The Humanities

As a student who had given much of his time at high school to literature and writing, Samuelson must have been excited by the introductory humanities course that he had to take in the first year.

Guidance on how to approach the course material began with religion, explaining that it was being treated simply as an element of human culture, an approach Samuelson would surely have found congenial given his lack of a religious upbringing, before listing the main questions philosophers had asked and the answers that had been proposed. They were advised that his­torical context was never far away: “the reader who assumes that everything should be written as it is written in the twentieth century cannot be very sound in his literary judgment.”⁵ For example, it would be wrong to criticize Sophocles for using choruses in his tragedies when he should be praised for “minimizing and modifying” their role.

Samuelson missed the part of the course dealing with the ancient world, so his first lectures would have been on the breakup of the Roman Empire and its replacement by Byzantine, Moslem, and “Western Roman-Teutonic” cultures. Lectures on these three topics provided the background for a discussion group in which the text was taken from Augustine’s Confessions. The course then covered political history up to 1250, and the major institutions of medieval society—feudalism, the church, and the town, discussion being of the Song of Roland. After this it turned to theology, philosophy, mysticism, education, the arts, and literature.

A significant feature of this part of the course, given Samuelson’s devel­oping interest in the idea of science, was that it provided a context for the emergence of the social sciences. With Galileo and Newton, nature came to be seen as a system of mathematical laws, and it was believed that these laws could be discovered through reason: “reason was the admirable essence both of Nature and of Man.”⁶ Any doubts about these propositions were dispelled by Descartes and Newton, who “by the exercise of reason in alliance with observation and experiment had brought all nature within the boundaries of a single mathematical formula.”⁷ Whether or not he noted the point at the time, he was being exposed to the idea that would dominate his work on economics: that mathematics could unify seemingly disparate fields of knowledge.

The displacement of tradition and theology by reason was the context in which the social sciences emerged.

The new thinking habits established in connection with the study of Nature were bound before long to influence the... Social Sciences. If law and order, reduced to an impressively simple pattern, obtained throughout the physical universe, why did they not obtain also in human society?⁸

Why was it, people asked, that if nature was rational, the affairs of mankind were characterized by “irregularity, caprice, injustice, inequality, in sum, the most distressing denial of reason at every point?” The intellectuals applied reason to make the case of reform, not concerned with whether this led to the downfall of the old order and the transfer of power to their own (middle) class.

Given the need for gold to finance war in an age when raising credit was difficult, the first doctrine to emerge was mercantilism, supporting restric­tions on trade that were intended to increase the supply of precious metals and promote national self-sufficiency. However, mercantilism failed to meet the needs of the middle class, which “possessed in constantly increasing mea­sure the courage, enterprise, and capital necessary to take advantage of the economic opportunities of an expanding world.”⁹ It was “contrary to the sim­plicity of nature,” which favored the doctrine of laissez-faire expounded by Adam Smith. Samuelson’s teachers clearly sided with laissez-faire, endorsing the idea that businessmen were rugged individualists. However, following Smith, they pointed out that businessmen turned to the state for protection when laissez-faire did not suit them. In the nineteenth century, the indi­vidualist philosophy of laissez-faire remained powerful but had to be modi­fied to respond to the “glaring defects” of unrestrained individualism: state intervention increased and there were moves toward equalizing incomes. Liberalism, arising to counter socialism, was presented as one of the few transforming factors affecting the contemporary world, alongside science and the industrial revolution. Asserting that people should be allowed to govern themselves, liberalism was always “a compound of political and economic considerations” and offered an ideal toward which it was thought society should move.

The culmination of the course was the United States, “our own throb- bingly vital country,” the culture of which was also to be analyzed using the genetic method.¹⁰ By this point in the course, Samuelson’s teachers claimed, students had been “provided with a set of spiritual values enabling us to bring a tutored understanding to bear upon the religion, the philosophy, the art, and the literature by means of which our own countrymen offer the latest version of man’s eternal hopes, despairs, and dreams—eternal in their essence but ever changing in their fragile, iridescent forms.”¹¹ After reviewing American literature since the Revolution, tracing various strains of optimism and pessimism against the background of industrialization and economic change, the course ended with an account of pragmatism, pre­sented as neither optimistic nor pessimistic but aiming to be objective, and abandoning any search for certainty and finality in philosophy. Thus, even in his humanities course, Samuelson was being exposed to a clear vision of science and a pragmatic political philosophy centered on laissez-faire that implied an important role for the social sciences.