The Gauntlet: A Challenge to the Myth of Progress
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The Gauntlet: A Challenge to the Myth of Progress
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Overview
Subtitled "A Challenge to the Myth of Progress," this collection includes selections from Old Worlds for New, Post-Industrialism, Towards a Christian Sociology, and Means and Ends. This first-ever anthology of Penty's works presents a compelling vision both of what's wrong with the world and of what kind of socio-economic order would help to make it right. The writings in this volume provide a sampling of Penty's thorough and persuasive critique of the myths that dominate modern economic and social thought. They also outline his intellectual and practical program for the restoration of such essentials in economic life as the dignity of labor, justice in pricing, equity in property distribution, quality in craftsmanship, preservation of rural culture, and, above all, the recognition of spiritual truth as the foundation of all real economic order.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781605700168 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | IHS Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Gauntlet
A Challenge to the Myth of Progress
By Arthur J. Penty
IHS Press
Copyright © 2003 IHS PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932528-29-9
CHAPTER 1
THE GAUNTLET
Arthur J. Penty His Life and Early Influences
Arthur Joseph Penty was born in York, England, in 1875. His early education was interrupted in his thirteenth year, when, after continued marked success in his studies, he was put to work in his father's drawing office. Becoming adept in his craft concurred with a rather spasmodic interest in the cultural world around him. Architecture was his world, and the later years of his social and economic inquiries always evidenced the fact that planning and building soundly, constructively and permanently were part of his inner make-up. Factual observation was fundamental in his theory of knowledge and we are indebted to Stanley James's brief biography of him, written shortly after his death on January 19, 1937, for a pointed reference in one of his books indicating his valuation of those gifted with a strong practical bent of mind.
Commenting on the great strides made in medieval times in experimental methodology in the physical sciences by the Franciscans, Penty had said:
Learning being forbidden them by the rule of their order, they naturally acquired the invaluable habit of observing facts for themselves – a habit which book-learning is very apt to destroy. Men who begin life with much book-knowledge are very apt to look at things from the special angle provided by the books they have read and to neglect the lessons which the observation of facts can teach. It was thus that the Franciscans' renunciation of learning stood them in good stead; it proved to be the means whereby a new impulse was given to the acquisition of knowledge.
Before he left York for London in 1902, his skill as an architect was rather widely acknowledged. On several occasions his work had received public commendation, and had been made the subject of a monograph published in Germany.
Penty very shortly became affiliated with the Fabian Society in London, whose members, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Philip Snowden and George Bernard Shaw advocated a moderate form of state socialism. Although he had some connections with the Socialists in York, he had always been and was to the end of his life a vigorous opponent of collectivism. Socialism in those days had a rather loose significance, and anyone who was not in agreement with the prevailing social and economic philosophy was liable to term himself or be called a Socialist, as witnessed by the reception given in some quarters to Pope Leo's encyclical on the condition of labor. Penty preferred to call himself a radical Tory, despite the fact that all his friends told him the term did not mean anything. He was associated with the Fabians until 1916 and, while he found himself frequently at variance with many of the members, it gave him the opportunity to develop his social thought and the vigorous discussions, in which he never hesitated to participate, formed the convictions which were later to be the basis for his constructive plans for social reform. Quite logically and consistently the Fabians favored the greater expansion of industrial power in order that the descent to collectivism might be made the easier.
It was during this period that Penty put out his first book, The Restoration of the Gild System. The sources, as noted in the Preface of that work, which influenced him in his antipathy toward the industrial arrangement of society, and which, together with his discoveries of the permanence of medieval architecture, turned his attention to the societal forms prevailing in that earlier age, were four writers who were vigorous participants in the nineteenth century aesthetic revolt against Industrialism. These four men were John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold and William Morris.
Ruskin, in particular, opposed the economic basis of the industrial system and excoriated it for its lack of understanding of human values and the disproportionate attention paid to material success. He deplored the existence of large scale production where it subordinated human labor to a cog in a machine and sublimated whatever creative and artistic instincts the workmen had. For Ruskin, the solution lay in the re-establishment of an economy similar to medieval times with regimentation of production and prices, and the organization of workers into groups resembling the craft guilds of those times.
Thomas Carlyle was a sympathizer with the struggles of the working class in the industrial sections of England. He repudiated what he believed was the characteristic quality of the age: its selfishness, utilitarianism and materialism. Relations between employer and employee in his time were reduced to the terms of a wage bargain and were marked by the relative indifference of the former as to how the latter found the environment of his daily work or the conditions of his home life that were commensurate with the pay he received. Freedom was the abstract conception of the economic thinking of the age and of the political life of the times. But for the worker, servility was his status in the industrial world and his insignificant preference at the polls his only show of political freedom. Penty's dislike of democratic methods in the political sphere was probably influenced to a great extent by Carlyle who preferred a government of the wisest, which was not always a consequence of popular preference in elections.
The influence of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy is cited as background reading in the earliest of Penty's writings. Though perhaps better known as one of those responsible for the introduction of the Hegelian idea of the State into England, he was a critic of the motivating forces in the industrial movement. The central idea of Arnold's teaching is the difference between means and ends, between machinery and the thing which it produces. In Culture and Anarchy, he set forth the idea that faith in machinery is a besetting danger and that the possibility exists in all ways of life to mistake means for real ends.
William Morris was the originator of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and it attracted wide attention while succeeding in putting into practice hand production of such quality that reflected the craftsman's conception of beauty and perfection. The satisfaction which medieval workmen received in their work, despite the undeniable crudity and provincialism of their environment, was revived in these isolated instances. Morris felt that when the laborer was a craftsman only beautiful things were made, as reflected by the homes they dwelt in and the things they used for their personal needs. And these things were art since they embodied the visions of the workmen and expressed the composure and serenity of his labor. But in the modern industrial world, all this is changed. It is first of all characterized by its exterior ugliness. The worker, under no obligation to use his intelligence, is of economic value only insofar as he has physical strength or skill. Morris was not opposed to machinery in principle, but he, like Penty, undertook in his social thinking the means of restricting its use.
Upon his return to England, Penty renewed his acquaintanceship with A.R. Orage, who was also a member of the Fabians and interested in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Penty's dissatisfaction with the trend of Socialist thought and its complacency about the trends towards centralization of production was shared by Orage, who was a part owner of a weekly called The New Age. While somewhat less restrained than Penty in his enthusiasm for the adoption of medieval patterns in society, he saw in the rising strength of the trade unions a potential instrument in effecting industrial control. Contributors to his periodical included such names as Hilaire Belloc, Gilbert K. and Cecil Chesterton, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. The New Age advocated a "frank acceptance of the integral character of the unions and their right to an equal share in the responsibility of management in the business their members are engaged in," and went on to say that "the true line of development of the restoration of the essential features of the gild system, the responsibility of its members, the disposition of its collective forces and joint control of industry."
Penty stressed the artistic and ethical implications in the guild doctrine while Orage was more concerned with seeking the sympathy and cooperation of the fast growing unions. H.G. Wells has said that Guild Socialism was the result of the impact of guilds and Mr. Penty on the uneasy conscience of Mr. Orage. A contributor to The New Age, S.G. Hobson launched the Guild Socialist movement with the publication of a book called National Guilds, a collection of periodical contributions edited by Orage, which went through three editions. Connected also with the Guild movement was one of the organizers of the Fabian Research Department, a brilliant intellectual named G.D.H. Cole who was a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. The Guild movement appealed to him principally as a via media between collectivism and syndicalism.
The medieval guild had been an autonomous unit, local in character, but the tendency in the movement was towards a national guild. Penty's opposition was thereupon aroused as he contended the very evident possibility of over-centralization and the danger to personal freedom inherent in this policy. The champions of the national guilds, among whom was G.D.H. Cole and some Oxford associates with Marxian sympathies, had stressed the fact that modern industry was on a national set-up with corresponding methods of efficiency in the way of purchasing and distributing that could not lightly be disregarded. Trade unions likewise were national and the thinking habits of their members were not provincial.
The failure of the National Building Guild demonstrated the strength of Penty's position when it became evident that inefficient branches were retarding the efficient ones. Penty has outlined what were the basic differences between medieval and National Guildsmen:
Local and national was not finally the issue that separated Guildsmen into rival groups, but different conceptions of the purpose of a Guild. Critics of National Guilds laboured under the disadvantage that the only term they had to describe the type of Guild they advocated was "Medieval Guild," and this term had a serious disadvantage. ... We are indebted to Mrs Victor Branford for bringing this discussion at cross purposes to an end by designating the National Guilds as Producing Guilds and Medieval Guilds as Regulative Guilds, which does define the essential differences. For the essence of the National Guild is the organization of industry on an entirely self-governing basis, without any admixture of private interests for the purposes of production; while the essence of the Medieval Guild idea is a regulative body that does not propose to engage in production but to regulate it. The aim of such Regulative Guilds. ... being not primarily to supplant the individual producer by any form of co-operative production, but to accept the principle of the private management of industry for the present, at any rate, and to seek to superimpose over each trade or industry an organization to regulate its affairs in the same way that professional organizations enforce a discipline among their members today; with the difference that in addition to upholding a standard of professional conduct they would be concerned to promote a certain measure of economic equality among their members.
The only difference between such Regulative Guilds and their Medieval prototypes would be that whereas the latter exercised control over employers and workers engaged in small workshops owned by small masters, the former would exercise control over workers and employers engaged in large and small factories and workshops, owned by private individuals or limited liability companies or self-governing groups of workers (i.e. producing guilds or co-operative producers).
Although the medieval implications of the movement seemed to fade after 1912, Penty still retained his interest in the movement and the preface to Old Worlds for New admitted the immediate impracticability of medieval guilds or regulative guilds as he later preferred to call them. Its practical application being temporarily thwarted, the medieval guild became for him the object of his long range policy. National Guilds had a purpose and an aim to secure the abolition of the wage system. He foresaw that workers in control of industry would find that there were underlying basic difficulties and contradictions in industrialism that would not be resolved by their attaining power. Their solution could only be effected by a return to local guilds and as a means to that end, Penty lent his approval to National Guilds.
Penty's first book, The Restoration of the Gild System, already mentioned, had appeared in 1906. It was a proposal for an alternative program of social reform to the Collectivists. He suggested concentration on five points:
1. The stimulation of right thinking upon social questions.
2. The restoration of a spirit of reverence for the past.
3. The dissemination of the principles of taste.
4. The teaching of elements of morality, especially in relation to commerce.
5. The insistence upon the necessity of personal sacrifice as a means to the salvation alike of the individual and of the State.
In 1917 appeared the second of Penty's works, Old Worlds for New, in which he foresaw the decline of Capitalism after the War and the inherent perils to the structure of society from the evils of mass production and fluctuating prices.
Guilds and the Social Crisis was written in 1919 and the same charges are reiterated with a growing concern at the wide divergence of social and political views between the traditionalists on the one hand and the Marxians on the other.
Not satisfied with studying contemporary social phenomena, he evolved in A Guildsman's Interpretation of History the thesis that an historical consideration of the past presented in a sympathetic light and not in the light of materialist prejudices will lend a more rounded view to the aspect of industrialism and its consequences. This work, which exhibits the best efforts of Penty's scholarship, was finished in 1920 and had appeared serially in the columns of The New Age during the preceding year and a half. It was later translated into Japanese.
Guilds, Trade and Agriculture, written at a time when the Guild Socialist movement was in a transition stage, endeavours to elucidate Guild theory on the subject of exchange and in this work Penty regards the Guilds as a means to an end. This end is an establishment of a just price in marketable commodities. The necessary position of agriculture as a basic industry, which has been endangered by a policy of fluctuating prices, is viewed with concern, especially as affecting the future of England.
Post Industrialism, published in 1922, takes cognisance of the growing objection to enforced unemployment after the war, which took less of a transitory status than was hitherto conceded. The attack on mechanized industry had before come from two classes: those displaced by labor-saving devices who had to submit to all the inconveniences of a policy based on mobility of labor, and, secondly, from men like Ruskin and Morris, who had an aesthetic objection to the abuses of the machine.
In Towards a Christian Sociology, Penty applies the principles of Christian morality, as he views them, to the social and economic problems confronting society. The need of incorporating spiritual values in human relationships and the rescuing of human personality from the degrading level it had attained in modern industrial life is the theme of this book.
The crisis of unemployment and the necessity of establishing England as a self-supporting nation, once its supremacy as the workshop of the world had been seriously challenged, led him to collaborate with William Wright, a member of Parliament, in the writing of Agriculture and the Unemployed, a terse presentation of the issues involved and published in 1925.
The history of free trade with its unfulfilled promises of international amity and its depressing effect on national agriculture are given in Protection and the Social Problem, published in 1926.
Means and Ends summarizes the social philosophy of Penty, lays some emphasis on the false conception of the guild system as a necessarily lower stage in social evolution and is noteworthy for the first appearance of the principles which he establishes for the control of machinery, which are also included in an amplified form in his two succeeding volumes.
Communism and the Alternative, written for the Student Christian Movement, shows how Communism, in its glorification of industrialism and mechanistic processes and its promulgation of class war undermined its ulterior aim. The alternative theory proposed should rest upon the principles of Christianity and, unlike Communist theory, must accept human nature as it is found.
Tradition and Modernism in Politics, which is largely a series of articles originally appearing in the American Review, deals critically with Fascism, Communism, the Leisure State, the New Deal and the implications of his theories on money and machinery. Both this work and Distributism: A Manifesto were published posthumously in 1937. The latter was offered to the Distributist League subject to revision of any statements that possibly conflicted with the principles of that organization. Because of his death, the brochure was published without editing by the league.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction by Dr. Peter Chojnowski,THE GAUNTLET,
Arthur Penty: His Life and Early Influences Arthur J. Penty: His Contribution to Social Thought,
Currency and the Guilds Towards a Christian Sociology,
Means and Ends Means and Ends,
Regulative and Producing Guilds Towards a Christian Sociology,
The Ethics of Consumption Old Worlds for New: a Study of the Post-Industrial State,
The Return to the Past Post-Industrialism,
The Church and the Common Mind Towards a Christian Sociology,