Was the industrial revolution a calamity for the workers? Not when you consider what came before

‘HELL UPON EARTH’? 

THE TRUE NATURE 

OF THE VICTORIAN CITY 

The Victorian city is often painted as a place of squalor and misery for the working class, where hordes of downtrodden workers were crammed together in dehumanising conditions, lacking the proper freedoms that modern people have come to expect from metropolitan living. Emma Griffin, author of Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution, published by Yale University Press, investigates the reality of Engels’ assertion that working class life in a newly industrialised Victorian city was ‘Hell Upon Earth’. By contrasting the common experience of urban life to the reality of the rural struggle that migrants left behind, Griffin discovers that the city offered its inhabitants a host of opportunities, securities and freedoms that the countryside simply couldn’t.

Victorian cities have received a very bad press. Take Dickens’ famous creation, Coketown in Hard Times – a mill-town set in the north of England and probably inspired by a visit to Preston. Coketown was depicted as a miserable place filled with identical and uninspired brick buildings, all covered with soot, thanks to the coal burned in its many factories. Engels’ account of mid-nineteenth-century Manchester was even more uncompromising: a place of dirt, squalid over-crowding, and exploitation. The historic heart of Manchester he described as a place of ‘filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness’, adding that it was hard to describe ‘the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation and health … which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants… If any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air – and such air! – he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither’. It was, quite simply, ‘Hell upon Earth’.

Yet in their haste to describe the drawbacks of urban living, historians have arguably overlooked the advantages that living in the city offered, even to those who lived in the slums. A remarkable collection of autobiographies written by working men and women in the nineteenth century provides a very different slant on city life to that offered by such iconic writers as Dickens and Engels. These writers do not mention ugly buildings or soot. Nor do they describe their cities as ‘hell upon earth’. They present them as places of social and intellectual freedom. It may jar with what we think they ought to be saying, but it is a verdict that we ought at least to consider.

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Read more: yalebooksblog.co.uk

Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin

by Amanda Vickery

The dominant montage of 19th-century Britain on film and TV is one of opposites: industrial exploitation and proletarian despair contrasted with a rural idyll of wholesome work and lingering in frothy meadows beyond the reach of the railway. The dark satanic mill versus Lark Rise to Candleford.

Frederich Engels drew on two years' observation of living conditions in Manchester in the early 1840s to produce The Condition of the Working Class in England, a paradigm-setting account of the material and spiritual losses that accompanied a sudden transition to industrial society. This fable of proletarian immiseration underscored left-leaning historythereafter. Arnold Toynbee, who coined the term "industrial revolution" in the 1880s saw it as a "disastrous and terrible event" creating vast wealth for a few through the degradation of the many. The argument was reiterated by Sydney and Beatrice Webb, and fleshed out by the pioneering popular historians John and Barbara Hammond.

The pessimist school did not hold the field unchallenged, however. Victorian writers such as Harriet Martineau, Edward Baines and Andrew Ure saw industrial work lifting a generation from grinding rural poverty. Meanwhile economic historians such as John H Clapham in the 1920s drew on the new science of statistics to make clear that wages had "risen markedly". The standard of living debate polarised the postwar history profession, and was still live in academic journals when EP Thompson published in 1963 The Making of the English Working Class, a bible of labour history.

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Read more: www.theguardian.com

This year we will see if America is still a center-right country, or if Obama’s two terms will mark a historic shift to the left.

2014: 

Year of Decision

 by Bruce Thornton

This year we will see if America is still a center-right country, or if Obama’s two terms will mark a historic shift to the left. History and recent events give cause for optimism, subject, of course, to unforeseen events.

The champions of big government, wealth redistribution through taxation and entitlement transfers, and a coercive, intrusive regulatory regime have many times exaggerated the death of conservatism and the final victory of progressivism. Remember this famous pronouncement by culture critic Lionel Trilling in 1950? “In the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation . . . But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Even as Trilling wrote those words, the work of Russell Kirk, F.A. Hayek, Richard Weaver, Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, and many others were developing a powerful conservative philosophy that would bear fruit in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Or those of a certain age can remember the triumphalism of the left after the disgrace of Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, which was followed a year later by the debacle in Saigon and the seeming repudiation of the conservative view of America’s role as the defender of freedom against communist expansion. But the incompetence and naïve idealism of Jimmy Carter’s four years as president quickly made plain the deep flaws of the progressive ideology, as stagflation at home and foreign policy retreat abroad taught us once again that the utopian fever dreams of the progressives threatened our prosperity and endangered our security. The failure of the Carter presidency created the conditions favorable to conservative ideas, and galvanized a people receptive to the philosophy of prudence, self-reliance, and the Constitutional principle of limited government.

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Read more: www.frontpagemag.com

It is upon the shoulders of the parent that civilization depends

Parents: The Glue Holding 

Our Civilization Together

by Jack Kerwick

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More so than anyone else, conservatives know that this is the case. Soldiers and police officers are government actors. Yet government is and can only be as good as the citizenry over which it presides. In other words, in spite of what Big Government ideologues would have us think, governments do not create civilizations. Governments cannot create civilizations.

Fundamentally, a civilization is a composition, authored, as it were, over the span of many thousands of years and by countless numbers of people, of a complex of refined manners or habits.

To put it more simply, a civilization is not natural. It is even unnatural. Rather, civilizations are like works of arts: they are hard won achievements.

What this means is that no one is born a civilized person. The civilized are not born at all. Savages are born—each and every time a human being comes into the world. The civilized, though, are made.

And they are made by their mothers and fathers.

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Read more: www.frontpagemag.com

Economic analysis—at the systemic level—that genuinely respects private property and a rightful role for the market but avoids a view of “capitalism” that is at odds with Catholic social teaching

Rediscovering Heinrich Pesch

 and Solidarism

by Stephen M. Krason

Heinrich Pesch, 1854-1926, a German Jesuit priest and economist, is largely unknown in the U.S., but arguably he is one of the most important and influential Catholic thinkers of the past few centuries. It was to the thought of Pesch and his disciples that Pope Pius XI turned to in composing his monumental encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931), and it is from Pesch that John Paul II has taken many of the ideas of his own social encyclicals, including the idea of man as the subject of work, of man's dominion over the world as founded on his exercise of work, and even the key term "solidarism" (solidarity). Indeed, it sometimes seems uncanny, after reading John Paul, to turn to Pesch and see the same ideas, sometimes presented in nearly the same words. Any thinker who has had such influence over more than one Supreme Pontiff is worth knowing better.

The passing of the eminent American Catholic economist, Dr. Rupert J. Ederer, at the age of ninety on Thanksgiving Day 2013 calls attention to the great, but equally unsung, economic thinker and system that he devoted most of his career to furthering: Heinrich Pesch, S.J. and solidarism. Pesch, who died in 1926, was thought to have inspired Pope Pius XI’s great social encyclicalQuadragesimo Anno five years later. In spite of Pesch’s relative obscurity, Ederer called him an economic “system builder,” on par with Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes—although the system he constructed was based firmly on Catholic teaching and the natural law. The word “solidarism” rings of the principle of solidarity, which has been stressed more recently in Catholic social teaching. In fact, solidarism is also referred to as “the solidarity work system.” There is some indication that Pesch’s solidarism influenced the famed Solidarity trade union movement in Poland that rose to prominence a generation ago and led the way to the collapse of Eastern European communism.

What, broadly, are the basics of solidarism?

First, it rejects both individualism and collectivism and seeks to uphold the good of both the individual and society. In short, it embraces the common good as understood by sound ethics.

Second, there is a solidarity among all men because of, simply, their common humanity.

Third, the worker cannot be reduced to a mere factor of production, nor can economics be made the be-all-and-end-all, so that everything is reduced to economic calculation.

Fourth, the market and its advantages are accepted as givens by solidarism and economic freedom is a good thing.

Fifth, in line with this, while there are certainly market inclinations and forces (e.g., supply and demand) they cannot be treated as rigid “laws” (a notion that came from the Enlightenment).

Sixth, the sense of solidarity motivates the solidarist to promote occupational groups or other sorts of arrangements of those taking part in a particular industry—which must be voluntarily agreed to, and not imposed by the state—which would aim at a kind of enlightened self-regulation.

Seventh, solidarism has no illusions about economic reorganization as some kind of panacea. The proper shaping of the human soul, of course, is a prerequisite.

Eighth, solidarism strongly defends private property, although private ownership—whether on the individual or large-scale corporate business level—can never be separated from the obligation of its social use (i.e., the concern about others and the community in the use of one’s property).

Ninth and tenth: the concern for socialization and the universal destination of created goods perhaps underlies the ninth and tenth points. While the state could step back with a solidaristic-type economic restructuring, its role cannot be minimal. Besides the proper kinds of interventions in the economy it must provide what in the Reagan period first came to be called a “safety net.” While—consistent with the principle of subsidiarity—the family and religious and other civil-society-type groups should be the first to take care of the needy, the state as a matter of justice must help out when this is insufficient. Also, it cannot be indifferent to the situation of wealth distribution; disparities of wealth have to be addressed.

Eleventh, solidarism stresses the need for a just wage. This has direct implications for the state’s social welfare role: a just wage across the economy would mean that there would be less demand for public assistance programs.

Twelfth, solidarism is concerned about justice in pricing (which, interestingly, is an area that has not been developed much in the social encyclicals). A just price is one that both covers costs and yields the producer or trader a reasonable gain (a profit).

Thirteenth, any tax levied must be truly necessary, must take into account persons’ level of wealth, may be heavier on, say, investment income than income earned from work, and must be used to fund activities that will promote the common good and not merely the private good of some (e.g., interest groups).

The fourteenth and final point is one that certainly collides with prevailing economic thinking: completely free trade must be rejected. This is because of commutative justice: certain countries are unable to derive the same advantage as others in a free trade regimen.

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Read more: www.crisismagazine.com

Nacionalismo: "No escuchemos a esos falsos profetas que nos prometen una Cataluña más cristiana a cambio de abrir la puerta de lo sagrado a la ideología del momento"

Diez mentiras del nacionalismo catalán

MARÍA JESÚS CAÑIZARES 

Javier Barraycoa (Barcelona, 1963) vuelve a desmontar

 los mitos nacionalistas en su libro «Cataluña Hispana» 

• ¿Sabías que la primera capital de la España unificada por los godos fue Barcelona? 
• ¿Que la Barcelona de 1714 estuvo defendida también por un Tercio de castellanos y que Felipe V, tras la Guerra de Sucesión, constituyó un cuerpo para su protección personal dirigido por catalanes? 
• ¿Que en Barcelona, cuando nadie conocía la sardana, el baile más popular era el de San Isidro, en memoria del patrono madrileño? 
• ¿O que, hasta la llegada del catalanismo, a ningún catalán se le ocurrió poner el nombre de Jordi a sus hijos? 
• ¿Y que el monasterio de Montserrat tuvo monjes castellanos durante cuatro siglos y dependía de la comunidad benedictina de Valladolid?
• ¿Y que el origen de los 'castellers' no fue catalán sino valenciano?
• ¿O que en el diccionario de lengua española hay más de mil vocablos de origen catalán? 
• ¿Sabía que los catalanes participaron en todas las grandes gestas militares del imperio español, como en la crucial batalla de Lepanto?

Este libro descubre infinidad de historias que demuestran la verdadera esencia hispánica de Cataluña y desvela la mitología y las miserias intelectuales del nacionalismo catalanista.

Las diez mentiras:

1- Existe un sustrato étnico catalán
2-El mal de Cataluña es el centralismo madrileño
3- Cataluña fue una «nación» gracias a la negativa de Borrell II de rendir pleitesía al rey franco Hugo Capeto
4- La Generalitat es originalmente catalana
5- Cataluña ha tenido una espiritualidad diferente
6- Los catalanes no participaron en la Conquista y el «genocidio» americano
7- «Nación» catalana nada tiene que ver con «nación» española
8- Castilla oprimió la lengua catalana y el nacionalismo la salvó
9- Companys fue un modelo para todos los catalanistas
10- El fin del catalanismo radical ha sido siempre la independencia

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Leer más aquí: www.abc.es

La invasión de la ideología 

en el catolicismo catalán

por Álex Rosal

En Cataluña se palpa la apostasía silenciosa 

y la secularización rampante. 

Mossen Joan estaba exultante. Había acudido, en julio de 2010, a la manifestación en defensa del Estatut de Catalunya convocada por las fuerzas políticas nacionalistas,y había disfrutado de lo lindo con los discursos y eslóganes coreados. Y, claro, tan enchufado se encontraba con tanta exaltación ideológica que al oficiar la Eucaristía de las ocho, como acostumbraba todos los días, llegó a la homilía y soltó una soflama nacionalista por espacio de veinte minutos, olvidándose por completo del Evangelio del día. Pero, mossen Joan estaba contento. Ese sábado había vivido muchas emociones juntas y quería compartirlas con su comunidad cristiana.

Al terminar la prédica dejó el ambón y se dirigió al altar. Con esa excitación tan terrena de predicar de cuestiones mitológicas, no había estado muy atento a la feligresía que llenaba el templo, pero ahora, un poco más calmado, levantaba la vista para ver a sus ovejas... y no estaban todas. Unas cuantas, sin hacer aspavientos, ni querer llamar la atención, se levantaban sigilosamente de los bancos y abandonaban educadamente la iglesia, disconformes por esa homilía tan poco religiosa.

Mossen Joan que es un buen sacerdote que roza los ochenta años, estaba apesadumbrado. 

Llegó como pudo a la residencial sacerdotal y se desahogó con un presbítero amigo: 

"Josep Maria, em sembla que m´ he equivocat; m´ he equivocat ", repetía una y otra vez un tanto desconsolado. No era para menos. Su ideología, por muy legítima que fuera, había invadido un ámbito, el religioso, que debería estar al margen de cualquier moda política por muy ruidosa que sea... ya que acabará muriendo, como han muerto a lo largo de la Historia otras ideologías que parecían eternas y ahora están enterradas bajo tierra.

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Leer más aquí: www.religionenlibertad.com


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It’s crucial for lovers of liberty to understand how a voluntary economic marketplace works, in order to explode the myths and lies of its enemies

To Understand Public Policy, 

First Understand Markets

by Robert P. Murphy

In this day and age, virtually every major “public” or “social” issue involves proposals for government interference with the market. That’s why it’s crucial for lovers of liberty to understand how a voluntary economic marketplace works, in order to explode the myths and lies of its enemies.

In the final section of Human Action, Ludwig von Mises stressed the importance of all citizens to acquaint themselves with the findings of economic science. Unlike physics or engineering — where the scientists could safely continue with their advancements, whether or not the average person understood how they worked — economicpolicies as enacted by governments will ultimately rest with public opinion. No matter how decisively the great classical economists destroyed the case for mercantilism centuries ago, we still suffer from tariffs because most people want to “save jobs” by keeping out “cheap foreign imports.”

Indeed, just about all of the “public issues” of today are crucially dependent on an understanding of sound economics, including ObamaCare, Bitcoin, quantitative easing, the trillion-dollar platinum coin, so-called “green” energy initiatives, and the “sequester.” To understand whether government intervention in a particular sector will bring desirable effects, the first task is to learn how the market economy works.

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Read more: mises.org

In a chess game, a pawn can become any one of the royal pieces,

Thinking for ourselves

By Ben S. Carson

The rewards of independence and common sense are many

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In a chess game, a pawn can become any one of the royal pieces, if it can make it to the other side of the board. The opponent will do almost anything to keep one from reaching its goal, because that would interfere with the power structure. If they can keep the pawns on “their side” of the board, where it is much safer, the status quo can be maintained. Although no analogy is perfect, it is pretty easy to see the point here. By keeping large groups of Americans complacent and afraid to challenge authority, the position, wealth and power of those in authority can be maintained. The last thing those in authority want is independent-thinking citizens who wake up to the reality that this country was actually designed for them and not for a ruling class that thinks it knows what’s best for everyone else. They dread the possibility of people actually scrutinizing their words and deeds, and holding them accountable for same. By using strong-arm tactics and a sheepishly compliant news media, which originally was supposed to be the guardian of truth, they have been very successful at pawn control.

I can’t remember how many times during my medical career I was told, “You can’t do that” or “No one has done that before” or “Do you think all the incredibly bright people who have preceded you didn’t think of that?” Certainly if I had listened to those comments instead of critically analyzing the problems and using both the triumphs and mistakes of others from the past to produce innovative solutions, my career path would have been considerably different. We have these magnificent brains with outstanding reasoning ability in order to be creative and in order to be able to critically analyze what we hear and see. All of us as citizens must stop acting like pawns and start acting like masters of our own destiny.

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Read more: www.washingtontimes.com