desire for participation in
creation. This was the condition for the realization of modern science. In
reflecting on “the rise of science and the decline of Orthodox Christian-
ity,” Richard Westfall noted that “the central events of the sixteenth cen-
tury, the Reformation and all that flowed from it, lead irresistibility to the
conclusion that ‘Christian’ continued to be the single most suitable adjec-
tive to describe European civilization when the seventeenth century
opened.”41 Such self-conscious endeavours diverge from ancient and scho-
lastic conceptions of science but did not deviate far from the deism that
justified human power.
3.2 Francis Bacon: revising nature

Ockham’s ideas on individual experience and observation advanced a
gradual shift in the authority of the church over science. However, with
Francis Bacon, this progressive movement not only nourished positivism
but also further emphasized human dominance over nature. Bacon’s Orga-
num begins by conceiving humans capable of grasping nature’s mysteries
and equipped with administering power to direct nature “[t]o generate and
superinduce a new nature or new natures, upon a given body.”42 The pur-
suit of knowledge continued to purify faith in God. By gazing into the in-
telligible, measurable, and predictable regularities, humans could come to
know themselves as subjects of divine power. Bacon found “natural phi-
losophy” offered a better understanding of “the Word of God, the surest
remedy against superstition, and the most approved support of faith.”43 As
a lawyer, parliamentarian and politician, Bacon went beyond natural phi-
losophy. His “entire program” was dedicated to “the reform of human
learning.”44 Bacon defined learning as the “acquisition of God’s wisdom”
and “regarded divine wisdom as the archetype for human learning.”45 His
arguments for improvement of learning criticized the rigid orders that limit
the “progress of sciences” and the “liberty” of “thoughts and contempla-
tions of the mind.”46 Liberty became the key for humans’ unlocking nature
and tradition.
Bacon claimed that “the activity of Adam in Eden was that of the natu-
ral philosopher.”47 His interpretation of the universe and human role to
experiment with it differed from Calvin’s interpretation of the doctrine of
the Fall and humanity’s total depravity. For Bacon, humanity’s fall did not
entail the corruption of humankind’s faculties. Our receptivity to knowl-
edge to improve our earthly status was a gift conferred by the power of the
Maker for humankind to know and direct nature. What is nature if it is
incapable of escaping human’s limits? But Bacon’s question was instead:
What is human if it cannot perceive, learn, represent, and direct nature?
The need for confidence over nature gradually eclipsed the divine knowl-
edge. It also questioned and transformed Aristotelian assumptions and
previously held measures of human reach. The first Aristotelian assump-
tion was cosmological: essences and nature were arranged in hierarchical
and logical structures. The second assumption held an epistemological re-
gard for the nature of the human mind and its divinely gifted capacity to
see the universal in the particular. For Aristotle, concepts were “derived
immediately from ordinary experience, what characterized a body is its
habitual mode of behaviour, some ‘natural motion’ which express its
‘form’.”48 According to Shea: “Quantity is irrelevant because it can only
tell how much of a substance we have, not what kind. In this perspective,
science was basically a descriptive enterprise.”49 In contrast, Bacon’s desire
to look into the properties of nature required that: “The secrets of nature
are better revealed under the torture of experiments than when they follow
their natural course,” and “human reason ultimately has a discretionary
power over nature,” confirmed “by biblical revelation.”50 Bacon’s method
of inquiry legitimized human “authority to proceed in judicial manner and
interrogate nature by every means if, in some way, it refused to talk.”51
The active questioning of nature under certain conditions defined by the
human experimenter supplemented priestly eyes and ears with a power of
dissecting, counting, and recording.
From learning what it was that nature could have done (nature has
agency for the ancients), humanity gradually moved to “obliging nature
to do what it cannot do by means of artificial and fabricated instrument,
or ‘machines’—scales, winches, levers, pulleys, wedges, screws, gears—
which can serve, for instance, for the construction of war machines or
automata.”52 According to Hadot, the progression of this form of vio-
lence towards nature closes the gap between the scientist and the magi-
cian. “Against the Greek idea that Nature has a kind of divinity, …
Bacon retorts that the Bible elevates man above the rest of creation and
sets no limit to his use of it, aptly,” by the claim that “‘[t]he spirit of
man is as the lamp of God.’”53 Biological and social sciences follow Ba-
con’s faith and desire to look into:
those impressions of nature which are imposed upon the mind by the
sex, by the age, by the region, by health and sickness, by beauty and
deformity, and the like, which are inherent and not extern; and again,
those which are caused by the extern fortune; as sovereignty, nobility,
obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adver-
sity, constant fortune, variable fortune, … and the like.54
Bacon continued to assert that understanding “complexions and constitu-

tions” of nature served the utility of healing the body and “the diseases and
infirmities of the mind” and “is of special use in moral and civil matters.”55
We might conquer nature if we could conquer our own nature, thus an
asceticism of knowing for the sake of control predated Bacon. However,
his conceptualization of the feedback mechanism for knowledge empha-
sized utility, never-ending alterations (later framed in terms of progress),
and improvements in the study of the individual person.
In deliberating on the usefulness of knowledge for material governance,
Bacon touched two major themes of “justice and natural law and the need
to base policy on accurate empirical knowledge.”56 Bacon conceived politics
as an administration of humans and things: both dealt with numerical cal-
culations. According to Greenleaf, this “approach, was wholly empirical,
and, out of context, wholly amoral.”57 In replacing ancient conventions
with a detached scientific gaze, the “sovereign’s necessary knowledge” be-
came the “knowledge of things” which is “statistics.”58 Over time, Bacon’s
method became synonymous with the study of nature by mathematical
positivists. “The more numbers that we have, more inductions we shall be
able to make”—referring to the integration of the Baconian method with
Charles Babbage’s (1791–1871) statistical approach—Ian Hacking noted
that “the empty soils of human behaviour began to overflow with laws of
human nature.”59 The production of laws about human nature accompa-
nied advancement in the print industry and the distribution of information.
Such laws were also supplemented by technological tools that enabled the
study of microorganisms in biology, whereby the diversity of species and
their continuum from God to its creation was put to test. However, this was
far from a sudden uncontested progression as those attuned to empiricism,
such as Locke, were cognizant that a systematic unity of knowledge was
governed “by virtue of some arbitrary definition defined by us,” humans.60
The uptake and expansion of Bacon’s philosophy gradually reshaped the
religious responsibility in looking after human happiness. The acceptance of
the use of statistics for the documentation and organization of civil life was
contingently marked by linking the body politic to a machine. “For Bacon,
both mechanic and (by extension) machines inhabited a social as much as
an intellectual sphere,” as the word “mechanics” in Bacon’s time suggested
“routine…unthinking activity.”61 Sawday continues: “In Bacon’s mechani-
cal future, machines will spawn further machines, …. Daedalus, for Bacon,
expressed a larger sense of mechanical arts,” connected to the “labyrinth.”62
Bacon’s influence on the members of Royal Society who followed him
(Petty, Hooke, and Boyle) cannot be easily estimated.
3.3 William Petty: valuing each head

As a physician, scientist, and philosopher of the Royal Society, Petty ex-
tended the machine–body analogy of his teachers, Bacon and Hobbes, to
the public sphere by creative use of numbers. Acknowledging the influence

of Hobbes’s political philosophy on Petty, Johnson noted that, Petty “saw
more virtue in the modern than in the ancient world and following the
steps of Bacon he sought to resolve problems by a direct rational attack
rather than by means of history or precedent.”63 Such a reliance on ratio-
nalization served certain ends. The class-based society of Petty’s time saw
the labouring people as working machines and subject to management and
control. “The labouring class was not considered to have an interest; the
only interest was the ruling class view of the national interest,” Macpher-
son clarified, citing Petty’s words:
People are… the chiefest, most fundamental and precious commodity,

out of which may be derived all sort of manufactures, navigation, riches,
conquests and solid dominion. This capital material being of itself raw
and indigested is committed into the hands of supreme authority in
whose prudence and disposition it is to improve, manage and fashion it
to more or less advantage.64
Petty’s “supreme authority” could become any authority willing to im-

prove, manage, and fashion human beings as a form of capital. In the wake
of weakening of the monarch by the judicial measures, the House of Lords
produced knowledge that legitimized the commercialization of human life
for maximizing profit.
According to Ursula Franklin, during the 17th century, many aspects of
governance began to align themselves with the economic activities of mate-
rial production. And Petty’s philosophy reflected the emerging practices of
division of labour that led the manufacturers to assert and exercise firm
control over the process and product of those they employed. For Petty, the
working beings are likened to the components of the working clock and
their existence is reduced to functions.65 Such conceptions focused on maxi-
mizing economic output and increasing efficiency while treating humans
based on their economic value. The human economy of Petty nurtured “eco-
nomic individualism” and “lack of control over the market” as “essential
ingredients [for] producing the double system of value.”66 The idea of eco-
nomic individualism associated with the Renaissance remained to be under
the influence of Thomas Aquinas’s thesis that “divine providence” is not, as
Trinkaus puts it, “in any way a limitation of human freedom, because free-
dom of the will is in itself a participation in the providential government of
the universe.”67 Economic conception of human freedom served as a pillar
of political economy and followed Petty’s creative approach.
Petty’s Political Arithmetic addressed the King. Petty aimed to educate
his majesty concerning national competitive mercantilism.68 Not only
numbers gained primacy but they also enabled comparisons to be made
between cities, reassuring the King on the state’s economy. “Petty tried to
master the material theoretically and to interpret it purposefully in a way
in which this had hardly been attempted before,” Schumpeter explains,
and “created for himself theoretical tools with which he tried to force a
way through the undergrowth of facts, and in consequence we find theo-
retical considerations full of vigour and thoughtfulness at every step.”69
The tools and interpretations that Petty created for himself later gain sci-
entific status.
Even though economic analyses were not adopted in his lifetime, Petty’s
numeric conventions made a lasting mark, extending the boundaries of
economic analysis and modelling the use of statistics in other fields. The
quantification of the public sphere was well underway in Italy before the
Reformation. As early as 1427, Maifreda reports, “the Florentine Land
Register was the supreme expression and patrimonies of the city’s 250,000
subjects” but this “quantifying exploitation” did not go without “confron-
tation” from spiritual institutions.70 The preoccupation with the manage-
ment of the material world continued to be formed in complex relation to
the Church and its Christian doctrine—negotiating, integrating, and refor-
mulating the theological and spiritual thoughts of divine providence dur-
ing the Renaissance. This tension between the theological roots of the
exercise of government and scientific concerns for managing people con-
tinued in Petty’s lifetime. National competitions, colonial wars, and mer-
cantilism offered the condition for Petty’s calculations of the monetary
value of “each head”:
Whereas the Stock of the Kingdom, yielding but 15 millions of proceed,

is worth 250 millions; then the People who yield 25, are worth 416 ⅔
Millions. For although the Individuals, of Mankind be reckoned at
about 8 years purchase; the Species of them is worth as many as land,
being in its nature as perpetual, for ought we know. …. If 6 millions of
People be worth 417 millions of pounds Sterling, then each head is
worth 69l. or each of the 3 millions of workers is worth 138l. which is
7 years purchase, about 12d. per diem [sic].71
Economic individualism meant determining the monetary value of each

body. Petty did not offer a general thesis on national wealth. However,
when Petty compared London economically to other major European cit-
ies, he considered housing, health, and mortality rates of the people.
Petty connected the military values to economic values and the economic
values to education and health. This is evident in his advocacy for indus-
trial schools, which were run by desires for profit and fears of poverty.
When addressing the elites, Petty spoke openly against the “unworthy
preachers in divinity”; he wanted the young, “instead of reading hard
Hebrew words in the Bible,” to become “apprentices” in trades. Petty was

sure that gentlemen “would know how to make use of” these tradesmen
and handicrafts. He concluded his plans for industrial schools by noting
that there is no value in “dignity wherof [it] cannot be valued or com-
puted.”72 The neoliberal subordination of human life through market ra-
tionalization exploits Petty’s sentiments towards dignity. The
instrumentalization of education for employment originated at a time
when the rich elite determined the values of life and learning of those they
employed by calculation.
The religious themes were not altogether abandoned. They were incorpo-
rated flexibly as Petty rationalized his approach when he was addressing the
King. The monetary rectification of body politic in Petty’s cost–benefit anal-
ysis of the value of people considered: “Whether the speedy peopling of the
earth” would “fulfill the revealed Will of God” and at the same time be
“advantageous” to the state.73 Such alignment of population growth with
the well-being of the state secularized the will of God and the pastorate role
in sustaining the public good. Both were directed towards economic ends.
Evidently, Petty’s objective knowledge was not impartial. It advanced nu-
merical representations for private and national economic outcomes while
valuing his computational mastery as superior to the experiential knowl-
edge of merchants and farmers. “Petty linked impartiality to numbers to
enhance the authority of one kind of experience over another,” poovey
noted, but “that the impartiality he associated with numbers both implied
and entailed interpretation—of how to use and understand the numbers
themselves.” Thus his “policies also served a personal agenda.”74 As a mer-
cantilist entrepreneur, Petty defended his self-serving principles in terms of
national and religious benevolence—each incorporated in his science.
To those who later construed economics a science, Petty offered a grid
on why certain things are of value, how their value can be measured, and
the utility of such knowledge.75 His experimentalism was unique compared
to economic writings of his humanist predecessors, such as John Hales, or
his contemporary statistician, John Graunt. “Functional analysis and
quantitative precisions … became the chief ends” for Petty, and “experi-
ment was the most trustworthy means of obtaining new truths.”76 Truth-
making followed Petty’s commitment to economic individualism by way of
numbers. He supposed that “if every man’s Estate could be always read in
his forehead [sic],”77 both elites (like himself) and the state government can
benefit. Petty’s philosophy continues today in data economies that conflate
the responsibilities of the state with the interests of private enterprise, both
harvesting more and more data on each consumer. For example, as of 2011
the United States Environmental Protection Agency calculated the value of
the life of each citizen to be worth, on average, at 9.1 million.78 This mon-
etary value of consumers and workers, “include a variety of human capital
measures, such as education and job experience, as well as other individual

measures, such as age and union status,” “job characteristic variables,”
“the worker’s industry, and measure of physical exertion associate with
the job.”79 Financial instruments have gained greater influence in deter-
mining the value of human life. Possessive individualism continues to pro-
ceed from the “need” for scientific accuracy in a depersonalized economy.
Labelling humans with numbers and monetizing all activities continue to
inform how we ought to know and treat ourselves.
Petty’s analysis constitutes the initial conceptualization of humanity as a
national commodity. His monetary valuation of human life persists to
have implications for modern health and education policies. Health and
education are not only similar, they are inseparable. Since they have be-
come conceived as industries they are, Blaug notes, subject to capital mar-
kets: “Health is similar to education in that it is partly carried out for
investment and partly for consumption motives.”80 In societies organized
around investment and consumption, cost–benefit analysis of education
and health paves the way to rationalize ignorance and disease as intended
outcomes of prioritizing economic interests.
3.4 Scepticism: the animal–machine economy

René Descartes (1596–1650) began his Principle of Philosophy with a re-
flection on human judgement. He accepted God’s wisdom while he af-
firmed doubt towards human knowledge, including knowledge obtained
from mathematics.81 His view relied on mind and body distinction. For
Descartes the “proposition, I think, therefore I am” represented the “cor-
rect order”; but he was cognizant that propositions by “themselves do not
provide knowledge.”82 Living in the wake of the Church treatment of Gali-
leo for heresy, Descartes could have had little doubt about the risks he
took when thinking. He insisted that his propositions—when accompanied
by the knowledge of God—extend human knowledge.
Prior to Descartes, scepticism as an intellectual movement was often
concerned not only with questioning the reliability and access to but also
the authenticity of knowledge. As a practice of assessing dogma, scepticism
can be traced to ancient Greek thinkers. Its revival from the 14th to 17th
century began with the rediscovery of these Greek sceptics. Its gradual as-
sociation with irreligiosity has to be contextualized; it occurred during an
age that affirmed religion, questioned worldly affairs and maintained that
only God has absolute knowledge. However, the “‘skeptic’ and ‘believer’
are not opposing classifications.”83 Richard Popkin contextualized Des-
cartes’ thought in a movement originating within theology that also influ-
enced thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, Blaise Pascal, Baruch
Spinoza, as well as the members of the Royal Society such as John Wilkins,
Robert Boyle, and Joseph Glanvill. Referencing scepticism entry into vari-
ous schools of thought, Popkin pointed out that its form in Puritan and
Angelic scholars reached a new high in the works of Pierre Bayle (1647–
1704): “Whether sacred or secular, Bayle makes it clear that reason fails to
make the real world intelligible.”84
Acknowledging the influence of Calvin on Bayle, Popkin pointed out
that Bayle did not reject the possibility of basing one’s faith on one’s con-
sciousness in contrast to accepting authority. One of Bayle’s targeted at-
tacks was Christians’ accommodation of the commercial society. Bayle
found that if the “inhabitants of another world” were to look into “the
morals of Christians,” it becomes evident that Christians “do not conduct
themselves according to the light of conscience” that there is “a Paradise
for those who obey the law of God and a Hell for those who do not.”85
Bayle was not alone in his observation. Pierre Nicole’s Moral Essays (1674)
had proposed “just as the selfish, and thus conflicting, wants of individuals
could be harnessed to politically beneficial ends, so too could competing
social and economic interest be made to obey similar constraints.” Nicole
assumed that “unintended consequences of certain historically domesti-
cated form of self-aggrandizement” had both “social utility and communal
benefit.”86 These views of elevated commercial morality posed the question
of whether knowledge of God kept in check human passions and
inclinations.
Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) provided the most comprehensive
analysis of the disparity between the theological morality and civil laws
and practices. In The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville argued moral corrup-
tion had been useful to individuals’ prosperity. If the English society was
an example of such success, it was due to the self-rationalizing speculation
of their elites that their vices had public benefits. He wrote:
nothing can render the unsearchable depth of the divine wisdom more
conspicuous, than that Man, whom Providence had designed for Soci-
ety, should not only by his own frailties and imperfections be led into
the road to temporal happiness, but likewise receive, from a seeming
necessity of natural causes, a tincture of that knowledge, in which he
was afterwards to be made perfect by the true religion, to his eternal
welfare.87
Mandeville showed what had become of values of piety and charity. He

saw that Christian morality rested on making humans “believe reward and
punishment from an invisible cause, and the more this belief always influ-
ences them in all their actions, the closer they’ll keep to justice”—this at
first converted Pagan priests and soldiers to doctrines of peace and duty
but later became the seed for the new priests and soldiers’ doctrines to rule
their own kind.88 Piety and charity were customs so the elites fulfilled their
need for self-admiration and social attention. They were means to justify
libertarianism and paternalism of the self-interested industrial elites. As
fire, water and air have destructive and productive nature, by the same
analogy, Mandeville showed that pride, self-regard and vanity are
components of profit-driven society.
Mandeville’s writings are the window onto the epitome of the early En-
lightenment’s morality. Irreducible to economics or moral philosophy,
Mandeville’s influence was on the project and direction of social and be-
havioural sciences and the conceptual affirmation of human instincts. In
his scientific and secular association of humans to animals, Mandeville
insisted that his observational approach disclosed the invisible part of hu-
man existence. However, the notion of the human as animal offered by
Mandeville was no longer situated in either the cosmological or the theo-
logical chain of being.89 In his medical dissertation Mandeville had argued
for the Cartesian case of animal automatism. As an anatomist, he applied
his scientific methods to the “analysis of society.”90 After Mandeville, it
became difficult to argue that the cruel social circumstances and human
appetite have no functions in the prevailing logic of economic progress.
Mandeville also must be credited for rationalizing economy of wants in
place of economy of needs: People have misunderstood the word evil as
having wants
that on the multiplicity of those wants depended all those mutual ser-
vices which the individual members of a society pay to each other; and
that consequently, the greater variety there was of wants, the larger
number of individuals might find their private interest in labouring for
the good of others.91
This was an initial exposition of an economy of self-interests. As fire, water

and air have destructive and productive nature, by the same analogy, Man-
deville argued that pride, self-regard and vanity are necessary elements of
society.
By drawing on England, Mandeville argued self-preservation does not
need to be intentionally extended to help another so the society benefits. For
example, acting to help those in need depended on physical and social prox-
imity to those who suffered and relating to their needs. He observed that the
more distance the rich kept from those who suffered, the less likely the rich
were to become troubled by human suffering. He noted that acts of charity
were also subject to the rational capacity of the elites who relied on charity
to compensate for their shame, malice, and cruelty. Mandeville was high-
lighting that charity had become “destructive to virtue or religion,” making
the rich “believe that giving money to the poor, though they should not part
with until after death, will make a full atonement in the next world for the
sins they have committed in this” world.92 He is writing in the context of the
debate on the expansions of charity schools for less fortunate—the bases of
which presaged the organization and arguments for public and universal
education—during the 1720s. He reminded the elites that knowledge out-
side of Christian dogma harms the poor by enlarging their desires and
wants; additional knowledge for the poor also harms those in power for the
learned poor will have no reason to submit to their equals. For Mandeville,
the poor who survived to the age of forty with no literacy have “good quali-
ties” conducive to “the public peace.” Compared with those with “univer-
sity education,” whose “irreconcilable hatred, strife, envy, calumny and
other vices destructive to mutual concord,” the “illiterate labouring poor
are hardly ever tainted” by these traits “to any considerable degree.”93 In
the Fable, Mandeville had explained that the English lords had written laws
for the purpose of exercising their power; in his objection to charity schools
he asserted that the children of the poor are happy and useful as they are,
and if they continue to commit crimes as they grow, their crimes would not
match the crimes committed by the elites directing the society.
Mandeville also explained the “tension between a methodological indi-
vidualism and a resort to Providence” in Christian morality and natural
law was learned from early organized civilizations to enable the “cunning”
few rule the majority. Self-taught “skillful politicians” and “priests” gov-
erned vast numbers of humans with “the greater ease and security.”94 Such
inferences did not settle with Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) whose life-
work emphasized an egalitarian morality. Hutcheson’s effort was partly
directed to rework “the narrowly interest-based interpretations of the nat-
ural law theory” in Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke, by elaborating that
natural morality facilitated sociability in humans. Hutcheson thought this
moral sense was “universally distributed” to serve “the production of the
greatest pleasure for the greatest number.”95 Mandeville’s argument that
such a production and such a pleasure was directed by custom and educa-
tion to meet the self-interest of a small group provided a different and
plausible scenario of the moral senses. The preached ethical codes were
impossible to achieve according to Mandeville, since in their articulated
usefulness and rationality rested selfish passions. Although Hutcheson had
no convincing response to this objection, he attacked Mandeville for his
reduction of virtues to passions. However, he agreed with Mandeville that
reason alone could not provide “independent standard for action,” and no
truth about the “principle of morality could be established without a thor-
ough examination of human nature.”96 While disagreeing with Hutcheson’s
moral thesis, Mandeville accepted utilitarianism as a guiding principle for
the practical purposes it offered. Mandeville’s acceptance had an ironic
spin: “The utilitarian viewpoint is highly practical, but it will send you to
Hell.”97 The Hell at stake is the evil brought by instrumental self-interested

actions for maximization of utility, wealth and happiness.
The intellectual battle between Mandeville and Hutcheson provides the
context for the philosophy of David Hume (1711–1776), an adversary of
religious superstition and a proponent of scepticism. Hume also cautioned
that scepticism is not immune from the dangers of becoming unending
speculation that haunts the pleasures in life. Meanwhile, Hume argued:
“In all the incidents of life, we ought still to preserve our scepticism. If we
believe that fire warms, or water refreshes, it is only because it costs us too
much pain to think otherwise.”98 Learned in ancient philosophy, Hume
was aware that religion was built in relation to a particular model of phi-
losophy that included scepticism; early Christians had applied it to the
teachings of the Eastern ancient religions and also in reformulating the
legacies of the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans. With recognition of this his-
tory, Hume’s ambition sided with science. His approach remained Baco-
nian as he aligned himself with the advancement of knowledge. He insisted:
“Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the
most neglected,” and he endeavoured “to bring it little more into fash-
ion.”99 The gradual intensification of utilitarian philosophy from Bacon to
Hutcheson and to Hume directed the faith on human thought and action.
While scepticism accommodated utilitarianism, the growing scientific ap-
proach to human nature had moral implications to society.
Hutcheson had given further emphasis on the direction of knowledge of
human nature, stressing its “use” for the end of human “happiness” and
“pleasure.”100 Hume was partly in agreement. He objected to characteriz-
ing reason and utility as innate causes and focused on human behaviour as
a source for producing scientific knowledge about morality. In his scientific
approach to ethics, Hume also distanced himself from the underlying as-
sumptions of natural law. Since the knowledge of the past consists of in-
stances that are strengthened by belief and habits, these very beliefs and
habits cannot be the absolute causes of human behaviour. He stressed that:
We must, therefore clean up our experiments in this science from a cau-

tious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the
common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in af-
fairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judi-
ciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a
science which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior
in utility, to any other of human comprehension.101
Hutcheson’s moral utilitarianism and Bacon’s scientific approach unite in

rationalizing the study of human nature. The last quoted sentence is de-
monstrative of Hume’s faith in procedures and applications of science.
Hume’s scepticism concerned mainly religious conceptions of human na-

ture and neglected both human interest in assigning utility to certain be-
haviours and the limitations of scientific experiments in grasping the
complexities of moral life.
How was morality constructed as the faith in science grew? Hume
stated: “The chief spring of actuating principle of the human mind is plea-
sure and pain.”102 We take pleasure in the idea of beautiful and useful,
Hume explained, not only in what is pleasing to ourselves but also what is
pleasurable for strangers and other creatures. This he called sympathy.
Sympathy is an ability to take pleasure both in human beings and in ob-
jects that produce an end agreeable for both the individual and society.
Hume explained that sympathy produces our sentiment of morals in artifi-
cial virtues, enabling us to become proper members of society. A preoccu-
pation with happiness and pleasure, not suffering, directed Hume’s
conceptualization of human nature. When faced with the pain and suffer-
ings of other human beings, sympathy was an experience of “uneasiness”
but implied no action, for Hume.
Hume’s sympathy was coupled with an affirmation that “selfishness” is
“inseparable from human nature, and inherent in our fame and constitu-
tion.”103 While Hume saw a degree of pride as necessary for functioning in
society, he also saw that the beauty of visible objects causes us to sympa-
thize with those “possessed of the advantage of fortune,” explaining that:
First, to that immediate pleasure, which a rich man gives us, by the view
of the beautiful clothes, equipage, gardens, or houses, which he pos-
sesses. Second, to the advantage, which we hope to reap from him by his
generosity and liberality. Thirdly, to the pleasures and advantage, which
he himself reaps from his possessions, and which, produce an agreeable
sympathy in us.104
The first and second suggest that the “rich” are “capable of contributing
to the happiness or enjoyment of his fellow-creature, whose sentiments,
with regard to him, we naturally embrace.”105 Hume continued by stress-
ing that we ought to be “preferring the third principle to the other two,
and ascribing our esteem of the rich to a sympathy with the pleasure and
advantage, which they themselves receive from their possessions.”106 Hume
left little room for misinterpreting to whom he was most sympathetic. The
rich were to be admired for their natural abilities. In this instance, Hume’s
concerns for utility vanished. On the one hand, his abstraction and ratio-
nalization of sympathy diverted attention from Mandeville’s truth-telling.
On the other hand, in his contribution to economic fiction, Hume concep-
tualized a human nature in which some naturally submit their right to
happiness to secure the happiness and enjoyment of the rich.
Hume’s untying justice from vice and virtue and rationalizing self-interest
were distinct from the moves his predecessors made. Eugene Rotwein points
out that Hume’s position differed from natural right theorists as his “treat-
ment of the principles of human nature permit no place for anything compat-
ible to ‘natural rights’ and he never accepts anything but ‘utility’ as the
criterion for evaluating social policy.”107 However, Hume agreed with natu-
ral law theorists that the state has to respect the individuals’ liberty and inter-
ests. But he did sympathize with a particular group over others: the merchants.
For Hume, merchants created more value than physicians and lawyers. Mer-
chants deserve the highest respect because their desire for fortune through
commerce increases industry; they also employ others “in the arts of gain,
which soon engage their affection, and remove all relish for pleasure and
expense. … and make the love of gain prevail over the love of pleasure.”108
Hume did not say that merchants should be respected because they create
employment. They deserve respect because they embody the value system
by which others become industrious and alert to profit. The elites were an
end in themselves. They transformed the landlord and peasant system by
promoting industry and mastering the art of profit. Love of profit, no lon-
ger called greed, became a desirable value.
Hume’s economic analysis, with its focus on human behaviour, had sci-
entific implications for future policies that treat humans as machines. An-
ticipating contemporary economism, Hume offered that “[t]he spirit of the
age affects all the arts; and the minds of men, being once roused from their
lethargy,” by the “refinement in the mechanic arts” which impacted phi-
losophers, politicians, generals and poets alike.109 According to Simon
Schaffer, Hume’s critique of innate causal powers was central to the devel-
opment of the so-called Scottish philosophers and their claim for the prog-
ress of machine philosophy. Schaffer situated Hume’s philosophy within
the “culture that viewed the labourers as machines with one that saw ma-
chines as sources of power.”110 The Cartesian automata was often adopted
creatively to explain the scientific approach to body politic. It also had
implications to explain human nature.
Hume’s contemporary, La Mettrie, in his book Machine Man, had not
only contested the possibility of human souls but also promoted the au-
thority of science, de-emphasizing divine reason and natural law. La Mett-
rie argued that “the study of nature results to produce unbelievers.”111
While rejecting Descartes’ religious views, La Mettrie deployed Descartes’
approximation of animals to machines to compare human to animal:
“Man was trained like an animal; he became an author in the same way he
became a porter.”112 This assertion deemphasizes humans as inherently ra-
tional animals. Evolutionary philosophy influenced the assumptions about
education that aligns humans with the notion of scientific progress. This is
indicative of La Mettrie’s conception of humans as machines, learning by
the way of languages, signs and symbols, “to express their new feelings by
movement dictated by the economy of their imagination.”113 However, the
class-based industrial society imposed economic conditions where the
working class were to be and become autonomous, self-regulated, produc-
tive, and docile. In this context, the process of learning to be an animal
emphasized the resemblances between humans and machines.
When the 11th-century Muslim scholar and inventor, Ismail Al-Jazari,
outlined the mechanism and method of automata and other technologies
such as water-raising pumps and modern clocks, he had not conceived
these self-moving instruments as analogies for human beings. He was fol-
lowing the work of his Chinese and Muslim predecessors, not foreseeing
the speedy mechanization of the Enlightened Europe nor the growth of
robotics and automations of the technological age where the workmanship
of human beings is framed secondary to the machines.114 By the 18th cen-
tury, the writings of La Mettrie demonstrate that the scientific orientation
had enabled a mechanistic approach to humans and society. From this
approach followed formal justification for two registers, one from “the
anatomic-metaphysical register” to align the body with the society and one
concerning the “technico-political register” to constitute regulations “by
empirical and calculated method.”115 La Mettrie’s postulation of the hu-
man machine did not only produce a body without soul but it also pro-
posed that human beings evolved from their need to express emotions and
fulfil their desires, rather than deliberating on reason and virtues. He
thought that humans are the most perfect of animals not because we are
created in the image of God but because nature has enabled us to be as
such. La Mettrie’s book demonstrates that the Cartesian accounts were not
narrowly applied to economic administration; they were broadly absorbed
into scientific approaches to self and society. The ongoing discovery of a
new human nature—between machine and animal—supported colonial
and aristocratic desires for eliminating error in social life and advanced
nation-building by misconstruing social progress.
3.5 (A)political economy
Not only did humans have gradually become compared to the likeness of
machines but also our moral conducts and sentiments have changed. The
social order also became engineered as a machine and “those who did this
engineering could represent this condition as natural.”116 The admiration of
machines for their beauty and usefulness grew from awe to utter acceptance.
Automata did not disappear; today they are inserted into the flesh of the liv-
ing, penetrating their very cellular movements.117 With automatization came
a shift in creed and ritual of participation in a society (explained by Newto-
nian laws) that privileged power in social control for the sake of progress.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith referred to machines as useful,

and beautiful in their facilitation and abridgement of labour. He explained
their applications for manufacturing and projected their uses in agricul-
ture.118 While distinguishing between human labour and that of the ma-
chine, he saw both in service to the same end: profit. “All the improvements
in machinery, however, have by no means been the inventions of those who
had occasion to use the machine.”119 Smith insisted that those who invent
ought to continue to do so. Scientists, merchants and philosophers enhance
their capacities by directing their attention towards their specializations.
Well-defined divisions of labour de-emphasized economic fairness, as
power belonged in the hands of business elites:
When a company of merchants undertake, at their own risk and ex-

pense, to establish a new trade with some remote barbarous nation, it
may not be unreasonable to incorporate them into a joint stock com-
pany, and to grant them, in case of their success, a monopoly of trade
for a certain number of years. It is the easiest and most natural way in
which the state can recompense them for hazarding a dangerous and
expensive experiment, of which the public is afterwards to reap the ben-
efit. A temporary monopoly of this kind may be vindicated upon the
same principles upon which a like monopoly of a new machine is
granted to its inventor, and that of a new book to its author.120
In Smith’s theory, the state played a role in inter-national economic ven-

tures, granting temporary monopoly to those who took risks. The risks
voyagers, merchants, and inventors took should be rewarded—not banked
as a status—so the “public” also benefited. In contrast to mercantilism, the
nation state rewards economic activity. However, the state ensures capital
does not accumulate in the hands of the few. Smith also adopted Hume’s
rejection of the “utility of poverty argument,” namely “the claim that low
wages were an incentive to industry.”121 What has not received sufficient
attention to this day is the utility of wealth argument and whether the high
wages of CEOs, shareholders, angel investors and hedge fund managers—
as they name themselves—deliver benefits to the public and its civic
organization.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiment Smith followed Hume, acknowledg-
ing that: “Pleasure and pain are the great object of desire and aversion,”
but Smith also sided with Hutcheson that “the principle of approbation
was not founded on self-love.”122 For Smith, the three categories stated by
Hume—sympathy with the agents for their own sake, for their utility to
another and the possible societal good—are to be balanced. Unlike Hume,
Smith delimited reliance on utility in the general rule of justice.123 Smith
agreed with Hume’s effort to establish moral philosophy as a science of
human nature and followed Hume’s philosophy, diverging from the cold
objectivism of the Hobbesian self-interest and providing an avenue for the
reconstruction of genial sociability.124 However, he did little to disrupt the
rich from exploiting the poor:
The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable.
They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural
selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience,
though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the
thousands of whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain
and insatiable desires they divide with the poor the produce of all their
improvements. They are let by an invisible hand to make nearly the
same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been
made, had the earth been divided into equal proportions among all its
inhabitants, and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, ad-
vance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication
of the species.125
Although Smith affirmed the activities of the rich, he was clear that they
also have to contribute to the lives of others; their desire for luxury ought
to be contained and admiring them as idols corrupts society. Meanwhile,
Smith postulated two different human natures. The poor lack the natural
selfishness and rapacity, and the rich act without intending and knowing.
The “without knowing” was dropped in Smith’s most cited passage of the
invisible hand in The Wealth of Nations, since those who advance the so-
ciety towards progress (and its eventual fall) presumably must be in posses-
sion of both desire and knowledge.
The governing principle legitimizing this classified society was Provi-
dence. “Providence” had not “abandoned those who seemed to have been
left out,” Smith thought, but continued to look after “the real happiness of
human life…[since] the beggar, who suns himself by the side of highway,
possesses that security which kings are fighting for.”126 Was it for Provi-
dence that the rich did not abandon their wealth for the security of the
beggar? Smith suggested that the entrepreneurial life is counterintuitive to
real happiness and security. Only certain religious aspects were absorbed
into the discourse of political economy.127 Smith believed that “every part
of nature, when attentively surveyed, equally demonstrates the providen-
tial care of its Author, and we may admire the wisdom and goodness of
God even in the weakness and folly of man.”128 He did not elaborate on
natural law or Christian charity. However, he used providence as a govern-
ing principle to explain away economic and social inequalities as he em-
phasized the state as an authority.129 How was this authority to be managed
if Smith remained ambivalent towards the natural and divine sentiments?
A close look at the Theory of the Moral Sentiments confirms the symbol-
ism of the metaphor of the machine, particularly when Smith is reflecting
on “the great system of government, and the wheels of the political ma-
chine… to promote the happiness of those who live under them.”130 He
regarded the universe as a “complete machine” and a “coherent system”
governed by general laws that progressively undid the natural conceptions
of the body politic.131
The notion of human machine that surfaces when Smith wrote of educa-
tion requires further analysis as it maps the future directions for human
capital policies and conventions. Smith wrote:
A man educated at the expense of much labour and time to any of those
employments which required extraordinary dexterity and skill, may be
compared to one of those expensive machines. The work which he
learns to perform, it must be expected, over and above the usual wages
of common labour, will replace to him the whole expense of his educa-
tion, with at least the ordinary profits of an equally valuable capital. It
must do this too in a reasonable time, … in the same manner as to the
more certain duration of the machine.132
Smith explained that “education, study or apprenticeship” is a form of

“capital fixed and realized” in the person, while the “improved dexterity
in the workman can be considered in the same light as a machine or instru-
ment.”133 It was also this “improved dexterity” and not the human person
that Smith asked us to consider as an upgraded machine. The educated
person—who may be compared to a machine—Smith thought should be
treated as a moral being. Unlike the proponents of human capital theory,
Smith affirmed the roles of virtues and emotions in human conduct. Not
only virtues but also Smith’s concept of “reasonable time” would be later
adjusted by his neoliberal counterparts. When Smith argued for limits of
state administration over education, he did so not to enable private profi-
teers to monopolize public education for monetary gains. In Smith’s case,
Spengler explains, “[t]he arrangement under which teachers worked did
not maximize incentive to good performance.”134 Smith had no formula
for maximizing the utility of education. His main concern was to “describe
and seek establishment of a politico-economic environment within which
[hu]man’s desire and efforts” are directed to improve both the individual
and society.135 He emphasized that education ought to be useful for the
person and not needlessly expensive and cautioned that a system of private
or public incentive would be a hindrance to liberty.
Smith’s admiration for the mechanical metaphors corresponded to the
stoic model of self-constitution and included the management of individuals’
self-interest. Smith relied on the ancient theme of “self-command” to
encourage readers to “abstain from present pleasure, … in order to secure

greater pleasure to come.”136 His admiration is explained as a “resolute firm-
ness of the person” self-governed by keeping in mind fulfilment of his future
goals. Smith’s appreciation of stoic manhood and his abandonment of pure
and rational religion “agreed with Isaac Newton that God has ordained Na-
ture to operate by second cause and that to know the laws of Nature is to
know the decrees of God’s will.”137 Smith was not hostile to rational religion.
His chain of being from God to human spilled into the working of the society
in a “‘general’ rather than [confined to] ‘special’ Providence.”138 Lloyd de-
scribes Smith’s moral consciousness as capable of integrating the perspective
of another human being.139 Smith spoke to believers and atheists alike. For
Smith, the account of the impartial spectator “may be made ‘in the image of
God’, but it is nonetheless subordinate to divine judgment.”140 Although he
accepted the role of benign providence in merit and fortune, his impartial
spectator is capable of emotions and actions. Such capability requires atten-
tion to what sustains humanity. It requires an education concerned with un-
derstanding instead of competing, self-maximizing, and accumulating.
3.6 Instrumentalizing nature
Bacon’s metaphor of “a passive and possessable female nature strikingly
altered the traditional image of nature as Dame Kind, and ‘all-creating’
and bounteous Mother Earth who single-handedly bore and nourished her
children.”141 Mary Shelly alleged that in contrast to “ancient teachers” the
“modern masters promise very little … They have acquired new and al-
most unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic
the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shad-
ows.”142 Does the reconstruction of the invisible hand serve to justify
power, greed and violence? What exactly distinguishes humans from other
animals, those hunted for leisure, those locked up for spectators’ pleasure,
and those plugged into machines that monitor, feed and then slaughter
them for the good of humanity?
The technologies of commanding nature, including human nature, and
possessing capital developed interdependently in European history.
The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining

of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces
and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the
exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application.143
Bio-power, a power that seeks the application of knowledge to the manage-

ment of human population, marked the adoption of procedures that in-
structed humanity “what it meant to be a living species in a living world.”144
Biological existence was not only to be disciplined but altered and treated
as malleable livestock. In 1923, the biologist John Haldane argued that the
application of biology had not affected society sufficiently. Haldane noted
the biological sciences had prolonged life and made health improvements
and, as a result, had prepared public opinion for what would be the ulti-
mate goal and application of biological sciences beyond medicine: “a con-
scious attempt at the education of biology to politics”145 and subsequently
the social (and artificial) engineering of life forms. Next, I turn to the initia-
tion of processes and practices that further eroded human–machine distinc-
tions: market instrumentalism and utilitarian philosophy.
Notes
1 Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984), 57.
2 Hernando de Sato Polar, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs
in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic books, 2000), 218.
3 Genevieve Lloyd, Enlightenment Shadows (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 13.
4 Genevieve Lloyd, Providence Lost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2008), 4. Spinoza had developed “an ethic of freedom and virtue based on the
acceptance of necessity,” however, over time, he had come to symbolize an
atheist rejection of God’s concern, a global reception of his thought for Leib-
niz and Voltaire meant an influential critique of providence (Lloyd, 2008, p.
238).
5 John Watson, The Philosophical Bases of Religion (Glasgow: J. Maclehose,
1907), 212.
6 Ibid., 216
7 Ibid., 217.
8 Ibid., 244.
9 Nancy J. Hudson, Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of
Cusa (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 17–18.
Mankind was created to be ruler and beholder of the divine manifestation
in the universe. There is something of God in creation so valuable that God
created man to witness it. Mankind did not “fall” into the world, but he
was created for it (indirectly) and it for him.
(p. 18)
10 Hudson, Becoming God, 19.
11 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (New York:
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 114.
12 Ibid., 15.
13 Ibid., 217.
If God is called Light, it is because He cannot remain foreign to our experi-
ence. Gnosis, the highest stage of awareness of the divine, is an experience
of uncreated light, the experience itself being light: ‘in Thy light, we shall
see light’. It is both that which one perceives, and that by which one per-
ceives in mystical experience.
(p. 218)
14 Henry C. Lea, A History of Auricular Confession in the Latin Church Vol I:

Confession and Absolution (Philadelphia: Lea Brother & Co., 1896), 118.
15 Ibid., 156–57.
16 Ibid., 157.
17 Minso Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the
European Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 19.
18 Ibid.,100.
19 Ibid., 85.
20 John B. S. Haldane, Daedalus or Science and the Future: A Paper Read to the
Heretics, Cambridge on February 4th, 1923 (London: Trubner & Co., 1925),
48.
21 Ibid., 91–93.
22 John Cohen, Human Robots in Myth and Science (London: Allen & Unwin,
1966), 99.
Ancient cults expressed the contrast under consideration as esoteric, as
against exoteric knowledgae, which was open to all and taken as its face
value. The realm of the esoteric or symbolic was not limited to uttered
words or written texts but embraced all the objects and events of nature as
well as the actions of man himself.
(p. 99)
23 Ibid., 7. In the context of gnostic myth-makers Cohen (1966) wrote: “By in-
voking revelations or secret tradition allegedly deriving from Christ and the
Apostles, the Gnostics claimed to give a transcendent interpretation to the
entire visible and invisible world. They regarded themselves as privileged
‘knowers’…superior to the common ‘believers’….”(p. 36).
24 Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines, 21.
25 Elly R. Truitt, “Mysticism and Machines,” History Today 65, no. 7 (2015): 72.
26 Adrienne Mayor, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines and Ancient Dreams of
Technology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 146.
There is a difference between stories of gods wishing or commanding inert
matter to become alive, as in the biblical Adam and the myth of Pygma-
lion’s statue, and gods using superior forms of technology to construct ar-
tificial life, even if the inner workings are not described.
(p. 23)
27 Ibid.,152. Aristotle cited in Mayor.
28 Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2015), 23.
For Aristotle, the assimilation of the slave to ktema implies that he is a part
(morion) of the master, and part in an integral and constitutive sense. The
term ktema, which, as we have seen, is not a technical term of law but of
oikonomia, does not mean ‘property’ in a judicial sense, and in this con-
text, it designates things insofar as they are part of a functional whole….
The slave is a part (of the body) of the master, in the ‘organic’ and not
simply instrumental sense of the term, to such an extent that Aristotle
speaks of a ‘community of life’ between slave and master.
(p. 13)
29 Ibid., 23.
30 Mayor, Gods and Robots. John Cohen (1966) also noted: “In the Talmudic
belief that in the making of any person there are three partners: The father, the
mother and God Himself. … God gives ‘the breath, the soul, the physiognomy,
sight, hearing, speech, movement, understanding, wisdom’” (pp. 41–42).
31 Maureen Caudill, In Our Own Image: Building an Artificial Man (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 196. Caudill writes: “We are learning more
all the time about how our visual system works and how to imitate it in an
artificial system. Someday soon we will be able to translate that understand-
ing into our android Children” (p. 42).
32 Ibid., 221–22.
33 Elly R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 5.
34 Ibid., 8
35 Ibid., 71. Truitt notes that “venturing outside the conventional intellectual
avenues, mainly to pursue knowledge from Arabic and ancient sources …
talking heads, dramatize concern about the introduction of new natural
knowledge, its power, un-Christian origins and abilities of those who sought
it” (p. 95).
36 Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines, 34.
37 David C. Lindberg, “Introduction,” in God and Nature, Historical Essays on
the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and
Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 4.
38 Ibid., 12.
39 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (London: Gale,
1667/1734), 110–11.
40 Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature,
trans. Michael Case (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 125–26.
41 Richard S. Westfall, “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Chris-
tianity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes, and Newton,” in God and Nature: His-
torical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity, ed. David C Lindberg
and Ronal L. Numbers (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986), 218.
42 Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum, book 1,
Rev. Ed. (London: The Colonial Press, 1900), 368. The two books of Novum
Organum are titled: “On the interpretation of nature and the empire of man”
and “On the interpretation of nature or the Reign of man.”
43 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, ed. Joseph Devey (New York: Collier, 1902), 71.
44 Steven Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon
(Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 55.
45 Ibid., 58. “Bacon regarded the order in which God operated, placing light
before production and spending a significant amount of time in creating light,
as normative for human method” (59).
46 Bacon, Novum Organum, 72.
47 Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon, 61. “The hu-
man mind and its potential for knowledge remained as great as before the fall, and
humans had the freedom to make the most of it if they so choose” (p. 61). This
point is important for understanding Bacon’s later statement in Aphorism 28 of
the second book of the Novum Organum that human understanding is “depraved
by custom and the common course of things,” rather “than by sin” (p. 73).
48 William R. Shea, “Introduction,” in Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism: In
the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea (New
York: Science history publications, 1975), 14.
49 Ibid., 14.
50 Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature,
93.
51 Ibid., 94. According to Hadot, the judicial metaphor was carried from Bacon
to Kant.
52 Ibid., 94.
53 William A. Armstrong, “Introduction,” in The Advancement of Learning
Book 1 (London: Athlone Press, 1975), 40. Armstrong noted that “Bacon’s
interpretations of the biblical themes of creation, temptation, fall, and charity
are fundamental to the arguments of Book I” of The Advancement of Learn-
ing (p. 40). Meanwhile, Bacon’s influence on Darwin was “immeasurable”
(pp. 23–24).
54 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (Eugene: Generic NL Freebook
Publisher, 1605/1996), 66.
55 Ibid., 66.
56 William H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism, and Politics: Two Traditions of
English Political Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 220.
57 Ibid., 229.
58 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De
France 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009), 274.
59 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 62–63.
60 Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, 229. Emphasizing that the eighteenth cen-
tury held two theologies of God: One Absolut and other-worldly and self-
sufficient and the other “whose essential nature required the existence of
other beings,” Lovejoy notes that the dualism led to rejection of the logic
and
the conclusion that the imitation of an otherworldly God, even assuming
such a God, could not be the good for man, or from any creature, since the
reason or the goodness of God demanded that each grade of imperfect be-
ing should exist after its distinctive kind.
(p. 316)
61 Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the
Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007), 211. Sawday elaborated that
Bacon’s endeavour was to release the idea of ‘mechanics’ from sense rou-
tine…unthinking activity’, while also linked the term to the contemplation
of machines or mechanisms… to act upon nature in some way… For Baco-
nian nature was made up of matter that could be ‘reshaped, rearranged,
beaten, jostled around by heating, and suchlike’.
(p. 212)
62 Ibid., 215.
63 Edgar A. J. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British
Economic Thought (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1938), 96.
64 Crawford B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism:
Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 228.
65 Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology (Toronto: Anansi, 1999).
Petty cited in Franklin:
In the making of a Watch, if one Man shall make the Wheels, another the
Spring, another shall Engrave the Dial-plate, and another shall make the
Cases, then the Watch will be better and cheaper, than if the whole work be
put upon any one Man.
(p. 58)
66 Charles Trinkaus, “The Problem of Free Will in the Renaissance and the Ref-
ormation,” Journal of the History of Ideas 10, no. 1 (1949): 53.
67 Ibid., 53.
68 William Petty, Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic (New York: Mer-
shon company, 1888).
69 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch
(London: George Allen & Unwind LTD, 1954), 30.
70 Germano Maifreda, From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing
Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution (New
York: Routledge, 2012), 60–61.
71 William Petty, The Economic Writings. Together with the Observations Upon
the Bills of Mortality, ed. Charles H. Hull(London: Cambridge University
Press, 1899), 108.
72 William Petty, “Plan of an Industrial School,” in Education, the School and
the Teacher in English Literature: Republished from Barnards American Jour-
nal of Education, ed. Charles Henry Hull, (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1862),
207–08. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1680.
Petty, William, S. Economic Writings. Together with the Observations Upon
the Bills of Mortality Vol. 1. Edited by Charles Henry Hull. London: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1899. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1680.
73 William Petty, Essay on Mankind and Political Arithmetic (London: Cassell,
1888), 22.
74 Mary Poovey, A History of Modern Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 128.
75 Peter C. Dooley, The Labour Theory of Value (New York: Routledge, 2005), 62.
76 Edgar A. J. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British
Economic Thought, 96.
77 Petty cited in Poovey (1998, p. 128). Poovey notes that “no matter how we
interpret his [Petty’s] motives for making these particular recommendations,
he stood to profit from making economic expertise part for the production of
economic matters of fact” (p. 128).
78 Binyamin Appelbaum, “A Life’s Value,” The New York Time, Feb 17, 2011,
national edition.
79 Viscusi W. Kip and Joseph E. Aldy, “The Value of a Statistical Life: A Critical
Review of Market Estimates Throughout the World,” Harvard Law School
John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business Discussion Paper Se-
ries, paper 392 (2002): 8.
80 Mark Blaug, An Introduction to the Economics of Education (London, Pen-
guin Press, 1970), 318.
81 René Descartes, Principle of Philosophy, trans. Valentine R. Miller and Reese
P. Miller (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984).
God who can do all things, and by whom we are created for we do not know
whether He chose to make us in such a way that we are always mistaken,
even about those things which appears to us to be the best known of all.
(p. 4)
82 Ibid., 6.
83 Richard H. Popkin, History of Scepticims: From Savonarola to Bayle (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xxi.
84 Ibid., 445.
85 Pierre Bayle, “Miscellaneous Thoughts on Comet of 1680,” in The Fable of the
Beesand Other Writings, ed. Edward Hundert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 11.
86 Edward Hundert, “Introduction,” in The Fable of the Bees and Other Writ-
ings, ed. Edward Hundert, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), xxiv.
87 Bernard Mandeville, “Selections from the Fable of the Bees, Volume 1
(1723),” in The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. Edward Hundert,
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 44.
88 Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and Usefulness
of Christianity in War 1732 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), 33–34.
Mandeville accepted the use of fear in governance as suggested by Hobbes but
noted principles of contracts cannot sufficiently contain passion and ambi-
tions. As a defender of liberty for the people, Mandeville’s government acts
against tyrants while transparently favoring natural aristocracy (this is shared
by Benjamin Franklin, who associated with Mandeville) for growth of the
commonwealth regardless of economic disparity within it. Below we see
Hume reuses the same language while criticizing Mandeville’ views.
89 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004). Agamben is not making a reference to Man-
deville but Heidegger’s conception of animal in its theological context. Hei-
degger thinks that
the animal in its captivation is essentially held out in something other than
itself, something that indeed cannot be manifest to the animal either as a
being or as a non-being, but which, insofar as it disinhibits…bring an es-
sential disruption into the essence of animal.
(Heidegger quoted in Agamben, 2004, p. 61)
90 Edward G. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable; Bernard Mandeville and the
Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4–6.
Hundert explores the influence of Mandeville on Rousseau, Hutcheson,
Hume, Smith, Condillac, Malthus and Kant.
91 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or, Private Vices, Public Benefits,
with an Essay on Charity and Charity-schools (London: J. Tonson, 1729), 340.
92 Mandeville, “Selections from the Fable of the Bees, Vol. 1 (1723),” 114.
93 Ibid. 127. “There is not a more contented people among us than those who
work the hardest and are the least acquainted with the pomp and delicacies of
the world.” (p. 127) Mandeville continued,
I question whether the condition of kings would be at all preferable to that
of peasants, even as ignorant and laborious as I seem to require the latter
to be. The reason why the generality of people would rather be kings than
peasants is first owing to pride and ambition, that is deeply riveted in hu-
man nature, and which to gratify we daily see men undergo and despise the
greatest hazards and difficulties.
(p. 129)
See Adam Smith’s juxtaposition of king and peasant in the next chapter.
94 Bernard Mandeville cited in Edward G. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 78.
95 Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 79.

96 Ibid., 81–82.
97 F. B. Kay, “The Influence of Bernard Mandeville,” Studies in Philology 19, no.
1 (1922): 95.
98 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955), 270.
99 Ibid., 273.
100 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and
Virtue (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1725/2012), 2. Hutcheson’s end of knowl-
edge for human happiness differed from Mandeville’s materialistic arguments
articulated in Fable of the Bees.
101 Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, xxiii.
102 Ibid., 574.
103 Ibid., 583.
104 Ibid., 616.
105 Ibid., 616.
106 Ibid., 616.
107 Eugene Rotwein, “Introduction,” in David Hume Writings on Economics, ed.
Eugene Rotwein, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), lxxxi.
108 David Hume, “Of Interest,” in David Hume Writings on Economics, ed. Eu-
gene Rotwein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 53. Hume ar-
gued that policies must be considered in light of the merchants’ needs in order
to contribute to the wealth of the nation state.
109 David Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in Writings on Economics, ed.
Eugene Rotwein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 22.
110 Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” in The Science in Enlightened Eu-
rope, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1998), 132/135.
111 Julien O. De La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” in Machine Man and Other Writings,
ed. and trans. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24.
112 Ibid., 13. “Despite all of man’s prerogative over animals, to put him in the
same class as them is to do him a great honour” (p. 18). La Mettrie denied
that Humans are above animals by virtue of natural law instead he argued
that “nature made us to be beneath the animals” and it was the “miracles
worked by education” that helped humans to surpass their superiors (p. 19).
113 Ibid., 13.
114 Ibn Al-Jazari, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices
(Netherlands: Springer, 1974).
115 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 136. “The celebrated automata,
on the other hand were not only a way of illustrating an organism, they were
also political puppets, small-scale models of power” (p. 136).
116 Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 148.
117 Stephen Wolfram, “Statistical mechanics of cellular automata,” Reviews of
Modern Physics 55, no. 3 (1983): 601–45.
118 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith, Vol. 2, ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904), 174.
119 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol 1, 12.
120 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, 245.
121 Andrew S. Skinner, “David Hume: Principles of Political Economy” in The
Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge
122 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 379.
123 David Raphael, “Hume and Adam Smith on Justice and Utility,” Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, 73 (1972): 95. According to Adam Smith (2002),
“we approve of another man’s judgment, not as something useful, but as
right, as agreeable to truth and reality” (p. 25).
124 Smith (2002) explained that “though sympathy is very properly said to arise
from an imaginary change of situations with the person principally concerned,
yet this imaginary change is not supposed to happen to me in my own person
and character” (p. 374).
125 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 215. While the “disposition to ad-
mire, and almost to worship the rich and the powerful” is conceived as “nec-
essary” by Smith “both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks
and the order of society,” is, at the same time, “the great and most universal
cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” (p. 72).
126 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 216.
127 Bruce Moghtader, “Pastorate power, market liberalism and a knowing with-
out knowing.” Knowledge Cultures 6, no. 01 (2018): 18–35.
128 Ibid., 124.
129 Ibid., 64.
130 Ibid., 216.
131 Ibid., 225.
132 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, 103. Smith looked beyond the mone-
tary evaluation of workers (of William Petty) and considered social life.
133 Ibid., 265.
134 Joseph J. Spengler, “Adam Smith on Human Capital,” The American Eco-
nomic Review 67, no. 1 (1977), 36.
135 Ibid., 36.
136 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 222.
137 Lisa Hill, “The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith,” European Journal of His-
tory of Economic Thought 8, no. 1 (2011): 5.
138 Ibid., 15.
139 Lloyd, Enlightenment Shadows, 80.
140 Ibid., 94.
141 Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her life, Her Fiction, Her Monster (New York:
Methuen, 1988), 111.
142 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2008), 39.
143 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol I., 141.
144 Ibid., 142.
145 Haldane, Daedalus or Science and the Future: A Paper Read to the Heretics,
57. Haldane noted Daedalus’ “interest inevitably turned to biological prob-
lems, and it is safe to say that posterity has never equaled his only recorded
success in experimental genetics” (p. 47).
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2015.
Al-Jazari, Ibn. The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. Nether-

lands: Springer, 1974.
Armstrong, William A. “Introduction.” In The Advancement of Learning Book 1.
Edited by William A. Armstrong, 1–47. London: The Athlone Press, 1975.
Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning. Eugene: Generic NL Freebook Pub-
lisher, 1605/1996.
Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum. London: The
Colonial Press, 1900.
Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. Edited by Joseph Devey. New York: Collier,
1902.
Bayle, Pierre. “Miscellaneous Thoughts on Comet of 168.” In The Fable of the
Bees: And Other Writings. Edited by Edward Hundert, 9–18. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1997.
Blaug, Mark. An Introduction to the Economics of Education. London: Penguin
Press, 1970.
Cohen, John. Human Robots in Myth and Science. London: Allen & Unwin, 1966.
Descartes, René. Principle of Philosophy. Translated by Valentine R. Miller and
Reese P. Miller. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984.
Dooley, Peter C. The Labour Theory of Value. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by
Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage books, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by
Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De
France 1977–78. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2009.
Franklin, Ursula M. The Real World of Technology. Toronto: Anansi, 1999.
Greenleaf, William H. Order, Empiricism, and Politics; Two Traditions of English
Political Thought. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990.
Hadot, Pierre. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature.
Translated by Michael Case. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Haldane, John B. S. Daedalus or Science and the Future: A Paper Read to the Her-
etics, Cambridge on February 4th, 1923. London: Trubner & Co., 1925.
Hill, Lisa. “The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith.” European Journal of History
of Economic Thought 8, no. 1 (2011): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/713765225.
Hont, Istvan. “The Rich Country-poor Country’ Debate in Scottish Classical Po-
litical Economy.” In Wealth and Virtue. Edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ig-
natieff, 271–315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Hudson, Nancy J. Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa.
Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007.
Hume, David. A Treatise on Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955.
Hume, David. “Of Interest.” In Writings on Economics. Edited by Eugene Rot-
wein, 47–59. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970.
Hume, David. “Of Refinement in the Arts.” In Writings on Economics. Edited by

Eugene Rotwein, 19–32. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1970.
Hundert, Edward G. The Enlightenment’s Fable; Bernard Mandeville and the Dis-
covery of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Hundert, Edward G. “Introduction.” In The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings.
Edited by Edward Hundert, x–xx. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 1997.
Hurtado, Jimena P. “Citizens, Markets and Social Order: An Aristotelian Reading
of Smith and Rousseau on Justice.” In Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Poli-
tics, Economics. Edited by Paganelli Maria Pia, Dennis C. Rasmussen and Smith
Craig, 214–38. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Vir-
tue. Revised ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1725/2012. muse.jhu.edu/
book/18165.
Ignatieff, Michael. The Needs of Strangers. New York: Viking Penguin, 1984.
Johnson, Edgar A. J. Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British Eco-
nomic Thought..New York: Prentice-Hall, 1938.
Kang, Minso. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the Euro-
pean Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Kaye, F. B. “The Influence of Bernard Mandeville.” Studies in Philology 19, no. 1
(1922): 83–108. www.jstor.org/stable/4171820.
La Mettrie, Julien O. “Machine Man.” In Machine Man and Other Writings. Edited
and translated by Ann Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Lea, Henry C. A History of Auricular Confession in the Latin Church Vol I: Con-
fession and Absolution. Philadelphia: Lea Brother & Co., 1896.
Lindberg, David C. “Introduction.” In God and Nature, Historical Essays on the
Encounter Between Christianity and Science. Edited by David C. Lindberg and
Ronald L. Numbers, 1–18. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Lloyd, Genevieve. Providence Lost. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Lloyd, Genevieve. Enlightenment Shadows. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. New York: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A History of an Idea. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1933.
MacPherson, Crawford B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism:
Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Maifreda, Germano. From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Eco-
nomic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution. New York:
Routledge, 2012.
Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, with
an Essay on Charity and Charity –schools. 6th ed. London: J. Tonson, 1729.
http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=3406573
Mandeville, Bernard. An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and Usefulness of
Christianity in War 1732. Hildeseim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990.
Mandeville, Bernard. “Selections from the Fable of the Bees, Volume 1 (1723).” In
The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings. Abridged and edited by Edward Hun-
dert, 19–148. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
Matthews, Steven. Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon. Burling-
ton: Ashgate Publishing, 2008.
Mayor, Adrienne. Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines and Ancient Dreams of
Technology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her life, Her Fiction, Her Monster. New York:
Methuen, 1988.
Moghtader, Bruce. “Pastorate Power, Market Liberalism and a Knowing without
Knowing.” Knowledge Cultures 6, no. 01 (2018): 18–35.
Petty, William S. “Plan of an industrial School.” In Education, The School and the
Teacher in English Literature: Republished from Barnards American Journal of
Education, 188–208. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1862. https://archive.org/.
Petty, William S. Essay on Mankind and Political Arithmetic. London: Cassell,
1888. https://archive.org/details/essaysonmankindp00pettuoft.
Petty, William S. Economic Writings. Together with the Observations Upon the
Bills of Mortality Vol. 1. Edited by Charles Henry Hull. London: Cambridge
University Press, 1899. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1680.
Petty, William S. The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, Together with The
Observations Upon Bills of Mortality, Vol 2. Edited by Charles Henry Hull.
London: Cambridge University Press, 1899). https://oll.libertyfund.org/
titles/1680.
Polar, De Sato Hernando. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in
the West and Fails Everywhere else. New York: Basic books, 2000.
Poovey, Mary. A History of Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Science
of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Popkin, Richard H. History of Scepticims: From Savonarola to Bayle. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003. ProQuest UBC Ebook Central.
Raphael, David. “Hume and Adam Smith on Justice and Utility.” Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, 73 (1972): 87–103. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.
library.ubc.ca/stable/4544835.
Rotwein, Eugene. “Introduction.” In David Hume’s Writings on Economics. Ed-
ited by Eugene Rotwein, ix–xc. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970.
Sawday, Jonathan. Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise
of the Machine. London: Routledge, 2007.
Schaffer, Simon. “Enlightened Automata.” In The science in Enlightened Europe.
Edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer, 126–65. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch.
London: Allen & Unwin, 1954.
Shea, William R. “Introduction.” In Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism: In the
Scientific Revolution. Edited by Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea, 1–25. New
York: Science history publications, 1975.
Skinner, Andrew S. “David Hume: Principles of Political Economy.” In The Cam-
bridge Companion to Hume. Edited by David Norton, 222–54. Cambridge:
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by
Adam Smith. Vol. 1. Edited by Edwin Cannan. London: Methuen, 1904.
Adam Smith. Vol. 2. Edited by Edwin Cannan. London: Methuen, 1904.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by Knud Haakonssen.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Spengler, Joseph J. “Adam Smith on Human Capital.” The American Economic
Review 67, no. 1 (1977): 32–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1815877.
Sprat, Thomas. The History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of
Natural Knowledge. 4th ed. London: Gale, 1667/1734. http://find.gale.com.
Trinkaus, Charles. “The Problem of Free Will in the Renaissance and the Reforma-
tion.” Journal of the History of Ideas 10, no. 1 (1949): 51–62. https://www.jstor.
org.
Truitt, Elly R. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Truitt, Elly R. “Mysticism and Machines.” History Today 65, no. 7 (2015): 72–72.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/mysticism-and-machines
Viscusi, W. Kip and Joseph E. Aldy. “The Value of a Statistical Life: A Critical
Review of Market Estimates Throughout the World.” Harvard Law School John
M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business Discussion Paper Series, no.
392: (2002). http://lsr.nellco.org/harvard_olin/392
Watson, John. The Philosophical Bases of Religion. Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1907.
Westfall, Richard S. “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Christian-
ity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes, and Newton.” In God and Nature: Historical
Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity. Edited by David C Lindberg and
Ronal L. Numbers, 218–37. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Wolfram, Stephen. “Statistical mechanics of cellular automata.” Reviews of Mod-
ern Physics 55, no. 3 (1983): 601–45
4 Utilitarianism and market divinity
Those concerned with ethics often question the role of science and techno-
logical progress to human betterment. For example, Bertrand Russell was
“compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of domi-
nant groups, rather than to make man happy.”1 Cognizant that economics,
sociology, and psychology were moving under the advancement of biologi-
cal sciences, Russell wrote: “Darwinism and the idea of evolution affected
men’s imaginative outlook.”2 Darwinism did not take form independently
from cultural and historical forces, even though Darwin focused on non-
human species. According to Peter Bowler, the idea of evolution was pre-
sented by a number of Victorian thinkers, in utilitarian philosophy and
laissez-faire theories, before Darwin. They found “individualism as a li-
cense for unlimited competition” to “eliminate the weakest members of
society,” but they stopped short in translating the ethos of capitalism into
a natural principle.3 “Market theory introduce[d] the logic of social Dar-
winism before Darwin.”4 With its emphasis on private enterprise and indi-
vidual wants, market theory advanced a model of self-regulatory
government.
Initially, market theory helped the transition from land aristocracies to
liberalism and accommodated the development of political economy as a
science for policy. The market served as the legitimizing mechanism for
easing excessive regulation but gradually became a regulatory doctrine for
organization of the public in terms of costs and profits. Overtime, rivalries
to control the global markets led to devoting “more energy to war.”5 In the
wake of the World War I, Russell found “liberal ideals as free trade, free
press, [and] unbiased education, either already belong to the past or soon
will do so”; and “those who possess military and economic power can
control education and the press, and therefore secure a subservient democ-
racy.”6 The next chapter contextualizes Russell’s propositions. This chap-
ter demonstrates that the political economy moved away from concepts of
natural laws, transported conceptions of nature into the markets and be-
came organized around utilitarian calculations. Modern human capital
DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-5
theory thrives on the utilitarian philosophy that institutes ends-means ori-

entations to learning and labour while it relies on the market as a scape-
goat rationale for responsible government.
4.1 Nature and justice

The arguments for free trade occurred during the transition from despo-
tism to liberal democracy. The juxtaposition of the ideas of Jean Jacques
Rousseau with those of Adam Smith exposes two approaches the 19th
century inherited concerning equality, civility, and liberty. Rousseau and
Smith began with similar concerns but arrived at different processes and
solutions. Rousseau saw in the admired technical progress of the 18th cen-
tury a new model of slave society. His focus on inequality affirmed the
constitution of persons free from enslavement of material progress. Smith’s
concern centred on the satisfaction of economic needs, the pursuit of which
eventually was expected to bring a distributive justice to rich and poor.7
Commercial society’s demands led Smith to argue for further economic
progress and led Rousseau to consider conditions for equality if progress
was to be concerned with civil justice.
Smith had read the early works of Rousseau, but by adopting a scientific
approach rooted in Hume and Newton, he had rejected Rousseau’s ap-
proach to inequality.8 Smith’s rejection of Rousseau was not due exclu-
sively to scientific approaches. It unfolded in accord with the context of the
historical rivalry between France and Britain. According to Hurtado,
Smith’s position also reflected his interest in replacing the French and Car-
tesian systems with “the English System of Bacon and Newton.”9 Rous-
seau’s historical argument for egalitarian laws were distinct from Smith’s
faith that economic inequality would eventually be remedied by economic
growth and, that legislators would intervene to institute justice. Influenced
by Locke, Rousseau felt that private property offered the passage to civil
society. Private property was necessary for civil society and was not a
source of inequality. However, Rousseau thought that “whatever physical
inequality nature may have placed between men, and that while they may
be unequal in force or genius, they all become equal through conventions
and rights.”10 He saw scientific, technological, and economic conventions
prolonging inequality and found rights theories an avenue to mediate their
power.
Rousseau followed Aristotle in conceiving justice to be equivalent to
virtue; it was necessary for political life.11 In the context of pre-Revolu-
tionary France the nobility, by virtue of their ancestry, over-extended the
exercise of their rights in social and economic affairs. It was not until the
1780s that both bourgeoisie and nobility, under the influence of Enlight-
enment thinkers such as Rousseau, united in their opposition to
Utilitarianism and market divinity 129
“‘despotism’, and in the belief that liberal, representative institutions

were essential if property owners who bore the bulk of the direct tax
burden were to have any say in the way their money was spent.”12 Ac-
cording to William Doyle, all leisured groups participated in educating
the public for change since the ultimate aim was the defeat of despotism.
The seminal democratic thinker of the modern state, Rousseau stressed
“that, sovereignty…is nothing but the exercise of the general will—can
never be alienated, and that the sovereign—which is nothing but a col-
lective being—can be represented only by itself.”13 Citizens’ sovereignty
delimited monopolies of economic powers by reliance on state govern-
ment and coincided with industrialization. Unlike physical differences
granted by nature, economic inequalities—Rousseau thought—are con-
ventions that need to be limited by political (public) economy, which he
at times called government. Rousseau’s text on political economy had
instructed the elites to act in conformity to the general will, to “establish
the reign of virtue,”14 In Rousseau’s other writings, the reign of virtue
and instituting general will suggest a society concerned with justice. In
such a society, the wealthy are responsible to the public, not simply ex-
ploit it for profit.
Rousseau began his Discourse on Political Economy by referencing the
distinction between the ancient household and the commercial economy
of his time in order to highlight that the economy can no longer be con-
ceived as a private matter. Rousseau utilized the metaphor of the machine
to reconceptualize the body politics, arguing that the citizens “make the
machine live, move and work; and no part of this machine can be dam-
aged without the painful impression being at once conveyed to the
brain.”15 The “painful” impression on other parts of this body helped the
brain to attend to the whole. Along with Cartesian and mechanistic con-
ceptions of economy were metaphors of the state as a father that educates
and a sovereign maternal figure that nourishes her children, the citizens.
Citizens were not at the mercy of a system of natural liberty nor were
they subjects of a republic that secured their collective entity by reformu-
lating their individual will. Since their “stoic self-comment” is not di-
rected for meeting individual needs but for remaining free from
“temptation to compete” once again “[v]irtue would become natural,
that is fully social because society should remove the incentives for
envy.”16 And thus a society designed by competition could not be a means
to security and civility.
Unlike Smith’s economy of self-interests, Rousseau recognized as the
economic “body grew larger, and more complex, it began to lose its abil-
ity to function as a whole” and, at the individual level, one’s “interests
may occasionally coincide with those of others, and justice may occa-
sionally be expedient. But there is no reason to believe that these
conditions will always hold.”17 Rousseau’s citizens were entitled to sov-

ereignty distinct from market utopia. For him economics remained sub-
ordinate to human life; liberty was no instrument for economic
co-operation and competition. Humans were not a form of capital. Lib-
erty was not a means to justify inequality. Liberty was the condition and
effect of equality. However, before the age of mass media brainwashing,
Rousseau had seen the importance of managing public opinion as part of
the education of the citizen. The press and communication systems gen-
erally informed the modality of social agency. He referred to public opin-
ion as a law not “engraved on marble or bronze, but in the hearts of the
citizens,” which “daily acquires new force,” and it revives the old laws;
Rousseau wrote “of morals, customs and especially opinion—a part of
the laws unknown to our politicians, but upon which the success of all
the others depends.”18 Education was distinct from control or indoctri-
nation as it aimed at the aspiration of the individual. Cultivating certain
virtues (e.g., respect), education was interconnected to the overall proj-
ect of egalitarian laws.
In Émile, Rousseau often acknowledged “the Author of things” to em-
phasize his conception of the nature of humanity as not separate from
Providence. He was, however, clear about human autonomy (“Natural
man is entirely for himself”); values are recognized “in relation to the
whole, which is the social body.”19 This whole is a society—concerned
with both the material and spiritual—transforming the way primitive hu-
mans lived by establishing civil relations. In the examples he provided in
Émile, Rousseau retained his moral and political stand that the laws of
nature are not before and above human laws and associations. Rousseau
relied on “different and vacillating meanings of nature” to convey that,
“something can be done with the young to offset some of the more prob-
lematic aspects of civil society.”20 By cultivating the ability to converse,
question, and reason, humans learn to recognize freedom and its limits.
Anticipating advocates of socialization in education, Rousseau was sug-
gesting that it is the moral content of education that informs the power,
autonomy, and will of the individual. However, Rousseau moved away
from establishing norms and values to support utility in education. As
Egan observed, Rousseau “suggested that the mind is like the body” and
education “a matter of encouraging the fullest development of a natural
psychological process, and thereby fulfilling as far as possible the potential
of each individual student.”21 The idea that education should focus on the
development of individuals was potent but at the mercy of utilitarianism
and dismissal of Rousseau’s equality.
By examples, interactions, and conversations, Rousseau’s pupil, Émile,
learned that his desires to possess or to rule others were unjust regardless
of rationalization, utility, and/or self-interest. As he stood in relation to the
interests and reason of others, Émile developed an understanding of him-

self. For example, in one situation the young Émile had planted seeds and
nurtured a garden that he later learned belonged to someone else. He dis-
covered that his work had undermined the labour of a gardener who had
come to the land before he had. Instead of justifying his own purpose, or
seeing the work of others as inferior, Rousseau, Émile and the gardener
find an arrangement that suits all parties. Émile learned of “the idea of
property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant by labour.”22
From this example, Rousseau concluded that moral ideas could not ad-
vance if the instructor forgets it is in “action” that children learn. In con-
trast to Locke, Rousseau’s instructions were not solely for those who learn,
but for anyone trusted to guide and teach others.
Unlike Locke and Mandeville, Rousseau defended public education
(e.g., education for all). Education was not a charity but a necessity for the
“rules of popular or legitimate government,” as “the most important busi-
ness of the State,” and aiming to cultivate “public confidence.”23 Educa-
tion was more than instilling order and nurturing the employability of
citizens. The role of government does not simply end in funding education
institutions in anticipation of a return from consumers and taxpayers. For
Rousseau, the lessons, precepts, and instructions are fruitless and the au-
thorities, democratic or oligarchic, lose public trust if they themselves do
not practice what they expect of citizens. At stake are prudence and justice
and not an entrepreneurialism, moulding natural passions (which Rous-
seau conceived as necessary for preservation and self-love). Education con-
nects the person with wider networks of governance in appreciation of
laws that facilitate respect among citizens as equals.
Rousseau’s attempt to articulate a secular modern apprenticeship in
freedom can be read from different angles. One reading is indicative of the
ways in which humans are learned in a particular mode of freedom. Rous-
seau wrote: “There is no subject as perfect as that which keeps the appear-
ance of freedom. Doubtless, he [the student] ought to do only what he
wants, but he ought to want only what you want him to do.”24 He contin-
ued, “[b]y never doing anything except what suits him, he will soon do
only what he ought to do.”25 In describing the activities of the adult and
the child, Rousseau was describing apprenticeship in modern freedom. The
appearance of freedom, freedom reduced to doing what one wants, al-
lowed for surveillance and directing human will. The appearance of free-
dom instils docility. Émile outlined the mode of the nurturing individuals’
interest as they come to understand nature and civility:
Thus, not seeing you eager to oppose him, not distrusting you, with
nothing to hide from you, he [the student] will not deceive you, he will
not lie to you, he will fearlessly show himself precise as he is. You will
be able to study him at your complete ease and arrange all around him
the lessons you want to give him without him ever thinking he is receiv-
ing any.26
The person learns not to see the shortcoming of an authority; he even lacks
recognition that the central lessons are designed for implementation of soft
control to rule him by his own preferences and choices. It is hard to recon-
cile Rousseau’s Social Contract and Essays with some passages of Émile
that can only be read as supplements to Machiavelli’s Prince. Rousseau’s
views on childhood suggest a malleability of human nature, alterable by
customs and education.
Rousseau left little doubt that his claim for education based on his con-
ception of human nature is a deliberate if not calculated preparation of a
certain citizen, despite defending a moral politics against an immoral econ-
omy of interests. He directed the child neither by reward and punishment
nor by shame of an invisible providence but by reformulating the nature of
freedom and autonomy. Human nature is not wicked. It is malleable and
develops in relation to others.
Thus, when a child desires something that he sees and one wants to give
it to him, it is better to carry the child to the object than to bring the
object to the child. He draws from this practice a conclusion appropri-
ate to his age, and there is no other means to suggest it to him.27
Rousseau made it clear: “The Abbe de Saint-Pierre called men big children.
One could, reciprocally, call children little men.”28 It is always better to
carry humans to the object of their interest—be it freedom—instead of be-
ing ordered by them or ordering them. Co-operative governance was dis-
tinct from despotic paternalism and aristocratic libertarians.
Rousseau’s principle of justice by which the laws of the body politic are
enacted were centred on conventions of natural liberty based on property
as a necessary condition of citizenship.29 In this respect, Lemos pointed to
the inconsistency in Rousseau’s philosophy that labour alone gives a title
of property and the acceptance of “a class system based on differences of
inherited property, on the ground that there are certain rules of conduct
and duties of the rich that can adequately be learned and observed only
through being trained from childhood.”30 The gross imbalances in the dis-
tribution of property led Rousseau to conceptualize self-sovereignty by
taking labour as a property. Such a mode of self-sovereignty was the initial
step towards claiming certain rights for workers who were vulnerable; to
satisfy their material needs, they were dependent on the nobility.31 The du-
ties and obligations of various persons differed while social contracts, en-
visaged by Rousseau, maintained the overgrowth of intergenerational
economic inequality. Rousseau did offer a critique of commercial inequali-

ties where the poor renounce their will to satisfy the self-interests of the
rich. If Rousseau conceived labour as a commodity, he did not justify its
exploitation based on “greater good” arguments. He also emphasized la-
bour’s non-monetary value for human development and culture.
Rousseau’s principles “limit economic inequality to the extent necessary
to avoid domination” and “it is worth asking … how precisely inequality
of opportunity is related to domination.”32 (This question remains central
to modern predicaments.) Rousseau also accepted that the utopia of Na-
ture is no longer a possibility. Conceiving equality simply as a utopian
pursuit misses Rousseau’s point that equality is the condition for civil life.
John Dewey agreed. Dewey also stressed that focusing education on em-
ployability undermines democracy. He sought “the proper place” for “vo-
cational factors,” but for him education was an avenue to find one’s calling
instead of training the young to compete as opportunists.33 While Rous-
seau informed Dewey’s attention to psychosocial development, Dewey ob-
jected to the notion of “control for [the] child’s good, of conformity
merging into obedience, and of wills acting in harmony” implied in “the
laissez-faire pedagogy of Émile.”34 Rousseau’s liberty and equality were
reformulated in the obedience demanded by the laissez-faire advocates, in
particular by Jeremy Bentham, who revised Adam Smith’s visions of politi-
cal economy.
More than intellectual debts, Ignatieff implies the choice of words in
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments are “so close to those of Rousseau”
that they “cannot be mere coincidence.”35 Smith adopted and reformu-
lated some of Rousseau’s views on public economy. While Smith criticized
Rousseau, he too recognized political economy could not be left to the
elites; it required regulation. Smith also admitted that the concern for jus-
tice had to extend to the public and the individual. Smith’s notion of sym-
pathy echoes Rousseau’s notion of natural compassion (pity). Rousseau
and other French intellectuals of the 18th century worked through Man-
deville’s truth-telling of commercial elites and offered a distinction between
egoism and self-respect. Rousseau’s idea of “passions” as “principle instru-
ment of our preservation”36 became absorbed as part of liberal self-gover-
nance. Rousseau’s contrasts between Indigenous and European people
(aimed at showing civil inequality grew from social conventions) set the
direction for Smith’s justification of commercial civilization and open trade
as a facilitator of social progress. Smith rationalized political injustice by
economic reasons that subverts rights. Smith wrote: “Among the savage
nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work, is
more or less employed in useful labour” and yet they “are miserably
poor.”37 In explaining the manipulative power of the commercial elites in
so-called civilized nations, Smith observed a great number of people do not
labour at all and yet the produce of the whole labour of the society offers
them excess and luxury. This valuation led to the assumption that the
poorest members of European society live in better conditions than hunters
and gatherers. It also legitimized those who, by manipulation, controlled
capital and worked the labouring class were contributors to social prog-
ress. Smith found merit in the European model of economics to justify
colonization. He was not blind to the “savage injustice of the Europeans,”
but he judged the injustice was going to be “beneficial” to the Indigenous
people.38 Praise for the market economy grew from acknowledging its cru-
elties as part of its benevolence. The approximation and treatment of the
labouring poor to those subjected to the savage injustice of colonizers is
not without significance to the directions of political economy as a science
for contemporary policy. Those subjugated, Smith evaluated, eventually
will reap the benefits of progress if they survived the initial violence.
Colonization and national rivalry were processes informed by a faith in
the productive fruits of trade. The trust in trade made a shift from imperi-
alism by guns and religion to imperialism governed by imports and ex-
ports. Smith reasoned that international trade “might be” beneficial to
either side of trade even for powerful countries such as Britain and France,
if mercantile jealousy and national animosity were put aside, implying
trade facilitates peace. The idea that trade maintained rich nations in posi-
tions of power was initially expressed by David Hume, who construed
people and industrial technology as the main sources of national wealth;
what crossed the borders supplemented this existing wealth.39 Adam Smith
remained committed to Hume’s ideas, but he was also aware that trade by
itself may not bring improvements for overall population, thereby making
it necessary for the legislators to intervene.40 Smith’s political economy did
find inequality a problem, a problem he entrusted to a system of natural
liberty but also to the intervention of policymakers. Smith did not imagine
that sanctions and financial manipulations can misuse trade to prolong the
“savage injustice” of colonial and imperial powers.
Similar to Rousseau, Smith’s political economy became more transpar-
ent when considering his thoughts on education. He emphasized that the
education of the “common people will require the attention of the state”;
it should not be left to the people “of rank and fortune.”41 By this Smith
did not leave out considerations of private pursuits. He postulated that the
common people are to be taught what ensures they meet the demands of
their occupations—not necessarily about their natural liberty. However, he
emphasized the responsibility of the public in paying for necessary elemen-
tary learning. His advocacy of education rested on the reason that it “in-
structed and intelligent people besides” being “decent and orderly… [and
they] are more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors, and
they are therefore more disposed to respect those superiors.”42 After Smith,
the directions were set to justify the low-paid labour for the greater good
so far as it meets the interest of those whose political economy was deemed
lawfully superior.
4.2 The benevolent market

Drawing from French 18th century court records and historical docu-
ments, Judith Miller shows that the ideas of free trade initially came to
be formulated as a result of the state’s active role in managing the forces
of supply and demand in order to protect the population from uncontrol-
lable economic forces that could fuel revolts. Administrative authority
over trade did not cease after “the free-trade legislation of the 1760s,”
rather it “leaned more toward behind-the-scenes coercion, directed espe-
cially at grain owners and bakers.”43 Since the authorities did not want
the population to be a party in the negotiations with producers and mer-
chants, their “evolving policies required the goodwill and coordination…
in supervising the trade.”44 According to Miller, ideas for increasing eco-
nomic freedom had been in circulation since the 1730s in France. How-
ever, such ideas became part of economic liberalism in the 1750s and
1760s, aimed to remedy the food shortage and the devastation brought
by the Seven Years’ War. This is the context of political and intellectual
arguments that linked fears of food shortage (and impeding tax policies)
with the liberalization of markets. Miller emphasizes that the state cre-
ated free trade and its moderate role in administering market contributed
to the founding of economic liberalism. The initial ideas of the market as
a natural entity and as a self-regulating system were developed by French
physiocrats.
Physiocrats advocated for changing the conditions of mercantilism.
Having François Quesnay (1694–1774) as an authority led to the forma-
tion of a school of thought with shared visions. Quesnay, who served Louis
XV as a medical doctor, published his first economics article, Fermiers, in
1756, attracting reformists such as Jacques Turgot, Mercier de Riviere, Le
Trosne, Abbe Baudeau, and others in favour of an economic model in-
formed by agriculture. In the face of the economic upheavals of the 18th
century—including factory owners’ increasing power and the suffering of
the poor working class—the physiocrats “appeared to be a system of ad-
vance liberalism or a foundation for a constitution of a peasant democ-
racy.”45 The peasant democracy at stake drew extensively from the Chinese
despotic agricultural economy. The Europeans’ preoccupation with China
had begun in the 14th century. By the time of Quesnay, the occident had
reaped profits from Chinese sciences in military and printing technologies.
For Quesnay, China offered a portal to reformulate the role of the state in
economic affairs.
Quesnay explained that “the great empire of China” offered a model of

“political and moral constitution … based upon a knowledge of Natural
Law, … worthy to be used as a model for all states.”46 Similar to his Chris-
tian predecessors, Quesnay’s idea of natural law had its origin in the will
of a “supreme creator,” but its main emphasis rested on “the aggregate of
the laws of the physical order.”47 He explained that the economic order of
the nation must focus on laws aimed at reproduction of wealth:
these laws require on the part of legislator and of those who enforce
them, a very extensive knowledge and elaborate calculations, the result
of which must present, with proof, the advantages to the sovereign and
to the nation, especially the advantages to the sovereign, for he must be
induced by self-interest to do right thing. Happily, his interest, when
properly understood, always agrees with that of the nation…. 48
The sovereign’s interests are aligned with the production of national wealth
and the production of wealth are informed by the “elaborate calculations”
for the purposes of drafting positive laws. The extensive knowledge draws
from the physical order to direct policies. In the roundabout economic
framework, rigidity dissolves to preserve the state; the sovereign was to
trust and rely on the knowledge of the legislators. Such a trust was foun-
dational to political economy.
The concept of natural order was not new to the Europeans; however, it
was in need of new emphasis to direct government regulations.49 Noting
the “novelty in Quesnay’s handling of the natural order,” Maverick points
out that it articulated different visions from those formulated by Locke, for
it proposed that a natural order “will supervene if obstructive laws of men
are removed.”50 The idea transformed medieval thought that had relied on
the model of a monarch who governed by divine and natural laws. The
conception of natural economic order that can be observed and calculated
aimed at sound legislation. Prior to Adam Smith, Quesnay’s reawakening
of natural order pointed to the possibility of synchronizing national wealth
with the pursuit of self-interests. Quesnay
disengaged economic process from its anthropological role as servant of

the socio-political order and established its claim to be the direct mani-
festation of the natural order. In other words, he argued that economic
process itself embodied natural law and should thus dictate the socio-
political order.51
The argument for the naturalness of economic transactions followed from

revaluation of an overly regulated economic order. It did not claim that the
market can serve as a sole regulator of economic processes.
Although Quesnay relied on the ideas of natural order to reinterpret the

Eastern despotism, he drew on “Petty’s description of land as the mother
of wealth and the labour that cultivated it, the father.”52 Quesnay’s reliance
on Petty helped his scientific emphasis on both freedom and positive laws
that regulate freedom in state management. While Bacon and Petty ac-
cepted that government calculation must concern wealth, labour, and
taxes, they never envisaged the population as economic subjects who were
capable of autonomous behaviour.53 Quesnay’s economic approach worked
towards making certain associations—such as growth of capital with the
growth of population, increased demand conditions with supply of labour
and competition among workers resulting in profit for the landlords—pos-
sible.54 After Quesnay, many of these associations were reworked. How-
ever, his method of representation of economic processes by numbers and
diagrams remained central to economic science.
In the introduction to the fifth printing of Adam Smith’s Wealth of the
Nations—the final publication during Smith’s lifetime—Edwin Cannan
wrote: “The confession of faith of the Économistes is embodied in
Quesnay’s Tableau Économique … described as worthy as being ranked,
along with writing and money, as one of the three greatest inventions of
the human race.”55 This new faith, along with writing and money, was
influential in orienting humans and directing their attention. In the context
of the Tableau économique, Quesnay’s attempt was to present an economic
system that can function “much like an engine may function as a perfect
whole so long as one adds fuel.”56 Although Quesnay’s sole reliance on
agriculture was the subject of criticism for advocates of industrial progress,
this did not prevent Adam Smith from adopting many of Quesnay’s ideas.
“Smith’s reading of Quesnay as promoting ‘prefect liberty’ was the prod-
uct of their personal acquaintance,” Harcourt elaborated, for Smith: “Self-
interest and the natural desire of all men to improve their own condition
would still provide the engine for economic growth in the absence of per-
fect liberty.”57 Recognizing imperfect liberty, both Quesnay and Smith
viewed the role of impartial policymaker as a given for sustaining social
order and limiting economic exploitation.
The organic conceptions of the economic system offered by Quesnay
normalized that motives and impulses are natural contributors to eco-
nomic growth and eased the need for stringent regulatory power. The sense
of nationalism familiar to mercantilist’s lords as well as a new model of
individual liberty born from its limited paternalism were not so distant
from what natural law theorists believed. “As Locke was the father of po-
litical individualism, so Quesnay was one of the fathers of economic indi-
vidualism.”58 This individualism was co-dependent on managing public
opinion for preservation of the elites. In their short-lived triumph over
mercantilism, French economists, Turgot, Condorcet, and Quesnay left
their Scottish and British counterparts the conceptual tools to develop a

science for studying individual capacity for profit maximization. Although
political economists derived “their pedigree” from Quesnay, they diverged
from his advice in learning from the past and from his construct of limiting
trade to certain chosen activities.59
The exponents of commercial freedom develop their ideas in the context
of food scarcity and targeting the ineffective Corn Laws—trade restric-
tions designed to keep prices high to favour domestic producers (by British
mercantilists). The initial ideas of self-regulative markets were meant to
protect the public against scarcity, as commercial freedom advocates
thought free commerce could prevent famine. Rothschild suggested that
“self-interest and competition,” “institutions and corporations,” the
“market,” and the “state” meant different things in the 18th century than
in the 20th century.60 According to Rothschild, the efforts of the 18th cen-
tury thinkers were misinterpreted later “as a simple prescription that com-
merce is good and government bad.”61 The market was not simply an
instrument for trade; the elites utilized it to weaken the role of govern-
ment. In the progress and improvement proposal of laissez-faire advo-
cates, the markets gradually became an excuse to exempt elites and
government from their responsibilities. According to Williams, “Queen
Victoria once sent a message to two African chiefs” indicating that “‘Eng-
land has become great and happy by the knowledge of the true God and
Jesus Christ. To the Manchester Capitalists, ‘Jesus Christ was Free Trade,
and Free trade was Jesus Christ’.”62 The Manchester capitalists were man-
ufacturing elites who propagated their labour market policies as causes for
social improvement. The commercial capitalism of the 18th century, built
on slavery and trade monopoly, “helped to create the industrial capital of
the 19th century, which turned around and destroyed the power of com-
mercial capitalism, slavery and all its works.”63 Williams clarified that the
capitalists’ interest was on the side of the colonial empire. By reliance on
utilitarianism, they also advanced market mentality to govern the lives of
the working class.
4.3 Market reformed morality

According to John Maynard Keynes, laissez-faire philosophy first appeared
in the response given to the French economic minister, Jean-Baptiste Col-
bert (1619–1683) by French aristocrats when asked how the mercantilist
government could support them. Keynes noted that the phrase found its
full support in the political philosophy of Jeremy Bentham.64 Bentham had
read Smith’s texts reworking the English ancien régime. Smith’s arguments
for self-interest and free trade gained a new momentum under the laissez-
faire “dogma” that “got hold of the education machine.”65 According to
Kanth, laissez-faire advocates “find Benthamite utilitarianism a better

guide to the functions of the state” than Smith’s “obvious and simple sys-
tem of natural liberty” that welcomed justice.66 Although Smith explained
“a society in which every human is in some measure a merchant,” he did
not foresee that the “science of the legislator” and “science of jurispru-
dence” would one day serve as a science for limitations on the “political
vision of society.”67 The new laws of market providence held by laissez-
faire advocates were to determine how social progress takes its course.
While Quesnay and Smith articulated the intellectual underpinnings for
the market, it was in the disputes of the Poor Law Reform that their views
were creatively altered. From 1795 to 1834, regulations were introduced
for the sake of abandoning the laws of Tudor legislation, relieving poverty
by government and ecclesiastical action, instituted since the late 15th cen-
tury. This desertion of the poor relief laws began by the Speenhamland
system, as an aid-in-wages for employees, which relied on public means to
mitigate rural poverty brought by the mechanization of agricultural la-
bour. Speenhamland was proposed as an amendment to the Elizabethan
Poor Relief Act of 1601 which instituted taxation of the wealthier citizens
to provide basic shelter, food, and clothing to those physically incapable to
work. According to Polanyi, “Speenhamland was an automaton for de-
molishing the standards on which any kind of society could be based … it
put a premium on the shirking of work and the pretense of inadequacy”
and “increased the attraction of pauperism precisely at the juncture when
a man was straining to escape the fate of the destitute.”68 The Reform Bill
of 1832 and the Poor Law Amendment of 1834 abolished the Speenham-
land system. The industrial revolution dehumanized the poor and inserted
them within the machinery of the material production. According to
Poovey, pauperism—a moral designation—came to be distinguished from
poverty, an economic category.69 The new sentiment was that of willing
self-renunciation for subsistence. The natural liberty arguments began to
be misconstrued so that the industrial elites are supplied with labourers.
The free circulation of labour supply went hand in hand with the train-
ing and policing of the public. As Kanth observed: “the old Poor Law was
not so much in violation of ‘natural law’…, as it was an impediment to
social expediency on the classical road to social improvement and material
advancement.”70 The elites’ claimed that economics as a science can im-
prove the conditions of the poor. This claim scandalized the parish origins
of the Poor Laws. After abolishing the Poor Laws, the poor were no longer
poor. According to Polanyi, they were a “working class, whose immediate
self-interest destined them to become the protectors of society.”71 The new
society that emerged in the 19th century “was subjected to laws which
were not human laws.”72 Human laws become subservient to the market
laws. The economic elites nurtured the predatory logics of markets by
euphemism for social progress. The gradual transition from Elizabethan

Poor Laws represented an instrument for popular demoralization and de-
humanization. At the same time the capitalists relied on the presumptive
power of the market to claim agency, freedom, and autonomy on behalf of
the poor. Natural self-regulatory principles of the physiocrats were reinter-
preted to claim that markets can look after putting the poor to work.
Those with authority conveyed to the working class that there is no sur-
vival outside of the market. To rationalize the neutralization of their moral
values, early proponents of political economy resorted to a scientific objec-
tive approach in scrutinizing laws that aimed at human preservation.
Despite their many disagreements, Thomas Robert Malthus and David
Ricardo, thought society could only be harnessed by the extension of mar-
kets into the management of human affairs. They agreed on abolishing the
Poor Laws and establishing a science for economic growth. They adhered
to Mandeville’s rejection of supporting the poor, while judging Mandev-
ille’s system was distinct from their science.73 They each utilized an objec-
tive approach to the government of the working class. For example,
Malthus applied a market analysis in thinking that as population rises, the
supply of labour rises and its cost falls. This requires labourers to work
harder which subsequently discourages marriage, making corrections to
the population increase. He recognized the Poor Laws were instituted for
the most benevolent purposes; however, Malthus, a clergyman by training,
reassured his interlocutors that the market is more benevolent:
The fear of the Lord is very justly said to be the beginning of wisdom;
but the end of wisdom is the love of the Lord, and the admiration of
moral good. The denunciation of future punishment, contained [in] the
scriptures, seems to be well calculated to arrest the progress of [the] vi-
cious, and awaken the attention of the careless; but we see, from re-
peated experience, that they are not accompanied with evidence of such
a nature, as to overpower the human will, and to make men lead virtu-
ous lives with vicious dispositions, merely from a dread of hereafter.74
Malthus was cognizant that he was departing from a long tradition that
went back to the Gospels. At the same time, he implied that scientific utili-
tarianism upgrades and supplements theology. Whether from God or man,
the new laws were “calculated” to serve the purpose of the creator. These
laws evidently justified the decisions not to preserve human life. Abolishing
the state’s intervention in the livelihoods of the poor would allow the mar-
kets to do what they do: look after life and death.
In the next editions of the Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus
suggested that education offered social improvement in place of the Poor
Laws. However, he maintained his position in the first edition where he had
outlined an economic approach to population. Against the growing senti-

ments of his contemporaries’ utilitarian defence of secular education, Mal-
thus wanted the Church to remain in charge of schooling.75 During this
time, the elites began to explore the implications of education for lowering
crime and avoiding revolt as well as for improving the conditions of the
poor by reinforcing strong work habits. Committed to religious virtues,
Malthus wanted to teach the poor about patience and frugality. Not only
did education function for self-management but Malthus also thought it
had civil and political purposes: “its obvious tendency to teach the lower
classes of society to respect themselves, by obliging the higher classes to re-
spect them.”76 Malthus’ arguments for universal education accompanied his
recognition of civil liberty and respect in society; however, he shared with
his aristocratic contemporaries a calculative approach to social progress.
“Malthus’ law of population,” and the “idea of a law of struggle
throughout living nature,” Robert Young informs us, impressed Darwin,
“and provided a convenient mechanism for a natural analogue to the
changes which he was studying in the selection of domesticated variet-
ies.”77 Young was drawing from Darwin’s notebooks and letters written
from 1838–1858 in which Darwin confessed his intellectual debt to Mal-
thus for the theory of natural selection. Darwin interpreted Malthusian
“concept of struggle” in two ways: first in relation “to the competition
between different individuals of the same species” to survive and repro-
duce and, second, in reference to the struggle of “species against the envi-
ronment.”78 While Malthus provided a logic of struggle to secularize
government, Darwin’s idea of a law of struggle naturalized the discourse of
competitive individualism. Malthus indicated that unless “compelled by
necessity” humans “sluggish and averse to labour”79 may never seek prog-
ress. Markets were gaining force as mechanisms that facilitated struggle
and competition as means for social and economic progress.
For Malthus, the poor’s motivation to labour and improve their moral
and social condition went hand in hand. However, Ricardo’s technical ap-
proach only concerned the economics of wealth. He reworked Smith’s gen-
eral thesis of self-interest by according centrality to the motivation of the
rich to maximize profit from exchanging goods that included labour as a
commodity.80 Ricardo also “consider[ed] money as invariable in value,”
allowing for “relative variation in the value of other things,” including
“the different quantities of labour required to produce them, and their be-
ing altered by a variation in the value of money itself.”81 Adam Smith’s
conception of labour as the measure of value had diverged from Locke’s
conception of labour as a property. Ricardo, Polanyi points out, “com-
pleted what Locke and Smith had begun, the humanization of economic
value; what the Physiocrats had credited to Nature, Ricardo reclaimed for
man.”82 Ricardo’s emphasis on the distinction between employment of
labour and employment of capital worked towards producing a theory of

value that secured profit for those who held capital. They were in charge
to direct human society by employing labour and capital.83
An advocate for abolishing the Poor Laws, Ricardo understood that
technological improvements increase profit for the capitalists but not for
the wage labourers. Indeed, he acknowledged, “that the substitution of
machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the interest of the
class of labourers.”84 Characterizing the survival of the working popula-
tion as an “interest” demonstrates his lack of empathy and ethics. Ricardo
reasoned that if technology increases efficiency and profit for the capital-
ists, it should also increase the net revenue of the nation; that, by itself, is
a sufficient reason for its development. Machinery was not solely for the
sake of producing certain goods; for Ricardo and his followers who
claimed society is a machine, technology secured a profitable future. At
times contested, these views coincided with the growing role of science for
social welfare but also control. As health and education became institu-
tionalized, “scientific method” also “authorize[d] certain people to inter-
fere in the interior lives of the poor.”85 The disinterested scientific approach
had social and cultural significance beyond purely economic formulations
of the body politic. As anatomical and mechanical metaphors for manag-
ing society overlapped, they produce a contradiction in understanding na-
ture. On the one hand, mastery and exploitation of nature for the increase
of wealth was found problematic. On the other hand, the utilization of
natural resources and humans were unavoidable for social progress.86 No
contradiction discouraged Ricardo.
The “value system” of Ricardo, according to McMurty, “instructs peo-
ple to see their preferences as ‘rational’ and proclaims the value ground’s
unlimited expression as ‘liberty’”87 And markets gave the pretence that
liberty is reducible to preferences and economic choices. In market liberty,
those who own capital employ those who do not. The latter are made will-
ing to sell themselves as property. Ricardo’s use of physical laws of produc-
tion offered a systematic alteration of Smith and Quesnay’s conceptions of
the market. Ricardo, McMurty noted, set in motion the “market theol-
ogy,” facilitating the trust put on the market as an administrator of reward
and punishment that once referenced the invisible hand of God.88 Ricardo
reconstructed the religious underpinnings by positive analysis of wealth,
based on facts devoid of moral content. According to Klaver, it was Ri-
cardo who provided “a secular alternative to divine law and a bourgeoisie
version of ‘virtue’ that places capitalist economic organization at the center
of reassuring narrative of human development and progress.” In Ricardo’s
decontextualized approach, economic processes become a “natural law
unto themselves.”89 Hollander praised Ricardo not for his contribution to
economic theory but for his method that “established the title of economic
inquiry to the rank of positive science.”90 Hollander admitted that “his

data may have been inadequate, his method in part defective, and his con-
clusions sometimes misleading,” but Ricardo was essential in “converting
economic speculation to an organically related body of general princi-
ples.”91 Thus, pseudoscience informed the general principles of the eco-
nomic conceptions. Although almost all of Ricardo’s propositions were
disputed by the 1870s, his lasting impact was felt in the adaptation of his
outlook for economic growth. Ricardo’ authority had established “the fear
that in rejecting Ricardo entirely the case for free trade might be jeopar-
dized.”92 Mark Blaug concludes by acknowledging that Ricardo’s influence
has stood the test of time; Ricardo guided, for example, William Stanley
Jevons—the father of neo-classical economics—and supported mathemati-
cal approaches that made utility quantifiable. Ricardo’s treatment of hu-
man life as a mean for economic ends had been informed by Bentham.
For both Ricardo and Bentham, James Bonar explains, “political indi-
vidualism was part and parcel of economic principles… and, when Ben-
tham made self-interest a leading principle of politics, Ricardo, to follow
him, needed only to make clear to himself the underlying political basis of
his economic ideas.”93 Economic fictions reformulated political individual-
ism: the market acts as a natural lawgiver of prices, wages, and profits. In
this context, the interest in popular education was directed by desires to
train people in competitive individualism and to advance laissez-faire on a
large scale. Stark points out that “Bentham and Ricardo shared belief that
[the hu]man is essentially a selfish animal” and it is “useless” and “unnec-
essary to fight that selfishness.”94 They envisaged “personal and public
welfare is perculated by the admirable mechanism of modern market rela-
tions.” Stark continues, “Ricardo clothed these doctrines into the stern
forms of economic theory; Bentham developed their implication in a host
of philosophical, psychological, jurisprudential, educational, and political
writing. [While] Ricardo was a Benthamite, Bentham was not exclusively
a Ricardian.”95 Perceiving humans as selfish animals strengthened and nor-
malized the laissez-faire doctrine. Bentham’s conception of humans as
“pleasure-seeking and pain-fleeing animals”96 inevitably justified humans
to treat their own kind as they treat animals—a resource.
Bentham’s approach to political economy as a “science” of improving
society informed public opinion. For example, a popular educational text,
Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy brought the thoughts
of the early economists to households. The book presents a dialogue be-
tween two women discussing the major themes of economics while citing
passages from Smith, Malthus, Say, Bentham, and others as authorities.
Among the major themes are capital and labour. While capital is equipped
with agency and power, labour is dependent on capital, machinery, and
industry. Mrs. B. teaches Caroline:
It may appear paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that whatever

abridges and facilitates labour will eventually increase the demand of
labourers… [italics in original]. Caroline: Or, in other words, to turn
people out of work is the most certain means of procuring them em-
ployment! This is precisely the objection I was making to the introduc-
tion of new machinery.97
Caroline feared that all resources—which included the labour of the

working class—would become exhausted because technological develop-
ment promotes long-term consumption but not employment. Mrs. B. re-
sponded: “No, that cannot be the case, where there is capital the poor
will always find employment.”98 Capital had found a faceless identity:
ensuring that the poor would work. The capitalist who employs the new
machine “is the immediate gainer,” Mrs. B. transparently claimed, and
the “working classes” have something to gain from the “abridge of man-
ual labour” and that is “the cheapness of the goods.”99 The working class
became consumers of what they produced but from which they did not
profit.
Caroline was pressed to believe the new science and had to understand
for herself that the civilized economy differed from primate economies. In
the so-called civilized economy, those without wealth must be schooled
and believe that efficiency in using and exploiting life is what brings social
progress. The use and accumulation of capital dictates the survival of the
fittest. The definition of “capital” given is “any accumulated produce
which tends to facilitate future productions.”100 The book’s transparent
educational aim was to convey that the interest of the working classes is
labour and the interest of the capitalists is the accumulation and employ-
ment of capital. Mrs. B. claimed economics is a form of “knowledge” the
“general diffusion” of which “excites greater attention in the lower classes
to their future interests,” and Caroline asked, “you would not teach politi-
cal economy to the labour classes, Mrs. B.”101 Mrs. B. answered: “No; but
I would endeavour to give the rising generation such an education as would
render them not only moral and religious, but industrious, frugal and
provident.”102 This new mentality, merging the old and new providence
discourses, depended on printing presses. Before the Education Act of
1870 created a new demand for the publishing industry, the propagation
of political economy through print had begun and narrowed the gap be-
tween moral values of capitalism and Christianity. Capitalists’ orientation
to material progress relied on religious ideas for changing social senti-
ments. And the growth of literacy in the working class was expected to
strengthen faith, capitalism, and nationalism.103 The reliance on market as
a system of social organization took form along the lines of divided classes
as the British Empire revised rights and liberty.
4.4 Revising liberty: Bentham’s society

Bentham’ idea for panopticon management of public institutions was bor-
rowed from a small factory in Russia during his visit in 1787. The factory
was operated with no machines but humans who worked as if they were
machines. For the remaining of his life, Bentham stood in admiration of
the model of architecture that had located an inspector where he had the
“power to commence and conclude a survey of the whole establishment”104
without the workers knowing whether they are being observed. This de-
sign was, he thought, universally applicable. Bentham wrote: “Note,—that
it was for persons of the unoffending class,” the working people, “that this
new plan of architecture was originally draft[ed].”105 It increased the eco-
nomic value of each child:
[T]he pecuniary value of a child at its birth – that value which at present
is not merely equal 0, but equal to an oppressively large negative quan-
tity, would under that system of maintenance and education which I
had prepared for it, have been a positive quantity to no inconsiderable
amount.106
The prospect of monetary profit from human life took hold of morality.
The panopticon ensured not only self-conduct but also accountability es-
tablished by principles of universal and constant inspectability. Božovič
points out that: “Bentham creates the fiction of God in the panopticon” by
the pragmatics of “a gaze and a voice that cannot be pinned down to any
particular bearer.”107 Bentham claimed that “the panopticon is a living
entity, ‘an artificial body’, which is kept alive by the inspector with his gaze
and his voice”; this artificial body was inseparable from the plan to build
“out of bricks, iron, glass” divine like attributes.108 Bentham referred to
panopticon as an “engine” by which: “Morals reformed – health preserved
– industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burthens lightened –
economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the guardian knot of the Poor-
Laws are not cut, but united – all by a simple idea in Architecture! [sic].”109
Against the background of the Poor Laws controversies, Bentham’s idea
aimed at cultural reforms by which human beings become frugally g overned
and useful.
The calculative approach to maximize pleasure by administering and
managing pain gave utilitarian doctrine a new force. In reference to Ben-
tham’s defence of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” Parekh
detected an ambivalence in Bentham’s oeuvre, noting that “the phrase ex-
cluded the happiness of the rich and privileged few, and therefore implied
political radicalism to which he [Bentham] was unsympathetic for a long
time.”110 Political radicalism did articulate a progressive liberal ideology
towards the common people. This radicalism had been generated by the
French Revolution. It had opened doors for Bentham’s employment of
“economic methodology” to “representative institutions… grounded on
hedonistic standards.”111 Bentham believed an accurate economy of incen-
tives would enforce the reign of economic enterprise, help the penal system
in dealing with crime, and act on God’s behalf to secure the greatest hap-
piness of all living things. “Radicalism,” Bowler clarifies, “reform of exist-
ing institutions to get rid of the straight jacket imposed by the legacy of the
aristocratic rule, thus freeing society to allow maximum exploitation of its
economic potential.”112 According to Bowler, utilitarianism and laissez-
faire economics underpinned political radicalism and “the belief that indi-
viduals left to themselves will” provide the “most effective social and
economic order” sustaining a link “with the deist tradition in which the
Creator’s laws ensure the balance of nature.”113 Bentham’s focus on calcu-
lating utility, in his arguments for the greatest happiness of the greatest
number, concerned “all social habits” and was paralleled to “the natural
theology” that “influenced Darwin in his youth.”114
Before Bentham, the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest num-
ber” appeared in Cesare Beccaria’s (1738–1794) On Crime and Punish-
ment, a book that had changed the administration of criminal justice.115
Beccaria’s influence went beyond crime and punishment. Schumpeter noted
that Beccaria had educated the Enlightenment thinkers about “utility and
scarcity.”116 His arguments “for more humane punishments,” expanded
into the realm of institutions in service to “a more effective, efficient and
persuasive form of social control,” combining the two domains of policing
and economy, rendering them “seamless and continuous.”117 For example,
in his text on political economy Bentham had explained that “if idleness
[is] to be discouraged, it is not because it is the non-acquisition of wealth,
but because it is the source of crime.”118 For Bentham the science of wealth
moves towards incorporation of pain and pleasure principles and utilizes
these principles for economic development. Bentham acknowledged his
debt to Beccaria for orienting him to economic applications of pain and
pleasure.119 In a society where the powerful and powerless live differently,
pain and pleasure were mediated and measured (and continue to be) ac-
cording to the economic status. Bentham defined the instrument of plea-
sure as “anything that goes under the name of a possession: whether that
possession be a real or fictitious entity” and concluded that “[m]oney
therefore is the only current possession, the only current instrument of
pleasure.”120 Possessions and money are rendered as instruments to gov-
ern: “As pleasure is given by giving money, so is pain by taking it away.”121
While Bentham’s contemporaries applied money to relationships of supply
and demand, Bentham found a utility in money beyond the market and
into the governance of bodies. His moral compass was reduced to “valuing
every thing in money.”122 By limiting government’s role in economic af-

fairs, Bentham’s model of jurisprudence left a door open for those in pos-
session of money to profit from the use of others. Children were no
exception.
Children of the poor were taken from their families and placed in the
school of industry (receiving allowances for maintaining the child) and/or
placed into new families as an apprentice or servant. Bentham found this
separation of children from their caretakers and parents justified by “the
utility of the legal subordination”; he considered the arrangement “a
source of instruction” that played an “important function” (e.g., instilling
“good behaviour”) for public benefit. Bentham rationalized by writing:
“He, who takes the apprentice with and for money, may have employment
for the money without having any for the apprentice.”123 Neither the chil-
dren nor their parents deserved money—they must be grateful that they
were saved by Bentham’s principles from being left to themselves. This was
not, presumably, a “forced system of casts” but “a system of equal and
unexpansive liberty.”124 Apparently, the liberty of the poor had to also
bring money to the wealthy. Bentham’s model of liberty went hand in hand
with legal subjection justified by calculations of utility. The duration of
apprenticeship of the young depended on profitability. By the early de-
cades of the 20th century, Bentham’s industrial schools were recognized as
prisons. Subsequent shifts in the mistreatment of children were not gov-
erned by valuing the principle of money but by recognizing humanity and
human rights.
The French Constitution of the Rights of Man and the Citizen decreed
that all humans have a right to liberty, property, security, and resistance to
oppression. “Liberty” for Bentham was “conceived of not as an expression
of a dynamic self,” Long noted, “but as subjection to the hedonistic dic-
tates of sensory organism in a world of potentially dangerous ‘inanimate
or irrational bodies.’”125 Bentham’s liberty was restructured by self-defence.
He relied neither on the Aristotelian conception of humans as political by
nature nor on the theological natural right. For Bentham “a natural right
was a contradiction in terms” and “he preferred the word ‘security’ to the
word ‘liberty’, so he thought… the term ‘right’ in its political sense should
be replaced by the term ‘securities against misrule.’”126 According to
Dewey, for Bentham “‘right’ is nothing but a round-about means for the
hedonistic end of private satisfaction.”127 Bentham’s reconceiving of the
sovereign masters as pain and pleasure at once retained liberty and sub-
jected it to obedience. Bentham found obedience as a precondition for the
happiness he promoted. And security was the rationale by which authori-
ties instituted obedience. As Bentham became gradually sympathetic to
democratic thinking, obedience became the interest of the subjects. The
gap between democracy and totalitarianism started to close as increasing
security and happiness meant increasing control and surveillance. Obedi-

ence is internalized and expressed by looking after one’s interest. Bentham
“speculate[d] that people must have originally obeyed their sovereign be-
cause of their fear,” Parekh explained, but “the advantages of civil society
would have led them to continue their obedience and so converted it into
a habit and later into a disposition.”128 Bentham’s commitment to utility
translated into the internalization of obedience as part of one’s civil dispo-
sition. However, Bentham would never have advocated subordination to
tax-dodging elites and transnational corporations.129 His advocacy of a
system of taxation rewarded obedience through legislative power that po-
sitioned government, not a few technocrats, as the authority in matters of
civility.
According to Parekh, for Bentham “political life can be fully explained
only in terms of man’s desire for pleasure and aversion to pain.”130 Ben-
tham’s hedonism tied individuals to calculations that constrained existence
to a never-ending search to maximize happiness. “What is happiness? It is
the possession of pleasure with the exemption from pain. It is in propor-
tion to the aggregate of pleasures enjoyed, and of pains averted.”131 Ben-
tham failed to specify the judge of this happiness. He continued to define
virtue as “that which maximizes pleasures and minimizes pain,” and vice
as, “that which lessens happiness, or contributes to unhappiness.”132 What
was vice?
Vice may be defined to be a miscalculation of chances: a mistake in esti-

mating the value of pleasure and pain. It is false moral arithmetic; and
there is the consolation of knowing that, by the application of a right
standard, there are few moral questions, which may not be resolved,
with an accuracy and a certainty not far removed from mathematical
demonstration.133
Moral questions were to be trusted to mathematical demonstrations. If

vice is a miscalculation of chance than what gains prominence is the very
process of reducing chance. For Bentham morality can become efficient if
accurate calculations take hold of human problems. Meanwhile, Bentham
acknowledged the impossibility of detaching ourselves from our self-inter-
ests; nor can we sidestep those pleasures and pains we experience when we
dedicate ourselves to social welfare. Bentham’s moral arithmetic echoed
the numerical approach of William Petty’s political arithmetic. Together
they demonstrate an intensification of a numerical approach to human life
and pave the way to the age of surveillance capitalism.
The enjoyment and suffering produced conduct and their accurate calcu-
lation keeps humans in check. In this circular logic, Bentham made a sys-
tematic assault on virtue ethics. Bentham and those who followed him
reduced matters of welfare and morality to calculations by reliance on

their science. What they advanced was not an ideology nor science but
vanity, indicative of a distorted mind that sought to reconcile self-interest
and benevolence: “Bentham says of himself, in one of his latest Memo-
randa—‘I am a selfish man, as selfish as any man can be. But in me, some-
how or other, so it happens, selfishness has taken the shape of
benevolence.’”134 The self-flattering Bentham called himself a “man” as he
treated other humans as animals; even so, the next chapter demonstrates,
he became an influential idol for economists, policymakers, and psycholo-
gists of the 20th century.
4.5 Bentham and education

To secure a promising future, Bentham thought “increase in the quantity
of useful knowledge possessed by the middle classes” will manifest “prob-
able results” of “improvement in respect of health, domestic economy and
personal comfort.”135 Improvement in the conditions of the lower and
middle classes was thought to bring proportionate improvement to the
conditions of their superiors. Schools became associated with the pro-
grammes of social and economic improvement. The monitorial schools of
Andrew Bell (1753–1832) and Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) not only
saved money and time but they also realigned the charity schools of the
18th century with the values of an industrial society. While Bell’s schools
affirmed the role of religion, it was Lancaster who advanced that “moral-
ization of the poor be based on nonsectarian religious principles.”136 Lan-
caster’s ideas resonated with Bentham’s manufacturing of ambitions in
accord with market revolution. According to David Hogan, Lancaster’s
Improvement in Education inspired Bentham to write his own text detail-
ing the content and administration of schools. In Chrestomathia, meaning
conducive to useful learning, Bentham argued that his “panopticon prin-
ciples” improved the monitorial system by “minimizing the distance be-
tween the situation of the remotest scholar and that of the master’s eye.”137
He clarified the value of panopticon: it “prevents remoter objects from
being eclipsed by nearer ones; partly by enabling the Master to see without
being seen.”138 The aims of surveillance in Bentham’s schools were not to
teach but to inform human identity. “Chrestomathic precepts” posed that
if children could “be sufficiently filled with information, they would be
more likely to make the more advantageous choices between pain and
pleasure, indolence and work, crime, and honesty, and so on.”139 Bentham
insisted that school money is to be used towards administrating useful in-
struction and that excluded religion. However, schools ought to have no
instruction repugnant to religion in general and to “Christian Religion in
particular.”140 Bentham’s rhetoric did serve the purpose of minimizing the
differences between the two dominating monitorial systems—Bell and

Lancaster’s—by “stressing that the school provide a system of ‘social co-
operation’” since “school coaxed student[s] with varying disposition[s]
into unified patterns of action” and “coordinated trajectories for individ-
ual advancement while simultaneously avoiding ‘controverted points of
Divinity.’”141 Bentham’s educational schemes were connected to his ad-
vancement of utilitarianism and his insistence for the reorganization of
institutions by pain and pleasure principles.
The dominating doctrines for education defended by the wealth-based
society of England would travel to the United States and Canada but these
were Lancaster’s views before incorporating Bentham’s view. Lancaster ar-
gued that the “hope” for “reward sweetens labour”; and “[t]he very na-
ture of expectation,” and “the prospect of something to be attained in
future” was “to operate as a wire-drawing machine to human industry.”142
A factory model of education was in play long before public schools came
into existence. The probable prospect of the future returns, however, were
not defined narrowly in terms of economic outputs. Lancaster influenced
the formation of a national system in which the models of monitorial sys-
tem were structured by metaphors familiar to those who took responsibil-
ity for the economy and society.143 Lancaster’s schools gained full force in
the early decades of the 20th century when the very conception of teacher
as a machine dispensing rewards and punishment was promoted by the
behaviourists.144 The incorporation of Lancaster’s ideas in North American
schools meant that teachers were conceived as part of the “‘technology’ of
the school classroom,” as part of “the promotable package of ideas that
would allow the school be visibly successful to policy makers and other
stakeholders.”145 In wanting schools to become systematized, Lancaster
prioritized the design of its daily activities, stressing their economic contri-
bution to the country in making children useful.
Lancaster’s ideas received an upgrade from Bentham’s utility-based
schools. Bentham’s principles of pain and pleasure directed schooling as a
means for economic self-government and crime reduction. Bentham com-
bined the concerns for learning with concerns for the applications of con-
trol and explained both in terms of maximizing happiness in the future.
The act of learning becomes subject to reward and punishment. And the
value of learning was judged by its utility. “Panoptic classrooms began
with a random order,” Ferguson explains, they aimed to provide a rational
order that converted the arbitrariness of numbering into a series of state-
ments of the relative value of each individual in the group.”146 According
to Ferguson, Bentham’s schools introduced practices that made social rec-
ognition itself (praise and blame, precedence and neglect) central to peda-
gogy and “employed a game model of examination designed to confer a
number on everyone” to subject individuals, undergoing exams, to an
artificial order.147 In noting that “learning for learning’s sake” was replaced
by usefulness of what was learned, Ferguson stressed that “Benthamite
utilitarianism was committed to identifying who was good, who was bet-
ter, and who was best at various specific and comparatively small activi-
ties” and for this it often relied on “a model of public examination.”148
Such a model enabled individuals to rank themselves in relation to “a per-
ceptible and justifiable hierarchy.”149 This ordering was the source of a
social structure wherein persons became motivated to seek self-improve-
ments and engage in self-analysis as such self-conduct became rationalized
as an expression of liberty. The frugal self-management carried an air of
economism.
Bentham was conscious that monopolies on power impede commerce
and politics. However, as Guidi noted, Bentham’s emphasis on “market
competition” and his “economic analysis of representation,” carried “a
distinctive libertarian flavour.”150 Bentham was not alone in his convic-
tions; he wrote in a culture of libertarianism and paternalism. His contem-
porary, Marquis de Sade, too thought of the human body to be under the
supervision of the two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure; he, too, found
human beings to be rational maximizers of their own happiness. He relied
on pain and pleasure to teach his subjects that their bodies were mere ves-
sels. And in a similar manner to Bentham, Sade’s materialistic atheism had
excluded “any need for God’s existence” to rationalize worldly rites and
rituals and nurtured “an unlimited rational exploitation” of the disadvan-
taged groups.151 In fiction and practice, Klossowski noted that Sade ex-
posed the bourgeoisie mentality. Despite universal rights, Sade acted on
the “belief that his superior social position gives him special rights. Chief
among these rights [was] his right to revise the notion of what [hu]man is,”
based on “an experimental right.”152 Sade may help us understand the
early 19th century reconstruction of freedom by hedonistic utilitarianism.
He showed that the maximization of pleasure cannot be devoid of self-
interest and often involves inflicting pain on others. His targets were the
vulnerable members of his society: women and children. His fictions dem-
onstrate how preoccupation with pleasure results in demolishing moral,
judicial, and theological conventions; Sade’s morality, however, was not as
advanced as Bentham’s, for he stopped short in transmitting what he prac-
ticed to social and institutional conditions.
“Sadean pornography joins Benthamite consequentialism and a host of
class-forming practices in eighteenth-century civil society to make action
more visible in relation to other people than in relation to individual inten-
tion,” Ferguson points out, as the two shared a philosophy “of action in
which morality is extremely imperfectly assimilable to rule of conduct,
codes of behaviour that may be taught.”153 Bentham and Sade both posi-
tioned economic principles above the law and reduced the body to be a
substitute for money.154 For both, the human body becomes an object, an
instrument for consumption, and a commodity manipulated by the sover-
eign masters, pain and pleasure. Bentham and Sade both recommended
reforming moral values, so the economically privileged group, in their own
terms, can command those in need of care and compassion.
Bentham’s consequentialism accepts Sade’s philosophy and morality to-
wards childhood by imposing an economic approach to their education.
The utilitarian calculus of Bentham and his likeminded economists justi-
fied child labour from age five by relying on the greater happiness of the
greatest number principle. Here is one expression of his differentiated but
personalized happiness:
Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines: so they were
but happy ones, I should not care. …whoever sets up and inspection-
school upon the tiptop of the principle [of the panopticon], had need to
be very sure of the master; for the boy’s body is not more the child of his
father’s, than his mind will be of the master’s mind; with no difference
than what there is between command on one side and subjection on the
other. Some of these queries which I have been treating you, and finer
still, Rousseau would have entertained us with; nor do I imagine he
would have put his Emilius into an inspection-house; but I think he
would have been glad of such a school for his Sophia.155
Sophia was thought to be by nature modest, attentive, and reserved and

her education was centred on patience, gentleness, zeal, and affection nec-
essary for maintaining the family.156 The economic reasoning of Bentham’s
time implied that the “[w]eak men should be treated as women.”157 And
Bentham’s happiness was socially engineered for this treatment. He did not
care whether the humans were soldiers, monks, or machines: the “boy’s
body” and mind are under command. His happiness is a fiction to be writ-
ten by experimentalist masters. Bentham’s treatment towards childhood
systematized inspection and experimentation. His libertine attitude pene-
trated the will and body from an early age.
Bentham’s logic of maximizing greatest happiness is partially distinct
from Sade in its reliance on contractual and legal rhetoric. Bentham
thought “no consensual mode of sexual gratification should be con-
demned” if it was conceived to maximize the “greatest happiness of the
community.”158 How would children fare? Writing of the relationship of a
pupil and teacher, Bentham reasoned:
Deriving from his intercourse with his pupil, in addition to whatever

may be his remuneration in the ordinary form, the preceptor, finding in
the exercise of this his function pleasure in a sort and degree never in the
present state of things experienced, may apply himself to it with a de-

gree of zeal and assiduity correspondently increased [sic]. The pupil on
his part, experiencing, instead of that moroseness and haughtiness
which, from that commending situation, is at present so frequently met
with, a degree of attention and kindness so extraordinary, may find a
pleasure in an occupation which otherwise would have been a painful
and laborious one.159
Bentham found sexual relationship was justified to increase improvement

in the pupils. Self-limitation of sexual expression is not based on moral or
religious obligation but on calculation of its cost. It is unclear whether
Bentham justified reward and punishment in order to obtain consent from
the young. It is clear, however, that Bentham asked all parties to suspend
consideration of sympathy and focus on utility maximization. The legal
and scientific measures revised certain rights to meet certain interests. Ben-
tham’s novelty was in articulating a universal conception of the selfish in-
dividual whose intention and life is manipulated by actions of even more
selfish others.160 Bentham, the jurist, promoted experimentation with poor
children from the moment of birth “to make of” children what the master
pleases.161 His thoughts travelled to the United States and were adopted by
jurists and economists who defended treating children as a form of capital.
I begin the next chapter with Richard Posner and Gary S. Becker’s defence
of Bentham’s philosophy.
4.6 Behavioural technology
The marriage of hedonistic utilitarianism to laissez-faire economics was not
an accident. Both opposed egalitarianism. Today, those who observe, direct,
and examine the modes of co-operation and competition rely on the logic of
the market to legitimize their manipulations of human capital by managing
information and misinformation. The messages from the unseen continue to
be communicated not from an omnipresent God but an omnipresent market
and the technologies that help it to surveil.162 Uncritical acceptance of the
self-governing power of the markets created the neo-liberalism of our era.
Bentham’s promulgation of the principle of utility as the standard for right
action continues to inform public and private policies whereby the right ac-
tion is decided by monetary cost–benefit calculations.
When Edward Thorndike argued for the primacy of measurement in
education the thoughts of his utilitarian predecessors had become main-
stream. Thorndike characterized “education as a business” dedicated to
the “production and prevention of changes in human beings” the products
of which not only concerned employability skills but also “refinements of
taste, ideals of honor, service, and truth.”163 Thorndike was not alone; he
was an influential theorist expressing a culture that reimagined control and

efficiency as indispensable elements of human development. Behaviourism
and social utilitarianism distracted from Jane Addams’ and John Dewey’s
school curriculum dedicated to community and democratic life. According
to Cremin, the intensifying influence of social utilitarianism and scientific
measurement in education was gradual; it gained full momentum only af-
ter the Second World War.164 In the next chapter, I show that utilitarianism
became internalized in the disciplines of psychology and economics.
Notes
1 Bernard Russell, Icarus; or the Future of Science (London: K. Paul, Trench,
Trubner & Co., 1924), 8.
2 Ibid., 9.
3 Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 96.
4 John McMurty, Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System
(Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998), 76. According to McMurty, it was the
gradual force of market theory that gave realization to human labour as a
commodity and instituted wage-slaves who privately own their labour power
but are left at the mercy of the market doctrine of supply and demand (p. 95).
5 Bernard Russell, Icarus; or the Future of Science, 9.
6 Ibid. 38, 40.
[I]n time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility,
so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized. Epileptics, consumptives, dipso-
maniacs and so on will gradually be included; in the end, there will be a
tendency to include all who fail to pass the usual school examinations.
(p. 49)
7 Michael Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, 108–10. “For Smith this blind upward
spiral of needs delivers men from natural scarcity, and on this ground alone
enlarges human freedom. For Rousseau, the spiral of needs is a tragedy of
alienations” (p. 110).
8 Jeffrey Lomonaco, “Adam Smith's ‘Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh
Review’,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (2002): 659–76.
9 Jimena P. Hurtado, “Bernard Mandeville's Heir: Adam Smith or Jean Jacques
Rousseau on the Possibility of Economic Analysis,” The European Journal of
the History of Economic Thought 11, no.1 (2006): 3. Acknowledging the
similarities between Mandeville and Rousseau, Hurtado noted that, their
treatment of pity differed: “Rousseau believes pity is an original feeling in hu-
man nature and considers it to be the source of all virtues. Mandeville accepts
the existence of pity but seems to believe that every virtue is nothing but van-
ity disguised” (p. 3).
10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract”, in The Major Political
Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. John T. Scott (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012), 178.
11 Jimena P. Hurtado, “Citizens, Markets and Social Order,” in Adam Smith and
Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics, ed. by Maria Pia Paganelli, Dennis C.
Rasmussen and Craig Smith (Edinburgh, Scotland Edinburgh University

Press, 2018), 226. Rousseau rejected slavery as natural.
12 William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1988), 137.
13 Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” 179.
14 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “A Discourse on Political Economy,” in The Social
Contract and Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. George D. H. Cole
(London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 140.
15 Rousseau, “A Discourse on Political Economy,” 140.
16 Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, 123.
17 Nancy Folbre, Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 87. At the same time, Rousseau, “worried
women might pursue interests separated from those of men, [and] feared that
self-interest would undermine social solidarity” (p. 95).
18 Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” 202.
19 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile or on Education, trans. Allen Bloom (New
York: Basic Books Publishers, 1979), 39–40. “This Being which wills and is
powerful, this Being active in itself, whatever it may be, which moves the
universe and orders all things, I call God” (p. 277).
20 Bernadette M. Baker, In Perpetual Motion, 221–23. Baker noted that Rous-
seau deviated from Locke but yet the familial reliance on education retained
conventions of masculinity.
21 Kieran Egan, “Education’s Three Old Ideas, and a Better Idea,” Journal of
Curriculum Studies 31, no. 3 (2010): 259.
22 Rousseau, Émile, 99–100.
23 Rousseau, “Discourse on Political Economy,” 149.
24 Rousseau, Émile, 120.
25 Ibid., 120.
26 Ibid., 120.
27 Rousseau, Émile, 66.
28 Ibid., 67.
29 Ramon M. Lemos, Rousseau’s Political Philosophy: An Exposition and Inter-
pretation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 168. Rousseau followed
Locke in conceiving “the laws of the body politic are compatible with principles
of justice, the possession of property, rather than being a source of political
liberty, provide an additional motive for complying with these laws” (p. 168).
30 Ibid., 169.
31 Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 159.
32 Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-love: Evil, Rationality, and
the Drive for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219.
Controlling economic opportunity
counts as a form of domination in Rousseau’s sense because when one
group has a long-term advantage in determining the laws that another
group must obey, the former have succeeded in getting themselves obeyed
by the latter, even though this obedience takes the form of obeying laws.
(pp. 219–220)
For example, see the functions of super PACs (political action committees) in
the United States.
33 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy
of Education (New York: The Free Press, 1966), 258.
34 Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in

American Education 1876–1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 152.
35 Michael Ignatieff, “Smith, Rousseau and the Republic of Needs,” in Scotland
and Europe 1200–1850, ed. Christopher C. T. Smout (Edinburgh: John Don-
ald, 1986), 197.
36 Rousseau, Émile, 212. Rousseau continued, “Our natural passions are very
limited. They are the instruments of our freedom; they tend to preserve us. All
those which subject us and destroy us come from elsewhere” (p. 212).
by Adam Smith, Vol. 1, ed. Edwin Cannan, (London: Methuen, 1904), 2.
38 Ibid., 414.
39 Istvan Hont, “The ‘Rich Country-Poor Country’ Debate in Scottish Classical
Political Economy,” in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Igna-
tieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Smith, like Hume in the ‘Jealously of Trade’, realized that the selective trad-
ing policies of the rich would prevent the poor countries from benefiting
from their various advantages. He maintained that only free trade between
nations could eventually lead to the wealth of all. The mutuality of markets
would guarantee this….
(pp. 301–302)
Unlike Hume, Smith did not “pin his hopes for the rich country remaining
rich simply on the industry of the towns” (p. 303). The case of the colony of
India standing as late as 1948 proves appropriation of Smith’s ideas as suited
for the profiteers.
by Adam Smith, Vol. 1, ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904), 460.
41 Ibid., 270. Smith wrote: “Though the state was to derive no advantage from the
instruction of the inferior ranks of people, it would still deserve its attention that
they should not be altogether uninstructed” (p. 272). Thus, the initial expres-
sions of human capital theory did not lean towards nation-building strategies.
42 Ibid., 273.
43 Judith A. Miller, Mastering the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 26
44 Ibid., 26.
45 Max Beer, An Inquiry into Physiocracy (London: Frank Cass & Co, 1966),
15. Beer noted that Alexis de Tocqueville found physiocrats as precursors of
the French Revolution.
46 François Quesnay, “Despotism in China,” in China, a Model for Europe, ed.
Lewis Maverick (Texas: Anderson, 1946), 264. The model, Quesnay explained,
is both “physical” and “moral,” combining the two “together” (p. 265).
47 Ibid., 273.
48 Ibid., 271.
49 Bernard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of
Natural Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
50 Lewis Maverick, China, a Model for Europe (Texas: Anderson, 1946), 31.
51 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution
and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1976), 9.
52 Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,”
Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (1995): 442.
53 Ibid., 278.
54 Walter A. Eltis. “François Quesnay: A Réinterprétation 1. The Tableau
Économique,” Oxford Economic Papers 27, no. 2 (1975): 167–200.
55 Edwin Cannan, “Introduction,” in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations Vol. 1. Adam Smith, ed. Edwin Cannan(London:
Methuen, 1904), xxxi.
56 Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, 28.
57 Ibid., 28.
58 Henry Higgs, The Physiocrats: Six Lectures on the French Economistes of the
18th Century (London: McMillian, 1897), 46.
59 Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origin of Political
Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 284. “Cary and
Quesnay both feared that specializing in the wrong kind of trade would lead
a country astray. Ricardo solved the issue in 1817 by de facto claiming that
manufacturing and agriculture were qualitatively alike” (p. 282).
60 Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the
Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 25.
61 Emma Rothschild, “Commerce and State: Turgot, Condorcet and Smith,”
The Economic Journal 102, no. 414 (1992): 1197.
62 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961),
136. “The colonial system was the spinal cord of the commercial capitalism
of the mercantile epoch” (p. 142).
63 Ibid., 210.
64 John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire (London: L. & Virginia
Woolf, 1927), 18–21.
65 Ibid., 24.
66 Rajani K. Kanth, Political Economy and Laissez-Faire (New Jersey: Rowman
& Littlefield, 1986), 119–23. Laissez-faire, for Bentham and Mill “was a ‘war
cry,’ a militant creed” (p. 22).
67 Donald Winch, “Adam Smith’s ‘Enduring Particular Result’: A Political and
Cosmopolitan Perspective,” in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Istvan Hont and Mi-
chael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 257. Winch
is writing in the context of Laissez-faire, and the ways in which Smith was
reinterpreted as an advocate of the market to impose limitations on the
state.
68 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 99.
69 Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 11.
70 Rajani K. Kanth, Political Economy and Laissez-faire: Economics and Ideol-
ogy in the Ricardian Era, 70. The demolishing of the Poor Laws was a legal
and economic affirmation for starving the rural poor to death.
71 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 101. Speenhamland was designed to pre-
vent the common people from becoming wage labourers.
The poor Law Reform of 1834 did away with this obstruction of the labour
market: the ‘right to live’ was abolished…. Psychological torture was coolly
advocated by and smoothly put into practice by mild philanthropists as a
means of oiling the wheels of the labor mill.
(p. 82)
72 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 125.
73 Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 239–41.

Malthus echoed Smith in claiming that benevolence could only be effective
in a state of ‘perfect knowledge’ unavailable to men. But God, in making
self-love a stronger passion, had providentially benefited humanity, since
‘by this wise provision the most ignorant are led to promote the general
happiness, an end which they would have totally failed to attain, if the
moving principle of their conduct had been benevolence’.
(p. 240)
74 Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the
Future Improvement of Society (London: A.M. Kelley, Bookseller, 1965),
237–38.
75 Maureen A. Turner, “The Educational Ideas and Influence of Thomas Robert
Malthus (1766–1834)” (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 1991). Turner
points out that for Malthus: “Religious instruction, however, was not recom-
mended only in the hope that it would make children ‘wise unto salvation’; it
would also make them more law-abiding citizens…” (p. 76).
76 Thomas R. Malthus, “Essays on Population, Volume 4,” in The Works of
Thomas Robert Malthus, eds. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden, Electronic
Edition (Virginia: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), 207. After 25 years from the
first publication the aristocratic tone of the first edition was replaced by a
discourse on civil liberty.
77 Robert M. Young, “Darwin’s Metaphor: Does Nature Select?” The Monist
55, no. 3 (1971): 452.
What Newtonianism and its analogies in psychology, politics and social
theory had failed to bring about—including man and society in the do-
main of natural law—had finally been achieved by the patience of some-
one [Darwin] who could somehow integrate Paley and Malthus (both in
their ways representatives of the naturalist movement in its utilitarian
aspect).
(p. 486)
78 Peter J. Bowler, “Malthus, Darwin, and the Concept of Struggle,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 37, no. 4 (1976): 632.
79 Robert, M., Young, “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context
of Biological and Social Theory,” Past & Present 43 (1969): 109–45.
80 David Ricardo, Principle of Political Economy and Taxation, ed. E. C. K.
Conner (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891).
81 Ibid., 40.
82 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 126.
83 Mark Blaug, Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study (New Haven: Yale
Certainly Ricardo never saw the issue as clearly as Bentham had done 20
years earlier: in an unpublished MS Bentham considered the effect of an
increase in the quantity of money on prices when there is unemployment of
labour as contrasted with the situation in which ‘all hand capable of em-
ploy were full of employment’.
(p. 76)
84 Ricardo, Principle of Political Economy and Taxation, 379.
85 Poovey, Making a Social Body, 84–85. There was

a defense against treating humans like machines, as a basis for authorizing
programs of surveillance and control, and as a license for politically unrep-
resented groups to claim some of the power that reformers also struggled
to seize from each other.
(pp. 77–78)
The context here is the overlapping of religious, political, and economic dis-
courses in the wake of the poor law reforms.
86 Nathaniel Wollach, “The Liberal Origins of the Modern View of Nature,”
The Tocqueville Review 34, no. 2 (2013): 107–31. Wollach named Malthus,
Ricardo, Mills and Tocqueville as liberals who in varying degrees integrated
Bacon’s legacy of dominating nature in political economy.
87 McMurty, Unequal Freedoms, 31.
88 Ibid., 68. In reference to Ricardo’s value system, McMurty cited Gorge Gilder,
one of the advisors to Ronald Reagan writing: “Under capitalism …the ven-
tures of reason are launched into a world ruled by morality and providence…
Capitalism entails faith in the compensatory logic of the cosmos” (pp. 68–69).
89 Claudia C. Klaver, A/Moral Economics: Classical Political Economy and Cul-
tural Authority in Nineteenth-century England (Ohio: Ohio State University
Press, 2003), 3/7.
90 Jacob H. Hollander, David Ricardo: A Centenary Estimate (New York: Au-
gustus M. Kelly Pub., 1968), 129–30.
91 Ibid., 134.
92 Blaug, Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study, 229. According to Blaug,
both Marxist and the Neo-classical economists drew from Ricardo’s concep-
tion of production and possession, the former would appropriate Ricardo
towards socialism that eventually became associated with John S. Mill; the
latter would take it towards utility maximization.
93 James Bonar, “Preface,” in Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Robert Mal-
thus 1810–1823, ed. James Bonar (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1887), xiv.
94 Werner Stark, “Jeremy Bentham as an Economist,” The Economic Journal
56, no. 224 (1946): 584.
95 Ibid., 584.
96 Ibid., 595.
97 Jane H. Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy (Philadelphia: Maxwell,
1817), 90.
98 Ibid., 90.
99 Ibid., 92. Evidently, the lessons of political economy instruct the poor to be
independent from the charity of the rich or protection of the state.
100 Ibid., 95. Later when Caroline quoted a poem to argue against the rise of pov-
erty facilitated by abolishment of poor laws Mrs. B. rejected her points ex-
plaining poets are not a “very good authority in political economy” (p. 130).
101 Ibid., 133.
102 Ibid., 133.
103 Harold Innis, Political Economy in the Modern State (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1946).
104 Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol 11, ed. John Bowring
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 97. The architecture was implemented
in a “large workshop” which had no “steam engines,” but populated by
workers (p. 97).
105 Ibid., 102.

106 Ibid., 103–04.
107 Miran Božovič, “Introduction,” in The Panopticon Writings (New York:
Verso, 1995), 11.
There is perhaps no other work of human hands, no icon, that can bring
God closer to us, through which God can reveal himself to a greater extent
than through Bentham’s panopticon, although the God of the panopticon
nevertheless always remains deus absconditus, a God who jealously hides
his face.
(p. 11)
108 Ibid., 19.
109 Ibid., 31.
110 Bhikhu Parekh, “Introduction,” in Bentham’s Political Thought, ed. Bhikhu
Parekh (London: Groom Helm, 1973), 16–17. See also James H. Burns “Happi-
ness and Utility: Jeremy Bentham’s Equation,” Utilitas 17, no. 1 (2005): 46–61.
111 Marco E.L. Guidi, “Jeremy Bentham, the French Revolution, and the Political
Economy of Representation (1788 to 1789),” European Journal of History of
Economic Thought 17, no. 4 (2010): 580. “Only those people who have great
talents and great ambitions can conceive of the hope of obtaining an office the
value thereof can indemnify them against the expense necessary to purchase a
seat” (Bentham in Guidi, 2010, p. 599). Human capital theorists later utilized
“talent” as an explanation for inequality.
112 Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 94.
113 Ibid., 94.
114 Ibid., 95.
115 Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, 53–60.
116 Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford
117 Harcourt, The Illusions of the Free Market, 21.
For both Smith and Beccaria, the two spheres [policing and economy] over-
lapped. To Smith, the umbrella category was police, and that category sub-
sumed the discussion of public economy and the wealth of a nation. To
Beccaria… the overarching category was public economy, within which
police formed one important sector alongside commerce and finance.
(pp. 21–22)
118 Bentham Jeremy, A Manual of Political Economy (McMaster: University Ar-
chive for the History of Economic Thought, 1843), 40.
119 Jeremy Bentham, “Value of a Pain or a Pleasure,” in Bentham’s Political
Thought, ed. Bhikhu Parekh (London: Groom Helm, 1973), 117–18.
120 Ibid., 118–19.
121 Ibid., 120. Bentham (1973) continued, since taking away money causes pain,
money can be constituted as “not only the measure, but the producing instru-
ment or cause” (p. 121).
122 Ibid., 121.
123 Jeremy Bentham, Observation on the Poor Bill, ed. William Pitt (London: Wil-
liam Clowes & Sons, 1797/1838), 30–31. William Pitt noted in the introduc-
tion that Bentham’s text, although unpublished, appeared to influence members
of the Legislature, and that the Observations powerfully contributed to the
abandonment of the measure in question, influencing Ricardo and Malthus.
124 Ibid., 33.

125 Douglas Long, Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham’s Idea of Liberty in
Relation to his Utilitarianism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977),
18.
126 Ibid., 77.
127 John Dewey, Theory of the Moral Life (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win-
ston, 1960), 78.
128 Parekh, “Introduction,” in Bentham’s Political Thought, 21.
129 Takuo Dome, Political Economy of Public Finance in Britain, 1767–1873
(London: Routledge, 2004), 67. Bentham’s advocacy for the market was not
one-sided. He considered both business and government. Dome also noted:
“To Bentham, the natural and only original object of taxation was ‘revenue’”
(p. 69).
130 Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Introduction,’ in Bentham’s Political Thought, 17. Werner
(1946) added Bentham expected that “Men and State must subordinate them-
selves in the same way to this hedonist imperative” while noting that his psy-
chology remained rational and empiricist (p. 56).
131 Jeremy Bentham, Deontology; or, the Science of Morality Vol. 1, ed. John
Bowring (London: Longman, 1834), 17.
132 Ibid., 17.
133 Ibid., 131. In his desire for maximizing happiness by mathematical calcula-
tions, Bentham distanced himself from asceticism associated with practical
wisdom and well-being. For the ancient philosophers, eudemonia meant ac-
tive deliberation and participation in happiness. Eudemonia was a practice as
well as a psychology contained in virtue ethics.
134 Bhikhu C. Parekh, Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessment, Vol 1. (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 34. “Bentham’s vanity was so excessive as to stop short,
but by a very little, of that which sometimes leads to, and almost always indi-
cates a distorted mind” (p. 34).
135 Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, ed. Smith, M. J. and Burston W. H. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 45.
136 David Hogan, “The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lan-
caster and the Psychology of Early Classroom System,” History of Education
Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1989): 384.
137 Bentham, Chrestomathia, 106.
138 Ibid., 106. Italic in original.
139 Eric Midwinter, The Development of Social Welfare in Britain (Philadelphia:
Open University Press, 2000), 56.
140 Bentham, Chrestomathia, 92.
141 Mark Canuel, “Bentham, Utility, and the Romantic Imagination” in Selected
Writings, Jeremy Bentham, ed. Stephen G. Engelmann (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 510.
142 Joseph Lancaster, Improvements in Education: As it Respects the Industrious
Classes (London: Darton and Harvey, 1803),18.
143 Leopoldo Mesquita, “The Lancasterian Monitorial System as an Education
Industry with a Logic of Capitalist Valorization,” International Journal of the
History of Education 48, no. 5 (2012): 661–75.
144 Peter M. Taubman, Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse
of Standards and Accountability in Education (New York: Routledge,
2010).
145 Jennifer M. Muller, “‘Engines of Educational Power’: the Lancasterian Moni-

torial System and the Development of the Teacher's Roles in the Classroom:
1805–1838” (Doctoral Diss., The State University of New Jersey 2015) 9–11.
See also Harold Silver, Education as History: Interpreting Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Education (London: Methuen, 1983), 19.
146 Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory What Utilitarianism Did to Ac-
tion (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004), 19.
147 Ibid., 20.
148 Ibid., 17.
149 Ibid., 17.
150 Marco E.L. Guidi, “Jeremy Bentham, the French Revolution, and the Political
Economy of Representation (1788 to 1789),” European Journal of History of
Economic Thought 17, no. 4 (2010): 601.
151 Pierre Klossowki, “Nature as Destructive Principle,” in The 120 Days of So-
dom & Other Writings, ed. Pierre Klossowki (New York: Grover Press:
1996), 71.
152 Ibid., 71.
153 Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory What Utilitarianism Did to Ac-
tion, 73.
154 Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency, ed. Vernon Cisney, Nicolae Morar and
Daniel Smith (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017). For the similarity and
differences between De De Sade and Adam Smith (and their agreement to see
ethical relationship in economic terms) see David Martyn, “De Sade’s Ethical
Economies,” Romantic Review 86, no. 1 (1995): 45–63.
155 Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (New York: Verso, 1995),
89–90.
156 Folbre (2009) explained, the “pursuit of individual self-interest” was based
on calculation while passion connoted “impulse and emotion, femininity and
heat.” “Self-interest arises from self-love, or amour-propre, a term the French
particularly liked” (p. 44). The French,
viewed self-interest in masculine terms, as a force of nature (and an instru-
ment of pleasure). But in a sense, they welcomed its domestication in a
marriage of commerce and the rule of law, a marriage in which small infi-
delities on either side might be permitted. Passion could, after all, be a
unifying force.
(p. 46)
157 Folbre, Greed, Lust & Gender, 94. It was by acceptance of radical individual-
ism that both Bentham and Sade would target those who had little inclination
to self-maximize as objects of use and pleasure.
158 Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-watkin and Michel Quinn, “Editorial Intro-
duction,” in Jeremy Bentham, Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings
on Sexual Morality, ed. Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-watkin and Michel
Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014), xii.
159 Jeremy Bentham, Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Mo-
rality, ed. Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-watkin and Michel Quinn (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 2014), 106.
160 Folbre, Greed, Lust & Gender, 106. “Bentham treated pleasure and pain as
dimensions of ‘utility’—a term he appropriated from David Hume, but treated
as a scientific concept analogous to Newton’s conception of gravity… (p.
106).
161 Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 91.

An inspection-house, to which a set of children had been consigned from
their birth, might afford experiments enough that would be rather more
interesting. … taking the children out of the hands of their parents as much
as possible, and even, if possible, altogether. …. and then you make of them
what you please.
(p. 91)
162 Matt Phillips, “The Stock Market is Making a Comeback. Was It Something
the Fed Said?” New York Times, January 20, 2019. When the Federal Reserve
had raised interest rates on Dec. 19, [2018], and the stock market slid 6 per-
cent in the days afterward, its chairman, Mr. Powell, had said “‘We’re listen-
ing with, you know, sensitively to the message that—that markets are
sending… And we’re going to be taking those downside risks into account as
we make policy going forward.” Today, not the theologians but central bank
officials, economists, chief investment officers, and hedge fund managers tell
us what messages they hear.
163 Edward L. Thorndike, “The Measurement of Educational Products,” The
School Review 20, no. 5 (1912): 289–99.
164 Cremin, The Transformation of the School, 200. The reference here was to
Franklin Bobbitt, a contemporary to John Dewey. Bobbitt’s scientism under-
mined Dewey’s psycho-social and democratic ideals for education (p. 200).
Bibliography
Baker, Bernadette M. In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History
and the Child. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Beer, Max. An Inquiry into Physiocracy. London: Frank Cass & Co, 1966.
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principle of Morals and Legislation.
Kitchener: Batoche Books, 1781/2000.
Bentham, Jeremy. Observation on the Poor Bill. Introduced by William Pitt. Lon-
don: William Clowes & Sons, 1797/1838. www.jstor.org/stable/60207989.
Bentham, Jeremy. Deontology; or, the Science of Morality, Vol. 1. Edited by John
Bowring. London: Longman, 1834. https://archive.org/details/deontologyorthes
01bentuoft.
Bentham, Jeremy. A Manual of Political Economy. McMaster University Archive
for the History of Economic Thought, 1843. https://econpapers.repec.org/
bookchap/hayhetboo/bentham1843.htm.
Bentham, Jeremy. The Works of Jeremy Bentham Vol 11, edited by John Bowring.
New York: Russell & Russell, 1962.
Bentham, Jeremy. “Value of a Pain or a Pleasure.” In Bentham’s Political Thought,
edited by Bhikhu Parekh, 109–27. London: Groom Helm, 1973.
Bentham, Jeremy. Chrestomathia, edited by Smith, M. J. and Burston, W. H. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Bentham, Jeremy. Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings. Vol 1, edited by Werner
Stark. London: Routledge, 2004a.
Bentham, Jeremy. Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings. Vol 2, edited by Werner
Stark. London: Routledge, 2004b.
Bentham, Jeremy. Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Moral-

ity, edited by Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Michel Quinn. Ox-
Blaug, Mark. Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study. New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1973.
Bonar, James. “Preface.” In Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Robert Malthus
1810–1823, edited by James Bonar, vii–xviii. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1887.
Bowler, Peter J. “Malthus, Darwin, and the Concept of Struggle.” Journal of the
History of Ideas 37, no. 4 (1976): 631–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/2709028.
Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1984.
Božovič, Miran. “Introduction.” In The Panopticon Writings, edited by Miran
Božovič, 1–28. London; New York: Verso, 1995.
Buck-Morss, Susan. “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display.” Critical
Inquiry 22, no. 2 (1995): 434–67. https://doi.org/10.1086/448759.
Cannan, Edwin. “Introduction.” In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations Vol. 1. Adam Smith, edited by Edwin Cannan, xii–xivii. Lon-
don: Methuen, 1904.
Canuel, Mark. “Bentham, utility, and the Romantic Imagination.” In Selected
Writings, Jeremy Bentham, edited by Stephen G. Engelmann, 500–19. New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Cremin, Lawrence A. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in Ameri-
can Education, 1879–1957. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1961.
Dewey, John. Theory of the Moral Life. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1960.
Dewey, John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Education. New York: Free Press, 1997.
Dome, Takuo. Political Economy of Public Finance in Britain, 1767–1873. Lon-
don: Routledge, 2004.
Doyle, William. Origins of the French Revolution. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988.
Egan, Kieran. “Education’s Three Old ideas, and a Better Idea.” Journal of Cur-
riculum Studies 31, no. 3 (2010): 257–67. https://doi.
org/10.1080/002202799183115.
Eltis, Walter A. “Francois Quesnay: A Réinterprétation 1. The Tableau
Économique.” Oxford Economic Papers 27, no. 2 (1975): 167–200. https://doi.
org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.oep.a041311.
Ferguson, Frances. Pornography, the Theory What Utilitarianism Did to Action.
Folbre, Nancy. Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas. Oxford:
Guidi, Marco E. L. “Jeremy Bentham, the French Revolution, and the Political
Economy of Representation (1788 to 1789).” European Journal of History of
Economic Thought 17, no. 4 (2010): 579–605.
Harcourt, Bernard. The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of
Natural Order. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Higgs, Henry. The Physiocrats: Six Lectures on the French Economistes of the 18th
Century. London: McMillian, 1897.
Hogan, David. “The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lancaster
and the Psychology of the Early Classroom System.” History of Education
Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1989): 381–417. https://doi.org/10.2307/368910.
Hollander, Jacob H. David Ricardo: A Centenary Estimate. New York: Augustus
M. Kelly Pub., 1968.
Hont, Istvan. “The Rich Country-poor Country’ Debate in Scottish Classical Po-
litical Economy.” In Wealth and Virtue, edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ig-
natieff, 271–315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Hundert, Edward G. The Enlightenment’s Fable; Bernard Mandeville and the Dis-
covery of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Hurtado, Jimena P. “Bernard Mandeville's Heir: Adam Smith or Jean Jacques
Rousseau on the Possibility of Economic Analysis.” The European Journal of the
History of Economic Thought 11, no. 1 (2006): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/0
967256032000171489.
Hurtado, Jimena P. “Citizens, Markets and Social Order: An Aristotelian Reading
of Smith and Rousseau on Justice.” In Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Poli-
tics, Economics, edited by Paganelli Maria Pia, Rasmussen Dennis C. and Smith
Craig, 214–38. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Ignatieff, Michael. The Needs of Strangers. New York, Viking Penguin, 1984.
Ignatieff, Michael. “Smith, Rousseau and the Republic of Needs.” In Scotland and
Europe 1200–1850, edited by Christopher C. T. Smout, 187–206. Edinburgh:
John Donald, 1986.
Innis, Harold. Political Economy in the Modern State. Toronto: University of To-
ronto Press, 1946.
Kanth, Rajani K. Political Economy and Laissez-Faire. New Jersey: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1986.
Keynes, John Maynard. The End of Laissez-faire. London: L. & Virginia Woolf,
1927.
Klaver, Claudia C. A/Moral Economics: Classical Political Economy and Cultural
Authority in Nineteenth-century England. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2003.
Klossowki, Pierre. “Nature as Destructive Principle.” In The 120 Days of Sodom
& Other Writings, edited by P. Klossowki, 65–86. New York: Grover Press,
1996.
Klossowski, Pierre. Living Currency, edited by Vernon Cisney, Nicolae Morar and
Daniel Smith. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.
Lancaster, Joseph. Improvements in Education: As it Respects the Industrious
Classes. London: Darton and Harvey, 1803.
Lemos, Ramon M. Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An Exposition and Interpreta-
tion. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977.
Lomonaco, Jeffrey. “Adam Smith's ‘Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Re-
view’.” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (2002): 659–76. https://doi.
org/10.2307/3654165.
Long, Douglas. Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham’s Idea of Liberty in Relation
to His Utilitarianism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.
Malthus, Thomas R. An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the

Future Improvement of Society. London: A.M. Kelley Bookseller, 1965.
Malthus, Thomas R. “Essays on Population, Volume 4.” In The Works of Thomas
Robert Malthus. Virginia: Pickering & Chatto, 2001. https://www.library.ubc.
ca.
Marcet, Jane H. Conversations on Political Economy. Philadelphia: Maxwell,
1817.
Maureen, Turner A. “The Educational Ideas and Influence of Thomas Robert Mal-
thus (17661834).” PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 1991. Retrieved June 15,
2019, from http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2015/
Maverick, Lewis A. China, a Model for Europe. Texas: Anderson, 1946.
McMurty, John. Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System.
Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998.
Mesquita, Leopoldo. “The Lancasterian Monitorial System as an Education Indus-
try with a Logic of Capitalist Valorization.” International Journal of the History
of Education 48, no. 5 (2012): 661–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2012
.658159
Midwinter, Eric. The Development of Social Welfare in Britain. Philadelphia: Open
Miller, Judith A. Mastering the Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999.
Muller, Jennifer M. “‘Engines of Educational Power’: The Lancasterian Monitorial
System and the Development of the Teacher’s Roles in the Classroom: 1805–
1838.” Doctoral diss., The State University of New Jersey, 2015.
Neuhouser, Frederick. Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-love: Evil, Rationality, and the
Drive for Recognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Parekh, Bhikhu C. “Introduction.” In Bentham’s Political Thought, edited by
Bhikhu Parekh, 13–44. London: Groom Helm, 1973.
Parekh, Bhikhu C. Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessment, Vol 1. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993.
Phillips, Matt. “The Stock Market Is Making a Comeback. Was It Something the
Fed Said?” New York Times, January 20, 2019. https://www.nytimes.
com/2019/01/20/business/stockmarket-recovery-federal-reserve.html
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.
Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864.
Reinert, Sophus A. Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origin of Political
Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Ricardo, David. Principle of Political Economy and Taxation, edited by E. C. K.
Conner. London: George Bell and Sons, 1891.
Rothschild, Emma. “Commerce and State: Turgot, Condorcet and Smith.” The
Economic Journal 102, no. 414 (1992): 1197–210. doi:10.2307/2234386.
Rothschild, Emma. Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the En-
lightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile or on Education. Translated by Allen Bloom. New
York: Basic Books Publishers, 1979.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “A Discourse on Political Economy.” In The Social Con-

tract and Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Translated by George D. H.
Cole. London: J. M. Dent, 1993.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “On the Social Contract.” In The Major Political Writings
of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Translated and edited by John T. Scott, 153–252.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012a.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Discourse on Inequality.” In The Major Political Writ-
ings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Translated and edited by John T. Scott, 37–152.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012b.
Russell, Bernard. Icarus or the Future of Science. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner
& Co., 1924.
Schofield, Philip, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Michel Quinn. “Editorial Introduc-
tion.” In Jeremy Bentham, Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sex-
ual Morality, edited by Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Michel
Quinn, xi–xxix. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1963.
Adam Smith. Vol. 1, edited by Edwin Cannan. London: Methuen, 1904.
Stark, Werner. “Jeremy Bentham as an Economist.” The Economic Journal 56, no.
224 (1946): 583–608. https://doi.org/10.2307/2225988.
Stark, Werner. “Introduction.” In Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, Vol 1,
edited by Werner Stark, 12–78. London: Routledge, 2004. https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315017013.
Thorndike, Edward L. “The Measurement of Educational Products.” The School
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Virginia: William Byrd Press, 1944.
Wollach, Nathaniel, “The Liberal Origins of the Modern View of Nature.” The
Tocqueville Review 34, no. 2. (2013): 107–31.
Young, Robert M. “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Bio-
logical and Social Theory.” Past & Present 43 (1969): 109–45. http://www.jstor.
org/stable/650113.
Young, Robert M. “Darwin’s Metaphor: Does Nature Select?” The Monist 55, no.
3 (1971): 442–503, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197155322.
5 Human capital theory
In the early decades of the 20th century, the ideas of competition and mar-
ket remained as safeguards “to national welfare.” The American journal-
ist, Talcott Williams found “free competition, free contract and personal
freedom for all men [sic] is the last gift of high civilization.”1 Williams
praised the United States government for protecting its citizens from the
economic elites. He acknowledged the role of trade unions in accepting
stratified income was for the greater good of society. By making compari-
sons to Britain and providing the example of railroad construction, he
showed that the monetary return on wages for labour was higher in the
United States compared to Britain. In contrast, the interest earned on capi-
tal was higher in Britain compared to the United States. Williams, a jour-
nalist learned in economics, wrote during the years in which the United
States replaced Britain in industrial production. One significant contribu-
tor to industrial progress was railway construction. And an important part
of the labour force of the railroads were African Americans who did not
share the free competition and liberty Williams enjoyed. The railroad man-
agers and federal government officials participated in unfair employment
practices towards African Americans; the case for hiring them aimed at
directing white racism to agitate unions.2
Neglecting the prevailing racial violence, Williams praised the “Sherman
Act” and the role of American judicial power to institute competition, not
merely an instrument to exploit labourers.3 Nearly 50 years later, the
“Sherman Act” came under scrutiny by Alan Greenspan. He argued the
Act was hampering innovation and harming society. Greenspan began by
scrutinizing the role of government, calling the constructions of railroads
“true monopolies” where the “power was not derived from a free market.
It stemmed from governmental subsidies.”4 Greenspan failed to recognize
that no single private investor or corporation had the capacity or willing-
ness to carry such a grant project. He failed to mention that railroads ulti-
mately secured the mobility of humans and goods that led to the
maximization of profit for some more than others. Unlike Williams, who
DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-6
Human capital theory 169
calculated returns on capital and labour, Greenspan failed to provide nu-

merical evidence for his argument. When Greenspan provided an example,
he drew from the Standard Oil Company of John D. Rockefeller. At the
turn of the 20th century, the company controlled over “more than eighty
percent of refining capacity,” and Greenspan speculated that a monopoly
made “sense” for it “accelerated the growth of the American economy.
Such control yielded obvious gains in efficiency.”5 Unlike Williams, who
provided the four-way cross comparison on returns, Greenspan failed to
support with empirical evidence how and in what ways the “control” he
praised brought the obvious gains and efficiency. Greenspan insisted that
“the ultimate regulator of competition in a free economy is the capital
market.”6 What happened to the old myth of the free market? What had
made the word “free” interchangeable with “capital”? Greenspan called
for “a laissez-faire economy of ‘active’ competition,” assuming that it has
within it, as a machine does, “a built-in regulator that protects and pre-
serves it.”7
Preserving markets had nothing to do with preserving humans and so
state laws were not simply inefficient but obtrusive. Greenspan made not
one single reference to the “citizens” mentioned in Williams’ essay. But he
defended the “businessmen,” who, driven by self-interest, presumably take
care of societal happiness. Greenspan’s conception of capitalism resulted in
the 2008 economic recession, requiring governments to rely on public
funds, increase national debt, and rescue the “too big to fail” economic
entities. The monopolies had become strong enough to reason that compe-
tition gives businessmen immunity to be free from prosecution. In the face
of profound financial insecurity, human capital was pressed to retrain,
seek work, and pay taxes to support the United States’ ongoing military
expeditions in the Middle East.
In a slightly different argument than Greenspan’s, Richard Posner criti-
cized the “arbitrary power” and “arbitrary law enforcement” of the anti-
trust laws and asked the government to limit its role in “maintaining
competitive markets.”8 Affirming Bentham’s legacy, Posner argued that the
laws must be designed based on economic approaches. Posner saw that the
market and the economic analysis as sufficient for making policy deci-
sions.9 Posner was cognizant that Bentham’s economic approach to legal
conventions differed from Smith’s. Posner acknowledged that “Bentham
was a pioneer in developing techniques of brainwashing;”10 and he agreed
that Bentham’s calculative approach radically departed from natural right
theories. However, Posner praised Bentham for postulating that “human
beings act as rational maximizers of their satisfactions in all sphere” and
he recommended that the “sovereign masters of pain and pleasure” be in
effect yardsticks for legal judgements.11 Posner was in search of “a moral
theory that goes beyond classical utilitarianism and holds that the criterion
for judging whether acts and institution are just or good is whether they
maximize the wealth of society.”12 He argued for an economic approach to
justice, instead of the obvious opposite (e.g. arguing for a just economy).
Aware of Bentham’s ambivalence towards equal rights, Posner proclaimed
that Bentham’s “approach allows a reconciliation among utility, liberty
and even equality as competing ethical principles.”13 In the classical con-
ceptions, utility, liberty, and equality were not posed as competing ethical
principles.
Posner and Greenspan exemplify the mode of reasoning generated dur-
ing the Cold War. For example, the long-standing associate of Posner, Gary
Becker wrote that the “panic in the United States engendered by the more
spectacular Soviet accomplishments has in turn spawned a re-examination
of American policies and procedures relating to economic growth and mili-
tary technology.”14 Among these policies were education policies which
necessitated stronger emphasis on “science and engineering” to aid “eco-
nomic and military development.”15 While Becker indicated it is difficult to
calculate the economic returns from college education, he postulated “a
policy designed to spread such information, especially among the low-in-
come families,” may strengthen economic outputs.16 The Cold War pro-
vided an opportunity for producing policies that aligned educational
institutions with economic and military development. This realignment of
education away from citizenship and child development towards the pro-
duction of economic outputs was exported to other countries, often pres-
sured to reform their own education system to align with the United
States.17 This chapter examines the historical context of human capital
theory as it became rationalized and gained adherence.
5.1 Labour and capital

Bentham had postulated political economy as the system that guides the
use of capital to direct human labour and liberty. Bentham thought that:
“No kind of productive labour of any importance can be carried on with-
out capital,” adding that “labour, and not money, is the real source of
wealth.”18 It can be inferred that determining human labour is a source of
wealth. Those in pursuit of wealth must labour and understand that labour
itself is enabled by capital. Note that while Bentham supported the dis-
courses of administering the human capital, he anticipated and normalized
the absorption of mental and bodily power granted by the technological
progress:
Under the general denomination of labour, considered as employed in

the giving of increase to wealth in any shape, two particulars may be
distinguished: 1. The mere bodily energy employed in the production of
the effect in question; 2. The skill or mental power displayed in the ex-
ercise of the bodily act, in the choice of the bodily operation carried on
in that view, and in the mode of carrying them on.19
In the first denomination labour is “mere bodily energy” but irreducible to

the work of agricultural or industrial society. It extends to technological
society and the production of effects and affects. It can be understood as
timeless: in both ancient slavery and contemporary machine-learning the
human body is an instrument for production. Bentham’s second definition
of labour was novel from the point of view of economic theory and bound
to affect the definition of capital.20 While the two denominations of labour
were distinguishable for Bentham, they were becoming blurred in theories
and practices of capitalism. The abstraction of labour and capital func-
tioned to dissociate the social and ethical responsibility of the capitalists by
reframing their role as increasing the wealth of the nation and granting
them privileges over the common good.
The Austrian school’s leading economist, Eugen Böhm von Bawerk
(1851–1914), rejected the emphasis on “national wealth” explained by
the English economists including Bentham. Böhm-Bawerk saw capital-
ists’ role as infused in social relations. He defined labour as a force to be
realized in terms of capital. Böhm-Bawerk was cognizant that, in mod-
ern political economy, capital had been defined differently to explain
social and private processes within the economic affairs: For Adam
Smith, capital was defined as a stock of goods for production and na-
tional wealth; for John M’Leod, it had been “stock of accumulated la-
bour”, “purchasing power” and “circulating power”; for Jevons as
“wealth employed to facilitate production”; for Karl Marx, capital rep-
resented as an “instruments for the exploitation” of the labourers; for
Karl Knies, as an “available stock of goods… to satisfy wants in the fu-
ture.”21 For Böhm-Bawerk capital is a capacity to rearrange nature by
human power; while it can be understood in terms of the distinction of
social and private, capital is a force that erases the public and provide
distinction.
Social Capital we shall call a group of products, which serve as means

to the socio-economical acquisition of goods; or, as this acquisition is
only possible through production, we shall call it a group of products
destined to serve towards further production; or, briefly, a group of in-
termediate products.22
What he held as social capital was a group of products but not a common
good. He recognized that private capital, as long as it concerns production
and acquisition, as extracted from the social capital.23
Böhm-Bawerk envisaged capital’s power would reinvent not only

things but also values. The first thesis of his theory proposed “the use
assumed by Use Theory as having an independent existence has really no
existence at all.”24 The second posed, “the value of the use joins” with
the “value of substance of capital,” and “the two together make up the
value of the product.”25 It is based on the first assumption of interdepen-
dence that the second assumption is possible. According to Smart, for
Böhm-Bawerk “the value does not arise in the production, nor is it pro-
portional to the efforts and sacrifices of those production. The causal
relation runs exactly the opposite way.”26 Because there is production
there are needs and desires. At their discretion, capitalists relied on scien-
tific methods of “induction and deduction” to evaluate subjective values
by “psychological links” to guide and inform motives and action.27 De-
picting capitalism is an open system that gives and takes value to utilities
and functions, Böhm-Bawerk responded to Marx’s criticism of capitalism
as a closed system of production and consumption. Böhm-Bawerk found
the relative “equality” thesis Marx had drawn from Aristotle to formu-
late a just exchange based on “commensurability” to be “old-fashioned”
and explained that “as the matter of fact modern political economists
agree that the old scholastic-theological theory of ‘equivalence’ in the
commodities to be exchanged is untenable.”28 As Chapter 2 demon-
strated, the scholastic theory of “equivalence” was the basis for not only
economic liberties but also ethical and political rights. Böhm-Bawerk’s
assertion that “labour is not paid because it makes sacrifice” but, “be-
cause it makes products which obtain value from human wants,” ne-
glects (Smart asserts) the fact that “all production sacrifices life, and
capital sacrifices immediate enjoyment.”29 The primacy of satisfying
wants replaced the old theology of sacrifice while establishing new norms
to meet the sacraments of capital.
Böhm-Bawerk redefined social capital in seven categories: land; build-
ings such as factories, shops, and railways; tools and machines; useful ani-
mals; raw and auxiliary materials; finished consumption goods; and
money. Evidently what was defined as social was to be held privately. He
regarded labourers as serving the aims of private capital and acting as if
they were capitalists themselves. While criticizing English writers who in-
cluded “the maintenance of productive labourers under social capital,” he
argued because human food, clothing, fuel, and lighting of their homes
constitute private capital, human maintenance is consumption: “Produc-
tive labourers are not simply consuming subjects, but are also active eco-
nomic instruments; and that, consequently, the subsistence which does
directly serve for the maintenance and furtherance of their life indirectly
serves towards the further production of goods.”30 Böhm-Bawerk contin-
ued by noting that English economists considered labourers as a machine
of production and considered wages as an element of production cost. He

wanted to secure the economic outputs without caring for the workers.
Looking after the labourers, in his eyes, would force cuts on profits for the
capitalists.
Böhm-Bawerk’s views reflected the conditions of capitalism: investment
in technologies and techniques to automate value creation accompanied
by negligence of innovations that automate value extraction from hu-
mans. Capitalism depends on profiting from neglecting workers. It de-
pends on fears of scarcity to make people not only productive but also
self-governing. Böhm-Bawerk’s revisions to the classical economics and
natural right theories were in sync with the work of his contemporaries—
William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Carl Menger, and Knut Wicksell—
who made similar attempts at rethinking the boundaries of labour and
capital for the sake of calculating interest and utility. Their theoretical
focus extended the scope of economic analysis and intensified economic
individualism. And their reliance on mathematical models strengthen un-
derlying presumptions about economics as a science. The mathematical
models often assumed that the standard of judgement is pursuit of self-
interest and sought to utilize this assumption to predict, direct, and con-
trol human behaviours.
The ideas of Austrian economists travelled to the United States and were
gradually absorbed.31 However, it is difficult to summarize their influence.
For example, consider Friedrich Hayek, who offered a competing logic to
Böhm-Bawerk, when he wrote:
There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level
of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to
all without endangering general freedom’ that is: some minimum of
food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any
reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive sys-
tem of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life
against which few can make adequate provision.32
Written during the Cold War, these sentences resemble the scholastic–theo-
logical defence of life. The old-fashioned became fashionable once again as
Hayek expressed freedom in terms of “security” that could be designed.
Responsibility is projected onto the state to look after that “minimum”
survival needed to inject confidence in the population. Cognizant of the
history and the “cruel exploitation” of “the less fortunate members,”33
Hayek recognized a dilemma, namely “whether we should direct and orga-
nize all economic activities according to a ‘blueprint’, that is, ‘consciously
direct the resources of society to conform to the planners’ particular views
of who should have what.’” He rejected “planning” in favour of “dogmatic
laissez faire attitude. The liberal argument does not advocate leaving things
just as they are; it favours making the best possible use of the forces of
competition as a means of coordinating human efforts.”34 In laissez faire
2.0, the technocratic state lays the conditions for guiding and coordinating
individuals’ efforts, not leaving things as they are, as it assists expansion of
social Darwinism. Hayek also suggested the “growth of monopoly” is not
so much the “consequence of the advance of technology” but “the result of
the policies.”35 He wanted a particular mode of control in which markets
facilitate collaboration of the private and the public sectors.
In an attempt to define capital, Hayek thought of “a general definition of
capital only in the negative form of saying that the only things which never
will have to be regarded as capital are really the permanent resources in the
strict sense of the term.”36 Immediately, he added the “particular definition
of the term capital can of course come only from its use as a tool of analy-
sis” to reflect its “comprehensive character.”37 What was this comprehen-
sive character? By the time of Hayek, the concept of capital had become an
instrument for calculating profit from natural and human resources. The
character of capital allowed economists and capitalists to calculate and
speculate both the function and the value of goods before, during, and after
use. Just as humans had objective and subjective capacities to study them-
selves so could capital, given its comprehensive character. Hayek wrote:
[T]here will almost always exist potential but unused resources which
could be made to yield a useful return, but only after some time and not
immediately; and that the exploitation of such resources will usually re-
quire that other resources which could yield a return immediately or in
near future, have to be used in order to make these other resources yield
any return at all. This simple fact fully suffices to explain why there will
nearly always be possibilities of increasing the output obtained from the
available resource by investing some of them for longer period.38
Similar to his predecessors, Hayek hedged his assertions, inserting “almost

always,” “could,” and “usually” but arriving at a “simple fact” that justified
unbounded exploitation of whatever was deemed as a source of profit. His
definition is broad enough to include human life. However, the conceptual
ascendency of capital cannot be attributed to any one single person or school.
It resided in the wake of capitalism’s reliance on technology and science.
5.2 Capital, desires, and education

Whether in the utilitarian liberalism of the British Empire or the ordo-lib-
eralism of Germany,39 the conceptualization of humans as a form of capi-
tal proceeded to make national economic growth part of the mental
furniture of people who accepted it as part of modern liberal democracy.

In this, the before-and-after the Second World War literature shows an in-
tensification of the effort to secure a certain desired future through mass
education of the Americans. An example of pre-Second World War thought,
consider that of the late 19th-century economist, Joseph Nicholson. He
acknowledged Petty as he drew attention to those “American economists”
who relied on statistics in making claims that “increase of population in a
given area more than proportionately increases the productive power of
the people.”40 Nicholson saw this proposition as a justification for Petty’s
thesis but recognized that, unlike land and machine, humans were mortals.
However, Nicholson assumed while individuals perish their “profession or
trade survives, like a Platonic idea,” and by this he reasoned that, similar
to land, and even more so, people “are permanent sources of [national]
income.”41 Land and population together and by themselves were insuffi-
cient explanations for national economic growth. Cycles of boom-and-
bust followed a combination of cultural, social, and technological
factors—in powerful nations.42 Nations that had been empires thrived eco-
nomically for multiple reasons, they often contrive effective control over
mental and physical working bodies.
Among the pre-Second World War American economists Nicholson
mentioned was Irving Fisher. Fisher added clarity to mathematical models
by explaining labour (its subjective and objective values), capital (stock of
wealth), and income (flow of wealth) by including psychological factors.
Fisher differentiated between in use and future use of capital.43 Although
he drew from Böhm-Bawerk’s analysis of interest, Fisher’s ideas aligned
with the English economists, in particular those who furthered Bentham’s
theories of pleasure and utility by mathematical approaches.44 In a book
devoted to nature of capital, Fisher noted that “the important facts,” for
him were “that capital is productive, that it is antithetical to income, that
it is a provision for the future or that it is a reserve.”45 The “or” was be-
coming a feature of economics conceptualization, for it accommodated
inclusivity. Fisher defined wealth as moveable and immovable material and
added the third category: human beings. From observation of commodities
as raw materials and as finished products, and by thinking that it is not the
fertility of land that counts as wealth but the fertile land that is wealth,
Fisher reformulated what it meant to be educated. When a person “studies
law, medicine, journalism, music, or prepares for any other profession,”
Fisher thought, “he [sic] is investing in his own person, with the hope that
the same thus invested may ultimately be returned to him (with interest).”46
That historical hope of self-improvement had had a theological underpin-
ning, but now was reformulated as a mean to toil for an expected worldly
return. This expectation of economic reward integrates the psychological
factor of desire into economics. Fisher explained that “pleasure is not the
desire, but the satisfaction of the desire …. Desirability, which means the
intensity of desire of an individual under certain conditions” is fulfilled
when pleasure the “derivable” of desire sees an increase in “future years.”47
The intensity of desire informs individuals’ decisions and conducts. Fish-
er’s point of view demonstrates a concern with the psychological factors
and their applications to economic organization.
For Fisher, neither the person nor the work has any value until they
come in contact with a system of exchange. The conception of an engaged
self, for whom time recedes to the background, due to the pleasure labour
and love can provide, is challenged by the formulation of a human oriented
to a future filled with hopes and anxieties for return. Time becomes an in-
strument for contractual measures of self-accountability. Wealth is what
we (humans) desire, according to Fisher, but what is wealth? “Wealth con-
sists of material appropriated objects, and property, of rights in these ob-
jects; that wealth in its broadest sense includes human beings.”48 Wealth is
not solely a possession; the concept was extended to include rights to not
only what humans deem as objects, but also humans themselves. Wealth
becomes associated with an anticipation that sustains lack.49 Where
“wealth in its broadest sense includes human beings,” Fisher stressed, “all
capital yields income and that all income flows from capital – at least when
the term ‘capital’ is used in its broader sense, which includes human be-
ings.”50 Fisher’s account differs from Alfred Marshall, who did not pre-
scribe rigid lens to education as a mean for pursuit of wealth.
Fisher credited Marshall for correlating utility with desire and measur-
ing the force of an economic motive based on the prospect of pleasure.
Marshall maintained a balanced view of the two extreme views of desire,
one informed by the “Buddhist doctrine” to root out as “many wants and
desire as possible” and those of Herbert Spencer, for whom “desire is al-
ways beneficial because it stimulate[s] people to increase exertions.”51
Marshall noted that society must make a place for those who prefer mod-
eration and steady work that “offers them the best opportunity for the
growth of those habits of body, mind and spirit in which alone there is true
happiness.”52 He interpreted the notion of flow and use of capital ex-
pressed by Fisher’s definition of capital “without a rival,” and identified
this aspect of Fisher’s definition incorporated production and consump-
tion. Marshall explained that Fisher’s definition of capital was inclusive of
the “past efforts and sacrifices” and was forward looking to future gratifi-
cations.53 However, Marshall’s objection to Fisher’s definition of capital
was “that it was too radical a departure from established usage” and “it
failed to satisfy the requirement, not of science, but of terminology.”54 In
response, Fisher clarified he was offering both a negative and a positive
definition.55 While both Marshall and Fisher agreed on the ordinary busi-
ness use of capital in production and consumption, Marshall objected to
the synonymous use of funds and stock and wanted to see a separation
between use and profit—and posed that the income a person “derived
from land, capital and labour” is different from the “benefits which a per-
son reaps from the use of his own clothes [and] furniture.”56 This distinc-
tion is relevant to education, for the mental and spiritual enlargement
education brings to the person is self-valuable; if it ends up being useful at
some point, so be it, but if its sole purpose is directed by its economic use-
fulness, it will subordinate the person, rather deterministically, to socio-
economic demands.
The intricacy and tension in defining capital and its scope did not disap-
pear. However, if Marshall and Fisher could not come to agreement on the
definition of capital, who could? For the next half a century, attention
shifted to statistical and mathematical approaches they each had advanced
in the study of utility (not as a value for Marshall). In the first half of the
20th century, new approaches to income and utility began to include the
economic value of human persons in their calculations. However, such ap-
proaches were challenged on ethical and political grounds. For example,
Zhan argued that since the abolition of slavery, there is no longer any
private economic value for human beings as such. Zhan lamented that
“calculation about the economic value of” the human offends the “dig-
nity” of the person; he proposed “that exception should be taken to plac-
ing human service and material goods in the same category.”57 Zhan’s
reflection on the value of human morality and dignity were cautionary
notes, weighing the cost of economic returns.
Initially, instead of reducing humans to material goods, the human capi-
tal conceptions focused on economic values of education and utilized sta-
tistical data to make a case for investing in higher education for its national
and personal economic returns. For example, John Walsh suggested pro-
fessional capacities gained by education should be included as national
wealth irrespective of the model of government. He showed a correlation
of higher education (of lawyers, doctors, engineers, business executives
and teaching professions) with higher income. The return on income ex-
ceeded the cost of acquisition of education; it did not become debt. Walsh
acknowledged that parents “only incidentally” acted as “investors; they
are parents first of all, … should they have savings remaining after provid-
ing for the education of their own children, they experience no incentive
whatever to spend it on the education of the children of others.”58 Simul-
taneously altruistic and selfish, parents were confined to caring for their
own children. At the time, on various occasions, Walsh adopted a careful
terminology to convey that college education “may be considered a form of
capital,”59 not that it was simply all that. He also provided an example of
the lawyers and emphasized his doubt that innate qualities were in play for
their income, which had exceeded the income of other professions during
the time he studied them. Walsh explained that the demand for lawyers
presented a special case in which they collected a large surplus return. He
recognized that in such cases a system of taxation was to be incorporated by
government to facilitate market equilibrium and in this “the investment
made in professional ability and material capital act in the same way.”60
The Great Depression had created a social concern that affirmed that the
state ought to be an active agent in the wealth management.
After the Great Depression, the idea of education as an investment was
supplemented to include a discourse of consumption. The modality of con-
sumption dealt with refraining from spending and investing for returns
that could fuel future consumption. Marshall had stated that a theory of
consumption has to serve as the “scientific bases of economics,” stressing
the “study of consumption must come after, and not before, the main body
of economic analysis” for it followed from learning about desires and
wants in order to invent and satisfy them.61 He acknowledged that Ben-
tham’s analysis of pain and pleasure had enabled the study of consump-
tion. Marshall also complained that the English school—following
Bentham’s direct influence—had been too focused on deducing theories
from statistics.62 Statistical approaches had gained momentum in the later
part of the 19th century when their primary focus was on designing pro-
grammes for social welfare rather than for increasing private capital. For
example, Walsh, in his paper discussed above, drew on statistical data.
Similar to his contemporaries he relied on objective knowledge to influence
subjective decisions for public good.63 Walsh was working within the realm
of classical economists who had deemed the state’s role as necessary for the
maintenance of unmonopolized market.
Nearly a decade after Walsh, Milton Friedman and Simon Kuznets stud-
ied five professional practices: medicine, dentistry, law, certified accoun-
tancy, and consulting engineering. In their Income from Independent
Professional Practice, Friedman and Kuznets left out the data from busi-
ness executives and teachers that Walsh had considered. Perhaps the busi-
ness executives were distinguished from the rest of professions, attuned to
an invisible hand—as Adam Smith had thought—and for this, they were
above the knowledge economy and thereby enjoying exclusive privileges.
Friedman and Kuznets anticipated that the growing reliance on capital will
set directions for the knowledge economy. Business executives were to be
seen as moral entities applauded by economists and state policymakers,
not for their charity but for providing humans with precarious employ-
ment. Friedman and Kuznets also left out the teaching professions, as
teaching was on the way of becoming anything but an independent prac-
tice. Teachers were to surrender their relative independence as nationalism
controlled public opinion, redirecting educational institutions away from
citizenship concerns towards economic growth, just as independent
scholarly research was redirected to meet certain dictated ends.64 The so-
called independent professions, judged worthy of academic study, thereby
depended upon college education; all required time and financial invest-
ment to support the individuality that the concept of “independent” signi-
fied. All except the “consulting engineers” were under state licensure. To
acknowledge that these professions were often regulated, the authors’ cited
Harold Rypins, the Secretary of the New York State Board of Medical
Examiners:
In all the profession there has developed in the last few years, an aristo-
cratic, or at least a restrictive movement which, in a sense, is reminiscent
of the medieval guilds. The trend is still in an early state, but in law,
medicine, dentistry and other professions under state licensure, the signs
are apparent…65
By quoting this statement Friedman and Kuznets made the point that such
control is necessary to ensure the quality of training but also to make the
professions competitive. Romanticizing the Middle Ages, Friedman and
Kuznets showed little recognition that membership in guilds protected the
medieval men economically only by subjecting them to the rigid hierarchi-
cal systems that permitted no vertical movement socially and politically.
Friedman and Kuznets noted (in the footnote) the competition between
individuals managed by the professional organization was important. They
nudged the National Bureau of Economic Research to “study” it as a
model for the future organization of society: “Medicine offers an opportu-
nity to observe a form of politico-economic control that promises to be-
come increasingly important that offers one type of pattern for the future
organization of society.”66 The role of associations, councils, and examina-
tions as governing bodies was to make it difficult to enter a profession and
this has social implications for it evidently offer a form of control wherein
competition remained triumphant. Few decades later, Friedman came to
attack government control but also reformulated the bases of democratic
society, equality. He pressed that “like every ideal, equality of opportunity
is incapable of being fully realized.”67 He placed equality against personal
liberty to condemn government interventions in protecting citizens against
corporate elites. Meanwhile, he promoted the control advanced by “free
enterprise, competition, laissez-faire.”68 In his study of institutional eco-
nomics in America, Rutherford noted that the First World War set in mo-
tion the idea that economics is relevant to the modern problem of social
control encouraging economists to accommodate pragmatist philosophy
and experimental approaches. Employment was only one of the “problems
that seemed to demand new forms of ‘social control’ to supplement the
market,”69 but one in which big business and the state had a shared
interest. The First World War had created a movement in which “all bel-
ligerent powers ‘moved in the direction of organized capitalism and war
collectivism.’”70 The furthering of business conventions in the public
sphere served to protect the freedom espoused by profiteers.
The five professions Friedman and Kuznets studied shared another com-
mon feature: they were not under the threat of being replaced by machin-
ery. Moreover, by the way of education they made individuals into
productive enterprises. The five professions showed resemblance to the
guild system as each provided the possibility of self-autonomy. Unlike the
guild system, in which the “apprentices were bound to a master” and a
master committed to individual persons (“the master boarded and lodged
both the apprentices and paired workmen in the family rooms above the
shop and store”71), trainees were put through an impersonal training pro-
gramme. In modern economic models, education was conceived to be an
investment that carried risks, so individuals could conceive themselves as
accountable decision-makers.72 Friedman thought about income inequality
from the angle of preferences and choices, a view that garnered public
opinion, a shared belief that certain people were seemingly more rational
self-maximizers than others. Such views reflected the utilitarian assignment
of value to acts. Utilities and outcomes reformulated the question of natu-
ral and political equality.
Individualizing the problems of income inequality distracted attention
from the conditions of life in a country apprenticed in racial violence against
African Americans.73 Friedman diverted attention from justice as he ex-
plained equality in terms of buying power. Both the emphasis on markets,
that they reflect all relevant information and provide sufficient means for
competition, and the use of mathematical models in economics often lacked
attention to social justice. Meanwhile, there was growing faith placed in
Kuznets’s proposal that “income inequality would automatically decrease
in advance phases of capitalist development, regardless of economic policy
choices….”74 By the end of 1950s, citing Friedman’s work on preferences
and choices, Mincer acknowledged that “the emphasis of contemporary
research has been almost completely shifted from the study of the causes of
inequality to the study of the facts and of their consequences for various
aspects of economic activity, particularly consumer behaviour.”75 The at-
tention to “behaviour” of so-called “consumers” was narrowing the gap
between psychology, economics, and education as entirely separate disci-
plines. This focus also set in motion the use of “statistical techniques to
noneconomic data”76 to economize life itself, as Friedman later confessed.
In 1955, while making the case for the privatization of vocational and
professional education, Friedman coined the phrase “human capital.” For
support, he cited his own study and those conducted by Kuznets.77 In his
eyes, education played a dual but unifying force for the production of
citizen-workers. He saw education as training which could be improved if

it were only trusted to private enterprises, thereby mobilizing competition,
and encouraging innovation. Limiting the role of government in education,
allowing businessmen to rule the schools, and denationalizing education
would presumably widen the range of choices available to parents and in-
dividuals. He felt sure that a private enterprise governed by profit-seeking
interests had a better chance than government to reduce stratification.
Forty years later when discussing the voucher system, Friedman admitted
that vouchers by themselves would not change the education system. How-
ever, they “can promote rapid privatization” and “constitute a real incen-
tive for entrepreneurs” if “the acceptance of vouchers” comes free from
interference with “the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to ex-
plore and to innovate.”78 Here was a play of freedom and incentives. En-
trepreneurs were to enjoy unbounded freedom to experiment with public
education while the parents and children dealt with the choices made for
them. This treatment of freedom and incentives originated from Fried-
man’s position that the equality of opportunity should not be interpreted
literally. His misconceptions misled policymakers and diverted attention
from democratic education practices. Later, Becker and Becker clarified
that the “introduction of school vouchers primarily” was meant for the
“poor children.”79 The schools of the British empire have also been de-
signed for the education of the children of the poor, and their theories and
practices were appropriated in the colonies.
5.3 Economists dreaming of education

Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker supplemented Friedman and Kuznets’
assumptions. Aware of Marshall’s criticism of Fisher, Schultz opted for
Fisher’s definition that thought of humans as the form of capital that pos-
sessed capital and were possessed by it. Schultz thought “Marshall’s view
of capital” and his valuation of human had neglected whether the knowl-
edge, skill, and training provided by education is a national investment.80
Schultz acknowledged that the Cold War with the U.S.S.R had demanded
a change in the United States policies, and he thought that if people are “an
important part of the wealth of nations,” then education becomes “a spe-
cial priority.”81 The policies that target education were not separable from
the Cold War. They aimed at generating economic growth to combat po-
litical and military adversaries. Education was a consumption that con-
sumed the individual persons in order to increase their monetary output.
However, as an undertaking that required money, discipline, and time,
education was not to be considered as labour. Schultz relied on the distinc-
tions made between labour and capital by his predecessors. He criticized
conceiving labour based on time and wages for it projected a rigid
expectation on the worker. In his eyes, “not only bureaucrats and farmers
but also labourers, students, housewives and consumers are entrepre-
neurs.”82 Anticipating the gig economy, Schultz imagined a society in
which economic risks are naturalized as part of human life. His under-
standing of labour in terms of capital emphasized that the quality of labour
has improved over time. This improvement was due to labour’s depen-
dency on capital investments and technological improvements. Thus, the
entrepreneurial discourse that emphasized the human role in a dynamic
economy formulated human agency in terms of capital investment.
Schultz, who was a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study of the Be-
havioural Sciences and financially supported by the Ford Foundation dur-
ing 1956–1957, helps us to better understand the role of economics in
education. Schultz worked closely with Ralph Tyler, the director of the
Centre.83 Tyler’s work was responsible for the de-professionalization of
teachers by accountability measures and the movement of “principles” that
drained the school curriculum from academic and practical experiences by
linking objectives with assessment.84 Schultz acknowledged his debt to Ty-
ler before explaining the role of economics in education concerns examin-
ing major “inefficiencies in the way resources are used,” considering the
“relative factor prices,” calculating the “value of schooling,” and manag-
ing the “incentives” and the “earnings that students forgo.” Cognizant that
the intensifying intrusion of “efficiency experts” into education had under-
mined the “human factor,” Schultz believed that by “adopting new tech-
niques” and “new kinds of inputs… educational services” can improve
“economic output.”85 Evidently, the role of economics was to deemphasize
the “human factor” by prioritizing only the economic factors. The dis-
course of efficiency injected business values into education institutions.86
On another occasion, Schultz noted education’s commitments to train “re-
sponsible citizens” but then clarified what he meant by that phrasing:
“What is implied is that, in addition to achieving these cultural goals, some
kinds of education may improve the capabilities of a people as they work
and manage their affairs and that these improvements may increase the
national income.”87 Positioning humans at the service of the nation also
meant education may accomplish other objectives. Education “can be pure
consumption or pure investment, or it can serve both these purposes.”88
Education is a service that is conceptualized by market terminology. Edu-
cational values become competing goods and are given price tags.
Nationally, the relocation of productive forces from the United States, in
search of higher profits and also as a way to combat organized union de-
mands for fairer wages as well as life and work balance was not without
implications for rates of unemployment. The promotion of higher educa-
tion, advanced by human capital theorists, delayed entry into the labour
market, deferring the shock of relocations and automation. Even if the
factory employment had remained within the United States—which was

impossible given capitalists’ obsession with reducing costs and increasing
profits—it did not necessarily mean that the gross national product would
continue to increase at the same rate as it had during the Second World
War era. Human capacity for production, by itself, was not a sufficient
cause of economic growth. A combination of factors, including new means
of communication and mass schooling had led to increased economic pro-
duction, but these were supplementary to what William Petty had intro-
duced and Simon Kuznets developed: humans as central contributors to
national gross domestic product (GDP).
Consumer society vitalized an economy centred on human choices and
behaviours. There was also a contingent rapid shift from an economy
based on the production of goods to financialization of economic produc-
tivity whereby money (not labour) made money. According to Abramov-
itz, the increased productivity since the 1870s—withholding the effect of
population increase—was not due to “increase of labour input per head”
but to “the complex of little understood forces which caused productivity,
that is, output per unit of utilized resources.”89 Labour productivity had
increased. However, since the productivity, explained as output per indi-
vidual, fluctuated during the period of the late 19th and early 20th centu-
ries, Robert Solow proposed the one essential contributing factor to be
technical change, which directed the “slowdowns, speed ups, improve-
ments in the education of the labour force.”90 Technical changes followed
from investments and directed human capital development.
Schultz had observed that the transformation of labour in agriculture
was due to the growth of economic organization and investment in knowl-
edge.91 So, the growth of unemployment generated by the advancement of
machinery necessitated certain flexibility towards knowledge as a con-
sumptive good that produces certain humans. As a consumption education
is consigned to economic demands. Education’s ethical and political com-
mitment to public good is sidestepped as public imagination became ac-
customed to human capital theory’s emphasis on economic incentives.
Schultz felt the need to stress that the humans he deemed as a form of capi-
tal ought to trust the “political and legal institutions” that “have been
shaped to keep [hu]man free from bondage.”92 The previous chapter
showed, in reference to the Poor Laws, that the arbitrary use of power by
knowledge producers enabled political and legal reforms that erased elites’
obligations towards the economically vulnerable population. Schultz con-
sidered that conceiving humans as “akin to property” has a potential to
return to “slavery” and “bondage,” if legal protections were manipu-
lated.93 Bondage is a technical, legal, and economic term. It differs from
slavery: for the slave can exercise a degree of self-control. The slave was
used for his/her utility and this utility was reasoned to be beneficial to both
the master and the slave. But in bondage, even that minimal reciprocity is
reformulated by the logics of control and predictability. In the age of ongo-
ing connectivity, the problem is not only that humans become integrated
into the ecosystem of large technological corporations (i.e. Amazon, Ap-
ple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) in order to learn and labour. There
is also an element of bondage. The choice architects of these large busi-
nesses utilize behavioural feedback in their platforms to manipulate men-
tal, emotional, and physical processes in order to increase predictability
and profit. Slaves recognized their helpless position and, if they did not run
away, a punishable or suicidal decision, they accepted they were born to
secure the economy of the masters. Their labour did not serve their dignity
but served a socially constructed economy. For the liberal classical think-
ers, the conception of labour as an activity linked to human flesh offered
the defence of the right to oneself. As “social relations become the eco-
nomic system” humans become “the raw material for capital via data.”94
Human beings conceived as resources are consumed by information com-
munication technology (ICT) platforms and their data is used for profit.
This mode of profit making uses the technological doctrine of efficiency,
incorporates ideals of consumer society, and thrives on market rationality
to mediate and expand control on social relations.
Before the age of the Internet, the market approach to human develop-
ment had argued for revising social values such as democratic and respon-
sible government. For example, unlike Schultz, Gary Becker, held no faith
in “government intervention” for he imagined “an ideal democracy is very
similar to an ideal free enterprise system in the marketplace.”95 Becker
makes no mention that the market is undemocratically structured by eco-
nomic inequalities (and monopolies). He wanted the state to run as a busi-
ness firm but also as a business firm that subordinates public good to the
reign of private enterprise. Becker sounded convinced that even politicians
are for sale as they sell themselves to voters and interest groups. “Just as
managers of firms are hired,” Becker wrote, “so too are politicians and
bureaucrats assumed to be hired to further the collective interests of pres-
sure groups, who fire or repudiate them by election and impeachment
when they deviate excessively from these interests [the interests of the own-
ers].”96 He also thought voters’ “‘preferences’ can be manipulated” through
managing information and feeding them misinformation, all provided “by
interested pressure groups.”97 Becker and Murphy asserted that “people
cannot simply ‘choose’ the value they want, they must get values hard-
wired into preferences for them to be effective.”98 It is presumed that the
cost-benefit calculations are by themselves sufficient to legitimize the hard-
wiring of “norms,” “values,” and “habits” for certain ends, “especially
among children” since they are the group for whom the exchange is not
voluntary.99 This economic outlook conceived humans as hardwired to be
self-interested rational maximizers. In his book, Human Capital, Becker

explained this hardwiring in terms of specific and general training that
becomes an integral part of the human person.
5.4 Human capital and (ir)rationality

Becker began Human Capital with a citation from Marshall: “The most
valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings.”100 Becker stopped
where Marshall continued:
and of that capital the most precious part is the result of the care and
influence of the mother, so long as she retains her tender and unselfish
instincts, and has not been hardened by the strain and stress of unfemi-
nine work.101
Marshall characterized maternal care as an uncalculatable investment.

Becker’s economic approach to human behaviour included that which had
been free from economic calculation. The unselfish instinct recognized by
Marshall was later explained by Nel Noddings as “natural caring” and not
limited to mothers, but nonetheless associated with women’s emphasis upon
“subjectivity” and relationships.102 Marshall’s evaluation recognized that
economics could not quantify such caring activities. Becker reformulated
Marshall’s thesis and, under the influence of Schultz and Friedman, moved
towards reinterpreting familial relationships through the lens of the market
and the assumptions of rational choice theory.103 Marshall had recognized:
[I]n estimating the cost of production of efficient labour, we must often

take as our unit the family. At all events we cannot treat the cost of
production of efficient men as an isolated problem; it must be taken as
part of broader problem of the cost of production of efficient men to-
gether with the women who are fitted to make their homes happy, and
to bring up their children vigorous in body and mind, truthful and
cleanly, gentle and brave.104
Marshall understood human character in relation to other cultural activi-

ties aside from work. He also had thought that in paying workers “high
wages and in caring for their happiness and culture, the liberal employer
confers benefits which do not end with his generation” but extend to their
“children.”105 Here is an acknowledgement of caring again. Marshall
showed that the utilitarian calculus need not be sadistic, analyzing human
relations only on the basis of maximizing profits.
In contrast, Becker focused on individuals and families as utility maxi-
mizers. Part of Becker’s effort in introducing “utility functions” was to
connect the “utility of the parents” and their consumption to the “utility
of each child,” reformulating parental care towards children as utility
functions.106 The implication was to subtract attention from public welfare
as the responsibility of the government and employers. For Becker, welfare
is governed by private wealth and resources. For example, people invest in
education to maximize their existing resources. This is often due to their
expectation of future returns; as a result, the “young people have a greater
incentive to invest because they can collect the return over more years.”107
And so Becker thought that: “Women spend less time in the labour force
than men and therefore, have less incentive to invest in market skills.”108
He thought that the priority to invest is based on age and gender. By Beck-
er’s logic, individuals and families became business firms who calculated
their returns when deciding to fall in love, get married, and care for their
children. “The increasing importance of human capital dramatizes the
realm of family life. Much as we like to think of ourselves as producers, we
are, ourselves, produced.”109
Becker also revised employers’ responsibilities as stated by Marshall. On
various occasions, Becker had stressed that “the trainees, not the firms …
bear the cost, … [e]mployees pay for general on-the-job training by receiv-
ing wages below what they could receive elsewhere.”110 Moreover, busi-
nesses “shift training costs to trainee and have an incentive to do so when
faced with competition for their services.”111 Faced with competition, fi-
nancial incentives determined the ethics of employers. Becker showed that
employees, in one way or another, pay for the cost of general or specific
training—training aimed at making them more productive for the firms—
through low wages and additional work hours. Becker thought that
“school can be defined as an institution specializing in the production of
training,” adding: “School and firms are often substitute sources of par-
ticular skills.”112 It can be inferred that he wanted children to cover the
cost of their education.
For Becker, human “learning” was to be “treated symmetrically with
other investments.”113 There are two modalities of learning at play. One is
the statistical and computational learning that belongs to the convention of
investment finance. Second, closely knitted to the first, is psychological be-
haviourism. Both came together in their acceptance of logical positivism
that nurtured anti-metaphysical approach.114 In Becker’s model the “ratio-
nal person would invest only” if the expected rate of return and the risks
associated with the investment made economic sense.115 The rational per-
son is rational in-so-far as s/he engages in such calculations. Individuals “or
society choose learning only if it is a sufficiently good investment,” Becker
thought, “the conclusion must be that learning is a way to invest in human
capital that is formally no different from education, on-the-job training, or
other recognized investments.”116 Unlike Marshall, Becker was not
suggesting that it is capital which is invested in humans. The actual invest-

ment is in training people to learn to become certain beings. This is the in-
vestment wherein humans become a form of capital. This conception of
learning abandons the idea that knowledge is important for its own sake.
The notion of learning as becoming human capital is often neglected, for
its emphasis is on incentivizing education by the prospects of rewards in
the unforeseen future. The “learning” Becker had in mind was derived
from Bush and Mosteller’s Stochastic Models for Learning, a book that
describes the applications of probability and mathematical laws for mak-
ing people and machines learn by reliance on behavioural technologies.
Bush and Mosteller acknowledged that they “have been strongly influ-
enced by the Hullian and Guthrian schools thought” and that their “ap-
proach is similar to Skinner’s….”117 Behaviourism had developed from the
works of Ivan Pavlov, Edward Thorndike, and Burrhus F. Skinner, whose
experimental participants were dogs, cats, and pigeons. In this manner, hu-
man learning was informed by experiments on animals’ learning before it
extended to the education of children. Pavlov showed that manipulation by
a technician can induce certain responses from a dog. A dog in bondage
became attentive to his food as a stimulus which was accompanied by a bell
applied before its delivery. Over time, the sound elicited the conditioned
response, the dog’s saliva. This proved that, by association, the dog had in-
ternalized an order. This is important for if one postulates that the dog
learned in the human’s sense of the word that would mean that the dog
understands the intent of the bell, as does the experimenter. Or it might lead
to indicating that the experimenter attempted to teach the idea of the bell to
the dog. Nevertheless, the pain animals experienced informed the lives of
the controller and the controlee.
At the start of the 20th century, Edward Thorndike suspected that the
study of animal “behaviour” would enable him learn something about the
“mental development of young children” and by this association “the cha-
otic dream of early childhood” came under the “the logical world-view of
the adult scientist.”118 By studying animals under certain conditions,
Thorndike speculated that animals learn “as man so commonly does, by
the indirect connection of a response with a situation.”119 The Chain of
Being from God down to animal—humans were located in the middle—
was displaced by the indirect connection between animals and children.
Thorndike was not alone, the primacy of stimuli—and the prospect of in-
centive—was vital to behaviourists’ locus of control, in which the experi-
menter focused on desired ends. All parties, including the experimenter,
learned by incentives.
As a movement, behaviourism normalized data-driven practices and the
incentivization of social processes. Becker’s economic approach (to behav-
iours) sought to show how economic variables—including incentives—can
impact learning in controlled and uncontrolled environments. He stayed

committed to Bentham’s behaviourism and to utilitarianism, supplementing
these by considering individual and social “interactions.”120 He assumed
that humans possess “stable preferences” and “accumulate… information
and other inputs” from the “markets” in order to “maximize” their util-
ity.121 Information (as a stimulus) directed choices, preferences, and activi-
ties, and also reframed assumptions about human agency and ethics.
Becker adapted Bentham’s legacy to “all kind of behaviours,” determin-
ing “what we ‘shall’ do as well as to what we ‘ought’ to do.”122 According
to Long the social implications of Bentham’s philosophy gained renewed
force in behavioural technologies during the Cold War:
Long after Bentham’s proposal for a fresh ‘scientific’ analysis of human

motivation and a corresponding technology of environmental manipu-
lation at the sociopolitical level had fallen on unreceptive ears, the cry
for the creation of a ‘science of human behavior’ has in our own genera-
tion been raised once more by B.F. Skinner… [for] a behavioral technol-
ogy comparable in power and precision to physical and biological
technology.123
Bentham’s philosophy influenced the “standard of judgment.”124 Long’s ob-

servations extend to those whose constructs of social welfare rely on nudges
and choice architectures so certain individuals in power can influence the
behaviours of others.125 Skinner suspected that it was a “philosophy of hu-
man nature which has been useful in implementing” the modern notion of
democracy, “its method of control” requiring “very little engineering” but
“[t]hrough a masterful piece of misinterpretation, the illusion is fostered
that these procedures do not involve the control of behavior”; they are sim-
ply a matter of “getting someone to change his mind.”126 Skinner alluded to
break “the illusion” of the conception of choice when he wrote: “The gov-
ernment manipulates variables which alter the behavior of the governed and
is defined in terms of its power to do so. The change in behavior of the
governed supplies a return reinforcement to the government….”127 He
added that he was writing of systems which “may be as simple as a strong
man taking property from the weaker members of a group or as complex
as a modern government embarking upon educational program[s], which
will generate the skilled manpower it needs.”128 Skinner’s behaviourism
was aligned with economistic deployments of educational programmes to
generate what the strong man and the state desired: A form of capital that
learned and laboured for incentives. According to Aldous Huxley, Skin-
ner’s treatise, Science and Human Behavior, “is solidly based upon facts.
But unfortunately, the facts belong to so limited a class.”129 Huxley’s refer-
ence was to Big Government and Big Business and their increased use of
behavioural sciences to govern the masses. Huxley’s comment reflects the

cultural movement in Anglo-American social sciences, including econom-
ics, to both explain and direct human behaviour to pre-conceived ends
(e.g., economic growth).
Becker thought of his “economic approach” as “a valuable unified
framework for understanding all human behaviour,” by which he viewed
humans as maximizers of their utility by accumulating “information and
other inputs in a variety of markets.”130 This economic behaviourism and
its assumptions fell under growing scrutiny by psychologists. For example,
Richard Herrnstein acknowledged utilitarianism as the “common intellec-
tual ancestors to modern psychologists and economists” and noted Ben-
tham’s pain and pleasure principles “continue to be the flywheel of
behavioral and social science, as well as of political, moral and legal phi-
losophy.”131 Recognizing “the possibility of peculiar and self-destructive
utility functions,” Herrnstein worried they can “lead to maladaptive be-
havior,” warning “that people may need help in their pursuit of subjective
satisfaction” and “objective well-being.”132 The help offered assumed that
psychology was a more suitable science than economics to comment on
(and command) human behaviours. As “descendants of Bentham,” Her-
rnstein agreed with Becker on “the primacy of pain and pleasure” as the
basis for “social science” to design social institutions.133 However, Herrn-
stein’s case for the adaptation of the “inductive” method of psychology to
formal structures of economic theory followed his recognition that: “Be-
havioural psychology has searched for the processes that control behav-
iour, rather than” being distracted by “equilibria” and processes that
“might produce” it.134 Herrnstein was transparent about the goals of be-
havioural psychology: Controlling humans. According to Blakely, social
sciences “competing theoretical instantiations may be read as expressive of
a particular kind of modern ethical self, one that is technocratic and ma-
nipulative in its dealings with others.”135 Social sciences of psychology and
economics conjured forth the human being they interpreted.
The applications of psychology to economics showed little interest in
improving social ethics. It rebutted the overgeneralized theses (of Becker,
Friedman, and Schultz) that humans always optimize their utility, act ra-
tionally to achieve their self-interests, and maintain stable preferences.
This literature followed the works of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tver-
sky, whose psychological research on judgement and decision making
studied human subjects under uncertain conditions.136 Their findings
trimmed the overgeneralized notion of humans as self-interested utility
maximizers. When Kahneman and Tversky began their collaborations they
focused on subjective probability, but as they moved away from psychol-
ogy to economics in the 1980s, they began to acknowledge Herbert Si-
mon’s efforts to
replace the global rationality of economic man with a kind of rational

behavior that is compatible with the access to information and the com-
putational capacity that are actually possessed by organisms, including
man, in the kinds of environments in which organism exist.137
Unlike Becker, who thought that humans accumulate an optimal amount

of information and other inputs from markets to self-maximize, Simon
thought humans self-managed according to the available information. Si-
mon had turned to psychology—when it was beginning to become inter-
mingled with information-processing metaphors—to examine learning
phenomena as an essential avenue to remodel global rationality. He agreed
with behavioural psychologists concerning conditioning principles govern-
ing an organism’s (human, animal, and machine) action, but instead looked
into information-processing capacities under certain conditions.
Certain imposed conditions allowed Simon to find that human “ratio-
nality is very limited, very much bounded by the situation and by human
computational powers.”138 This bounded rationality constituted a different
approach to reason. Becker’s defence of rationality had accepted a degree
of inefficiency and even irrationality in economic agents. In one instance
Becker wrote, “that economic theory is much more compatible with irra-
tional behavior than had been previously suspected.”139 Irrational behav-
iour was infused into the overall body of economic theory, evident in the
idea that “the market would act as if ‘it’ were rational not only when
household, [individuals and firms] were rational, but also when they were
inert, impulsive, or otherwise irrational.”140 Becker regarded rationality as
subject to the standards of judgement held; it was stable as far as it bent
backward to meet changing demands. Becker’s faith on economic individu-
alism conveyed that humans’ rationality is reflective of their ability to ad-
just themselves to market demands and to digest (mis)information in order
to maximize utility and satisfy their preferences. The phrase “as if” intro-
duces a flexibility so that irrational decisions can become rationalized.
Markets act as a representative of accepted rationality. And firms act to
survive competition by planning and executing profit-maximizing behav-
iours. Even when demonstrating a variety of irrational behaviours, they
nonetheless calculate demand conditions and change production to maxi-
mize profit. For Becker, “the irrational units”—be it households, firms, or
individuals—are “‘forced… to respond rationally.”141 Becker explained
human rationality in terms of market forces and contributing factors in-
cluded access to information, personal background, and economic talent.
Simon considered the “as if” processes explained by Becker had ne-
glected how people go about making decisions and had failed to explain
the mechanisms of variations and selections. He thought “survival” is gov-
erned by adaptation but not necessarily optimization. Simon wanted us to
“speak of the survival of the fitter rather than the survival of the fittest.”142
The central mechanism in his approach is the competition for niches, since
humans developed altruism and aggression due to environmental demands.
Simon found humans’ survival depended on their programmability to
think and learn. “Programmability is also conducive to social existence
and most effectively exploited in social environments rather than [in] an
isolated one,” Simon elaborated humans’ “susceptibility to accepting pro-
grams under social influence and pressure,”143 which he called docility.
Docility is a valued trait for it is part of adapting to a culture. Docility as-
sists in acquiring transmitted traits; Simon suggested, “extensive borrow-
ing by competing groups can be prevented,” and provided the example of
colonization: “The European conquest of North America provides perhaps
the clearest example of this process in modern times.”144 The example of
European conquest admitted that the conquerors were possessed by the
illusion of the “superior fitness” over their own kind and those they con-
quered were in possession of “strong altruism: unrequited sacrifice of fit-
ness for the benefit of other organisms.”145 Simon was providing revisions
to the history of homo economicus and the overall theory of political econ-
omy Smith and Malthus had postulated. Survival comes at the expense of
competition; it is enforced by “processes of specialization and niche elabo-
ration”146 that made the dominance of colonizers non-competing. Once
“again the treatment of Indigenous people gave expression to a range of
colonial ideas about how best to privatize, register, and protect private
property and how to organize commercial transactions among individuals,
corporations and government.”147 Simon’s work concerned administration
of behaviours to attain organizational ends for corporations and
government.
For Simon, individuals should not be left to themselves; if public and
private governing bodies are involved in investing, they ought to be in-
volved in the design of things to ensure efficiency, accuracy, and predict-
ability in outcomes. Social engineering refined its gaze into education
institutions.148 And Simon’s reformulation of learning remained central:
“Individual learning in organizations is very much a social, not a solitary,
phenomenon,” Simon asserted, and yet he thought “[a]ll learning takes
place inside individual heads.”149 His work on computers had convinced
Simon to think of the human brain as a device that is reprogrammable to
adopt to organizations’ values. Organizations exploit rewards, hierarchies,
and networks to lead individuals to abandon their personal values and re-
formulate their choices to meet administrated demands.150 Simon preferred
an inductive approach to incentives that began with “money and goods”
but expanded to personal comfort, pride, and satisfaction to influence hu-
mans to abandon their will and accept an organization’s values. Simon
found that socialization builds “conformity to habitual practices and
attitudes” desired by administrators of the organization. Simon postulated

that any group is organized around value and factual elements; if there is
difficulty in separating the two, it becomes a task of the organized bureau-
cracy to make its “participants behave in terms of organizational values to
a sufficient extent.”151 What is at stake is not simply a change of opinion
but “long-range, cumulative influences that are internalized and become
part of their outlooks and personalities.”152 While Becker trusted markets
as a source for value creation, he also, similar to Simon, admitted that or-
ganizational values ought to be hardwired through training. Both ap-
proaches pave the way for social engineering.
The notion of information and inputs occupied both Simon and Becker
and the concepts of environment remained as an ambiguous ground for
their theories and experiments. According to Pinar, the “‘environment’”
had been for a “long-time term of preference for a social and behavioural
science that has too often stripped history and culture from its efforts to
understand what it observes,” neglecting “ever-widening circles of signifi-
cance.”153 In this respect, Simon’s desire “to replace” a concept and treat it
as an object speaks to his conception of rationality as a possession. And, as
any possession, it was vulnerable to scrutiny, theft, replacement, and con-
trol. While Becker’s assumptions concerning the human capacity to maxi-
mize utility and seek self-interests were scrutinized by Simon, humans
remained hostage to an economic approach and incentivizing logic that he,
along with Friedman and Schultz, advocated.
In his Nobel Laureate lecture, Becker characterized his “indebtedness to
Milton Friedman” as “unlimited.”154 Friedman and Schultz were not Beck-
er’s PhD supervisors, but their approach encouraged his thinking to apply
an economic approach to societal issues. For example, Friedman and
Schultz were responsible for putting forward how the question of discrimi-
nation may be addressed by economists. The question became the topic of
Becker’s doctoral dissertation; Becker
associate[ed] with each person a taste for discrimination. This taste or

prejudice would be measured based on how much income an employer
is willing to forfeit in order to avoid hiring somebody who he didn’t like
from a group that he didn’t like….155
Such calculations applied market mentality to racism and failed to address

ethical conduct. Becker rationalized that the market may facilitate a taste
for discrimination as much as it may hamper discrimination under certain
conditions. Becker also recalled that, in his first presentation on human
capital theory at the annual meeting of the American Economic Associa-
tion in late 1950s, discussants “were absolutely outraged,”156 by his treat-
ment of education as a commodity. The first time he explained his economic
analysis of the family, making “an analogy” between the demand for chil-
dren by parents and the demand for durable consumer goods, “everyone
started laughing.”157 But in the face of disapproval and ridicule, Friedman
defended Becker. Little had changed by 1992, when Becker received the
Nobel Prize in economics; his work remained contested in Western Eu-
rope. In private, he was told there were members of the Nobel Prize com-
mittee who did not want to award him. Moreover, he was informed that
the public announcement of his award had brought protesters into the
streets. Despite these facts, Becker felt that the “prestige and financial re-
wards” provided “validation” that “the economic approach to human be-
haviour is acceptable work and that we are doing real economics.”158 Was
Becker doing real economics? Or real economics was altered after 40 years
of neoclassical economics?
In the third edition of Human Capital, Becker confessed the “long sub-
title” for the first edition was composed to gain acceptance for the idea of
treating education as an augmentation of labour power and to protect him
from the common criticism that he was “treating people like slaves or ma-
chines.”159 However, by the time of the third edition, there was little need
for protection. The language of human capital was circulating beyond the
field of economics and beyond the United States. What was it that drew
politicians, nationalists, school principals, academics, and journalists to
the phrase? The concept of human capital had become a “good rationale
for obtaining public monies,” and, according to Becker, “this partly ex-
plains its success.”160 The logic of obtaining money had influenced the
standard of judgement in the United States. Categorizing humans as under-
developed, developed, and used resources also had implications for mate-
rialistic ideology of nation states. The theory helped nations to calculate
the costs involved in producing a product: Human capital.
5.5 Human capital: contradictions

The proponents of the human capital theory were transparent about three
things. First, Milton Friedman openly acknowledged the “deterioration”
of the “education system” in the United States after four decades of incor-
porating human capital policies.161 And Friedman recognized that the
“technological and political revolution threaten advanced countries with
serious social conflict arising from a widening”162 income gap, but failed to
recognize the diversions from the moral economy as a condition of social
conflict. Second, Becker did not leave out the possibility of “disinvesting”
in humans for the sake of maximizing economic outputs.163 Third, Schultz
found knowledge production as an important part of training humans to
become certain kinds of social animals—entrepreneurs, who could not “es-
cape” the economic measures dominating their private and public life.164
The internalization of the economistic conceptions of social life had a

gradual global impact, leading to teachers and students being conceived
“as commodities.”165 Did an economic approach to human development
foster equality, freedom, and democracy?
According to Piketty, “since the 1970s income inequality has increased
significantly in the rich countries, especially [in] the United States.”166
While “net private wealth” had increased, so had the “burden of national
debt” owed by future generations.167 While inequality has been reduced at
the global level, it continues to grow in the rich countries. According to
Piketty, inequalities in education contribute to inequalities in opportunities
and there is little evidence that human capital policies have increased inter-
generational mobility.168 Piketty found that investment in education is vital
for social development, but he rejected the assumption that “the progress
of technological rationality is supposed to lead automatically to the tri-
umph of human capital over financial capital and real estate.”169 Without
democratic governance “economic rationality” by itself won’t “automati-
cally give rise to democratic rationality.”170 Democratic rationality consid-
ers human participation in decisions and processes that concerns social
life. In the face of revisions to the rational and utility-maximization thesis
of proponents of human capital theory, economic approaches to human
life continue to participate in the treatment of humans as properties, com-
manded by technologies that have incorporated behavioural techniques to
control and expropriate human life.171
Notes
1 Talcott Williams, “Competition as a safeguard to National Welfare,” The An-
nals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 42, (1912): 74.
2 Eric Amesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Strug-
gle for Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). From
the Civil War to the Civil Right movement of the 1940s, African American
railroad workers continued asking the juridical institutions (that Williams
praised) for equality and justice as they suffered unfair employment
practices.
3 Edward Berman, Labor and the Sherman Act (New York: Harper, 1930). The
Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 was passed to eliminate the evils of trusts and
business monopolies. The act was intended to punish illegal trusts and not the
labour unions. However,
[f]rom 1890 until the Supreme Court, on March 22, 1897, rendered its first
decision under the statue against a business combination, the lower federal
courts had held in only one case that such a combination had violated the
law. On the other hand, they had, during the same period, declared certain
activities of labour unions to be violations of the act on twelve different
occasions.
(p. 3)
4 Alan Greenspan, “Antitrust,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, ed. Ayn

Rand (New York: New American Library, 1966), 58.
5 Ibid., 59.
6 Ibid., 60.
7 Ibid., 61. Ayn Rand’s fictions claimed regulations were an “assault on integ-
rity” of businessmen. She influenced generations of conservative politicians in
the United States who neglected the common good.
8 Richard A. Posner, “Conglomerate Mergers and Antitrust Policy: An Intro-
duction,” St. John’s Law Review 44 (1969): 532.
9 Richard A. Posner, “Value and Consequences: An Introduction to Economic
Analysis of Law,” Chicago Working Papers in Law and Economics 53 (1998):
1–13. Posner’s advocacy of removal of the anti-trust laws worked towards giv-
ing employers more “control” over the use of “human capital” (p. 9). See Gary
S. Becker and Richard A. Posner, Uncommon Sense: Economic Insight from
Marriage to Terrorism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009). Posner wrote:
Privatization is a perennial issue in economics… The issue reflects the fact
that there is no hard-and-fast line between the provision of services by
government and by the private sector, and that private provision of services
is generally more efficient than public because political interference is less.
(p. 291)
In acknowledging the “long history of mercenaries,” Posner pressed that the
“non-American employed by private security companies in Iraq are mercenar-
ies. … Instead of just providing weapons and recruits, why not let the private
market provide entire military formation?” (p. 292).
10 Richard A. Posner, The Economics of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1981), 40.
11 Ibid., 42.
12 Ibid., 115.
13 Ibid., 115. See also Richard A. Posner, “Utilitarianism, Economics, and Legal
Theory,” The Journal of Legal Studies 8, no. 1 (1979): 103–40.
14 Gary S. Becker, “Underinvestment in College Education?” The American Eco-
nomic Review 50, no. 20, 1960): 346.
15 Ibid., 352.
16 Ibid., 343–4.
17 William F. Pinar, ed. International Handbook of Curriculum Studies (New
York: Routledge, 2014). Authors from Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, It-
aly, Mexico, Turkey and Portugal make references to the adverse impact of
human capital theory on educational practices and policies. See also Joel
Spring, Economization of Education: Human Capital, Global Corporations,
Skills-Based Schooling (New York: Routledge, 2015).
18 Jeremy Bentham, A Manual of Political Economy (McMaster: University Ar-
chive for the History of Economic Thought, 1843), 43 and 45.
19 Jeremy Bentham, “A Manual of Political Economy,” in Jeremy Bentham’s
Economic Writings, Vol 1, ed. Verner Stark (London: Routledge, 2004), 260.
Bentham had elaborated on the second mode of labour, “the mode of carry-
ing” the labour of others from schools to workshops.
20 Verner Stark, “Introduction,” in Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, Vol
1, ed. Verner Stark (London: Routledge, 2004). Stark noted the first definition
was “the classical one; but the latter had its attractions for the left-wingers
among the economists… Bentham showed that he was a liberal with a
difference, and not a blind doctrinaire” (p. 53). Bentham’s ideas for competi-
tion extended to the bankers and “all monied men” and had proposed a 20%
tax on their profits (p. 77).
21 Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, The Positive Theory of Capital, trans. William
Smart (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co, 1923), 32–33.
22 Ibid., 38.
23 Ibid., 71.
24 Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest: A Critical History of Eco-
nomic Theory, trans. William Smart (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), 264.
25 Ibid., 264.
26 William Smart, “Translator’s Preface,” in Capital and Interest: A Critical His-
tory of Economic Theory, trans. William Smart (New York: Brentano’s,
1922), xii. Böhm-Bawerk rejected the Abstinence theory, production theory
and the exploitation theory.
27 Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, “Karl Marx and the Close of his System,” in Karl
Marx and the Close of His System & Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx, ed.
Paul M. Sweezy (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), 67.
We can, by a combination of induction and deduction, much used in our
science, investigate the motives which direct people in carrying on the busi-
ness of exchange and in determining the exchange prices on the one hand,
and on the other hand which guide them in their co-operation in
production….
(pp. 66–67)
28 Ibid., 68–69.
29 Smart, “Translator’s Preface,” xv.
30 Böhm-Bawerk, The Positive Theory of Capital, 66–67. Bentham was one of
the English writers that was concerned with the subsistence of the. He was
also concerned with over accumulation of capital. His position was different
from those of William Goodwin (1756–1836) who had argued for instituting
“equal property” in order to diminish the “evil propensity of man.” Goodwin
questioned the benefits of “accumulating property for the purpose of obtain-
ing some kind of ascendancy over the mind of our neighbours” and diagnosed
an unbound right to accumulation will be “contrary to the general good” (p.
437). See William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1793/2013).
31 Larry J. Sechrest, “Alan Greenspan: Rand, Republicans, and Austrian Crit-
ics,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6, no. 2 (2005): 271–97.
32 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Institute of Economic
Affairs, 1944/2001), 67.
33 Ibid., 67.
34 Ibid., 45.
35 Ibid., 60.
36 Ibid., 60.
37 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Pure Theory of Capital (London: MacMillan and
Co., 1941), 56–57.
38 Ibid., 60.
39 Michel Feher, “Self-appreciation; or, the Aspirations of Human Capital,”
Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 21–41.
40 Joseph S. Nicholson, “The Living Capital of the United Kingdom,” The Eco-
nomic Journal 1, no. 1 (1891): 97.
41 Ibid., 100. Nicholson (1891) acknowledged that “some allowance must be

made for the people themselves (apart from their wealth producing power)—
the difficulty” was “to determine the most reasonable measure” (p. 103).
42 Geoffrey Crowther, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Claremont: Clare-
mont College, 1957).
43 Irving Fisher, “What Is Capital?” The Economic Journal 6, no. 24 (1896):
509–34. Fisher was cognizant of Böhm-Bawerk’s view that “capital is not ‘lent’
at interest but sold for interest” (p. 515). Although Fisher partially agreed with
this view, he found it incomplete. Fisher (1906) distinguished labour from
work: “The work is objective; the labour is subjective. Properly speaking, an
employer does not pay man for his labour, but for his work” (p. 175).
44 Nathalie Sigot, “Jevons’s Debt to Bentham: Mathematical Economy, Morals
and Psychology,” The Manchester School 70, no. 2 (2002): 262–78.
45 Irving Fisher, The Nature of Capital and Income (London: MacMillan Com-
pany, 1906), 57.
46 Ibid.,107.
47 Ibid., 43. Eugen Böhm-Bawerk (1923) had arrived at the same conclusion.
48 Ibid., 51.
49 Bruce, Moghtader, “Human Capital and Education of Desires After Michel
Foucault,” Journal of Self-Governance and Management Economics 5, no. 4
(2017): 35–52.
50 Ibid., 184.
51 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (New York: Palgrave Mc-
Millian, 2013), 112. The “mistake” of Herbert Spencer and those who fol-
lowed him was that they supposed “that life is for working, instead of working
for life” (p. 112).
52 Ibid., 113.
53 Ibid., 650.
54 Irving Fisher, “Precedents for Defining Capital,” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics 18, no. 3 (1904): 387–88; Alfred Marshall, “Distribution and Ex-
change,” The Economic Journal 8, no. 29 (1898): 37–59.
55 Irving Fisher, “Precedents for Defining Capital,” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics 18, no. 3 (1904): 386–408.
56 Alfred Marshall, “Distribution and Exchange,” The Economic Journal 8, no.
29 (1898): 56.
57 Friedrich Zahn, “Economic Value of Man—Is It an Object of Statistics?”
Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics 1, no. 4 (1934): 428–29.
58 John R. Walsh, “Capital Concept Applied to Man,” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics 49, no. 2 (1935): 276.
59 Ibid., 284.
60 Ibid., 285
61 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 76. In this respect, Marshall noted
that no other successor matches Bentham’s contribution to economics.
62 Ibid., 629.
63 For example, in early standardized tests, such as Intelligence Quotient tests,
statistics offered individuals an understanding of themselves by comparing
them to the average score of a sample population. The test was used, and simi-
lar tests continue to be developed, in order to establish social categories for
educational placement, assessing disabilities and evaluating job applicants.
The statistical apparatus also gave form to conceptualizing education in rela-
tion to income distributions.
64 Harold Innis, Political Economy in the Modern State (Toronto: The Ryerson
Press, 1946).
65 Milton Friedman and Simon Kuznets, Income from Independent Professional
Practice (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1945/1954),
12.
66 Ibid., 21
67 Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Harvest
Book, 1990), 132. Friedman’s attack on control concerns his political favou-
ritism of the conservative party. Friedman stated that
the Democratic party of the United States has the chief instrument for
strengthening the government power which Jefferson and many of his con-
temporaries viewed as the greatest threat to democracy. And it has striven
to increase government power in the name of a concept of ‘equality’ that is
almost opposite of the concept of Jefferson identified with liberty and Toc-
queville with democracy.
(p. 131)
Politically motivated, Friedman pressed that “equality of opportunity” should
not be “interpreted literally” (p. 132).
68 Ibid., 133.
69 Malcolm Rutherford, The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics,
1918–1947: Science and Social Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 19. “The emergence of institutionalism as a defined and self-
aware movement in American economics can be dated to the period around
the end of World War 1” (p. 53). The
institutionalists were active in the development of institutions of education
and research in economics. Institutionalists were not only associated with
the NBER, but also with the Institute of Economics, The New School for
Social Research, the Brookings Graduate School, the Social Science Re-
search Council, and with other programs of education and research. In
these endeavors, institutionalists were able to gain the substantial support
of Foundations such as Rockefeller.
(p. 52)
70 Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberal-
ism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 28.
71 Ellwood P. Cubberley, A Brief History of Education: A History of Practice
and Progress and Organization of Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1922), 109.
72 Milton Friedman, “Choice, Chance, and the Personal Distribution of In-
come,” Journal of Political Economy 61, no. 4 (1953): 277–90; Milton Fried-
man and Leonard J. Savage. “The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk,”
Journal of Political Economy 56, no. 4 (1948): 279–304.
73 William F. Pinar, The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynch-
ing, Prison Rape, and the Crisis of Masculinity (New York: Peter Lang, 2001),
210–14. “Before emancipation, the lynching of slaves occurred only in excep-
tional circumstances, as the economic interests of slaveholders ran counter to
mob violence” (p. 169). Pinar documents, mob violence grew after emancipa-
tion and by 1893 and: “Statistical data suggest that lynchings in cotton-produc-
ing regions occurred when the need for labour was greatest” (p. 211).
74 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2014), 11. According to Piketty, Kuznets’ interpretations of
the statistical income data of 1913 to 1948 “was a product of the Cold War”
(p. 14). Piketty wrote: “Since the 1970s, income inequalities have increased
significantly in the rich countries, especially the United States” (p. 15).
75 Jacob Mincer, “Investment in Human Capital and Personal Income Distribu-
tion,” Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 4 (1958): 281–302.
76 Milton Friedman, “Milton Friedman,” in Lives of the Laureates: Twenty-
Three Nobel Economists, ed. William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2009), 73. See also: Spencer H. Banzhaf “Retrospectives: The
Cold-War Origins of the Value of Statistical Life,” The Journal of Economic
Perspectives 28, no. 4 (2014): 213–26.
77 Milton Friedman, “The role of Government in Education,” in Economics and
the Public Interest, ed. Robert A. Solo (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
1955). Human capital was yet not a theory; in fact, he reflected on the “im-
perfection” of the capital market in the investment in human beings.
78 Milton Friedman, “Public Schools: Make Them Private,” Education Econom-
ics 5, no. 3 (1997): 341–44. Forty years later while writing about privatiza-
tion of education, Friedman resorted to his authority when he argued for a
voucher system to face off the “serious social conflict arising from a widening
gap” in “income” (p. 341).
79 Gary S. Becker and Guity N. Becker, The Economics of Life (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1997), 6.
80 Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Man: An Economist’s view,” Social Ser-
vice Review 33, no. 2 (1959): 111–12.
81 Ibid., 109.
82 Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Entrepreneurial Ability,” The Scandina-
vian Journal of Economics 82, no. 4 (1980): 437.
83 Theodore W. Schultz, The Economic Value of Education (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1963), viii.
For some purposes ‘schooling’ and ‘education’ are interchangeable, but for
other purposes a concept is required to represent the activities that are an
integral part of teaching and learning of students, and another concept to
represent particular a function for the educational establishment.
(p. 3)
84 William F. Pinar, Curriculum Studies in the United States: Present Circum-
stance, Intellectual Histories (New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2012). Ralph W.
Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1949). See William F. Pinar (2013), “Plagiarism and the ‘Tyler
rationale’,” Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Cur-
riculum 9, no. 2 (2013): 1–13.
85 Schultz, The Economic Value of Education, 12–13.
86 Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1962).
87 Theodore W. Schultz, “Capital Formation by Education,” Journal of Political
Economy 68, no. 6 (1960): 572.
88 Ibid., 571.
89 Moses Abramovitz, “Resource and Output Trends in the United States Since
1870,” National Bureau of Economic Research (1956): 6.
90 Robert M. Solow, “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Func-

tion,” Review of Economics and Statistics 39, no. 3 (1957): 312–20.
91 Theodore W. Schultz, The Economic Organization of Agriculture (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1953). In discussing “the declining economic importance of
agricultural land,” Schultz mentioned “that advances in techniques, improve-
ment in skills, use of more capital and better organization have been about as
applicable to agricultural production as to the production in the rest of the
economy” (p. 125). Becker (1994) reminds us: “Compelling evidence of the
link between human capital and technology comes from agriculture…. Educa-
tion and training are also helpful in coping with changing technologies” (p.
25). Becker clarified what he means by education does not deal with knowl-
edge passed on from “parents to children.”
92 Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Man: An Economist’s View,” 110.
93 Ibid., 110.
94 Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is
Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Redwood City:
Stanford University Press, 2019), 117.
95 Gary S. Becker “Competition and Democracy,” The Journal of Law & Eco-
nomics 1 (1958): 106. “It may be preferable not to regulate economic mo-
nopolies and to suffer their bad effects, rather than to regulate them and suffer
the effects of political imperfections” (p. 109).
96 Gary S. Becker, “Theory of Competition among Pressure Groups for Political
Influence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 98, no. 3 (1983): 396.
97 Ibid., 392. Becker, later, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from
George W. Bush.
98 Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy, Social Economics: Market Behavior in
a Social Environment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 144.
99 Ibid.,145.
100 Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with
Special Reference to Education (New York: Columbia University Press,
1964).
101 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 469.
102 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984). According to Noddings, care concerns “reciproc-
ity” which— is not an exchange or “contract” (pp. 4–6).
103 Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1993). The market approach is applied to a household as a business
enterprise.
104 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 469. In the footnote to this, Marshall ac-
knowledged William Petty for his conceptualization of human capital.
105 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 670.
106 See Gary S. Becker and Robert J. Barro “A Reformulation of the Economic
Theory of Fertility,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 103, no. 1 (1988):
1–25; Gary S. Becker, Kevin M. Murphy and Robert Tamura, “Human Capi-
tal, Fertility, and Economic Growth,” Journal of Political Economy, 98, no.
5 (1990): 12–37.
107 Gary S. Becker, Human Capital, A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with
Special Reference to Education (New York: Columbia University Press,
1964), 50.
108 Ibid., 51.
109 Folbre, Greed, Lust & Gender, 301.
110 Becker, Human Capital, 1st ed., 12–13. Those who put others to work were un-
der no obligation to bear the costs of specific training and/or general training.
111 Ibid., 18/22.
112 Ibid., 29.
113 Ibid., 46.
114 Daniel L. Smith, “Behaviourism and Logical Positivism: A Revised Account of
the Alliance” (PhD dissertation: University of New Hampshire, 1983). Re-
trieved October 11, 2019, from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
According to Smith,
behaviorism and logical positivism shared a common style as movements….
In light of the rejection of their disciplines’ historical problems, both move-
ments were viewed from within and without as radical developments. As a
result, both were often promulgated with radical rhetoric and propaganda.
Because both arose in somewhat hostile intellectual environments, they
were defended in aggressive and polemical fashion. Finally viewing their
movements as the key to progress in their respective disciplines led behav-
iorists and logical positivists alike to express widely optimistic claims about
the future benefits of acting on their presuppositions. The writing of both
groups frequently showed a sort of missionary zeal, a zeal which was re-
flected in their occasional references to winning ‘coverts.’
(p. 5)
115 Becker, Human Capital, 1st ed., 55.
116 Ibid., 46.
117 Robert R. Bush and Frederick Mosteller, Stochastic Models for Learning
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1955), 333. The noted psychologists, Edwin
R. Guthrie and Clark L. Hull were behaviourists. Hull’s theory remained to
be focused on reinforcements and Guthrie’s on associations. The two ap-
proaches differed and were thought not compatible with each other. For Bush
and Mosteller (1955) this was not an issue. Grouping Hull, Guthrie and Skin-
ner together reflects the commitment to their mathematical approaches to
human learning rather than the commitment to democratic education.
118 Edward Thorndike, Animal Intelligence (New York: The Macmillan com-
pany, 1911), 292–93.
119 Ibid., 114. From his experiments Thorndike had formed an “opinion” that
animals do have representations and that such are the beginning of the rich
life of ideas in man. …” (p. 113). Thorndike added that he did not think that
animals “thought of getting freedom or food” but he thought they learned
about the environment designed for them by reward and stimulus (p. 293).
120 Gary S. Becker, “A Theory of Social Interactions,” Journal of Political Economy
82, no. 6 (1974): 1063–93. See Gary S. Becker, The Economics of Discrimina-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). Becker had “analyzed dis-
criminatory behaviour by incorporating race, religion, and sex” into the “utility
functions” and in the second publication incorporated the standard of living of
the “poorer” person into the utility function of “richer ones” (p. 1065).
121 Gary S. Becker, An Economic Approach to Human Behaviour (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1976/2013), 14.
122 Ibid., 8–9. See Jimena Hurtado, “Jeremy Bentham and Gary Becker: Utilitari-
anism and Economic Imperialism,” Journal of the History of Economic
Thought 30, no. 3 (2008): 335–57.
123 Long, Bentham on Liberty, 216.
124 John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics (New York: H. Holt and Company,
1932), 263. Dewey and Tufts began their assessment of “Benthamite School”
as “anti-historic.” They find the “chief interest” for Bentham was to influence
the “standard of judgment” and “his acceptance of hedonistic psychology
was, in the broad sense, an historic accident” (p. 263).
125 Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein and John P. Balz. “Choice Architecture,”
The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy 25, (2013): 428–39.
126 Burrhus F. Skinner, “Freedom and the Control of Men,” The American
Scholar 25, no. 1 (1956): 47–65.
127 Burrhus F. Skinner, Science and Human Behaviour (New York: McMillan,
1953/2005), 345.
128 Ibid., 345.
129 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1958), 122.
130 Gary S. Becker, An Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, 13.
131 Richard J. Herrnstein, “Behaviour, Reinforcement and Utility,” Psychological
Science 1, no. 4. (1990): 217–18.
132 Richard J. Herrnstein, “Behaviour, Reinforcement and Utility,” in The Match-
ing Law: Papers in Psychology and Economics, ed. Howard Rachlin and Da-
vid I. Laibson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 264.
133 Richard Herrnstein, “Behavior, Reinforcement and Utility,” Psychological
Science 1, no. 4 (1990): 224.
134 Ibid., 217–18.
135 Jason Blakely, We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Poli-
tics, and Power (New York: Oxford University Press), 84. The digital revolu-
tion supported the upsurge of technocracy by granting elites abilities to
commercialize human behaviours via datafication.
136 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of De-
cision Making Under Risk,” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–92.
137 Herbert A. Simon, “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice,” Quarterly
Journal of Economics 69, no. 1 (1955): 99.
138 Herbert A. Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1983), 34.
139 Gary S. Becker, “Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory,” The Journal of
Political Economy 70, no. 1 (1962): 2.
140 Ibid., 2.
141 Ibid., 12.
142 Herbert A. Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1983), 49.
143 Ibid., 55. Simon is reinterpreting and expanding Malthus’ thesis. “A species
that can change its culture is defined as ‘programmable’” (Simon, 1983, p.
55), to do so it sacrifices some of its own kind and in the process rewards
some genes over others.
144 Ibid., 57.
145 Ibid., 57.
146 Ibid., 73.
147 Anthony J. Hall, Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and
Capitalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010), 33.
148 Herbert A. Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality: Volume 1, Economic
Analysis and Public Policy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). In place of utility
formulas, Simon was concerned with the way the government can be more
efficient. He recommended that public policy intensifies the use of statistics,

not for ranking but “for the analysis of the factors making for efficiency or
inefficiency.” And “statistics must be considered not so much a means of visit-
ing judgment upon cities as a means of pooling their experiences in arriving at
factually based principles of administration” (p. 13).
149 Herbert A. Simon, “Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning,” Or-
ganization Science 2, no. 1 (1991): 125.
150 Herbert A. Simon, “The Function of the Executive Revisited,” (1986). Re-
trieved July 30, 2019 from: http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/
awarchive?type=file&item=38869
151 Herbert A. Simon, Donald W. Smithburg and Victor A. Thompson, Public
Administration (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 61–62.
152 Ibid., 67.
153 William F. Pinar, What is Curriculum Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Rutledge,
2012), 52.
154 Gary, S. Becker, “Gary Becker,” in Lives of the Laureates: Twenty-three Novel
Economists, 5th ed., ed. William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2009), 255. Becker recalled Milton Friedman’s approach made eco-
nomics a tool.
155 Ibid., 256.
156 Ibid., 261.
157 Ibid., 263.
158 Ibid., 269.
159 Becker, Human capital, 3rd ed., 16.
160 Becker, “Gary Becker” in Lives of the Laureate, 261.
161 Milton, Friedman, “Why Government is the Problem,” Essays in Public Pol-
icy, no. 39 (California: Hoover Institution Press Publication, 1993).
162 Milton Friedman (1997) “Public Schools: Make Them Private,” Education
Economics 5, no. 3 (1997): 341–44.
163 Becker’s 1992 laureate speech, the Economic way of Looking at Life, made
clear that “the process of investing and disinvesting in human capital often
alters the very nature of a person…” (p. 392).
164 Theodore Schultz, Origins of Increasing Returns (Cambridge: Blackwell Pub-
lisher, 1993). “Given our dynamic economy, people cannot escape being en-
trepreneurs in their life span… whether a person is bad or good in performing
this function is quite another matter” (Schultz, 1993, p. 3).
165 Peter, P. Grimmett, “International Teacher Education: Liberal Cosmopolitan-
ism Revisited or Post-modern Trans-nationalism,” Teacher Education Quar-
terly 36, no. 4 (2009): 7–25. See also Peter, P. Grimmett, “The Governance of
Canadian Teacher Education: A Macro-political Perspective,” Counterpoints
334 (2009): 22–32.
166 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 15.
167 Ibid., 567.
168 Ibid., 420. Piketty mentioned that the unequal access to higher education is
not a problem solely in the United States, but also in countries such as Ger-
many, France, Italy, and Spain (p. 485).
169 Ibid., 21
170 Ibid., 21
171 Jathan Sadowski, “When Data Is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and
Extraction,” Big Data & Society 6, no. 1, (2019): 2.
Bibliography
Abramovitz, Moses. “Resource and Output Trends in the United States Since
1870.” National Bureau of Economic Research (1956): 1–23. https://www.nber.
org/chapters/c5650.pdf.
Amesen, Eric. Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for
Equality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Banzhaf, Spencer H. “Retrospectives: The Cold-War Origins of the Value of Statis-
tical Life.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 4 (2014): 213–26.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23973565.
Becker, Gary S. The Economics of Discrimination. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1957.
Becker, Gary S. “Competition and Democracy.” The Journal of Law & Economics
1 (1958): 105–09. www.jstor.org/stable/724885.
Becker, Gary S. “Underinvestment in College Education?” The American Eco-
nomic Review 50, no. 20 (1960): 346–54.
Becker, Gary S. “Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory.” The Journal of Politi-
cal Economy 70, no. 1 (1962): 1–13.
Becker, Gary S. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Spe-
cial Reference to Education. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
Becker, Gary S. “A Theory of Social Interactions.” Journal of Political Economy
82, no. 6 (1974): 1063–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1830662.
Becker, Gary S. An Economic Approach to Human Behaviour. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1976/2013.
Becker, Gary S. “Theory of Competition among Pressure Groups for Political Influ-
ence.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 98, no. 3 (1983): 371–400. http://www.
jstor.org/stable/1886017.
Becker, Gary S. A Treatise on Family. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Becker, Gary S. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special
Reference to Education. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Becker, Gary S. “Gary Becker.” in Lives of the Laureates: Twenty-three Novel
Economists. 5th ed, edited by William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, 251–72. Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 2009.
Becker, Gary S., and Robert Barro. “A Reformulation of the Economic Theory of
Fertility.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 103, no. 1 (1988): 1–25. https://doi.
org/10.2307/1882640.
Becker, Gary S., and Guity N. Becker. The Economics of Life. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1997.
Becker, Gary S., François Ewald and Bernard E. Harcourt. “Becker on Ewald on
of Biopolitics’ Lectures.” Coase-Sandor Instituted for Law & Economics Work-
ing Paper no. 614, 2012.
Becker, Gary S., and Kevin M. Murphy. Social Economics: Market Behavior in a
Social Environment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Becker, Gary S., Kevin M. Murphy, and Robert Tamura. “Human Capital, Fertil-
ity, and Economic Growth.” Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5 (1990):
12–37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2937630
Bentham, Jeremy. A Manual of Political Economy. McMaster University Archive

for the History of Economic Thought: 1843. https://econpapers.repec.org/
bookchap/hayhetboo/bentham1843.htm.
Bentham, Jeremy. “A Manual of Political Economy.” In Jeremy Bentham’s Eco-
nomic Writings, Vol 1, edited by Werner Stark, 223–71. London: Routledge,
2004. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315017013.
Berman, Edward, Labor and the Sherman Act. New York: Harper, 1930.
Blakely, Jason. We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics,
and Power. New York: Oxford University Press.
Böhm von Bawerk, Eugen. Capital and Interest: A Critical History of Economic
Theory. Translated by William Smart. New York: Brentano’s, 1922. Obtained
from Internet Archive.
Böhm von Bawerk, Eugen. The Positive Theory of Capital. Translated by William
Smart. New York: G. E. Stechert & Co, 1923.
Böhm von Bawerk, Eugen. “Karl Marx and the Close of his System.” In Karl Marx
and the Close of His System & Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx, edited by
Paul M. Sweezy, 3–102. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949.
Bush, Robert R., and Frederick Mosteller. Stochastic Models for Learning. New
York: John Wiley & Sons, 1955.
Callahan, Raymond E. Education and the Cult of Efficiency. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1962.
Crowther, Geoffrey. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Claremont: Claremont
College, 1957.
Cubberley, Ellwood P. A Brief History of Education: A History of Practice and
Progress and Organization of Education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922.
Dewey, John and James H. Tufts. Ethics. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1932.
Feher, Michel. “Self-appreciation; or, the Aspirations of Human Capital.” Public
Culture 21, no.1 (2009): 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2008-019
Fisher, Irving. “What Is Capital?” The Economic Journal 6, no. 24 (1896):
509–34.
Fisher, Irving. “Precedents for Defining Capital.” The Quarterly Journal of Eco-
nomics 18, no. 3 (1904): 386–408. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1884076.
Fisher, Irving. The Nature of Capital and Income. London: MacMillan Company,
1906.
Folbre, Nancy. Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas. Oxford:
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France 1978–
79. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Friedman, Milton. “Choice, Chance, and the Personal Distribution of Income.”
Journal of Political Economy 61, no. 4 (1953): 277–90. https://doi.
org/10.1086/257390
Friedman, Milton. “The Role of Government in Education.” In Economics and the
Public Interest, edited by Robert A. Solo, 123–44. New Jersey: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 1955.
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1962.
Friedman, Milton. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. New York: Harvest

Book, 1990.
Friedman, Milton. “Public Schools: Make Them Private.” Education Economics 5,
no. 3 (1997): 341–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/09645299700000026.
Friedman, Milton. “Milton Friedman.” In Lives of the Laureates: Twenty-Three
Nobel Economists, edited by William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, 65–78. Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 2009.
Friedman, Milton and Simon Kuznets. Income from Independent Professional
Practice. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1945/1954. https://
www.nber.org/books/frie54-1.
Friedman, Milton and Leonard J. Savage. “The Utility Analysis of Choices Involv-
ing Risk.” Journal of Political Economy 56, no. 4 (1948): 279–304. http://www.
jstor.org/stable/1826045.
Greenspan, Alan. “Antitrust.” In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, edited by Ayn
Rand, 56–64. New York: New American Library, 1966.
Grimmett, Peter P. “International Teacher Education: Liberal Cosmopolitanism
Revisited or Post-modern Trans-nationalism.” Teacher Education Quarterly 36,
no. 4 (2009): 7–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23479281.
Hall, Anthony J. Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capital-
ism. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010.
Hayek, Friedrich A. The Pure Theory of Capital. London: MacMillan and Co.,
1941.
Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. London: Institute of Economic Affairs,
1944/2001.
Herrnstein, Richard J. “Behavior, Reinforcement and Utility.” Psychological Sci-
ence 1, no. 4 (July 1990): 217–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1990.
tb00203.x.
Herrnstein, Richard J. “Behaviour, Reinforcement and Utility.” In The Matching
Law: Paper in Psychology and Economics, edited by Howard Rachlin and David
I. Laibson, 251–65. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Hurtado, Jimena P. “Jeremy Bentham and Gary Becker: Utilitarianism and eco-
nomic imperialism.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 30, no. 3
(2008): 335–57.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited. New York: Harper & Brothers,
1958.
Innis, Harold. Political Economy in the Modern State. Toronto: University of To-
ronto Press, 1946.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision
Making Under Risk.” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–92. http://www.jstor.
org/stable/1914185.
Long, Douglas. Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham’s Idea of Liberty in Relation
to His Utilitarianism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.
Marshall, Alfred. “Distribution and Exchange.” The Economic Journal 8, no. 29
(1898): 37–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/2956696.
Marshall, Alfred. Principles of Economics. 8th ed. New York: Palgrave McMillian,
2013.
Mincer, Jacob. “Investment in Human Capital and Personal Income Distribution.”

Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 4 (1958): 281–302. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/1827422
Moghtader, Bruce. “Human Capital and Education of Desires after Michel Fou-
cault.” Journal of Self-Governance and Management Economics 5, no. 4 (2017):
35–52.
Nicholson, Joseph S. “The Living Capital of the United Kingdom.” The Economic
Journal 1, no.1 (1891): 95–107. https://doi.org/10.2307/2955843.
Couldry Nick and Ulises A. Mejias. The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colo-
nizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism. Redwood City: Stan-
ford University Press, 2019.
Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2014.
Pinar, William F. The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching,
Prison Rape, and The Crises of Masculinity. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Pinar, William F. Curriculum Studies in the United States: Present Circumstance,
Intellectual Histories. New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2012.
Pinar, William F. What is Curriculum Theory, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Pinar, William F. “Plagiarism and the ‘Tyler rationale’.” Journal of the American
Association for the Advancement of Curriculum 9, no. 2 (2013): 1–13. https://
doi.org/10.14288/jaaacs.v9i2.187724.
Pinar, William F. International Handbook of Curriculum Studies. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2014.
Posner, Richard A. “Conglomerate Mergers and Antitrust Policy: An Introduc-
tion.” St. John's Law Review, 44 (1969): 529–32. https://chicagounbound.
uchicago.edu/journal_articles/1901/.
Posner, Richard A. “Utilitarianism, Economics, and Legal Theory.” The Journal of
Legal Studies 8, no. 1 (1979): 103–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/724048.
Posner, Richard A. The Economics of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1981.
Posner, Richard A. “Value and Consequences: An Introduction to Economic Anal-
ysis of Law.” Chicago Working Papers in Law and Economics 53 (1998):1–13.
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics.
Rutherford, Malcolm. The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics,
1918–1947: Science and Social Control. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011.
Sadowski, Jathan. “When Data is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction.”
Big Data & Society (2019): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549.
Schultz, Theodore. Origins of Increasing Returns. Cambridge: Blackwell Publisher,
1993.
Schultz, Theodore W. The Economic Organization of Agriculture. New York: Mc-
Graw-Hill, 1953.
Schultz, Theodore W. “Investment in Man: An Economist’s view.” Social Service
Schultz, Theodore W. “Capital Formation by Education.” Journal of Political

Economy 68, no. 6 (1960): 571–83. www.jstor.org/stable/1829945.
Schultz, Theodore W. The Economic Value of Education. New York: Columbia
Schultz, Theodore W. “Investment in Entrepreneurial Ability.” The Scandinavian
Journal of Economics 82, no. 4 (1980): 437–48. doi:10.2307/3439676.
Sechrest, Larry J. “Alan Greenspan: Rand, Republicans, and Austrian Critics.” The
Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6, no. 2 (2005): 271–97. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/41560284.
Sigot, Nathalie. “Jevons’s Debt to Bentham: Mathematical Economy, Morals and
Psychology.” The Manchester School 70, no. 2 (2002): 262–78. https://ssrn.com/
abstract=309314.
Simon, Herbert A. “A Behavioral model of Rational Choice.” Quarterly Journal of
Economics 69, no. 1 (1955): 99–118.
Simon, Herbert A. Models of Bounded Rationality: Volume 1, Economic Analysis
and Public Policy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982.
Simon, Herbert A. Reason in Human Affairs. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1983.
Simon, Herbert A. “The Function of the Executive Revisited.” (1986). July 30,
2019 http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file&
item=38869.
Simon, Herbert A. “Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning.” Organi-
zation Science 2, no. 1 (1991): 125–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2634943.
Simon, Herbert A., Donald W. Smithburg and Victor A. Thompson Public Admin-
istration. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950.
Skinner, Burrhus F. Science and Human Behavior. New York: McMillan,
1953/2005.
Skinner, Burrhus F. “Freedom and the Control of Men.” The American Scholar 25,
no. 1 (1956): 47–65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41208055
Slobodian, Quinn. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Smart, William. “Translator’s Preface.” In Capital and Interest: A Critical History of
Economic Theory, edited by William Smart, v–xx. New York: Brentano’s, 1922.
Smith, Daniel L. “Behaviourism and Logical Positivism: A Revised Account of the
Alliance.” PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 1983. https://scholars.unh.
edu/dissertation/1396
Solow, Robert M. “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function.”
Review of Economics and Statistics 39, no. 3 (1957): 312–20.
Spring, Joel. Economization of Education: Human Capital, Global Corporations,
Skills-Based Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Stark, Werner. “Introduction.” In Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, Vol 1,
edited by Werner Stark, 12–78. London: Routledge, 2004. https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315017013.
Thaler, Richard H., Cass R. Sunstein, and John P. Balz. “Choice Architecture.” The
Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy 25, (2013): 428–39. http://dx.doi.
org/10.2139/ssrn.2536504
Thorndike, Edward L. Animal Intelligence. New York, The Macmillan company,

1911.
Tyler, Ralph W. Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1949.
Walsh, John R. “Capital Concept Applied to Man.” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics 49, no. 2 (1935): 255–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/1884067.
Williams, Talcott. “Competition as a Safeguard to National Welfare.” The Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 42 (1912): 74–82.
Zahn, Friedrich. “Economic Value of Man—Is It an Object of Statistics?” Sankhyā:
The Indian Journal of Statistics 1, no. 4 (1934): 427–31. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/40383978.
6 Understanding the present
In The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener argued “that society
can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communi-
cation facilities which belong to it.”1 He pointed out communication be-
tween machine and human and between machine and machine escalates the
problem of control in human learning and labour: “If the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, and the later eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is
the age of communication and control.”2 According to Hiems, Wiener’s
analysis considered “the sources of learning” to expose the “inhuman use
of human beings” through “manipulative control of communication.”3 As
a pioneer of the field of cybernetics, Wiener cautioned that economic pros-
pects drive public and private institutions to adopt communication tech-
nologies “irrespective” of their “long-time damage” to individual and
society.4 He was concerned about the impairments of an economic system
with increased emphasis on informational activities.
Both Gary Becker and Herbert Simon relied on information theory and
technological development, in a complementary and contradictory manner
to treat humans as economic goods.5 For Becker, information was a means
to increase economic outputs since it directed investment decisions. The
focus of information production in human capital theory is on making
people learn themselves as certain beings. In this respect, human capital
theory erodes the distinction between education and other conventional
investment. According to Becker, human capital theory allows for combin-
ing “the physical and psychological factors associated with learning the-
ory” with technologies that can transform and utilize these factors to
increase economic outputs.6 On the other hand, Simon explained that
“what information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention
of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of atten-
tion.”7 Like any poverty, tracing the accumulation of wealth helps finding
who profits from humanity’s poverty of attention. The economic emphasis
on functions, optimization, and efficiency has increased investment in ICT
DOI: 10.4324/9781003363736-7
Understanding the present 211
and normalized the role of for-profit corporations in public education.8

This chapter contextualizes the role of human capital theory in globaliza-
tion and digitalization. It concludes by offering possible reconsiderations.
6.1 Education reform and data politics

As early as 1907, the “desire to buy the new technological and commodi-
fied leisure products” was thought to “spur people to work harder.”9 The-
ories of consumption, as indicated in previous chapters, were forward
looking. From the time of Quesnay, an emphasis on production, consump-
tion, and expenditure conceptualized freedom and voluntary action in eco-
nomic terms. During the 20th century, economic approaches to organization
of society encouraged the state to act as both a contractor and a partner for
business. By the 1930s, public intellectuals were becoming concerned
about the impact of this transition on individuals and society. For exam-
ple, John Dewey had warned that, “business is conducted upon the basis
of ruthless competition for private gains.”10 Dewey cautioned against reli-
ance on business mentalities in social, economic, political, and interna-
tional affairs. He was wary of the personhood business mentalities
engender: “The self is not a mere means to producing consequences be-
cause the consequences, when of a moral kind, enter into the formation of
the self and the self enters into them.”11 The self, as long as it was to re-
main moral, could not be reduced to an instrument for certain ends—pro-
duction of economic outputs. A society subservient to the economy not
only neglects personal morality it negates social solidarity.
Dewey’s concerns came before Callahan’s study of the business elites and
their support for standardized measures of performance, thereby restruc-
turing schools during the first decades of the 20th century. Businessmen
relied on scientific, mechanical, and organizational concepts to subordi-
nate educational questions to business considerations.12 Callahan’s re-
search was followed by other studies that examined the historical
transitions of schools to benefit the businesses. This was due to new ten-
dencies in economic theory that combined “the myth of educational de-
cline” of the Cold War era with complementary “myth” that “the so-called
business people are capable of solving a variety of problems from the man-
agement of publicly funded hospitals to deciding the appropriation cur-
riculum for the different levels of schooling.”13 By the 1990s, such myths,
promoted in the United State, proliferated in Canada, England, and Aus-
tralia; reducing the role of public education to training workers and uni-
versities as service providers of the marketplace.14 The political force of
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher strengthened the Anglo-American
global influence and fused national concerns with economic policies to
control educational institutions, as producers of human capital.
The transference of business mentality and audit culture into education

established practices in collecting data from teachers and students and nor-
malized widespread surveillance. In Teaching by Numbers, Peter Taubman
explains that discourses of standards and accountabilities facilitated the
national transformation of public education in the United States. “It is
impossible to separate the transformation that has occurred in education
from the economic policies,”15 Taubman stressed. While economic policies
conceived education within markets and imagined schools within the realm
of business world, quality insurance strategies targeted human develop-
ment: Policies “informed by corporate agendas and the language and prac-
tices of the marketplace” were translated “seamlessly into the language of
learning objectives, information processing, metacognition, and perfor-
mance outcomes, which were forged in a nexus of military personnel, psy-
chologists, and computer scientists and programmers.”16 One impact of
this transformation was to reduce learning to accessing information, think-
ing to “problem solving,” and reducing education to training “intellectual
capital.”17 These transformations further contributed to the conception of
humans as “decontextualized social identities or data.”18
The decontextualization of human life had begun by conceiving an eco-
nomic value on each person. Deeming humans as information processors
permeated the information economy and reliance on the World Wide Web.
The digital economy grew on infrastructural logics of industrialization and
colonization. The dominance of the English-speaking world in monopoliz-
ing information production was already underway before the verdict of
human capital took hold of globalization as Americanization. For exam-
ple, Theodore Schultz had set directions for the future proponents of hu-
man capital theory as he defended the investment logic to remedy the
problems of the “poor countries.”19 Schultz failed to recognize the rich
countries had robbed now poor countries, for nearly five centuries of colo-
nization, exploitation, and genocide. The economic conceptualization of
labour, education, and life itself hardly eased fears of communism nor did
it enabled the administration of justice and reparation. Schultz’ emphasis
on the role of global markets did not solely promote capitalism, it also sug-
gested the creation of a multi-tiered government in which the financial
sector would play a key role in directing investment. The Global South
would then adhere to the obligations that would secure predictability for
investors. This new logic of so-called investment in humans meant to align
the “poor nations” with Americans’ values and markets.20 The preoccupa-
tion with accumulation of human wealth had, then, both national and in-
ternational implications. Human capital theory was explained as an avenue
to develop and to change other nations. It helped those nations to emulate
the United States’ economic model. The supranational organizations such
as the World Bank and the Organization of Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) serve as engines of information production that uni-

versalize human capital approaches and promote marketization of educa-
tion across national borders.
At the turn of the 21st century “human capital theory remains a power-
ful political influence,” Williamson observed, producing “‘flexible special-
ists’ who can adapt to fluctuations and changes in market demands.”21
Today’s markets make only demands. Even facts and content are jeopar-
dized where “market demands” direct investment and divestment on hu-
mans. Equipped with technological surveillance, markets’ demands for
self-sacrifice show no mercy towards the precariat.22 As flexible learning
continues to be associated with flexible labour, Jane Marcet’s lessons in
Conversations remain to be instructive that those who control and pro-
duce capital occupy separate socio-political realms than those who put
themselves to work as a form of capital. And thus, the logics of human
capital theory have done little to decentralize the locus of control applied
on human life since industrialization. Two centuries after Marcet, the fi-
nancial investment on educational technology enables elites to profit from
both selling commodities (software and hardware) to education institu-
tions and appropriating the data they gather from human capital as digital
assets to expand their scope of power.
On the one hand, monitoring platforms are changing the role of teachers
by misconceiving computational facilitation of behavioural feedback to
students as teaching and transforming pedagogical relationships to nudges.
On the other hand, policy entrepreneurs that keep governments focused on
economic rewards of education aim to influence decision-making by pri-
oritizing certain expertise to alter the future of schooling across national
borders. Williamson understands that the “two main expert groups …
controlling the agenda for the curriculum of the future” are “psychologists
and computer scientists.”23 Ignoring teachers signifies an escalation of
brainwashing and control exerted by the business-state partnership. By the
second half of the 20th century, “politicians and policymakers” claimed
“education is a business” and “singled out” the teaching profession as “ac-
countable” for social and economic reality.24 Today, not only teachers but
politicians and policymakers—even the state—are disposable. “The state is
no longer the central source of authority”; new authorities in education
adhere to human capital religion and invest in the making of the “cyborg
identity” of learners.25 There is a shift in power from the state-business
partnership to the stateless trans-continental corporations with no or little
legal and political obligations to protect people. Cyborg identities offer a
prospect of an “‘eroding distinction’ between public and private, produc-
tion and reproduction, work and leisure in a technological world.”26 The
hybridization “of humans with information technologies” provides further
economic justification of “psychic as well as behavioral” manipulations.27
Cyborgs are economic entities: producers and products of an age in which

human activities and aptitudes are processed by devices and transported by
cloud technologies. New capabilities in time-space compression efforted by
digitization and datafication has revised the exercise of colonial powers on
a geographical territory to continuous and seamless value extractions in
transforming life to data and data to capital.
Scaling technological innovations in education often come with corpo-
rate interests, lacking sufficient attention to history, locality of knowl-
edge and diversity of experience. Presently corporate interest and venture
philanthropy unite market logics and social responsibility by investments
that expand the influence of tech elites over teaching and learning to bet-
ter control the future of education.28 The existential threat of big tech is
sensed by their “craving monopoly” and “concentration of power” in
expanding their “networks” to “escape competition.”29 The discourse of
probable future progress remains relevant to technological monopolies
steering human transgression to the labyrinth of animals and machines
so that algorithms govern human capital, from the womb to the coffin.
Human capital conventions systematically positioned human life at the
mercy of a totalizing digital culture in which every click, gaze, and word
uttered or written is integrated within cybernetic networks that construct
and automate constraints and possibilities. What else could the final aims
of increasing efficiency by the measures of technological progress be
other than to decode humans for more predictable economic outcomes?
By securing comfort, ease, delivery, and convenience, technocracy gets a
hold of civilization. The current indicators convey that the future of edu-
cation should be trusted to the technological infrastructure that are de-
signed to maximize predictability and profit and upgrade human capital
verdicts by seamless commercialization of the flesh. This future is ac-
tively sought by a group of investors, policymakers, and administrators,
misguiding parents and teachers that the public and private interests are
mutually compatible. With little understanding of history, technocrats
and social engineers misconceive technological progress as social
progress.
While the gap between feudalism and industrialization had been short-
ened by experimental logics of the libertarians and bureaucrats, who
looked after security and happiness of people, transnational corporations
and entrepreneurs are appropriating science and technology for the brave
new world of digitalization. In this respect, surveillance has become both
the cause and conditions of a new order that monitors, computes, and
categorizes human capital. Harcourt points out that the logic for digital
monitoring of schoolchildren and employees cannot be reduced to sole
aims of security and maximizing welfare. Digital technologies are in the
process of restructuring selfhood, installing the “feeling that one has no
control over oneself.”30 In this regard, endless affirmation of connectivity

is the admission of submissions to quantification processes. The argument
that if “we do not have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear” is pro-
moted by the mechanisms of digital exposure that are “radically trans-
forming our subjectivity,” demanding the “moral transformation” of
values that protect social spaces, personal privacy and intimate lives.31
From the discourses of utility, efficiency, and welfare of economists to the
self-mortifying conception of human capital, freedom is restrained by the
apparatus of computing machines and their mathematical models to man-
age human capital.
6.2 Datafication and de-localization

At the end of the 20th century, Gary Becker acknowledged that his works
and those by “Schultz and others on human capital are extensively used in
the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China. Even before the recent re-
forms, economists, and planners there had no trouble with the concept of
investing capital in people”.32
The popularity of the concept cuts the ideological divide between capi-
talism and communism. As a framework to approach human development,
human capital theory diminishes ethical and political considerations by
giving primacy to predestined outcomes. This benefited nations and indi-
viduals with capital, and proactive in knowledge production about eco-
nomic means and ends. What would be the significance of human capital
to the digital economy monopolized by a handful of corporations experi-
menting with artificial intelligence and algorithms that alter decision-
making and mediate relations? It legitimizes applications of political and
economic imperialism by hardwiring how humans know themselves as
individuals and groups and what they believe to be true.
Competition for controlling resources, including human resources, has
positioned some nation states as a primary beneficiary of technological in-
novation. Today, the technological race between the United States, China,
and Russia continues to subject people, constitutions, and traditions by
information and misinformation. Anthony Smith observed:
The threat to independence in the late twentieth century from the new
electronics could be greater than was colonialism itself. We are begin-
ning to learn that de-colonization and the growth of supra-nationalism
were not the termination of imperial relationship but merely the extend-
ing of a geo-political web which has been spinning since the Renais-
sance. The new media have the power to penetrate more deeply into a
‘receiving’ culture than any previous manifestation of Western
technology.33
Edward Said added that the effective “unopposed expansion of various

forms of cultural control that emanated from the United States has created
a new mechanism of incorporation and dependence” by which “handful of
American trans-national corporations” not only control and manufacture
information but also fracture national policies and commodify and dispos-
sess people.34
Globalization of the 20th century developed on the bases of “American
exceptionalism,” indicating that the United States is at once a model for
other nations and different from other nations.35 Spring documents that
human capital policies supported the global expansion of the United States’
technological corporations by the way of the United Nations, the World
Bank, and the World Economic Forum: It “resulted in a scenario of the
Bank loaning money to developing countries that, in turn, use the money
to buy educational technology from global firms.”36 Increasing purchases
of education technology and advancing trade went hand in hand with
building economic dependencies and communicating new objectives for
local governance. The emphasis on trade encouraged consumerism on an
international scale and promoted the Anglo-American model of marketized
schooling through economic interventions in the Global South. New tech-
nological networks, spread globally from 1960 to 2000, were powered by
assertions that the distribution of information would democratize the
world. Democracy is “jeopardized,” Mosco cautioned, “by a world in
which key economic, political, social and cultural dimensions” are “domi-
nated by a global network of firms.”37 The firms at stake are cyber technol-
ogy corporations that influence how individuals and societies conduct
themselves. The romanticized power of technology to democratize the
world has faded. Technological devices are used to disrupt social, eco-
nomic, and political processes by allowing interest groups to meddle with
democratic processes and providing elites with new means to increase their
influence over society.38
In this context, datafication supplements the goals of transforming life
into capital when recoding human development for economic develop-
ment. Human capital practices are united with technological capabilities to
embed certain universalized priorities that reduce chance and limit choices
by assigning competencies to human development. In emphasizing a set of
human capital competencies, OECD policies neglect cross-national diver-
sity and classify the “world-cultures” based on Euro-American percepts.39
Such policies driven by scientific categorization often homogenize treat-
ment of human life. Rappleye observes that globalization awakened
“cross-national transfer” of policies and practices that challenged “state’s
exclusive role in education” and advanced “generalizability and adaptabil-
ity of concepts” across national and international organizations.40 This is
evident in OECD’s emphasis on human capital production in standard
assessments generated by the Programme for International Student Assess-

ment (PISA). PISA produces cross-national rankings that often contribute
to the national rhetoric of educating citizens. For example, Takayama and
Apple explain that the measures and metrics of PISA helped transport the
politics of “educational reform” of the United States to Japan and enabled
“Japanese conservatives” to legitimize their own “reform” through the
combination of “nationalistic and quasi-market interventions.”41 The
practice of ranking and ordering countries by PISA projects certain West-
ern values, upheld by science and control, in a global scale. They transmit
Anglo-American values, such as competitiveness and entrepreneurship, to
students and introduce marketization and multi-tier governance to educa-
tion institutions.
The marketization of education has also downstream effects towards
the techniques of datafication and incorporation of information systems
to automate the production of human capital. In this context, technologi-
cal corporations play an ever-increasing role in determining the values
and metrics adopted in national and international education policies.42
The instruments and methods of data extractions reduce complexities in
human development to information. They wage a mass internalization of
possessive individualism in their desires for improving personalized learn-
ing, producing self-regulated learners, and optimizing economic outputs.
For example, most recently, the global standard tests of OECD are turn-
ing to “techniques, metric and instruments to measure” social-emotional
learning.43 The digital techniques in capturing “intimate data of students’
social-emotional personal qualities might then be shaped in ways that fit
politically and economically preferable forms of emotional conduct” and
utilized “for purposes of evaluation and accountability.”44 The intrusion
of the private realm of self is explained by the policy entrepreneurs on the
bases of increasing economic opportunities. The use of socio-emotional
learning measurement has created an infrastructure for psychologists and
economists to aid the technological frontiers in educational governance
across the OECD countries. The standardized frameworks of socio-
emotional learning are repackaged within “changing accounts of human
capital which emphasizes the ‘noncognitive’ aspect of valuable skills.”45
According to Williamson, while psychologists translate human q ualities
“into psychometric data,” economists explain these quantitative mea-
sures as having “potential economic value (human capital)” and conceive
data as the source for “nudging” and “control.”46 Gary Becker needed a
theory in order to approach human development in economic terms. “If
enough data are available, no theory is needed. The possibility of enlisting
Big Data to discern the masses’ patterns of behaviour heralds the begin-
ning of digital psychopolitics.”47 Big Data activates a power that acts on
human consciousness through audio-visual capabilities (e.g., cameras,
microphones, and sensors). Such capabilities come from investment in

technologies instead of human wellbeing. Han explains that the new tech-
nologies extend Bentham’s panopticon surveillance from behaviours and
movements to thoughts and emotions: “psychpower is more efficient”
and subtler “than biopower insofar as it watches over, controls, and influ-
ences human beings not from outside but from inside.”48 Psychpower
mediates the relationship to oneself and seeks predictability in processes.
It builds dependencies on technologies that both help and hinder self-
management. Digital surveillance normalized at work, school, and homes
camouflages control through ongoing connectivity while it promotes self-
disclosure and self-exploitation.
In Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code,
Benjamin provides various examples of the continuation of unequal treat-
ments brought by algorithms and codes, often undisclosed to the users.
Benjamin observes educational institutions are becoming increasingly sub-
ject to “vague and unsubstantiated claims about efficacy of design think-
ing”49 by technology corporations and administrators. However, “many
tech insiders choose a more judicious approach to tech [by] … opting to
send their children to schools in which devices are banned or introduced
slowly, in favor of ‘pencil, paper, blackboards and craft material.’”50 Ben-
jamin points out that, “the latest products” are sold with “a concern that
all students deserve access—yet the more privileged refuse it.”51 Those who
can “afford the luxury of opting out” are concerned with “tech addiction”
and worry about the lack of “data privacy, because access goes both ways
with apps and websites that track users’ information.”52 The elites’ con-
cern about the privacy of their children is a concern about protecting and
preserving their families. A study of over 60 “cross-sectional, longitudinal
and empirical studies” found that “smartphone and social media use con-
tributes to mental distress, self-injurious behaviour and suicidality among
youth.”53 The medical experts, Abi-Jaoude, Naylor, and Pignatiello, advo-
cate for an active role of classroom teachers and find the campaigns of
public awareness necessary. If by any stretch, the proponents of human
capital were advocates of health would they have something to say about
protecting wellbeing and agency of those they deemed as capital?
As the 19th century elites relied on “propaganda” to institute taxation
for public education in the “interests of both public and private welfare,”54
the 21st century elites are on a mission to privatize public schools by dis-
courses of access and flexibility in advocacies for personalized learning.
Roberts-Mahoney and colleagues show that while personalized learning
technologies advance corporate school reforms, they fail to “render, or
even recognize education as an individual private good,” and there is “zero
scientific evidence that personalized learning systems enhance educational
efficacy.”55 However, widespread adoption of learning technologies enable
efficient management of human capital to achieve predetermined socio-

economic outcomes.56 Technological systems aim at reducing costs and in-
creasing speed. They do so by eliminating human work and transferring
responsibility to algorithms. The logics of access, speed, and usefulness of
technological devices not only secure profit for certain economic elites in
the global north but they also supplement the logics of empire by homog-
enizing schooling with little recognition of place and history, increase digi-
tization of society by translating human life into bits of information, and
undermine human agency/decision-making by transforming human inter-
actions into input and output data.
6.3 Reconsidering
If education was to be “a means of securing technical efficiency in special-
ized future pursuits,” John Dewey recognized that, it “would then become
an instrument of perpetuating… the existing industrial order of society.”57
The emphasis on the technical skills and the competencies of human capi-
tal theory of education has perpetuated the industrial order. Dewey hoped
for a democratic
society in which every person shall be occupied in something which

makes the lives of others better worth living, and which accordingly
makes the ties which bind persons together more perceptible—which
breaks down the barriers of distance between them.58
Writing in 1916, Dewey was concerned that “intellectual and emotional

limitation characterizes both the employing and the employed class. While
the latter often have no concern with their occupation beyond the money
returns it brings, the former’s outlook may be confined to profit and
power.”59 Had Dewey anticipated the prospect of money returns becoming
an avenue for social engineering, he would have elaborated on his critique
of market democracy. Today, both pragmatism and behavioural sciences
emanate Western perspectives and suppress the possibilities of alternative
worlds to market democracy. However, understanding and separating
pragmatism from the current movement of behavioural politics proves
central to deciphering their applications in the glocal governmentality of
education institutions and re-evaluating the economic approaches to hu-
man development.
Writing a century after Dewey, Martha Nussbaum observes that the
overemphasis on technical skills and factual knowledge for the sake of
economic growth has neglected personal and social values such as sympa-
thy, thoughtfulness, and imagination. Investment in technical skills in-
creased national economic growth. However, “producing economic growth
does not mean producing democracy. Nor does it mean producing a

healthy, engaged, educated population in which opportunities for a good
life are available to all social classes.”60 Democracy is hospitable to diver-
sity, humility, and vulnerability. Its ethical and political values for educa-
tion are irreducible to producing human capital. Nussbaum reports that
“the economic growth culture has a fondness for standardized test, and an
impatience with pedagogy and content that are not easily assessed in this
way.”61 The result is a neglect of humanities and liberal arts. Standardiza-
tion, when applied to human life, erodes recognition of diversity and also
justice. By acknowledging the role of place and history in international
economic development, Nussbaum elucidates that the “rules of global
competition are in many ways advantageous to the richer nations, as are
the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.”62
She indicates applying a single set of values to all the world’s people is a
form of imperialism that benefits the economically and technologically ad-
vanced nations.
Nussbaum draws from Amartya Sen, who has conceptualized the “capa-
bility approach,”63 a normative ethical framework to consider human
wellbeing outside of commercial forces. Sen has repositioned commodifi-
cation of human development by considering those elements that are in-
trinsically valuable as well as by considering plurality in economic and
social functions.64 From the capability approach, Sen gives primacy to “the
well-being and freedom of people; their indirect role through influencing
economic production; and their indirect role through influencing social
change.”65 According Nussbaum, the capability approach recognizes “a
theory of what human nature is” takes on “evaluative and ethical form”;
and so among the many things that human beings might develop is the
capacity to do things while they live in a “just society” that nurtures
them.66 Sen suggests that human life should not be valued and governed
based on a set of preconceived unnegotiated economic outputs (e.g., to be
developed as a form of capital). “The question of the valuation of the out-
put can be quite complex and much would depend on from whose point of
view the valuation is made.”67 The capability approach attends to the pro-
cesses of value creation. In this respect, it allows for local and small-scale
government, non-government, and self-organized community groups to
contribute to policy decisions. It also encourages “quite diverse specifica-
tions and empirical and theoretical applications”68 in the design and evalu-
ation of policies.
Instead of developing and utilizing humans as sources of national and
corporate profit, capability approach starts with recognition of the diver-
sity among people and proceeds with attention to conditions of life. It
prioritizes preservation of people, place, and history as social and eco-
nomic contributors. Capabilities, as considerations, may offer an avenue to
revise the outdated value system made by the economic measures of colo-
nial, imperial, and slave societies. According to Nussbaum, acceptance of
a set of capabilities also harnesses recognition of the “relationship between
education and human dignity.”69 One of the capabilities Nussbaum men-
tioned is “control over one’s environment,” having equal rights to “gov-
ern” and “reason” in the political-material realm.70 Such a consideration
calls for imposing limitations on hierarchical and technological control
systems that overrule the right to privacy by conjuring up the right to use
human data for public and private profit. In this context, critical digital
literacy is a curricular necessity often overlooked in today’s education.
Both engaging young people in conversations about growing dependencies
to platforms that treat humans as economic resources and examining mis-
conceived economic notions that have served as imperatives to extracting
information (data) in order to predict, modify, and direct behaviours con-
tribute to education that cultivates agency, freedom, and wellbeing.
Sen has shown the reliance on “engineering” in the 20th century has
“shift[ed] the directional focus of ethical reasoning” and “that the nature
of modern economics has been substantially impoverished by the distance
that has grown between economics and ethics.”71 He notes that adopting
utility as a stand-alone economic value has legitimized treating “rights” as
“entirely instrumental to achieving goods or particular utilities.”72 Sen has
also challenged the narrowly defined notion of selfhood described by be-
havioural economists, emphasizing that studying behaviours are not mat-
ters of facts but expressions of normative judgements, embedded in history
and place. He has addressed the shortfalls of modern-day utilitarianism,
contractualism, and welfarism and its impact on individuals and groups.73
He advocates for “the need for improving the standard informational ac-
counts of states of affairs.”74 Information management and production
must give primacy to agency, freedom, and wellbeing. Instead, the mo-
nopolistic power of international corporations (such as Apple, Meta,
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft) over the information economy contrib-
utes to existing economic and political inequities.75 The global reach of big
tech into education and healthcare indicates their desire for power over life.
It is worthy to remember that the conventions of a free capitalistic soci-
ety are not compatible with the monopolistic practices of transnational
and global corporations. Particularly, in relation to data ownership and
data sovereignty, the big tech operations of data collection and informa-
tion management challenge the elemental right to oneself and self-
government. Even Hayek was worried about monopolies over information
management, worrying that such monopolies represent instruments of to-
talitarian control wherein “people’s loyalty to the system become the only
criterion for deciding whether a particular piece of information is to be
published or suppressed.”76 Hayek added that such a monopolized control
leads to a situation in which even the pretence of the “search for truth is
abandoned and that the authorities decide what doctrines ought to be
taught and published.”77 Hayek indicated that the centralization of infor-
mation processing powers leads to the deconstruction of the liberal ideals
of privacy and right to oneself and nurtures the rise of authoritarianism.
Currently, the discourses of technological optimization, social innovation,
and economic maximization are obfuscating the ethical and political ques-
tions that once preoccupied economists.
6.4 Education vs. schooling human capital

Sen suggests that “the self-examination induced by the Socratic question,
‘How should one live?’” may once again reawaken ethics,78 and thereby
ease engineering efforts of rewriting human nature. Subsuming human
capital theory within Socratic questioning may enable a “change in per-
spective that allows for a reconceptualization of one’s self [and ones’ prac-
tice], under a given regime.”79 After his lectures on human capital theory
and American neoliberalism, Foucault too turned to Socrates in search of
an ethical framework. Socrates, who cared for the young and old, treating
people from Athens and outside as friends, contested the convention of
caring for mind and body as only vessels to obtaining power and wealth.80
Socrates’ attention to the question, what makes a good life? can awaken
recognition of ethics in education.
Socrates’ philosophical truth-telling about ethos in the form of parrhe-
sia, reconstructed by Foucault’s call for truth-living can inform educational
theories and practices that foster human development.81 “The vivifying
quality of teaching-as-truth dwelling (as it may be called) gets blocked if
teaching is understood primarily as an act of implementation, with the cur-
riculum as a settled commodity,” David Smith appreciates, adding that
“personal truth is not a commodifiable thing that can be applied through
diligent training….”82 Teaching-as-truth is no cultivation of the mind to
produce yet more useful knowledge by means of which entrepreneurs can
enrich themselves at the expense of others. Truth dwelling may encourage
practices (such as studying, meditating, walking, and drawing) that sup-
port attention to diverse ways of being and knowing ourselves as moral
subjects.
In his turn to ethics, Foucault offers an examination of truth as he at-
tends to present history. “History plays an essential role in the constitution
of the object, where the objects are people and the ways in which they be-
have.”83 Foucault’s deliberation on formalization, normalization, and
dominance of ways of being and knowing ourselves as certain subjects
concerns practices of freedom. In considering the axes of knowledge,
power, and ethics, he asks three interconnected questions: “How are we
constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as

subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we consti-
tuted as moral subjects of our own actions?”84 Foucault’s attention to the
relation between being (historical ontology) and knowing (epistemes) as-
sists in the problematization of economic approaches to personhood. One
might apply this critical lens to the capability approach. For example, an
increase in societal capacities through institutional justice may not result in
“increased agency equally for everyone,” Sugarman explains, “advances in
capabilities may benefit some social groups, but constrain others.”85 Con-
sidering human capital theory and commercialization of human life, Fou-
cault’s problematization of the present can also enable evaluating
power-knowledge relations and transforming ourselves as ethical subjects,
through self-care and self-examination. In the context of the global hege-
mony of Anglo-American approach to education, Carusi also finds Fou-
cault’s contribution relevant to working towards “non-instrumental”
approaches to education policies.86 In considering globalization and digita-
lization, Foucault’s scholarship is potent to: 1) disassemble interventions
aimed at the entire social body by information production and 2) address
the lack of distinction between words, things, and beings in policies and
practices. His work has awakened realizations that scientific theories (and
metaphors) are not neutral vehicles of understanding. They arise in a his-
torical context and have ethical, political, and economic dimensions. In the
case of human capital theory, we are left with a narrative that has altered
institutions and constitutions across the globe, informing how we must
develop humans to live in a marketized and privatized world. It has dis-
tracted attention from developing both culturally sustainable education
and alternative economic systems.
What would education look like if it was concerned with humanity and
the world that sustains humanity? Instead of social engineering of human
capital to produce economic outputs by schooling, education institutions
would attend to human development and social ethics. Education can in-
clude a set of activities that include “care of the self, of others, of the com-
munity and of the environment.”87 Here innovation in education can begin
by examining the hardwiring values of competitive individualism, attend-
ing to homogenizing schemes of neoliberal economics, and reconsidering
the ongoing commercialization of children and adults through technologi-
cal infrastructures. Education informed by history, philosophy, and geog-
raphy and integrated by arts (theatre, painting, dance, and music) may
affirm our humanity across borders, genders, and ethnicities. Education in
liberal arts has personal, ethical, and economic consequences as it can
strengthen our moral, spiritual, and social dimensions.88 This is particu-
larly important in cultures where some (caught in plagiarizing and buying
university admission) are genuinely puzzled why education is not another
consumer option like any other object. In nations where students’ debt and
precarious employment are growing, some are realizing education is not
necessarily for profit making and that seeing it so only furthers the distance
between social beings. In societies preoccupied by economic returns, it may
be more cost-saving to educate persons in the liberal arts rather than en-
trusting humanity to self-maximizing actors behind artificial intelligence
and automation. As mental health issues intensify in countries where eco-
nomic growth, competition, and militarism have taken centre stage, unme-
diated face-to-face conversations may support efforts at self-knowledge
and recognition of our socio-emotional lives. Authentic and mindful con-
versations as a practice that requires empathy, play, love, and deliberation
strengthens characters and societies—as do meditation, study, and reflec-
tion on how to care for beings (and things).
What could be an educated person? “An educated person, first and fore-
most, understands that one’s ways of knowing, thinking, and doing flow
from who one is,” not “an island unto oneself, but is a being-in-relation-
with-others, and hence is, at core an ethical being.”89 Ted Aoki recognized,
being educated is more than “possessing knowledge and acquiring intel-
lectual or practical skills,” but being and becoming concerned with
“thoughtful living with others.”90 These are the thoughts of a teacher atten-
tive to the relationships that sustain humanity, including relationships with
the rest of the living world. Human capital approaches to education ad-
vance commercialization of all relationships, even the relationship to one-
self. This is not without cost. The cost of schooling children as an implicated
form of capital is their agency and freedom. Embracing possibilities to live
as human beings requires educational opportunities so that the next genera-
tions will be able to deliberate on the kind of life they want to lead.
6.5 Transgression
The 21st century schooling has become a system of creating human capital.
While the 19th century schooling conflated political and economic respon-
sibilities, it hardly suggested that individuals be schooled as flexible enter-
prises who adapt to market demands. Such a transformation relied on
pseudoscience and bureaucracy to think of human lives as economic re-
sources and schooling as a means for generating economic outputs; it was
supported by investments in information production that conflated private
and public interest. As educational institutions are asked to engineer hu-
man capital, technological corporations’ exploitation of the interdepen-
dence of all things becomes the Internet of things. Norbert Wiener
recognized that practices and policies prescribed by computer programs
further their penetration of human affairs. These “machines on which we
depend are themselves a source of communication and control and in
practice are in some respects not subject to human interferences.”91 Writing

during the Cold War, Wiener noted the enemy was not Russians. “To Wie-
ner the primary enemy was … the inhuman use of human beings, and for
him this included exploitation, imposition of rigidity, and absence of feed-
back and honest two-way communication in the social organization.”92
Half a century after Wiener, Cathy O’Neil, a mathematician by training,
observed that algorithms now micromanage social institutions. In the case
of schools, O’Neil noted, the “value-added” logics of “efficiency” and “op-
timization” of algorithms “have different payoffs. For the school district,
the payoff is a kind of political currency, a sense that problems are being
fixed. But for businesses it’s just the standard currency: Money.”93 This
distinction is erased when schools are run as businesses, organized on tech-
nological platforms so that children become flexible for the use of libertar-
ians eager to put them to work. O’Neil recognized that “software is doing
its job. The trouble is that profits end up serving as a stand-in, or proxy, for
truth.”94 Algorithms facilitate control of information and money. They do
not incorporate transparency and their calculations are not without costs:
Privacy, liberty, and health is “increasingly a luxury that only the wealthy
can afford.”95 As markets influence human development, it becomes diffi-
cult to estimate the impact of digitization, digitalization, and datafication
of education. Over time, it becomes difficult to distinguish whether we are
raising and caring for children or producing cyborgs who have internalized
labels, classifications, and categories as truths about who they are.
The 20th century brought humans back to the problem of the ancient
Greeks and their rejection of treating humans as apolitical animals and
slaves. In their limited conception of democracy, Greeks recognized that
selfhood is intricately associated with the modalities of educating citizens.96
For the Greeks, only slaves had to renounce their liberty in order to so-
cially and economically self-maximize. The slaves were deemed quasi-
rational agents who entrusted their work and welfare to external control.
They were told by their masters to be concerned that their children learn
to become economic instruments. Are we detached from slave, serf, and
colonial societies as we live by proxies that track and classify our behav-
iours, shape, and control our beliefs, capture, and record our desires? “By
putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by the
means of electric [digital] media,” Marshall McLuhan knew, “we set up a
dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of
hand and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls—all such extensions of
our bodies, including cities—will be translated into information system.”97
The new technologies as extension of the human nervous system and
bodily powers—in the Aristotelian sense the slave was an extension of the
master’s body—have delivered civilization to the age of information capi-
talism in which few can afford to live as an ends to themselves.
Digital technologies have advanced translating one kind of knowledge

into another to the point that they have built infrastructures and systems
over socio-spatial processes. Financial investment on educational technol-
ogy and knowledge production about the prospects of technological devel-
opment has distracted policymakers and administrators from the long-term
consequences of automation and the ways in which technological mediums
change and govern social beings. Wiener, the pioneer of cybernetics, was
clear about the social, personal, and economic impact of automation and
digitization monopolized in the hands of corporate elites:
Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any

feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent
of slave labour. Any labour which competes with slave labour must ac-
cept the economic condition of slave labour.98
The discourses of competitive individualism and developing humans as

economic resources have camouflaged the emergence of economic condi-
tion of slave labour. Education could help. It is by education that we are
able to reassess the fictions we are told about ourselves and the world. In
an age of communication and control, examining the truth about human
life, what we know to be true of ourselves and why, has personal and
moral currencies.
Notes
1 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
(New York: Doubleday Anchor books, 1954), 16. “Information is a name for
the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust it, and
make our adjustment felt upon it” (p. 17)
2 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine, 2nd ed. (New York: MIT Press, 1961), 39.
3 Steve J. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics
to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), 303.
4 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 161.
5 Whether the person acts to optimize or satisfy certain ends, both Becker and
Simon admit that the informational inputs impact public and private invest-
ment decisions.
6 Becker, Human Capital, 1st ed., 47.
7 Herbert Simon cited in Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential
Thread of Big Tech (Penguin Press: New York, 2017), 88.
8 See: Alexander Koch, Julia Nafziger and Helena Nielsen, “Behavioral Econom-
ics of Education,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 115 (2015):
3–17; Emiliano, Grimaldi, and Stephen J. Ball. “The blended learner: Digitali-
sation and regulated freedom-neoliberalism in the classroom.” Journal of Edu-
cation Policy 36, no. 3 (2021): 393–416.
9 Joel Spring, Education Networks: Power, Wealth, Cyberspace, and the Digital
Mind (New York: Routledge, 2012), 159–60.
Consumerism as an economic doctrine developed in the early 20th century
in the United States in part out of a fear that technological advances would
reduce work time. Fear of workers having too much leisure time was rooted
in a Protestant Christian belief that “Idle hands are the devil’s tools.” The
argument for an economic system driven by consumption was made in a
1907 book by economist Simon Patten, The New Basis of Civilization.
(p. 159)
10 John Dewey, Theory of the Moral Self (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win-
ston, 1960), 118.
11 Ibid., 148.
12 Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, 244–46.
13 Peter P. Grimmett, “Reconceptualizing Teacher Education: Preparing Teachers
for Revitalized Schools,” in Changing Times in Teacher Education Restructur-
ing or Reconceptualising? ed. Marvin F. Wideen and Peter P. Grimmett (New
York: Routledge, 2005), 206.
14 Peter P. Grimmett. “The Governance of Canadian Teacher Education: A
Macro-political Perspective,” Counterpoints 334 (2009): 22–32.
15 Peter M. Taubman, Teaching by Numbers; Deconstructing the Discourse of
Standards and Accountability in Education (New York: Routledge, 2010), 96.
16 Ibid., 170.
17 Ibid., 169.
18 Peter M. Taubman, “William Pinar’s Contribution to Our Understanding of
Sex, Gender and curriculum,” in The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Stud-
ies, ed. Mary Aswell Doll (New York: Routledge, 2017), 154.
19 Schultz, “Investment in Man: An Economist’s View,” 113.
20 Ibid., 113.
21 Ben Williamson, The Future of the Curriculum: School Knowledge in the Digi-
tal Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 48.
22 Wendy Brown, “Sacrificial Citizenship: Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and
Austerity Politics,” Constellations 23, no. 1 (2016): 3–14.
23 Williamson, The Future of the Curriculum, 65.
24 William F. Pinar, The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate
Lives in Public Service (New York: Routledge, 2009), 46.
25 Williamson, The Future of the Curriculum, 122–23.
26 William F. Pinar, What Is Curriculum Theory (New York: Routledge, 2004),
148. Pinar offered a cautionary note that: “In today’s politics of public misedu-
cation, the computer becomes the latest technological fantasy of educational
utopia…” (p. 8).
27 William F. Pinar, Education Experience as Lived Knowledge, History Alterity:
The Selected Works of Williams F. Pinar (New York: Routledge, 2015),
90–91.
28 Stephen J. Ball, Carolina Junemann and Diego Santori, Edu. net: Globalisation
and Education Policy Mobility (New York: Routledge, 2017).
29 Franklin Foer, World without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (New
York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2017), 12.
30 Bernard Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 219.
31 Ibid., 232–33. International information processing companies, Google, Face-

book, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, rely on “neoliberal governmentality” to
secure corporate profit. For example, “Facebook assumes and promotes the idea
of the entrepreneurial self, so closely tied to Chicago School Theories of Human
capital,” while it “hides the profit motive associated with all the advertising and
highlights the open-market features of sociability” (Harcourt, 2015, p. 99).
32 Becker, Human Capital, 3rd ed., 16–17.
33 Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information cited in Edward W. Said, Cul-
ture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 292.
34 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 292.
35 Martin S. Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-edged Sword (New
York: Norton, 1996).
36 Joel Spring, Economization of Education: Human Capital, Global Corpora-
tions, Skill-based Schooling (New York: Routledge, 2015), 120.
37 Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 2004), 60.
38 Ronald Deibert, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (Toronto:
House of Anansi, 2020).
39 Keita Takayama, Arathi Sriprakash and Raewyn Connell, “Toward a Postcolo-
nial Comparative and International Education,” Comparative Education Re-
view 61, no. 1 (2018): 5.
40 Jeremy Rappleye, “Theorizing Educational Transfer: Toward a Conceptual
Map of the Context of Cross-National Attraction,” Research in Comparative
and International Education 1, no. 3 (2006): 227.
41 Keita Takayama and Michael Apple, “The Cultural Politics of Borrowing,”
British Journal of Sociology of Education 29, no. 3 (2008): 289–301.
42 Taylor P. Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson, “Policy Scientificity 3.0: Theory and
Policy Analysis In-and-for this World and Other-worlds,” Critical Studies in
Education 56, no. 1 (2015): 161–74. Stephen J. Ball, Carolina Junemann and
Diego Santori, Edu. Net Globalisation and Education Policy Mobility (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2017).
43 Ben Williamson, “Intimate Data Infrastructure,” in Comparative Methodology
in the Era of Big Data and Global Networks. World Yearbook of Education,
ed. Radhika Gorur, Sam Sellar and Gita Steiner-Khamsi (London: Routledge,
2019), 69.
44 Ibid., 69–70.
45 Ben Williamson, “Psychodata: Disassembling the Psychological, Economic,
and Statistical Infrastructure of ‘Social-emotional Learning’,” Journal of Edu-
cation Policy 36, no. 1 (2021): 145.
46 Ibid., 135.
47 Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2017), 78.
48 Ibid., 80.
49 Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim
Code (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 177. The technological innovations sup-
port existing complex social differentiation and ordering that sustain inequality
in race, gender and age, legitimized by utilities and value functions that look
after capital.
50 Ibid., 15.
51 Ibid., 16.
52 Ibid., 16.
53 Elia Abi-Jaoude, Karline Treurnicht Naylor and Antonio Pignatiello, “Smart-

phones, Social Media Use and Youth Mental Health,” Canadian Medical As-
sociation Journal 192, no. 6, (2020): 136. Reviewing 60 empirical studies, the
authors acknowledged “there is a dose–response [media consumption] rela-
tionship, and the effects appear to be greatest among girls” (p. 136).
54 Ellwood P. Cubberley, A Brief History of Education (Boston: Houghton Miff-
lin, 1922). In England the conception of “education as a private and voluntary
and religious affair” was “deeply ingrained” but reworked by the Elementary
Education Act of 1870 (pp. 347–348). In the case of the United States, “School
societies and Educational Associations, organized by propaganda had already
established” before people demanded “the free education of their children as a
natural right” (pp. 365–366).
55 Heather Roberts-Mahoney, Alexander J. Means and Mark J. Garrison, “Netf-
lixing Human Capital Development: Personalized Learning Technology and
the Corporatization of K-12 Education,” Journal of Education Policy 31, no.
4 (2016): 417.
56 Svetlana M. Murzina, Sergey V. Revunov, Elena N. Lavrinenko, Roman V.
Revunov and Anton D. Murzin, “Education Digitalization as a Factor in Hu-
man Capital Asset’s Development: Modern Challenges and Development Pros-
pects,” in Innovative Trends in International Business and Sustainable
Management. Approaches to Global Sustainability, Markets, and Governance,
ed. E. I. Lazareva, A. D. Murzin, B. A. Rivza and V. N. Ostrovskaya (Singa-
pore: Springer, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4005-7_35.
57 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to Philosophy of
Education (New York: Free Press, 1916/1997), 316.
58 Ibid., 316.
59 Ibid., 317.
60 Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 15.
61 Ibid., 48.
62 Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Ap-
proach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 116.
63 Sen, Amartya. 1980. “Equality of What?” in S. M. McMurrin (ed.) Tanner
Lectures on Human Values. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Reprinted
in Sen 1982, pp. 353–69. Capability approach began as an alternative ap-
proach to utilitarian equality, total utility equality, and Rawlsian equality. One
of its central premises is to recognise the diversity among people and so define
some capabilities as universal and others as culturally (locally) specific.
64 Amartya K. Sen, “Well-being, Capability and Public Policy,” Giornale degli
Economisti e Annali di Economia, Nuova Serie 53, no. 7/9 (1994): 333–47. Here,
the “opportunity to choose” is not governed by “instrumental” procedures for
certain preconceived welfare or for the sole aim to increase economic output.
65 Amartya K. Sen, “Human Capital and Human Capability,” World Develop-
ment 25, no. 12 (1997): 1959–961.
66 Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Ap-
proach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 28.
67 Amartya K. Sen, Employment, Technology and Development (New Delhi: Ox-
ford University Press, 1975/1999), 7.
68 Ingrid Robeyns, “An Unworkable Idea or a Promising Alternative? Sen's Capa-
bility Approach Re-examined,” CES discussion paper 00.30 (Katholleke Uni-
versiteit, Leuven, November 28, 2000), 28.
69 Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 75.

70 Ibid., 34.
71 Amartya K. Sen, On Ethics and Economics (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987):
7. Although Sen acknowledged the engineering elements are also evident in
Aristotle and Smith, they inform understanding “the importance of rules of
conduct” (p. 78). Sen found their considerations of ethics still relevant to eco-
nomic reasons.
72 Ibid., 49. Sen notes that “the ‘engineering’ aspect of economics has tended to
go hand in hand with sticking to a very narrow view of ethics,” namely choice
theories and utilitarian philosophies (p. 50).
73 Amartya K. Sen, Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Har-
vard University Press, 2002); Amartya K. Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). Sen asked for correction to
utilitarianism that simplifies human choices and behaviours and translate them
into numeric utilities, contractualism that continues to set no limits to private
wealth accumulation at the expense of the societal rights, and welfarism that
lacks attention to agency and freedom and serves as a means for libertarian
paternalists to control choices.
74 Amartya K. Sen, “Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures
1984,” The Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 4 (1985): 184.
75 Joel Spring, Education Networks: Power, Wealth, Cyberspace and The Digital
Mind. New York: Routledge, 2012); Elena Aydarova, “Shadow Elite of Teacher
Education Reforms: Intermediary Organizations’ Construction of Accountabil-
ity Regimes,” Educational Policy 36, no. 5 (2022): 1188–221.
76 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, ed. Bruce Caldwell (London: Rout-
ledge 2014), 176.
77 Ibid., 176.
78 Sen, On Ethics and Economics, 2.
79 Andrew Dilts, “From ‘Entrepreneur of the Self’ to ‘Care of the Self’: Neo-lib-
eral Governmentality and Foucault’s Ethics,” Foucault Studies 12, (2011): 145.
80 Plato, “Apology,” in Five Dialogues: Euthephro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Pha-
edo, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2002). “Wealth
does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything
else good … individually and collectively” (p. 34).
81 James P. Burns, Power, Curriculum and Embodiment: Re-thinking Curriculum as
Counter-conduct and Counter-politics ( New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2018);
Stephen J. Ball, “A Horizon of Freedom: Using Foucault to Think Differently
about Education and Learning,” Power and Education 11, no. 2 (2019): 132–44;
Bruce Moghtader, Foucault and Education Ethics (London: Palgrave, 2016).
Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2006), 27/31.
The ancient Greeks understood well the slippery character of truth when
they assigned it a word with a double and contradictory meaning. Aletheia
indicates both ‘unconcealment’ and ‘concealment.’ Just when I think I have
discovered something to be true, unconcealed, revealed at last, for all time,
something with which to secure myself into the future, suddenly it slips
away into concealment, confusion, into the cloud of unknowing.
(p. 29)
83 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Harvard University Press,
2002), 49.
84 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul

Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 49.
85 Jeff Sugarman, “Historical Ontology,” in The Wiley Handbook of Theoretical
and Philosophical Psychology, ed. Jack Martin, Jeff Sugarman and Kathleen L.
Slaney (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 168. Sugarman was considering
the role of psychology in education. His evaluation also applies to the discourse
of economics.
86 Tony F. Carusi, “The Ontological Rhetorics of Education Policy: A Non-instru-
mental Theory,” Journal of Education Policy 36, no. 2: (2019): 232–52.
87 Jordi Collet-Sabé and Stephen J. Ball, “Beyond School. The Challenge of Co-
producing and Commoning a Different Episteme for Education,” Journal of
Education Policy (2022): 13. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2022.2157890
88 Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 120–30. An “education that gets both students and
teachers more passionately involved in thinking and imagining reduces costs by
reducing the anomie and time wasting that typically accompany a lack of per-
sonal investment” (p. 120). Nussbaum added: “Teaching of the sort I recom-
mend needs small classes, or at least sections, where students discuss ideas with
one another, get copious feedback on frequent writing assignments, and have
lots of time to discuss their work with instructions” (p. 125).
89 Ted T. Aoki, “Inspiring the Curriculum,” in Curriculum in a New Key: Col-
lected Works of Ted T. Aoki, ed. William F. Pinar and Rita L. Irwin (New York,
Routledge, 1990/2004), 365.
90 Ibid., 365.
91 Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, 310.
92 Ibid., 310–11. In Wiener’s words:
If the rules for victory in a war game do not correspond to what we actually
wish for our country, it is more than likely that such a machine may pro-
duce a policy which would win a nominal victory on points at the cost of
every interest we have at heart, even that of national survival.
(p. 310)
93 Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases In-
equality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2017), 12.
94 Ibid, 12. Mathematical models govern public and private decisions.
95 Ibid, 170.
96 Plato, “Alcibiades I,” In Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1892); Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject:
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham
Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005). In their masculinized ethics of liberty,
Greeks rejected treating other free men as slaves, women, children, and
animals.
97 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964), 57.
98 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 162.
Bibliography
Abi-Jaoude, Elia, Naylor T. Karline and Antonio Pignatiello. “Smartphones, Social
Media Use and Youth Mental Health.” Canadian Medical Association Journal
192, no. 6. (2020): 136141. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.190434.
Aoki, Ted T. “Inspiring the Curriculum.” In Curriculum in a New Key: Collected

Works of Ted T. Aoki, edited by William F. Pinar and Rita L. Irwin, 357–65.
New York: Routledge, 1990/2004.
Aydarova, Elena. “Shadow Elite of Teacher Education Reforms: Intermediary Or-
ganizations’ Construction of Accountability Regimes.” Educational Policy 36,
no. 5 (2022): 1188–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904820951121.
Ball, Stephen J. “A Horizon of Freedom: Using Foucault to Think Differently about
Education and Learning.” Power and Education 11, no. 2 (2019): 132–44.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1757743819838289
Ball, Stephen J., Carolina Junemann and Diego Santori. Edu. Net Globalisation
and Education Policy Mobility. London: Routledge, 2017.
Becker, Gary S. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Spe-
cial Reference to Education. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
Becker, Gary S. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special
Reference to Education. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
Brown, Wendy. “Sacrificial Citizenship: Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and Aus-
terity Politics.” Constellations 23, no. 1 (2016): 3–14. https://doi.
org/10.1111/1467-8675.12166
Burns, James P. Power, Curriculum and Embodiment: Re-thinking Curriculum as
Counterconduct and Counter-politics. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2018.
Callahan, Raymond E. Education and the Cult of Efficiency. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1962.
Carusi, Tony F. “The Ontological Rhetorics of Education Policy: A Non-instru-
mental Theory.” Journal of Education Policy 36, no. 2 (2019): 232–52. https://
doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2019.1665713.
Collet-Sabé, Jordi, and Stephen J. Ball. “Beyond School. The Challenge of Co-pro-
ducing and Commoning a Different Episteme for Education.” Journal of Educa-
tion Policy (2022): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2022.2157890
Cubberley, Ellwood P. A Brief History of Education: A History of Practice and
Progress and Organization of Education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922.
Deibert, Ronald J. Reset: Reclaiming the Tnternet for Civil Society. Toronto:
House of Anansi, 2020.
Dewey, John. Theory of the Moral Life. New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1960.
Dilts, Andrew. “From ‘Entrepreneur of the Self’ to ‘Care of the Self’: Neo-liberal
Governmentality and Foucault’s Ethics.” Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 130–46.
https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i12.3338
Foer, Franklin. World Without Mind: The Existential Thread of Big Tech. New
York: Penguin Press, 2017.
Foucault, Michel. “What is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by
Paul Rabinow, 32–50. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de
Franc 1981–82, edited by Frederic Gros. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Grimaldi, Emiliano, and Stephen J. Ball. “The blended learner: digitalisation and
regulated freedom-neoliberalism in the classroom.” Journal of Education Policy
36, no. 3 (2021): 393–416.
Grimmett, Peter P. “Reconceptualizing Teacher Education: Preparing Teachers for

Revitalized Schools.” In Changing Times in Teacher Education Restructuring or
Reconceptualising? Edited by Marvin F. Wideen and Peter P. Grimmett, 202–
225. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Grimmett, Peter P. “The Governance of Canadian Teacher Education: A Macro-
political Perspective.” Counterpoints 334 (2009): 22–32. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/42980268.
Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Han, Byung-Chul. In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017.
Harcourt, Bernard. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. London: Institute of Economic Affairs,
1944/2001.
Heims, Steve J. John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the
Technologies of Life and Death. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980.
Koch, Alexander, Julia Nafziger and Helena Nielsen. “Behavioral Economics of
Education.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 115 (2015): 3–
17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2014.09.005
Lipset, Martin S. American Exceptionalism: A Double-edged Sword. New York:
Norton, 1996.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Moghtader, Bruce. Foucault and Education Ethics. London: Palgrave, 2016.
Mosco, Vincent. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2004.
Murzina, Svetlana M., Sergey V. Revunov, Elena N. Lavrinenko, Roman V. Revu-
nov and Anton D. Murzin. “Education Digitalization as a Factor in Human
Capital Asset’s Development: Modern Challenges and Development Prospects.”
In Innovative Trends in International Business and Sustainable Management.
Approaches to Global Sustainability, Markets, and Governance, edited by E. I.
Lazareva, A. D. Murzin, B. A. Rivza and V. N. Ostrovskaya (Singapore: Springer,
2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4005-7_35.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality
and Threatens Democracy. New York: Broadway Books, 2017.
Pinar, William F. The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate Lives
in Public Service. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Pinar, William F. Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity:
Selected Works of William F. Pinar. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Plato. “Alcibiades I.” In Dialogues of Plato, edited and translated by Benjamin
Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892.
Plato. “Apology.” In Five Dialogues: Euthephro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo.
Edited by M. A. Grube, 21–44. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2002.
Rappleye, Jeremy. “Theorizing Educational Transfer: Toward a Conceptual Map

of the Context of Cross-National Attraction.” Research in Comparative and
International Education 1, no. 3 (2006): 223–40. https://doi.org/10.2304/
rcie.2006.1.3.223.
Roberts-Mahoney, Heather, Alexander J. Means and Mark J. Garrison. “Netflix-
ing Human Capital Development: Personalized Learning Technology and the
Corporatization of K-12 Education.” Journal of Education Policy 31, no. 4
(2016): 405–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2015.1132774.
Robeyns, Ingrid. “An Unworkable Idea or a Promising Alternative? Sen’s Capabil-
ity Approach Re-examined.” CES discussion paper 00.30. Katholleke Universit-
eit, Leuven, 2000. http://www.econ.kuleuven.be/ces/discussionpapers/default.
htm.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Schultz, Theodore W. “Investment in Man: An Economist’s View.” Social Service
Sen, Amartya K. “Equality of What?” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values.
Stanford University, (May 22, 1979). http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/
Sen,%20Equality%20of%20What.pdf.
Sen, Amartya K. “Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984.”
The Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 4 (1985): 169–221. https://doi.
org/10.2307/2026184.
Sen, Amartya K. On Ethics and Economics. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Sen, Amartya K. “Well-being, Capability and Public Policy.” Giornale degli Econ-
omisti e Annali di Economia, Nuova Serie 53, no. 7/9 (1994): 333–47. https://
www.jstor.org/stable/23247762
Sen, Amartya K. “Human Capital and Human Capability.” World Development
25, no. 12 (1997): 1959–61.
Sen, Amartya K. Rationality and Freedom. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
Sen, Amartya K. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2002.
Sen, Amartya K. and Bernard Williams. “Introduction: Utilitarianism and Be-
yond.” In Utilitarianism and Beyond, edited by Amartya Sen and Bernard Wil-
liams, 1–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Send, Amartya K. Employment, Technology and Development. New Delhi: Ox-
ford University Press, 1975/1999.
Smith, David G. Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization,
Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy. Rotterdam: Sense Publisher, 2006.
Spring, Joel. Education Networks: Power, Wealth, Cyberspace, and the Digital
Mind. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Spring, Joel. Economization of Education: Human Capital, Global Corporations,
Skill-based Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Sugarman, Jeff. “Historical Ontology.” In The Wiley Handbook of Theoretical
and Philosophical Psychology. Edited by Jack Martin, Jeff Sugarman and Kath-
leen L. Slaney, 166–82. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2015.
Takayama, Keita and Michael W. Apple. “The Cultural Politics of Borrowing: Ja-
pan, Britain, and the Narrative of Educational Crisis.” British Journal of Sociol-
ogy of Education 29 no. 3 (2008): 289–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142
5690801966360.
Takayama, Keita, Arathi Sriprakash and Raewyn Connell. “Toward a Postcolonial
Comparative and International Education.” Comparative Education Review 61,
no. 1 (2017): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1086/690455.
Taubman, Peter M. “William Pinar’s Contribution to Our Understanding of Sex,
Gender and Curriculum.” In The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies,
edited by Mary Aswell Doll, 152–160. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Webb, Taylor P. and Kalervo N. Gulson. “Policy Scientificity 3.0: Theory and Pol-
icy Analysis In-and-for this World and Other-worlds.” Critical Studies in Educa-
tion 56, no. 1 (2015): 161–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2014.949812
Wiener, Norbert. The Human use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New
York: Doubleday Anchor books, 1954.
Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and
the Machine. 2nd ed. New York: MIT Press, 1961.
Williamson, Ben. The Future of the Curriculum: School Knowledge in the Digital
Age. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.
Williamson, Ben. “Intimate Data Infrastructure.” In Comparative Methodology in
the Era of Big Data and Global Networks World Yearbook of Education, edited
by Radhika Gorur, Sam Sellar and Gita Steiner-Khamsi, 59–75. London: Rout-
ledge. 2019.
Williamson, Ben. “Psychodata: Disassembling the Psychological, Economic, and
Statistical Infrastructure of ‘Social-emotional Learning’.” Journal of Education
Policy 36, no. 1 (2021): 129–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2019.1672
895.
Index
Aboriginal peoples 71–2, 89 Curriculum 12, 14, 154, 182, 211,

Aoki, Ted 224 213, 222
Aquinas, Thomas 49–54 Cyrus 5, 16–20, 23–6, 32
Aristotle 26–8, 49–50 cybernetics 210, 226
artificial life 90, 92–6, 115; body 145; cyborgs 213–4, 225
intelligence 94, 215, 224
automaton 93–4, 98, 109–110 Daedalus 92, 96, 99
Dante, Alighieri 53–4
Becker, Gary S. 2, 5, 153, 170, 181, Darwinism 127, 174
184–190, 192–4, 210, 215 democracy 13, 127, 184, 188, 194,
behaviorism 153–5, 187–9 216, 220; Athenian 15, 22–3, 225;
Bentham, Jeremy 133, 169, 171, modern 128, 133, 135, 147, 175
188–9; education 149–153; society Dewey, John 133, 147, 211, 219
145–9 digitization 214, 219, 225–6; economy
Benthamite 138–9, 143 212, 215
Bacon, Francis 58, 63, 96–100 datafication 214, 215–7
Bacon, Roger 95
big data 217 economic imperialism 30, 72, 215;
big tech 214, 221 individualism 66, 100–2, 137, 173,
body politic 50, 71, 99, 102, 109, 113, 190; inequality 128, 133, 180, 194;
132, 142 liberalism 135; value of person 1,
Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen 171–3, 175 100–1, 141, 145, 150, 177
economics as science 27, 102, 139,
Capability approach 220–1, 223 143, 173, 175, 177, 180; discipline
capital 89, 171, 174–7 44, 105, 130, 144, 189, 193; in
capitalism 28, 44, 47, 74, 127, 138, education 177
144, 148, 169, 171–3, 212 education ethics 221–3
China 135–6, 215 empire 3, 9, 13, 14, 31, 68, 45;
Christianity 29–31, 48, 61, 92, 95, 97; American 181, 215; British 145,
and capitalism 144 174, 181; Persian 5, 16; Roman 29,
colonization 4, 61, 71–3, 89, 134, 191, 30, 45, 53, 72
212 empiricism 58, 99
colonial 73, 101, 110, 138
Cold War 2, 4, 170, 173, 181, 188, Finley, Mosses 25, 28
211, 225 Foucault, Michel 1, 3, 4, 25, 26, 29,
Communism 2, 212, 215 222–3
Index 237
Friedman, Milton 3, 68, 178–181, policy 99, 109, 127, 134, 170, 213, 220;
185, 189, 192–3 economic 1, 180; education 2, 103,
Franciscans 55–6 170, 217, 223; makers 137, 150
progress economic 105, 110, 112, 128,
genealogy 2–3 141; industrial 66, 137, 168;
Gerson, Jean 58–60 scientific 48, 91, 97–9, 109; social
globalization 4–5, 72, 211–2, 216, 223 133–4, 137, 140, 142, 144;
technological 127, 170, 194, 214
Hacking, Ian 5, 99 psychology 90, 127, 154, 180, 189
Herodotus 15–6, 18, 23 psychpower 218
Hayek, Fredrich 173–4, 221
Hume, David 107–9, 111 Quesnay, François 135–7, 142, 211
Indigenous 133–4, 191 Ricardo, David 140–3

industrial schools 101–2, 147 right natural 49, 51–6, 63; political 28,
industrialization 129, 212, 213 29, 172; property 59; theory 58, 73,
information 11, 68, 69, 99, 149, 153, 109, 169, 173
170, 180, 188–190, 192, 210, 212, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 128–133
215–7; information communication
technology 3, 184; data 221 Schultz, Theodore 2, 3, 181–3, 185,
Innis, Harold 3 192–3, 212, 215
Sen, Amartya 220–2
laissez-faire 127, 133, 138–9, 143, Skinner, B. F. 187, 188
153, 169, 174, 179 Simon, Herbert 189–192, 210
liberalism 72, 127, 135, 174 Smith, Adam 66, 111–4, 128, 133,
Locke, John 63–73 134, 137, 139, 142, 178
slavery 28–3, 72, 93, 171, 177; natural
Machiavelli, Niccolo 17, 32, 60–1, law 51, 67; modern 69, 138, 183
132 social capital 171–2
Malthus, Thomas R. 140–1, 191 Socrates 17, 19–24, 25, 27, 32, 222
Mandeville, Bernard 104–6 statistical 99, 177–8, 180, 186
market 127, 130, 134, 135–140; surveillance 4, 25, 26, 31, 131, 148,
liberty 142–4 149, 212; technological 213–4;
Marx, Karl 171–2 panopticon 145, 149, 218
neoliberalism 1, 62, 153, 222 technological platforms 31, 184, 213,

Noddings, Nel 73, 185 221, 224
Nussbaum, Martha 219–22 Thorndike, Edward 153, 187
truth 2–3, 10, 21–3, 51, 89, 108, 222,
Ockham 54–9 225–6
Organization for Economic Tully, James 67, 71, 72
Co-operation and Development 4,
222 utilitarianism 130, 139–141, 146,
150–4, 169, 188–9
Petty, William 1, 99–103, 175, 183
Pinar, William F. 6, 12, 192 Winer, Norbert 210, 224–6
Plato 20, 21, 22, 32
political economy 44, 73, 100, 110–2 Xenophon 16–20, 24, 26, 28, 32

Schooling, Human Capital and Civilization - A Brief History (2023)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Schooling, Human Capital and Civilization - A Brief History (2023)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Schooling, Human Capital and Civilization - A Brief History (2023)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

SCHOOLING, HUMAN

CAPITAL AND CIVILIZATION

This book explores the formation of human capital in education, interro-

Bruce Moghtader is an instructor in the Department of Educational Stud-

In this age of multimedia information overload, scholars and students may

South Korean Education and Learning Excellence as a Hallyu

Currere and Psychoanalytic Guided Regression

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

1 To rule with justice 9

2.6 Liberty after Locke 70

4 Utilitarianism and market divinity 127

5 Human capital theory 168

6 Understanding the present 210

I am deeply indebted to William F. Pinar for his mentorship, intellectual

Moghtader, B. “Human capital and education of desires after Michel Foucault.”

Today, it is impossible to say precisely what we mean when we call persons

Theodore Schultz, and Gary S. Becker. Targeting education policies, they

As a guiding approach, genealogy enables self-examination of knowledge

underpinnings for property and ownership aimed at social order—their

governable.”18 In 2012, Gary Becker agreed with Foucault’s overall evalu-

21 Ian Hacking, “Kinds of People: Moving Targets,” Proceedings of the British

The neolithic period is marked by the development of social and techno-

1.1 The beginning of school and empire

Manufacturing truth integrated human flesh into rituals. The formation

made affordable to the sons of administrators and those active in economic

[E]dubba was instrumental in the dissemination of knowledge and lit-

indigenous. “The temples, palaces, and estate—collectively referred to as

The relation of inferiority and superiority is, however, essential in any

No form of government, or profession of political idea, saves the state

Ferguson writes aware of the inequalities of race, education, religion, and

democratic constitution was established based on a moral pride that was

Democracy placed the responsibility for freedom on the Athenian citizens.

his Greek and Macedonian commanders to Persian brides. In Alexander’s

participants in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.”49 Xenophon did not write to

sought to decode history for political expediency. In this context, Cyrus

In antiquity, Xenophon’s text, “Education of Cyrus (Cyropaedia) seems

Plato’s critique of unequal freedom in democracy may enable a reflection

1.4 Ancient economics and education

on affairs of managing the household. Once again, Cyrus is referenced; this

knowledge. “The lessons offered by the Oeconomicus extend beyond eco-

basic unity of virtue in men and women. In contrast to Xenophon, “Aris-

can also teach them to be masters of others.”103 In response, Ischomachos

Joseph Schumpeter, even though Aristotle continued to view economic ac-

1.5 Ancient slavery and pre-modern progress

the cities in which individual freedom reached its highest expression—

The use of humans as economic resources continues to both exploit indi-

In the case of antiquity, it would be a mistake to assume slavery as the

This way of life was revolutionary, animated by knowledge and rituals

Treating children as a form capital points to the multiplicity of forms and

7 Henry W. F. Saggs, Babylonians (Berkeley: University of California Press,

30 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Charles Forster Smith

52 Cyrus is referred to as a model ruler in Machiavelli’ Prince (Chapter 6). The

72 Richard Kraut, “The Defense of Justice in Plato’s Republic,” in Plato’s Re-

84 Michael Jackson, “Philosopher-­Kings and Bankers,” Theoria: A Journal of

109 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch

Charpin, Dominique. Writing, Law and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopota-

Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

Xenophon. The School of Cyrus: William Barker’s 1567 Translation of Xeno-

1.1 The beginning of school and empire

1.4 Ancient economics and education

1.5 Ancient slavery and pre-modern progress

84 Michael Jackson, “Philosopher-Kings and Bankers,” Theoria: A Journal of

2.1 Monasticism and secular state

2.2 Thomas Aquinas: the church and the political community

2.3 William of Ockham: a right beyond the law

2.4 Tension in the late medieval state

2.5 John Locke: liberating property

2.6 Liberty after Locke

3.1 The divine and the artificial life

3.2 Francis Bacon: revising nature

3.3 William Petty: valuing each head

3.4 Scepticism: the animal–machine economy