Monetary Manipulation: Berkeleyan and Otherwise; Hermathena CX p32, 1970.

From evidence elsewhere it seems that JJ wrote this paper in 1964. He included it among the papers which he pulled together into his unpublished 'Consumer Demand as the Basis of Credit', which I have referenced in the SSISI stream. Hermathena in the end accepted it, perhaps because of his impending publication of his Berkeley book.

In it he attempts to determine the conditions under which the expansion of the money supply can generate a higher level of real economic activity without being inflationary, contrasting the 30s with the post-war experience. It can be taken as a commentary on the Keynesian liquidity preference theory of the rate of interest. He concludes that 'monetary manipulation, though sometimes apparently magical in its potency, can in general operate only at the fringe'.

Bishop Berkeley's Querist in Historical Perspective

I review it elsewhere, and aim to reproduce it in full eventually, as a separate re-publication exercise. Such an exercise might become useful in the context of the current wave of economic revisionism, where Adam Smith rubs shoulders with Marx in the pages of the Harvard Business Review, and reconstructing Marxists contemplate the role of the market.

I am indebted to Collison Black, late of Queen University Belfast, and who served with my father on the Council of the SSISI in the 50s, for drawing my attention to some work in the University of Illinois by Salim Rachid.

In a Manchester School paper (Vol LVI no 4, December 1988) Rachid mentions JJ's Berkeley work in support of his thesis regarding the existence of an 'Irish School of Economic Development 1720-1750'. This included Berkeley, Molyneux, Swift, Dobbs and Prior, and was closely linked to applied-scientific development activity via the Dublin Society. Rachid distinguishes this group from the 'Merchantilists' with whom all economic thought prior to Adam Smith has tended to be uncritically identified by historians of economic thought, and shows how they were in fact Smith precursors. JJ went further and regarded Berkeley as being a Keynes precursor.

I suggest that there is perhaps some raw material here for exploitation by scholars interested in the historical roots of development economics. I would go further and suggest that in the composition of this group, with the strong scientific component as expressed in Dobbs and Prior, we have a good model which in current development economic thinking needs to be recaptured. The key to economic development is technical competence in the useful arts, and this was the Dublin Society's prime objective.

At this point it is appropriate to place on record that JJ in the 40s encouraged me to take up science as a career, and I now realise that this must have been as a consequence of the foregoing insights.

Berkeley and Marxism

In his thesis he analysed the various Marxist attacks on Berkeley's philosophy; these mostly stemmed from Russia in the 1900s, when Lenin showed that the 'empirio-criticism' of Mach, Godunov and others was in fact thinly-disguised Berkeley, whom Lenin respected as an honest promoter of objective idealism. The context was the attempt by the 'critical Marxist' school (Bernstein and others) to banish dialectics to the fringe of Marxism; Lenin retained it at the core.

Cathcart made it clear that the materialism Berkeley was attacking was the 'mechanistic materialism' of the 18th century and that his arguments were had been rendered redundant by the introduction of the dialectical process into Marxist materialist thinking. He has chapters on the epistemological and social roots of Berkeley's Immaterialism. Nowhere however does he touch on the Querist or on the economic thinking of Berkeley; he remains strictly within the boundaries of the discipline of philosophy. This to my mind is somewhat un-Marxist, neglectful of Engels's principle of the 'interconnectedness of everything', and suggests that there is here unfinished business.

For example, how was the thinking of Berkeley on economic matters, as expressed in the Querist, influenced by comparative experience of colonial economic systems in Ireland and America? What connection if any was there between his philosophy and his economics, and if there was one, did it help or hinder, and if so, how?

Cathcart was influenced in the choice of his thesis material by the bicentenary conference which took place in Trinity College in 1953, to which my father JJ contributed the keynote paper. I am surprised that Cathcart did not pick up any pointers from my father's paper, which analysed the progressive 'development economics' aspects of Berkeley as economist, counter-posing him to Adam Smith. This suggests to me that the compartmentalisation of academic philosophy had managed to impose itself on Cathcart's thinking, distancing him from the essential 'philosophy of action' nature of Marxism.

Although I knew vaguely about Cathcart's work at the time, I regret not having had the opportunity to interact with him or with my father in this context; I had missed the 1953 conference, being in France, and Cathcart during most of this time was in Raphoe Grammar School. Marxist thought in Ireland in the 1950s never achieved anything approximating to a 'critical mass' enabling it to develop creatively and interactively with the real world. Desmond Greaves was also aware of the existence of Cathcart's thesis, but I have seen no evidence that he might have read it or interacted with him about it.

Scientific Publications by RJ

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Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999