Submitted in Accordance With The Requirements For The Degree of

THE THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST IN MODERN ECONOMIC DISCOURSE:
A CRITICAL STUDY IN THE LIGHT OF AFRICAN HUMANISM AND

PROCESS PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
By
MUNYARADZI FELIX MUROVE
submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF THEOLOGY
in the subject of
THEOLOGICAL ETHICS
at the
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA
PROMOTER: PROF M B G MOTLHABI
SEMPTEMBER 2005
ii
Student Number: 852-048-8
DECLARATION
I declare that THE THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST IN MODERN ECONOMIC

DISCOURSE: A CRITICAL STUDY IN LIGHT OF AFRICAN HUMANISM AND
THE PROCESS PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY is my own work and that
all the sources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by
means of complete references.
_______________________ ___________________
SIGNATURE) DATE
(MF MUROVE)
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Professor Mokgethi Motlhabi for his patient, highly critical and
equally encouraging supervisory role, my friend Dr. Patrick Ngulube for his technical
support, my beloved friend Queen and my children Rudo and Tadiwa for all their
encouragement and love. My heartfelt gratitude goes to my parents and sisters for their
encouragement. I am very thankful for the financial assistance that was given to me by
the Unilever Ethics Centre and the unfailing support and encouragement that was also
given to me by my colleague Professor Martin Prozesky. The initial financial assistance
of the National Research Foundation is hereby acknowledged.
iv
SUMMARY
Modern economic theory of self-interest alleges that in their economic relations people
always behave in a way that maximises their utility. The idea whether human beings were
solely self-interested has a long history as it can be seen from the writings of Greek
philosophers and the Church fathers. Among Greek philosophers there were those who
argued that human beings were naturally self-interested (Aristotle) and those who
maintained that human beings were communal by nature (Plato, Stoics and the
Pythagoreans). The later position was adopted by the Church fathers as they condemned
self-interest as the sin of avarice and greed.
The justification of self-interest in human and political activities was part and parcel of
the economic and political early modernists, as it can be seen in the works of Mandeville,
Hobbes, Hume and Adam Smith. In the writings of these thinkers, the flourishing of
wealth depended on individual freedom to pursue their self-interests. In this regard, self-
interest became the sole source of motivation in the behaviour of homo economicus. A
persistent motif in late modern economic discourse on self-interest is based on the idea
that people think and act on the basis of that which is to their self-interest. It is mainly for
this reason that late modern economic thinkers maintain that society would prosper when
people are left alone to pursue their self-interests. Late modern economic theory of utility
maximisation alleges that individuals act only after calculating costs and benefits.
The argument of this thesis, based on the commonalities between African humanism and
process philosophical anthropology, is that self-interest is antithetical to communal life as
advocated in the ethic of Ubuntu. One who acts solely on the basis of maximising his or
her utility would inevitably deprive others of a humane existence. A holistic metaphysical
outlook based on the relatedness and interrelatedness of everything that exists as we find
it in African humanism and process philosophical anthropology implies that the
individual exists in internal relations with everything else. We should go beyond self-
interest by giving primacy to a holistic ethic.
v
Key Terms
Capitalism; Community; Homo Economicus; Ethics; African Humanism; Modernity;
Process thought; Utility maximisation; Self-interest; Ubuntu.
vi
ABBREVIATIONS
AI Adventures of Ideas
CN Concept of Nature
SMW Science and the Modern World
RM Religion in the Making
PR Process and Reality
MT Modes of Thought
ESP Essays in Science and Philosophy
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................... iii
ABBREVIATIONS .......................................................................................................... vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................... vii
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 1
1.1 Statement of the Problem........................................................................................... 1
1.1.1 Summary ................................................................................................................ 1
1.1.2 Origins of the Problem........................................................................................... 2
1.2 The Limitations of the Study ..................................................................................... 4
1.3 Significance of the Study ............................................................................................ 5
1.4 Method of Investigation.............................................................................................. 5
1.5 Plan of the Study ......................................................................................................... 6
PART I: THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST AND MODERN ECONOMIC
DISCOURSES ................................................................................................................... 8
CHAPTER TWO: EARLY GREEK AND JUDEO-CHRISTIAN DISCOURSES ON
SELF-INTEREST ........................................................................................................... 11
2.1 Introduction............................................................................................................... 11
2.2 Self-Interest Defined ................................................................................................. 12
2.3 Self-Interest and Greek Philosophical Discourses ................................................. 14
2.3.1 Plato and the Pythagoreans .................................................................................. 14
2.3.2 Aristotle................................................................................................................ 17
2.4 Self-Interest and the Judeo-Christian Tradition ................................................... 20
2.4.1 The Essenes of Qumran ....................................................................................... 21
2.4.2 St Ambrose of Milan............................................................................................ 22
2.4.3 Gregory of Nazianzen .......................................................................................... 23
2.4.4 St. Basil the Great ................................................................................................ 24
2.4.5 St. Augustine........................................................................................................ 25
2.4.6 Thomas Aquinas .................................................................................................. 29
2.5 Self-Interest and the Reformation Era ................................................................... 31
2.6 Conclusion and Observations .................................................................................. 38
viii
CHAPTER THREE: EARLY MODERNITY AND THE ECONOMIC THEORY

OF SELF-INTEREST .................................................................................................... 41
3.1 Introduction............................................................................................................... 41
3.2 Definition of Modernity............................................................................................ 42
3.3 Self-Interest and Political Theories of Early Modernity ....................................... 44
3. 3.1 Machiavelli and Political Liberalism .................................................................. 44
3. 3.2 Self-Interest in Hobbes’ Theory of Social Contract ........................................... 46
3.3.3 David Hume and Self-Interest in Politics ............................................................ 49
3.4 Self Interest and Early Modern Economic Liberalism ......................................... 50
3.4.1 Mandeville’s Parody of Egoism that benefits the Common Good ...................... 51
3.4.2 Self-Interest in Adam Smith’s Liberal Economic Theory ................................... 56
3.4.3 Self-Interest and the Invisible Hand .................................................................... 59
3.4.3.1 The Religious Significance of the Invisible Hand ........................................ 60
3.4.3.2 Smith’s concept of the Invisible Hand and the Sociological Theory of
Spontaneous Orders .................................................................................................. 63
3.4.4 Polanyi’s Critique of Smith’s Economic Liberalism ........................................... 71
3.5 Conclusion and Observations .................................................................................. 73
CHAPTER FOUR: OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS TO AND DEBATES ON THE
THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST IN EARLY MODERN ECONOMIC
DISCOURSE ................................................................................................................... 76
4.1 Introduction............................................................................................................... 76
4.2 Economic Significance of Self-Interest and the Theory of Evolution .................. 77
4.2.1 Malthus’s Justification of Selfishness through Demographic Theory................. 77
4.2.2 Economics of Self-Interest in Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution................ 80
4.2.3 Self-Interest and the Social Biology of Herbert Spencer..................................... 82
4.2.4 Philip Wicksteed and the Moral Neutrality of Self-Interest ................................ 85
4.3 Self-Interest as the Dehumanising aspect of the Liberal Economy...................... 92
4.3.1 John Ruskin.......................................................................................................... 92
4.3.2 Karl Marx’s Humanistic Argument ..................................................................... 93
4.3.3 Self-Interest and Veblen’s Institutional Evolutionary Economics....................... 97
4.4 Conclusion and Observations ................................................................................ 103
ix
CHAPTER FIVE: SELF-INTEREST AND LATE MODERN ECONOMIC

THOUGHT.................................................................................................................... 106
5.1 Introduction............................................................................................................. 106
5.2 Self-Interest As Motivation in Late Modern Economic Discipline .................... 107
5.3 Utility Maximising Rationality and Human Economic Behaviour .................... 110
5.4 Self-Interest and Welfarism in Neo-Liberal Economics...................................... 112
5.4.1 The Selfishness of Ayn Rand............................................................................. 112
5.4.2 Nozick’s Theory of Minimal State Interference ................................................ 115
5.4.3 Samuel Brittan on Individual Freedom in Economic Matters ........................... 116
5.4.4 Paul Heyne on the Predominance of Self-Interest in the Public Sphere............ 118
5.4.5 Alexander Shand and Frank Field on Welfare as Subsisting in Self-Interest.... 119
5.5 Modern Arguments against Self-Interest ............................................................. 122
5.5.1 The Sociological Argument ............................................................................... 122
5.5.2 The Economic Argument of the Plurality of Motivations ................................. 124
PART II: A CRITIQUE OF SELF-INTEREST FROM THE PERSPECTIVES OF
AFRICAN HUMANISM AND PROCESS PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
......................................................................................................................................... 131
CHAPTER SIX: AFRICAN HUMANISM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE
THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST ................................................................................ 133
6.1 Introduction............................................................................................................. 133
6.2 Defining African Humanism.................................................................................. 134
6.3 The World-View of African Humanism ............................................................... 136
6.4 Centrality of Ubuntu in African Humanism ........................................................ 144
6.4.1 Proverbial Wisdom on Ubuntu .......................................................................... 148
6.4.2 Ubuntu and Solidarity of the Past and the Present............................................. 149
6.4.3 Ubuntu and Ukama ............................................................................................ 151
6.5 Relationality and African Humanism ................................................................... 152
6.6 African Humanism and the Primacy of Community........................................... 156
6.6.1 Arguments against the Communitarianism of African Humanism.................... 161
6.7 African Humanism as the basis of African Socialism.......................................... 166
x

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE IMPLICATIONS OF PROCESS PHILOSOPHICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE THEORY SELF-INTEREST................................ 177
7.1 Introduction............................................................................................................. 177
7.2 Background to Process Thought and Ethics ........................................................ 178
7.3 The World-view of Process Philosophy................................................................. 178
7.3.1 The Influence of the New Scientific Discoveries .............................................. 179
7.3.2 The Process Concept of Prehension................................................................... 187
7.4 Process Thought and the Co-existence of Humanity and the Environment...... 191
7.5 Arguments against Process Relationalism............................................................ 195
7.6 The Process Critique of Self-Interest as an Illusion of Egoism .......................... 197
PART III: IMPLICATIONS OF THE VALUES OF AFRICAN HUMANISM AND
PROCESS PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY ON THE THEORY OF SELF-
INTEREST .................................................................................................................... 208
CHAPTER EIGHT: RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS.................. 210
SECTION A: BEYOND SELF-INTEREST: TOWARDS A HOLISTIC ETHIC . 210
8.1 Introduction............................................................................................................. 210
8.2 The Primacy of an All-Embracive Community ................................................... 211
8.3 Beyond Self-Interested Rationality to Relational Rationality ............................ 213
8.4 Fostering the Common Good................................................................................. 215
SECTION B: GENERAL CONCLUSIONS .............................................................. 218
8.6 Overview .................................................................................................................. 218
8.7 Self-Interest and Early Philosophical Discourses ................................................ 219
8.8 Early Modernity and the Socio-Economic Theory of Self-Interest.................... 220
8.9 Other Contributions to and Debates on the Theory of Self-Interest in Early
Modernity ...................................................................................................................... 223
8.10 Self-Interest and Later Modern Economic Thought ......................................... 224
8.11 African Humanism and its Implications for the Theory of Self-Interest ........ 226
8.12 The Implications of Process Philosophical Anthropology on Self-Interest ..... 228
xi
8. 13 Beyond Self-Interest: Towards a Holistic Ethic................................................ 230

8.14 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 231
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 233
1
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.1 Statement of the Problem
1.1.1 Summary
The theory of self-interest in modern economics, which amounts largely to the

glorification of self-interest, has not been sufficiently interrogated and critiqued by social
scientists, especially from the ethical perspective. Studies such as those of Max Weber
and R H Tawney have been mostly accepted uncritically by Christian ethicists, obviously
because they sing welcome praises of what Weber termed the Protestant ethic. This ethic
is credited with promoting hard work, thrift, and investment of wealth, thus providing
some of the key bases for the emergence of Western capitalism.
The relative lack of critique of the theory of self-interest and other theories which support
it is the problem confronting this thesis. The purpose of the thesis, therefore, is partly to
provide such a critique, and precisely from the perspective of ethics. In doing so, it will
not dwell much on the reasons for this apparent omission in modern economic theory.
This thesis thus has a four-fold purpose.
First, it is to consider the grounds, as well as their plausibility, on which modern

economic theory considers self-interest to be the basic motive behind all human existence
and behaviour. The second purpose is to engage with this assumption by critically
interrogating it with a view to exploding it. Third, the thesis will try to show indirectly,
through the argument it pursues, that the thesis of “church sociologists” such as Weber
and his associates is not necessarily without its problems nor beyond reproach. It would
not be an exaggeration to say that it may be guilty of making generalisations from a few,
carefully selected facts – facts which, nevertheless, do not represent the “whole truth”.
Finally, through the use of critical tools derived from African Humanism and Process
Philosophical Anthropology, the thesis will continue to critique the theory of self-interest,
on the one hand, while, on the other, recommending an alternative ethic based on the
2
premise of our common belonging and our relatedness as human beings. Such an
alternative ethic is, at basis, an ethic of the common good.
1.1.2 Origins of the Problem

Modern economic theory of self-interest is based on the presumption that human
economic relations are solely motivated by self-interest. Related to this presumption is
the idea that individuals would promote the welfare of society through the pursuit of their
self-interests rather than when they deliberately try to enter into economic relations that
are based on altruistic sentiments. It is also alleged that self-interest or individual vices,
rather than virtues, are the reason for the flourishing of wealth.
Self-interest in modern economics derived from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in

which he argued that economic relations are about appealing to each other’s self-interest
or greed. By appealing to each other’s self-interest we end up attaining that which we
want rather than when we appeal to each other’s generosity. The implication of Smith’s
observation was that self-interested actions of individuals lead to social, economic and
political equilibrium, which is more desirable than when we consciously decide to give
shape to these realities through regulations (Smith 1976: 423). The problem with this
Smithian theory of economic relations that are based on unregulated pursuit of self-
interest suggests an anarchic view of society in the sense that there is a lack of concern
for what self-interest would do to the whole social order.
Self-interest has been seen by economists such as Robert Heilbroner (1972a: 120) as an
economic advocacy of an anarchic theory of society because it presumes a social
existence that is based on unregulated competitiveness in pursuit of economic gains. In
this regard, solidarity through a sense of belonging to the community and to society at
large becomes external to the modern economic discipline and its implied economic
relations. If individuals are only self-interested, it logically follows that they cannot be
interested in the welfare of others or those of society as a collectivity of the common
good. Contemporary neo-liberal economists say that society is just an abstract – what is
3
real are individuals and their self-interests. It is mainly for this reason that governmental
efforts to promote welfare through progressive taxation are seen as an infringement on
individual rights and freedoms (Rand 1963a 92-101; 1964: 92-93; Nozick 1974: 33;
Brittan 1988: 37; Heyne 1983: 272-284).
Another claim that is made by late modern economic theorists is that self-interest serves
as a human motive that helps us to maximise our utilities. An economic relation that does
not lead to the maximisation of utility can hardly be considered as economical. The late
modern economic rule of utility maximisation implies that human beings are greedy
because they can only be satisfied after a maximum consumption of whatever they
consume (Tullock and Mackenzie 1985: 7; Hamlin 1986: 17-36). This reduction of
human economic motivations to utility maximisation does away with any other
motivations in human economic behaviour. In this utility maximisation view of self-
interest a human being is dehumanised as his or her other motives are reduced to greed
(Sen 1987: 15-20; Fisk 1980: 17; Handy 1998: 132-133). If human economic motivations
are reduced to utility maximisation, however, the problem is that the pursuit of self-
interest will inevitably lead to social inequalities, rampant pollution and depletion of
resources upon which the future generations depend.
The problem of abstracting the individual from social and environmental relationships
brings us also to the problem of the compatibility of self-interest with environmental
well-being. If human beings are only self-interested, it becomes difficult to argue for the
need to have an all-inclusive moral outlook that has a concern for the natural
environment. The contemporary neo-liberal ideal of endless accumulation of wealth
through the individual pursuit of self-interest discounts the needs of future generations
and the well-being of the natural environment (Daly and Cobb 1989: 36; Ikerd 1999: 2).
The argument of this thesis is that self-interest as it has been championed by early
modern economists, and is still being adhered to by late modern economists, tends to do
away with morality in economic relations as well as within the realm of our social and
political existence as human beings. Secondly it will be argued that self-interest within
4
late modern economic discourses ultimately militates against the well-being of future
generations. If one can exist solely according to the dictates of self-interest, there is
nothing that can stop that individual from polluting and depleting the environment and its
natural resources (Lux 1990: 165; O’Neil 1998: 162; Ikerd 1999: 3).
My critique of the modern economic theory of self-interest will be based on a relational

ethic that engenders the idea that the individuals’ well-being is intrinsic to their belonging
to society and the natural environment, and that there are no realities that can exist
meaningfully outside these internal relations with everything that exists. For this purpose,
two critical tools which are employed in this thesis are African humanism and process
philosophical anthropology. These tools present us with a relational ethical paradigm that
emphasises the interconnectedness of everything that exists. Under such a paradigm self-
interest becomes illusory, if not pathological (Kasenene 1994: 141-142; Bujo 1997: 162;
Hartshorne 1950: 38; 1974: 202-206). As we shall see in chapters 6 and 7, the
commonalities between these two critical tools offer us a holistic ethical paradigm based
on the notion that everything that exists can only attain a meaningful existence in
symbiosis with, and for, others. Thus in applying the commonalities between these two
critical tools as we shall see in chapter 8, we shall come up with a holistic ethic that can
help us to go beyond self-interest.
1.2 The Limitations of the Study

The topic of this study is too wide for a thorough treatment within the limitations of a
doctoral dissertation. This implies that certain issues will not be given the detailed
analysis they deserve. While this study is an investigation of self-interest in modern
economic discourses, it is mainly concerned with ethical issues rather than with issues of
economics as a discipline. The study does not intend to cover all discussions on self-
interest unless there is some direct relation with self-interest in economic ethics. As a
student of ethics, my investigation will not be that of a neutral academic observer, but it
consists of an advocacy of an ethical point of view that renders the modern economic
5
theory of self-interest unacceptable. My critique of self-interest is limited to African

humanism and process thought.
1.3 Significance of the Study

The idea of employing African humanism and process philosophical anthropology in
critiquing the theory of self-interest in modern economic discourse has never been done
anywhere to my knowledge. For this reason, this thesis will have a unique contribution to
make in this aspect of economic ethics. In most of our universities, economics is usually
treated like disciplines such as physics, biology and chemistry. The underlying
assumption amongst modern economists is that economics is not a humanistic discipline
that has a direct bearing on people’s lives.
Here I am insisting that economics should be treated as a humanistic discipline that

should be pursued within the parameters of a relational ethic. From this relational ethical
paradigm, economic activities have to be pursued with the aim of promoting the well-
being of all human beings as well as that of the natural environment. Consequently, the
relational ethic that is espoused in this thesis goes beyond anthropocentricism as it
embraces everything in existence. Another element of novelty in my approach is that it is
multidisciplinary because it investigates other disciplines with the aim of tapping their
contributions to the main subject of the study. This multidisciplinary approach widens
one’s perspective on the subject matter in question.
1.4 Method of Investigation

From what has been said so far, it should be clear by now that this study is historical,
critical and constructive. The historical approach to this thesis implies that attention will
be given to the historical discourses on self-interest in so far as these discourses shed
light on the theory of self-interest in modern economic discourse. The origins of the
discourses on self-interest will be traced from the Greek philosophical tradition, the
Church fathers, early modernity up to late modernity. This historical approach is
evolutionary because self-interest in economic relations is shown as integral to the
evolution of modern capitalism.
6
This thesis is critical of the theory of self-interest on the grounds that it falsifies human
nature and human economic relations by reducing their economic motivations to utility
maximisation. While arguments will be raised against self-interest throughout the
discussion, the critical tools that have been chosen, as we shall see in chapters 6 and 7,
are African humanism and process philosophical anthropology.
The investigation that is done in this study is also constructive as its last part presents us
with an alternative ethical paradigm of a holistic ethic. At this point, I would like it to be
known that this investigation should be seen as a creative venture into constructive
criticism. As far as the research method is concerned, all the information that is used in
this study comes from books, journals, newspaper articles, periodicals and the internet,
depending on their relevance to the subject under discussion. This means that all my
sources are written materials.
1.5 Plan of the Study

This thesis is comprised of three parts. The first part (chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5) situates the
problem identified in this study (the theory of self-interest) within the historical context
of Greek philosophers and the Judeo Christian religion. It also gives an analysis of the
economic discourses on self-interest during the era of early modernity up to late
modernism or contemporary times.
The second part of this study (Chapters 6 and 7) consists of theoretical tools (African
humanism and process philosophical anthropology) that are applied as critical tools
against the theory of self-interest. These tools are applied as criticism of self-interest at
the same time in these chapters.
Chapter 8, which is a synthesis of this study, draws from the commonalities between
African humanism and process philosophical anthropology. This chapter consists of two
7
sections. The first section has recommendations that can enable us to go beyond self-
interest by constructing a holistic ethic. The second section is a conclusion of the study.
8
PART I: THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST AND MODERN ECONOMIC

DISCOURSES
The aim of this part of the thesis is to engage in a systematic and philosophical discussion
on the theory of self-interest in early modern and late modern economic discourses. An
effort is made to give a systematic exposition of the historical economic discourses on the
theory of self-interest, such as the ancient Greek philosophers and the Church fathers.
Within these sources, it is shown that the economic idea of self-interest was implicitly
discussed in relation to the ideal of panta koina (community of property). Community of
property was an antithesis to private property or self-interested behaviour. Self-interest in
this sense was also equated to greed (Plato, Stoics and the Pythagoreans). Aristotle, on
the other hand, supported self-interest in economic affairs on the grounds that human
beings are self-interested by nature.
From the time of the Church Fathers, self-interest was also condemned as the sin of
avarice, greed or selfishness. Their critique of self-interest was also influenced by the
Greek ideal of panta koina. Later within the history of Christianity, the reformed
Protestant leaders such Martin Luther John Calvin were mostly influenced by economic
ethic of the Church fathers. With the rise of reformed Protestantism or the Puritans, there
is strong unanimous evidence among scholars the teaching of the Puritans helped the rise
of modern capitalism.
However, early economic and political modernists argued that self-interest was the
natural order of the liberal economy as well as statecraft. Bernard de Mandeville said that
it was human vices and not virtues that were the main causes for the flourishing of
wealth. The most significant figure in this era was Adam Smith who took a radical
position from medieval traditional economic morality and argued that it was upon the
pursuit of self-interest that the liberal economy could flourish and nourish everybody.
The proverbial understanding of a human being as solely self-interested came to be
known as homo economicus. Smith’s argument was that homo economicus was solely
motivated by self-interest. From this argument, Smith went on to build an economic
9
theory that has popularly come to be known as laissez faire economic theory or economic
liberalism. It is by coining self-interest as the central motivating force in economics that
Adam Smith exiled morality from economics.
An argument that was raised by the critics of the liberal economy during the era of
classical modernity was that self-interest was not inborn but part and parcel of the
evolution of capitalism. This evolution, as Karl Polanyi argues, was actually necessitated
by politicians, legislators and philosophers through their writings. In other words, human
beings were not naturally self-interested. Another humanistic argument that came from
John Ruskin, Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen said that self-interest was integral to the
evolution of modern capitalism as a distinct economic system that differed from medieval
economic practices, which were more communally orientated. In the era of early
modernity, the belief was that the pursuit of self-interest frees individuals from
communal constrains, and that it is mainly the reason for capitalistic prosperity.
The latter view has been pivotal to late modern economic discourses on self-interest. Late
modern economic discourses on self-interest affirm the position of early modernists. This
affirmation can be discerned from the fact that it is argued from both philosophical and
economic points of view that society would do well when individuals are left on their
own to pursue their self-interest. Government interference with the economy is seen as a
dangerous act that can only result in the suffering of those who are supposed to be
helped. In late modern economic discourses, self-interest is characterised as indispensable
to utility maximisation. This way of thinking disregards the reality of the plurality of
motivations in human economic behaviour.
Late modern economic discourses on self-interest militate against the economic well-
being of future generations because self-interest lacks a sense of concern for our
solidaristic existence. This inherent lack of concern for the future can be discerned from
the argument that self-interest can only dictate that the individual should pursue his or her
self-interest at present without taking into consideration the economic well-being of
10
future generations. Also, issues of pollution and depletion of natural resources can hardly
be taken into consideration when the individual is solely self-interested.
11
CHAPTER TWO: EARLY GREEK AND JUDEO-CHRISTIAN DISCOURSES ON

SELF-INTEREST
For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one
thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself
concerned as an individual [sic]. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to
neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfil (Aristotle, Politics, 1261).
2.1 Introduction
This chapter situates the discussion of the theory of self-interest in a broader historical
context. The theory of self-interest is a doctrine that aroused much intellectual curiosity
among ancient philosophers and theologians. Among Greek philosophers such as Plato,
Aristotle and the Pythagoreans, the socio-economic theory of self-interest was debated in
relation to the ideal of common ownership of property as a pre-requisite to socio-political
tranquillity. Thus for some of these thinkers self-interest, which led to private ownership
of property, was seen as the cause of socio-economic and political discord. As we shall
see in the course of this chapter, there was no agreement among the influential Greek
philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle on the role of self-interest in the acquisition and
distribution of material possessions.
In Judeo-Christian antiquity, the debate was somehow very close to that of the Greeks in
the sense that the main thrust of the discussion was on common ownership of property as
opposed to private ownership of property. Self-interest, as we shall see in the writings of
Church fathers such as St. Ambrose of Milan, Gregory Nazianzen and St. Augustine, was
described as ‘the sin of avarice’. This sin of avarice was typical of a human being in his
or her fallen state. The ideal eschatological community became that which owned its
material possessions in common, a practice that came to be equated to the common good
as opposed to self-interest (Schumpeter 1986: 130-136). Both Greek antiquity (especially
Plato) and Judeo-Christian antiquity seem to have had an idea of a future community that
is characterized by common ownership of property.
In the first section of this chapter I will start by situating the discourse on self-interest in
the context of the Greek philosophical tradition. Attention will be given to those
12
influential figures whose thoughts on the subject had a great bearing on the future of
economic discourse. The second section will go on to consider the Judeo-Christian view
on self-interest. Finally I will summarise this chapter by drawing on those points which I
see as significant to the early modern economic discourse on theory of self-interest. As a
prelude to the following discussion on self-interest, it will be necessary for us to explain
what we mean or understand by the term ‘self-interest’.
2.2 Self-Interest Defined

According to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1973: 1934), the term self-interest
means being solely concerned with “one’s personal profit, benefit, or advantage”,
secondly, it means “regard to, or pursuit of, one’s own advantage or welfare, to the
exclusion of regard for others”. Hence the term self-interested means the individual is
“actuated solely by regard for one’s personal advantage or welfare”. This dictionary goes
on to define “selfish” – the root wood for self-interest as meaning being “devoted to or
concerned with one’s own advantage or welfare to the exclusion of regard for others”.
Within this definition it is evidently clear that self-interest and selfishness can be used
interchangeably on the premise that they imply being concerned with one’s personal
advantage to the exclusion of the others.
The world renowned delopmental economist, Albert Hirschman (1977: 9-30) said that the
word ‘interest’ had its origins from the Latin word “interesse”, a concept that “stood for
the fundamental forces, based on the drive for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement,
that motivate or should motivate” actions of everybody. Hirschman went on to say that
the term interest was originally used in relationship to economics in the late Middle Ages
as a euphemism against taking interest on a loan which was condemned “as a sin of
usury”, even though there were multiple meanings to it. But Hirschman also stated that,
“An inquiry into these multiple meanings and appreciations is in effect an exploration of
much of economic history and in particular of the history of economic and political
doctrine in the West over the past four centuries”.
13
A survey on the economic teachings of the Church Fathers shows that self-interest was
equated with terms such as; usurpation, covetousness, interested in one’s economic well-
being whilst excluding those of the others, avarice, concern for one’s own private
interests, self-love, pursuit for one’s own personal advantage, malignant covetousness (cf.
Rhys 1906: 26; McKeon 1941; 1155a-1772a; Viner 1978: 16; Troeltsch 1931: 116;
Hengel 1986; 150-156; Shewring 1948: 6-12; Gonzalez 1990: 216-219). Other scholars
have drawn from these characterizations of self-interested behaviour and came to the
conclusion that in economics, self-interest meant greed. Alexander Robertson suggested
that the term self-interest is a nicer meaning for greed because it is “self-interest which is
the enfeebled metaphor, not greed”. According to Robertson, “Translating ‘greed’ into a
forgiving notions of ‘self-interest’ or ‘rational choice’ is not just a technicality, it’s a
moral deed” (Robertson 2001: 8-9). He went on to say that the acceptability of self-
interest into economics was the result of scholarly attempts by early modern economists
to emancipate economics from morality whereby the “idea of sympathy as social logic”
was “hardened into a theory of self-interest” (Robertson 2001: 52-53).
In the era of early modernity, Hirschman said that two elements were developed by
economists to characterize self-interested driven action. Firstly, self-interest meant that
individuals give predominant attention to the consequences of contemplated action for
themselves. Secondly, in their economic relations, individuals will always be rationally
calculative – a systematic attempt at evaluating costs benefits and satisfactions (cf. Smith
1872: 330; 1976: 56; Wicksteed 1946: 166). In late modern economic theory, self-interest
is postulated as the sole source of human economic motivation that helps individuals to
maximise their utilities. As a mechanism that helps individuals to maximise their utilities,
late modern economists define self-interest as implying that human economic relations
are value-neutral or that they are not concerned with the well-being of others. Neither are
they concerned with the moral disposition of the economic agent (cf. McConnell 1972:
40; Tullock and McKenzie 1985: 7; Brittan 1988: 212; Heyne 1983: 272; Shand 1990:
79). In this thesis I will use the term “self-interest” in the light of the modern economic
presumption that in their economic relations people are solely motivated by self-interest.
14
2.3 Self-Interest and Greek Philosophical Discourses
2.3.1 Plato and the Pythagoreans

Plato and the Pythagoreans discussed the idea of self-interest under the political theory of
the community of property, whereby the ideal political community was that which owned
everything in common. However, one should take note of the fact that Plato’s main focus
was neither self-interest nor the community of property, but the ideal state. It was in this
context that community of property for the guardians1 was discussed. But the ideal of
community of property was well known among the Greeks. It seems to go back to the
time of the philosopher Pythagoras (6th century B.C.E). Pythagoras founded a community
of disciples based on the principle that friends should have everything in common. In this
community, men and women were admitted on equal terms. Members of this community
surrendered their possessions to the community in pursuit of a common way of life. Even
scientific and mathematical discoveries were seen as collective (Russell 1991: 49-56;
Gorman 1979: 113-116).
The community of property of the Pythagoreans was facilitated by the fact that
Pythagoras’s followers believed in his divinity. As Peter Gorman (1979: 117) observed,
this belief in the divinity of Pythagoras “promoted the ideal of harmonia or the unity of
all minds in the society whereby no disputes arose concerning the laws and philosophical
ideas taught. The fact that the members of the society shared all their belongings also
contributed to this ideal” (see Gorman 1979: 121). Part of the ideal of community of
property was to overcome the problem of multiplicity which was mostly attributed to
private ownership of property. Iamblichus reported that genuine Pythagoreans were
expected to express their unity by having property in common: “He ordained that the
genuine Pythagoreans should have their goods in common and lead a communist life for
1
In the Republic, Plato divided citizens into three classes – namely, “the common people, the soldiers, and
the guardians”. The later class alone was to wield political power so that they would “carry out the
intentions of the legislator”. In our modern language the guardians are politicians or rulers. These guardians
were supposed “to have small houses and simple food”. They were supposed to live as in camp, dining
together in companies, and they were to have no private property beyond what is absolutely necessary.
These guardians were expected to thrive for the good of the whole. In their thriving for the good of the
whole, they were supposed to have common houses and common meals. Even their children were supposed
to be raised by the state without any knowledge who their parents were. In so doing, the guardians were
expected to fuel the spirit of public common belonging (Russell 1991: 125-129).
15
all time…” (Gorman 1979: 121). Obviously within such a community, the pursuit of self-
interest in economic affairs would have been seen as abhorrent.
Plato (427-347 B.C.E) discussed the possibility of community of property among the
leading classes of the ideal state in his Republic (462 B.C.E). He quoted the well-known
saying: “friends have all things in common” and one category among these things was
women and children (see Rhys 1906: 155-160). For the Platonists, as for the
Pythagoreans, the reason for the community of property was not just to abolish poverty or
to help the poor. There was a metaphysical reason which was based on the assumption
that multiplicity is evil, hence, it must be overcome by unity:
Can there be any greater evil than discord and distraction and plurality where
unity ought to reign? Or any greater good than the bond of unity? …and where
there is no common but only private feeling a State is disorganised – when you
have one half of the world triumphing and the other plunged in grief at the same
events happening to the city or the citizens. Such differences commonly
originated in the disagreement about the use of the terms ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’,
‘his’ and ‘not his’…And is not that the best ordered State in which the greatest
number of persons apply the terms ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ in the same way to the
same thing? (see Rhys 1906: 159).
In support of his political theory of social unity as an overriding ethical value for
harmonious social existence, Plato uses the example of the human body in order to
illustrate the kind of solidarity he has in mind: “Then when one of the citizens
experiences any good or evil, the whole State will make his case their own, and will
either rejoice or sorrow with him” (see Rhys 1906: 160). For Plato the ideal is unity.2
Self-interested individuals were part of the evil of multiplicity. It was also central to
Plato’s political theory that when forming a state, focus must be given to the collective
interest rather than to the individual interest. The individual or the citizen was supposed
to work for “the preservation and perfection of the whole…” (see Rhys 1906: 162). Thus
2
Plato’s cosmology as set forth in the Timaeus is based on the idea that there is only one world, not many,
as various pre-Socratic philosophers had taught. The world was a created copy designed to accord as
closely as possible with the eternal plan. The world in its entirety was a visible animal, comprehending
within itself all other animals. Thus according to Plato, everything existed on the principle of unity. In such
a cosmology, the doctrine of individualism had no metaphysical basis (see Russell 1991: 122-127).
16
Plato would put it emphatically that the goal and purpose of human existence was
primarily that of promoting harmony within the whole:
Your own being also, fond man, is one such fragment, and so, for all its littleness,
all its striving is ever directed toward the whole, but you have forgotten in the
business that the purpose of all that happens is what we have said, to win bliss for
the life of the whole; it is not made for you, but you for it. …what is best for the
whole proves best also for yourself in virtue of our common origin. …whereas a
man who means to be great must care neither for the self nor for its belongings,
but for justice, whether exhibited in his own conduct, or rather in that of another
(see Rhys 1906: 175-180).
The individual was supposed to see his or her wellbeing as intrinsically tied up with that
of the community within a fellowship ownership of property. Social discord or unrest was
a result of the private ownership of property. This private ownership of property was evil
because it was achieved at the expense of the whole. For Plato, even rulers were
supposed to be concerned first and foremost with the well-being of their subjects as their
first priority. Plato had this to say to them: “… [N]o physician, so far as he is a physician,
considers what is advantageous for the physician, nor enjoins it, but what is advantageous
for the sick; for it hath been agreed that the accurate physician is one who taketh care of
sick bodies, and not an amasser of wealth” (see Rhys 1906: 20). In the above example,
Plato wanted to drive home the point that a ruler was not supposed to be self-interested in
his or her office; rather, s/he was supposed to be more concerned about the interests of
her subjects than those of her own.
According to Plato, it was necessary that “every government, in as far as it is

government, considers what is best for nothing else but for the governed and those under
its charge, both in political and private government”. But this was not a matter of
technical requirement for rulers; rather the ruler’s ability to sacrifice his or her interest for
the good of the governed was a chief characteristic of a good person: “good men are not
willing to govern, neither for money nor for honour; for they are neither willing to be
called mercenary, in openly receiving a reward for governing, nor to be called thieves, in
taking clandestinely from those under their government; as little are they willing to
govern for honour, for they are not ambitious” (see Rhys 1906: 24-26). In other words,
17
those who govern are not supposed to do so for their own personal interests, but purely
for the well-being of the governed. Hence, “he who is indeed the true governor doth not
aim at his own advantage, but at that of the governed; so that every understanding man
would rather choose not to be served than to have trouble in serving another” (see Rhys
1906: 26).
2.3.2 Aristotle
Aristotle did not agree with Plato’s theory of the ideal state. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E)
has a long discourse on friendship in his Nichomachean Ethics (Basic Works of Aristotle
1155a-1172a). In dealing with the question of “friendship” and “self-love”, he quotes a
series of proverbs about friendship: “one soul, what friends have is common, equality is
friendship…Hence he [a friend] should also love himself most of all”. What Aristotle is
saying is that for one to be able to have a sense of love for others, s/he should love herself
or himself first. As he put it, “Therefore the good man should be a lover of self (for he
will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows), but the wicked
man should not; for he will hurt both himself and his neighbours, following as he does
evil passions” (see McKeon 1946: 1155a-1172a).
One’s self-interest has to be neutralised by caring for the well-being of others. But when
it comes to the question of common ownership of property, Aristotle does not agree with
Plato. Among his criticisms of Plato he has the following to say:
Property should in a certain sense be common, but, as a general rule, private; for ,
when every one has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and
they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own
business…Again, how immeasurably greater is the pleasure, when a man feels a
thing to be his own; for surely the love of self is a feeling implanted by nature [my
emphasis] and not given in vain…(see McKeon 1941: 1127).
Thus for Aristotle, common ownership of property was optional because by nature,
human beings are self-interested. In other words, economic success was only possible
when people behaved self-interestedly. Consequently, it would be impossible to have
economic advancement without self-interest.
18
While Plato had argued that immeasurable pleasure, to use Aristotle’s words, was only
attainable when everything was owned in common, when there was no self-interest,
Aristotle saw it as that which was enjoyed when society had self-interested individuals.
This implies that a self-interested person was also a benefactor of society since s/he was
able to share his or her economic exploits with other members of society:
And further, there is the greatest pleasure in doing a kindness or service to friends
or guests or companions, which can only be rendered when a man has private
property. These advantages are lost by excessive unification of the state. …No
one, when men have all things in common, will any longer set an example of
liberality or do any liberal action; for liberality consists in the use which is made
of property (see McKeon 1941: 1151-1152).
Pivotal to Aristotle’s advocacy of self-interest and its resultant private ownership of

property was the idea that the individual can only be generous when s/he owns property
privately. Freedom to own property was in congruence with liberality. One needed to
own something for them to be able to give or to share.
While Plato saw social discord or strife as a result of private ownership of property,
Aristotle argued for the opposite. According to Aristotle, human beings are naturally self-
interested, therefore economic activities should take this nature of our being into
consideration. Aristotle’s understanding of self-interest as ‘a feeling implanted by nature’
was a resultant picture of his own metaphysics.3 Aristotle’s metaphysics was partly based
on an attempt to account for (what he saw as) the reality that things remain the same, but
they can change without loosing what they were before. In other words, there was an
underlying law which made everything that exists to behave in the way it does. The
underlying economic law within human nature was self-interest. Without private
3
In his metaphysics, Aristotle introduced the doctrine of ‘Essence’. According to this doctrine, things
existed distinctly according to their essence. One’s essence is what one is by his or her very nature. It is
those properties which one cannot lose without ceasing to be oneself or loosing one’s identity. This
doctrine implied that there are certain things whose nature is unchangeable. In this kind of metaphysics, it
is also implied that ‘love of self’ was part of the essence of human beings (Benn 1933: 285; Russell 1991:
177).
19
ownership of property, Aristotle argued that some members of society can easily resort to
idleness.
Aristotle went as far as saying that “a man must have so much property as will enable
him to live not only temperately but liberally; if the two are parted, liberality will
combine with luxury; temperance will be associated with toil. For liberality and
temperance are the only eligible qualities which have to do with the use of property” (see
McKeon 1941: 1156). The implication of Aristotle’s insight as quoted above was that
ownership of private property was inseparable from liberality because one must own
something in order to be in the position to share with others. Ownership without liberality
would only result in luxuriouness. Hence, ownership of property was inseparable from
liberality. It is partly for this reason that Aristotle refuted Plato’s economic presumption
that private ownership of property was the cause of misery and inequality. Instead, he
argued that one has to take into consideration the population factor:
One would have thought that it was even more necessary to limit population than
property; and that the limit should be fixed by calculating the chances of mortality
in the children, and of sterility in married persons. …The neglect of this subject,
…is a never-failing cause of poverty among the citizens; and poverty is the parent
of revolution and crime (see McKeon 1941: 1156).
The economic principle which is being advocated by Aristotle here is that the idea is not
to own everything in common as was suggested by Plato and the Pythagoreans, but to be
on guard that human mouths do not outstrip the available resources. Another argument is
that liberality is only possible when the individual has something to give. In other words,
individuals can only give or be altruistic when they have something to give or to be
altruistic about.
From the Pythagoreans to Plato, the theme of panta koina (community of property) was
actually based on the political presupposition of social harmony through unity rather than
multiplicity, which is characteristic of a society of self-interested individuals. In the
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle saw the relevance of panta koina in the realm of
friendship instead of society in general.
20
The ideal of panta koina was also debated within Judeo-Christian antiquity in relation to
the idea of the ideal eschatological community. Such a community was characterised by
the sharing of material possessions. The pursuit of self-interest was deplored as a sin of
avarice. The Judeo-Christian tradition, with some exceptions, shared to a great extent the
ideals of Greek philosophers such as Plato and the Pythagoreans with reference to the
ideal of community of property.
2.4 Self-Interest and the Judeo-Christian Tradition

The Judeo-Christian tradition on economic matters does not give us an explicit and
detailed discussion on self-interest. Its predominant economic outlook was on community
of property, as opposed to private ownership of property representing self-interest. As we
shall see later on in the discussion, the Church fathers were mostly of the opinion that
riches that were owned in private were the source of social deprivation for the poor. As
Jacob Viner puts it, “The Fathers denied that there was a natural right to private property.
…They advised all Christians to avoid seeking riches, to avoid attaching value to them
other than as reserve for almsgiving, and to beware of the propensity of the possession of
riches to foster luxurious living, pride, and arrogance…” (Viner 1978: 16).
In the same vein, Ernst Troeltsch observed that “[p]ossessions and earthly goods”
according to the Church Fathers, “were originally destined for all, and it is only due to sin
and greed that there are such glaring differences between those who have and those who
have not” (Troeltsch 1931: 116). Privately owned riches were seen as a manifestation of
the sin of avarice, greed and usurpation. All these terms, came to imply self-interested
economic behaviour, as we shall see in the economic writings of modernists in chapter 3.
However, the ideal of community of property went against the institution of private
property. Community of property was also an antithesis to economically self-interested
behaviour.
21
2.4.1 The Essenes of Qumran

In the Jewish world the idea of panta koina in the sense of community of property was
practiced only among the Essenes of Qumran.4 Judaism as a whole was not much
interested in the ideal of oneness, surely not in the way it was portrayed by Plato. The
Jewish interest was in a land without poverty. Before the rise of Christianity, Judaism had
developed a system to help the poor which was unique. The legal basis for this system
was the second tithe, the so-called tithe for the poor, commanded in Deuteronomy 14: 29,
26, 21. It seems the ideal of panta koina was something typically Greek, not Jewish.
However, it appears within Jewish literature that the idea of common ownership of
property carried the imaginations of many people to the extent that it was seen as typical
of an eschatological community or an ideal community of the future. This vision of a
future based on common ownership of property gave rise to communities such as the
Essenes of Qumran.
The Essenes of Qumran saw themselves as the eschatological community of Israel. They
believed they already shared in the heavenly life. For that reason they observed strict
rules of ritual purity. They had their possessions in common and at least one of the
reasons for their community of property had to do with this purity: “As for the property
of the men of holiness who walk in perfection, it shall not be merged with that of the men
of falsehood who have not purified their life by separating themselves from iniquity and
walking in the way of perfection” (see Hengel 1986: 167). Other reasons for their
practice of community of property may have been their criticism of the greed of the
priests of Jerusalem and an expression of their sense of unity, a form of unity that was
expressed in the common ownership of property.
4
Qumran community was a sectarian movement which the historian Josephus called the Essenes. This
group of hermits was formed of men who were recruited “from the large number of people who resort to
their mode of existence because they are wearied of life’s struggle with the waves of adversity”. They
believed that they were the chosen eschatological community of Israel who were destined to belong to the
sons of light. While they despised war and violence, they also believed in an eschatological war between
the sons of darkness and the sons of light. By virtue of their righteousness, they were chosen to be the
eschatological army on the last days. Their belief in the ‘end of days’ shaped their economic outlook. All
those who joined this community had to surrender their material possessions to the community for common
use. Private ownership of property was strictly forbidden (Leaney 1966: 32-50).
22
Philo pays attention to the theme of equality when he describes the Essenes as men of
high moral excellence:
No single slave is to be found among them, but all are free exchanging services
with each other, and they denounce owners of slaves, nor merely for their
injustice in annulling the state of Nature, who mother-like has born and reared all
men alike, and created them genuine brothers, not in mere name, but in every
reality, though this kinship has been put to confusion by the triumph of malignant
covetousness, which has wrought estrangement instead of affinity and enmity of
friendship (see Hengel 1986: 150).
Evidently common ownership of property was highly valued as an expression of high

moral excellence. In the Greek context, particularly that of Plato, the ideal of panta koina
was an attempt to return to an assumed original unity. For the Qumran community, it was
part of a strategy to remain ritually pure and an expression of unity. The Church Fathers,
as we shall see in the following sections, were somehow influenced by Plato in their
critique of self-interest.
2.4.2 St Ambrose of Milan

St Ambrose of Milan (died A.C.E. 397), who was apparently well versed in Greek
philosophy, argued philosophically that panta koina was God’s original plan, which had
been upset by original sin. He agreed with the Stoic5 teaching when he said:
Nature has poured fourth all things for men for common use. God ordered all
things to be produced, so that there should be food in common for all, and that the
earth should be a common possession for all. Nature, therefore, has produced a
common right for all, but greed [usurpation] has made it a right for a few (see
Hengel 1986: 151-152).
5
Stoicism was a mixture of Greek and Roman philosophy. The worldview of stoicism saw nature as
ordained by a Lawgiver who was also beneficent Providence. Everything was fashioned to secure certain
ends by natural means. Everything had a purpose connected with human beings. God was not separate from
the world. S/he was the soul of the world, and each person contained a part of the Divine Fire. All things
were parts of one single system, which is called nature; the individual life was good when it was in
harmony with Nature. Virtue was to be found in a will that was in agreement with Nature. Within such a
philosophical outlook authentic existence could only be that which was premised on social and
environmental harmony. To be self-interested, that one would see his or her well-being apart from the
whole, was to deviate from the ultimate truth about the nature of reality (Murray 1915: 25).
23
St Ambrose of Millan saw the ideal of the common ownership of property as a state
characteristic of the ‘golden era’. Private ownership of property was a result of human
greed in the sense that whenever someone had amassed wealth to himself or herself, such
a person was seen as depriving others of the necessities of life. Ideal social existence was
that everybody should have access to the necessities of life. This greed was interpreted as
implying the condition of humanity in its fallen state. In the childhood of humanity, all
property was held in common. The downfall from this blissful state came about with the
introduction of private property in human society.
Thus in line with Stoic teaching, Ambrose argued against private property on the grounds
that it was against natural law. In the golden era which was dominated by natural law, the
first human beings lived without external laws, but according to the dictates of nature.
The institution of private ownership of property was a precipitation of selfishness as it
condoned the individual’s accumulation of wealth at the expense of the common good.
Private ownership of property heralded an era of greed in human society – thus giving
rise to human estrangement from the blissful state. As we shall see in the following
section, this was part of Gregory Nazianzen’s argument against private ownership of
property.
2.4.3 Gregory of Nazianzen

The Church Father Gregory of Nazianzen (A.C.E 329-389) also echoed Stoic philosophy
in his Lucilium Epistulae when he said:
Philosophy has taught us to worship that which is divine, to love that which is
human; she has told us that with the gods lies dominion, and among men,
fellowship. This fellowship remained unspoiled for a long time, until avarice[6]
tore the community asunder and became the cause of poverty even in the case of
those whom she herself had most enriched. For men cease to possess all things the
6
Avarice was understood by the Church fathers as well as in the Middle Ages as belonging to such
abominable passions as “greed, love of domination and love of glory”. Self-interest was condemned in the
sense that it was understood to be part and parcel of those abominable passions. The Church fathers’
teaching was based on the idea that one could avoid being trapped in those passions by developing a
charitable outlook towards life. For St. Augustine, the solution lied precisely in the Pythagorean and
Platonic ideal of having material possessions in common (Katzenellenbogen 1964: 9-30).
24
moment they desire all things for their own. But the first men and those who
sprang from them, still unspoiled followed nature…But avarice broke in upon a
condition so happily ordained, and, by its eagerness to play something away and
to turn it to its own private use, made all things the property of others, and
reduced itself from boundless wealth to straitened need. It was avarice that
introduced poverty, and, by craving much, lost all (see Hengel 1986: 154-156).
Gregory saw the history of the evolution of economics as marked by two crucial
transitional phases. The first phase was characterised by harmonious existence between
humanity and nature, whereby humanity was under the tutelage of nature. In this
primordial state, nature was seen as a relative to live with instead of subduing.
The second phase in the history of this evolution became that of avarice-driven private
ownership of property. This phase was a precipitation of social and environmental
discord and humanity’s ultimate vulnerability. Self-interest was condemned as a sin
precisely because it was going against human nature, which was a nature predisposed
with the inclination to belong, and to work for the common good.
2.4.4 St. Basil the Great

In the same vein, St. Basil the Great (A.C.E. 330-379) preached against those who made
exorbitant profits while having an indifferent attitude to charity. According to Basil, the
root of this problem lay in the individual who hordes material possessions for himself or
herself at the expense of the poor:
Who is the covetous man? One for whom plenty is not enough. Who is the
defrauder? One who takes away what belongs to everyone. And are not you
covetous, are not you defrauder, when you keep for private use what you were
given for distribution? When someone strips a man of his clothes we call him a
thief. And one who might clothe the naked and does not – should not he be given
the same name? The bread in your hoard belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your
wardrobe belongs to the naked; the shoes you let rot belong to the barefoot; the
money in your vaults belong to the destitute (see Shewring 1948: 6).
What is implied in the above citation is that someone who is insatiable when it comes to
accumulation of wealth is a covetous person because that person’s greed is the source of
25
deprivation for the poor. The rich owe to the poor all that they accumulate in excess.
Basil saw this redistribution as an expression of love towards one’s neighbour:
So whoever loves his neighbour as himself owns no more than his neighbour
does. But you have a great fortune. How can this be, unless you have put your
own interests before those of others?...I know many people who fast, pray, groan,
and do any kind of pious work that doesn’t affect their pockets, but at the same
time they give nothing to the needy (see Shewring 1948: 10-12).
The Christian ideal of loving one’s neighbour like oneself became Basil’s argument
against self-interest. One who amassed wealth for his or her own self-interest at the
expense of the poor would logically have failed to love one’s neighbour as oneself. A
concern with the interests of others, especially the poor was seen by the Church Fathers
as an expression of Christian charity or love of one’s neighbour.
The pursuit of self-interest without love for one’s neighbour became deplorable because
it was contrary to the law of love. But Basil was not only against those who were rich, he
equally rebuked those who did not want to work while they were capable of doing so: “It
is much better to meet your needs through your own work than to be lifted up
suddenly…” (see Shewring 1948: 80). In other words, those who were capable of
working were supposed to work, and those who were incapable of working were
supposed to be given from the superfluity of the rich. Basil’s insight about work seems to
have anticipated the notion of welfare economics and the problem of free-riders. As we
shall see in chapter 5, one of the salient arguments of neo-liberal economists is that if
people are to rely on others for their wellbeing, some people will refuse to work. Hence,
self-interest is supposed to guard against such tendencies.
2.4.5 St. Augustine

The condemnation of self-interest as synonymous with greed, fraud and avarice, was also
given a thorough treatment by St. Augustine of Hippo (A.C.E 354-430). In the Middle
Ages, St. Augustine gave basic guidelines to the medieval outlook by denouncing
individual lust for money and material possessions as one of the three principal sins of a
fallen person, lust for power – libido dominandi – and sexual lust being the other two
26
(Hirschman 1977: 9). While there is no explicit reference to the condemnation of self-
interest, Augustine discussed it as one of those vicious passions that inhabited a human
being.
Augustine’s teaching on wealth was based on his theory that wealth in itself was not bad,
but avarice that goes hand in hand with wealth. One finds him arguing that: “Avarice is
not a fault inherent in gold, but in the man who inherently loves gold, to the detriment of
justice, which ought to be held in incomparably higher regard than gold” (see Gonzalez
1990: 215). In other words, one who would love gold more than the well-being of fellow
human beings was actually evil. Also, someone who would use God or fellow human
beings as means to acquiring material things was actually practising evil. Thus Augustine
characterised such people as “those perverse creatures who would enjoy money and use
God, not spending money for God’s sake, but worshiping God for money’s sake” (see
Gonzalez 1990: 216).
According to Augustine, all economic activities were supposed to aim at the glorification
or enjoyment of God. Whatever was surplus from one’s economic transactions was
supposed to be shared with those who were destitute. This implies that profits accrued
from one’s economic activities were supposed to be shared with the poor. Profits that
were accrued with the aim to accumulate more wealth were prohibited for two reasons.
Firstly, making a profit from trade or money given on credit was regarded as usury.7
Secondly, there was to be a distinction between what was necessary and what was
superfluous. Basic things such as food and clothing were necessary, but those other
things which one did not make immediate use of were superfluous. Augustine stated it
7
Rejection of usury was part of Church doctrine pertaining to economic matters. The economic assumption
of this doctrine was that there should not be interest on loans. The rationale behind this doctrine was that
those who borrow money were poor, hence to charge an interest on their borrowing was to exert an extra
burden on their shoulders.The Middle Ages is replete with stories of business people who thrived on
making gains by exploiting public necessities. There are also stories that were told in churches about how
such people had misfortunes falling upon them as a result of God’s anger against usury. Usury meant
charging a price that was excessively higher than what the product cost for its production. Also, while
borrowing and lending was common in the Middle Ages, credit transactions were prohibited among
Christians. Equally, a monopolist who controlled all people’s economic activities in order to take advantage
of their necessities was committing a sin of usury (Tawney 1926: 48-50; Viner 1978: 85-90).
27
explicitly that “…not to give to the needy what is superfluous is akin to fraud…From
those that God gave you, take that which you need, but the rest, which to you are
superfluous, are necessary to others. The superfluous goods of the rich are necessary to
the poor, and when you possess the superfluous you possess what is not yours”8 (see
The implication of Augustine’s teaching here is that while profits can be made from one’s
business activities, if those profits give rise to superfluous goods, those superfluous goods
were supposed to be given back to the poor. It is obviously clear that Augustine wanted
wealth to be distributed equitably to the extent that he characterised someone who
amassed more wealth than what they needed as actually stealing from the poor.
Augustine’s economic presumption was that all material goods belonged to God, and that
when one gives what was superfluous to the poor this was not an act of liberality, but an
act of restitution.
The ideal was that wealth should be shared or enjoyed in common rather than being
privately owned by an individual. When wealth is privately owned, it means that the poor
have been deprived of a livelihood. The one who deprives them of their livelihood was
actually committing a sin of avarice. Having equated the individual’s pursuit of economic
gain or self-interest to a sin of avarice, Augustine taught: “Anyone who wishes to serve
the Lord must not rejoice in private, but in common. The earliest Christians made
common property of their goods. Did they loose what was theirs? ...It is because of our
private possessions that there are disagreements, enmity, dissension, wars…” (see
8
Jacob Viner argued that apart from insisting that the rich should abstain from methods of acquiring wealth
which involved the impoverishment of others, Augustine proposed no remedy for the alleviation of poverty
except almsgiving to the needy poor. According to Viner, this alms giving was a precept that was enjoined
by the Christian Scriptures. Hence, “Almsgiving was recommended to the rich, however, not only as a
religious duty but, within limits, as sin-redeeming. It was a means of ‘building up treasure in Heaven’, and,
when carried far enough, a remedy against the moral dangers of the possessing of great riches and
luxurious living”. Viner goes on to say that, “Some of the Fathers, however, also condemned frugality
unless what was consequently unspent was given as alms”. For example, “St. Basil declared that after one
had dissipated much of one’s riches in foolish expenditure, one should not hide the remainder in the
ground: ‘It was the extreme of folly to dig to the center of the earth for gold, and then to rebury in the
ground what had been extracted from it’” (Viner 1978: 20-21).
28
Like Plato, Augustine believed that common ownership of wealth rather than private
ownership of property would bring about peace and tranquillity in human society. In the
place where Plato had suggested a republic under the watchful eye of the guardians who
lived under community of property, Augustine suggested a society of monks as an ideal
community of those who shared property. Thus Augustine’s solution to counteracting the
passion of self-interest was partly based on Plato’s ideal state, spiced a bit with
Aristotle’s principle of ‘nothing in excess’. His advice to those who had opted for a
monastic life was that
…all things may be done with a greater care and more thorough cheerfulness than
if each one were for his own selfish interests. For when we find it written of
charity, that “she seeks not her own”, we should thus interpret the words, namely,
that the common good is to be preferred to our own selfish interests, and not our
own interests to the common good. Judge, therefore, your progress by this rule:
whether or not you more and more prefer the welfare of the community to your
own private interests, so that in all the needs of this life which pass away that
charity may reign which abides forever [my emphasis] (Dominican Order, in LCO
– Liber Constitutionum et Ordinationum 1984: xxiii).
For Augustine, therefore, self-interest was the cause of strife and restlessness in human
society. The solution lied in opting for the common good through charity. The common
good and the pursuit of self-interest are simply incompatible. Self-interest was an
antithesis of charity. For this reason, the passion of self-interest was to be counteracted by
charity, which is the telos of all existence. Augustine and the other Church fathers thus
seemed to have critiqued self-interest from the religious eschatological conviction that
the future human existence will be based on the pursuit of the common good through
living in community of property. Self-interest did not have a future because it was based
on the immediate satisfaction of individual selfish needs.
Here the ideal was that individual self-interest should be sacrificed to the common good,
which implied the good of the whole community. In Augustinian terms, in short, the main
reasons why self-interest should be rejected is that it was a manifestation of the sin of
avarice, secondly, all wealth originated from God for common use, hence someone who
29
amassed more than what was necessary would inevitably deprive the poor. Lastly, the
pursuit of self-interest caused untold suffering to the poor. For all these reasons, it is
evidently clear that self-interest was understood as greed that led to accumulating more
wealth at the expense of other members of society.
2.4.6 Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas (A.C.E 1225-1274) was partly influenced by Augustine on the aspect of
equating self-interest to avarice, but he was more of an Aristotelian. On the issue of panta
koina he adopted the economic maxim of Aristotle, whom we have seen previously
declaring that ‘property should be in a certain sense common, but as a general rule
private’. Where Aristotle had argued that the love of self was something implanted by
nature, Aquinas saw this underlying law as the Natural Law.9 Aquinas stated this law as
follows:
It is evident that all things partake somewhat of the eternal law, in so far as,
namely, from its being imprinted on them, they derive their respective inclinations
to their proper acts and ends. Now among all other, the rational creature is subject
to Divine providence in the most excellent way, in so far as it partakes of a share
of providence…Wherefore it has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a
natural inclination to its proper act and end: and this participation of the eternal
law in the rational creature is called natural law (Aquinas 1948: 618).
Aquinas had adopted the concept of natural law with the intention of showing that human
nature shares or participates in the life of God through reason or rationality. The concept
of natural law had implications for both political and economic liberalism. The main
implication, as we shall see in chapter 3, was that it gave impetus to the idea that human
reason was the source of the individual’s autonomy from traditions and other social
9
The doctrine of Natural Law was not of Aquinas’ invention. In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle discussed
‘virtue in a way which showed the importance of applying one’s reason in such a way that this reason ends
up concurring with the nature of things or reality’. Throughout Nicomachean Ethics one gets the
impression that to be ethical one has to be cautiously calculative in order to ensure that there is ‘nothing in
excess’ in whatever one does. Aristotle puts emphasis on a meticulous application of reason. In this
manner, Aquinas saw Natural Law as the law which came directly from God, and inscribed in each
individual’s heart. The problem with natural law is that it overemphasizes the application of rationality as if
all people are philosophers, also, it upholds individualism through rationality – an aspect which undergirds
the socio-economic theory of self-interest (Copleston 1976: 199-207).
30
collectivities. The emphasis on reason or rationality became part of the early modern
economic dogma that homo economicus was rational and calculative in pursuit of his or
her economic interest. Aquinas insisted, however, that “[c]ommunity of goods is….part
of the natural law” in the sense that God created wealth to be enjoyed in common
(Aquinas 1948: 115).
Aquinas used this natural law as a springboard for his further discussions on property and
the sin of avarice. According to his theory of property, “The distribution of property is a
matter not of natural law but, rather, human agreement…The individual holding of
possessions is not, therefore, contrary to the natural law; it is what rational beings
conclude as an addition to the natural law” (Aquinas 1975: 69). Aquinas came up with
three arguments to support why there should be individual ownership of property instead
of having a community of property:
First because each person takes more trouble to care for something that is his sole
responsibility than what is held in common or by many…Second, because human
affairs are more efficiently organised if each person has his own responsibility to
discharge; there would be chaos if everybody cared for everything. Third …We
do, in fact, notice that quarrels often break out amongst men who hold things in
common without distinction (Aquinas 1948: 169).
Here Aquinas’s argument for private ownership of property was simply a reiteration of
Aristotle’s position which was that private ownership and the love of self were part of
human nature. According to Aquinas, it was part and parcel of natural law that since
wealth was given to humanity through providence, it also followed that wealth that is
held in superabundance should be made accessible to the poor.
The dictates of human law cannot derogate from natural law or divine law. The
natural order established by God in his providence is, however, such that lower
things are meant to enable man to supply his needs. A man’s needs must therefore
still be met out of the world’s goods, even though a certain division and
apportionment of them is determined by law. And this is why according to natural
law goods that are held in superabundance by some people should be used for the
maintenance of the poor (Aquinas 1975: 83).
31
To a certain extent it can be deduced that Aquinas had conceded to the fact that the way
in which wealth is distributed under human laws is different from what it ought to be
under natural law. To correct this discrepancy, it was important that the ruler should take
it upon himself or herself to ensure that there is an equitable distribution of wealth in
society:
For according to the teaching of the saints, the riches that are superfluous do not
belong to the rich man [as his own] but rather to the one appointed by God as
dispenser, so that he can have the merit of a good dispensation. And therefore an
injury is done to the poor in not dispensing the superfluous. And this injury is
something that the prince, who is the guardian of the right, should set to rights by
the power of his office (Aquinas 1975: 229).
Not only did Aquinas not dispute the fact that there should be private property in society,
his economic position was that superfluous possessions were supposed to be redistributed
to those poor members of society. In other words, there was to be some moral norm or
authority to which economic activities were supposed to be subordinated. According to
Aquinas, this authority was the government. Of most significance is the fact that Aquinas
had somehow provided some systematic philosophical analysis of economic behaviour
during his times. Joseph Schumpeter observed that for Aquinas, economics was about
“household management” in the Aristotlean understanding of oeconomia (Schumpeter
1986: 91-93; cf. Bigongiari 1973: 154). The aim of human actions in relationship to their
economic activities was supposed to be the common good. As we shall see in the
following section, this traditional religious economic ethics was rejected by reformed
Protestantism.
2.5 Self-Interest and the Reformation Era

As shown in the preceding discussion, from the Church Fathers up to the medieval times,
self-interest was condemned on the basis that it was part and parcel of avarice. During the
Reformation era, Martin Luther continued with this condemnation almost along the same
lines. In his work on “Trade and Usury”, for example, he said that he was writing about
“financial evils” so that some “people – however few they are – may be delivered from
the gaping jaws of avarice” (Luther 1962: 245). Luther was very much steeped in the
32
economic ethics of the Church Fathers with regards to self-interest. His main criticism of
self-interest can be discerned from those of his writings which were directed against
business people or merchants who had a tendency of taking advantage of poor people’s
needs. He writes,
When once the rogue’s eye and greedy belly of a merchant find that people must
have his wares, or that the buyer is poor and needs them, he takes advantage of
him and raises the price. He considers not the value of the goods, or what his own
efforts and risk have deserved, but only the other man’s want and need. He notes
it not that he may relieve it but that he may use it to his own advantage by raising
the price of his goods, which he would not have raised if it had not been for his
neighbour’s needs. Because of his avarice, therefore, the goods must be priced as
much higher as the greater need of other fellows will allow, so that the
neighbour’s need becomes as it were the measure of the goods’ worth and value
(Luther 1962: 248).
As shown in the above quotation, Luther rendered a direct attack on self-interest when he
described merchants or business people as ‘greedy’ people who ‘take advantage’ of poor
people’s needs by raising prices when goods are in short supply. Ernst Troeltsch (1931:
556) observed that in Luther’s economic ethics, “the continuation of the patristic and
medieval prohibition of usury is taken for granted” as profits accrued in one’s business
activities were supposed to be “paid back” to the community. Luther strongly endorsed
the Christian ethic of love of one’s neighbour as the guiding principle in the individual’s
economic activities. In the same vein, John Calvin had a direct concern for the poor.
Whilst Calvin was not against the charging of interest on loans, however, he was against
the charging of interest on loans to the poor. Calvin’s economic ethics was based on the
idea that the business person was
…a steward of the gifts of God, whose duty is to increase his capital and utilise it
for the good of Society as a whole, retaining for himself only that amount which
is necessary to provide for his own needs. All surplus wealth should be used for
works of public utility, and especially for purposes of ecclesiastical philanthropy.
Only productive credit for business purposes is allowed, not usury credit, which is
simply used for living on interest. From poor men, [sic] or people who have been
otherwise harassed by misfortune, no interest is to be taken; loans also were not to
be refused for lack of securities (see Troeltsch 1931: 648).
33
It can be deduced from the above quotation that Calvin accepted the “spirit of
capitalism”, but he also tempered it with concern for the needy. Calvin’s economic ethics
was partly influenced by the teachings of the Church Fathers as he taught that that which
was superfluous was supposed to be given to the poor in order to alleviate their suffering
(see Troelsch 1931: 648). A thorough reading of Calvin’s economic ethics does not show
any direct nor indirect support for the pursuit of self-interest without concern for the
wellbeing of the community.
Another important figure in the Reformation era was John Wesley. His economic ethics
was based on three rules – “Gain all you can; save all you can; give all you can” (see
Marquardt 1992: 35). These rules are seen by many scholars as a summation of Wesley’s
economic ethics. What these rules implied was that in their economic activities,
individuals were expected to make profits, save those profits and be charitable to others.
It is also important to note that in these three rules, the making of profit and its saving
were curtailed by social obligations imposed by the Christian ethic of love for one’s
neighbour. It was also central to Wesley’s economic teaching that money-making was not
evil in itself, but what individuals did with their money determined the goodness or
badness of their action. Wesley made a distinction between material possessions that
were superfluous and those that were necessary. Those material possessions that were
superfluous were given by God primarily for their management and administration: “The
true owner of all things in heaven and on earth is God. As our Creator and Sustainer, God
has provided instructions for [their] proper use and has promised eternal reward to us as
stewards for obedience to them” (see Marquardt 1992: 37).
In the light of the above citation, the implication of Wesley’s economic teaching was that
human beings were supposed to see their economic activities in terms of being God’s
stewards. Manfred observed that according to Wesley’s economic ethics, “The Christian
should strive for neither poverty nor wealth in itself; Wesley neither praised nor
commended poverty, and he explicitly and frequently warned against wealth. ...Since
everything one legitimately earned is regarded as a good entrusted by God, Wesley
perceived economic success as God’s gift” (Marquardt 1992: 42; cf. Troeltsch 1931:
34
813). Here it is also important to take cognisance of the fact that the idea of seeing
economic success as a gift from God, as we shall see in the course of this discussion, was
later on construed by the Puritans as justification for overaccumulation. But when this
justification of overaccumulation is seen in the light of Wesley’s third rule – give all you
can - we find a situation whereby modern capitalistic overaccumulation is inevitably
tempered with a concern for the well-being of others in the community (Troelsch 1931:
813).
As our discussion shows thus far, it is evidently clear that the founders of the
Reformation era did not condone self-interest in the sense of selfishness or greed. They
actually condemned it through their condemnation of economic practices that were based
on avarice, greed and usury. However, Church historians and sociologists argue that
reformed Protestantism or the Puritans created some economic teachings that were based
on some of the doctrines of the early reformers such as hard work, seeing one’s economic
activities as obedient service in the calling, frugality, thrift, discipline and hard work.
Scholars argue that these teachings fuelled the expansion of early modern capitalism in a
way that might not have been anticipated or intended by the early reformers (Troelsch
1931: 557; Hill 1958: 226; McGrath 1988: 222; Olson 2004: 165-166). The main
proponent of this argument was the German sociologist Max Weber, who advanced the
thesis that the Puritans, in particular, had a causal influence on the emergence of modern
capitalism through their propagation of the above doctrines.
Weber’s main thesis was that the Protestant ethic of hard work as a calling introduced a
revolution that fuelled the rise of modern capitalism. In the seventeenth century onwards,
the rise of Puritanism, brought about an ethic which, according to Weber and Richard
Tawney,1 gave some religious ethical justification for usury. This religio-economic
1 Tawney argues partly against the thesis that the Reformation era inaugurated a period of unscrupulous
commercialism which had been previously held in check by the teaching of the Church. His argument is
that the Catholic Church before the Reformation was participating in usury in the selling of indulgences
and undertaking colonial economic expeditions of Spain and Portugal. “[The] Reformation released forces
which were to act as a solvent of the traditional attitude of religious thought to social economic issues, it
did so without design, and against the intention of most reformers”. As far as the first generation of
reformers was concerned, there was no intention, among Lutherans, or Calvinists, or Anglicans, of relaxing
the rules on avarice (Tawney 1926: 94).
35
development, according to Weber, gave rise to the ‘spirit –Geist’ of capitalism or

capitalistic motives and objectives (Weber 1958: 47-48; Tawney 1926: 75-88; Viner
1978: 151).
It is important, however, to note that both Tawney and Weber are not saying that
Puritanism was responsible for the origin of capitalism; rather, the argument is that
reformed Protestantism or the Puritans taught an ethic of individualism, thrift and
frugality that apparently became conducive to the evolution of modern capitalism.2 Since
modern capitalism is based on an individualistic conceptualisation of a human being, it is
also integral to Tawney’s and Weber’s argument that the teaching of reformed
Protestantism about the individual as solely accountable to God helped to free the
individual from the traditional communal sense of accountability. The implication here is
that in economic matters the individual was free to pursue his or her own self-interest. As
Heilbroner puts it, “Acquisitiveness became a recognised virtue – not immediately for
one’s private enjoyment, but for the greater glory of God” (Heilbroner 1972: 33). It is this
religious justification of capitalistic acquisitiveness that removed the medieval religious
sanction against self-interest. Another argument that shows that reformed Protestantism
justified self-interest in economic affairs is that the border between avarice and frugality
is not always clear “because saving money, for instance, could be taken as an excuse for
refusing to offer necessary assistance to others” (Bujo 1997: 163).
Weber argued that the ascetic form of reformed Protestantism generated the spirit of
modern capitalism that came to be characterised by endless accumulation of wealth
combined with strict discipline. As he put it, “In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic,
the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all
2 Max Weber’s analysis of the origins of capitalism was based on contrasting “medieval ethical principles
with the moral and social attitudes which developed in connection with the great religious movements of
Reformation”. One finds that among the chief characteristics of this Reformation, he “emphasized the role
played by the spread of Calvinism in introducing a new conception of economic life”. Weber argued that
through this conception of economic life, “labour was transformed into a ‘calling’, that rectitude, severity,
and diligence were elevated to the rank of primary virtues, that worldly success was considered a symptom
of divine blessing, and that thriftiness combined with gainful use of one’s means was a duty prescribed by
Christian morality” (Pribram 1983: 38-39).
36
spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not
to say hedonistic, admixture…Man [sic] is dominated by the making of money, by
acquisition as the ultimate purpose of life” (Weber 1958-53).
According to Weber, therefore, the Puritans emphasised the accumulation of wealth as

the main purpose of one’s economic activities. It can be discerned from the above
quotation that such an economic outlook went against medieval religious economic ethics
as it encouraged the importance of not spending what was superfluous. This religious
economic justification of overaccumulation was seen as an indispensable rationale to the
ascendancy of modern capitalism. The rules which came to be indispensable to the
evolution of modern capitalism, as Weber puts it, were those of
…rigid limitation of expenditures on personal consumption or charity,

concentration of time and attention on the pursuit of one’s business affairs,
avoidance of distraction through intimate friendship with others, systematic and
pitiless exploitation of labour, and strict observance of honesty in one’s relations
with others within the limits set by ‘formal legality’” (Weber 1958: 48-49).
The adoption of these strict character qualities in business activities became integral to
the selection of successful business people “through a process of economic survival of
the fittest” (Weber 1958: 55; cf. Viner 1978: 151; Heilbroner 1962: 54-56).
Business activities, especially in Reformed Calvinism, came to be understood as a

calling. As Weber puts it, “The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass
worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfilment of the
obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. This was his
calling” (Weber 1958: 239). Weber also observed that, according to Luther’s teaching,
“The monastic life is not only quite devoid of value as a means of justification before
God, but he also looks upon its renunciation of the duties of this world as the product of
selfishness, withdrawing from temporary obligations” (Weber 1958: 244). In short,
Weber’s argument was that the ethic of work as a calling was a religious moral
justification that facilitated the expansion of modern capitalism.
37
Weber and Tawney seem to go as far as to say that among the Puritans, all those
economic qualities that were condemned by medieval religious economic ethic were
actually indispensable to the working of modern capitalism. Someone who worked solely
for his or her self-interest came to be understood as responding to God’s calling. To
illustrate this, Weber refers to a sermon once preached by a Puritan to the effect that, “If
God shows you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way, if you
refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling,
and you refuse to be God’s steward, and to accept His gifts and use them for Him when
He require it…” (see Weber 1958: 162). Tawney observed that this calling was not
understood as a condition in which the individual was born “but a strenuous and exacting
enterprise, to be undertaken, indeed, under the guidance of Providence, but to be chosen
by each man[sic] for himself, with a deep sense of his solemn responsibilities” (Tawney
1926: 239-244).
With this notion of ‘calling’, Reformed Puritans managed to embrace self-interest and
profit-making in business activities as a sign of God’s favour. A Reformed Calvinist
minister of Boston once gave a sermon on economic matters in which he said that profit
and loss incurred in business should be understood as part and parcel of “Providence”,
and that “…where there is scarcity of the commodity, there men may raise their price; for
now it is a hand of God upon the commodity, and not the person” (see Tawney 1926:
155). In this type of reasoning, someone who withholds the supply of a product on the
market with the aim of creating a higher demand that will result in higher prices for the
product was simply following the will of God.
That the laws of business were basically in accordance with the laws of God was thus the
predominant understanding among the Puritans. Hence one finds Heinrich Gossen tracing
the origins of self-interest in business activities to the original plan of God in this way:
Organise your actions for your own benefit. God implanted self-interest in the
human breast as the motive force for progress. By following self-interest we
follow God’s will. Going against self-interest only inhibits God’s plan …How can
38
a creature be so arrogant as to want to frustrate totally or partially the purpose of

his creator (see Daly and Cobb 1989: 89)
Working for one’s self-interest was thus similar to complying with God’s plan because
such a motive, according to the above quotation, had its origins in God. Thus self-
interest, which was previously condemned as a sin of usury and avarice, came to be
interpreted as having its natural basis in the evolutionary plan of God.
By embracing the pursuit of self-interest as a calling in economic activities, therefore, it

seems to follow that Puritanism had a causal influence on the evolution of modern
capitalism. Further, with an emphasis of individual sovereignty on matters of faith and
economic affairs, Puritanism laid the seeds for individualism as a social ethic suitable for
laissez faire capitalism. If the individual was accountable to God alone for his or her
actions, it also followed that in economic matters, the individual was only accountable to
herself or himself (Viner 1978: 184-189; Hollinger 1983: 41; Canterbery 1987: 94-96).
Some scholars argue, consequently, that the evolution of capitalism, particularly in

America, was largely contributed to by the ‘Protestant ethic’, which promoted a type of
individualism that denied any meaningful communal relations. With the rise of Reformed
Protestantism, especially the Puritans, the ethic of capitalism that emphasised the nobility
of the individual pursuit of self-interest was embraced as part of the divine plan for homo
economicus. Robert Heilbroner (1962: 56) observed that this religious economic outlook
“undoubtedly provided a highly favourable stimulus for the evolution of the market
society”.
2.6 Conclusion and Observations

This chapter discussed the economic theory of self-interest from the philosophical and
religious perspectives. The philosophical perspective was that of Greek philosophers such
as Plato, the Pythagoreans, the Stoics and Aristotle. The first three seem to have
discussed self-interest under the theme of panta koina or community of property. Their
argument was that in order for society to counteract self-interest, property should be
39
owned in common. Common ownership of property was argued for as a pre-requisite to

social harmony (Russell, 1991: 49-46; Gorman 1979: 113-116; Rhys 1906: 155-162).
Aristotle held a different view from his predecessors. His argument was that being self-
interested was central to human nature because people are supposed to love themselves
first before they can love others. After submitting that self-interest was central to human
nature, Aristotle went on to argue against the Platonic idea of community of property on
the premise that if people owned everything in common, then no one will be responsible
for anything. Subjecting the individual’s economic possessions to the common pool
would be a recipe for economic anarchy. For Aristotle, people were not solely self-
interested, on the contrary, they are also endowed with the nature of liberality. Hence, it
logically followed that for individuals to exercise liberality they had to own something
which they could give (McKeon 1941: 1127-1152; Benn 1933: 285; Russell 1991: 177).
From the religious perspective, I discussed self-interest within the context of the Judeo-
Christian religion, the Church fathers, the Medieval era up to the Reformation era. In the
context of the Judeo-Christian religion, it seems that self-interest in the form of private
ownership of property was opposed on the basis that property should be owned in
common. The discourses of the Early Church on self-interest seemed to have been a
reiteration of what Plato had taught. The Church fathers critiqued self-interest from the
premise that God gave the goods of the world for common use, hence self-interest led to
a sin of avarice. Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, agreed with the idea of private
property on the grounds that such an economic arrangement would help to avoid quarrels
(Viner 1978: 16; Troeltsch 1931: 116; Leaney 1966: 32-50; Hengel 1986: 151-155;
Schewring 1948: 6-80; Gonzalez 1990: 216-219; Aquinas 1948a: 618; 1975b: 69-257;
Bigongiari 1953: 149-154; Schumpeter 1986: 91-93).
The Reformation era – or at least part of it - rebelled against the traditional religious
economic ethic of the Church’s medieval morality and actually gave some religious
justification to the pursuit of self-interest in economic activities. Marx Weber and
Richard Tawney argued that this Puritan economic outlook gave rise to the evolution of
40
the spirit of modern capitalism. Some of the Puritans did put it explicitly that working for
one’s self-interest in economic affairs was part of the divine plan. In other words, Puritan
Protestantism freed the individual from ecclesiastical traditional constraints and allowed
him or her to pursue self-interest in economic activities (Weber 1958: 47-244; Viner
1978: 151; Heilbroner 1962: 54-56; Doberstein and Lehmann eds. 1959: 292-293;
Tawney 1926: 155-244).
The reformed Protestant economic evolution was not just a religious outlook, however.
The Protestant economic outlook was influenced by the rise of rationalism and
developments in modern science. This era, which is popularly known as the age of
modernity, meant a sharp break with the medieval economic outlook. Religiously, it
meant a rejection of traditional authority and an insistence upon the role of reason in
making ethical choices.
Modernity in philosophy, as in economics, taught that the individual was rational,

calculative and self-interested. The Puritan sentiment that the individual pursuit of self-
interest was in accordance with the law of God was actually a religious reiteration of
what was already a popular economic sentiment in society during the era of early
modernity. It is to this era of early modernity that we turn in the next chapter, within
which context the economic theory of self interest will now be discussed. (Canterbery
1987: 94-114; Daly and Cobb 1989: 89; Viner 1978: 184-189; Hollinger 1983: 41;
Heilbroner 1962: 46).
41
CHAPTER THREE: EARLY MODERNITY AND THE ECONOMIC THEORY

OF SELF-INTEREST
All systems of preference or of restraint, therefore, being taken away, the obvious and simple
system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord…By pursuing his own interest he [the
individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to
promote it…The natural effort of every individual is to better his own condition….(Smith 1976:
423-508).
3.1 Introduction
The era of early modernity is an era that has been popularly described by many scholars
as the era of reason, science and individualism. Medieval teaching on economic morality,
which was primarily based on the condemnation of avarice, was rejected on the grounds
that it was ignorant about the real nature of human beings in relationship to their
economic activities. In the scientific sphere, what scholastics had condemned as avarice
was championed in the biology of Darwin and the social biology of Herbert Spencer as
actually the underlying principle of survival among species. The Newtonian physics
supported the reality of self-interest as it advanced the idea that objects have been
predetermined to operate according to certain rules. Economic theorists after the
scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton did not find it difficult to assign self-interest the
role of predetermining human economic activities.
Within the political sphere, early modern political liberalism taught that individuals
should be ruled on the assumption that they are solely self-interested, and that the liberal
constitution should reflect this reality. Politics was not based on the pursuit of the
common good as it was taught by scholasticism. Rather the ruler himself was also seen
by some as only self-interested. Adam Smith weaved his economic theory on the premise
that the individual was rational and self-interested, hence self-interested individuals are
actually benefactors of society. Obviously this early modernist economic outlook was a
radical shift from or the opposite of the traditional economic outlook of medieval times.
42
This chapter will start by giving a definition of modernity, after which a distinction
between early modernity and late modernity will be made. Secondly, I will discuss the
theory of self-interest within the context of political liberalism during the era of early
modernity or the enlightenment, with special attention to the political writings of
Machiavelli, Hobbes and Hume. Thirdly, special attention will be given to economic
liberalism with reference to Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith. It will be argued
that Adam Smith’s concept of ‘the invisible hand’ had a tremendous contribution to the
economic idea that the economy works well without government efforts to regulate it.
Rather, the common good is promoted when individuals are left to pursue their own self-
interests.
3.2 Definition of Modernity

According to The Shorter English Dictionary, the word “modern”, is derived from the
Latin word, “modo” which means “just now”. It also means, “pertaining to the present
and recent times; originating in the current age or period. Belonging to a comparatively
recent period in the life-history of the world” (Onions et al., 1973: 1342). The term
modernity was theologically and philosophically applied to imply an historical
intellectual epoch in Western history that went against the medieval traditional ways of
thinking which came from the Church. For the sake of convenience, I will divide the
period of modernity into early modernity, which refers to the period between 1485 and
1800, and later modernity which will cover the period from 1801 until the present.
During the rise of early modernity, ideas were accepted on the basis that they concurred
with the modern thought. Klaus Nürnberger observes that
…the evolution of this new way of thinking began to unfold very slowly and
gradually picked up speed. For a long time its potential seems to have been
arrested by legal and hierarchical institutions, a static metaphysics and a
superstitious religion. Beginning with the ‘Renaissance’ and culminating in the
‘Enlightenment’, it progressively discarded these shackles (Nürnberger 1999:
187)
43
The implication of Nürnberger’s observation is that modernity was a way of thinking that
occurred gradually as a distinct pattern of thought that differed sharply with
traditionalism. Nürnberger goes on to say that modernity is a process that is still
occurring even today. According to him, “The spiritual content of this mentality
diversified into various ideological movements. Liberalism, the philosophy of freedom,
justified the pursuit of individual self-interest. …The belief in progress justified the
pursuit of the self-interest of humankind as a whole at the expense of the rest of creation”
[his emphasis] (Nürnberger 1999: 187). Nürnberger characterised modernity as an era of
individualism that put emphasis on “rationalism”, “empiricism” and “free enterprise”
(1999: 194). It is mainly for this reason that modernity constituted a radical revolt against
traditionalism (Giddens 1991: 2).
The revolt of early modernity against traditionalism is more nuanced in the writings of
Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Bernard de Mandeville and Adam
Smith, just to mention a few. In their writings, these thinkers of early modernity argued in
their various ways that self-interest was indispensable in the government of society as
well as in the running of the political economy (Nürnberger 1999: 203-204). For Karl
Marx, early modernity was a transition from traditional feudal societies to capitalism.
Since early modernity meant “the liberation of individuals from primary ties to family
and local community into a lonely crowd of consumers”, on Marxist conceptualisation it
also meant dehumanisation (Madsen et al 2002: xiv; Marx 1973: 83; Ritzer 1996: 565).
As we shall see in chapter 5, some of the themes of early modernity such as liberalism,
individualism, anti-traditionalism and rationalism are integral to modernism. Economic
ideas of early modernity such as those of Adam Smith and Bernard de Mandeville
provide the foundational basis for conceptualising late modern or contemporary neo-
liberal economic discourses and practices. Michael Perelman observes that “[Smith’s]
importance appears to emanate from the vigour of his ideological project of advocating
laissez-faire and obfuscating all information that might cast doubt on his ideology”
(Perelman 2000: 8). Late modernism in economics is captured by terms such as
44
contemporary economics, neo-liberal economics and modern economics. All these

phrases suggest a continuation of thought between early modernity and later modernity.
3.3 Self-Interest and Political Theories of Early Modernity

The era of early modernity, which is sometimes referred to as the era of Enlightenment,10
provided a sharp turn in the history of western social thought. There was a rejection of
the holistic conception of the individual in relation to society. As Hollinger (1983: 22)
puts it, “The Enlightenment thinkers viewed reality atomistically and heralded values of
freedom, privacy, self-sufficiency, dignity, and self-determination” as more important
than communal belongingness. Political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes and Hume
emphasised the contractarian nature of social existence on the assumption that society
was basically a composition of individuals. The individual was only concerned with his
or her own self-interest. Since the individual was only concerned with his or her self-
interest, rulers were supposed to take cognisance of this political truism. Political
pluralism became a system that was to check and coordinate individual self-interests
(Tocqueville 1946: 99-123).
3. 3.1 Machiavelli and Political Liberalism

In the 16th and 17th centuries behaviour motivated by self-interest played a significant role
in the making of liberal politics. Niccolo Machiavelli (1467-1527) came up with a book
entitled The Prince, in which he argued that it was within the prerogative of the ruler to
indulge in acts of cruelty and mendacity without resort to guilt feelings because the
Prince was presumed to be rational and calculating. In chapter XVIII of The Prince the
10
According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the word enlightenment comes from the verb to
enlighten, which means the action of enlightening, “to give light, to impart knowledge, wisdom”. When it
is used sarcastically, enlightenment means “shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt
for authority and tradition…the individualistic tendencies of the age of enlightenment” (Onions et al.
1973). While the term enlightenment is used to refer to social, economic, political and religious
developments in western society beginning with the eighteenth century, this term is imbued in many
difficulties because it has meant different things to different disciplines. From a religious perspective, it is
argued that the enlightenment gave rise to the Protestant reformation that emphasized individual
sovereignty above the community and received traditions. From an economic perspective, the
enlightenment heralded a new era where communal relations were economically translated into contractual
relations. Economic and political writings of the enlightenment commercialized all the spheres of human
life (Heilbroner 1972: 16-30; Daly and Cobb 1989: 390-391).
45
sub-title is: “How Princes should honour their Word”. Machiavelli said that a ruler will
perish if s/he is always good; s/he must be as cunning as a fox and as fierce as a lion. As
he put it:
[A] prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honour his word when it places him at a
disadvantage and when the reasons for which he made his promise no longer
exist. If all men were good, this precept would not be good; but because men are
wretched creatures who would not keep their word to you, you need not keep your
word to them” (Machiavelli 1961:100).
In other words, the prince was supposed to be ruthlessly calculative in his actions. S/he
was to make decisions and act on them primarily on the basis of advantages to his or her
self-interest. The prince was expected to be solely concerned with his self-interest by all
means. Machiavelli’s position was that human nature was naturally evil.11 Since human
nature was evil, it also implied that ‘a prudent ruler’ was supposed to imitate this evil
nature by acting in terms of protecting his interests by whatever means deemed
necessary. In this regard, the question of means was to be treated in a purely scientific
manner, without regard to the goodness or badness of the ends.
In order for the prince to expand and maintain power, Machiavelli made a distinction
between “the effective truth of things” and “imaginary republics and monarchies that
have never been seen nor have been known to exist” (Machiavelli 1961: 100). The latter
was utopian while the former was realistic in so far as it started from the state of human
11
Machiavelli held a sceptical outlook on human nature in the sense that he started from the premise that
human nature was basically evil. Such an approach to human nature is philosophically known as sceptical
realism. According to sceptical realists, we should understand human beings as they are, rather than what
we might wish them to be. The advice of Machiavelli to the ruler is that s/he would rule well when s/he acts
according to human nature which is evil. The same approach to human nature could also be found in the
writings of Confucians. For example, in ancient China the Confucian Xun Zi argued against Mencius who
had said that people can do that which is good by returning to their original nature – a nature that was based
on harmonious existence between humanity and nature. Xun Zi argued that Mencius’ aspirations were
impossible because: “The nature of man is evil; his goodness is the result of his activity. Now, man’s
inborn nature is to seek for gain. If this tendency is followed, strife and rapacity result and deference and
compliance disappear. By inborn nature one is envious and hates others. Therefore the sages of antiquity,
knowing that man’s nature is evil, that it is unbalanced and incorrect, …established the authority of rulers
to govern the people, …” (cited in Chan 1963: 128-131). Surely there is nothing respectable about human
nature, hence the reason we have rulers is primarily to restrain self-interested human nature from ushering
society into a nihilistic war. If human nature was aggressive, self-interested and anti-social, a prudent ruler
was supposed to take these elements of human nature as the building blocks of his or her rule.
46
nature or a human being as s/he really is. A realistic theory of the state had to be based on
a thorough knowledge of human nature. The knowledge which was advanced by
Machiavelli as characteristic of human nature was that a human being was basically self-
interested, hence the ruler was expected to be extremely self-interested if s/he was to be
in tune with human nature (Machiavelli 1961: 100-105).
Thus the legacy of Machiavelli to political liberalism is that he attributed self-interest to

every person in society, including the ruler. The traditional understanding of a ruler as we
have seen in the previous chapter was that s/he was there for the common good. The
modernist understanding of the role of the ruler as articulated by Machiavelli was that
s/he does not represent the interests of people, but his or her own personal interest. It
would be a mistake if the ruler was to rule with the view of promoting his or her subjects’
wellbeing. Machiavelli emphasised those instances where the prince was well advised or
even duty bound to practice cruelty, mendacity, treason and other sorts of cruel
assortments (Machiavelli 1961: 95). Within liberal society, people are attracted to the
ruler under the illusion that s/he represents their interests, without knowing that the prince
is only self-interested in as much as they are also self-interested. To a certain extent
Machiavelli’s theory of state-craft was echoed by Thomas Hobbes who shared a sceptical
outlook towards human nature.
3. 3.2 Self-Interest in Hobbes’ Theory of Social Contract

In the 16th century Thomas Hobbes (1962: 21-32), who came to be popularly known as
the father of the contractarian theory of morality, came up with the theory that by nature,
humanity was amoral, that we are like wolves to each other – hence a harmonious social
existence was only possible when we entered a contract under the guardianship of a
government. For him a human being was supposed to be understood in a mechanistic
way. The only reality was the natural body or material thing. All bodies were composed
of matter in motion. Thought was a form of motion in matter and ideas were vibrations in
the matter of the individual’s brains and nerves. The pressure of external objects upon our
organs of sense produces delight or aversion, and causes our actions (Hobbes 1962: 21-
47
32). Obviously Hobbes was attempting to describe a human being in terms of the
scientific paradigm of mechanistic physics.
Part of his philosophical efforts was to explain the origins of morality in human society.
To start with, Hobbes argued that a human being was not a social animal. In Leviathan,
he constructed a theory according to which human beings are by nature not inclined to
work for the common good due to the fact that they are evil. This evil had three principle
causes: “competition, difference and glory” and during the era when human beings
existed in a state of nature,12 “they are in that state which is called war, and such a war is
of every man against every man…and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short” (Hobbes 1962: 98-100). Human nature, which Hobbes saw as severely self-
centred, became the reason for the existence of laws under the guardianship of some all-
controlling power. Without laws under the guardianship of a ‘leviathan’, human pursuit
of self-interest could easily place people in a condition of a universal war:
…the laws of nature – [such] as justice, equality, modesty, mercy, and, in sum,
doing to others as we would be done to – of themselves, without the terror of
some power [13] to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural
passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants
without the sword are words, and of no strength to secure man at all. Therefore,
notwithstanding the laws of nature…, if there be no power erected or not great
12
Hobbes’ (1962: 100-112) theory of nature differed remarkably from that of Plato, the Pythagoreans and
the Church fathers in the sense that he premised the original state of human existence on the principle of
strife and conflict for the sake of glory and honour. He stated that: “All societies therefore are either for
gain or for glory, not so much of love of our fellows, as for love of ourselves…We must therefore resolve
that the original of all great, and lasting societies, consisted not in the mutual good will men had towards
each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other”. By nature, a human being was not a social
animal who would like to belong to social collectivities. To develop sociality, human beings had to submit
themselves under that most awesome power – Leviathan. The will of ‘Leviathan’ was the only road to
sociality. Morality and civil laws were themselves artifices that have nothing to do with human nature (see
also Kropotkin 1924: 149-153).
13
In Leviathan, Hobbes (1962: 72) gave power prominence in the enabling of social harmony for the
reason that it enabled the individual to have protection against the acts of aggression from others. Material
wealth and honor are power because they give protection against the aggressive acts of others. Hobbes
would put it strongly that: “…Riches joined with liberality, is power; because it procureth friends, and
servants: without liberality, not so; because in this case they defend not; but expose men to Envy, as a prey.
Reputation of power is power; because it draweth with it the adherence of those that need protection. …”.
All these forms of power are based on the assumption that human existence is based on perpetual strife. In
this regard, there is no room for seeing human existence on terms of solidarity and mutual aid, but on
viciousness (Macpherson 1970: 36-37).
48
enough for our security, every man will – and lawfully – rely on his own strength
and art for caution for all other men (Hobbes 1962: 99).
According to Hobbes, therefore, humans are basically, originally and naturally evil. The
reason why people chose to submit themselves under a sovereign authority was in itself
to guarantee self-preservation from the universal war that could result from love of
liberty for themselves and dominion over others. Human existence was primarily about
competing interests instead of shared interests. In the state of nature, humanity existed
without any sense of fellow feeling or mutual aid, hence life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short’. For Hobbes there simply was no mutual aid within the status naturalis,
as Plato, the Stoics, and the Church fathers had taught. In order to account for social
harmony, Hobbes (1962: 100) argued that individual self-interest and the need to procure
it by putting into consideration one’s greater advantage, caused individuals to enter into a
contract in status civilis under the guardian of the Sovereign.
The idea that humanity was extremely self-interested was articulated by Hobbes (1962:
99-104) as follows: “Whereas the agreement of irrational creatures is natural, that of men,
is by Covenant only, which is Artificial: and therefore it is no wonder if there be
somewhat else required (besides Covenant) to make their Agreement constant and
lasting; which is a Common Power, to keep them in awe, and direct their actions to the
Common benefit”. The duty of the Sovereign was to ensure that each self-interested party
to the agreement was to honour the agreement. Already here the role of the state or the
government was reduced to the protection of individuals’ self-interests. Human beings
did not have any inclination to work for the common good unless they were forced to do
so physically – ‘covenants, without sword, are nothing but words’!. The implication of
Hobbes’s contractarian theory of social existence is that human beings do not observe
agreements without the use of external force. Thus the need to enforce contracts justified
the existence of government in human society. Hobbes’s main presumption is that human
beings are amoral and asocial by nature, hence society and its institutions are just
artifices.
49
3.3.3 David Hume and Self-Interest in Politics

In the same vein with the political theory of Hobbes, David Hume saw the society of his
day as populated by egoists. To rule such egoists, Hume argued that the liberal
constitution has to appeal to people’s self-interests. He puts it pragmatically in his essay,
“On Independency of Parliament”, that
…in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and
controls of the constitution, every man [sic] ought to be supposed a knave, and to
have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must
govern him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, co-operate to the
public good. Without this,…we shall find, in the end, that we have no security for
our liberties or possessions, except the good-will of our rulers; that is, we have no
security at all. It is therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be
supposed a knave [his emphasis] (Hume 1882: 117-118).
As this quotation shows, according to Hume, the constitution of political liberalism was
to be based on an understanding of human beings as knaves. The word ‘knave’, according
to Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms (1978: 861), suggests “sly trickery and deceit”.
This word belongs to the family of words such as “villain, scoundrel, blackguard, rascal,
rogue, scamp, rapscallion and miscreant”, words which mean “a reprehensible person
utterly lacking in principles…, blended worthlessness, meanness and unscrupulousness”.
Here self-interest is synonymous with knavishness and insatiable avarice or greed. After
ascribing all these deplorable qualities to human nature, Hume argued that social
harmony can only be attained by appealing to people’s self-interests. Political liberalism,
according to Hume, was only possible within a context of self-interested individuals.
The doctrine of political liberalism within early modernity was thus based on the idea that
people are self-interested, consequently the goal of the liberal constitution is to safeguard
these diverse interests. People rallied behind political arrangements in order to protect
their self-interests. This was also part of Hume’s argument when he said that in
government,
…where the power is distributed among several courts, and several orders of men,
we should always consider the separate interest of each court, and each order;
50
and, if we find that, by the skilful division of power, this interest must necessarily,
in its operation, concur with public, we may pronounce that government to be
wise and happy. If, on the contrary, separate interest be not checked, and be not
directed to the public, we ought to look for nothing but faction, disorder, and
tyranny from such government (Hume 1882: 119).
Hume’s argument in the above passage is that government institutions within political
liberalism should be a reflection of the fact that society is comprised of a multiplicity of
interests. The duty of the government is to co-ordinate these potentially conflictual
interests. Failure to do so can only result in anarchy. We can justifiably say that within
political liberalism, the role of the government was not primarily one of advancing the
common good, but rather of co-ordinating self-interest among its members. This, indeed,
was a sceptical understanding of human nature. What political liberalism said about self-
interest was also seen as applicable to the nature of the workings of the liberal economy.
3.4 Self Interest and Early Modern Economic Liberalism

During the era of early modernity, economic liberalism shared the same sentiments with
political liberalism on the belief that society was populated by individuals who were
primarily self-interested. Some of the shared characteristics between economic liberalism
and political liberalism were based on the metaphysical understanding of an individual as
atomistic and unconstrained by society, a self-sufficient individual whose social existence
was based on contracts. These characteristics formed an epistemological symbiosis
between political liberalism and economic liberalism. The assumption that homo
economicus was solely self-interested became the major premise for the economic theory
of early modernity. Self-interest became indispensable for understanding the creation of
wealth and its distribution within a particular society as well as in international trade. A
Dutch physician by the name of Bernard de Mandeville argued that the economy itself
was a manifestation of self-interest, which was ironically causing the flourishing of
wealth.
51
3.4.1 Mandeville’s Parody of Egoism that benefits the Common Good

Mandeville (1924: 18-36) wrote a little parody called The Fable of Bees,14 in which he
argued that vices were actually the cause of economic enterprise and development:
Vast numbers thronged the fruitful Hive;

Yet those vast Numbers made ‘em thrive;
Millions endeavouring to supply
Each others’ Lust and Vanity;
…Thus every part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradise;
To enjoy the world’s conveniences,
Be famed in war, yet live in ease,
Without great vices, is a vain
Utopia seated in the brain.
In this poem, self-interest is equated to vice, lust and vanity. According to Mandeville, all
these abominable qualities of self-interested behaviour are the real cause of the
flourishing of wealth in society. His main thesis was that public benefits are the outcomes
of private vices and not of private virtues. Mandeville was wholly convinced that a
successful social order should be one where public benefits are based on private vices.
Socially desirable consequences would come from the individual’s pursuit of self-
interest. It was a crucial part of Mandeville’s argument that a viable social order can
emerge out of the spontaneous actions of purely egoistic impulses without the regulation
of government or altruistic individual behaviour (Goldsmith 1985: 62-63).
Mandeville’s vision of the liberal economy was that the unregulated market characterised
by the interactions of free individuals will produce results that will promote the public
14
Although Mandeville was not an economist, his writings were influential in shaping the direction of
economic thinking in the 18th century. In 1705 he published a pamphlet under the tile, The Grumbling Hive:
Or Knaves tur’d Honest, which was republished under the title, The Fables of Bees: Or Private Vices,
Public Benefits. The grumbling hive, according to this parody, was originally a thriving and powerful
community. However, when its inhabitants were miraculously converted to a virtuous moral condition, the
community was reduced to an impoverished and depopulated state. Mandeville concluded that a successful
social order must be that where public benefits are built upon a foundation of private vices, not on
economic morality of Medieval times. Mandeville advocated a vision of an economy that organizes itself
and that allocates resources through the market place. While he does not make an analysis of the workings
of the market mechanism, there is a clear conviction that the unregulated market provides a system
operated by purely egoistic people who will, on the long run, advance the public good (Kaye 1988, Vol. 2;
Viner 1953).
52
good. The assumption that private vices would bring about the common good renders
political organisational efforts meaningless. To put it in strong terms, political
interference with the running of the economy will be an unnecessary constraint.
While Christian morality had taught that virtue was to be found in the subjugation of
vices, Mandeville did not agree with this teaching.15 In line with the spirit of early
modernity which put emphasis on individual freedom, he argued that the affairs of the
world were not based on obedience to such a utopian type of morality. Hence he
protested that if all actions were to cease except those that arise from unselfishness, trade
would end, the arts would be unnecessary, and the crafts would be abandoned:
As Pride and Luxury decrease,

So by degrees they leave the Seas.
Not Merchants now, but Companies
Remove whole Manufactories.
All Arts and Crafts neglected lie;
…So few in the vast Hive remain,
The hundredth Party they can’t maintain (Mandeville 1924: 34-35).
According to Mandeville, the introduction of virtue in a society that was striving on vices
leads to the ruining of a prosperous hive or the economy. His argument against the
morality of virtue was that if vices, luxury and corruption are connected with economic
prosperity, then virtue would only lead to economic decay and the resultant poverty.
Vices of individuals may be private but they are public virtues in the sense that they do
benefit society in the long-run. The understanding was that something can only be
virtuous when it is beneficial or that no action is virtuous unless it is beneficial to society
(Goldsmith 1985: 34-35; Radcliffe 1994: 762-763).
15
In Mandeville’s poem the antagonists were the moralists who were always complaining about the lack of
virtue in the liberal economy. His argument against these moralists was that if ever virtue was to be
introduced in the economy, then that would do away with the motivation and the means by which the
flourishing of wealth came about. Since virtue was not the cause of the flourishing of wealth, the main
cause was “pride, vanity, and self-love”. If these qualities were to be denied, then society would be reduced
to a state of deplorable misery and poverty. Mandeville was even opposed to charity schools that were set
up to educate children from poor families on the grounds that such a practice would inevitably deprive
industries of cheap labour (Mandeville 1924: 267-271; Lux 1990: 116-119).
53
The argument that individual private vices were for public benefit was well articulated in
his second poem titled, “The Moral”. Moralists, argued Mandeville, did not understand
that,
Fraud, Luxury and Pride must live

While we the Benefits receive
Do we not owe the Growth of Wine
To the dry shabby crooked Vine?
…So vice is beneficial found,
Bare Virtue can’t make Nations live
In Splendour; they, that would receive
A Golden Age, must be as free,
For Acorns, as for Honesty (Mandeville 1924: 36-37).
In the above stanzas the argument is that the mistake which was made by moralists was to
give primacy to charity and self-denial. For him, people were not motivated by
consideration for others, but by self-interest. Mandeville satirised the medieval moral
doctrine that said that no action was virtuous unless it involved self-denial. If that is true,
he argued, then virtue does not exist, since all actions aim at some gratification, at an
increase in self-esteem (Mandeville 1924: 41). Civilisation did not come about through
self-denial, but through what moralists regard as moral weaknesses: avarice, vanity,
luxuriousness, ambition and the rest. Social existence was predominantly characterised
by ‘private vices’ or the luxuriousness of the rich which were in turn benefiting the poor.
Mandeville made a distinction between virtue and goodness. Virtue, in the sense of
complete self-denial, was an illusion because all actions came from self-interest. On the
other hand, no action is completely virtuous, but it may be good when it is useful to
others (Mandeville 1924: 357-358).
The result of his deductive reasoning led him to the conclusion that all moral conduct has
a selfish basis. Someone who might try to help a person in a dangerous situation should
be understood as selfish because s/he would be doing so with the hidden intention of
satisfying his or her own need for compassion in the sense that the one who helps gets
personal satisfaction from helping. Even those people who performed acts of self-
54
sacrifice and self-denial were only doing so because they loved to be praised or they were
afraid of being blamed. He expressed it pragmatically that:
The Greediness we have after the Esteem of others, and the Raptures we enjoy in
the Thoughts of being liked, and perhaps admired, are Equivalents that overpay
the Conquest of the strongest Passions…[A]ll Human Creatures, before they are
yet polish’d, receive an extraordinary Pleasure in hearing themselves prais’d: this
we are all conscious of, and therefore when we see a Man openly enjoy and feast
on this Delight, in which we have no share, it rouses our Selfishness, and
immediately we begin to Envy and Hate him. For this reason the well-bred Man
conceals his Joy, and utterly denies that he feels any, and by this means consulting
and soothing our Selfishness, he averts that Envy and Hatred…(Mandeville 1924:
68-78).
Thus Mandeville reduced all human emotions and actions to selfishness. The human
tendency of being generous to others was in itself some form of disguised selfishness.
Even altruistic acts were acts that originated from concealed selfishness. Hence a virtuous
person was someone who was capable of concealing his or her selfishness – thus averting
the wrath of the selfishness of others. Social relations, economic, political and religious,
were in themselves a manifestation of selfishness. A human being was purely an egoist
whose appetites were simply insatiable. From the premise that a human being was an
egoist, Mandeville developed an economic creed that exonerated the pursuit of self-
interest for luxurious purposes.
Mandeville’s parody had far reaching implications for the evolution of economic
liberalism. Firstly, he introduced an element of philosophical realism in economic
activities in the sense that his argument was that we should admit that economic activities
are not based on the ethic of virtue nor are they concerned with virtue, but with vices.16 In
16
Mandeville’s realism can be discerned from his An Enquiry Into the Origin of Moral Virtue in which he
introduced his work as follows: “One of the greatest Reasons why so few People understand themselves, is,
that most Writers are always teaching Men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their Heads with
telling them what they really are. …As for my Part…I believe Man to be a compound of various Passions,
that all of them, as they are provoked and come uppermost, govern him by turns, whether he will or no. To
show that these qualifications, which we all pretend to be ashamed of, are the great Support of a flourishing
Society, has been the Subject of the foregoing Poem” (Mandeville 1924: 39-40). In other words,
Mandeville is arguing that in economic matters, what we wish people to be is different from what they are
by nature. Human nature is not that virtuous, rather it is only viciously self-interested. Human economic
actions have nothing to do with morality, or they are not concerned with virtue.
55
the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville spelt out the theory that came to be popularly known as
Laissez Faire. According to this theory, economic affairs should not be interfered with by
government. The main assumption is that things by themselves tend to find their own
equilibrium, and that unregulated pursuit of self-interest on the part of the individual will
be for the benefit of the community. In other words, interference on the part of the
government through regulations would disturb that delicate balance (cf. Mises 1966: 674;
Hayek 1982: 96).
Mandeville’s parody found its economic theoretical synthesis in the economic theory of
Adam Smith.17 Smith took this rudimentary Mandevilian modernist economic discourse
into the economic sphere in a way that established irrefutable harmony between self-
interest and economic liberalism. The Mandevilian thesis that all private economic vices
were actually the main reason for the flourishing of wealth became the basis for Smith’s
argument that economic relations are about appealing to each other’s self-interest. Jacob
Viner observed that, “Many scholars, including economists who should know better,
regard Mandeville as a pioneer expounder of laissez-faire individualism in the economic
field and as such an anticipator of Adam Smith” (Viner 1958: 339-340). To support this
claim, Viner came up with themes that are found in the Fable of the Bees which are also
common in Smith’s Wealth of Nations. These themes are, (i) the importance of self-
interest as the driving force of socially useful economic activity, (ii) a better allocation of
labour among different occupations would result if left to individual determination than if
regulated or guided and (iii) a rejection of governmental legislation (Viner 1958: 340).
Viner argues that the theme of ‘the individual self-interest that benefits the poor’ was
already flourishing during the times of mercantilism before Mandeville. However,
scholarly opinion on this matter seems to weigh against Viner.
17
While Mandeville had interpreted self-interest as a ‘private vice’, in his Wealth of Nations Adam Smith
substituted Mandeville’s ‘private vice’ with precise terms such as “advantage” or “interest”. These terms
became central to the construction of both modernist liberal and neo-liberal economic theory. It was Adam
Smith who put it bluntly that economic theory has to be constructed around the idea that the individual was
self-interested, and that society should see him or her as only interested in his or her own gain or advantage.
People should be allowed to follow their own self-interests in the market. While their self-interests do not
come from a sense of concern for the common good, Smith argued that they somehow end up promoting it
without intending to. In this way, Smith managed to maintain Mandeville’s insight that ‘private vices’ were
actually ‘public benefits’ (Brittan 1985: 9-12).
56
Maurice Goldsmith argued that Mandeville might not have been an economic theorist but
his justification of capitalism can be discerned from the fact that he examined “men’s
[sic] private vices – human motives and passions – and on their link to the public benefits
of prosperity and wealth, but he was more a theorist of the spirit of capitalism than of its
economic structure” (Goldsmith 1985: 124). It is also part of Goldsmith’s argument that
the spirit of capitalism was not something peculiar to Mandeville’s western society,
rather, “Eastern potentates, feudal lords, magnates of the church, humble peasants, noble
Romans, cultured Greeks and many others have been infected with the love of gold. The
desire for wealth is not confined to capitalism; wealth for high living, conspicuous
display or hoarding are all non-capitalist” (Goldsmith 1985: 124).
However, the argument that private vices rather than public virtues were the cause for the
flourishing of wealth has been seen by many economic scholars as the crucial insight to
modernist evolution of capitalism (cf. Schumpeter 1986: 184; Polanyi 1968: 109-110;
Lux 1990: 123-124). As we shall see in the following section, the Mandevilian thesis that
‘private vices were pubic benefits’ became part and parcel of Adam Smith’s
understanding of human economic relations and motives. Like Mandeville, Smith argued
that self-interest was a private vice that was beneficial to the whole of society because it
was primarily a private vice that was responsible for economic prosperity.
3.4.2 Self-Interest in Adam Smith’s Liberal Economic Theory

Adam Smith18 echoed Mandeville’s Fable of Bees when he argued in his Wealth of
Nations that the real nature of human beings in relationship to their economic dealings is
18
Adam Smith was a moral philosopher at the University of Glasgow – Scotland. As a moral philosopher,
he taught subjects such as “Natural Theology, Ethics, Jurisprudence, and Political Economy”. The
university of Glasgow was the leading centre for what has come to be known as the Scottish
Enlightenment. Smith’s first book was entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he made an
inquiry into the origin of moral approbation and disapproval. His main concern was to investigate how
human beings can be so self-interested and at the same time being sympathetic to others. Smith’s answer to
this ethical puzzle was that as human beings we are endowed with the ability to sympathise with others
(Heilbroner 1972: 45; Smith 1976; 5). Smith’s famous work is The Wealth of Nations which was published
in 1776.. In this work he made a detailed analysis of human economic behaviour in a way that gave rise to
the development of economics as a distinct discipline. In The Wealth of Nations Smith investigates how it
was possible for people who are only concerned with their self-interest to promote the well-being of
everybody without any governmental interference. An important concept that was coined by Smith to
57
that they are solely self-interested, and that the private and competitive pursuit of self-
interest was the source of the common good. In his most quoted passage Smith puts it
succinctly that:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we
expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-interest. We address
ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our
own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend
chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens. Even a beggar does not
depend upon it entirely (Smith 1976: 26-27).
The gist of Smith’s argument above is that in economic relations, human beings are
solely motivated by self-interest, and that we ought only to appeal to each other’s self-
interest if we are to get what we want. We do not gain our necessities from the
benevolence of the business person, but from his or her self-love. This self-love was the
main motive behind all economic relations. In his or her state of self-love, homo
economicus cannot be approached in terms of our shared humanity, but only by soothing
his or her self-interest.
Though Smith was a moral philosopher, as we shall see in the course of the discussion,
his utterances in the above citation are amoral ones. Who could have influenced him to
take such an amoral position? In answering this question, scholars such as Kenneth Lux
and Robert Heilbroner have come up with two answers. The first is that the era of early
modernity which saw the rise to social prominence of Isaac Newton’s physics and
empiricist philosophers, especially Hobbes, Locke and Hume, played a crucial role in
moulding Smith’s economic theory. Smith marvelled at Isaac Newton’s scientific ideas,
especially his principles of physics according to which gravitation and motion cause
things to follow regular laws. For Smith the law of gravity was the same as the law of
self-interest in economics. There was social harmony between individual self-interest and
social welfare which was closely analogous to the harmony and predictability of the
describe the working of the liberal market is called ‘the invisible hand’. Smith used this concept as a
metaphor that “explains how each individual’s pursuit of private gain can nevertheless add up to the good
of society” (Smith 1976: 12-13;Lux 1990: 25; Heilbroner 1972b: 52-54).
58
movement of planets (Heilbroner 1972a: 64; Lux 1990: 138-143; Arrow and Hahn
1971:1).
In this regard, the Wealth of Nations was an economic synthesis of the Newtonian
mechanistic universe. Just like the Newtonian mechanistic universe, the economic world
was seen to work under mechanistic rules. Economic exchange led to the division of
labour with unintended results that led to enormous production of wealth, more so than if
there were no exchange. The creation of wealth did not depend on conscious government
planning, but on individuals pursuing their self-love. Self-love, which was previously
characterised as the sin of avarice, was the only reason why there are economic activities
in society. Smith saw self-interest as having implications for the common good in the
sense that while the individual was only self-interested, s/he was able to promote the
welfare of society without intending to do so (Smith 1976: 26-27; Lux 1990: 139).
Smith actually believed that self-interested economic activities were not supposed to be
regulated by government:
All systems of preference or of restraint, therefore, being taken away, the obvious
and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord…By
directing [his] industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest
value, he [homo economicus] intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in
many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part
of his intention…By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the
society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it [my emphasis]
(Smith 1976: 413).
In other words, government should not regulate the economic sphere because self-interest
does benefit society. Those members of society who were weak were supposed to benefit
from the self-interest of those who were strong. Smith’s assumption was that business
people do benefit society by providing job opportunities to those in need as well as giving
considerable taxes to government which will in turn promote the common good through
welfare. However, it seems that Smith was aware of the dilemma that his theory of self-
interest could not be equated with the common good nor could it lead to the egalitarian
distribution of wealth.
59
As a way out, Smith postulated the idea that in pursuit of his or her self-interest, the
individual is ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of their
intention’.19 The invisible hand appeared in Smith’s earlier book called The Theory of
Moral Sentiments in which he stated that the rich
…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 whom they employ be
the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor
the produces of all their improvements. They are led 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 portions among all its inhabitants; and
thus, without intending it, without making it, advance the interest of society [my
emphasis] (Smith 1872: 304-305).
Since on Smithian terms self-interest meant selfishness, it also followed that selfishness
could not bring about the common good, consequently he came up with the concept of
‘the invisible hand’ as a natural mechanism that was to be responsible for the welfare of
society. The concept of the invisible hand seems to have been adopted by Smith on the
grounds that it was a distributive mechanism. While he does not explicitly tell us what
this ‘invisible hand’ stands for, the following sections are concerned with some of the
interpretations that have been given to this concept by other scholars.
3.4.3 Self-Interest and the Invisible Hand

Commenting on the concept of the invisible hand, Kenneth Lux (1990: 89) said that “in
the pursuit of self-interest the individual is ‘led by an invisible hand’ to promote the
social good, although that is no part of his intention”. Here the implication is that the
19
The Smithian concept of the ‘Invisible Hand’ is based on the assumption that in matters of buying and
selling, or choosing what and how to produce, we will do others more good if we behave as if we are
following our self-interest rather than by pursuing explicit altruistic purposes. This concept removes guilt
feelings about what the individual does in her economic activities. It removes guilt feelings because it gives
the impression that ‘people should be allowed to follow their self-interest in the market and should not feel
guilty in doing so’. As a maxim of ‘natural liberty’, it exhorts people to maximise their own self-interest
without bothering about the welfare of society. They should not bother about the welfare of society because
the ‘invisible hand’ will take care of that without their own conscious efforts to do so. In the final analysis
everyone ends up contributing to the general welfare while thinking that s/he is working for her self-interest
(Hirschman 1977: 10; Brittan 1985: 11-12).
60
individual’s economic actions are solely aimed at self-interest, but those same actions end
up promoting good ends that were not intended. For example, in 1877, an American
Lawyer by the name of Samuel Tilden is said to have given a speech at a testimonial
dinner of an American business tycoon by the name of Junius Morgan. He remarked:
You are, doubtless in some degree, clinging to the illusion that you are working
for yourselves, but it is my pleasure to claim that you are working for the public.
While you are scheming for your own selfish ends, there is an overruling and wise
Providence directing that the most of all you do should inure to the benefit of the
people. Men of colossal fortunes are in effect, if not in fact, trustees for the public
(cited in Canterbery 1987: 114).
This seems to be a reiteration of Mandeville’s thesis that ‘private vices’ were actually
‘public benefits’. The understanding in the above citation is that the public does benefit
from the selfishness of a business person. A business person might not be aware of this
truism. The above testimony augments the belief that business people are indeed
benefactors of society. That a business person who is solely self-interested is the
benefactor of society, is something we should understand as the ordinance of
‘Providence’. However, the concept of ‘the invisible hand’ has other two complementary
implications. The second implication is religious and the third one is sociological.
3.4.3.1 The Religious Significance of the Invisible Hand

Religiously, Adam Smith’s context of early modernity was also flourishing with debates
on whether God was a Cosmic moralist or not. Deists within modernity advocated a form
of natural religion with a Supreme Being whose will was enshrined in the principles of
morality. They believed “in a world ordered by natural law, and in the inference of
knowledge concerning this world by observation of its workings” (Kaye 1988: x1).
Deists “had faith in a cosmology and an ethics of divine origin and of eternal and
universal truth and applicability”. For them there was always an “inevitable agreement of
the will of God with the results of human actions” (Ibid.). The philosophical foundation
of Deism lay primarily in the conception of natural law. The understanding was that
“every law framed by human beings bears the character of a law exactly to that extent to
which it is derived from the law of nature”. It is most likely that Smith saw the invisible
hand “as a natural law of the universe, a force that possessed the awesome power to bring
good out of private greed” (Tawney 1926: 51; Cort 1988: 11).
61
From the perspective of the Deists, the promotion of human happiness was entirely
dependent on God’s providence. This belief in God’s providence was premised on the
grounds that “God, being infinitely good, provides all his creatures the means of attaining
that happiness, whereof their natures are capable” (Byrne 1989: 53). In this way of
reasoning, a link is made “between God’s perfect goodness and his uniform and
unwavering concern to make human beings happy” (Byrne 1989: 54). Since God was
understood as existing in a state of perfect happiness s/he could not be interested in his or
her own happiness but only in the happiness of God’s creatures (Byrne 1989: 59-60).
It was part of the argument of the Deists that the universe and the social order were
planned by God in such a way that they operate under certain laws that concur with the
designer’s intentions. This way of reasoning can be discerned from James Corey’s
argument that, “It is the mind of God that is ultimately responsible for the many unifying
themes that are found throughout the living world. God directly created all the various
species on earth ex nihilo according to a common plan” (Corey 1994: 108). Such an
argument is a posteriori rather than a priori. All arguments of this nature focus on the
orderliness of the world around us, and argue from this to the existence of the creator or a
benevolent deity. In a way, the moral implication of such an argument is that whatever is
happening in the world, good or bad, is in accordance with God’s plan. On our part we do
not have to worry about the self-interested behaviour of homo economicus because God’s
benevolence will turn their self-interested actions into our own good (Murove 1999: 101-
102).
The philosophical assumption of the Deists was also influenced by the religious doctrine
of Providence. Both Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations bear
testimony to this influence. The influence of the doctrine of Providence on Smith’s
economic outlook was captured by Jacob Viner as follows,
Smith develops the doctrine of a beneficent order in nature, manifesting itself

through the operation of forces external to nature and the innate propensities
implanted in man [sic] by nature. The moral sentiments, self-interest, regulated by
natural justice and tempered by sympathy and benevolence, operate in
conjunction with the physical forces of nature to achieve the beneficent purposes
of Nature (Viner 1958: 216-217).
62
In line with the doctrine of Providence, Smith’s presumption was that, as there is some
orderliness in nature, this orderliness can also be found in human activities in a way that
reflects the attainment of purposes that are in congruence with nature. In the Theory of
Moral Sentiments, Smith expressed this doctrine of Providence as follows, “When by
natural principles we are led to advance those ends which a refined and enlightened
reason would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their
efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by which we advance those ends, and to
imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God” (Smith
1872: 80). The implication here, as Viner observed, is that “Providence has so fashioned
the constitution of external nature as to make its processes favourable to man [sic], and
has implanted ab initio in human nature such sentiments as would bring about, through
their ordinary working, the happiness and welfare of mankind” (Viner 1958: 217).
Smith’s providential deism implies that human economic actions give rise to
consequences or outcomes that were not intended. Since the outcomes of self-interested
human economic actions have been pre-ordained, it also follows that there was no need
for additional influence to a social order that is so fine tuned. As Smith puts it,
The idea of that divine Being, whose benevolence and wisdom have, from all
eternity, contrived and conducted the immense machine of the universe, so as at
all times to produce the greatest possible quantity of happiness, is certainly of all
the objects of human contemplation by far the most sublime….The administration
of the great system of the universe, however, the care of the universal happiness
of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man (Smith
1872: 210).
The argument of the above quotation is that we must understand human society as
primarily subsisting under the providential influence of God. For this reason, there is no
need for any further interference with the way the economy works because such an
economic system depends on providence. Smith’s advocacy of divine Providence in the
socio-economic order was an implicit articulation of the liberal economic belief that
society and the economy work well without interference from government. Because of
his belief in the presence of Providence in economic activities, it was part of Smith’s
argument that even those who were poor would be assisted by this Providence which he
apparently postulated as synonymous with ‘the invisible hand’.
63
While the rich might have been solely self-interested, their selfishness, according to
Smith has been divinely mandated. They have been chosen or selected as indirect
benefactors of society because their greed is directed to beneficial ends by the invisible
hand. It is Smith’s religious belief that God used the greediness of the rich for the benefit
of the poor. The self-interest of the rich will not endanger the wellbeing of the poor
because, “When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither
forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last,
too, enjoy their share of all that it produces” (Smith 1872: 163).
Smith’s theological position was in congruence with economic liberalism’s

understanding of the economy as a self-correcting mechanism based on the principle of
“natural liberty” (Viner 1958: 220-221; Lux 1990: 89). The Smithian concept of ‘the
invisible hand’ presupposed a natural harmony between the liberal economy as a self-
regulating mechanism and human necessities. While economic activities were motivated
by self-interest, Smith saw harmony between the individual’s self-interest and the
common good. As we shall see in chapter 5, this idea is pivotal to neo-liberal economists’
claim that the economy does work well when there is no government intervention or
government spending on welfare through taxation. Their usual argument is that the
economy, relying on individuals competing for the fulfilment of their self-interests, will
automatically fulfil the general welfare of society better than when they are motivated by
reasons of the welfare of others. In this type of reasoning it logically follows that selfish
passions are desirable in the creation and distribution of resources. Also, it implies that
there is harmony between individual self-interest and the interest of society as a whole
(Polanyi 1968: 135-148; Heilbroner 1962: 40-72).
3.4.3.2 Smith’s concept of the Invisible Hand and the Sociological Theory of
Spontaneous Orders
The second implication of the invisible hand is sociological. The invisible hand implies
that a beneficial order emerges as a result of the unintended consequences of individual
actions.20 As we have seen previously, Mandeville argued that while human self-
20
Sociologists have sometimes argued that sometimes human actions can lead to consequences beyond
their control. Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim all argued that people create social structures
64
interested actions are directed to egotistical ends, they give rise to a particular beneficial
social order, an order that would do good for the well-being of society. Economic
liberalism of early modernity engendered the idea of a free market system as a self-
regulatory system which organises itself without any outside help. The presumption was
that the free market, being populated by egotistical individuals, does in the long run give
rise to a spontaneous order which is to the advantage of everybody in society (cf.
Dahrendorf 1989: 183-187).
Kenneth Arrow and Frank Hahn (1971: 1) expressed their fascination with the Smithian
concept of ‘the invisible hand’ as follows: “[T]he notion that a social system moved by
independent actions in pursuit of different values is consistent with a final coherent state
of balance,…is surely the most important intellectual contribution that economic thought
has made to the general understanding of social processes” In other words, there was
some congruence between self-interested actions of individuals and the common good of
society (cf. Polanyi 1968: 68-70).
For Smith, self-interest was analogous to the principle of motion in social theory in the
same way that attraction was in Newton’s principle of motion. His most famous
contribution to modernist economics was that government should not make laws to
regulate the economy because laws and regulations were contrary to human nature. The
wealth of nations did not depend on the government’s ability to legislate and
constitutionalise, but on the freedom of individuals to pursue their self-interests. The idea
of restraining self-interest through constitutional legislation was a mistaken one because
self-interest brings its own social harmony that is more desirable than that which is
consciously planned for by government. Thus Smith disentangled society into political
and economic spheres (Polanyi 1968: 71). The former was not supposed to stretch its
unprofessional fingers to the latter because the economic sphere had a life of its own.
but those structures soon take on a life of their own, over which the creators have little or no control.
Because people lack control over them, structures are free to develop in a variety of totally unanticipated
directions. Their argument has been that the liberal capitalist economy, being driven by self-interest, does
not guarantee any social structure. Karl Polanyi, however, is of the view that the laissez-faire economic
system was not a creation of unintended consequences of human acts, and that its origins came about as a
result of deliberate legislation by the liberal government. Polanyi argued that in the 1790s up to 1825
economic liberal principles were embraced by politicians and business people as the route which the liberal
market economic system was to take (Polanyi 1968: 135-159).
65
The conviction that the political sphere should not encroach on the economic sphere is
well elaborated in Moral Sentiments, where Smith admonished that the liberal economy
had a life of its own that does not need interference from government:
The man of system seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of
a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a
chess-board; he does not consider that the different pieces upon a chess board
have other principles of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them;
but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a
principle of motion of its own, altogether from that which the legislator might
choose to impress upon it (Smith 1872: 330-381).
In the above quotation the idea is that government should not attempt to regulate the
market since everyone on the market is self-interested in such a way that all who transact
in the market are rational enough to know what they want. Being driven by self-interest,
society will find its own equilibrium or harmony which is analogous to the Newtonian
objects which find their respective places due to laws of gravity and motion. The world of
Adam Smith was a Newtonian one, and like his contemporary thinkers, he saw the social
order of his day as a naturally self-equilibrating one (Macpherson 1970: 185-189; Milgate
1991: 105-112).
To give an example, in his price theory Smith shows in an unadulterated form the
Newtonian scheme of thought turned to the analysis of social phenomena. Thus Smith
puts it pragmatically in his Wealth of Nations that: “There is in every society or
neighbourhood an ordinary or average rate of wages and profit”, and that: “This rate is
naturally regulated” (Smith 1976: 55). The price at which a commodity actually sells is
known as the market price. This market price, according to Smith, has “a tendency to
gravitate around the natural price, but it is always being turned back toward the natural
price by the force of interest as manifested in supply and demand. Effective demand is
made up of all those who are willing to pay the natural price of the commodity”. In cases
when the quantity brought to the market is less than effective demand, “the self-interest
of some would lead them to bid a little more than the natural price of the commodity”
(Smith 1976: 56).
66
In a manner that echoes Newtonian physics, Smith described the price of a commodity as
follows:
The natural price is, therefore, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of
all commodities are continually gravitating. Different accidents may sometimes
keep them suspended a good deal above it, and sometimes force them down even
somewhat below it. But whatever may be the obstacles which hinder them from
setting in the centre of repose and continuance, they are constantly tending
towards it (Smith 1976: 58).
Thus prices are seen as ‘gravitating’ about the norm or natural point, always repelled
from this point, but also being forced back toward it by the ‘pull’ of self-interest. In other
words, while the Newtonian force of gravity made things to remain in their respective
positions, self-interest gave natural order to the pricing system without any external
intervention through governmental regulations.
On the distribution of resources, also, Smith maintained that there was no need for
government intervention: “Without any intervention of law, therefore, the private
interests and passions of men naturally lead them to divide and distribute the stock of
every society, among all the different employments carried on in it, as nearly as possible
in the proportion which is most agreeable to the interest of the whole society” (Smith
1976: 630). For this reason, Smith saw society and its resources as actually governed by
self-interest without the assistance of government or governmental intervention. It was
self-interest which had assumed the role of the invisible hand.
Other scholars have argued that while each person is motivated by self-interest, the
concept of the invisible hand entails an understanding of society and its institutions as a
result of spontaneous orders. This is the theory that one finds in Hayek’s book, Law,
Legislation and Liberty. Hayek’s argument is that human actions usually lead to
consequences which are unintended by the actors.21 Thus he argued that those who
21
The meaning of Hayek’s concept of spontaneous orders is that while individual actions may be solely
self-interested, they give rise to a particular social or economic order that they may not have anticipated.
Such an order is endogenous rather than exogenous. It is endogenous in the sense that it is not an order that
is influenced by convention, customs and traditions. Geoffrey Hodgson chided Hayek on the grounds that
67
complained about Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand were ignorant due to the
fact that “they cannot conceive of an order which is not deliberately made, and partly
because to them an order means something aiming at concrete purposes which is…what a
spontaneous order cannot do” (Hayek 1982: 37-38). According to Hayek, the sum of
unintended individual actions over a period of time results in an order which is
comprehensible to the human mind as if it were a product of an intelligent planner
(Hayek 1982: 41-42).
Hayek deduced from this that the outcomes of human actions bring about a more
beneficial order to the participants than what was intended. The implication of a
spontaneous order is that the individual pursuit of self-interest gives rise to a more
harmonious social system than what would be the case under a consciously planned
social system. In other words, self-interest should be seen as the self-organisation of
society. It organises society without any conscious human effort. It is this ability to self-
organise that gives rise to social contentment (Hayek 1982: 43-54). However, Hayek was
more concerned with presenting us with a sociological theory that would suit the
Smithian concept of ‘the invisible hand’ as commensurate with laissez faire capitalism.
In line with this aim he submitted that, “In society, reliance on spontaneous order both
extends and limits our power of control” (Hayek 1982: 41). As we shall see in the
following section, Hayek’s vision of a society that creates order without external
interference was actually a restatement of Adam Smith’s advocacy of laissez faire.
within such an understanding of a spontaneous order, “Individuals are regarded as if they are born with a
fixed personality; they are not constituted through social processes. The analysis has then to proceed from
these given individuals to examine the spontaneous order that may emerge; it does not consider the kind of
individual that may emerge from a social order of a given type, and contribute further to the evolution of
the social order in the future” (Hodgson 1988: 138). Hodgson’s argument is that we should not see
individuals in their subjectivity as giving rise to spontaneous orders, but that we need to take into
consideration the contributions that are made by social influence. As he puts it, “There can be a virtuous
circle where civilized behaviour is both built up by, and contributes to, cohesive social norms. But also the
circle can be virtuous, in that a shortage of solidarity and trust may accelerate a propensity for individuals
to diminish further their tolerance or altruism, thus advancing the process of decay” (Hodgson 1988: 138).
68
Smith’s economic theory in the Wealth of Nations was based on the idea that money,
prices, and profit and loss22 give the signals that lead to amendments in resource
misallocations, and thus promoting economic growth. Economic institutions such as the
market, and industrial division of labour, arise in an evolutionary process. Thus the idea
of a spontaneous order, of a self-ordering system, continued to give the basis of the
economic discipline itself. One of the arguments that was put forward by Hayek in his
Individualism and Economic Order was that the individualism that arises from the theory
of spontaneous order is the only genuine individualism that makes economic sense: “The
true individualism which I shall try to defend began its development with John Locke,
and particularly with Bernard Mandeville and David Hume, …and Adam Smith” (Hayek
1948: 4).
Hayek’s thesis in this work was that actions of individuals do create a social order that
was never intended: “…[T]hat the spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates
things which are greater than their individual minds ever fully comprehend…is the great
discovery of classical and political economy which has become the basis of our
understanding not only of economic life but of most truly social phenomena”. From this
assertion, he argued that true individualism sees most of the order we find in human
economic activities “as unforeseen result of individual actions” (Hayek 1948: 8).
According to him, the individualism that arises from an understanding of the economy as
a spontaneous order leads to advocating “an individualism of antirationalism” (Hayek
1948: 8-9).
22
Smith’s philosophy of money was based on the idea that the value of money depends on “when its supply
may be increased at the pleasure of the individuals, and when its supply is placed under limitation and
restraint”. In other words, the acts of self-interested individuals gave rise to the value of money through
controlled supply which in turn created scarcity. George Simmel argued that people create value by making
objects, separating themselves from those objects, and then seeking to overcome the “distance, obstacles,
difficulties” they encounter in trying to get hold of those objects. The greater the difficulty of obtaining an
object, the greater its value. The general principle is that the value of things comes from the ability of
people to distance themselves properly from objects. Among the factors involved in the distance of an
object from an actor are the time it takes to obtain it, its scarcity, the difficulties involved in acquiring it,
and the need to give up other things in order to acquire it. In the economic realm, money serves both to
create distance from objects and to provide the means to overcome it. In the process of creating value,
money provides the basis for the development of the market and the capitalist society. Money provides the
means whereby these entities acquire a life of their own that is external to, and coercive of the actor. The
need for money gives rise to calculative and self-interested relationships (Simmel 1978: 66-125).
69
Hayek (1948: 13-14) tells us that individualism is not bad at all, but the problem lies in
“the belief that individualism approves and encourages human selfishness”. This belief,
according to him, is a problem of moral evaluations of human economic activities. As he
puts it, “There can be no doubt, of course, that in the language of the great writers of the
eighteenth century it was man’s ‘self-love’, or even his ‘selfish interest’, which they
represented as the ‘universal mover’, and that by these terms they were referring
primarily to a moral attitude…” . For Hayek, the idea that the individual is solely self-
interested does not have much significance because the individual cannot care for society
in general besides “a narrow circle of which he is the centre”.
According to Hayek (1948: 15), it is a given natural economic process through the market
that the individual ends up contributing “to ends which were no part of his purpose”.
What we need to take into consideration is the fact that this human behaviour is not a
glorification of selfishness as it is mistakenly understood:
If we put it concisely by saying that people are and ought to be guided in their
actions by their interests and desires, this will at once be misunderstood or
distorted into the false contention that they are or ought to be exclusively guided
by their personal needs or selfish interests, while what we mean is that they ought
to be allowed to strive for whatever they think desirable [his emphasis] (Hayek
1948: 15).
Part of Hayek’s argument of spontaneous orders is his refutation of the theory of rational
homo economicus. In a society where there is a plurality of choices and capacities, one
cannot know what would be known by “other members of society taken together” (Hayek
1948: 15). It is because of this universal ignorance that Hayek was against what he called
“rationalistic individualism” on the grounds that this type of individualism does not
realise that individuals are often required to submit themselves to irrational forces of
society. We have to bear in mind that “the understandable craving for intelligibility
produces illusory demands which no system can satisfy” (Hayek 1948: 20-24).
Hayek’s economic antirationalism complements well the Smithian notion that in pursuit
of his or her self-interest, the individual promotes the good of society without knowing it.
70
It is this universal ignorance that led Hayek to advocate his theory of spontaneous orders
- or a society that ends up with structures that were not intended by its citizens. In this
regard, individuals do not have to be rational to pursue their self-interests. Hayek’s
advocacy of antirationalism is based on his avowed optimism in the market as a self-
correcting organism.
In support of Hayek’s ‘economic antirationalism’, Alexander Shand argued that at the

market place no one knows best, and that we cannot establish with certainty what the
business person would do with his or her wealth. Equally, those who benefit from the
business person’s wealth do not even know how the funds were accrued, and for what
purpose. Those who advocate rational economic individualism forget that the successful
entrepreneur “is led by the invisible hand to bring the succour of modern conveniences to
the poorest homes he does not even know” (Shand 1990: 74-75; Hayek 1982: 154). But
this is not all. According to Shand, “…the market is the best way by which the individual
may serve the needs of hundreds of people whom he does not know of and of whose
desires he is also ignorant; but this is achieved through, not through altruism, but through
self-interest” (Shand 1990: 78).
Hayek’s and Shand’s argument of economic antirationalism or economic universal

ignorance, as we shall see in chapter 4 is actually contradicted by neo-liberal economists
who argue that the individual is self-interested due to the fact that s/he is calculative in
his or her economic activities. For the time being, the argument of economic
antirationalism as we shall see in the following subsection is further undermined by the
argument that early modern economic liberalism was a result of a process that involved a
conscious rational deliberation on homo economicus. In other words, a self-interested
homo economicus was an eighteenth century rational construction who might not have
existed in other epochs of western economic history. Karl Polanyi advanced a thesis that
emphasised the prevalence of choice in economic and social organisation. In other words,
the modern liberal economy was not a product of the pursuit of self-interest through
universal ignorance.
71
3.4.4 Polanyi’s Critique of Smith’s Economic Liberalism

Karl Polanyi23 (1968: 71-85) came up with two arguments to show that the economic idea
of a self-regulating market which brings about a spontaneous order is illusory. He argued
that “no society can exist without a system of some kind which ensures order in the
production and distribution of goods. …[N]ormally, the economic order is merely a
function of the social, in which it is contained”. To support this insight, Polanyi made a
historical analysis of the market since early modernity, in which he demonstrated that the
idea of a self-regulating market was only a nineteenth century development in Western
civilisation which was non-existent in the previous epochs. Through legislation and the
writings of liberal economic and philosophical thinkers, it came to be believed that
“[h]armony was inherent in economy…the interests of the individual and the community
were identical – but such harmonious self-regulation required that the individual respect
economic law even if it happened to destroy him” (Polanyi 1968: 85).
Polanyi’s second argument was a comparative anthropological argument in which he

demonstrated that an economic system that evolved around self-interest was relative to
Western civilisation. As he puts it, “the individual in primitive society is not threatened
by starvation unless the community as a whole is in a like predicament. Under the kraal-
land system of the Kaffirs, for instance, ‘destitution is impossible: whosoever needs
assistance receives it unquestioningly’” (Polanyi 1968: 163). His argument here is that in
non western societies, the idea of greed or selfishness as characteristic of economic
relations was virtually unknown.
23
Karl Polanyi was an economic historian and anthropologist. In his work, The Great Transformation,
Polanyi argued that “the motive of individual profit associated with market exchange was never till the
modern age the dominant principle of economic life”. He said that earlier societies before the advent of
modern economic relations and practices were based on “non-economic relations such as kinship,
communal, religious and political relationships”. These economic relations were devoid of the profit motive
and material gain. Modernist academic writings on the economy gave rise to the idea of the economy as
primarily an interaction of individuals at the market. Markets became institutions that functioned without
the economy. As Polanyi puts it, “Orthodox economic history, in effect, was based on an immensely
exaggerated view of the significance of markets as such a ‘certain isolation’, or , perhaps, a ‘tendency to
seclusion’”. The idea of a market that existed as an independent institution from the economy was closely
related to an understanding of society as a spontaneous order that was self-regulating (Polanyi 1968: 56-67;
Wood 2000: 21-26).
72
Polanyi’s argument can be supported by some of the pre-colonial Portuguese traders who
were trading in cloth and beads in the Zambezi valley in the 14th century. Portuguese
traders such as Diego and de Couto recorded in their diaries that the Africans “are so lazy
that they will stop work as soon as they find enough gold to buy two pieces of cloth to
dress themselves…[They] have neither eagerness nor greed…as they always rest content
with but little” (cited in Mudenge 1988: 171). The above example authenticates Polanyi’s
argument that self-interest or greed did not have a universal applicability in all economic
relations, rather, it was an evolutionary antecedent of early modernity in western society.
Polanyi went a step further to argue that in many non western societies, selfishness was
rather externally induced, especially during the era of colonialism. As he put it,
It is the absence of the threat of individual starvation which makes primitive

society, in a sense, more human than market economy, and at the same time less
economic. Ironically, the white man’s initial contribution to the black man’s [sic]
world mainly consisted in introducing him to the uses of the scourge of hunger.
Thus the colonists may decide to cut the breadfruit trees down in order to create
an artificial food scarcity or may impose a hut tax on the native to force him to
barter away his labour (Polanyi 1968: 164).
What the above quotation implies is that in a society where people have an inherent
tendency to care for each other, economic relations based on competitive greed could not
have existed. It follows that economic relations that were based on greed or selfishness
were actually invented in the same way that they were invented in the western societies
during the era of early modernity. Nicholas Xenos (1989: 7-38) developed Polanyi’s
evolutionary argument further when he argued that the economic concept of scarcity
came about as a result of the failure of Enlightenment scholars to differentiate needs from
desires. The rich became the object of emulation while those who were poor did not have
any significant attention from society. Xenos went on to observe that the motif of
abundance was also invented with an understanding that there should be continuous
economic progress, and that each individual was capable of amassing as much wealth as
they can lay their hands on. The motif of abundance implies greed when seen from the
perspective of scarcity.
73
Since greed was an evolutionary antecedent of early modernity, Polanyi argued that we
should equally see the free market idea as an historical social creation, or a phenomenon
that was consciously brought into existence by philosophers and economists. To give an
example, Adam Smith was optimistic that self-interest propels humanity to do that which
will ultimately benefit others. His economic treatise was based on the premise that the
laws governing the universe were congruent with humanity’s economic activities and
their ends. While Smith saw the harmonious as the result of ‘chance interaction’, Polanyi
saw deliberate human choices at play (Polanyi 1968: 112-115; cf. Canterbery 1987: 203-
204). As we shall see in chapter 4, Spencer and his social biology and Malthus’s
‘Population law’ were all based on the conviction that government was not supposed to
interfere with economic activities because nature was capable of establishing its own
balance by decimating the undesirable elements of the economic society, such as the
poor. The laws of economics were the laws of nature and consequently seen as the laws
of God. As Polanyi puts it: “To the politician and administrator laissez-faire was simply a
principle of the ensurance of law and order, with the minimum cost and effort. Let the
market be given charge of the poor, and things will look after themselves” (Polanyi 1968:
117).
That the unregulated liberal economy would take charge of the needs of the poor in the
long run was an economic doctrine that was also shared by other early modern
economists besides Adam Smith. While the individual pursuit of self-interest gave rise to
social misery and inequality, early modern liberal thinkers saw the free market economy
as a natural order or a spontaneous order which should not be interfered with by
government. This was a natural working of the law of nature. Put in religious terms,
whatever was happening on the economic scene was part of divine providence.

In this chapter I have tried to show that early modernity brought about a paradigm shift in
the understanding of self-interest. Political and philosophical liberals of modernity such
as Machiavelli, Hobbes and Hume argued in their various ways that rulers were supposed
74
to rule their subjects on the premise that those subjects were also self-interested. Among
these liberal thinkers, the underlying philosophical assumption was that a human being
was naturally self-interested, hence a viable political and economic system was supposed
to reflect this reality. The belief that human beings were egoists seems to have provided
some symbiosis between economic liberalism and political liberalism in early modernity
(Machiavelli 1961: 100-105; Hobbes 1962: 21-104; Hume 1882: 117-119).
In economics, Bernard de Mandeville (1924: 18-78; cf. Goldsmith 1985: 34-50) argued
that all those vices which were condemned by moralists were actually the cause of the
flourishing of wealth. Mandeville’s thesis was that private vices were public benefits.
From this presumption, Mandeville argued that virtue can only breed poverty and
deprivation. Mandeville’s parody was a rudimentary expression of the economic theory
of laissez faire.
The doctrine of laissez faire says that society would benefit and make significant
progress when individuals are left to pursue their self-interests at the market place
without interference from government. It was also shown that Adam Smith weaved
Mandeville’s insight into an economic theory in which he argued that homo economicus
was only self-interested, and that it was upon the pursuit of self-interest that the liberal
economy was able to flourish and nourish everybody. Smith coined the term ‘the
invisible hand’ as that which was enabling the poor to benefit from the greed of the rich
(Smith 1976: 26-27; 1872: 304-305).
As an attempt to unpack the implications of the Smithian concept of ‘the invisible hand’ I
came up with three possible implications of this concept. The first implication was based
on the liberal economic assumption that self-interested individuals are social benefactors.
The second implication was that the concept of the invisible hand originated from the
doctrines of deism and providence. During the era of modernity, deists believed that God
was capable of using human vices to promote the common good (Viner 1958: 85;
Tawney 1926: 51; Byrne 1989: 53-60).
75
It was also argued that the Smithian concept of ‘the invisible hand’ concurs with the
religious doctrine of providence in the sense that it implies the minimisation of
government distributive economic intervention as a crucial economic principle The main
presumption was that, while human beings might be solely self-interested, their self-
interests were bringing about a desirable economic order that was benefiting the poor.
According to Smith, this would not be the case if self-interested individuals were
deliberately trying to be altruistic (Viner 1958: 85; Canterbery 1987: 114; Tawney 1926:
51; Cort 1988: 11; Byrne 1989: 54-60).
The third implication was sociological. The argument which was put forward by Hayek
was that sometimes human actions tend to give rise to spontaneous social orders rather
than what was intended by the actors. From these three implications, it followed that
human selfishness was taken by Adam Smith to be an unalterable reality of nature. It was
something natural that human beings should always work in pursuit of their self-interests.
Karl Polanyi argued that self-interest in economics came about as a result of economic
evolutions of early modernity that were triggered by political legislatures, economists,
philosophers, politicians and scientists (Hayek 1948: 4-24; 1982: 37-54; Shand 1990: 74-
78).
Another argument that was advanced by Polanyi against early modernity’s advocacy of
self-interest was that there were other societies whose economic relations were not driven
by self-interest. It was also shown that the naturalisation of self-interest in economics
within the era of early modernity was partly influenced by developments in sciences,
especially the Newtonian and Darwinian scientific revolutions. Newton’s physics
postulated the theory that objects existed as self enclosed entities that obeyed rules of
gravity and motion. In the Smithian liberal economics self-interest played a role that was
analogous to the Newtonian rules of gravity and motion. However, as we shall see in the
following chapter, early modernity gave rise to an understanding of economics as integral
to evolution (Polanyi 1968: 163-164; Milgate 1991: 105-112; Smith 1976: 55-58).
76
CHAPTER FOUR: OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS TO AND DEBATES ON THE

THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST IN EARLY MODERN ECONOMIC
DISCOURSE
With the advent of the predatory stage of life there comes a change in the requirements of the successful
human character. Men’s habits of life are required to adapt themselves to new exigencies under a new
scheme of human relations. …Under the competitive regime, the conditions of success for the individual
are not necessarily the same as those of a class. The success of a class or party presumes a strong element
of clannishness, or loyalty to a chief, or adherence to a tenet; whereas the competitive individual can best
achieve his ends if he combines the barbarian’s energy, initiative, self-seeking and disingenuousness with
the savage’s lack of loyalty or clannishness (Veblen 1931: 225-226)
4.1 Introduction
Early modern capitalism, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, can rightfully be
regarded as a phase among phases in the evolution of capitalism as a fully fledged and
organised economic system. The liberal economy evolved from one presumption about
homo economicus to another. As it was argued by Polanyi in chapter 3, the idea that a
free market economy, populated by individuals who are solely self-interested, would
promote prosperity for the majority of its citizens was consciously formed by early
modern philosophers and economists. It is institutions that give rise to the form and
content of individual economic behaviour (Hodgson 1988: 124).
The economic conviction of early modernity was that the individual’s economic
behaviour was solely self-interested. It also followed that government was supposed to
promote the individual’s pursuit of self-interest through legislation. Thomas Malthus,
Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer saw self-interest as not only typical of human
society. Rather, self-interest was also the working of the laws of nature. Human pursuit of
self-interest and the scarcity of natural resources were part and parcel of the evolutionary
process of human society and its political economy. An increase in human population that
was not matched by an increase in resources implied that in the scramble for such scarce
resources the fittest would survive.
It was Thorstein Veblen who came up with an argument of evolution about economic
institutions. Whereas Malthus, Darwin and Spencer had advocated natural selection
77
through the survival of the fittest, Veblen came with a theory that institutions also evolve
(cf. Canterbery 1987: 200; Hodgson 1988: 124-125). Instead of studying the economic
behaviour of the individual as a unit of rational choice, Veblen puts focus on economic
behaviour of the rich as a class that had its particular economic way of behaving or
habits. The same approach was to a great extent employed by other evolutionary
humanists such as John Ruskin and Karl Marx.
This chapter is comprised of four sections. The first section deals with self-interest in
Malthus’ theory of population geography, Darwin’s concept of natural selection and
Herbert Spencer’s social biology. While these thinkers employed a naturalistic
interpretation of self-interest that resonated very well with that of early modern
economists, their theory of evolution, it will be argued, concurred very well with the
capitalistic thinking of early modernity. The second section will attempt to give the
meaning of self-interest in economics as given by Philip Wicksteed. Thirdly, it will be
shown in the third section, drawing from the works of Thorstein Veblen, John Ruskin and
Karl Marx that self-interest dehumanises. The fourth section is a conclusion.
4.2 Economic Significance of Self-Interest and the Theory of Evolution

4.2.1 Malthus’s Justification of Selfishness through Demographic Theory
Thomas Malthus, who is popularly known as the patron of population geography,
expressed a resentful attitude towards economic liberalism. Malthus came up with a book
entitled An Essay on Population in which he advanced a theory that there was an
unbridgeable chasm between human society as it is, and that which economic liberalism
saw as fine tuned by divine providence. His thesis was that there was a tendency in nature
whereby, if the population is left unchecked, it outstrips all the available means of
subsistence. Humanity was caught up in a relentless trap in which its reproductive zeal
tends to drive it to a situation of struggle between many mouths and the perpetually
insufficient resources. As he puts it, “[Since] population can never actually increase
beyond the lowest nourishment capable of supporting it, a strong check on population,
78
from the difficulty of acquiring food, must be constantly in operation” (Malthus 1958: 6;
cf. Heilbroner 1972a: 73-83).
Malthus’s position was simply a logical one in the sense that the main problem of the
world arises from the fact that there were too many people in it. Hence, there was an
early connection between population and poverty. An increase in the sum of humanity
entailed an increase in poverty because many human mouths have a tendency of
overrunning the resources. This demographic insight led him to the argument that the
poor were not supposed to be helped. A poor person for whom “at nature’s mighty feast
there is no cover” might be kept alive by charity; but since s/he would then propagate his
or her own kind, such charity can only be cruelty in disguise. Malthus explained this
insight by postulating that since land could not multiply itself without human labour, it
inevitably followed that the number of people would sooner or later overrun the amount
of food. Thus the divergence between human mouths and food could only lead to a
conclusion that a larger number of humanity would be condemned to one type of misery
or another (Malthus 1958: 12-15; Heilbroner 1972a: 83).
Since population could not exist without food, Malthus argued, some premature death in
the form of famine or disease must always pay a visit to the human race! If the vices of
humanity cannot bring about an effective ‘preventive check’24 that can facilitate
depopulation, then some ‘positive check’ in the form of sickly seasons, epidemics and
plagues can be a vital mechanism that can equilibrate between nature’s providence and
human mouths (Malthus 1958: 14-15). Definitely, Malthus did not have any hope in the
24
Malthus advanced two types of checks on population – that is, “preventive and positive checks”. The
preventive check had a natural existence within a person’s rationality, that is, a human being’s ability to use
reason so as to weigh the pros and cons of his or her actions into a distant future. This involves moral
values such as those of restraining from sexual activities or postponing the age of marriage. On the other
hand, positive checks appear in the form of “common diseases and epidemics,, wars, plagues, and famine”.
According to Malthus, the total “of all these preventive and positive checks, taken together, forms the
immediate check to population” (Malthus 1958: 12-15). Unlike Malthus, Adam Smith had an optimistic
view about human reason and the liberal economy’s ability to defy Malthus’ scepticism about human
existence. According to Smith, there was no need to worry about population because human beings are not
“like the lower animals, actuated by instinct only”. The fact that they are endowed with reason enables
them “to perceive and appreciate, with more or less accuracy, the consequences of their actions, and to
shape their conduct accordingly”. It was by virtue of reason that Smith argued that humanity “cannot
increase beyond the means of subsistence available for support”, and that if that happens, “moral restraint”
will help as a mechanism for population check (Smith 1976: 454-455).
79
future of the poor because their economic station made them prone to being nature’s
suitable candidates for depopulation. In his eyes, the poor had an undesirable existence in
the laws of nature – hence they were always the first to pay the debt of nature (Malthus
1958: 35; Heilbroner 1972a: 81).This became the basis for his critique of charity or
welfarism.
Malthus critiqued what was then called ‘Poor Laws’ in his English society on the grounds
that though these laws may have “alleviated a little the intensity of individual misfortune,
they have spread the evil over a much larger surface” (Malthus 1958: 35-40). He
advocated for the abolition of parish allowances as well as governmental allowances to
the poor on the grounds that if the poor were finding assistance through charity and
welfarism the result would be the “obvious tendency to increase population without
increasing the food for its support. A poor man may marry with little or no prospect of
being able to support a family in independence. They may be said therefore in some
measure to create the poor which they maintain” (Malthus 1958: 45-50). His argument
was that the poor were not supposed to propagate their own kind. If they were to
propagate their own kind, that in itself would be a recipe for the creation of a vicious
circle of poverty. It was only those who were rich who were supposed to survive.
According to Malthus, their selfishness was part of a positive check on the population
(Malthus 1958: 50).
Malthus’ demographic doctrine was also echoed by Charles Darwin in his theory of
evolution, in which he argued that those species that survive are those that are always
strong. Whereas Malthus was resentful towards government’s welfare programmes to
improve the lot of the poor, Darwin saw the principle of struggle for survival, where
those who could not keep up with the struggle were destined for extinction as part of the
sanction of nature.
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4.2.2 Economics of Self-Interest in Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

In Darwin’s On the Origins of Species25 self-interest became a mechanism of natural
selection. The theory that has gone concurrently with the socio-economic theory of self-
interest is the theory that those who are poor are those species that could not adapt. These
less adapted (the poor) would be overrun by the rich, who in this case are the well
adapted. Sometimes the less adapted will be naturally exterminated. Kenneth Lux (1990:
147) caricatured this reasoning as follows:
The poor generally represented an inferior variety. By being driven into

undesirable and non-life-supporting environments, they would naturally tend to
die off, and thus the species of Homo sapiens would strengthen, evolve, and
progress. Social welfare legislation was bad because it interfered with this natural
process and thus retarded social evolution.
Darwin saw the process of natural selection as something which was not only confined to
nature, but also to economics and social welfare. Since competition for survival was part
of the law of nature among species, it also followed that those that fail to adapt (the poor)
will naturally perish. Those who pursue their self-interest stand a better chance of
survival than those who sacrifice their self-interest to the common good. Darwin argued
that successful organisms in life’s battle will tend to differ from unsuccessful ones. That
being the case, the fittest will be naturally selected for survival (Lux 1990: 147).
The fittest were selected as opposed to the weak who were destined for extinction from
life’s race for survival. The strong, he argued, who from their advantaged existential
position as “individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in
the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce
offspring similarly characterised” (Darwin 1859: 127). Darwin named the above principle
25
Darwin’s theory of evolution has two parts. The first part maintains that the different forms of life have
developed gradually from a common ancestry. The second part of Darwin’s theory was the struggle for the
survival of the fittest. All animals and plants multiply faster than nature can provide for them; therefore in
each generation many will perish before the age of reproducing themselves. In a given environment,
members of the same species compete for survival, and those best adapted to the environment have the best
chance of surviving. This theory when applied to economics gave impetus to the idea that the motive force
of evolution is a kind of biological economics in a world of free competition. In economics the Darwinian
concept has come to imply that the individual’s pursuit of self-interest should be seen as part of the
working of the law of nature (Schmookler 1984: 150-158).
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‘Natural Selection’, implying that those who are strong or successful in life were selected
for survival by the law of nature.
According to Darwin, this principle was operative among all creatures. He made a
comparative analysis between ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ societies in which he saw the
process of natural selection as something which savage societies were putting in practice
as they let their weak die:
With savages, the weak in body are soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibited a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other
hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the
imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; our medical men exert
their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment…thus the weak
members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to
the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to
the race of man (Darwin 1859: 185).
On Darwinian terms, advancing welfare to the disadvantaged members of society such as

the aged and the poor would only be an interruption of the process of natural selection.
Such people are undesirable to society; hence the ideal would be that they should be left
alone so that nature can take its course. Humanitarian efforts should be seen as
unnecessary interference with the process of natural selection because it was part of the
law of nature that those who happened to be poor are only destined for extinction.
Karl Marx saw Darwin’s theory as a projection of the capitalist society into nature. In his
letter to Engels he protested that “Darwin was applying the Malthusian theory also to
plants and animals…It is remarkable how Darwin recognises among beasts and plants his
English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets,
inventions and the Malthusian struggle for existence” (cited in Knight 1991: 51). Engels,
in his The Dialectics of Nature, agreed with Marx and added that: “Darwin did not know
what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he
showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate
as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom” (cited in
Knight 1991: 51-52).
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Marx and Engels were not denying the reality of evolution, but they were denying the
idea that species exist in a state of competition as characteristic of their nature. A social
existence that is based on competitiveness with the intention to eliminate the other can
only boil down to saying that human beings are amoral by nature. However, social
biologists within early modernity argued that self-interest was a survival mechanism
within the life struggle for existence. The liberal economy was part and parcel of the
evolutionary process. Just as it was the case in the struggle of species for their own
survival, the liberal economy was interpreted by social biologists as a reflection of this
evolutionary principle. The main argument of the social biologists (social Darwinists)
was that self-interest had a survival value within a group.
4.2.3 Self-Interest and the Social Biology of Herbert Spencer

The father of social biology, Herbert Spencer, characterised life as “the struggle for
existence among the same species and between members of different species”. In this
struggle for existence, Spencer argued, “a successful adjustment made by one creature
involves an unsuccessful adjustment made by another creature, either of the same kind or
of a different kind” (Spencer 1907: 13). The idea here is that any creature that succeeds
presupposes the existence of an unsuccessful one.
Competition among species of the same kind has often resulted in a situation whereby
“the stronger often carries off by force the prey which the weaker has caught” (Spencer
1907: 13). Those who are strong stand the chance of greater survival than the weak. The
implication of Spencer’s observation to economics was that those who succeed in
business or in any field of life have been naturally selected. Ray Canterbery interpreted
Spencer’s social biology as implying that, “to aid the poor, either by private or public aid,
interfered irreparably with the progress of the race” (Canterbery 1987: 92; cf. Lux 1990:
146-148; Schumpeter 1986: 788-791).
Canterbery’s interpretation of Spencer’s social biology as implying the undesirable

existence of the poor was further supported by Spencer when he argued, “Ethics has to
recognise the truth recognised in unethical thought that egoism comes before altruism.
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…Unless each duly cares for himself, his care for all others is ended by death; and if each
thus dies, there remain no others to be cared for” (Spencer 1907: 161). Spencer went on
to say, “This permanent supremacy of egoism over altruism, made manifest by
contemplating existing life, is further made manifest by contemplating life in course of
evolution” (Ibid.). Spencer’s main thesis was that egoism rather than altruism will be
favoured by evolution
To support the superiority of egoism over altruism in the evolutionary process, Spencer
argued that the evolution of life on earth, as well as its complexity, was subordinated
to the law that every individual shall gain by whatever aptitude it has for fulfilling
the conditions to its existence. The uniform principle has been that better
adaptation shall bring greater benefit; which greater benefit, while increasing the
prosperity of the better adapted, shall increase also its ability to leave offspring
inheriting more or less its better adaptation. And by implication, the uniform
principle has been that the ill-adapted, disadvantaged in the struggle for existence,
shall bear the consequent evils: either disappearing when its imperfections are
extreme, or else rearing fewer offspring, which inheriting its imperfections, tend
to dwindle away in posterity (Spencer 1907: 162).
According to Spencer, the fact that those species that are less adapted (the inferior) were
consigned to extinction while those that are adapted (the superior) were naturally
selected, was the law of nature or the natural law, which was not supposed to be
interfered with by external arrangements: “Any arrangements which in a considerable
degree prevent superiority from profiting by the rewards of superiority, or shield
inferiority from the evils it entails – are arrangements diametrically opposed to the
progress of organisation and the reaching of a higher life” (Spencer 1907: 162).
From the above evolutionary law, Spencer deduced that “The necessary implication is
that blessings are provided for offspring by due self-regard, while disregard of self
carried too far provides curses” (Spencer 1907: 163). In other words, if ‘disregard of self’
provides curses, it logically follows that egoists or those who are self-interested have a
better future than altruists because, since these egoists are mostly concerned for their own
selves, it also follows that they do actions that better their life conditions – thus
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increasing their posterity. This argument is supported by Spencer’s example in which he

observed that, “Though a man’s body is not a property that can be inherited, yet his
constitution may fitly be compared to an entailed estate; and if he rightly understands his
duty to posterity, he will see that he is bound to pass on that estate uninjured if not
improved” (Spencer 1907: 165). To explain the meaning of the above example, Spencer
stated, “To say this is to say that he must be egoistic to the extent of satisfying all those
desires associated with the due performance of functions” (Ibid.).
While the individual might not be solely accentuated by egoistic or selfish motives,
Spencer argued that egoism should always take precedence over altruism because, “The
adequately egoistic individual retains those powers which make altruistic activities
possible. The individual who is inadequately egoistic, loses more or less of his ability to
be altruistic” (Spencer 1907: 167). As a way of illustrating this insight, Spencer gave an
example that a mother who feeds the infant at the expense of her health will end up dead.
Similarly, a father who is “misled” by “the notion of self-denial” and becomes a
workaholic to the extent of ignoring his bodily pains stands a greater chance of dying
(Spencer 1907: 167-168). Egoism ensures one’s survival as well as the survival of one’s
offsprings. Spencer’s biological and social evolutionary conviction was that
[s]entient beings have progressed from low to high types, under the law that the
superior shall profit by their superiority and the inferior shall suffer from their
inferiority. Conformity to this law has been, and is still, needful, not only for the
continuance of life but for the increase of happiness; since the superior are those
having faculties better adjusted to the requirements – faculties, therefore, which
bring in their exercise greater pleasure and less pain (Spencer 1907: 170).
In the eyes of Spencer, the unregulated liberal economy, relying on individuals pursuing
their self-interests, was an utmost expression of “natural progress”. This natural process
of evolution “would end in ‘equilibrium’ of peace and happiness” (Spencer 1907: 171-
172; cf. Canterbery 1987: 92). Spencer’s social biology thus far was based on the belief
that egoism or self-interested actions are the cause of natural selection. Conversely,
altruism can easily lead to the extinction of the individual and his or her offsprings. Here
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Spencer severed altruism from natural selection – thus implying that egoists rather than
altruists will be naturally selected.
Spencer did not only argue for egoism against altruism. He went on to advocate the
dominance of self-interest in all economic relations. His argument in this regard was that
the labourer who is mostly “looking for wages for work done” was not different from the
merchant “who sells goods at a profit”. Equally, a doctor who charges a consultation fee
was not different from “the priest who calls the scene of his ministrations ‘a living’”.
According to Spencer, this shows “the truth that selfishness…is not only legitimate but
essential” (Spencer 1907: 171). Without selfishness all these services and economic
undertakings would cease. Selfishness or egoism was the main cause of natural selection,
not altruism. Spencer is known for coining the phrase “survival of the fittest” as central to
the law of natural selection (Lux 1990: 147; Conniff 2003: 15). To some greater extent
Spencer refuted altruism in human economic behaviour as well as among other species. It
is also clear that self-interest was a life mechanism that helps the survival of species, and
that it had nothing to do with morality. The idea that the pursuit of self-interest has
nothing to do with morality constituted one of the schools of thought on self-interest in
early modernity.
4.2.4 Philip Wicksteed and the Moral Neutrality of Self-Interest

Wicksteed for his part, saw compatibility between self-interest and cooperation. He
developed the argument that people can only work or cooperate with each other on the
basis of their self-interests: “Why, then, do they co-operate with me at all? Not primarily,
or not solely, because they are interested in my purposes, but because they have certain
purposes of their own; …Our relations with others enter into a system of mutual
adjustment by which we further each other’s purposes simply as an indirect way of
furthering our own” (Wicksteed 1946: 166). Wicksteed went on to suggest that besides
the role of self-interest in effecting cooperation, we have to take into consideration the
role that is played by ‘economic force’.26 As he puts it,
26
Economic force means manipulating people’s way of life with the aim of forcing them to enter into
economic relations which otherwise they would not enter without this external influence. For example, in
late eighteenth’s century colonial Africa, Henry Keigwin advised that, “The native nature is conservative,
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And by economic forces I shall mean anything and everything which tends to
bring men [sic] into economic relations [because] the attraction which draws me
towards the accomplishment of my purposes becomes an economic force
whenever the state of knowledge and the organisation of life suggest my entering
into an economic relation with someone else as the best means of realising my
aims (Wicksteed 1946: 168).
What the above quotation implies is that people enter into economic relations because of
the forces that are exerted upon them by economic factors. Within these economic
relations, other people are only means to the realisation of one’s goals because “the
economic relation is entered into at the prompting of the whole range of human purposes
and impulses, and rests in no exclusive or specific way on an egoistic or self-regarding
basis”. It is for this reason that “the economic forces and relations have no inherent
tendency to redress social wrongs or ally themselves with any ideal system of distributive
justice” (Wicksteed 1946: 169-170).
In economic relations that are mostly driven by economic forces, ethical considerations
should be seen as irrelevant. The irrelevance of ethical considerations can be discerned
from the fact that “[t]he economic relation, then, or business nexus, is necessarily alike
for carrying on the life of the peasant and the prince, the saint and the sinner, of the
apostle and the shepherd, of the most altruistic and the most egoistic of men” (Wicksteed
1946: 171). In other words, economic relations are ethically neutral or they have nothing
to do with ethical evaluations or considerations. If that is the case, it also implies that the
debate of self-interest versus altruism is not relevant. The argument of moral neutrality27
averse to innovations, ignorant of any such thing as the force of economic pressure. Left to themselves,
they will not think of any danger till it is on them” (Keigwin 1923: 12). From this colonial observation
what followed in many societies that were colonized was the imposition of various forms of taxes so that
the native people would end up seeking employment in the newly established colonial industries and mines.
In the evolution of capitalism, a person’s choice not to work has carried with it a penalty of starvation. All
these observations imply that the so-called ‘economic force’ was not something natural, but a manipulation
of economic relations with the aim of advancing the aspirations and ideals of capitalism.
27
Wicksteed’s argument is that economics as a natural science has nothing to do with value judgments. For
us to see how this is the case it is necessary that we should have a condensed view of how the whole
discipline is structured. After applying mathematics and graphs to economics, modern economists divided
economics into three areas: (i) positive (economic theory), normative (welfare economics) and (iii)
practical (economic policy). Within this division, the first deals with ‘what is’, the second with ‘what ought
to be’ and the third concerns the practical steps which need to be taken to achieve a particular goal
(Robinson 1964: 29-62; Schumpeter 1986: 575-605; Samuelson and Nordhaus 1992: 2-11; Anderson 1993:
87
in economic relations is further substantiated by Wicksteed when he says that in carrying

out business transactions, it is not an economic consideration whether the other person is
“selfish or unselfish” (Wicksteed 1946: 171).
Wicksteed’s argument is, therefore, that business activities are not concerned with the
moral motives behind human economic actions. What is important is to understand that
each person involved in a business transaction is not involved out of sympathy for the
other. One might be a saint or a radical altruist, but when it comes to business, that does
not count as an economic value. He reminds us,
In principle the study of business relations is the study of the machinery by which
men are liberated, over a large area of life, from the limitations which a failure of
correspondence between their faculties and their purposes would otherwise
impose upon them. The things they have and can are not the things they want and
would; but by the machinery of exchange they can be transmuted into them
(Wicksteed 1946: 173).
What Wicksteed is saying in the above quotation is that business relations are
mechanistic relations. In these mechanistic relations, certain ends are attained without
any human effort. Just as a machine that functions according to its predetermined laws,
he argued that business relations should be seen in this light. These relations produce
results which no one has ever anticipated. This observation led Wicksteed to the principle
that in business activities, “Each party to an economic relation enters it in the furtherance
of his own purposes, not those of the other”. Thus he submitted,
1-38). While the last two areas imply the existence of value judgements, the first area – the scientific core
of economic theory does not purport to uphold any value judgement. Wicksteed’s argument of value
neutrality lies in the salient assumption that economics, like other natural sciences, should make a
distinction that fact (what is) must be separated from value (what ought to be). What ought to be (value)
cannot be made a subject of a true scientific investigation. Value judgements should not be allowed into a
true scientific analysis because they will prejudice the objectivity of the economic phenomena. As
Wicksteed puts it, “Economic relations constitute a complex machine by which we seek to accomplish our
purposes, whatever they may be. They do not in any direct or conclusive sense either dictate our purposes
or supply our motives. We shall therefore have to consider what constitutes an economic relation rather
than what constitutes an economic motive” (Wicksteed 1946: 4). An argument that has been levelled
against the idea of value-neutrality is that economic theory of early modernity was based on the subjective
theory of value in the sense that human economic relations were understood as the expression of
preferences on the part of the individual subject, of the satisfaction which the individual was expected to
derive from the incremental use of goods. Consequently, the human action was perceived in purely
individualistic terms (Sen 1987: 45-47; Schumpeter 1986: 659-681).
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In his attitude towards himself and ‘others’ at large, a man may be either selfish or
unselfish without affecting the economic nature of any given relation, such as that
of Paul[28] to his customers; but as soon as he is moved by a direct and interested
desire to further the purposes or consult the interests of those particular ‘others’
for whom he is working at the moment, then in proportion as this desire becomes
an ultimate object to him…the transaction on his side ceases to be purely
economic (Wicksteed 1946: 174).
Economic relations, according to Wicksteed, have nothing to do with our human motives
and attitudes. When transacting with others at the market place, our aim is solely to
pursue our self-interests, not the interests of those we transact with. The economic
outlook of indifference to the concerns of others was further demonstrated by Wicksteed
as follows: “We enter into business relations with others, not because our purposes are
selfish, but because those with whom we deal are relatively indifferent to them, but are
(like us) keenly interested in purposes of their own, to which we in our turn are relatively
indifferent”. For this reason, Wicksteed argued, “There is no taint or presumption of
selfishness in the matter at all” (Wicksteed 1946: 179).
In order to emphasise the value-neutrality of self-interest, Wicksteed further argued, “The

specific characteristic of an economic relation is not its ‘egoism’, but its ‘non-tuism”.29
(Wicksteed 1946: 180). In other words, in economic relations the selfishness of the
individual does not count. Equally, altruism does not count in business because homo
economicus is single minded in the pursuit of his or her self-interest. To call a person
who is only pursuing his or her business purposes selfish is to misuse the word selfish.
Wicksteed insisted that the proper understanding of a business person is that:
28
Wicksteed gave an example of St. Paul and his business of tent-making. From this example he deduced
that, “although Paul was certainly not thinking of himself or of his own advantage when he was making
tents in Corinth, yet neither was he necessarily or even probably thinking, in any disinterested or
enthusiastic manner, of the advantage of those for whom he was working and whose wants he was
immediately supplying” (Wicksteed 1946: 173). According to Wicksteed, this example was an illustration
of the economic truism that in all economic relations, our aim is to further our own self-interest, and not of
the others.
29
Tu is a French and Latin word for ‘you’. According to Wicksteeed, if we are to make sense of economic
theory we do not need to postulate the existence of selfishness in economic activities “but merely to assume
the principle of nontuism in economic exchange” (Wicksteed 1946: 180; Lux 1990: 156-157). The
selfishness and unselfishness of an individual does not count when doing business.
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He [sic] is exactly in the position of a man who is playing a game of chess or

cricket. He is considering nothing except his game [30]. It would be absurd to call
a man selfish for protecting his king in a game of chess, or to say that he was
actuated by purely egoistic motives in so doing. It would be equally absurd to call
a cricketer selfish for protecting his wicket, or to say that in making runs he was
actuated by egoistic motives qualified by a secondary concern for his eleven. The
fact is that he has no conscious motive whatever, and is wholly intent on the
complex feat of taking the ball (Wicksteed 1946: 180).
Wicksteed’s analogy of business activities as similar to a game of chess or cricket is

meant to illustrate the fact that selfishness is a motive that is not applicable to business
activities. In this analogy, if one’s intent is simply the game at hand, or the pursuit of
one’s self-interest, the problem will be that of reducing the plurality of human
motivations to a single motivation, that is, self-interest (Lux 1990: 158-159). This self-
interest is given to us as morally neutral in the sense that to be self-interested has nothing
to do with one’s moral outlook.
To say self-interest is morally neutral means that the individual’s business actions cannot
be subjected to moral evaluations. Moral sentiments such as generosity, pity, sympathy
and magnanimity are inapplicable when put in the context of business relations as a
game. However, the problem that confronts us here is that even in games like cricket,
chess or football there are values and rules such as fair play, honesty and mutuality. A
game that does not observe these values will definitely cease to be called a game. Our
argument here is that if business is a game, the notion of fair play carries with it some
moral or ethical requirements that impose constraints on our economic relations.
30
The idea of equating economic relations to a game is not just an analogy. Classical liberal economists
have often alluded to it as a way of understanding the actions of homo economicus. The argument which
was put forward by classical liberal economists was that people do cooperate after calculating the
advantages that can be accrued from such cooperation. Jean-Jacques Rosseau is on record as saying: “If a
group of hunters set out to take a stag, they are fully aware that they would have to remain faithfully at their
posts in order to succeed; but if a hare happens to pass near one of them, there can be no doubt that he
pursued it without qualm, and that once he had caught his prey, he cared very little whether or not he had
made his companions miss theirs” (cited in Dimand 1996: 15). In this understanding of economic relations
as a game, the idea is that the individual acts in a calculative way concerning what possible action to take
so as to maximise one’s self-interest, and not that of the group. Ludwig von Mises observed that, “The
immediate aim in playing a game is to defeat the partner according to the rules of the game. This is a
peculiar and special case of acting. Most actions do not aim at anybody’s defeat or loss” (Mises 1966: 116).
In other words, in a game, the individual’s actions are morally neutral. Players are only interested in their
interests, not the interests of their opponents.
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Wicksteed held an ambivalent position in which he denies morality in economic relations

while at the same time affirming it: “There is no actual or conceivable community in
which the economic relations are not habitually subject to the control of moral principles”
(Wicksteed 1946: 182). To support this claim, he gives us an example of an employer
who gives low wages to his employees while he makes fortunes in his business activities.
Wicksteed points out that our attitude towards such an employer would be: “We think it
brutal callousness on his part to be in such close relations with persons whose human
claims are so entirely ignored, without being stirred to active sympathy with them”
(Wicksteed 1946: 182). For Wicksteed, however, such moral sentiments are misplaced in
the context of business relations because we are not supposed to be sympathetic towards
employees in business relations.
The reason why we cannot be sympathetic to those employees who are being paid poor
wages comes from the fact that we are mostly interested in our own self-interest instead
of those of the others. Even these poorly paid employees are only concerned with their
own self-interests instead of that of their employer:
That a man should be in constant relations with such pitiable people, and yet not
pity them, we may rightly think that his heart is hardened. But we forget that the
relation is quite as completely economic on the side of the employees as it is on
the side of the employer. They too are getting their living out of a man without
any direct consideration of his interests, or desire to further his purposes. And we
do not blame them. …the economic motive, like the animal appetites, for
example, in itself neither makes us moral nor excuses us for not being so. In other
words, the economic relation is unmoral only in the same sense in which family
affection is unmoral. The economic relation has no inherently moralising power
(Wicksteed 1946: 183).
What Wicksteed is saying is that, while we are mostly moved by moral considerations in
our dealings with others, we should bear in mind that it is a mistake for someone to
expect just dealing in business activities on the grounds of moral considerations. Thus
Wicksteed reprimanded those moralists who were accustomed to complaining about the
lack of morality in business activities: “It is idle to assume that ethically desirable results
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will necessarily be produced by an ethically different instrument, and it is as foolish to

make the economic relation an idol as it is to make it a bogey” (Wicksteed 1946: 184).
What moralists have to bear in mind is that, “The catholicity of the economic relation
extends far enough in either direction to embrace both heaven and hell, and to suggest to
each that its own ends may be best served by an ad interim devotion to those of the other
[would be misleading]” (Wicksteed 1946: 185). Moralists were supposed to come to
terms with the fundamental economic truism that “the economic organisation of society
in itself does not in any way discriminate between worthy and unworthy ends, and lends
its machinery to all who have any purposes of their own and any power of furthering the
purposes of others” (Wicksteed 1946: 186).
If ‘the catholicity of economic relations’ can ‘embrace both heaven and hell’, however, as
Wicksteed alleged, it can be argued that someone who steals from pensioners’ funds with
the aim of furthering his or her own self-interest cannot be seen as having acted
unethically because those pensioners are equally as self-interested as s/he is. Yet
someone who steals from the needy so as to further his or her own self-interest is usually
said to have acted selfishly and thus immorally. This is the argument that was made by
Lux when he said that self-interest is not morally neutral, but that self-interest means
selfishness or acting in such a way that one’s economic actions will deprive others of a
humane livelihood (Lux 1990: 158-159).
If self-interest often means selfishness, the argument that has been levelled against it in
the early modern economic discourse is that it is dehumanising because it presents us
with an individual who is unscrupulously greedy as the ideal homo economicus. John
Ruskin and Karl Marx, as we shall see in the following section, argued that the liberal
economy of early modernity, constructed around the idea of a self-interested human
being, was actually dehumanising. In other words, the liberal economic theory and
practice presupposed an amoral human being as the ideal homo economicus. Self-interest
was not morally neutral, however; rather it meant selfishness and greed as the main
motivating force in economic relations.
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4.3 Self-Interest as the Dehumanising aspect of the Liberal Economy

4.3.1 John Ruskin
John Ruskin advanced a vehement critique of the early modernist economic

understanding of a human being in his book, Unto This Last. In it he cynically argued:
The social affections, say economists, are accidental and disturbing elements in
human nature; but avarice and desire for progress are constant elements. Let us
eliminate the inconstants, and considering the human being merely as a covetous
machine, examine by what laws of labour, purchase and sale, the greatest
accumulative result in wealth is attainable. Those laws at once determined, it will
be for each individual afterwards to introduce as much of the disturbing
affectionate elements as he chooses, and to determine for himself the result on the
new conditions supposed (Ruskin 1862: 2).
The modernist economic interpretation of economic relations, as already implied, did not
take into account humanistic values such as mutual aid or altruistic behaviour. Rather, it
eliminated them as inconstants and replaced them with a self-interested individual. That
which remained as the ideal image of homo economicus became a human being in the
form of a machine – one that is acting without any other motives besides self-interest.
Ruskin critiqued the dehumanising nature of the early modern liberal economic system
on the basis that it was constructed around the notion of maximisation of self-interest.
The pursuit of self-interest, according to him, was not something natural as early modern
economic liberalism had espoused. On the contrary: “Men [sic] of business do indeed
know how they themselves made their money, or how, on occasion, they lost it. Playing a
long-practised game, they are familiar with the chances of its cards, and can rightly
explain their losses and gain” (Ruskin 1862: 39). Economic activities in the liberal
economy are similar to a game in which one has to know the rules in order to be able to
maximise one’s self-interest. In playing this game, Ruskin pointed out: “What is really
desired, under the name of riches, is, essentially, power over men; in its simplest sense,
the power of obtaining for our own advantage the labour of a servant, …the authority of
directing large masses of the nation to various ends (good, trivial, or hurtful, according to
the mind of the rich person)” (Ruskin 1862: 44-45).
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According to Ruskin, self-interest implies selfishness or greed. The ultimate realisation of

this self-centredness is attained when the individual has reached the stage where they
have large numbers of people working for them because of scarcity and necessity. Thus
Ruskin sarcastically chided liberal economists when he said that “…the art of becoming
‘rich’, in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much
money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbours shall have less. In
accurate terms, it is “the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our favour”. He
contended that such an “absurd assumption that such inequalities are necessarily
advantageous, lies at the root of most of the popular fallacies on the subject of political
economy” (Ruskin 1862: 46).
Evidently Ruskin was also arguing against the liberal economic assumptions that
inequalities were indispensable in the liberal economy because self-interested individuals
would do much good to society when they pursue their own self-interests than when they
deliberately try to promote the common good of society. The early modern liberal
economic theory and practices that saw a human being as solely motivated by self-
interest became the subject of Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism as dehumanising.
4.3.2 Karl Marx’s Humanistic Argument

Karl Marx was a thorough and pragmatic humanist. He emphatically rejected the
capitalistic economic theory and practices of early modernity31 on the grounds that
capitalism was dehumanising or alienating. I do not intend to go into a detailed analysis
of Marxist economics. My main focus here is on Marx’s understanding of human
relations under the capitalist economic system. Marx argued that the modernist economy,
as it evolved from feudalism, “…has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that
bound man [sic] to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other access between
31
In Marx’s writings, capitalism is modernity in the same way that modernity is capitalism. Capitalism was
the grand narrative of human existence: Capitalism “is the general light tingeing all other colours and
modifying them in its specific quality”, “a special ether determining the specific gravity of everything
found in it, “the economic power that dominates everything in modern society” (Marx 1973: 83-88; Sayer
1991: 11-12). Capitalism, according to Marx, brought about a social revolution that severed relations
between modern society and traditional society. Since modernity implied radical change with traditional
institutions, capitalism was the main energizing force for this change.
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man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” (see Marx and
Engels 1975: 315). Marx, with his dialectical theory of history, saw modernist liberal
capitalism as one of those passing historical epochs in humanity’s evolution to a
collectivist society or communism. In Grundrisse, Marx puts it succinctly that the idea of
“social connectedness” as “a mere means towards individual private purposes” was a
development of the eighteenth century history of western capitalism (Marx 1973: 83-84).
Ray Canterbery summarised Marx’s evolutionist understanding of early modern

capitalism as follows:
Capitalism was an extension of Man’s self-interest that he would grow to dislike,

a stage of history’s progress that was alien to Man [sic] and not the culmination of
civilisation. …When Man arrives at a true perception of reality, he will at the
same time experience the economic system that is best for him. This view is
contrary to neoclassical economics, in which the market system is first, last, and
always (Canterbery 1987: 190-191).
Capitalism according to Marx was just a passing stage in the evolution of humanity. As a
stage chiefly characterised by self-interest, humanity will abandon it when humanity has
reached a higher stage where private property would cease to exist. The end of
capitalism, according to Marx, will be brought about by its own internal contradictions.
Among these contradictions is that capitalism divided society into “two classes – the
property owners and the propertyless workers”. Moreover, capitalism presumes the
interests of the property owner or capitalist as the ultimate cause of its existence. It is
mainly for this reason that “[t]he only wheels which political economy sets in motion are
greed and the war amongst the greedy – competition” [his emphasis] (Marx and Engels
1975: 270-271). Since capitalism puts much emphasis on the wellbeing of the owners of
capital or property, it obviously neglects the interests of the workers (Marx and Engels
1975: 271).
Another crucial observation that was made by Marx was that under the capitalistic
economic relations, those who work in the economy do not own their products. For this
reason, “the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on
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this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful
becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer
he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less it belongs to him as his own” [his
emphasis] (Marx and Engels 1975: 272). It is partly for this reason that he critiqued
capitalism as actually dehumanising and alienating to the workers. According to Marx,
those who have laboured in the production of a particular commodity must be its owners.
He suggested that alienation and dehumanisation were going to be overcome at that point
in time, in the future, when the workers would unleash a revolution that would result in
their ownership of the means of production. This ownership of the means of production
will also result in the end of the institution of private property and the establishment of a
communist society. Marx’s advocacy for a communist society came partly from the
observation that, under capitalism and its institution of private property, we have “a state
of universal prostitution with the community” whereby individuals relate to each other
solely in terms of personal gains and satisfactions. On the other hand, under communism,
The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages paid out by
communal capital – by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the
relationship are raised to an imagined universality – labour as the category in
which every person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and
power of community [his emphasis] (Marx and Engels 1975: 294-295).
Marx also argued that under communism, human beings will come to grips with their real
nature, which is a nature to belong to society or to the community. For him,
“communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed
humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and
nature and between man and man [sic]…” (Marx and Engels 1975: 296). He was
convinced that human beings were naturally born with an innate nature to belong to the
community: “The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life – even if they
may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in
association with others – are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life” [his
emphasis] (Marx 1975: 299; 1973: 483-486). This belief in the sociality of human nature
led Marx to the presumption that communism was an affirmation of the sociality of
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human beings inherent in their nature. It is partly for this reason that he and Engels
refuted capitalism in The Communist Manifesto, on the grounds that it was primarily
based on the “selfish” motives of the bourgeoisie or owners of capital (Marx and Engels
1988: 71).
According to Marx, it was not humanity in general that was self-interested, rather it was
that small group of society that owned capital or the bourgeois that was self-interested.
With the evolution of the bourgeois social class, dehumanisation was carried to heights of
magnanimous proportions:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices
and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before
they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man
is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind (Marx and Engels 1988: 58).
For Marx, it was the bourgeois class that brought about change to the old traditional ethos
that emphasised a morality of common belonging and common interest. The bourgeois
class had no other motive besides that of maximising personal gain. The need for
maximising personal profits compels the bourgeoisie not to be committed to any place,
tradition and custom: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases
the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connexions everywhere” (Marx and Engels 1988: 58). The
expansive nature of capitalism was the result of the bourgeoisie’s relentless pursuit of
wealth. Marx observed that this relentless pursuit of personal gain was creating a global
culture of interdependence.
This bourgeois global culture of interdependence, Marx noted, meant that, “In place of
the old and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse every direction,
universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual
production” (Marx and Engels 1988: 59). But this universal capitalist intercourse was not
based on mutual concern among nations in their territories. Rather, it was based on the
imposition of the bourgeoisie’s modes of production: “It compels all nations, on pain of
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extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what
it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it
creates a world after its own image” (Marx and Engels 1988: 59).
Marx’s argument was that with the evolution of capitalism during the era of classical
modernity, the expansion of capitalism all over the globe carried with it the imposition of
capitalist values to other peoples and cultures who did not share its economic values of
selfishness. His critique of capitalism, as seen throughout this section, was largely based
on his observation that it dehumanised human beings in its production and distribution
processes because it was an economic system that was based on the selfishness of that
class of society that owned capital and the means of production. Self-interest, on Marxist
terms, was not something inherent in human nature; instead, it was an ideological tool
that reflected the greed of those who owned private property. To a certain extent, Karl
Marx’s arguments were also echoed by Thorstein Veblen in his The Theory of the Leisure
Class.
4.3.3 Self-Interest and Veblen’s Institutional Evolutionary Economics

Veblen (1931: 1-22) started his book by classifying those who own private property as
belonging to the institution of the leisure class. This institution of the leisure class had its
origins in the history of archaic societies. In such societies, “The upper classes are by
custom exempt or excluded from industrial occupations, and are reserved for certain
employments to which a degree of honour attaches”. Within the historical development
of this leisure class, “Manual labour, industry, whatever has to do directly with the
everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the exclusive occupation of the inferior class”.
Veblen went on to observe that, “In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a
leisure class coincides with the beginning of ownership” whereby prowess and exploit
were the highest popular esteem that could be conferred upon the individual.
Veblen went on to observe that the idea of praising prowess and exploit in ancient
societies was the main reason that gave rise to modernist predatory capitalist economic
practices:
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The predatory instinct and the consequent approbation of predatory efficiency are
deeply ingrained in the habits of thought of those people who have passed under
the discipline of a protracted predatory culture. …In order to stand well in the
eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat
indefinite, conventional standard of wealth… (Veblen 1931: 30).
The implication here is that the greed of the leisure class or those who have lots of wealth
should be seen as a consequence of the predatory habit that is subconsciously archaic.
But this predatory habit has no proper explanation besides the seeking of power and
honour through endless accumulation and acquisition of wealth. The appetite for
acquisition and accumulation of wealth among the leisure class is insatiable.
Veblen contended that this insatiability among the leisure class can be seen from the fact
that this class is never satisfied with the material possessions it has. The need to acquire
more becomes too addictive, to such an extent that it leads to compulsive greed:
But as fast as a person makes new acquisitions, and becomes accustomed to the
resulting new standard of wealth, the new standard forthwith ceases to afford
appreciably greater satisfaction than the earlier standard did. The tendency in any
case is constantly to make the present pecuniary standard the point of departure
for a fresh increase of wealth; and this in turn gives rise to a new standard of
sufficiency and a new pecuniary classification of one’s self as compared with
one’s neighbours. So far as concerns the present question, the end sought by
accumulation is to rank high in comparison with the rest of the community in
point of pecuniary strength (Veblen 1931: 31).
The implication of the above quotation is that those who own private property or the
leisure class are mostly motivated by insatiable greed for wealth. This insatiable greed for
wealth among the leisure class was further captured by Veblen as follows, “[T]he normal
average individual [among the leisure class] will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his
present lot…” because “when he has reached what may be called the normal pecuniary
standard of the community, …this chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a restless
straining to place a wider and ever-widening pecuniary interval between himself and this
average standard” (Veblen 1931: 31). The main psychological reason behind this
insatiability comes from the fact that in the leisure class, individuals are driven by the
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habit of emulating the wealth of those who belong to their class – thus setting a path to an
endless economic state of competitive accumulation without stipulating standards for
sufficiency.
In this process of endless accumulation, the individual severs himself from communal
belonging. According to Veblen, “When he enters upon the predatory stage, where self-
seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this propensity goes with him
still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his scheme of life” (Veblen 1931: 33). In other
words, the individual in the leisure class enters a predatory stage in his or her economic
relations as he or she uses the community for his or her own economic purposes without
taking into consideration the interests of the community. The result of this behaviour is
that, “as the self-regarding antithesis between man and man reaches fuller consciousness,
the propensity for achievement – the instinct of workmanship – tends more and more to
shape itself into a straining to excel others in pecuniary achievement” (Veblen 1931: 33).
According to Veblen, the leisure class is endowed with conspicuous consumption32

patterns that can only be appeased by extraordinary lifestyles. As he puts it,
The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of
life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his
consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods
consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter,
services, ornaments… (Veblen 1931: 73).
Veblen said that such consumption is vicarious in the sense that it is done in order to
express one’s economic status within the leisure class. But this conspicuous consumption
is something which the individual is expected to maintain if s/he is to remain honourable
within the circles of the leisure class: “The conspicuous consumption, and the consequent
increased expense, required in the reputable maintenance of a child is very considerable
32
According to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the word conspicuous comes from the Latin world
conspicere, a word that means something that is “clearly visible, obvious or striking to the eye” (Onions et
al ed., 1973: 407). The phrase conspicuous consumption was coined by Veblen to describe the
consumption habits of the rich whom he constantly referred to as the leisure class. The theory of Veblen
was that this conspicuous consumption incites social emulation in the sense that others would also want to
emulate the consumption habits of the leisure class.
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and acts as a powerful deterrent. It is probably the most effectual of the Malthusian
prudential checks” (Veblen 1931: 113). In other words, those who belonged to the leisure
class were most likely to refrain from having many children with the aim of insuring that
their consumption patterns would not be compromised by their own offspring.
Another crucial observation that is made by Veblen was that “the wealthy class is by
nature conservative” in the sense that this class “opposes innovation”. Its opposition to
innovation is not only caused by the factor of vested interest, but this conservatism has “a
certain honorific or decorative value”. As he puts it, “Conservatism, being an upper-class
characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon,
is vulgar” (Veblen 1931: 198-200). This conservatism
makes it incumbent upon all reputable people to follow their lead [i.e., the
wealthy class]. So that, by virtue of its high position as the avatar of good form,
the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding influence upon social development
far in excess of that which the simple numerical strength of the class would assign
it. Its prescriptive example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other classes
against any innovation, and to fix men’s affections upon the good institutions
handed down from an earlier generation (Veblen 1931: 200).
But Veblen argued equally that the poor class becomes conservative from the point of
view that it lacks the power or energy that can bring about social change by virtue of its
pitiable economic base. It follows that “the institution of the leisure class acts to make the
lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them [the poor] as much as it may of the
means of sustenance, and so reducing their consumption…to such a point as to make
them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of
thought” (Veblen 1931: 203-204). In other words, the conservatism of the leisure class is
inevitable because it is parasitic or predatory on the poor class. This conservatism of the
leisure class becomes a mechanism that safeguards its own class-interests. Consequently,
the leisure class has an understanding of evolution as implying that, “Whatever is, is
right’; whereas the law of natural selection, as applied to human institutions, gives the
axiom: ‘Whatever is, is wrong’”. Veblen went on to observe that such a type of class-
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interested conservatism perpetuates the existence of unjust or inhumane institutional

practices (Veblen 1931: 207).
The conservatism of the leisure class is not so much concerned with perpetuating the
received moral values or religious sentiments. Moral values can only be conserved when
they help to support the long entrenched economic interests of the leisure class. The
economic relations of the leisure class, as Veblen bravely pointed out, are ‘acquisitive,
exploitative, and not of serviceability’. Thus he characterised the industrial processes and
the economic institutions of this leisure class as follows:
Their office is of a parasitic character, and their interest is to divert what

substance they may to their own use, and to retain whatever is under their hand.
The conventions of the business world have grown up under the selective
surveillance of this principle of predation or parasitism. They are conventions of
ownership; derivatives, more or less remote, of the ancient predatory culture
(Veblen 1931: 209).
In other words, the business world of the leisure class is simply predatory and parasitic in
as far as it feeds on the labour of others whom it denies access to the tastes of its class.
Such a business practice was archaic; hence it could not be applied in the present context.
The continual survival of such business practices owes its indebtedness to the past
economic outlooks that cannot be applied to today’s social conditions.
There are two arguments that have been put forward by advocates of liberal capitalism
against Marx’s humanism and Veblen’s institutional economic evolutionism. The first
argument is that the liberal economic theory is based on the empirical observation that it
is the individuals who act, and not the collective. Ludwig von Mises (von Mises 1966:
42) argued, “The life of a collective is lived in the actions of the individuals constituting
its body. There is no social collective conceivable which is not operative in the actions of
the individuals constituting its body”.
von Mises’s argument was that society itself is an abstract. What is real is the individual
who makes choices and acts on those choices “at a definite date and a definite place”. On
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the other hand, “Universalism, collectivism, and conceptual realism see only wholes and
universals disregarding the particularity of the individual action as the subject of rational
choice” (von Mises 1966: 45). In this way of reasoning, if we are to abolish the institution
of private property and replace it with communism, we will be doing away with the idea
that the individual is the subject of rational choice. For this reason, it is further argued
that an economic system that is based on communism or collectivism can only lead to a
repression of individual freedoms. Such a system would be repressive because it would
not allow individuals to pursue their self-interests.
The second argument is that an economic system that is based solely on the pursuit of
self-interest encourages individual creativity and prosperity. A French ethnologist by the
name of Alexis de Tocqueville argued that the individual pursuit of self-interest was the
main reason behind the economic prosperity that has been attained by the United States
of America. From his observation of the Americans in the 19th century, Tocqueville had
the following to say: “They owe nothing to any man [sic], they expect nothing from any
man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they
are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands” (Tocqueville 1946: 99).
From this observation he praised self-interest as follows:
The principle of self-interest rightly understood is not a lofty one, but it is clear
and sure. It does not aim at mighty objects, but it attains without excessive
exertion all those at which it aims. As it lies within the reach of all capacities,
everyone can without difficulty learn and retain it. By its admirable conformity to
human weaknesses it easily obtains great dominion; nor is that dominion
precarious, since the principle checks one personal interest by another, and uses,
to direct the passions, the very same instrument that excites them (Tocqueville
1946: 123).
Tocqueville’s insight was that economic flamboyancy and individual creativity that was
then the common scene in America should be seen as the result of the free reign of the
principle of self-interest. Self-interest was something which every person could apply in
their business endeavours if ever they wanted to succeed. When left unregulated from
without, self-interest directs human passions to noble ends. Self-interest and its truncated
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propensity to horde is advanced as an indispensable reality of human nature that

motivates people into undertaking economic activities.

This chapter was an investigation of self-interest in evolutionary institutional economics
during the era of early modernity. The main argument of this chapter was that self-
interest was an economic, institutional and evolutionary development. Thomas Malthus,
the father and founder of population geography saw nature as participating in the setting
of equilibrium between human consumption and the available resources. From this
insight, he advised that government should not interfere with the economy by introducing
laws that were aimed at alleviating the lot of the poor. The implication of this
demographic reasoning was that the elimination of the poor through starvation was in
itself a positive check. This was an academic way of inciting government to enact laws
that would institutionalise selfishness (Malthus 1958: 6-15; Heilbroner 1972: 73-83;
Hodgson 1988: 124); Canterbery 1987: 200).
On the other hand, Darwin’s theory came to the support of the competitive pursuit of self-
interest as actually part of the rule of natural selection among species. The implication of
Darwin’s theory of natural selection was that those who succeed in pursuing their self-
interest in economic affairs are naturally selected while those who are poor are destined
for extinction. Herbert Spencer, the father of social biology, was very explicit on this
point when he argued that it was natural or according to the law of nature that those who
succeed in business are naturally selected while those who are poor are destined for
extinction. Self-interest, according to Spencer, was part and parcel of the law of nature
that ensures the survival of the fittest. He derided altruism on the grounds that it could
only lead to the extinction of its practitioners (Darwin 1859: 127; Lux 1990: 147; (1907:
13-172; Schmookler 1984: 150-158)).
Philip Wicksteed, on the other hand, argued that the pursuit of self-interest was
something which was natural in business practices. It was Wicksteed’s argument that
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self-interest within the liberal economic affairs was morally neutral in the sense that the
way self-interest works in the liberal economy has nothing to do with moral evaluations.
This neutrality of self-interest could be discerned from the fact that those who transact
with the market could be murderers, fraudsters, saints, prostitutes and workers, yet their
ethical or unethical predispositions are irrelevant to the economic transactions. It was for
this reason that self-interest was actually severed from selfishness in such a way that it
remained as a morally neutral concept (Wicksteed 1946: 157-186).
In the last section of this chapter, two humanistic arguments were given, namely, that of
John Ruskin and Karl Marx. Ruskin argued that the pursuit of self-interest in economic
activities was not something that was morally neutral. Those who are solely self-
interested are greedy because in real practice they end up depriving economic necessities
to other human beings. According to Ruskin, self-interest in economic theory and praxis
was actually dehumanising. On the other hand, Karl Marx’s argument was also that the
whole economic system that emphasised individual self-interest was economically and
socially dehumanising, hence it was inevitably destined to breaking down. For Marx, the
future economic system would be based on communism instead of capitalism. Marx
maintained that the primacy that has been given to self-interest in economic affairs was
part and parcel of the 18th century economic evolution. By nature, however, human
beings are endowed with the propensity to belong to society. Thorstein Veblen saw
people as existing in a state of classes comprised of the leisure class and the labouring
class. The former class indulged in conspicuous consumption for the sake of honour and
power. The consumption patterns of the leisure class were thus characterised by Veblen
as predatory and parasitic greed. The consumption habits of the leisure class are the main
reason for social inequality (Ruskin 1862: 2-46; Marx and Engels 1975: 270-299; 1988:
58-59; Veblen 1931: 31-101).
While this chapter was a descriptive analysis of self-interest in early modernity, the
following chapter discusses self-interest in late modern economic thought. Contemporary
economic thought on self-interest is heavily indebted to the economic thought of early
modernity in its understanding of homo economicus because the individual is postulated
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as solely self-interested and the modern economic discipline itself presumes that the
individual maximises utility through the pursuit of self-interest.
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CHAPTER FIVE: SELF-INTEREST AND LATE MODERN ECONOMIC

THOUGHT
The world crisis of today is a moral crisis – and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it
…The New intellectual must fight for capitalism, not as a ‘practical issue’, not as an economic
issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and
nothing less will save it. …Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future –
if mankind is to have a future (Rand 1967: 201).
5.1 Introduction
Chapters 3 and 4 were concerned with self-interest during the era of early modernity. The
main presumption concerning self-interest was that in their economic relations, homo
economicus was solely self-interested. Economic relations that were based on the pursuit
of self-interest were actually beneficial to the whole of society. It followed that there was
no need for government intervention with the aim of promoting welfare. Adam Smith’s
concept of the invisible hand implied that there should not be governmental interference
with the economy, and that the free market economic system helps society to organise
itself without external interference. Because of the influence of early modern economic
thinking, capitalism, with its unregulated market system, came to be seen as the only
economic system that promotes individual freedom.
The entire neo-liberal economic thinking and the modern economic discipline itself rests
on the premise that human beings are self-interested creatures. Those who advocate or
appreciate the economic writings of Bernard de Mandeville, Adam Smith and Philip
Wicksteed are known as neo-liberals because they are usually against the intervention of
government in the economy. Neo-liberal economists believe in the primacy of a free
market economy where individuals pursue their self-interests in order to maximise their
utilities. Thus Francis Fukuyama cannot be bettered when he says that “[t]he entire
imposing edifice of contemporary neoclassical economic theory rests on a relatively
simple model of human nature: that human beings are ‘rational utility-maximising
individuals’” (Fukuyama 1995: 18). In this regard, all human motivations are reduced to
selfishness.
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Since this chapter is heavily indebted to the economic thought of early modernity, I will
only select those topics on self-interest in neo-liberal economic thought that have some
bearing on contemporary ethical concerns. The first section of this chapter will situate the
discourse on self-interest in the modern economic discipline. It will continue to be shown
in this section that the modern economic discipline presumes that the individual is solely
self-interested, and this self-interested homo economicus is the subject of economic
analysis. The second section investigates the consequences of such a model of a human
being in the light of the modern utility maximisation theory of rationality. It will thus be
argued in the third section that this utility maximisation theory of rationality militates
against welfarism. The fourth section will come up with arguments that militate against
the contemporary theory of self-interest.
5.2 Self-Interest As Motivation in Late Modern Economic Discipline

The reduction of human economic relations to selfishness or self-interest is a type of
reasoning that is well entrenched in contemporary economic textbooks. These textbooks
presume the pre-existence of a self-interested individual as the subject of economic
analysis. Thus one finds Campbell McConnell’s textbook, Economics, stating,
Since capitalism is individualistic, it is not surprising to find that the primary

driving force of such an economy is the promotion of one’s self-interest; each
economic unit attempts to do what is best for itself. …In short, capitalism
presumes self-interest as the fundamental modus operandi for the various
economic units as they express their free choices. The motive of self-interest
gives direction and consistency to what might otherwise be an extremely chaotic
economy (McConnell 1972: 40).
The implication of the above quotation is that there are no individuals who interact with
the economy without being primarily motivated by self-interest. The role of self-interest
is that it enables orderliness and consistency of behaviour. In this regard, the presumption
that the individual is solely self-interested also implies that s/he will always choose to act
according to that which is to her or his self-interest. In other words, self-interest enables
the individual’s behaviour to be predictable. In late modern economic discipline,
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individuals are expected to make choices and act on those choices according to costs and
benefits analysis.
The idea that the individual will always act in a way that favours her or his self-interest is
also entrenched in the modern economic application of game theory.33 The rationality of
game theory implies that individual actions are instrumentally rational in the sense that
they “have preferences over various things”, to such an extent that “it does not matter
what ends a person pursues: they can be selfish, weird, altruistic or whatever; so long as
they consistently motivate then people can still act so as to satisfy them best” (Heap and
Varoufakis 1995: 5). Game theory puts emphasis on how agreements among self-
interested individuals or egoists are made. It is thus expected that agreements should
always make those who enter them better off than they were before. Obviously this
implies that one can only be better off than what they were before by pursuing one’s self-
interest.
Modern economists further justify the use of self-interest as the modus operandi of
human economic behaviour on the grounds that it is value neutral in the same sense that it
was envisaged by Philip Wicksteed as we have seen in chapter 4. Thus it is alleged by
neo-liberal economists that economics has nothing to do with values. Tullock and
McKenzie would put it explicitly that
[e]conomics is not so much concerned with what should be or how individuals

should behave, as it is with understanding why people behave the way they do.
Accordingly, our analysis is devoid (as much as possible) of our own personal
values. We treat each topic as something that is to be analysed and understood,
33
Neo-classical economists by the names of von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern wrote a book entitled
Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour in which they demonstrated mathematically the theory of
cooperation using the theory of utility maximization. The relationship between economics and game theory
is based on the idea that the individual maximises her or his utility by virtue of rationality. The individual’s
choices in this regard are assumed to be strategic on the basis that the moves or choices s/he makes must
lead to utility maximization. Individual strategies are also presumed to depend on the strategies that are
made by other individuals (cf. Neuman and Morgenstern 1947). Robert Axelrod (1984: 6-20) advanced a
game theory of cooperation in which he argued that it is possible for there to be cooperation among egoists
“who pursue their own self-interest without the aid of a central authority to force them to cooperate with
each other”. As he puts it, “self-interest…allows an examination of the difficult case in which cooperation
is not completely based upon a concern for others or upon the welfare of the group as a whole” but on “TIT
FOR TAT”.
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and in order to do that, we must avoid the temptation to judge a given form of
behaviour as contemptuous, immoral, good, or bad. Therefore, in the context of
our analysis the services of a prostitute are treated no differently than the services
of the butcher; they are neither good nor bad – they exist and are subject to
analysis. Criminal activity is considered in a manner similar to that of legitimate
enterprise, and religion is treated as a ‘good’ (for some) that is sought and
procured (Tullock and McKenzie 1985: 7).
In the light of the above quotation, the implication is that economic analysis is value
neutral because the main concern of such an analysis is not the moral predisposition of
the individual. The way individuals treat each other during their economic relations falls
outside the purposes of economic analysis. Here the salient presumption is that each
individual is rational, hence choices that are made during business transactions are
choices that reflect a consistent application of rationality in pursuit of one’s self-interest.
The modern economic belief in the primacy of rationality led Tullock and McKenzie to
the argument that “the rational individual, in search of a spouse, will attempt to maximise
utility as in all other endeavours. …This means that he will seek to minimise the cost
incurred through marriage and family. If he marries someone who agrees with him, the
cost associated with arriving at marriage is less than otherwise” (Tullock and McKenzie
1985: 79).
In the light of Tullock and McKenzie’s argument, economic analysis presumes that the
individual will always use reason in a way that gives payoffs than otherwise. If that is the
only role of reason, one would anticipate that one can even abandon children if one has
established through calculations that they are an impediment to one’s utility
maximisation. The idea here is that human beings will always calculate costs and benefits
in order to establish that which is to one’s self-interest. Since it is argued by neo-liberal
economists that human beings will always act in a way that maximises their own utilities,
the only admissible type of reasoning is instrumental reason or ends-oriented rationality.
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5.3 Utility Maximising Rationality and Human Economic Behaviour

Tullock and McKenzie claimed that costs and benefits analysis determine all human
actions when scrutinised from the economic perspective. Even criminal activities do
reflect rational behaviour that aims at utility maximisation.34 They write,
To a degree that crime involves benefits and costs, crime can be a rational act, and
the amount of crime actually committed can be determined in the same manner as
in the amount of any other activity. The only difference may be that crime
involves behaviour that is against the law. The criminal can weigh-off the benefits
and costs and can choose that combination that maximises his own utility, and
will maximise his utility if he commits those crimes for which the additional
benefits exceed the additional costs (Tullock and McKenzie 1985: 122).
The implication of the above quotation is that it would be irrational for someone not to
steal if after calculating costs and benefits they know they could get away with it. Crime
is not different from any other human economic action except that it is against the law.
Though it is against the law, a criminal, as typical of homo economicus, can only apply
the principle of calculating costs and benefits before s/he acts, without recourse to moral
considerations. The criminal’s action becomes economical once s/he has managed to
maximise her utility. If an action does not lead to the maximisation of one’s utility, then
that action is judged irrational because it sidelines the fact that everybody makes choices
and acts on them on the premise of wanting to maximise their own utilities. In this way of
reasoning, there are simply no moral constraints with regards to the means used in
maximising one’s utility.
34
The modern economic theory of utility maximization states that “households [and individuals] try to
make themselves as well off as they possibly can in the circumstance in which they find themselves”
(Lipsey 1989: 141). An indispensable way of maximizing one’s utility is to pursue one’s self-interest. The
interests of others can only count in so far as they contribute to the individual’s utility maximization. The
implication of the theory of utility maximization to human economic behaviour is that the individual is
greedy because s/he will always want to have more and more. Critiques of the modern economic theory of
utility maximization argue that utility maximization is not the natural state of human economic behaviour,
but that it is induced through advertising. This argument was made by Daly and Cobb when they said that,
“If nosatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not
be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year’s model.
The system attempts to remake people fit its own presuppositions. If people’s wants are not naturally
insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going” (Daly and Cobb 1989: 85-86).
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Alan Hamlin (1986: 16-17) characterised modern economic rationality as “ends

rationality” because it is based on the assumption that the individual acts solely with the
aim of maximising utility. This utility maximisation is an overall conscious aim for
everybody. As he puts it, “utility maximisation is a special case of the more general self-
interest [in the sense that]…utility maximisation must assume that all ‘interests’ are
commensurable into a single dimension – utility – so that in choosing among actions the
individual will need only to compare utility content of alternative”. The implication of
Hamlin’s observation is that this theory of utility maximisation presumes that everybody
is self-interested, and that all make choices with the aim of maximising utility. Hamlin
went on to say that “it is sufficient to note that egoism, or self-interest, and
commensurability are both required components of utility maximisation in its
interpretation as a form of ends-rationality”.
According to Hamlin (1986: 17-36), amongst some of the characteristics of the ends-
rational view of utility maximisation is that “it is personal in the sense that the utility to
be maximised is my own. Other individuals do not enter into the evaluation process
except possibly as intermediate products…I am concerned about you only to the extent
that my utility is involved”. Secondly, “It is consequentialist in the sense that actions are
judged solely and completely by reference to their consequences. In the case of utility
maximisation, relevant consequences are those which carry some implication for the
individuals’s own utility”. The implication here is that in this ends-rational view of utility
maximisation, one relates to other people simply as means to the maximisation of one’s
utility. It also follows that one should always calculate the consequences of one’s actions
in the light of their ability to bring about the realisation of one’s utility.
In this ends-rational view of utility maximisation, it is also alleged that even “the act of
giving itself produces utility”. As Hamlin writes (1986: 36-37), “Behaving altruistically
can build a favourable reputation only if others are unaware of the underlying self-
interest”. This implies that “whilst altruism may appear to be un-self-interested in the
short-run, its long-term benefits – including the benefits of living in a society of altruists
– may dominate these short-run costs even in the egoist’s private calculus”. Within such a
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situation, Hamlin maintained that “the best position for each individual is that of an
egoist in an altruistic group”. Surely someone who lives in a group of altruists whilst s/he
is only an egoist will be cheating these altruists. But from the point of view of ends-
rational utility-maximisation cheating itself would be rational as long as the cheat is able
to maximise his or her utility afterwards.
The theory of utility maximisation implies that individuals are solely motivated by greed
or selfishness. It is mainly for this reason that it will be argued in the following section
that utility maximisation theory of ends-rationality militates against welfarism. As we
have seen in chapter 3, Adam Smith had said that whilst individuals were solely self-
interested in their economic relations, these self-interested individuals were indirectly
benefactors of society. Contemporary neo-liberal economists argue against welfare on the
grounds that in pursuing his or her self-interest, the aim of homo economicus has never
been that of promoting welfare, but solely his or her self-interest. Among neo-liberal
economists there are those who reject welfarism out-rightly and those who see the pursuit
of self-interest as a better guide to the promotion of welfarism.
5.4 Self-Interest and Welfarism in Neo-Liberal Economics
5.4.1 The Selfishness of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand is one of the distinguished scholars who wrote about self-interest
metaphysically as well as from an economic point of view. From an economic point of
view, she argued explicitly that selfishness makes better economic sense than altruism or
generosity. In her article, “What is Capitalism?”, Rand said that individuals do not have
an ethical obligation to the common good because the very concept of the common good
is just an abstract:
‘The common good’ (or the public interest) is an undefined and undefinable
concept: there is no such entity as ‘the tribe’ or ‘the public’; the tribe (or the
public or society) is only a number of individual men. Nothing can be good for
the tribe as such; ‘good’ and ‘value’ pertain only to a living organism – to an
individual living organism – not to a disembodied aggregate of relationships [her
emphasis] (Rand 1967c: 20).
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According to Rand, capitalism presumes that there is nothing which people can enjoy in
common. Consequently, she critiqued the idea of the common good as actually based on
some fallacious conceptualisation of human nature. Rand contended that the proper
understanding of human beings is well grounded in capitalism because it accords
individuals with distinct self-interests. It is for this reason that capitalism has been the
most efficient and prolific economic system that has ever existed on earth. In her other
article, “Theory and Practice”, Rand expressed her admiration of modern capitalism as
follows:
Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth…The
under-developed nations are an alleged problem to the world. Most of them are
destitute. …All of them scream for foreign help, for technicians and money. It is
only the indecency of altruistic doctrines that permits them to hope to get away
with it (Rand 1967b: 136).
Rand’s position was that those who are poor should rather be taught the values of
capitalism such as the institutionalisation of private property instead of being given direct
economic assistance. Equally, government attempts to promote welfare through taxation
are flawed because the only way to create greater wealth is not to interfere with the
economy: “Government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government
persecution, and …the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is
by keeping its hands off” (Rand 1967b: 141). While this principle of laissez-nous faire
(let us alone) had its origins in Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand as we have
seen in chapter 3, Rand argued that it was a relevant economic maxim even today.
For Rand, the modern plea to laissez-nous faire comes from rich people who are being
persecuted by government as they are being charged high taxes and forced to pay high
salaries to workers. In her article, “America’s Persecuted Minority”, Rand complained
that government applies double standards in its persecution of business people: “If
workers struggle for their wages, this is hailed as ‘social gains’; if business struggles for
higher profits, this is damned as ‘selfish greed’” (Rand 1967d: 44-45). But Rand is of the
view that the very idea of progressive taxation for the promotion of welfarism implies
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that the time of pure laissez nous faire capitalism had not yet come: “A system of pure,
unregulated laissez-faire capitalism has never yet existed anywhere. …The intellectuals –
the ideologists, the interpreters, the assessors of public events…denounce the free
businessmen as exponents of ‘selfish greed’ and glorified bureaucrats as ‘public servants”
(Rand 1967d: 48).
Rand (1963a: 18) went on to say that those who are economically fortunate have no
moral obligation to help the less fortunate because such help can only be injurious to
those who are being helped. It follows that “altruism erodes men’s capacity to grasp the
concept of rights or the value of an individual life; it reveals a mind from which the
reality of a human being has been wiped out”. In this way of reasoning, altruism is seen
as some mechanism that is employed by its advocates to cover up for their mental
deficiencies. Rand’s conviction was that individuals are self-sufficient, hence they do not
need help and sympathy from other members of society. A mistake that was made by
Rand, however, is that, she failed to see whether a society that is populated by egoists is
viable. For argument’s sake, let us assume that such a society exists. Surely it will be
irrational for someone to donate blood or life saving organs to other people. Equally, we
are bound to see those people who sacrifice their happiness for the happiness of others as
irrational.
Rand refuted the existence of society as a collectivity of the common good. She stated
categorically that, “If one wishes to advocate a free society – that is, capitalism – one
must realise that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. Since
there is no such entity as ‘society’, society is only a number of individual men…” (Rand
1964: 92). For Rand, it follows that the good is that which is good for the individual.
Also, since society is just an abstract,
[t]he principle of man’s individual rights [represents] the extension of morality

into the society system – a limitation on the power of the state, and man’s
protection against the brutal force of the collective…[A] right is the property of an
individual, society as such has no rights…the only purpose of government is the
protection of individual rights (Rand 1963b: 93).
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On the basis of Rand’s argument, since there is no such thing as society, and what we see
as society is just a sum of individuals, those who act as guardians of the common good
such as governments and other welfare institutions do not have rights over the
individual’s wealth. Here the justification for the existence of government is thus
restricted to the protection of individual property and individual rights. In the same vein
with Rand, Robert Nozick came up with a well-nuanced argument that the well-being of
society should come about in the absence of governmental interventions that deliberately
try to promote welfare. The role of the state was to protect individual freedoms to pursue
their self-interests.
5.4.2 Nozick’s Theory of Minimal State Interference

According to Nozick (1974: 33), society is made up of “distinct individuals” who have
“inviolable rights”, especially rights to property. He deduced from this premise that
taking into consideration the fact of our separate existence, “there is no justified sacrifice
of some of us for others. This root idea, namely that there are different individuals with
separate lives and so no one may be sacrificed for others, underlies the existence of moral
side constraints…”. Nozick maintained that government should not tax those who have
plenty with the aim of alleviating the suffering of those who are less fortunate.
Nozick’s argument implies strict limitation on the authority of government. Any

governmental efforts to promote welfare through distributive taxation would only violate
the rights of those whose income is taken for the benefit of others. From this observation
he deduced, “For this, one must focus upon the fact that there are distinct individuals,
each with his own life to lead” [his emphasis] (Nozick 1974: 34). Put in other words, the
only role of government is to maintain steadfastly the protection of individual properties.
Government does not have any meaningful role besides this. The implication here is that
the state is supposed to be removed from economic life as an agent of welfare. Nozick’s
minimal state theory presumes that all individuals are self-sufficient in terms of their
potentialities and that society can easily function without assistance from government.
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Commenting on Nozick’s minimal state theory, Bird (1999: 142) said, “This implies
coercing agency is asserting a property-right in the coercee’s actions. Such coercive
interventions are thus incompatible with individuals’ self-ownership”. The state can only
redistribute the individual’s earnings by a certain percentage if it owns that percentage.
Bird however feels that this is only plausible when individuals are understood as absolute
owners of themselves: “According to this view, there is no part or aspect of self’s own
activity over which others are entitled to make authoritative decisions. It is for this reason
that individuals have the inviolable right to decide just as they please how their personal
assets and resources should be used”. Bird went on to say that self-ownership implies a
particular political commitment to neutrality: “If a public agent is to take individual self-
ownership seriously, it has no reason to take any particular view of how personal assets
and resources ought to be used, since any effort to enforce such a view would violate
individuals’ rights” (Bird 1999: 183).
Neo-liberal economists put emphasis on the importance of individual freedom to pursue

their self-interest without government interference. In this regard, the free market is the
only mechanism that is deemed capable to fulfil the requirements for individual freedom.
Any form of governmental economic directive stands accused of violating the
individual’s personal decisions on how they want to spend their incomes, thus violating
self-ownership. For this reason, the role of the state is strictly restricted to the policing of
the market. It is mainly due to the need to protect individual freedoms that it is argued by
neo-liberal economists that government should not interfere with the economy under the
guise of promoting welfare.
5.4.3 Samuel Brittan on Individual Freedom in Economic Matters

Brittan (1988: 37), a prominent neo-liberal economist, said that economic liberalism puts
emphasis on the importance of freedom in the economic sphere: “A commitment to
freedom and personal choice also involves freedom to spend one’s money in the way one
chooses and to select one’s own occupation”. It follows that “a conception of society as
an organism can be a recipe for unlimited political intervention and for interminable
strife. Where expectations are high and values diverse, some kind of market economy,
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however imperfect, is a way of enabling people to live peacefully together”. Brittan’s

observation is a restatement of early modern economic teaching that the free market was
a more trustworthy mechanism for advancing individual freedom and equitable
distribution of wealth than governments.
To advance individual freedom, Brittan proposed that economic policy should be based
on the following presumptions:
Individuals should be regarded as if they are the best judges of their own interests,
and policy should be designed to satisfy the desires that individuals happen to
have…Policy should be governed by a preference for impersonal general rules
with a minimum of discretionary power by publicly appointed officials or private
bodies engaged in the backstage pressure – over their fellow men [sic]. We should
try to limit the domain of political activity even though we cannot mark out exact
boundary lines in advance…It is safer to rely on people’s private interests rather
than their professed public goals [his emphasis] (Brittan 1988: 109).
The implications of the above thought are that the market should not be interfered with
because people know their own interests. Since they know their interests, there is no need
to make policies that are aimed at promoting welfarism. The political sphere should not
interfere with the economic sphere because self-interest is far more trustworthy than
public interest. This means that the pursuit of self-interest brings prosperity and harmony
to society rather than when government deliberately tries to regulate the economy.
Another argument that is made by Brittan against the promotion of welfarism is that such
actions are a recipe for a breeding ground for free riders.35 Consequently, all collectivities
such as charitable organisations are susceptible to this free rider problem. Thus Brittan
expressed his abhorrence towards collectivities on the following grounds, “Collectivities
do not think, feel, exult, triumph, or despair, and to plan for their benefit is the wrong sort
35
Neo-liberal economists argue for self-interest as opposed to the common good mainly on the premise that
the existence of goods that are available for charity contributes to the rise of a society that is mainly
populated by people who are only interested in benefiting from the economy without contributing anything
to it. To counter this free-rider problem, it is the rationale of neo-liberal economists that self-interest in
economic relations dictates that one should be interested in one’s own well-being whilst remaining neutral
to the interest of others. Self-interest is also believed to have the propensity to identify and punish free-
riders as they are deprived of the enjoyments that accrue in participating in the working of the economy
(Lux 1990: 159; Poole 1991: 11-14).
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of high-mindedness” (Brittan 1988: 212). The implication here is that to plan for the
well-being of the community is to make a reckless mistake of substituting the individual
with the community. Individuals are the subjects of experience, not the community. If
individuals are the subjects of experiences, it also follows that it would be prudent for
government to leave these individuals alone to cooperate on the basis of pursuing their
self-interests. In other words, it is only individual self-interest that is real instead of
collectivities.
5.4.4 Paul Heyne on the Predominance of Self-Interest in the Public Sphere

In the same vein with Rand, Nozick and Brittan, Heyne argued that the usual debate that
is always based on public versus private is a misguided one. As he put it, “We should be
well advised to discount all the rhetoric about public versus private interests, and to look
for the incentives that actually shape the decisions that people take” (Heyne 1983: 272).
According to Heyne, people are solely motivated by self-interest after calculating costs
and benefits. It is mainly for this reason that Heyne went to the extent of refuting the idea
that government was there to foster society’s welfare. His argument was that it is a
misunderstanding for us to construe government as being there for the common good and
the individual for private interest. For Heyne, the correct understanding should be that
“Government is people interacting, paying attention to the expected costs and benefits of
the alternatives that they perceive” (Heyne 1983: 283). Heyne claimed that this
interpretation of people’s actions is an obvious fact that is based on the core of economic
theory itself: “Economic theory assumes that people act in their own interest, not that
they act in the public interest” (Heyne 1983: 284). Here the converse is also true that if
people were to act in the public interest, modern economic theory would simply have
nothing to do with their actions. In fact actions that are aimed at promoting the common
good would logically be judged as uneconomical.
Heyne went further to assert that even those people who appear to profess some
commitment to the promotion of welfare are in actual fact doing so for the sake of
advancing their own personal interests: “Sometimes it will be in a legislator’s interest to
pursue the public interest” (Heyne 1983: 284). In other words, the legislator cannot
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pursue the public interest if it is not to his or her benefit to do so. It is economically
expected that the public official must be rational and calculative about costs and benefits
to his or her interests. But Heyne’s interpretation of the private and the public as equally
dominated by self-interest presupposes a society that is populated by individuals who are
all rational and self-sufficient. The illusion behind this doctrine of self-sufficiency can be
discerned from the fact that in reality, as we shall see in chapters 6 and 7, there are no
individuals who are self-sufficient.
There are other neo-liberal economists who admit the importance of welfarism but argue
that welfare subsists in the pursuit of self-interest. The argument here is that economic
activities based on a self-interested individual would benefit social welfare rather than
individual actions that are done directly with the intention of promoting welfare. Here
self-interest is not defended for its own sake, but on the basis that it helps to advance
welfarism. It also implies that we cannot have welfare without individuals who are
dedicated to the pursuit of self-interest.
5.4.5 Alexander Shand and Frank Field on Welfare as Subsisting in Self-Interest

Shand (1990: 69), who is a prominent advocate of early modern economics in the
Austrian economic school of thought, argued that the economic results of the pursuit of
self-interest give rise to the promotion of welfare. He writes, “The doctrine that the
pursuit of self-interest will, through the operations of ‘the invisible hand’ work to
produce the greatest amount of welfare can be justified on utilitarian grounds; it is a
consequentialist social theory”. Shand goes on to say that “Adam Smith espoused the
theory of our interdependence when he argued that for someone to gain the help and co-
operation of others, they should rather appeal to their self-love”. Appealing to each
other’s self-love implies that we cannot get what we want by appealing to each other’s
sense of generosity. This implies that those who champion the promotion of welfare
whilst at the same time frowning at self-interest are economically misguided. Thus Shand
rebuked those who condemn self-interest whilst advocating welfare, such as the Church,
as follows:
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But for the most part Churches have always chosen to refuse to face up to the full
implications of the (to them) unpleasant reality that it is largely free market
competitive self-interest that has also generated the wealth that is the essential
prerequisite for the supply of medical care, adequate nutrition, and housing,
without which no amount of Christian good would do the slightest bit of good
(Shand 1990: 77).
What is implied in the above quotation is that instead of rebuking self-interest on grounds
of moral or religious prejudices, we should be grateful because the pursuit of self-interest
by individuals results in the generation of wealth that gives rise to vibrant healthcare
systems and plenty of food on our tables. The pursuit of self-interest is thus justifiable on
the grounds that it was the reason for the flourishing of wealth and the resultant
promotion of welfare. According to Shand, the promotion of welfare is best achieved
through the pursuit of self-interest at the free market place: “[T]he market is the best way
by which the individual may serve the needs of hundreds of people whom he does not
know of and of whose desires he is also ignorant; but this is achieved through; not
through altruism, but through selfishness” (Shand 1990: 79). The implication here is that
through the free market, the individual’s selfishness produces unintended benefits for all
without even governmental intervention.
Poole put his finger on the right spot when he stated the above rationale on welfarism as
follows:
The individual is concerned solely with his own well-being; nevertheless, the
result of what he does is to further the well-being of others with whom he is not
concerned. Indeed, he will secure this result much more surely than if he had
taken the well-being of others as the direct object of his behaviour. It is part of the
logic of the market to sever the conceptual continuity between the intentional
content of an individual’s action and its overall social meaning. …Self-interest is
validated not in its own terms, but because it is conducive to social well-being
(Poole 1991: 8).
This position on welfarism is a reiteration of the Mandevilian parody of vicious passions

or vices that transform themselves into public benefits as well as the Smithian concept of
‘the invisible hand’ when understood in the light of Hayek’s theory of spontaneous orders
as we have seen in chapter 3.
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Shand’s position on welfarism was also echoed by Frank Field in his article, “Altruism,
Self-Interest and Sustainability of Welfare”, when he said that it is only within an
economic system that is based on self-interest that altruism and welfare can be sustained
in the long-run. He avers,
I suggest that while altruism plays a part in all human activity, and public welfare
is no exception, the oxygen feeding this sentiment in the main comes from self-
interest…Moreso, self-interest and altruism need to be held in balance, with self-
interest being the dominant value. If this balance is overturned by altruism being
given too prominent a role, the likelihood is of a political backlash which
endangers the very operation of altruism itself within public welfare (Field 1999:
461).
Field’s insight as stated above is that there has to be self-interested individuals for there
to be welfare. The existence of charity or welfare presupposes the prior existence of self-
interested individuals. The flourishing of wealth is not the result of altruism, but self-
interest. If we start by teaching people to be altruistic, we end up endangering the very
existence of welfare and altruism. The reality of an altruistic sentiment that is prone to
promote welfare is the result of the pursuit of self-interest. Field exhorted that we should
not rush to the condemnation of self-interest without making a distinction between self-
interest and selfishness. As he put it, “self-interest should be distinguished from
selfishness [because] selfishness was itself a separate motive force from greed…” (Field
1999: 462).
Whilst Field tries to make a distinction between self-interest and greed, I think scholarly
opinion among neo-liberal economists as we have seen so far does not support him. In the
preceding sections the argument that came from neo-liberal economists was that in
economics self-interest was synonymous with selfishness and that there was nothing
wrong about that either from an economic point of view or from an ethical point of view.
From an economic point of view, it was argued however, that modern economics
assumes that individuals are self-interested or selfish in a way that implies value-
neutrality. From an ethical point of view, it was argued that altruism, collectivism and
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societies are simply manifestations of self-interest because self-interested activities of

individuals lead to the promotion of altruism. Kenneth Lux argued, however, that self-
interest cannot promote the altruistic cause. As he put it, “But the problem is that these
motives are mutually exclusive, or incompatible. You can’t be going both directions at
the same time. When you fulfil one you defeat the other. An altruist is an altruist
precisely because he is not an egoist; an ascetic becomes an ascetic by renouncing
sensualism” (Lux 1990: 158). Lux’s argument is that self-interest means selfishness, and
selfishness cannot promote the altruistic cause or welfarism.
However, there are modern scholars who argue that the theory of self-interest in late
modern economic discourses falsifies human nature. Sociologically, it is argued that the
theory of self-interest is nothing else but a summation of the anarchic theory of society.
From an economic point of view, it is argued that human beings are endowed with a
plurality of motivations; therefore self-interest is not the only motivating factor in human
economic relations. Another argument is that the pursuit of self-interest militates against
the economic livelihood of future generations.
5.5 Modern Arguments against Self-Interest
5.5.1 The Sociological Argument

Francis Fukuyama (1995: 20-21), a world renowned political scientist, contended that “to
assert that people prefer their selfish material interests over other kinds of interest is to
make a strong statement about human nature. It should also be quite evident that people
do not always pursue utility, however defined…”. Fukuyama went on to say that there are
other societies which have a distinct trait of ethics that puts emphasis on certain social
values, such as family solidarity, adoption of nonkin and “intimate face-to-face
relationships”. According to Fukuyama, all these cultural qualities “come about as the
result not of rational calculation but from inherited ethical habit”. Consequently, he
argued that “[i]t is not rational for people to be rational about every single choice they
make in life; if this were true, their lives would be consumed in decision over the smallest
matters” (Fukuyama 1995: 20). In other words, people do not always act after calculating
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costs and benefits as it has been claimed by neo-liberal economists. Fukuyama reminds
us: “The obligations one feels toward one’s family do not arise out of a simple cost-
benefit calculation, even if that family is running a business; rather, it is the character of
the business that is shaped by pre-existing family relationships” (Fukuyama 1995: 21).
Whilst Fukuyama says that self-interest of utility maximisation is indispensable in laws

of economics as a guide to making predictions and formulation of public policy, he
emphasises the fact that “human beings act for nonutilitarian ends in irrational, group-
oriented ways sufficiently often that the neoclassical model presents us with an
incomplete picture of human nature” (Fukuyama 1995: 21). According to Fukuyama,
economic behaviour and success depend on social trust that has been cultivated in a
particular society. In other words, it is not utility maximising self-interest that leads to
economic success, but the ethic of trust that is shown in a particular society. Thus he
writes, “Social capital and the proclivity for spontaneous sociability have important
economic consequences. …Social capital, the crucible of trust and critical to the health of
an economy, rests on cultural roots” (Fukuyama 1995: 23-39).
Instead of analysing the actions of the economic agent on the premise of the pursuit of
self-interest, Fukuyama argued that we should put our focus on the economic behaviour
of societies. To a certain extent Fukuyama’s argument was echoed by Grinker and Steiner
when they said that certain societies do not enter into economic relations that are based
on the pursuit of self-interest. In other words, what might be seen as a formal economic
behaviour in one particular society will not necessarily be an economic behaviour in
another (Grinker and Steiner 1997: 89). Marcel Mauss is more nuanced on this point
when he says that “[i]t is our western societies who have recently made man an
‘economic animal’. But we are not yet all creatures of this genus. Among the masses and
the elites in our society purely irrational expenditure is commonly practiced” (Mauss
1990: 76). In other words, culture plays a pivotal role in determining human economic
relations. Apart from the sociological argument, another argument by critics of neo-
liberal economics is that to claim that human beings are solely self-interested implies an
outright rejection of the plurality of motivations in human economic behaviour.
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5.5.2 The Economic Argument of the Plurality of Motivations

Amartya Sen (1987: 15-20) said that “the self-interest view of rationality involves inter
alia a firm rejection of the ‘ethics’ view of motivation”. This rejection of ethics comes
across with the neo-liberal economic presumption that self-interest is value neutral
because genuine economic relations are not concerned with the individual’s moral
predisposition. Sen’s argument against such a claim is that people act in ways that
“include the promotion of non-self-interested goals which we may value and wish to aim
at”. He contended that if we are to see “departure from self-interest maximisation as
evidence of irrationality” such a departure would “imply a rejection of the role of ethics
in actual decision making” (Sen 1987: 16). But Sen admitted that while self-interest plays
a crucial role in economic relations, we should also acknowledge the fact that there is a
plurality of motivations in human actions. He sums up his argument by saying that a
“mixture of selfish and selfless behaviour is one of the important characteristics of group
loyalty, and this mixture can be seen in a wide variety of group associations varying from
kinship relations and communities, trade unions and economic pressure groups” (Sen
1987: 20).
The implication of Sen’s argument as stated above is that human beings are endowed
with selfish and selfless behaviour. Such a mixture presupposes the existence of a
plurality of motivations in human economic behaviour. It follows that self-interest as the
sole determinant of human economic behaviour cannot be defended because such defence
implies a distortion of human nature. Economic relations depend on individuals who are
also predisposed with virtues such as sincerity, honesty, faithfulness, tolerance,
compassion, loyalty and unselfish service (Hubber 1984: 3; cf. Daly and Cobb 1989: 50).
In other words, virtues play a crucial role in economic relations. If we realise that the
individual we are doing business with is viciously self-interested we would try by all
means to avoid doing business with such an individual. To claim that in human economic
relations the individual is only self-interested amounts to falsifying human nature because
such a claim ignores the role that is played by virtuous motives in economic relations.
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The argument of plurality of motivations was also made by Daly and Cobb when they
said that in life it is possible to find people who do actions that are entirely contrary to
utility maximising purposes. According to these two authors, the theory of utility
maximising through the pursuit of self-interest is based on the subjective understanding
of value because in the final analysis one can easily come to the conclusion that whatever
the individual finds as maximising utility should be pursued without taking into
consideration the consequences of such behaviour on the well-being of the community
(Daly and Cobb 1989: 94-95). Such an inevitable conclusion shows that utility
maximisation through the pursuit of self-interest dehumanises human beings. Daly and
Cobb made reference to this dehumanisation when they said that there are remarkable
differences between homo economicus of contemporary economic theory and real people.
The modern economic presumptions about human beings as solely self-interested are
made for methodological purposes. As they put it,
Much in [modern economic theory] requires the model and cannot be formulated
without it. It requires the assumption of independent utility functions, which
means that the satisfaction of each individual is derived from goods acquired by
that individual in the market. Without this assumption it would become a tangle of
mathematical intractability, and in particular it would not be shown that pure
competition leads to an optimal allocation of resources (Daly and Cobb 1989: 86-
89).
The above observation implies that the self-interested utility maximising individual
(homo economicus) does not exist in real life. Rather, such an individual is a model that is
applied by modern economists in order to make sense of their presumed economic
behaviour. To a certain extent the same argument was made by the world renowned
mathematician and economist, Nicholas Georgescu-Rogen, when he said,
No science has been criticised by its own servants as openly and constantly as
economics. The motives of dissatisfaction are many, but the most important
pertains to the fiction of homo oeconomicus. The complaint is that this fiction
strips man’s [sic] behaviour of every cultural propensity, which is tantamount to
saying that in his economic life man acts mechanically (Georgescu-Rogen 1971:
1).
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Georgescu-Rogen’s argument was that a self-interested utility maximising individual was

based on the paradigm of mechanistic thinking as espoused in some natural sciences. In
this mechanistic thinking, a human being is modelled on the image of a machine whose
rules of motion can be subjected to quantitative analysis. In this way, quantitative
analysis is attained through measuring utility. In the same vein, Harvey Sindima said that
the “key concept in understanding relations in society is utility; feelings and emotional
needs are not important. Therefore, concern and care do not enter everyday living. Moral
conduct in a mechanistic society is guided by self-interest” (Sindima: 1995: 28; cf.
Heilbroner 1972b: 120). Within such a mechanistic understanding of persons, Robert
Heilbroner said that individuals “are imagined as isolated personages existing without
any social ties – self-supporting yet mutually dependent hermits, coexisting in a state of
latent hostility and suspicion” (Heilbroner 1972b: 120). The implication of Heilbroner’s
observation is that such a view of human beings is equally fictitious and dehumanising
because in real life people do not exist within such a state.
Apart from the argument of plurality of motivations, a third argument against

contemporary neo-liberal economic theory of self-interest is that the pursuit of self-
interest would inevitably fail to take into consideration the well-being of future
generations. Since the rationale behind self-interested reasoning is that the appetites of
the individual for wealth are insatiable, and that the resources of the earth are
inexhaustible, such a rationale leads to depletion and exhaustion of natural resources. In
actual fact the natural environment upon which human economic activities depend is
considered as an externality (cf. Gauthier 1986: 88; Daly and Cobb 1989: 51-53; Heyne
1983: 249; O’Neil 1998: 162). This severing of our relationality with the natural
environment deprives future generations of their economic well-being.
5.5.3 Modern Self-Interest as a Danger to the Well-being of the Future Generations

Taking into consideration the fact that the resources of the earth are exhaustible, it also
follows that the pursuit of self-interest at present will inevitably fail to take into account
the needs of future generations. John Ikerd (1999: 2-3) said that “contemporary
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economics is fundamentally incapable of dealing with relationships among people, or

between people and their environment”. Ikerd argued that this type of thinking militates
against the existence of future generations for two reasons. Firstly, “it’s economically
irrational to want to leave as much and as good as we have today for the benefit of the
future generations”. Secondly, “contemporary economics is concerned totally and
completely with the pursuit of short run, self-interest”.
The same argument was made by James Handy when he said that a society that is
populated by individuals who are only self-interested will compromise the needs of future
generations. He writes, “A proper selfishness would see the sense in investing in others in
order to create a better world for our descendants. Setting limits to our own needs,
defining what is enough, leaves more room to attend to the needs of others…” (Handy
1998: 113). Handy went on to say that self-interest can be condoned when it is oriented
towards the future, and not for its self, but for the well-being of the future generations.
Hence it is “a moral imperative that there has to be some sense of responsibility towards
the well-being of the future generations” (Handy 1998: 147).
However, Herman Daly argued that attempts to argue against the modern economic
theory of self-interest are sometimes rebutted by arguments that
we have no obligations to the future because future people do not exist, and rights
cannot inhere in nonexistent people, without rights there can be no obligations.
Therefore we have no obligations to future people. And even if we did, it is
sometimes added, the best way to serve the future is to maximise present riches.
The invisible hand, it is argued, not only converts personal greed into social
benevolence, it also transforms generational selfishness into intergenerational
generosity (Daly 1996: 221).
In the above quotation, Daly gave a superb summation of the rationale of modern
economic theory of self-interest with regards to the well-being of future generations.
Daly is arguing against the popular neo-liberal economic argument that those who
maximise their utilities and become richer leave benefits for future generations in the
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form of scholarship grants and welfare grants. His argument against this type of
reasoning is that
…the value of a sawmill is zero without forests; the value of fishing is zero
without fish; the value of refineries is zero without remaining deposits of
petroleum; the value of dams is zero without rivers and catchment areas with
sufficient forests to prevent erosion and siltation of the lake behind the dam.
Empty verbiage about the intergenerational invisible hand and the near-perfect
sustainability of man-made natural capital is just the usual confused attempt to
give a technical nonanswer to a moral question (Daly 1996: 221).
What is implied in the above argument is that the pursuit of self-interest at present is
depleting natural resources or natural capital upon which the future generations are
supposed to rely for their own economic activities. Within this type of futuristic
reasoning, it is also implied that future scholarships in mining are valueless when there
are no mineral deposits that are left by the present generation to be mined in the future.

In this chapter, my analysis of the modern economic theory of self-interest started with
the modern economic discipline itself. It was discovered that the modern economic
discipline presumes that a human being is solely self-interested. Related to this
presumption about human beings was that they always act after calculating costs and
benefits. In the modern economic discipline self-interest is rendered value neutral in the
sense that it has nothing to do with the individual’s moral predisposition. Since self-
interest is regarded as synonymous with selfishness, it does not carry with it any moral
evaluations. It follows that even criminal activity is justifiable when subjected to modern
economic theory of utility maximisation (Tullock and McKenzie 1985: 7-122).
We have also seen other neo-liberal economists and philosophers who argued that self-
interest was a better guide to social living than altruism. Since what is real is individual
self-interest rather than collectivities such as societies and communities, it also followed
that there was no need to help others through welfare. This type of reasoning implied a
total rejection of welfare on the grounds that collectivities have no rights, therefore it was
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the right of individuals to spend their fortunes in a way they deem suitable. Another
argument from neo-liberal economists justified self-interest on the grounds that it gives
rise to the flourishing of wealth, therefore enabling welfarism. Self-interested individuals
were actually benefactors of society, therefore welfarism subsists in self-interest (Shand
1990: 69-79; Field 1999: 461-462; Rand 1967c: 136-141; Nozick 1974: 33-34; Heyne
1983: 272-283).
After stating the arguments of the proponents of self-interest in modern economic

discourses, I also referred to some of the arguments that are raised by the critics of self-
interest. From a sociological perspective it was argued that self-interest spells an anarchic
view of society. People’s economic behaviour, on the contrary, is socially conditioned in
the sense that they behave according to socially inherited ethical habits. Another
argument was that people do not always relate to each on the basis of calculating costs
and benefits. In other societies, economic relations are not propelled by the motive of
self-interest. Equally, it is an unwarranted exaggeration to claim that people always act
with the sole aim of maximising their utilities (Fukuyama 1995: 21-39; Grinker and
Steiner 1997: 89; Mauss 1990: 76).
From an economic point of view, the argument against self-interest was that such a claim
ignores the fact that there is a plurality of motivations in human economic actions in the
sense that selfish and selfless motivations exist side by side. People can enter into
economic relations for other motives that might not be necessarily economic when seen
from the theory of utility maximisation. The implication of this argument was that people
are not always self-interested, as modern economic theory alleges. It was also argued that
the modern economic failure to take into account the reality of plurality of motivations is
mainly because the modern economic discipline is based on a mechanistic model of a
human being. Such a model was homo economicus who is conceptualised in a
mechanistic way so as to enable quantitative analysis. If that was the main reason for
coining homo economicus as solely self-interested, it also followed that such
conceptualisation of a person is entirely fictitious (Daly and Cobb 1989: 50-95;
Georgescu-Roegen 1971: 1; Heilbroner 1972b: 120; Sen 1987: 15-20; Huber 1984: 3).
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The last argument was that since self-interest severs our relationality with the natural
environment, it also implies that it deprives future generations of their economic well-
being. Taking into consideration the finitude of our earthly resources, the pursuit of self-
interest at present will compromise the needs of future generations. It was argued that the
present generation has a moral responsibility for the well-being of the future generations.
A sense of concern for one’s community at present and a concern for future generations
implies that we need an ethical paradigm that puts emphasis on relationality. Such an
ethic should espouse the idea that self-interest is not a universal motive in all people
(Ikerd 1999: 2-3; Handy 1998: 138-147; Daly 1996: 221).
The following chapter, which is about African humanism, offers us such an ethical
paradigm as it espouses relationality as the overriding reality of what it means to be
human.
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PART II: A CRITIQUE OF SELF-INTEREST FROM THE PERSPECTIVES OF

AFRICAN HUMANISM AND PROCESS PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
The aim of this part is to give a critique of the theory of self-interest in modern economic
discourses by applying the critical tools of African humanism and process philosophical
anthropology. This discussion will consider the cosmological and ontological
implications of African humanism and process philosophical anthropology.
To start with, the African world-view or cosmology does not separate humanity from the
rest of things that constitute existence. In this conceptualisation, a human being is seen as
internally related to the natural environment, ancestors, God and other people in society.
The idea of seeing human beings as existing in symbiosis with everything else in
existence will be expounded as the foundation of African humanism. A persistent motif
that filters through African humanism is the idea that to be fully human is to belong to the
community of existence rather than seeing oneself as solely self-interested.
The concept of common belonging will find its fullest expression in the African ontology
of the individual which says Umuntu ngomuntu ngabantu – a human being is a human
being through other human beings. This ontology of the individual makes it nonsensical
to uphold the modern economic theory of self-interest. The practical implications of this
ontology will filter through the African argument of communalism which says that
wealth should be there for the common good of the whole community rather than seen
solely in terms of the fulfilment of the individuals’ self-interests. Our actions that are
aimed at promoting the common good will also safeguard the common good of future
generations.
Process philosophical anthropology shares the insights of African humanism in its

critique of the socio-economic theory of self-interest. What is implied in Alfred North
Whitehead’s cosmological theory is also implied in his ontology of the individual. At the
basis of his cosmological theory is a conviction that reality is an interconnected whole,
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and human existence and experience are constituted in this connectedness of all reality.
Humanity exists in internal relations with all that shares this existence with it.
To champion the cause of self-interest, therefore, is to abstract human experience from

general existence. All that exists at present has been contributed to by other entities in the
past, and those that exist in the present will also contribute to the existence of other
entities in the future. For this reason our actions can only be moral when they promote
harmony between the present and the future generations. The ethic that is aspired by
African humanism and process philosophical anthropology, consequently, is that of
sympathy, solidarity, mutuality and communion with all that exists.
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CHAPTER SIX: AFRICAN HUMANISM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

FOR THE THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST
It is as if the apparent breakdown and decay in Africa today is a result of the curse of the
ancestors. Or is it not a curse but a warning, a sign from the ancestors calling on [Africans] to turn
again to their traditions and reshape their society anew, to create a modern and a future Africa that
incorporates the best of its own culture? (Mazrui 1986: 12).
6.1 Introduction
In chapters 3, 4 and 5 we encountered arguments that claim that human economic
relations are solely motivated by self-interest. The whole modern economic discipline
seems to have evolved around the idea of a self-interested homo economicus. It was also
established that self-interest in economics meant selfishness and greed. The individual in
this context is understood as endowed with an inherent tendency not to have interest in
the welfare of others. The main presumption was that the liberal economic system works
well to the benefit of everybody when individuals are left alone to pursue their self-
interest rather than when governments deliberately try to work for welfare. Self-interest
was natural to human reason, which is basically instrumental to utility maximisation. It
was not only human reason that made homo economicus to be solely self-interested;
modern economics went as far as saying that by nature all human beings were motivated
by self-interest.
The implications of African humanism to the theory of self-interest will show us the
falsity behind the claim that all human beings are self-interest. African humanism is part
of the world-tradition of modernity that holds that we can go beyond self-interest by
advocating the primacy of relatedness and interrelatedness amongst all that exists.
Relationships within reality involve God, ancestors, the natural environment and human
beings. The ultimate well-being of humanity is premised on the existence of harmonious
relationships among all realities that constitute existence. It is from the paradigm of
relationality as espoused in African humanism that self-interest will be rendered
implausible.
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This chapter is structured as follows: The first section will give a definition of African
humanism, drawing mainly from the writings of African scholars. In the second section,
it is shown that human relatedness in African humanism is cosmologically constituted
through the concept of relatedness. If human beings are intrinsically related to the natural
environment, their relatedness to each other is far more intense than what has been
presented as the case with the self-interested homo economicus. In section three, focus is
given to the African ethic of Ubuntu with the aim of showing the unintelligibility of
modern economic theory of self-interest when subjected to the ethical discourse of
African humanism. The fourth section argues that African humanism rejects self-interest
and emphasises economic values such as communalism and collectivism. It is also argued
that it is mainly African humanistic values that inspired the economic ethic of communal
collectivism which was interpreted by African politicians as African socialism.
6.2 Defining African Humanism

African humanism means the African understanding of a human being or what it means
to be human.36 All human cultures have an understanding of the main elements that are
central to a human being. In mainstream economic theory as it developed in the western
world up to the present day, the predominant understanding is that a human being is a
self-interested being. African humanism advocates an understanding of a human being as
relationally constituted both cosmologically and ontologically (Moquet 1977: 49-50;
Mazrui et al 1999: 559). The implication here is that a human being derives his or her
humanness within the context of relationality with all that exists.
36
A philosophy that attempted to articulate the socio-economic, political and religious vision of African
humanism was popularly known as the philosophy of negritude. The philosophy of negritude was a
reflection of French speaking African scholars such as Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire on what it
means to be a black person in a world that was dominated by western value systems. In its orientation, the
philosophy of negritude aimed at reconstructing African values through the rediscovering or celebration of
Africa’s primal values. For Senghor, negritude was an articulation of the recovery of an African collective
identity as well as the new world-view deriving from the African primal values and experiences (Senghor
1964: 49-50; Irele 1965: 68-69). For Cesaire, African humanism was an antithesis of the western
capitalistic civilisation and an affirmation of the African traditional values. Cesaire’s philosophy of
negritude aimed at critiquing the modernist humanism that divided human beings into categories of races as
well as treating them differently. Cesaire called this tendency “pseudo humanism” because of its narrow
and fragmentary attitude towards the rights of humanity. In other words, true humanism was supposed to be
all-embracing (cf. Eze 1998: 222-223).
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In African humanism, an individual is thus understood first and foremost as a communal

being. This understanding of an individual as a communal being is explicitly articulated
in the African ethical maxim that Umuntu ngomuntu ngabantu – a human being is a
human being because of other human beings (Ramose 1999; Samkange and Samkange
1980; Shutte 2001). In the ethic of Ubuntu, the idea is that the individual’s identity and
well-being is mediated through the community. African humanism sees human beings as
relational by nature – they are endowed with an inherent nature to belong to each other in
society. This human belongingness stretches from the past, to the present and into the
future. Human behaviour and its authenticity is thus based more on relationality than
exclusively on rationality. A human being is related to the ancestors, those who exist with
him or her in the present society and those who will exist in the future.
Some African scholars have defined African humanism as an inherent optimistic outlook
of Africans towards human nature. Within this aspect of African humanism, the idea is
that Africans place enormous emphasis on the importance of human life. The importance
of human life is sometimes expressed in people’s behaviour towards one another. A trait
of caring for human life or the value of another person is expressed through greeting,
talking and sharing one’s material possessions with others in society. People are not
valued according to what they own or possess, but by virtue of being persons. African
humanism spells an attitude that is all-embracing towards life in general (Senghor 1964:
26; Kaunda 1967: 31-38).
African humanism has also been defined as based on the African spirit of collectivism.
Within the economic sphere, the idea is that a real human being is someone who is
willing to share his or her material possessions with others in society. African humanism
ascribed full humanness to someone who was generous to his or her fellow human beings
than to someone who was selfish (Nkrumah 1968: 73; Toure 1979: 108; Nyerere 1968:
198). Thus a selfish person becomes an antithesis of all those qualities that are seen as the
most cherished character traits of African humanism. Kwame Gyekye, a Ghananian
philosopher, defined African humanism as an African traditional ethic that emphasises
concern for human welfare (Gyekye 1997: 158-159).
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6.3 The World-View of African Humanism

Every theory about human beings arises from a particular world-view. What is assumed
as a characteristic of a human being has some metaphysical underpinnings that purport to
support its claims. As it was shown in chapter 3, the mechanistic Newtonian world-view
that saw the universe as comprised of self-enclosed entities which only respond to the
rules of gravity and motion, was analogous to the economic idea of self-interest as the
attracting force in economic relations. A persistent theme that came up throughout
chapters 3, 4 and 5 was that self-interest was the main driving force in human nature. In
this world-view, all social relations were only artificial, and the natural environment was
seen as external to human economic interests. We have also seen that the very concept of
society as a collectivity was considered to be an abstract.
African scholars reject this world-view and argue that there is a reality of
interconnectedness between a human being and everything that exists. This is the
argument that was advanced by Ali Mazrui in his article, “From Sun Worship to Time
Worship”, when he said:
African civilisations were characterised by the following attributes: no great

distinction between the past, the present and the future; no great distinction
between the kingdom of God, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom; the
crocodile would be a god; no sharp divide between the living and the dead. The
pyramids were new residences of pharaohs. Refineries in the tomb were to be
enjoyed by the dead. To die was to change your address (Mazrui 1994: 175).
This construction of the African world-view is based on the conviction that the ethic of
an all-embracing relatedness had a natural basis among Africans. It is also a way of
refuting modernity’s idea of categorising reality in terms of types. Contrary to the
mechanistic world-view of modernity, the African world-view insists that all that exists
has to be understood in terms of symbiosis with others.
Mazrui’s argument is that the idea of seeing things in terms of their separateness
presupposed a sceptical outlook towards common existence between humanity and the
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natural world. He made the same argument when he alleged that the western mind was
primarily oriented towards ecological curiosity rather than ecological concern:37
Ecological concern goes beyond mere fascination. It implies commitment to

converse and enrich. Ecological concern also often requires a capacity in man
[sic] to empathise with nature. It requires a readiness on the part of man to see a
little of himself, and a little of his God, in his surroundings. Ecological concern
requires a totemic frame of reference. To that extent it is much more deeply
interlinked with fundamental aspects of African belief systems than it is to
European ones. Ecological curiosity is an aspect of science in its quest for
explanation and comprehension. Ecological concern is an aspect of morality in its
quest for empathy (Mazrui 1977: 262).
Mazrui’s argument is that a mind that does not see itself as part of the natural
environment is most likely to exploit the natural environment for its own selfish ends.
Contrary to such a mindset, the African mind can be characterised as a mind predisposed
to ecological concern due to its “totemic frame of reference”. He went on to say that
totemism has led people to identify with other species, thereby establishing a sense of
continuity between humanity and nature. This attitude blurs the distinction between
humanity and nature, the living and the dead, the divine and the human. In African
humanism, human identity is sometimes predicated on totemism to such an extent that we
can say that human identity is also continuous with that of the natural world.
To give an example of this African totemic frame of reference, Philippe Junod was
reprimanded by his servant, Office Muhlanga, whose totem was a zebra, for having killed
a zebra. In the conversation that ensued, Muhlanga had this to teach Junod:
The totem cannot be killed. In the olden times if this happened by accident…the
man who killed it would have been led to the border of the country and banished,
without any possibility of his returning. …We resemble our totem in spirit
(mweya). The zebra has got our manners, we have the same way of living. …If on
my way I am threatened with an accident, or likely to be in danger, for example, if
37
Mazrui made a distinction between ecological curiosity and ecological concern. He defined ecological
curiosity as the framework of intellectual agitation which seeks to explore and discover new factors about
nature. The driving force behind ecological curiosity is the excitement of thirst for knowledge. On the other
hand, ecological concern was actually based on an attitude whereby a human being comes to see his or her
well-being as integral to the well-being of nature (Mazrui 1977: 262).
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there is a chance of meeting lions, I am stopped by my Mutupo [38] (Junod 1938:

106-110).
The implication of the above quotation is that a totemic animal was treated just like any
other human relative. A person’s identity was predicated on the totemic species. The
significance of the totemic frame of mind is that the relationship between humanity and
the natural environment was not an imaginative construction, but integral to life
experiences. In African culture, the totemic system was the bedrock of an ethic of
environmental conservation in the sense that everybody did not eat every animal. The
totem is not, of course, one animal among others. It is limitless in the sense that no matter
how many persons are born in the family, its potentialities are never exhausted due to the
fact that one’s totem is inherited from the infinite past, hence the present generation will
pass on this shared identity to the future generations, thereby inculcating the sense of our
common belonging.
The totemic ethical value of infinite common belonging was expressed well by a Jesuit
priest, Seed, when he made the following observation concerning the origins of the Shona
people:
Mambiro, the ancestor from whom the Mutupo (totem) system originated, looking
out into the future, saw innumerable lives of his descendants through his sons, and
their sons’ sons. All are his ropa (blood); passed on weakened through the ages.
But he knows that as the lines stretch further and further away, and people
multiply, memory will be quite incapable of retracing the steps or of uniting all of
one generation; yet all of one generation will be vakomana (elder brothers) and
vanin’ina (younger siblings) just as his sons are; and those of different
generations will all be ropa rimwechete (all of one blood). Whatever his reasons
for making the line he chose for himself a name which is not the same of men, but
the name of something in his everyday life – of an animal tsoko (monkey) (cited
in Mutsvairo et al 1996: 17).
38
In Shona, the word Mutupo means a totem. Usually the totem or Mutupo is an animal or plant which a
particular family identifies itself with as its ancestor. Such an animal is not supposed to be eaten. One is not
supposed to marry a person who has the same totem as him or her. The idea is that a person must extend
relationships beyond one’s blood relations. Thus people would always know the type of relationship that
exists between them by invoking each other’s totemic names. In so doing, they establish the type of
relationship that should typify their relationship.
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The ethical significance of the totemic system lied in instilling a consciousness of

belonging into the past as well as into the future. Thus the totemic species serves as a
reminder of one’s indebtedness to these relationships. Within the totemic system,
relationships are not abstract, but rather, they are concrete. Philip Junod observed that:
“All baPedi greet each other with their totemic name: ‘Good-day, Duiker ! Good-day
Crocodile’” (Junod 1938: 108). In such relationships, when one avoids eating a certain
kind of animal or plant, it is avoidance to eating one’s own flesh. One can even say that
totemism is a principle that links the identity of a person or community with the natural
world (Knight 1991: 107-108; Murove 1999: 30).
Junod (1938: 112) went on to say that within the African totemic systems, “there are
feelings of affection and interdependence, of participation in one way of life, which in
many ways are quite inspiring”. Thus he observed, “Totemism shows well one
characteristic of the Bantu mind: the strong tendency to give a human soul to animals, to
plants, to nature as such, a tendency which is at the very root of the most beautiful
blossoms of poetry, a feeling that there is a community of substance between the various
forms of life”. In other words, totemism engendered the idea of solidarity among all
forms of life.
Related to the above observation is the totemic intuition that nobody is self-sufficient, or
that there are no entities that are self-sufficient, everything that exists has a plausible
explanation of its existence in the context of relatedness and interrelatedness. Within the
African culture, moral teaching was not concerned with abstract philosophical discussion;
rather, we find the folklore genre as integral to moral teaching. In these stories, nature
played a central role in such a way that it is rare to find a story with human beings only as
actors. In this genre, the world of nature was a stage upon which people translated and
retranslated their life experiences in language and metaphor of their social ethos. The
physical appearance and behaviour of an animal was language enough to make it play an
equivalent character in human society (cf. Aschwanden 1989: 115-116).
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African folktales constantly drive home the theme that there has to be sympathy and
mutuality in everything that exists. In most of these stories, a human character in a
helpless state, without relatives and sympathy from human society but only being assisted
by animals, culminated in the theme that nature naturally intervenes in times of
difficulties. In African folktales, as George Fortune puts it,
…the barrier between man and beast is abolished in favour of a convention that
animals, especially small animals, are wiser than humans and hold the key to their
predicaments if they are humble enough to ask for it and accept it. Small animals
befriend the persecuted and can transmit the magical means to salvation. The
familiar world is in constant communication with the unfamiliar world. The
frontiers of the visible are also crossed in folklore (Fortune 1974: 16).
In African folktales a human being is also understood as part and parcel of nature – hence
s/he should learn from nature. Within such a frame of mind, the individual sees his or her
well-being as inseparable from that of fellow creatures. African folktales aimed at
instilling a consciousness of humility and sympathy in society as well as with the natural
environment.
Apart from the views expressed above, there are other scholars who argue that the
African world-view of relationality is incompatible with the self-interested homo
economicus of liberal capitalism. Vernon Dixon (1976: 54-58) argued that the capitalist
doctrine of liberal individualism was incompatible with the African world-view. An
economic system that is based on the pursuit of self-interest is incompatible with the
African world-view. This incompatibility can be discerned from the fact that the
European world-view is based on “Men-to-Object” relationship while the African world-
view is “Man-to-Person” relationship, whereby the relationship between the “I” or the
self includes the phenomena as well as the noumena. In a mechanistic world-view such as
that of capitalism, there is a separation of the self and the phenomenal world. In this
process of separation, the phenomenal world becomes an object, an ‘it’. The phenomenal
world is seen as an entity which is totally independent of the self. In this world-view,
there is a distance between the observer and the phenomena, a distance which “is
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sufficiently great” to enable the observer to manipulate the observed without being
affected by it.
Dixon (1976: 58-59) argued that this separation of the self from nature and other people
has resulted in the objectification of nature and people. The idea of “empty perceptual
space” surrounding the self and separating it from everything else removes the self from
its natural and social surroundings and locates all entities in the universe in terms of
advancing the “self’s interests within the circle of empty perceptual space, that is the self
itself”. Outside the self, there are only objects that can be measured and manipulated.
Consequently, nature is seen as an “external, impersonal system which does not have the
self’s interest at heart”, hence it has to be subdued to the self’s ambitions and goals. As
such, “the individual becomes the centre of social space” in such a way that “there is no
perception of the group as a whole except as a collection of individuals”. This
individualistic conception of the self as basically an individual, tends to limit the
individual’s obligations and responsibilities because “the individual only participates in a
group; s/he does not feel [as part] of the group” (Dixon 1976: 59).
The individual does not feel as one of the group because in the individualistic world of
modern capitalism, society is primarily a composition of self-interested individuals who
are not concerned with the well-being of others. As we have seen in chapters 3, 4 and 5,
the rationality of modern capitalism thrives on a mechanistic world-view that presumes
everything to be self-enclosed with intrinsic properties that cannot be subsumed under
general existence. Contrary to such a world-view, the African world-view advocates that
there is no gap between the self and the phenomenal world because one is simply an
extension of the other. Dixon went as far as saying that Africans see a human being as
intrinsically related to nature, whereby a meaningful existence is that which is lived in
harmony with nature:
Their [i.e Africans] aim is to maintain balance or harmony among the various
aspects of the universe. Disequilibrium may result in troubles such as human
illness, drought, and social disruption. …According to this orientation, magic,
voodoo, mysticism are not efforts to overcome a separation of man and nature,
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but rather the use of forces in nature to restore harmonious relationships between
man [sic] and the universe. The universe is not static or ‘dead’, it is a dynamic,
animate, living and powerful universe (Dixon 1976: 62-63).
What is implied in the above quotation is that there is no distinction between humanity
and nature because being human entails being part of nature and the self’s well-being
depends on the well-being of nature.39 Dixon argued that due to the fact that the
individual is in a symbiotic relationship with nature, the desire to subdue nature as an
impersonal object is substituted by the need to participate in nature’s processes.
Comparatively, Dixon said that the western world-view postulates the self as
individualistic, autonomous, self-interested, and fundamentally isolated from nature and
other people. From the perspective of the African world-view, “communities are
relational complexes that are contrary to the European individuals” who are primarily
defined as self-contained units that constitute the community (Dixon 1976: 65-70).
The world-view of African humanism thus engenders the reality of dependence and
interdependence among all that exists. This world-view has a bearing on the African
understanding of a person from the perspective of life in general. Harvey Sindima
observed that:
The African concept of person is grounded in the concept of life, which is the
basis for understanding all creation and is a central, all-embracing and
overarching notion informing a manner of living in the world. This sense of being
connected, bounded in one common life, informs human relationships and defines
behavioural patterns. The African concept of community also arises from this
understanding of bondedness to natural life or the feeling of being in the network
of life. From this it follows that the ethical imperative is not to treat the other or
nature as a means, since the other is also part of the self. People belong to each
other, being bonded in one common life. Therefore consciousness is not
consciousness of self but always consciousness of the flow of life in the
community world (Sindima 1995: 127).
39
As we have seen in chapter 3, early modernity engendered a conception of morality as primarily a
contract or an artifice that is entered in terms of agreements between rational, self-sufficient and
autonomous individuals. Such a conception of morality tends to do away with the idea of the natural basis
of morality. Hobbes’ Leviathan characterized the natural world as hostile to the idea of natural cohabitation
among human beings on the grounds that human beings were postulated as viciously self-interested. The
whole doctrine of self-interest in economics is based on the assumption that we are naturally selfish,
therefore capitalism takes this conception of human nature into consideration in theory and practice.
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The implication of Sindima’s observation is that this African understanding of life

implies that human existence has to be understood within the context of the generality of
existence whereby life is the basis of this togetherness. Having postulated life as central
to the African world-view, Sindima argued that life is the basis of all ethical living and
reasoning. The individual’s way of life has to express this element of bondedness in life
as it embraces all that exists.
Since life is based on the principle of interconnectedness, human well-being is wholly

immersed in the processes of life. As Sindima (1995: 151) writes: “The African world
talks about life, not being. Furthermore, when participation is used to express
bondedness, it brings to Western mind a picture of individuals coming together to form
collectivities. This is not the case in Africa; people are already within the texture of life –
they do not have to come together”. In other words, the African understanding of life as
an interconnected whole presupposes the idea that the individual is intrinsically
connected to the fabric of life. Within such a world-view, a human being exists
meaningfully in a state of communication rather than participation: “Participation not
only fails to express the African idea of living in the fabric of life, but also defines
persons in terms of agency”. Defining persons in terms of agency entails a utilitarian
mentality whereby the individual’s worth “is dependent on function, ability or capacity.
This mindset entails serious ethical problems, especially in terms of care: Are people to
be cared for because of what they can do for society or by the mere fact that they are
humans? Functionalism is not the way Africans understand living in bondedness in life”.
In this type of reasoning, instrumental reasoning that facilitates utility maximisation falls
apart.
While the argument here has been that the modern economic theory of self-interest is
incompatible with the African world-view, the other side of this argument is that an
individual ontology arising from such a world-view is based on the idea that the
individual can only be recognised as a person by virtue of belonging to the community.
Traditional African thought espoused the idea that the individual exists by virtue of
belonging to the community. The understanding is that the individual is what s/he is
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because of the existence of other people or the community. This belongingness is

popularly known as the ethic of Ubuntu.
6.4 Centrality of Ubuntu in African Humanism

Augustine Shutte (1993: 46-47) has argued that the Western notion of a human being was
deficient because “the self is always envisaged as something inside a person, or at least as
a kind of a container of mental properties and powers”. Consequently, there is a
dichotomy between “the self and the world, a self that controls and changes the world and
is in some sense above it…”. Shutte goes on to say that in some Western patterns of
thought, “it is community which forms individuals”. The idea that the individual is
formed by the community also finds its expression in the “Zulu/Xhosa proverb that says:
Umuntu ngomuntu ngabantu” [my italics] (Shutte 1993: 47). What this entails is that a
person is a person because of other persons. In other words, the individual’s personhood
and identity are socially mediated.
Stanlake Samkange and Marie Samkange (1980: 38-39) proceed to define Ubuntu/Unhu
as follows:
The attention one human being gives to another: the kindness, courtesy,
consideration and friendliness in the relationships between people; a code of
behaviour, an attitude to other people and to life; is embodied in unhu or Ubuntu.
Hunhuism [sic] is, therefore, something more than humanness, deriving from the
fact that one is a human being.
Here Stanlake and Marie Samkange define Ubuntu in relationship to those qualities that
are socially appreciated. Another meaning of Ubuntu that can be deciphered from this
definition is that Ubuntu implies being human. Someone who has those described virtues
in her or his character is thus considered to have Ubuntu/Botho/Unhu. Behavioural
qualities such as those that arise from selfishness are thus considered to lack humanness.
Equally, one can infer from the ethic of Ubuntu that economic relations that are based
solely on the pursuit of self-interest would be incompatible with Ubuntu because such
actions imply that one only sees others as means to the attainment of one’s self-interest
(cf. Samkange and Samkange 1980: 38).
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Mogobe Ramose, offering a philosophical analysis of Ubuntu, states that Ubuntu can be
understood best when it is hyphenated as follows, ubu-ntu. This makes the word Ubuntu
to be understood as comprised of two words in one. As he puts it:
It consists of the prefix ubu- and the stem ntu-. Ubu- evokes the idea of be-ing in
general. It is enfolded be-ing before it manifests itself in the concrete form or
mode of existence of a particular entity. Ubu- as enfolded be-ing is always
oriented towards enfoldment, that is, incessant continual concrete manifestation
through particular forms and modes of being. In this sense ubu- is always oriented
towards –ntu. At the ontological level, there is no strict and literal separation and
division between ubu- and –ntu (Ramose 1999: 50).
Ramose (1999: 51-53) goes on to say that Ubu- implies a general conceptualisation of
being while –ntu means “the nodal point at which be-ing assumes concrete form of being
in the process of continual unfoldment…”. This unfoldment means “the indivisible one-
ness and whole-ness” and this implies that “Ubuntu is a verb noun”. From this definition
of Ubuntu as being and becoming, Ramose deduced that “Umuntu understood as be-ing
human (humanness); a humane, respectful and polite attitude towards others constitutes
the core meaning of this aphorism” because “Ubu-ntu then not only describes a condition
of be-ing, insofar as it is indissolubly linked to umuntu, but it is also the recognition of
be-ing becoming…”. Hence, “the imperative, ngabantu” reinforces the idea that being
human is not enough, one has to act in a way that shows “the embodiment of ubu-untu
(bo-tho)” because “human conduct is based unpon ubu-ntu”.
The novelty behind Ramose’s (1999: 80) definition of Ubuntu is that it has both
ontological and cosmological dimensions in a way that shows their inseparability.
Ontologically, Ramose observed that “African traditional thought emphasises the
primacy of the greater environing wholeness over that of human individuality. This
means that there is a mutual bondedness between the greater environing wholeness and
human individuality” The cosmological implication is that “[t]he human individual is
inextricably linked to the all-encompassing universe”. In other words, the individual
exists within a state of symbiosis with everything that exists.
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Mvume Dandala, in turn, characterised Ubuntu as the nature of what it means to be

human. Within such a characterisation, Ubuntu is what the individual thrives to achieve
in their day to day living. As he puts it:
The concept of Ubuntu can never be reduced to a methodology of doing

something. It is a statement about being, about fundamental things that qualify a
person to be a person. …Being human is achieved as a person shows
characteristics that qualify him or her to be so regarded. Hence it is quite possible
to refer to a person as a ‘non-person’ or ‘asingomuntu lowu’…The way one
relates to other people and the surroundings becomes a critical factor in
determining one’s beingness. Greeting or not greeting people, and how this is
done, becomes a critical factor – not merely to demonstrate how sociable one is,
but rather how human one is (Dandala 1996: 70).
In other words, Ubuntu finds its expression in the way one relates to other people. In
these relationships, one displays his or her humanness by acknowledging the presence of
others through greeting. However, if Ubuntu is expressed through doing, it becomes
contradictory to see it as a state of being.40 However, Dandala went on to say that, “The
saying ‘umuntu ngomuntu ngabantu’ becomes a statement that levels all people. It
essentially states that no one can be self-sufficient and that interdependence is a reality of
all” (Dandala 1996: 70). In Ubuntu, we articulate our interdependence on each other as
human beings as well as our need for each other. This comes through the realisation that
as individuals no one is self-sufficient, hence we cannot afford to be neutral to the
interests of others because a sense of what is morally praiseworthy is what the individual
is socialised into.
Peter Kasenene (1994: 141-142) observes that the Venda people express Ubuntu more
radically when they say that “Muthu u bebelwa munwe, ‘A person is born for the other’.
40
Ramose (1999: 51-53) argued that Ubuntu should be understood as a process instead of being understood
as static. As he puts it: “Umuntu is the specific entity which continues to conduct an inquiry into be-ing,
experience, knowledge and truth. This is an activity rather than an act. It is an ongoing process impossible
to stop unless motion itself is stopped. On this reasoning, ubu- may be regarded as be-ing becoming and
this evidently implies the idea of motion. …Because motion is the principle of be-ing, for ubuntu do-ing
takes precedence over the do-er without at the same time imputing either radical separation or
irreconcilable opposition between the two”. In other words, Ubuntu is about and becoming within the
matrix of relationships with other human beings. It is more about activity than being. This becoming aspect
of Ubuntu was captured well by Ramose when he said, “In other words, be-ing human is not enough. One
is enjoined, yes, commanded as it were, to actually become a human being. What is decisive then is to
prove oneself to be the embodiment of ubu-untu (bo-tho) because the fundamental ethical, social and legal
judgement of human worth and human conduct is based upon ubu-ntu. The judgement, pronounced with
approval or disapproval respectively, is invariably expressed in these terms: ke motho or gase motho”.
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This shows that …a person is a person through, with and for the community”. What this
saying implies is that a human being comes into existence for others. An individual’s life
is a gift for others. It is partly for the reason that the individual is a gift for others that
Kasenene goes on to say: “An individual who disregards the family or the community
and pursues personal interests is viewed as anti-social, and excessive individualism is
regarded as being a denial of one’s corporate existence. African societies emphasise
interdependence and an individual’s obligations to the community” (Kasenene 1994:
142). It is the idea of interdependence within the community that becomes a negation of
self-interest as a lack of Ubuntu/Botho.
Speaking of the origins of Ubuntu, Michael Gelfand (1973: 57-121) argued that in
African societies, Unhu “is derived from parents, from tribal practices from the distant
past. The parents teach their children unhu. The good man [sic] has unhu. He welcomes
visitors to his home where he receives them in the correct way due to the particular
visitor”. The idea that unhu is derived from the past instils a sense of responsibility on the
present generation for the furtherance of unhu into the future. According to Gelfand,
“Ultimately a person owes everything to his mudzimu [ancestor]; there is no doubt that a
person owes his unhu (his personality) to his vadzimu [ancestors]. His behaviour, his
consideration for others and his honesty are derived from his mudzimu” (Gelfand 1973:
121). What this implies is that the present generation owes its existence to the past, hence
it is its responsibility to sustain Unhu/Ubuntu/Botho into the future generations by living
virtuously at present.
In African culture, the greatest treasure which a parent can leave behind as lefa
(inheritance) to his or her descendants is botho. As Gelfand observed,
If a child lacks unhu his parents are blamed. Unhu is the correct way of living
according to the teachings of the [African] elders. A person with unhu behaves in
a good way, respects his parents and sets a good example. He shows respect to a
stranger, particularly one older than himself. A man possessed of unhu can adapt
himself to any environment; he will also be particularly careful not to damage the
reputation of another person, and careful to admit any wrong (Gelfand 1973: 139).
What is implied in the above quotation is that the responsibility of a parent is to socialise
his or her children into unhu. This socialisation into Unhu will enable the individual to
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live well with others in society and in different social circumstances in which the
individual might find themselves. A person is socialised into Unhu through the elders
who have more experience of what it means to be human than oneself. Unhu/Botho is the
foundation of moral reasoning. In this type of reasoning, one thinks with others by virtue
of sharing the same life with others in society and inheriting unhu from the past, hence
the individual will impart unhu into the future when they become an ancestor. The idea
that all generations are bonded in unhu is also integral to African proverbial wisdom.
6.4.1 Proverbial Wisdom on Ubuntu

In some of the African proverbs, moral advice is given on the basis that human actions
should be concerned with the present together with the future. To give an example, a
Sotho proverb says that: O se ka oa nyella nokeng ho bane tsatsi le leng o tla batla ho
nwa metsi teng – do not pollute the well because tomorrow you will want to come back
and drink water from it. A moral lesson in this proverb is that one should not upset the
present relationships because present relationships are a pledge for the future. Also,
another implication is that one should not despise the past because of the present. The
past has a contribution to make to the present in as much as the present will have a
contribution to make into the future. The above proverb finds its equivalent in the Shona
proverb that says: Kwaunobva kanda huyo, kwaunoenda kanda huyo – place a grinding
stone where you come from and where you go to. This means that one should live and
behave in such a way that the present does not compromise the future (Hamutyinei and
Plangger 1994: 376).
In the ethic of Ubuntu, the individual does not only exist in terms of fulfilling his or her
present needs, one has to take into account the needs of the future coming generations. In
other words, Ubuntu inculcates an awareness that the present harmonious relationships
are indispensable for future harmonious relationships. An ethical behaviour at present
that takes into consideration the concerns of the future generations is an investment for
the future because, as Gelfand observed, “the present is the whole of the past looking into
the future” (Gelfand 1981: 73). The implication of this observation is that future
existence is basically an extension of the present because that which will happen in future
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is partly occurring in the present. A Zulu proverb puts it well when it admonishes a short-
sighted person that, Musa ukuqeda ubudlelwano manje ngoba kusasa uzofuna ukubuyela
– Do not disrupt mutual relations at present because tomorrow you might want to come
back. Such a futuristic orientedness is an admonishment on the imperative of doing good
beyond one’s immediate existence, even beyond the grave. This entails that to be
concerned with one’s self-interest is not only to sever oneself from relationships within
the present, but it also means to sever oneself from the well-being of future generations.
As we have seen in chapter 5, modern economics which puts emphasis on short-run self-
interest cannot fulfil this dictum. In Ubuntu, the past is also celebrated as a way of
expressing solidarity between the past and the present.
6.4.2 Ubuntu and Solidarity of the Past and the Present

Ubuntu implies the integration of the past into the present through the celebration of the
lives of the ancestors. Those who are still living re-enact their relatedness with the past
through a process of remembering. In this act of remembering, the living enter into
communion with the ancestors. John Mbiti discerned this communion, whereby the living
give beer, water, milk, snuff or meat to the ancestors as an expression of fellowship
remembrance (Mbiti 1969: 26). Benezet Bujo (1997: 30) described the fellowship of the
living and their ancestors as anamnestic solidarity. In other words, anamnestic solidarity
implies keeping the memory of those who existed in the past. This anamnestic solidarity
is based on the African human urge to remain in symbiosis with the past in the present.
In brewing and slaughtering for the ancestors – Ukuhlabela amadlozi (Zulu) or Go

phahla badimo (Sotho) – the present community shares its life experiences with the past.
Whatever is happening now at present has to be acknowledged as happening because of
its relatedness to the past – it has been partly contributed to by the past. Credo Mutwa
observed that thoughts of the living do sustain souls of the ancestors through
remembering. In this process of remembering, communication between the ancestors and
the living is established (Mutwa 1996: 19-20). In the same vein, Bujo stated that this
anamnestic solidarity
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…has to include the gratitude towards all forefathers, [sic] who worked tirelessly
to ensure the human future of later generations. Their collective lifetime
experiences are passed on as wisdom to their offspring so that these will be able
to find their own identity, which again can lead to self-realisation and group
realisation only in anamnestic solidarity with the invisible community (Bujo
1997: 30-31)
In anamnestic solidarity with the ancestors, Ubuntu is expressed in the form of isintu
(African traditional ethico-religious practices) whereby the communal life of the living
and that of the ancestors is re-enacted as a gift to be shared and passed on. This sharing of
life is the primary link that unites members of the community of the living and their
ancestors. The conceptualisation of life as endless provides a symbiotic link between the
ancestors and their progenitors. In this symbiotic relationship, the ethical challenge
comes in the form of a realisation that the present generation is accountable to the well-
being of the future generations (Mazrui 1986: 11; Maier 1998: 52). Someone who exists
at present with the sole intention of pursuing one’s self-interest regardless of the
consequences of this self-interest to the well-being of the future generations would be
actually ignoring the contributions that have been made by those who have existed in the
past.
In Ubuntu, morality is not only for the individual’s well-being at present, rather, one
finds that a life lived virtuously at present promotes the well-being of the future
generations. A person who lives unethically at present assumes a future existence of
idlozi elibi – a vengeful ancestor whose previous anti-social behaviour can easily
influence the behaviour of his or her progenitors (Samkange and Samkange 1980: 51-52;
Gelfand 1973: 60-61).
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Ubuntu is also expressed in the Shona concept of Ukama.41 Ukama means being related
and interrelated, whereby human well-being and the well-being of everything that exists
is understood in terms of interrelatedness. Relationality is seen as indispensable to the
well-being of everything. Hamutyinei and Plangger (1994: 218-220) have the following
proverbs about Ukama that illustrate the centrality of relationality: Ukama hausukwi
nemvura hukabva (Relationships cannot be washed with water and get removed). Ukama
urimbo kudambura haubvi (Relationships are like bird lime; even after breaking it does
not vanish). Ukama makore hunopfekana (Relationships are like clouds; they
interpenetrate each other). In all these proverbs, the common motif is that relationality is
a given reality of our existence that cannot be disentangled. Nothing can have any
meaningful existence outside relatedness and interrelatedness.
6.4.3 Ubuntu and Ukama

In Ukama, human identity is not only restricted to fellow human beings. Rather it is also
traced to the natural environment through totemism. What it means to be human is not
only restricted to human society but also to the natural world. An ethic of Ukama is an
ethic of holism. It is holistic in the sense that my well-being as an individual has its
ontological meaning in relationship to my fellow human beings, those that are still alive,
ancestors, God and the environment. From this point of view, one can argue that while
the ethic of Ukama is a communal ethic, the ecological dimension enshrined in it
surpasses anthropological communalism. In Ukama, “a person can only be a person in,
with and through not just other people but in, with and through the natural environment”
(Murove 1999: 1; Prozesky 2003: 4).
41
The word Ukama means relationships or an understanding of reality in terms of relatedness.
Grammatically, Ukama is an adjective. As an adjective, its grammatical construction is U- Kama. U- is an
adjectival prefix and –kama is an adjectival stem. Taken as a sterm, -kama becomes a word which means
‘to milk a cow or a goat’. The idea of milking in Shona categories of thought suggests closeness and
affection. The noun for Ukama is Hama, meaning relative by blood or by marriage. When it is Ukama it
becomes an adjective which means being related or belonging to the same family. However, in Shona and
other African cultures, there is also a sense whereby Ukama is understood as not simply restricted to
immediate family ties or blood ties. People without blood ties can adopt terms like grandfather,
grandmother, mother, father, sister, brother, cousin and uncle towards each other as a way of expressing
friendly relationships (Dale 1994; 127; Gelfand 1981: 7-10; Bourdillon 1976: 34).
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Someone who observes Ukama or acts in a way that expresses their indebted to
relatedness and interrelatedness is commended as munhu chaiye (s/he is the epitome of
humanness). Ukama implies our human belongingness and the need to actualise this
belongingness with acts of generosity. To give an example, instead of telling someone
that they must share their food or material possessions with others, one can always put it
in a proverb that says: Ukama igasva hunozadziswa nokudya (Relatedness is a half
measure, it finds fulfilment in sharing). In this proverb a selfish person is admonished
with a proverbial reminder that Ukama is not a theoretical concept, but an existential
reality that should be enacted through sharing of food and possessions with others
(Murove 1999: 13).
Someone who shares what they have with those who do not have are actually promoting
Ubuntu or Ukama into the future. Equally someone who is obsessed with his or her self-
interest becomes susceptible to being anti-social. The reality of interdependence between
people as espoused in Ukama/Ubuntu is cultivated as indispensable to the African
personality because from childhood an African child is taught to share with those around
him or her. It is in sharing that Ukama is concretised. By virtue of Ukama, a person owes
his or her personality and character to his or her ancestors such that a child’s life is
understood as a prolongation of that of the ancestors. Hence the maxim Umuntu
ngomuntu ngabantu is an affirmation of this relatedness or Ukama. Taking into
consideration all that has been said about Ubuntu/Ukama, a crucial element that
characterises African humanism is relationality in human existence as well as among all
that exist.
6.5 Relationality and African Humanism

Leopold Senghor (1964: 72-74) advanced the argument that “negro-African reasoning is
intuitive by participation”. According to Senghor, this participation is inherited from
ancestors in whom a consciousness of the world according to which the subject and
object of observation, the natural and supernatural, the mundane and the divine, the
material and the spiritual, are united in an inseparable oneness. Senghor saw an African
as endowed with a sense of receptiveness or welcoming which was different from that
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type of thinking which was obsessed with differences. Contrary to this mechanistic
thinking, Senghor maintained that Africans do not draw a line between themselves and
the object: “[An African] does not hold it at a distance, nor does he merely look at it and
analyse it. After holding it at a distance, after scanning it without analysing it, he takes it
vibrant in his hands, careful not to kill or fix it”. What Senghor saw as typical of African
reason is that it was an embracive reasoning or a reasoning that sees threads of
interconnectedness among all that exist.
Senghor emphasised emotion and warmth as that which characterises African reason and
the resultant general attitude towards life in order to reject inhuman rationalism that
disentangles reality. Thus he defined negritude as
….the whole of the values of civilisation – cultural, economic, social, political –

which characterise the black peoples, more exactly the Negro-African world. It is
essentially instinctive reason, which pervades all these values, because it is reason
of the impressions, reason that it ‘seized’. It is expressed in the emotions, through
an abandonment of self in an identification with the object; through the myth, I
mean by images – archetypes of the collective soul, especially by the myth
primordially accorded to those of the cosmos. In other terms, the sense of
communion, the gift of imagination, the gift of rhythm – these are the traits of
negritude… (Senghor 1964: 50).
Senghor’s argument as stated in the above quotation is that African reasoning is relational
reasoning that is based on feeling all that exists as integral to one’s being. In this
reasoning, the individual’s perception of his or her surroundings is premised on the
principle of being in harmony with others or in communion with everything in existence
to the extent that the individual’s well-being depends on his or her predisposition to move
in rhythm with all that exists. Feelings imply acknowledging the presence of others rather
than one’s own subjectivity. Feelings give rise to a rationality that emphasises
togetherness with everything in life. Africans do not only feel the presence of those who
are sharing the present life with them, but they also feel the presence of those (ancestors)
who have existed in the past as participants in the well-being of those who live in the
present (Mazrui et al 1999: 635).
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By postulating African rationality as primarily relational through participation, Senghor

advanced the idea that the individual finds his or her identity in relationships with others.
If individuals are seen as only self-interested, and their existence in society as only a
contract as we have seen in chapters 3, 4 and 5, their participation becomes that which is
based on mutual deception. Thus the idea of seeing the individual in terms of communion
and participation is indispensable in understanding the African identity as espoused in
this relational rationality:
…the Negro-African sympathises, abandons his [sic] personality to become

identified with the Other. He dies to be reborn in the Other. He does not
assimilate, he is assimilated. He lives in common life with the Other; he lives in
symbiosis… ‘I think therefore I am’, Descartes writes…The negro-African would
say: ‘I feel, I dance the Other; I am… (Senghor 1964: 72-73).
Contrary to the Cartesian rationality that premised the individual’s identity on rationality
as the paramount characteristic that accords uniqueness to the individual, Senghor argued
that the individual’s identity that is inspired by African rationality derives from
relationships with others. On the basis of the African relational rationality that is
espoused by Senghor, the individual’s identity is something communal or is an identity
that ceases to be meaningful outside the realm of communion with others in society as
well as with all realities that constitute existence.
John Mbiti echoed Senghor when he argued that in the African context the individual’s
identity is understood as communally constituted:
The individual does not and cannot exist alone except corporately. Only in terms
of other people does the individual become conscious of his own being, his own
duties, his privileges and responsibilities towards himself and other people. When
he suffers he does not suffer alone but with the corporate group, his neighbours
and his relatives whether dead or living…The individual can only say: I am
because we are, and since we are, therefore I am (Mbiti 1969: 108).42
42
Mbiti’s last assertion about the human being is a sharp contradiction to Descartes whose philosophical
pilgrimage of doubt led him to a conclusion that: “I think, therefore I am” – Cogito ergo sum. Descartes
came to this conclusion after doubting everything in existence as possibly deceptive; hence the ‘I am’
makes mind more certain than matter and the minds of other people. Other things that exist become known
only by inference from what is known of the mind (Russell 1991: 547-551). The individual’s mind does not
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What Mbiti’s is implying in the above quotation is that the individual’s existence and
identity are caused by the community. The community existed prior to the ‘I’ of the
individual. Here the individual sees himself and his well-being in terms of the well-being
of the community. The other implication that we can deduce from the above thought is
that the individual’s identity is not something instantaneous or self-determined, but it is
derivative from relationships within the community at present, in the past as well as with
the natural species. One becomes what one is because of these relationships.
Kenneth Kaunda argued that the African is immersed in experience, and is moulded by
experience. Kaunda went on to enumerate those characteristics within African society
which he saw as typical of African humanism. The first characteristic is that Africans
enjoy the presence of other people:
We do not regard it as impertinence or an invasion of our privacy for someone to

ask us personal questions, nor have we any compunction about questioning others
in like manner. …Our curiosity…is an expression of our belief that we are all
wrapped up together in this bundle of life and therefore a bond already exists
between myself and a stranger before we open our mouths to speak (Kaunda
1966: 32).
In this characteristic, Africans are endowed with a welcoming attitude towards other
people. Such an attitude implies openness and communicability. This communicability is
possible because life is basically lived in togetherness. The whole life is a celebration of
togetherness. The idea of a celebratory attitude towards life becomes an antithesis to the
individualistic notion of privacy which presupposes that the community is external to the
individual’s well-being. Thus Kaunda emphasised the idea of communal bondedness as
follows:
enter into communion with the minds of other people. The Cartesian rationality has been seen as
representative of modern western individualism which emphasizes the individual’s incommunicability and
singularity as indispensable to what it means to be a person. Elochukwu Uzukwu argued that there is a
sharp difference between the African and the western understanding of a person: “While the African
definition of a person displays the human person as subsistent relationship – in other words, the person as
fundamentally ‘being-with’, ‘belonging to’ – Western philosophy lays emphasis on the absolute originality
and concreteness of the human person, ‘being-for-iself’…However, Western systems wish to guard against
the dissolution of the person in relationship, the ‘I’ is already constituted before it chooses to be related.
The autonomy and the incommunicability of the ‘I’ are fundamental (Uzukwu 1995: 42-45).
156
Our whole life is togetherness and to be cut off from our fellow human beings is
to die in the soul. …We are known of our laughter, music and dancing. Rhythm is
the very expression of the life force within us; it is symbolic both for our
relationship with other people and with all created things. …Every important
event in the life of the village and all the major milestones of our personal lives
are commemorated by ceremonials which include music and dancing. And it is at
such times that the barrier between the natural and the supernatural crashes down.
We are conscious of only one world – living generations sway in rhythm with
gods and ancestral spirits (Kaunda 1966: 35-36).
What is implied by Kaunda in the above quotation is that in African humanism, life is
enjoyed in the context of togetherness. This togetherness is an expression of human
relatedness and interrelatedness of all realities that share life with human beings. It is
within such a context of relatedness and interrelatedness that the individual’s life has its
ultimate meaning. Whatever event occurred in the life of the individual is shared with the
whole community as an occasion for celebration. This celebration connects the living and
the ancestors into a world of oneness. A persistent motif in African humanism is that of
celebrating human nature. This is partly because there is an inherent existential life
outlook that sees human beings as inevitably belonging to each other and to the web of
life. Kaunda went as far as saying: “Our optimism springs from our faith in people”
(Kaunda 1966: 36). Having faith in people implies that human nature is endowed with a
nature to belong to the community, and that the individual is originally a communal
being.
6.6 African Humanism and the Primacy of Community

From what has been said in the preceding sections of this chapter, it is clear that African
humanism is communitarian in the sense that much emphasis in the conceptualisation of
the individual is placed on the role of the community or that the community exists prior
to the individual. However, such a claim is also found among western scholars.43 The
43
Western communitarians such as Charles Taylor (1996: 191-197) are much known for their
communitarian approach to ethics. Charles Taylor’s most famous defence of communitarianism is that
human beings “develop their characteristically human capacities in society”. According to Taylor, “Living
in society is a necessary condition of the development of rationality, or of becoming a moral
agent…[O]utside society, or in some variants outside certain kinds of society, distinctively human
capacities could not develop”. Taylor’s communitarian argument puts emphasis on the fact that even the
tradition of individual rights that is emphasised so much by libertarians or individualists presupposes a
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notion of community in African humanism goes far beyond the usual anthropocentric
communitarianism in the sense that the community that is espoused in African humanism
embraces the natural world, the realm of the ancestors and human society as one and the
same reality of community. Hence one cannot talk of either of these dimensions of
community without implicating the other.
Ifeanyi Menkiti made a comparative analysis between the western and the African
understanding of community, after which he had the following to say:
Western writers have generally interpreted the “community” in such a way that it
signifies nothing more than a mere collection of self-interested persons, each with
his private set of preferences, but all of whom get together nonetheless because
they realise, each to each, that in association they can accomplish things which
they are not able to accomplish otherwise. In this primarily additive approach,
whenever the term ‘community’ is used, we are meant to think of the aggregated
sum of individuals comprising it (Menkiti 1984: 179).
Menkiti’s observation here is that in western societies community is basically understood

as a contract in which individuals come together as a way of protecting their self-
interests. Within this contractarian conceptualisation of community, community is simply
an association of individuals who happen to come together for their individual purposes.
Menkiti (1984: 197) argued that this understanding of community is not just “an
ontological claim, but a methodological recommendation to the various social or
humanistic disciplines interested in the investigation of the phenomenon of individuals in
groups; hence the term ‘methodological individualism’…”. According to Menkiti, such
an understanding of community is “at odds with the African view of community” because
in the African understanding of community, the individual is thoroughly fused in the
“collective we”.
Menkiti (1984: 180) went on to argue that the community was indispensable to the
formation of the individual’s character because it was an organic whole. In western
society, community is a random collection of individuals or “a non-organic bringing
social context. At this juncture, Taylor’s communitarian argument echoes African humanistic claims that
the individual is an individual because of other individuals.
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together of atomic individuals into a unit more akin to an association than to

community”. The argument here is that society is an organic whole in the sense that it
exists before the individual. It follows that the individual can only attain his or her
individuality within a social context. Menkiti concluded that when community is
understood as a random collection of atomic individuals, social existence becomes
plausible when “organised around the postulation of individual rights”.44 Contrary to the
idea of the primacy of individual rights, Menkiti said that “[i]n the African
understanding, priority is given to the duties which individuals owe to the collectivity,
and their rights, whatever these may be, are seen as secondary to their exercise of their
duties”. African humanism puts emphasis on communal well-being as a pre-requisite to
individual well-being.
In the same vein, Edison Zvobgo refuted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of
1948 on the grounds that it was a declaration of atomic individualism. His argument
against this declaration was that it expressed the western view of human rights whereby a
person is seen as a “separate, isolated, autonomous and self-determining individual, who,
apart from any social context, is a bearer of human rights” (Zvobgo 1979: 93). The
declaration of human rights hinged on the presumption that individuals are atomic and
self-interested, hence social existence was viable when understood as a contract rather
than a communion. Within the African individual ontology, on the other hand, such
presumptions are inconceivable because the idea of community is based on communion
in the sharing of communal values. As it was argued in the previous sections, African
humanism maintains that the individual cannot be abstracted from relationships. Obinna
Okere echoed Zvobgo when he said that “[l]iving in Africa means abandoning the right to
44
The language of individual rights has been seen by many scholars as incompatible with the African
understanding of a person and community because in Ubuntu, the emphasis is on respect for other human
beings as an expression of what it means to be human. The language of rights is based on atomic
individualism. This is the argument that was made by Charles Taylor when he said that a society that puts
too much emphasis on individual rights would tend to forget that “an assertion of the primacy of rights is
impossible because to assert the rights in question is to affirm the capacities, and granted that the social
thesis is true concerning capacities, this commits us to an obligation to belong” (Taylor 1996: 189). A
cultural situation that emphasizes the primacy of individual rights gives the impression that the individual is
owed by society. As we have seen in chapter 5, advocates of self-interest accuse community of oppressing
the individual. Thus individual rights were emphasized as the foundation of modern capitalism with almost
no mentioning of community rights.
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be an individual, particular, selfish, aggressive…in order to be with others” (Okere 1984:

149).
The assumption is that the individual’s well-being depends entirely on his or her
belonging to the community and not the other way round. Individuals are not seen as
autonomous and in competition against each other, but rather in communion with each
other. Eboussi Boulaga (1984: 181-188) observed that “the human being is a being of
relationship, and is fulfilled only by visible reticulation with the other, by this complex of
relationships with the other”. Thus he refuted individualism on the grounds that: “Human
being-together is the enigmatic form of the unity of human beings, which is asserted by
the fact that different manners of this being-together mutually limit each other, cause
mutual problems, and have meaning only by their mutual relationship. Each taken by
itself is contradictory, destructive”. What is implied by Boulaga here is that the individual
cannot have a meaningful existence outside the reality of communal relatedness. It is
within the communal context that the individual can assert her or his humanness.
Without communal embeddedness, human life degenerates into unintelligibility. The

starting point for understanding a human being and his or her ultimate well-being is based
on the context of relationality in the community of the living, ancestors, the natural
environment and God. Jomo Kenyata alluded to this insight when he observed that:
The selfish or self-regarding man [sic] has no name or reputation in the Gikuyu
community. An individualist is looked upon with suspicion and is given a
nickname of mwebongia, one who works only for himself and is likely to end up
as a wizard. He cannot expect that everything he does will prosper, for the weight
of opinion makes him feel his crime against society. Religious sanction works
against him, too, for Gikuyu religion is always on the side of solidarity. The aged
and weak are under the special protection of the ancestral spirits, and they are
never far away from home (Kenyata 1953: 199).
The implication of Kenyata’s observation is that an individual who is selfish is regarded

as a source of potential evil. Such an individual lives antagonistically to the reality of
communal solidarity. It is this denial of communal solidaristic existence that makes a
self-interested individual to be judged as a potential evil. Such a self-interested person
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cannot be expected to build community; rather s/he would be a destroyer of the

community. Someone who is nurtured by the community and then decides to exist in
pursuit of his or her self-interest would inevitably diminish the well-being of that
community. African humanism premises individual success or prosperity on communal
harmony or Kunzwanana (Shona) Ukuzwana (Zulu) – mutual understanding (Gelfand
1981: 9).
The argument that the individual can only attain his or her human potential in the
communal context was also made by Kwame Gyekye (1997: 38) when he said that a
human being was “a communal being by nature”. According to him, “[t]his
communitarian conception of the person implies that, since the human being does not
voluntarily choose to enter into a human community, community life is not optional for
the individual”. The implication of this argument is that human beings are communal
beings by nature, and this can be observed in that they have no choice on issues of
entrance into the human community. The prior existence of the community carries with it
the possibilities for the flourishing of the individual’s well-being.
Benezet Bujo on this matter said that the primacy of community constitutes what African
ethics is all about. It is within the context of the community that the individual is able to
attain her full individual potentials because the African community has an ethic of caring
that helps to support the well-being of the individual:
African ethics is not concerned about respect for one’s self: the community
occupies centre stage in such a way that the individual members must always bear
in mind and aim at a growth in quality of life for all members…No one lives for
himself alone, no one dies alone. No one feels alone and abandoned, for everyone
is our brother or sister. If this relatedness to the ‘we’ is not to crumble and
decompose into a plurality of ‘I’, a primal harmony in the community and a
primal trust in each other are necessary (Bujo 2001: 60-61).
Bujo’s observation is that the individual subsists within the community, hence the
individual’s actions are aimed at advancing the interests of the community. It is in
promoting the interests of the community that the individual is only able to come to the
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realisation that s/he belongs to the community or to others. An emphasis on the autonomy
of the individual at the expense of the community can only promote the illusion that
individuals have an independent existence outside the community. It is the community
that shares itself in the making of the individual’s identity. We would not be far from the
truth if we were to say that the individual’s sense of an ‘I’ is an ‘I’ that is evoked in
relatedness or solidarity with others. The prior existence of community as the bedrock of
human relationality and individual well-being spells out the idea that the individual
cannot be understood as self-sufficient, but that s/he exists in a state where s/he
continuously needs others.
6.6.1 Arguments against the Communitarianism of African Humanism

The idea that the individual needs the community for her ontological well-being is
sometimes critiqued as a recipe for individual oppression and lack of economic progress.
Augustine Shutte argues that the idea that the individual is free, and yet belongs to the
community, is contradictory because:
Freedom is self-determination, community means dependence on others…African

thought fails to do full justice to the idea of freedom, to the fact that persons are
self-determining. Individual freedom seems incompatible with full dependence on
community, and, as community is the necessary means for personal growth and
fulfilment, individual freedom has to go. There is an inbuilt tendency for the
group to dominate, making its own existence an end in itself rather than existing
for individuals who compose it (Shutte 2001: 12-13).
There are two issues that are raised by Shutte as problematic to the African notion of
community. The first issue has to do with the problem of freedom within the context of
community. Shutte’s understanding of community as implying absolute dependence on
others does not do justice to the African understanding of community. The African
understanding of community as illustrated by African scholars such as Menkiti, Mbiti,
Zvobgo, to mention just a few, is that the community forms individuals in the context of
interdependence rather than dependence. In this African conception of community,
individuals are free for each other rather than free from each other. Individual freedom is
a freedom that is enjoyed in togetherness rather than in solitude. The second problem is
that Shutte sees society as actually a composition of individuals – thus reiterating the
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doctrine of atomic individualism. To say that the community ‘exists for the individuals
who compose it’ is tantamount to making the community subservient to the wishes and
whims of the individual. Such a claim is exactly the opposite of the African
understanding of community.
African communal relationalism advocates that the individual exists in such a way that
his or her well-being is wholly determined by the relations that are established in all the
realms of existence. The individual is determined and partly determines the course of
these relationships. Placid Tempels expressed it well when he said that the individual is
necessarily an individual within the community, and that the individual exists within a
state of “real ontological dependence” (Tempels 1959: 109). The notion of ontological
dependence implies that the relations between the individual and community cannot be
abstracted or that they are not based on contracts that are entered to safeguard individual
self-interests. In other words, these relations cannot be disentangled because they are not
artificially constructed, but simply given within the community of existence. Gyekye
made a crucial observation when he said that in African communalism “the individual
inevitably requires the succour and the relationships of others in order to realise or satisfy
basic needs” (Gyekye 1987: 155).
Another argument that is given against the communitarianism of African humanism is

that there is a symbiosis between individualism and capitalistic development; therefore
too much community can only lead to underdevelopment. Paul Kennedy (1988: 140)
attributed what he saw as the absence of the entrepreneurial spirit in Africa to the fact that
African communitarianism was inherently inhibitive to the spirit of capitalism: “Thus,
entrepreneurs who wish to operate within kinship or community situation, where the
social pressures against individual acquisitiveness and mobility are still and ‘big men’ are
expected to redistribute wealth, must find some way to resolve a central contradiction
[sic]”. Kennedy’s assumption is that African communities are closed systems that are not
welcoming to economically innovative ideas. It is partly for this reason that he saw
Christianity in Africa as actually promoting the spirit of entrepreneurship. According to
Kennedy, those who were converted to Christianity were able to cut ties with the
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traditional community and put their business innovative ideas into practice under the
pretext of religion: “Church membership provided religious justification, spiritual
protection and practical assistance for the converts in their struggle to disentangle
themselves from the demands of their matrikin and concentrate instead on building up
business and nuclear family interests” (Kennedy 1988: 140).
Apart from the influence which the Christian religion is believed to have had on the
evolution of the ethic of individualism and capitalism in Africa, Kennedy (1988: 142)
argues that Islam played a similar role. According to Kennedy, Islamic conversion
provided “the same ‘release’ both from the demands of kin and community in time and
capital and from the fear of group hostility towards those who are perceived to be self-
seeking”. Once released from these traditional communal relations, Kennedy claimed that
individuals were able to enter into economic relations without any fear from traditional
communal sanctions:
…the Islamic ban on the consumption of alcohol and certain foods, as well as the
need to follow a partly separate ritual and social life, all provided the opportunity
for entrepreneurs to reduce their level of involvement in traditional society. Yet
this behaviour no longer incurred community displeasure since it was now judged
to be religiously determined rather than the result of selfish individualism
(Kennedy 1988: 142).
Kennedy’s argument as stated in the above paragraph is that the presence of capitalism in
Africa was facilitated by an element of individualism that is embedded in the Christian
and Moslem religions. The ethic of individualism that is indispensable to the
development of modern capitalism was to a greater extent facilitated by Christianity
when it disentangled individuals from communal relationships and emphasised the fact
that individuals were accountable for their own actions instead of communities.
Christianity and Islam became a way of escaping traditional communalism.
The same type of argument was also made by John Iliffe (1983: 48) when he said that a
Christian Evangelical by the name of Albert Atcho, of Ivory Coast, preached a peculiar
type of Christianity that emphasised the importance of entrepreneurship. Iliffe alleged
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that while Atcho was a healer, his healing activities were aimed at individuals instead of
communities: “Atcho healed individuals; he did not stress the restoration of harmony to
group…And it was entirely in keeping with the association of spiritual force with
material prosperity that he should have been an ascetic but [also] a wealth entrepreneur”.
This type of reasoning seems to echo Max Weber’s thesis which we saw in chapter 3,
alleging that there was some early connection between the rise of modern capitalism and
the Protestant ethic of individualism in the western world. The argument that capitalism
does not need communities arises from an academic view that sees modern capitalism as
synonymous with an autonomous individual. Thus economic problems that beset Africa
are mostly traced to Africa’s communitarian ethic. One finds Stephen Theron rebuking
Shutte for advocating the ethic of Ubuntu on the grounds that,
As for the ethical implications, the proverb [Umuntu ngomuntu ngabantu] simply
side-steps the slow Western development of the idea of personal responsibility,
charted in the Bible and elsewhere, and now known to Africans. Without this
consciousness the fruit of technology cannot be enjoyed. One cannot even drive a
car safely unless the driver realises that it depends on him and him alone whether
the car stays on the road. The proverb teaches Africans to evade responsibility,
rather, to hide behind the collective decision of the tribe (Theron 1995: 35).
According to Theron, the problem of economic development in Africa should be traced to

the fact that Africans understand themselves in terms of communal belonging with too
much emphasis on collective responsibility. Capitalistic economic success or
development is only possible on condition that Africans come to see themselves as
individuals who are solely responsible for their actions. The success of modern
capitalistic development depends on Africa’s readiness to embrace the ethic of
individualism instead of the traditional communal ethic.
Theron’s argument against Ubuntu and the resultant communalistic ethic it aspires to has
two fallacies which make him contradict himself to the point of extreme
unreasonableness. The first fallacy arises from his understanding of responsibility. His
understanding of responsibility is based on the idea that it is individuals on their own who
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should take responsibility for their actions. This understanding of responsibility is based
on the presumption that individuals are responsible for their actions because they are
autonomous beings. Thus the postulation of individuals as autonomous beings
corresponds very well with his analogy of a car that stays on the road because of the
individual’s realisation that ‘it depends on him and him alone that the car stays on the
road’. Needless to say that such an analogy militates against his individualistic notion of
a human being. If we are to employ his analogy of a car as our counter argument, we
have to say that the car can only stay on the road in relationship with other factors such as
weather visibility, attentiveness of other drivers, just to mention a few. If any of these
factors can be found wanting, the car will not stay on the road simply because of the
individual’s sense of responsibility. All these arguments still reinforce communal
embeddedness of responsibility as espoused in Ubuntu (Murove 1999: 39).
The arguments of the critics of African humanism have a common salient economic
assumption which is that its world-view and ontology are incompatible with the
machinations of modern capitalism that Africa has inherited from the western world.45
The post-colonial argument that was made by African politicians was that the self-
interested homo economicus inherited from colonial capitalism was incompatible with the
economic relations that are espoused in African humanism. As we shall see in the
following section, African humanism refutes an economic system such as capitalism on
the grounds that it is contrary to African humanistic values. These African humanistic
values can only lead us to the idea that wealth should be owned in common, or that
wealth is there for the whole community rather than for the benefit of a few.
45
World-renowned African scholar, Ali Mazrui (1990: 5; 1999: 429-494) traced the failure of capitalism in
post-colonial Africa to the problem of juxtaposing western capitalistic values to African ones. He traced the
litany of Africa’s poor economic performance to the fact that “Africa borrowed wrong things from the
West – even the wrong components of capitalism. We borrowed the profit motive but not the
entrepreneurial spirit. We borrowed the acquisitive appetites of capitalism but not the creative risk taking”.
Mazrui’s other argument is that the introduction of western capitalism through colonialism violated the
Weberian thesis of the Protestant ethic of capitalist development through hard work and frugality. This
twisting of values resulted in post-colonial economic relations that encouraged “ostentatious consumption”
without production.
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6.7 African Humanism as the basis of African Socialism

Post-colonial African scholars and politicians argued that the humanistic values of
African society, such as Ubuntu/Ukama, and their resultant communalistic vision of
society are evidence enough that traditional African society was a collective and caring
society; hence an economic system that is compatible with African humanistic values is
socialism.46 This is the argument that was adopted by Julius Nyerere (1968: 198) when he
said: “Traditionally we lived as families, with individuals supporting each other and
helping each other on terms of equality”. Nyerere went on to say that the foundation of
socialism is “a belief in the oneness of man [sic] and the common historical destiny of
mankind. Its basis, in other words, is human equality. …The purpose of socialism is the
service of man, regardless of colour, size, shape, skill, ability, or anything else.
…Without the acceptance of human equality there can be no socialism” (Nyerere 1968:
258).
The commensurability of African values and socialism was based on Nyerere’s (1968:
170-175) conviction that socialist values are justice, respect for a human being, and a
social development where one cares for people. Thus he argued that these values were
part and parcel of African traditional values: “We in Africa, have no more need for being
‘converted’ to socialism than we have of being ‘taught democracy’. Both are rooted in
our past – in the traditional life which produced us”. Here the argument is that socialism
is part of African culture, therefore Africans are socialistic by nature. His claim that
46
Other post-colonial African scholars such as Valentin Mudimbe (1994: 42) argue that in post-colonial
African political discourse, Marxism was appealed to because it “appeared to be the inspiration for the
renewal of the continent. A remarkable apotheosis, to the extent that the promises implied were, from the
onset, given as concrete expressions of the life of real people and as a negation of the exile which had held
them captive, Marxism seemed to be the exemplary weapon and idea with which to go beyond what
colonialism incarnated and ordained in the name of capital”. Mudimbe goes on to say that the whole
liberation project was conceived as a Marxist revolution: “…political men[sic] of action in Africa, sensitive
to this power of conversion of Marxist thought and seduced by the metaphors of an egalitarian society
organized on the basis of economic registers in the service of the betterment of people, of all people,
conceived the political liberation of new African countries in terms of Marxist revolution” Richard Bell
echoed Mudimbe when he said that “[b]oth African humanism and socialism were used to underscore the
values of common African heritage and the inherent struggle left to a people who were exploited by
colonial powers. It became to many African leaders after World War II that sustaining Western colonialism
was seriously undermining, if not destroying, the African social infrastructure based on traditional
humanistic values” (Bell 2002: 37). In other words, the socialist discourse was employed by African
politicians as a way of negating the impact of colonialism in the post-colonial African condition.
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Africans are socialistic by nature is partly based on his observation that socialism is only
possible within a caring society where “people care for each other’s welfare”.
Nyerere applied African humanistic values for his further analysis of how wealth should
be created and distributed in society. His argument against capitalism was that the
modern capitalistic accumulation of wealth without any sense of limits was at odds with
the African attitude towards wealth. Thus he rebuked the capitalistic tendency of
purposeless accumulation of wealth at the expense of other human beings as follows:
“The creation of wealth is a good thing and something which we shall have to increase.
But it will cease to be good the moment wealth ceases to serve human beings and begins
to be served by human beings” (Nyerere 1968: 319). In other words, the production and
distribution of wealth must have human needs as its main goal. Hence, the means and
ends of acquiring wealth should nourish human well-being instead of dehumanising
them.
Nyerere’s (1968: 320-321) quest for a humanistic economic practice led him equally to
the idea that African economic practices and outlook must be subjected to the African
context: As he put it, “we have to think in terms of what is available, or can be made
available, at comparatively small cost, and which can be operated by people. By moving
into the future along this path, we can avoid massive social disruption and human
suffering”. The ideal of pursuing economic activities whilst being sensitive to human
well-being led Nyerere to the argument that all technology applied in economic activities
should be that type of technology that embraces wider social participation: “We have to
consider whether some older equipment which demands more labour, but labour which is
less highly skilled, is not better suited to our needs, as well as being more within our
capacity to build and use”. What he is saying here is that the application of technology in
economic activities should not exclude the participation of people in the production
process. The ideal is that technology that is applied should be adaptable to people’s
contexts, thus enhancing greater human participation. Nyerere’s argument is that African
traditional values give rise to an economic system that puts emphasis on caring for the
well-being of other human beings before profits.
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Nyerere also argues that African traditional values put emphasis on economic relations
that were based on solidarity that was aimed at attaining the well-being of the whole
community. As Nyerere puts it:
Both the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ individuals were completely secure in African
society. Natural causes brought famine, but they brought famine to everybody –
‘poor’ or ‘rich’. No one starved, either for food or for human dignity, because he
lacked personal wealth; he could depend on the wealth possessed by the
community of which he was a member (Nyerere 1968: 3-4).
The implication of Nyerere’s insight is that economic relations in African traditional

society were primarily aimed at fostering the well-being of everybody. Those who were
rich and those who were poor experienced the same human social affection because of
communal solidarity. Within such a conceptualisation of human economic relations, the
modern capitalist ideal that the greed of the rich would benefit the poor, as we have seen
in chapters 3 and 5, falls apart. In traditional African economic relations no one existed in
a way that was parasitic to the community. Rather, the individual worked with the
community for the common good. This fact is expressed in the Swahili proverb which
says: “Mgeni siku mbili; siku tatu jembe – One is a guest for two days, on the third day
give him a hoe” (Nyerere 1968: 6). The implication of this proverb is that each person
should participate in the acquiring and distribution of wealth. In this economic practice,
the creation of wealth through collective work led to an egalitarian distribution of the
created good through Ujamaa (collectivism).
Nyerere (1968: 12-319) saw Ujamaa as resting “on the assumption of the equality of man
[sic]”, based on the belief that “all people were created by God”, and that “it is the only
basis on which life in society can be organised without injustice”. For Nyerere, Ujamaa
could be premised on two foundations, namely the Godly origins of all life and the
existential fact that people are fellow creatures within the common universe. On the
second foundation, it is thus deduced that from a general experience of life with others in
society, when other members of the community or society are denied the enjoyment of
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wealth because of the greed of others, it inevitably follows that they are being
dehumanised.
The idea of economic relations through Ujamaa was also echoed by Jomo Kenyata
(1953: 119; cf. Bujo 1997: 164) in his socio-economic policy which he described in
kiSwahili as Harambee. The term Harambe means “to pull together, or to work together
or to pull the same rope together at the same time”. The presumption here was that when
people pool their talents for a common economic cause such as poverty alleviation, they
are able to promote the flourishing of the common good more effectively than when each
one is concerned with his or her own self-interest (Bujo 1997: 164). Kenyata’s economic
justification of Harambe was partly based on the moral conviction that “there is no really
individual affair, for everything has a moral and social reference. The habit of corporate
effort is but the other side of corporate ownership; and corporate responsibility is
illustrated in corporate work no less than in corporate sacrifice and prayer” (Kenyata
1953: 119).
Kwame Nkrumah (1968: 73-74) also argued for African socialism from the point of view
that African traditional society was communal. While communalism prevailed in African
traditional society, it was also prevalent in the modern African society: “In socialism, the
principles underlying communalism are given in modern circumstance…Socialism,
therefore, can be and is the defence of the principles of communalism in the modern
setting”. In other words, the role of socialism was to defend and perpetuate African
communalism, which is mostly characterised by the lack of social classes in traditional
African societies. Nkrumah went on to say: “The African social system is communistic.
In the African social system the foundation of a pauper class is unknown, nor is there
antagonism of class against class”. In this way of reasoning, African socialism was
synonymous with talking about African traditional communalism. The term socialism
only denotes the modern discourse on communalism. African socialism was communistic
because of the absence of economic classes.
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Another African political leader, Tom Mboya, argued that socialism already existed in
Africa because some of the taditional African values were compatible with socialism:
…those proved codes of conduct in the African societies which have, over the
ages, conferred dignity on our people and afforded them security regardless of
their station in life. I refer to a universal charity which characterises our
societies…thought processes and cosmological ideas which regard all humankind,
not as a social means but as an end and entity in society (Mboya 1963: 6-7).
The implication of the above thought is that African socialism arises from the African
ontology and cosmology as opposed to mere philosophical speculation. Those Africans
who saw African socialism as similar to Western socialism were actually victims of
western “intellectual imperialism” in the sense that “they are so blindly steeped into
foreign thought mechanics that in their actions they adopt standards which do violence to
the concept of African brotherhood” (Mboya 1963: 7). In other words, African socialism
was different from western socialism because African socialism did not need to be
thought out as an ideology to counter the modern capitalistic system. African socialism
was the African economic outlook that arises from traditional African values.
In the same vein, Leopold Senghor writes that “[n]egro African society is collectivist, or,
more exactly, communal because it is rather a communion of souls than an aggregate of
individuals…[Africa] had already realised socialism before the coming of
Europeans…but we must renew it by helping it to regain a spiritual dimension” (Senghor
1964: 29). According to Senghor, the African individual ontology of negritude and its
world-view of symbiosis provide a fertile ground for an ethical presumption that wealth
should be shared equitably by all people in society. In traditional African society, the
spirit of collectivism was strengthened by the African belief in ancestors. What one does
with his or her wealth had some direct implications for his or her relationship with the
ancestors. Africans would even go to the extent of sharing their material possessions with
them. It is partly for this reason that Senghor’s inference could be seen as valid that
socialism as it developed in the west was deficient because it lacked the spiritual
dimension of a human person. Equally, it is also arguable that modern capitalism lacks a
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spiritual dimension about a human person because it has a mechanistic homo economicus
who is simply propelled into economic relations by self-interest.
Unlike Senghor, Mboya and Nyerere, who argued that the African humanistic values
were commensurable with African socialism, on the other hand, Sekou Toure argued that
the term socialism be dropped and replaced by the term communaucracy as a term that
captures African experiences under communal rule. Thus he said:
Africa is essentially ‘communaucratic’. Collective life and solidarity give Africa a

humanistic foundation which many people may envy. It is also because these
qualities that an African cannot imagine organising his life outside of his social
group – family, village or clan – are indispensable to communaucracy. The voice
of African people is not individualistic [his italics] (Toure 1979: 108).
Sekou Toure’s observation as stated above is that African values are more appropriately
commensurate with communalism rather than socialism. His use of the word
communaucratic instead of socialism was intended to distance African collectivism from
the inevitable western dualistic cast of materialism versus spiritualism. As he puts it:
We use the expression communaucratic precisely in order to avoid all

equivocation and all false analogies…Our solidarity, better known under its
aspect of social fraternity, the pre-eminence of group interests over personal
interests, the sense of common responsibilities, the practice of a formal
democracy which rules and governs our village – all of which constitute the basis
of our society – this is what forms what we call communaucratic realities (Toure
1979: 141-151).
Sekou Toure differentiated communaucracy from socialism also on the basis of African
humanistic values such as communal belonging within the cultural context of shared
interests. Communaucracy was also an antithesis of individualism. In the final analysis,
this meant that these traditional African values as espoused in communaucracy were
simply incompatible with modern capitalism because of its individualistic base.
The idea of communalism means a communally orientated way of life whereby the
individual shares his or her material possessions with others. This sharing of one’s
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material possessions with others arises from the humane convictions entrenched in
African humanism that the other person is one’s brother or sister, and that to be human is
to belong. It is to belong to society, to the land, as well as to the realm of the ancestors. It
is a kind of communalism that arises from the African existential feeling that makes the
individual to see herself as related and interrelated to such an extent that whatever one
owns is owned for common use, and is shared with others. Gelfand writes on the African
economic practice of communalism as follows:
All clansmen [sic] are materially equal in their Tribal Trust Land, since no land
can be bought or sold and each man receives just sufficient on which to grow
enough food for his family. As all the men in the clan claim to be brothers, it is
important in order to avoid jealousies that no one is wealthier than the rest. If any
man finds himself in strained circumstances, one of his brothers will help him
without expecting payment. One is struck by the uniformity of their lives and
possessions in their traditional surroundings. A feeling of peace, brotherhood and
equality emanates from them (Gelfand 1981: 15).
Within African communalism, people share their material possessions with the
conviction that the other person is one’s brother or sister. The reason behind this spirit of
generosity is that in traditional African society, everybody belonged, whether poor or
rich, people related to each other without prioritising one’s self-interest before the needs
of others. Ambrose Moyo (1999: 53) echoed Gelfand when he said that even “a complete
stranger can become a part of the family and in that respect would even be given land to
plough and be allowed to get married within the family. Traditional societies do not
primarily think in terms of nuclear families as this would be considered selfish and
individualistic”.
Though African traditional communalism acknowledges that there are individuals, these
individuals are socialised into generosity. As Moyo puts it:
[W]hat emerges from all this is that in traditional societies there was a common
use of property and not common ownership of property. The individual owned his
or her field, cattle, donkeys, goats and domestic equipment but could share them
with the needy. …However, because of this common use of property, the people
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in a particular village often felt they owned the thing together (Moyo 1999: 55-
56).
Moyo’s argument is that traditional African communalism tacitly recognised private

property in the sense that there was no common ownership of property. While there was
private ownership of property, individuals could voluntarily put their properties at the
disposal of their neighbours to use. Thus the idea of common use mutes the distinction
between private and common ownership. In modern capitalism, the institution of private
property carried with it the idea that the individual has the exclusive right to use her
property.
Mamaduo Dia Thiam argued that there should not be a dichotomy between socialism and
individualism. Thus he writes: “A synthesis will be possible between individualistic and
social values, harmony between them being achieved in the complete human personality.
This synthesis is of a true socialism and a true humanism, which will rest on African
reality and African values, while not rejecting the enriching contributions of other
cultures, will be genuinely African…[sic]” (see Friedland and Rosberg 1964: 75). While
it is not clear as to the type of synthesis which Dia had in mind between individualism
and socialism, the point he is making is that African traditional values cannot allow us to
postulate the individual as existing prior to the community.
While there is recognition of individuals in African communalism, individuals attain their

individual worth or moral character within the community. Since the individual is
communally constituted, his or her well-being is relative to that of the community. It is
mainly for the reason that the individual is communally embedded that Dia Thiam was
led to observe that:
[In Africa the] individual is not defined apart from the group, one is defined in
and with the group to which he [sic] belongs. The group and the individual are not
two distinct realities, but one and the same reality. …Negro-African socialism
rests on a cosmology, an explanation of the universe according to which being is
not divided, not reducible reality, but constitutes elements of a whole in which it
inserts itself and which gives its force and its life (See Friedland and Rosberg
1964: 85).
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Thiam’s observation as stated above is that African socialism arises from the African
individual ontology in which there is no dichotomy between the individual and the
community in as much as there is no dichotomy between a human being and the world-
view of wholeness. In this regard, African socialism is an economic articulation of the
African individual ontology and its world-view of symbiosis.
Other African philosophers, such as Kwame Gyekye, however, argue that this African
discourse on African socialism was properly about African humanism. Thus he writes:
In reference to the supposed traditional matrix of the ideology of African

socialism, the language of the African political leaders and thinkers seems to
indicate, pretty clearly on close examination, that it is the humanist strand of the
traditional social and moral thought and practice that they really had in mind in
their discourse on ‘socialism’ (Gyekye 1997: 159).
Gyekye’s argument in this quotation is that all this discourse on African socialism is
mainly about African humanism since appeal was made to African traditional moral
values rather than to an elaborate socialist economic system. Gyekye (1997: 159-160)
went on to argue, “It would be correct to say, however, that traditional society, animated
by its humanist ethic, would be a caring society, concerned about the well-being of its
members. A caring society, however, is not necessarily an egalitarian society” (Gyekye
1997: 159). The argument here is that while a humanistic ethic of African traditional
society might have given rise to a caring society, that should not be construed as evidence
of the existence of a society where people were regarded as equals in all respects. Being a
caring society also does not mean common ownership. “The individual’s dependence on
the wealth of the community derives from – and is an aspect of – the practice of social
and humanist morality, from the fulfilment of the moral obligations of people to their
fellow human beings” (Gyekye 1997: 159).
When people shared their material possessions with their fellow human beings they were
doing so out of humanistic moral considerations rather than ideological persuasion. Thus
Gyekye summed up his argument as follows: “I conclude that the use of the term
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‘socialism in reference to understanding the nature of the society envisaged by the

African political leaders and thinkers under the inspiration of the African tradition is a
misnomer. The term was undoubtedly used as a surrogate for ‘humanism’” (Gyekye
1997: 162). The implication of Gyekye’s observation is that African traditional values
would be commensurate with economic relations that are based on humanistic moral
consideration rather than on socialism as an economic ideology.

In this chapter, I started by giving a definition of African humanism and went on to show
that African humanism advocates a holistic ethic as it puts emphasis on relatedness and
interrelatedness among all that exists. The individual ontology of African humanism
shows that a human being belongs to the natural environment as well as to the
community, with fellow human beings. Within African humanism, the idea of human
solidarity encompasses the past, the present and the future (Moquet 1977: 49-50; Mazrui
et al 1999: 559; Mazrui 1994: 173; Senghor 1964; Kaunda 1967; Gyekye 1997; Ramose
1999).
I also tried to show that African humanism comes across as a relational ethic. The
relational ethical dimension of African humanism was demonstrated by investigating
some of the African ethical concepts such as Ubuntu/Botho, Ukama and Ujamaa. All
these concepts seem to support the idea that to be fully human is to belong to society, and
that individual identities cannot be abstracted from their common belonging. For this
reason, it was argued that the socio-economic theory of self-interest is incompatible with
the ethical outlook of African humanism (Shutte 1993: 46-47; Samkange and Samkange
1980: 38-39; Dandala 1996: 70; Kasenene 1994: 141-142; Gelfand 1973: 57-139;
Murove 1999).
In the last section we saw that the ethical implications of African humanism were
interpreted by some African scholars and politicians to imply that an ethical system that
engenders a world-view of interconnectedness and human communal belonging was
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compatible with socialism or collective ownership of wealth. The argument of collective

ownership of wealth came across in two forms. Firstly, there were those African scholars
who argued that the ethical values of African humanism within the African traditional
setting are compatible with socialism. Secondly, there was an argument that socialism
should not be seen as an end it itself, but that its importance should be premised on the
African need to advance the traditional ethos of communalism, a communalism that does
not draw a wedge between materiality and spirituality. However, another argument was
put forward against the socialist argument and this was that African traditional society
was thoroughly humanistic (Nyerere 1968; Kenyata 1953: 119; Nkrumah 1968; Mboya
1963; Senghor 1964; Toure 1979; Moyo 1992: 55-56; Gyekye 1997: 159-162).
It is clear in our discussion of African humanism that, according to African humanism,

the modern economic theory of self-interest is morally implausible and wholly
unintelligible. Another implication of African humanism to the modern economic theory
of self-interest is that it is dehumanising because people who can only relate to other
people on the basis of self-interest would be a danger to community life. It is also
dehumanising because if the individual is presumed to act with the aim of maximising his
or her utility, it follows that they will deprive others of a decent economic livelihood
because greed cannot benefit the community. Another implication which we can deduce
from our discussion on African humanism is that if modern capitalism presumes self-
interest as the determinant of an economic action, then the rationale of modern capitalism
is incompatible with African humanism. I would like to demonstrate that the ethical
implications of African humanism also find an echo in process philosophical
anthropology.
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CHAPTER SEVEN: THE IMPLICATIONS OF PROCESS PHILOSOPHICAL

ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE THEORY SELF-INTEREST
In the process view, when we lose the sense of connection with the Other, we sin. To me the
ethical message is clear: I should treat all beings in our world, not only humans, with loving
kindness and compassion – and myself as well. The process view is fundamentally one of
connection and nurturing of community (Jungerman 2000:197-198).
7.1 Introduction
In chapter 6, it was established that the implausibility of the modern economic theory of
self-interest can be discerned from the fact that African humanism is based on a relational
understanding of human existence and reality in general. Obviously when human well-
being is presented as intertwined with the well-being of everything else in existence, it
logically follows that the individual’s well-being depends on the well-being of the whole
to the extent that our human interests become entangled with the interests of everything
that exists. Human well-being was seen as inseparable from that of the natural
environment, communal solidarity among the living, the past and the future.
Process thought concurs with the presumptions of African humanism in the sense that it
is a philosophy of holism. As we shall see in the course of this chapter, most of the
doctrines that were developed by Alfred North Whitehead in his process thought were
aimed at building a holistic vision of reality in such a way that what Whitehead advocates
as the nature of reality applies equally to human existence. The first section of this
chapter will start by giving a brief background to process thought and ethics. The second
section is concerned with the process world-view and its relationship to the new sciences.
In the third section our concern will be on the ethical implications of process
philosophical anthropology on the modern economic theory of self-interest. Our last
section will be a conclusion and observations.
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7.2 Background to Process Thought and Ethics

Alfred North Whitehead, an Anglo-American mathematician and philosopher, did not
write about ethics specifically, nor did he give attention to the modern economic theory
of self-interest. His specific interest was in giving a metaphysical synthesis in light of the
developments in the new sciences such as the theory of relativity, quantum physics and
ecology. Apart from the doctrines that he developed throughout his philosophy,
Whitehead put it clearly that his process philosophy was a “philosophy of organism”, a
metaphor that suggests a holistic philosophical outlook towards life and reality in general
(Whitehead 1929: vii). A salient feature that runs throughout Whitehead’s process
philosophy is that an authentic understanding of human existence has to start with a
general understanding of reality (Jungerman 2000:1-14; Prozesky 1995: 54-59).
Whitehead’s process philosophical presupposition was based on the premise that all
reality exists authentically in terms of relatedness and interrelatedness. Human existence
was only possible within this web of relationships. This implies that judged from the
perspective of Whitehead’s implied philosophical anthropology, the modern economic
theory of self-interest, can only be seen as a serious mitigation against reality in the sense
that to exist self-interestedly would ultimately imply abstracting oneself from the
community of existence. The community of existence is chiefly characterised by a
process of giving and receiving within the complexity of relationships. That being the
case, the ethical implications of atomic individualism, self-sufficiency, liberalism of
neutrality and utility maximisation, which are integral to the theory of self-interest, are
abstractions from our common existence with everything else that shares this life with us.
7.3 The World-view of Process Philosophy

As we have seen in chapters 3, 4 and 5, the modern economic theory of self-interest arose
from a mechanistic world-view, especially that of Isaac Newton, that taught that things
existed as self-enclosed entities that can only respond to rules of gravity and motion. It
was shown in these chapters that in early modernity, self-interest played a role of the rule
of motion in human economic behaviour. Another influence of mechanistic science on
neo-liberal economics, as we have seen in chapter 5, was the homo economicus model of
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a human being who was presumed to be calculative in a way that resonates a calculating
machine. It was alleged that the individual will maximise his or her utility by pursuing
self-interest. Mechanistic scientific thinking is the foundation of atomic individualism
because the individual is postulated as an isolated entity that is self-sufficient, devoid of
essential relatedness. As we shall see in the following sub-section, process thought
rejected this mechanistic scientific paradigm on the grounds that it was not a true
reflection of reality.
7.3.1 The Influence of the New Scientific Discoveries

Whitehead’s (SMW 1925: 1-24) process thought was a philosophical synthesis of new
scientific discoveries such as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum physics.
This was done within a social background that was then dominated by Aristotelian
metaphysics and Newtonian mechanistic physics. In as much as the Newtonian mechanic
science had tremendous influence on social theory, Whitehead saw the theory of
relativity and quantum physics as having some implications to human existence as well.
Hence a thorough understanding of process cosmology and the resultant philosophical
anthropology is inseparable from some of the principles of relativity and quantum
physics.
From this new science, he deduced that all entities exist in a state of dependence and
interdependence. Thus he would state it in his Adventures of Ideas that, “The universe
achieves its value by reason of its co-ordination into societies of societies, and into
societies of societies of societies” (AI 1933: 264; PR 1929: 113). What this means is that
each actual entity cannot be isolated from its togetherness with other actual entities. In
other words, those things which were described by mechanistic science as individuals
that endure through space and time were actually societies in the sense that they are what
they are due to the principle of relationality with other entities in the process of
becoming. Whitehead’s process thought should be understood as a way of constructing a
world-view that has for so long been dominated by mechanistic thinking into one based
on relationality.
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The same efforts are also made by modern scientists who are arguing that the paradigm
of mechanistic science can no longer answer the questions of modern humanity that has
become so interconnected. For example, Donah Zohar (1990: 8-80) says that quantum
theory is summed up in the “Principle of Complementarity” which says that “each way of
describing being, as a wave or as a particle, complements the other and that a whole
picture emerges only from the package deal”. Zohar goes on to say that in the quantum
field, “even those particles which manifest themselves as individual beings do so only
briefly. They exist for a short time, and then dissolve into other particles or return into a
sea of energy”. From this scientific observation, Zohar stated that her purpose of relating
quantum physics to social theory was primarily based on arguing that “quantum physics,
and more particularly a quantum mechanical model of consciousness, allows us to see
ourselves as full partners in the process of nature” (cf. Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 223-
224).
According to Zohar (1990: 80-114), the experience which is offered humanity by

quantum physics is that in any quantum system of two or more particles, each particle has
both ‘thing-ness and relating-ness’, the first due to its particle aspect and the second to its
wave aspect. This kind of relationship is called “relational holism”. It is called relational
holism from the perspective that “the self stops to be an isolated self, but overlaps with
other selves in society”. The reason why the self overlaps with other selves in society is
due to the fact that the wave aspect of entities gives rise to relationships and the
consequent birth of new realities through the entanglement of their wave functions.
Because waves can overlap and become entangled with each other, quantum systems can
form internal relationships which would not be possible if entities are seen as closed
systems. Without these internal relationships, the cosmos would be non-creative. Hence
the social implication of quantum physics for human existence is that there has to be a
holistic understanding of nature as well as a solidaristic social existence.
The world renowned physicist, Fritjof Capra, expressed the same insight when he said
that a careful observation and analysis in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic
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particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood meaningfully
as interconnections:
Quantum theory reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot
decompose the world into independently existing smallest units; …nature appears
as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. …The
human observer constitutes the final link in the chain of observational processes,
and the properties of any atomic object can only be understood in terms of the
object’s interaction with the observer (Capra 1983: 78).
The universe in this regard is experienced as a dynamic inseparable totality in which the
observer is essentially related. In other words, a human being enters into
interconnectedness with the natural world, thus constituting a totality or a whole. In the
same vein, David Bohm (1988: 64) says that a new feature of quantum physics is that
“the whole organises the parts” as it is the case with living organisms”. Bohm goes on to
state, “An invisible connection between elements also exists which cannot be further
analysed. All of that adds up to the notion that the world is one unbroken whole”. The
implication of Bohm’s observation is that physical reality presents itself in terms of
connectedness and interconnectedness.
Ecological biology47 shares the insights of quantum physics on the reality of

connectedness and interconnectedness. A paradigm shift that is currently being
championed by ecological biologists is that all living organisms are open systems that are
open to influence from other living systems to the extent that they form a totality within
the community of existence. James Lovelock captured this new ecological biology as
47
The word ‘ecology’ is derived from the Greek word, oikos which means ‘household’. This word implies
that there is connectedness among all living things – all living organisms exist in a state of symbiosis with
each other. The word ‘ecology’ was first used by a German biologist Ernest Haeckel as “the science of
relations between the organism and the surrounding outer world”. In the early 20th century, biologists came
to the realization that the relationships between all living systems could be understood best as communities
or networks in the sense that all life systems depend on each other for their survival. An organism does not
have a life of its own independent of the natural environment. The environment was part of the organism.
Classical biology had taught that organisms exist with their own natures or types. For example, Charles
Darwin had theorized that organisms exist in a state of competition for survival, whereby the fittest were
able to survive after conquering the odds of the natural environment. The ecological paradigm contradicted
this theory by insisting that organisms do not exist in a state of competition against the environment, rather,
the correct account of the matter is that they exist in symbiosis or communion with the natural environment
– that they depend on each other for existence (Martin 1970: 120-123; Margulis 1993: 2).
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follows: “So closely coupled is the evolution of living organisms with the evolution of
their environment that together they constitute a single evolutionary process” (Lovelock
1979: 99). Instead of seeing evolution as implying the realisation of life through
competition against the environment, Lovelock argued that we should rather speak of co-
evolution as characterised by mutual adaptation of the environment and the organism.
Lovelock’s ecological biological idea of interconnectedness was also expressed by

Margulis and Sagan when they said that evolution occurs through trading DNA
information:
[S]cientists have observed that [bacteria] routinely and rapidly transfer different
bits of genetic materials to other individuals. Each bacterium at any given time
has the use of accessory genes, visiting from sometimes very different strains,
which perform functions that its own DNA many not cover. Some of the genetic
bits are recombined with the cell’s native genes; others are passed on again…As a
result of this ability, all the world’s bacteria essentially have access to a single
gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom
(Margulis and Sagan 1986: 223-224).
The trading of genetic information among the bacterial community has been integral to
evolution since the beginnings of life on earth, to the extent that we should see “global
communication network” as having been occurring since the embryonic stages of life
(Capra 1983: 224). This trading of genetic information contributes to the resistance of
drugs among bacterial communities. Margulis and Sagan (1986: 127-236) characterised
this trading of genetic information as also the major reason why there are always new
forms of life within the community of existence. Trading of genetic information is not
something that is distinctively bacterial, but is a characteristic that is shared by all living
organisms. The theory of the interconnectedness of all living organisms came to be
known as symbiogenesis. According to Margulis and Sagan, symbiogenesis implies that
the evolution of nature is characterised by convergence, which is the tendency of species
to evolve similar forms for meeting challenges, regardless of different ancestral histories.
The theme of the relationality of all that exists is the foundation of Whitehead’s
metaphysics.
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Whitehead (1948: 89-90) stated it in his Essays in Science and Philosophy that the
metaphysics which he espoused in his Process and Reality was that “the world as it
passes perishes, and that in perishing it yet remains an element in the future beyond
itself”. 48 He stated it succinctly that the main focus of process thought lies in “an attempt
to analyse perishing on the same level as Aristotle’s analysis of becoming”. In the place
where Aristotelian metaphysics was more concerned with being, process thought puts
emphasis on becoming. Whitehead’s presumption was that everything is in a state of
process. While Whitehead saw perishing as constitutive of process, he also stated that,
“Freshness provides the supreme intimacy of contrast, the new with the old. A new type
of order arises, develops its variety of possibilities, culminates, and passes into the decay
of repletion without freshness. That type of order decays; not into disorder, but by
passing into a new type of order”. In other words, the perishing of things is accompanied
by the reality of freshness, which is the coming into process of new realities that are also
related to those that existed in the past. But Whitehead did not hold a view of reality that
is based on the endless becoming of things: “I certainly think that the universe is running
down”.
The idea that the universe was running down was meant to illustrate the fact that the
contemporary physical order of reality was also in process:
We can see the universe passing on to a triviality. All the effects to be derived
from our existing type or order are passing away into trivialities. That does not
mean that there are not some other types of order of which you and I have not the
faintest notion… The universe is laying the foundation of a new type, where your
present theories of order will appear as trivial. If remembered, they would be
remembered or discerned in future as trivialities, gradually fading into
48
Whitehead’s coining of the term perishing to imply the processual nature of all that exists gives an
impression of a sceptical view of reality. However, he stated that he is using this term to imply the
becoming of things. As he puts it, “The notion of the prehension of the past means that the past is an
element which perishes and thereby remains an element in the state beyond, and thus is objectified. That is
the whole notion. If you get a general notion of what is meant by perishing, you will have accomplished an
apprehension of what you mean by memory and causality, what you mean when you feel that what we are
is of infinite importance, because as we perish we are immortal. That is the one key thought in which the
whole development of Process and Reality is woven…” (ESP 1948: 89).What is implied here is that it is
through a process perishing that we can account for the becoming of things. This implies that everything is
in process.
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nothingness. This is the only possible doctrine of a universe always driving on to

novelty (ESP 1948: 90).
The passing away of the universe is meant to emphasise the idea that what might be seen
as constitutive of reality or what we might conceptualise as the laws that undergird the
nature of the universe today might not necessarily be construed as valid laws by the
future generations. The passing away of a universe of a particular epoch is thus always
superseded by the universe of a new generation. It is within the reality of the passing
away of the universe that Whitehead accounts for novelty as central to process or change.
Cobb and Griffin (1977: 14-15) also observed that process thought asserts that everything
is in a state of process or change,49 and that “to be actual is to be a process. Anything
which is not process is an abstraction from process, not a full-fledged actuality” (Cobb
and Griffin 1977: 14). All reality, including God, is subject to change or becoming, that is
a transition from one actual entity to another. Entities are temporary events which perish
immediately upon coming into being. Hence, it is the perishing which “marks the
transition to succeeding events”. In this way, “time is not single smooth flow, but comes
into being in little droplets”. A vivid image that comes out of such an account of reality is
that of a continuous flow of events.
If things are in a state of a continuous flow, it follows that those things which are
attributed individuality are not real individuals. In his metaphysical work, Process and
Reality, Whitehead (1929: 50-51) called them “a society whose social order has taken the
49
The doctrine that reality was in a state of process is an ancient one which can be traced back to the Greek
philosopher Heraclitus who said that everything flows. He was chiefly famous in antiquity for his doctrine
that everything was in a state of flux. Heraclitus regarded fire as the fundamental substance; everything,
like flame in fire, is born by the death of something else. As he put it: “Mortals are immortal, and
immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying and other’s life”. Further, “All things
come out of the one, and the one out of all things; but the many have less reality than the one, which is
God”. The doctrine of perpetual flux was also emphasized most by his disciples, as shown in Plato’s
Thaetus. This very doctrine from an ancient philosopher could not be refuted even by modern science. In
science, especially chemistry, it used to be believed that the atom was an element which could not be
destroyed, but with the invention of radioactivity, it became common knowledge that the atom could
disintegrate when exposed to radioactivity. Physicists came up with new smaller particles such as protons
and electrons which formed atoms, but it was also discovered that when these particles meet they explode
and cease to be matter but a wave of energy. In a way, energy had to replace matter as that which is
permanent. Whitehead gave this doctrine of perpetual flux a systematic and extensive philosophical schema
in his Process and Reality (Bevan 1913: 121).
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special form of ‘personal order”. According to Whitehead, these individuals come to be

what they are by reason of the conditions imposed upon them through their prehensions
of some other members of the nexus50 from the past. In other words, the past provided the
occasion for experience. As Cobb and Griffin observed:
The past is composed of those events that have occurred; the future is radically
different, since it contains no occasions; and the present is the occasion that is
now occurring. The present is influenced by the past and it will influence the
future. Time flows asymmetrically from the past through the present into the
future. There can be no denial of the reality of time, nor can there be any doctrine
of its circularity. Every moment is new and none can be repeated. …In the
moment of concrescence, each unit of process ‘enjoys’ ‘subjective immediacy’.
Only when its process of concrescence is completed and hence is past does that
unit of process become datum of object of new processes to take into account
(Cobb and Griffin 1977: 16).
The implication of the above quotation is that all that exists has been contributed to by
the past, and that it will also contribute towards other entities that come into existence in
the future. In other words, nothing can exist meaningfully outside togetherness with the
past in the present. The present will also influence the future when it becomes the past.
While the existence of new entities is contributed to by other entities that existed in the
past, the term concrescence implies that through experience, the new entity develops an
aim that shows a unity of experience. When this new entity occurs, it implies that novelty
has also occurred in the process (Hartshorne and Peden 1981: 34).
Whitehead stated that an identity of any entity can only be understood fully in
relationship to what has transpired in the past. However, it must be mentioned that what
has transpired in the past is brought into a new synthesis by each experiencing thing.
Thus Whitehead put it that: “All relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of
actualities; and such relatedness is wholly concerned with the appropriation of the dead
50
Whitehead used this word so as to denote the idea that entities can only be understood meaningfully in
their togetherness. Outside their togetherness, all else become “derivative abstraction”. It is in this
togetherness that creativity is achieved by entities. There cannot be any creativity without togetherness of
entities.
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by the living – that is to say, with ‘objective immortality’51 whereby what is divested of
its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of
becoming” (PR 1929: ix). What Whitehead is saying here is that all things contribute to
the existence of others. What has been enjoyed previously by others in the past has a
bearing on the present or it influences the present reality. Putting it in anthropocentric
terms, our present actions have been influenced by the past, and the synthesis between the
present and the past will also influence the future, thereby bringing about novelty or
creativity.
The relationship between the past and the present is captured in Whitehead’s doctrine of
prehension. According to this doctrine, everything that exists feels the existence of
others. Any entity that does not feel the existence of other entities would be a “vacuous
actuality”. A vacuous actuality means something that cannot feel or experience the
existence of other entities (PR 1929: 43). In Whiteheadian terms, there cannot be
creativity or becoming without internal relations among entities in the cosmic evolution.
As we have seen previously, Whitehead stated that those things which we are accustomed
to seeing as individuals are actually societies, a term he used to imply the derivative
nature of cosmological and social order. As he puts it: “The members of the society are
alike because, by reason of their common character, they impose on other members of the
society the conditions which lead to that likeness”. Also, “the life of man is a historic
route of actual occasions which in a marked degree…inherit from each other” (PR 1929:
136-137).
51
The term ‘objective immortality’ refers to the fact that after an entity has reached its satisfaction, it
perishes. In this state of perishing, the entity enters in the nature of God, which is a state of objective
immortality. Within this state of being, the entity “becomes an object of possible prehension for the process
of becoming for other actual entities, including God. It belongs to the nature of being that it is a potential
for every becoming” (Hartshorne and Peden 1981: 34). Cobb and Griffin stated that this term implies the
incorporation of innumerable possibilities within a person’s life in two basic ways. These possibilities can
either be part of the objective content of what is felt, or they can qualify the subjective form depending on
how it is felt. For example, if one remembers apprehending something or someone with the subjective form
of anger or love, one can now objectify anger or love as part of the content of one’s present experience. In
other words a possibility which previously showed up in a subjective reaction is now in the objective
content of an experience (Cobb and Griffin 1977: 27-28).
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What is implied is that an individual or an actual occasion is not constituted by an

instantaneous identity. Rather, the individual identity is derivative from the past as well
as the present. It is chiefly on this derivative nature of existence that Whitehead built his
concept of society. However, this society is not an isolated entity that has its own mores:
…there is no society in isolation. Every society must be considered with its

background of a wider environment of actual entities, which also contribute their
objectifications to which the members of the society must conform. …the
environment, together with the society in question, must form a larger society in
respect to some more general characters (PR 1929: 138).
Whitehead’s insight as shown in the above quotation is that what we are accustomed to
see as distinct individuals or things are actually an embodiment of various realities in
existence. In this way of reasoning, it becomes illusory to postulate realities without a
sense of realisation of their togetherness. In his essay on “Immortality”, Whitehead
argued that, “The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the
centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence’. There is no such mode of existence;
every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of
the Universe” (ESP 1948: 64). What is implied here is that all entities are relationally
constituted. For us to understand the derivative nature of existence we have to go through
Whitehead’s doctrine of prehension and experience.
7.3.2 The Process Concept of Prehension

For a better understanding of Whitehead’s concept of prehension, it is important that we
should start with his understanding of experience. Previously, it was emphasised that
things derive their identities through a process of prehension of the past, and that a new
experience occurs as a result of a synthesis of the past and the present. In this way, the
emphasis is on the dependence of things on one another rather than on their autonomy.
Each actual occasion52 of experience starts as a reception of a multitude of influences
52
Actual occasions are also referred to as actual entities. An actual occasion is the real and final thing
which the world is made of. According to Hartshorne and Peden, “An actual entity is a drop of experience
which in itself constitutes its internal right-to-be. On the basis that actual entities are the only real things,
the ontological principle is asserted. On the basis of this principle, all things are positively somewhere in
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from the past. This relatedness to the past belongs to the nature of the present actual
occasion. The actual occasion must take account of its past, and this past sets boundaries
determining what is possible for the present experience (Leclerc 1958: 144-146; Prozesky
1995: 55).
According to Whitehead, an actual occasion or an actual entity must be seen as nothing

else but prehensions of various kinds of complex entities. Each entity finds its
contribution in the activity of prehending. When the prehending process is completed, it
exists objectively as an actual occasion that participated in the process of becoming with
other actual occasions. Thus each entity is partially self-creative, and it finally creates
itself from the material that is given to it by immortalised actual occasions (Hartshorne
and Peden 1981: 32-33; Prozesky 1995: 55). For Whitehead, actual occasions are able to
prehend the existence of other actual occasions because an actual occasion “is exhibited
as appropriating various elements of the universe out of which it arises. Each process of
appropriation of a particular element is termed a prehension. The ultimate elements of the
universe, thus appropriated, are the already constituted actual entities, and the eternal
object” (PR 1929: 65). What enables actual occasions to prehend the existence of others
lies in the ability for each actual occasion to feel the existence of others.
By employing the term ‘feeling’ Whitehead wanted to emphasise the fact that the
foundation of experience is emotional. In so doing, he parted company with empiricist
philosophers such as Hume who advanced the thesis that morality has only do with belief
and desire, elements which have nothing to do with the way the world goes (Hume 1882).
This theory came to be known as a sensationalist theory of perception. Empiricists who
are advocates of the sensationalist theory of perception would argue that our emotional
experience is derived form sensory perception.53 Thus our experience is purely
actuality and relatively potential everywhere for the process of another actual entity (Hartshorne and Peden
1981: 32). Human experience is not different from the rest of the natural world in the sense that it reflects
the way that the world actually is. An actual occasion has no existence outside its own becoming.
Consequently, actual occasions come to be in the process of the perishing of the other actual occasions. The
process actual occasion actually feels or prehends those other actual occasions that perished (Palmer 1998:
2-4).
53
Empiricism is a philosophical theory that says that our knowledge, with the exception of logic and
mathematics, comes from two sources, namely, sensation and perception through the operation of our
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subjective. As a way of rejecting the empiricist sensationalist theory, Whitehead said that
“the primitive experience is emotional feeling, felt in its relevance to a world beyond”;
therefore “perception in this primary sense, is perception of the settled world in the past
as constituted by its feeling-tones, and as efficacious by reason of those feeling-tones”
(PR 1929: 69). Evidently Whitehead is attributing feelings throughout the cosmos as the
general nature of all entities.
For Whitehead, an actual entity “is a process of feeling the many data, so as to absorb
them into the unity of one individual satisfaction”. Here the term satisfaction is similar to
the term feeling as it implies the result of the feeling or prehension in so far as “an actual
entity is a process of feeling” whereby an entity “discloses operations transforming
entities which are individually alien, into components of a complex which is concretely
one” (PR 1929: 55-56). The term feeling is used inseparably with the term prehension,
which also entails being emotional. Hartshorne and Peden (1981: 33) observed that,
“Feeling is essential to the process of becoming because on the basis of feeling,
prehensions are made and direction is given to the becoming of the actual occasion”. This
process is chiefly characterised by the following factors: “(i) the subject which feels, (ii)
the ‘initial data’ which are to be felt, (iii) the elimination in virtue of negative
prehensions, (iv) the ‘objective datum’ which is felt, (v) ‘subjective form’ which is how
that subject feels that datum”.
mind, which may be called internal sense. Since we can only think through ideas, and since all ideas come
from experience, it is evident enough that none of our knowledge precedes experience. This was the
epistemology which was at the heart of the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Barkley and Hume. Obviously, the
division of the universe into subject and object posed a problem for empiricism. The problem was one of
how we have knowledge of other things than ourselves and the operations of our own mind. As a solution
to this problem, John Locke in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, said that “since the mind,
in all its thoughts and reasoning, has no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or
can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them. Knowledge is the
perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas”. In this kind of epistemology, the mind is
postulated as a self-contained entity without any relationships with the outside reality. All we know about
the world is what the world cares to tell us; we must observe it neutrally and dispassionately, and any
attempt on our part to interfere with the process of perceiving this information can only lead to distortion
and arbitrary imagining. It also follows that we cannot know the existence of other people (s), or the
physical world. In its extremity, empiricism would deny any claim to know the outside world at all; thereby
insisting that what we call the outer world is only a construction of our minds (Russell 1991: 625).
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Whitehead saw this process of prehension as characteristic of the primitive form of

physical experience which is “emotional – blind – perceived as felt elsewhere in another
occasion and conformally appropriated as subjective passion. In the language appropriate
to the higher stages of experience, the primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the
feeling in another and feeling conformally with another” (PR 1929: 227). In this process
account of prehension, being able to feel the existence of others implies that there is no
line of demarcation that can be drawn between all entities that exist. Martin Prozesky
expressed the idea of the interconnectedness of all that exists succinctly when he said:
“For Whitehead reality is a single continuum admitting of no fundamental ontological
divisions. …It follows that reality must then be viewed as an interconnected totality, with
nothing actual being capable of existing in detachment or isolation from everything else”
(Prozesky 1995: 55; cf. Cobb and Griffin 1977: 25-26). Obviously the processual
perception of reality shows that no entities exist without the need for other entities.
The cosmological implication of the Whiteheadian concept of prehension is the idea of

creativity and novelty. In the process of becoming entities are influenced by what has
transpired in the past. In turn, they take this data from the past and translate them into
their own existence, thereby enabling a synthesis that ensues into a new reality. If we take
prehension to imply that all actual occasions have been contributed to by the past, we are
also bound to say that creativity is not wholly determined by the past, and that there is no
absolute chasm between ‘living’ and non-living entities. According to Whitehead, every
actual occasion entails the actualisation of innumerable possibilities. A present occasion
of experience arises out of previous occasions. This actualisation of novel possibilities
generally increases the enjoyment of experience, thereby giving rise to the intensity of
enjoyment (PR 1929: 156; ESP 1948: 64; Hartshorne and Peden 1981: 34).
For Whitehead (PR 1929: 220) all actual occasions or entities prehend other entities in
the process of becoming. In line with this doctrine of prehension, he defined experience
as “self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the
composition of many”. Experience presupposes enjoyment in as much as consciousness
presupposes experience, and not “experience consciousness”. The reason behind this
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understanding of experience is that Whitehead understood all things in existence as

capable of prehending (feeling/prehending) due to their openness to relationships with
what transpired in the past as well as what goes on in the present. Thus Whitehead would
insist that the human mind is essentially related to the object it prehends (PR 1929: 83;
Jordan 1968: 17-18; Cobb and Griffin 1977: 17).
The fact that things experience the existence of others led Whitehead to reject the idea of
“a vacuous actuality” or a void of subjective experience. As such, his understanding of
experience went against Descartes’ dualistic philosophy that was built upon experiencing
and non-experiencing entities. When reality is postulated as comprised of experiencing
and non-experiencing entities, the resultant picture is that of categorising life in terms of
conscious and non-conscious things. Such a world-view ultimately led to the idea of
seeing humanity as different in kind from the rest of other things in existence. Whitehead
rejected this kind of philosophy and instead came up with the notion that everything that
exists is held together by a thread of kinship with everything else (Jordan 1968: 20-25;
Leclerc 1958: 174).
In other words, human well-being should be understood within the context of communion
with other realities that share this existence with humanity. Whitehead’s implied
philosophical anthropology, as we shall see in the following section, means that we also
embrace the natural environment as co-extensive with what it means to be human.
7.4 Process Thought and the Co-existence of Humanity and the Environment
The implication of process philosophical anthropology is that human existence cannot be
demarcated from that of the natural environment. Whitehead (CN 1920: 31-33) developed
his philosophy of nature from the premise that mechanistic science and its attendant
philosophy of empiricism bifurcates nature, thus creating a dichotomy between nature as
“apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness”. In this
bifurcation of nature, Whitehead observed that “[o]nly one mode of the occupancy of
space is allowed for – namely, this bit of matter occupying this region at this durationless
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instant. This occupation of space is the final fact, without reference to any other instant,
or to any other pieces of matter, or to any other region of space”. Whitehead’s argument
against such perception of nature was mainly based on the premise that if there is
relationality among all that exists then such a division of nature cannot be sustained
because such a division of nature was a failure to see relationships from one thing to
another in the sense that each bit of matter ends up having its own place that could not be
inferred from another.
Whitehead went against the logic of the bifurcation of nature as follows: “If in the
location of configurations of matter throughout a stretch of time there is no inherent
reference to any other times, past or future, it immediately follows that nature within any
period does not refer to nature at any other period” (CN 1920: 33). Thus according to
Whitehead, the separation of nature into separate enduring entities was an absurdity
because a simply located entity cannot persist through time. If nature cannot endure
through time, it means that there are no relationships between the past and the present.
Hence the significance of the Whiteheadian theory of nature is that it insists that
humanity is part of nature in as much as nature is part of humanity. If it is the case that
humanity is internally related to nature, it also follows that the economic and the
mechanistic scientific idea of seeing humanity as having an autonomous existence from
nature can equally be described as an abstraction.
In other words, it is an abstraction of human experience, the experience of the totality of

togetherness with the natural environment. Cobb and Griffin (1977: 77) wrote that if
human well-being is tied up with the natural environment as process thought implies, we
have to bear in mind that “ingredients which are harmful to other living things are also
harmful to human bodies, on the one hand, and that the health of our psychic life is
intimately bound up with the health of our bodily life on the other”. Also, it follows that
no line can be drawn “explicitly or implicitly between human beings and other creatures”
because process thought “attributes the enjoyment of experience to every level of
actuality”. In the same vein, Prozesky writes,
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From the holistic cast of Whitehead’s primary ontology we can infer some
significant idea about the nature of humanity. To start with, if reality is at base a
single, seamless fabric, then there can be no valid separation of humankind from
the rest of things. People are thus continuous with the rest of
nature…Whitehead’s view of the interconnectedness of all that is actual means,
inter alia, that for Whitehead humankind is co-extensive with its environment,
both physical and social (Prozesky 1995: 56).
Prozesky’s observation is that if all that exists is internally related with everything else, it
would not be consistent with the concept of interconnectedness to see human existence as
external from the environment, be it social or natural. All these environments are simply
inseparable. Process thought is a philosophy that inherently espouses “the deep sense of
the interconnectedness, even interpenetrating of all things” (Birch and Cobb 1981: 144;
Cf. Eckersley 1992: 49). Process thought says that we do not exist as separate entities and
then enter into relationships, but that from birth we are constituted and coevolve within a
web of relationships. It is within these relationships that we attain our ultimate well-
being. Though we have the freedom to become what we want to be, we have this freedom
within the bounds of relatedness and interrelatedness (Birch and Cobb 1981: 95). Michael
Zimmerman expressed it in the same manner when he said that “the paradigm of internal
relations lets us view ourselves as manifestations of a complex universe; we are not part
but are moments in the open-ended, novelty-producing process of cosmic evolution
(Zimmerman 1994: 17).
Zimmerman’s observation that humanity is internally related to the cosmic evolution

demands a further examination on the would-be role of humanity in these relations. If
human existence has been simply a mundane pursuit of self-interest as the self-interest
theory of economics alleges, then the human contribution to the cosmic evolution can
only be a tragic one to our common belonging with the natural environment. For Birch
and Cobb an ethical concern for the well-being of the natural environment is possible
from the process perspective on the basis that we come to see each living thing as
endowed with autopoietic intrinsic value.
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Autopoietic intrinsic value means that all things that show self-production and self-
renewal have value in themselves. The word autopoietic comes from the Greek word
autopoiesis (autos – “self” and poiein “to produce”). Autopoietic entities are those
entities that are “primarily and continuously concerned with the regeneration of their own
organisational activity and structure”. This idea of autopoietic intrinsic value was also
expressed by Whitehead when he said that all entities experience intrinsic value which
can be measured according to richness of experience which is proportioned to its capacity
for openness to novelty. Thus according to this approach, the realisation that other things
have value in themselves is reason enough that we should not use them for our own
selfish ends (Birch and Cobb 1981: 151). However, a qualification must be made here
that from the process theory of internal relations, moral consideration is only possible
from the point of view that all autopoietic entities contribute to cosmic evolution.
On their own, autopoietic entities do not have any value. Their value is a kind of value
that is attained in interconnectedness with other entities. While Whitehead maintained
that each entity is self-determining, he also stated that this self-determination is within the
bounds of relatedness. Whitehead would even put it pragmatically that “there is no such a
fact as absolute freedom; every actual entity possesses only such freedom as is inherent in
the primary phase ‘given’ by its standpoint of relativity to its actual universe. Freedom,
givenness, potentiality, are notions which presuppose each other and limit each other”
(PR 1929: 135; cf. Birch and Cobb 1981: 141-162). In other words, freedom as implying
absolute independent existence and absolute self-determination would be a
misconception of reality and existence in general.
From the preceding discussion it is abundantly clear that Whitehead’s process thought
and its implied philosophical anthropology puts emphasis on relationality of all that
exists. Human existence is inseparably co-extensive with that of everything else that
exists and that has ever existed. If everything is relationally bounded, a theory of
motivation such as that of the socio-economic theory of self-interest can only be seen as
pathological and an outright abstraction of human nature. Equally, one cannot with
logical impunity externalise the existence of society and the natural environment in one’s
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existence. The social and the physical are related and interrelated. However, the argument
that is levelled by critics of process thought against this position is that such a
conceptualisation of reality can lead to an oppressive totalitarian vision of human
existence – thus ignoring the importance of individual persons and their rights.
7.5 Arguments against Process Relationalism

There are two arguments that have been advanced by David Stackhouse (1981: 103)
against the process doctrine of internal relatedness. The first argument is that the process
idea that an entity is the creative synthesis of its relations and not an enduring substance
does away with the idea of the individual personhood. Secondly, internal relatedness of
all that exists would fail “to provide guidance relative to the quality of relationships”
because it becomes difficult to speak of individual rights in the society where the
individual belongs. He writes, “there is a ‘thingness’ about life that does not easily
dissolve into its relationships; there is a reality about a self – a Socrates or Jesus, a John
Smith or Jane Doe – that is not easily accounted for by appealing to a ‘synthesis of a
multiplicity of relata’” (Stackhouse 1981: 108).
The implication of the above arguments is that for the individual to be a moral agent
whom society can accord rights, s/he has to be given autonomous existence. The idea of
individual autonomy becomes a precondition to the notion of individual rights as the
starting point for the setting of moral standards. Stackhouse went on to argue that not all
relationships are good. As he put it:
Relatedness can take the form of paternalism, manipulation, oppression and

persecution as often as respectfulness, liberation, love or just treatment.
Relatedness in fact becomes antithetical to justice if it submerges the reality of an
enduring individual person focused in its own right as an irreducible centre of
irreplaceable worth and dignity (Stackhouse 1981: 136).
The heart of the above argument is that not all relatedness is good because people
sometimes experience evil in this relatedness. Relatedness boils down to injustice when
individuals are not seen as subjects of worth and dignity. What Stackhouse is sidelining
in his argument is the fact that all those negative features which he sees as potentially
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present in relatedness constitute the antithesis of relatedness. The process doctrine of

internal relations refutes the idea that the individual is ‘an enduring entity with
irreplaceable worth and dignity’ because such an understanding of a person presupposes
that the individual does not change or experience change in his or her life. If that is the
case, then the individual will not experience creativity and novelty. It is relationality that
provides the individual with his or her freedom to become. Here one needs to take heed
of Whitehead’s advice that, “Wherever there is the sense of self-sufficient completion,
there is the germ of vicious dogmatism. There is no entity which enjoys an isolated self-
sufficiency of existence. In other words, finitude is not self-supporting” (ESP 1948: 78).
In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead anticipated Stackhouse’s objections to relatedness

when he stated that there are
variations of emphasis between Individual Absoluteness and Individual

Relativity. Here ‘absoluteness’ means the notion of release from essential
dependence on other members of the community in respect to modes of activity,
while ‘relativity’ means the converse fact of essential relatedness. In one of their
particularisations these ideas appear in the antagonism between notions of
freedom and of social organisation (AI 1933: 54-55).
While Whitehead advocates freedom from the perspective that each entity is self-
determining, he also maintains that it is also determined by others. In other words, in the
process of becoming, there is determinism and indeterminism. This determinism can be
observed from the fact that, “Actual entities are determined by extensive relations, eternal
objects, God, and prehensions of the past, as well as by every other relevant mode of
existence”. The indeterminism aspect of it is that these actual entities determine
themselves by choosing from the myriad of data that is presented before it as it suits its
mode of existence (Ross 1983: 61-64; Prozesky 1995: 55-56).
The process doctrine of internal relatedness says that a human being is a being open to
others, and ultimately shares a reciprocal influence with other human beings and the
natural environment (Cobb 1965: 51). The anxiety of Stackhouse arises from his pre-
commitment to the doctrine of atomic individualism that sees the individual as endowed
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with his or her properties that cannot be subsumed under common or general existence.
The doctrine of internal relations implies that if individuals are atomic and enduring
through time, such individuals can only be inflexible and probably exist in isolation from
the cosmic becoming. The idea that humanity is intrinsically tied up with the well-being
of all other realities that share this existence with it will be my point of entry into the
implications of the process cosmology for my critique of self-interest as an illusion of
egoism. This illusion is perpetuated by the tendency of the modern economic theory of
self-interest to abstract human beings from relatedness and interrelatedness.
7.6 The Process Critique of Self-Interest as an Illusion of Egoism

Charles Hartshorne, whose philosophical outlook was very much influenced by
Whitehead, argued in his article, “Beyond Enlightened Self-Interest”, that the very
concept of self-interest was based on the illusion of egoism. Hartshorne said that the
individual identity as an enduring reality was just an abstract, and that non-identity was
concrete:
Personal identity is a partial, not a complete identity; it is an abstract aspect of

life, not life in its concreteness. Concretely each of us is a numerically new reality
every fraction of a second…Consider, too, that many minute portions of one’s
body were once parts of the environment, and vice versa. So far as these portions
are concerned, spatiotemporal continuity connects one not with oneself in the past
or future so much as with the environment, that is, other individual beings, in the
past or future. If I am influenced now by what I have been in the past, I am as
genuinely influenced by what others have been in the past (Hartshorne 1974: 201-
202).
In chapter 5 it was shown that neo-liberal economists saw self-interest as natural from the
perspective that the individual had his or her identity that cannot be subsumed under the
collectivity of society or existence in general. In so doing, they failed to recognise that
self-identity is derived from relationships with other people. It is mainly on the derivative
nature of personal identity that Hartshorne went on to argue that reason should
universalise the interests of others in such a way that the individual should identify his or
her interests with the interests of others (Hartshorne 1974: 204).
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Hartshorne is undermining the doctrine of self-interest from its very roots, that is personal
identity, which is at the heart of both psychological egoism and ethical egoism.54 Both
psychological and ethical egoism tend to see the identity of a person as enclosed. In the
theory of psychological and ethical egoism the individual cannot exist in terms of internal
relations due to the fact that s/he has an identity that is incorrigible. This implies that each
one has his or her life experiences which cannot be shared with other people. Hartshorne
(1974: 206) echoed Whitehead’s doctrine of prehension when he said that the “other’s
past entered into your present being, your past into his, and both share a partly
overlapping causal future. Each helps to create a new self in the other and will influence
some of the same future selves”. Consequently, “the rational aim is the future good that
can help to bring about and take interest in the now, whether or not it will do us good in
the future and whether or not we shall be there to share in the good”.
While egoists tend to see personal identity in terms of the present, process philosophy
argues that personal identity stretches from the past, via the present, into the future.
Hartshorne (1974: 206-207) expressed this idea forcefully when he said, “Concretely I
am not a mere self, the same through change, but a ‘society’ or sequence of experiences,
each inheriting its predecessors, so far as memory obtains”. Such an understanding of
human existence is lacking in the theory of self-interest in the sense that “the egoist
subordinates the concrete to the abstract, the whole to the part, the really inclusive future
to a limited stretch of the future…” (cf. PR 1929: 87-88). While the modern economic
theory of self-interest implicitly discounts the future as we have seen in chapter 5,
process thinking insists that the becoming of the future should be premised on the idea of
the becoming of all that constitutes existence into a solidaristic union of everything that
54
Egoism is a theory which denies that we can be motivated simply by a concern for others. This is
psychological egoism. It is a thesis that says everyone acts for his or her own advantage, and that the only
reason why people act respectfully or kindly towards each other is for one reason or another to their
advantage. It might be fear of punishment that makes them act correctly. Some have ulterior motives; that
is, they expect other things later on, perhaps a reward in heaven when they die, or they are trying to avoid
guilt or want a feeling of self-satisfaction. In ordinary language, the egoist’s position is often called
selfishness. However, one has to make a distinction between psychological egoism and ethical egoism.
Psychological egoism seems to say that our nature is made in such a way that we cannot help but to act in
our own self-interest. On the other hand, ethical egoism claims that even though we can act in others’
interests because we are concerned for others, we ought to act in our own interest. Both positions can be
found in Ayn Rand’s book called The Virtue of Selfishness in which she propounded a thesis that one ought
always to act in favor of one’s self-interest as a maxim of what it means to be ethical (Alford 1991: 10-20).
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exists. In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead contradicted egoism as follows: “The past has
an objective existence in the present which lies in the future beyond itself. …Immediate
existence requires the insertion of the future in the crannies of the present” (AI 1933: 80).
The realisation that other people had contributed to one’s well-being, hence the need to
live in such a way that one does not compromise the future, becomes a moral imperative.
From a process perspective the urge towards the attainment of future values of human
existence has to be premised on solidarity as the source of all possible future creativity
and novelty. If our present existence feels the past, it is equally imperative that we, the
present generation, are ethically obligated to have a concern for the future. Thus to be
solely self-interested, and to use reason solely for the maximisation of utility or egoistical
ends is to deprive the future of any positive contributions from the present. John Cobb
would put it concretely that “moral value” is concerned with the future increase of beauty
which can only be brought into realisation when there is “an intuition that the worth of
beauty exceeds its momentary enjoyment, that its attainment is self-justifying beyond the
ability of reason to grasp its value” (Cobb 1965: 131-132).
In the Whiteheadian sense, moral value implies solidarity or togetherness in becoming.

The idea that solidarity is an ontological requirement for the future value of becoming is
the theme that runs through his process thought. He writes,
The solidarity is itself efficiency of the microscopic embodying the principle of

unbounded permanence acquiring novelty through flux. …The atomic unity of the
world, expressed by a multiplicity of atoms, is now replaced by the solidarity of
the existence continuum. This solidarity embraces not only the coordinate
division within each atomic actuality, but also exhibits the coordinate divisions of
all atomic actualities from each other in one scheme of relationships (PR 1929:
254-438).
In the light of the above quotation, solidarity presupposes relatedness and interrelatedness
of all entities. This relatedness and interrelatedness evokes a holistic form of existence,
whereby human existence is premised on the well-being of everything that shares this
existence with us in the present as well as in the future becoming. Thus the process
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ontology and cosmology and the resultant philosophical anthropology are both immanent
and teleological in the sense that they are concerned with the past, the present and the
future. An authentic human existence has to be concerned with the present as well as the
future.
It is mainly this concern with the present and the future which led Hartshorne (1974: 213-
215) to the idea that “ethics is the generalisation of instinctive concern, which in principle
transcends the immediate state of the self and even the long-run career of the self, and
embraces the ongoing communal process of life as such”. For Hartshorne, the aesthetic
basis of ethics is to seek optimisation of experience for the community. Consequently he
deduced that an ethically good act has two implications. Firstly, it contributes to the
harmony and intensity of experiences both in the agent and in spectators. Secondly, it will
produce an intense harmonious experience in the community, thereby giving rise to
genuine kindness, which is a kind of kindness that produces beauty in our common
existence. In other words, an act that can be evaluated as ethically good becomes that act
which is done in a way that surpasses self-interest.
Our human aspirations or interests are relative to the larger community of existence
rather than those of immediate individual self-interest. Human interests are relative to the
interests of the more inclusive life communities of which we are part, and upon whom we
utterly depend. Human beings thereby share with other participants in the community of
existence in the present as well as in the future. The futuristic aspect of ethics that arises
from process thinking is the result of the process premise that the present and the future
are an integrated totality. It follows that the human race is indivisibly one, and all human
beings, irrespective of whether they are living now or in the future, are interrelated. As
such, they belong to one another and to the same organic whole (PR 1929: 343-344;
Cobb and Griffin 1977: 19-20; Prozesky 1995: 150-156).
If the pursuit of self-interest for the sake of optimising one’s utility is the sole aim of
human economic activities as it is alleged in modern economics, it becomes irrational for
the individual to compromise his or her present opportunities for the sake of the future.
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The most forceful idea in process thought is that it emphasises the fact that the existence
of ethics in human society should be understood as a concern for the future. Thus
Whitehead puts it emphatically that “the effect of the present on the future is a business
of morals”. The futuristic orientation of process philosophy and its resultant ethical
theory finds its support from the fact that a large part of his concept of morality centres
on the implications of present actions for the future. It follows that a relational ethic is
concerned with the present because it is “a pledge for the future” (AI 1933: 380; MT
1938: 13-14). In other words, the future is the final judge of whether an action is morally
good or evil.
The common good of the future is attainable because our virtuous actions at present do
contribute to the maximal beauty of experience. In becoming objectively immortal, the
goodness attained by our virtuous acts contributes to the beauty of future existence. The
contribution of the present to future existence is impossible if the present generations are
solely self-interested without a sense of responsibility for the future.
From the process perspective, the idea of responsibility is characterised by three basic
features. Firstly, we have responsibility to people in the future, secondly, to all kinds of
things that constitute this existence other than human beings, and thirdly, globally
towards anyone, anywhere. When all these features are compromised, we end up having a
‘me-here-now’ conception of morality whereby the scope of moral concern is limited to
individual self-interest without taking into account the consequences of this self-interest
to the whole, thus depriving oneself of “a relevant future” (PR 1929: 27). A process
ethical concern for the future also arises from the logic that there is no unit which can
separate itself from others and from the whole. Human activity affects the whole network
of relations and its consequences extend into the distant future beyond human
imagination. It is not the agent’s future that is relevant, but the future of everything in
existence.
Whitehead (AI 1933: 113) said that a concern for the future inevitably demands foresight.
It is the foresight of the present impact upon the future that makes the agent morally
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responsible for future consequences. While “foresight is the product of insight”, where
there is insight without foresight, there is no morality. For there to be morality in the
future, we have a moral obligation to act in such a way that we consider all the possible
consequences of our human activities on the future. Hartshorne expressed the same idea
when he said:
The future that matters is not our own future as such, but rather any future we can
influence, sympathise with, and in some degree understand as good or bad for
someone. To serve this future can be our present aim, whether or not the good we
do to others will also be our own future good. It is our good, right now, to
promote what we care about for the future, whether it be a child’s welfare, even a
pet animal’s or our country’s, or mankind’s – and one could go further still. Other
things being equal, one prefers that persons, even animals, should be happy, not
only while one can share in their happiness but afterward as well [his emphasis]
(Hartshorne 1974: 205)
A process concern for the future is not only about the human future, but about an all-
inclusive future. It can be deduced also that Hartshorne is arguing that a concern for the
future should not only be a concern for one’s immediate family, but a future that takes
into account the interests of strangers as well as that of the natural environment. This
processual futuristic thinking is based on the understanding that everything that exists
generously contributes to the becoming of everything in life. The idea that everything that
exists finds its fulfilment in the process of giving and receiving provides us with further
grounds from which we can say that when our human existence is perceived as open to
influences from our general existence, we end up broadening our ethical perspective.
Whitehead compounded this observation by saying, “Morality of outlook is inseparably
conjoined with generality of outlook” (PR 1929: 23).
In a way, Whitehead is arguing that one’s particularity or the particularity of everything

that exists finds a meaningful existence within the realm of the whole, and not the other
way round as it is claimed by proponents of atomic individualism, as we have seen in
chapter 5. The same argument was made in his essay, “Mathematics and the Good” as
follows, “The notion of the essential relatedness of all things is the primary step in
understanding how finite entities require the unbounded universe, and how the universe
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requires meaning and value for reason of its embodiment of the activity of finitude”(ESP
1948: 81). The implication here is that from our day to day experience of the world we
should be informed by the realisation that there are no entities that are self-existent and
self-sufficient. Here we can deduce that to be solely self-interested is to presume oneself
to be immune from relationality.
In his Religion in the Making, Whitehead (1926: 95) described egoists as “good people of
narrow sympathies” who are “apt to be unfeeling and unprogressive, enjoying their
egotistical goodness”. He said, “[T]hey have reached a state of stable goodness, so far as
their own interior life is concerned. Their type of moral correctitude is, on a larger view,
so like evil that the distinction is trivial”. The ethical ideal for Whitehead is that one
should have an inclusive or general moral outlook so as to be in solidarity with
everything that exists. The idea of solidaristic existence becomes plausible on the
grounds that process thought provides us with relatedness and interrelatedness as the
foundation of everything that is real. If all that exists is related and interrelated, it equally
follows that the idea of independent existence or autonomous existence that is implied in
the modern economic theory of self-interest is illusory.
By denying the whole idea of independent existence that is implied in modern economic
theory of self-interest as we have seen in chapter 5, process thought undermines self-
interest at its very root. According to Whitehead, the notion of independent existence has
an “error that has double origin, one civilised, and the other barbaric” (ESP 1948: 71). As
he puts it,
The civilised origin of the notion of independent existence is the tendency of

sensitive people, when they experience some factor of value on its noblest side, to
feel that they are enjoying some ultimate essence of the Universe, and that
therefore its existence must include an absolute independence of all inferior types.
The second misconception is derived from the earlier types of successful civilised,
or half-civilised, social system. The apparatus of preserving unit is stressed (ESP
1948: 71).
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In the above quotation, the error of independent existence manifests itself in two forms.
The first manifestation of independent existence comes in the form of the negation of
those other realities that are deemed inferior. At the micro level of human existence, if
one is solely concerned with the pursuit of self-interest in order to maximise one’s utility,
it also follows that those other realities that are deemed inferior will be ignored. At the
macro level, those who might be fortunate in life do not feel themselves as existing in
solidarity with those who are less fortunate. In its second manifestation, independent
existence can be an attempt to totalise human existence under the presumption that a
viable, successful social system requires despotism. Whitehead saw these errors of
independent existence as integral to “all human edifices” that constantly “require repair
and reconstruction” (ESP 1948: 71).
If all human edifices require reconstruction as it is alleged by Whitehead, it also follows

that the homo economicus of modern economics needs to be revised because such a
model of a human being is not realistic. This is because to be always motivated by self-
interest implies that homo economicus is not concerned with the interests of others. It is
the neglect of, or failure to realise our human interdependence that shows that there will
always be a need for referring to our relationality in whatever we do. Since process
thought says that nothing is permanent, and that the synthesis between the past and the
present constitutes the present self, what might be assumed by the individual as his or her
self-interest could be simply a temporal transitional phase of experience. Hartshorne and
Creighton Peden (1981: 7) maintained that, “No one who observes people can pretend
that in fact they always seek anything like their own long-run advantage. If this were the
case only utter stupidity could explain how frequently and obviously they act contrary to
their own long-run advantage”.
The process account of individual identity presupposes the existence of a plurality of

motivations as integral to their economic relations. Hartshorne (1950: 30-38) also argued
that in process thought, “A person is given not as a particular actuality, but as a principle
of sequence of actualities”. In process thought, according to Hartshorne, “what is called
an individual in common life can only be understood as a form of sequence of particular
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actualities socially inheriting common quality from antecedent members; and that
personality itself is a special temporally linear cause of such social – that is sympathetic
inheritance”.
Within such an account of personal identity, the individual’s interest cannot be neutral to
the interests of others as it is alleged in modern economic theory of self-interest. The
account of human economic relations based on self-interest tends to limit the individual’s
personal identity solely to present economic relations. It also needs to be mentioned that
the modern self-interest theory of human economic relations presumes that relationships
are external to our existence and everything that shares this existence with us.

In this chapter, attention was given to Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophical
anthropology as an antithesis to individualism and self-interest. I started by giving some
condensed clarification of process thought and ethics, in which I argued that the
relevance of process thought to ethics lies in its relational metaphysical conceptualisation
of reality in general. Process philosophy is a metaphysics that attempts to explain new
scientific theories such as the theory of relativity and quantum physics, which are also
theories based on a relational understanding of physical reality. In its metaphysical
interpretation of these new sciences, process thought asserted that all that is real, or actual
entities, is relationally constituted (Whitehead 1925; 1929; 1933; 1948; Zohar 1990;
Capra1983; Margulis and Sagan 1987; Lovelock 1979; Jungerman 2000: 1-14; Prozesky
1995: 54-59; Cobb and Griffin 1977; Hartshorne and Peden 1977).
The relationality of everything that exists has been accounted for in two ways. Firstly, it
was argued that actual entities are influenced by the past due to their ability to feel what
transpired in the past. Secondly, everything that exists is related to everything else
because each actual entity has the ability to prehend the existence of other actual entities.
This implies that all life is held together by a thread of relatedness and interrelatedness. It
was argued that since Whitehead’s process philosophy was a holistic philosophy, what he
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said about the world is also implied in human existence (PR 1929: 65-69; Jordan 1968:
20-25; Leclerc 1958: 174).
A critique of self-interest found its climax in the form of two arguments. The first
argument was that self-interest, from the process perspective, would inevitably militate
against the future, thereby compromising the economic well-being of the future
generations. The second argument was that if everything is related and interrelated, it also
follows that the individual’s identity cannot be determined in advance, such that s/he
would consistently know her self-interest. This argument led us to the idea that our
relationality demands that we adopt a generality of outlook that can enable us to embrace
an all-inclusive community (CN 1920: 31-33; Cobb and Griffin 1977: 77; Prozesky 1995:
56; Birch and Cobb 1981; Zimmerman 1988).
If everything is related and interrelated, the implied philosophical anthropology means

that human beings do not exist externally to these relationships. Human beings are actual
entities among other actual entities, hence they cannot exist meaningfully outside internal
relations with all that exists. To exist as an autonomous individual or species was to
abstract oneself from the process of becoming. It was on these grounds that Whitehead
rejected the whole western philosophical and theological tradition of independent
existence, noting that such a conceptualisation of actual entities abstracts them from their
togetherness (SMW 1925: 198-200).
Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne refuted the self-interest theory or egoism on the
grounds that it was based on the assumption of a person as a self-enclosed enduring
subject. Since the world of change is integral to the world in which the individual is
embedded, it is within this processual world that the individual embraces and is embraced
by what goes on in this world. This implied that neither the individual’s identity nor his
or her motivations are permanent (ESP 1948: 64-71). Because of the processual nature of
reality, Whitehead argued that all human identities and social structures will always
remain in constant need of reconstruction. The fact that there is nothing permanent
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implies that one cannot assign self-interest to human economic relations as the sole
determinant of behaviour (Hartshorne and Peden 1981: 6-7).
Whitehead’s implied philosophical anthropology was also captured in those instances

where he stated that those actual entities that we ascribe individuality are societies. The
term society was used by Whitehead so as to denote the idea that human personality is
inherited and is influenced by others, and that it will also influence future existence. The
process conceptualisation of a human being had two ethical implications. The first
implication was that one should always act in such a way that one’s present actions will
contribute positively to the lives of the future generations. Secondly, a morally plausible
act must be that which displays a generality of outlook. This means that we should see
the human and the natural environment as interconnected. The natural environment was
not external to human existence (AI 1933: 80; Hartshorne 1974: 206; RM 1926: 95).
It should be clear by now that process philosophical anthropology shares many

commonalities with African humanism. An ethical social solution to the socio-economic
theory of self-interest will derive from the commonalities between African humanism and
process philosophical anthropology. Since process philosophical anthropology and
African humanism have made self-interest implausible, in the following chapter I will
recommend the need for a holistic plausible ethic beyond self-interest before stating the
conclusions of the study.
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PART III: IMPLICATIONS OF THE VALUES OF AFRICAN HUMANISM AND

PROCESS PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY ON THE THEORY OF SELF-
INTEREST
It became clear from Part II that the modern economic theory of self-interest is
implausible when viewed from the common aspects of African humanism and process
philosophical anthropology. In the light of these commonalities, recommendations will be
made to the effect that a holistic ethic should enable us to go beyond self-interest. A
holistic ethic that is being espoused in this part is that type of ethic that is premised on the
paradigm of relationalism among human beings, as well as between humanity and the
natural environment.
The world-view of African humanism and its individual ontology engender the primacy
of relationality among all that exists. Human existence and life in general are meaningful
in the context of relationships. These relationships are not only about things in their
concrete, but they involve the past, the present and the future. It is possible to extend the
common good into the future if our present existence fosters inclusive well-being among
all that exists. The actions that are done for the good of all will also promote the good of
all into the future. Such a paradigm of a holistic ethic can only be plausible on the
grounds that we start by affirming relationality as an inescapable frame work of
everything that exists.
Both African humanism and process philosophical anthropology espouse the idea that
human beings are internally related to the natural environment. In process philosophical
anthropology, these relations were captured through concepts such as ‘internal relations’,
‘relatedness’, ‘prehension’ ‘philosophy of organism’ and ‘society’. All these concepts
suggest a philosophical commitment to a holistic cosmological vision. On the other hand,
African humanism, through the totemic system and the concept of Ukama, engenders the
idea that human well-being and identity are derived from relationships. Individuals are
not owners of their ‘selves’. Rather, they derive their identities from their relatedness to
society and the natural environment. The ideal form of human existence should be that
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type of existence that reflects the reality of our interconnectedness with the natural
environment. Modern economic acts that are done solely for the pursuit of self-interest
will ultimately militate against human existence in the future.
Lastly, it will be shown that process philosophical anthropology and African humanism
present us with a more plausible paradigm for understanding humanity and its ultimate
well-being. Both process anthropology and African humanism give us a strong sense that
to be human is to belong to other human beings – Ubuntu - and to be in communion with
all realities that share this existence with us. Process thought echoes this insight when it
refers to what we are accustomed to call individuals as actually ‘societies’ – implying the
derivative nature of all existence, including human beings. The notion of seeing a human
being in terms of social belongingness implies that the economy should promote the
ultimate well-being of everybody by fostering the common good.
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CHAPTER EIGHT: RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
SECTION A: BEYOND SELF-INTEREST: TOWARDS A HOLISTIC ETHIC
What can be taken for granted is that ideas can express further ideas if they are systematically
referred to one situation after another. To change the metaphor, if an idea is fertile, it may well
conceive a different kind of child if it is mated to a different kind of situation. There is always the
possibility that it may produce nothing new, but the cross-breeding is worth attempting all the
same (Mazrui 1967: 4).
8.1 Introduction
As the above title indicates, my main focus in this chapter is on making recommendations
to the effect that ethics should enable us to see our human economic relations as being
beyond those of the modern homo economicus. My recommendations in this regard will
derive from the commonalities between African humanism and process philosophical
anthropology. It became abundantly clear in our discussion of African humanism and
process philosophical anthropology that these two thought patterns provide us with a
holistic ethic that makes self-interest metaphysically implausible. The second section of
the chapter summarises the conclusions reached in all the preceding chapters of the study.
Having shown the implausibility of self-interest in modern economic discourse I shall

recommend a humane and holistic ethical paradigm. In this suggested holistic ethical
paradigm, it will be shown in the following sub-section that we should traverse self-
interest by putting emphasis on our communal belonging. A community thus grounded
should be a community that embraces the ontological and the cosmological dimensions of
human existence. The third sub-section argues that if human beings are human beings by
virtue of belonging to the community, the ethic that arises from African humanism and
process philosophical anthropology would imply that ethics will go beyond self-interest
by putting emphasis on relational rationality. In the final sub-section before the
conclusion to this part of the chapter it is shown that all these three recommendations
imply the importance of promoting the common good in our existence.
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8.2 The Primacy of an All-Embracive Community

A common theme that ran through both African humanism and process philosophical
anthropology was the idea that a human being was related and interrelated. Put in other
words, the well-being of the individual was inseparable from the well-being of the
community. This individual relatedness to the community was expressed in the African
concept of Ubuntu – humanness – and also in the process concept of society. In African
humanism, Ubuntu or humanness shows that there is no dichotomy between the
individual and the community because one is a human being because of the existence of
others. From the process perspective an individual is a society – a term that denotes the
derivative nature of human existence. If that is the real nature of human existence, it
follows that self-interest should be rejected as a dangerous error that can bring harm to
communities since it elevates individual self-gratification beyond concern for community
(Hartshorne 1950: 30-38; PR 1929: 87-88; Dandala 1996: 70; Ramose 1999: 80;
www.alfred.north.com/papers/vol01/01_Prozesky).
We also need to realise that what it means to be human is something that the individual
derives from the community because there is simply no dichotomy between the
individual and the community. It is this inherent lack of dichotomy between the
individual and the community which should lead us to reject self-interest on the basis that
it is pathological. Human well-being, in the light of African humanism and process
philosophical anthropology, should be nourished through the cultivation of virtues such
as loyalty, courtesy, tolerance, patience, generosity, hospitality and readiness to
sympathise with others. In other words, virtues instead of vices are the main reason for
the flourishing of our humanness. Since no one can be a person outside the community, it
also implies that self-interest erodes our humanness (Ramose 1999: 52-53; Menkiti 1977:
172-174; Kenyata 1953: 119).
Because of the fact that our humanness has been contributed to by the community as well
as those who existed in the past, the individual’s interest should be linked to the interests
of others so that s/he will contribute positively to those who will exist in the future. If the
individual’s being has been contributed to by those who existed in the past, and is
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continuously being contributed to by others who are existing at present, it also follows
that an authentic ethical existence should be that type of existence that fosters solidarity
in the community. Communal solidarity demands that individuals must be in the position
to express active concern for the well-being of each other in such a way that there can be
harmony and mutual understanding with the community (Hartshorne 1974: 204-207; PR
1929: 87-88; Gelfand 1973).
From a holistic ethical paradigm that arises from the commonalities between African
humanism and process philosophical anthropology, we need to realise that everything
that exists is embedded in the community by virtue of relationality. The implication is
that no line of demarcation can be drawn explicitly or implicitly between human beings
and other creatures. This means that we should see our human existence as intrinsically
interwoven with other forms of existence, and that together with these other life forms we
constitute a community. If we see community as an all-embracing phenomenon of
existence, it also implies that human interests must take into account the interests of this
all-embracing community. It is an ethical imperative that our economic activities should
thus be pursued in a way that enhances or invigorates the well-being of the community as
a whole (Hartshorne 1974: 202-206; Menkiti 1984: 180).
Since African humanism and process philosophical anthropology say that community is
prior to the individual, it also follows that the object of economic analysis should be
communities or societies rather than individuals. The individual’s economic well-being
depends on the economic well-being of the community. The modern economic model of
homo economicus who is solely propelled by self-interest must be replaced by economic
behaviour of communities. Communal values should constitute social capital which is
indispensable to a humane economic system. When communities accept a particular
economic behaviour as integral to their moral values, such a practice will thrive because
it will already be deriving from social capital (Daly and Cobb 1989: 366-368; Kenyata
1953: 199).
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Taking into consideration the fact that the individual is sustained by the community and
its values, it is also an ethical requirement that the individual should be concerned with
the well-being of the community. In other words, wealth should help to enhance human
dignity in as inclusive a manner as possible. The enhancement of human dignity through
the sharing of wealth is possible because to be fully human implies the capacity to feel
the sufferings of others (PR 1929: 138-227; Cobb and Griffin 1977: 17; Hartshorne and
Peden 1981: 7-34; Jordan 1968: 20-25; Kenyata 1953: 199; Bujo 1998: 164; 2001: 60-61;
Nyerere 1968: 3-4; Gyekye 1987: 155).
The idea of community that is espoused in African humanism and process philosophical
anthropology also implies that our human existence should reflect communion between
humanity and the natural environment. Our human existence is inseparable from that of
the natural environment because there is no demarcation between human existence and
that of the natural environment. We need to bear in mind that the destruction of the
natural environment implies the destruction of humanity at present as well as in the
future. It follows that a genuine economic ethics should show a sense of concern for the
well-being of the natural environment. Here an important feature that should characterise
ethics is relationality (Mazrui 1977: 262; Ramose 1999: 80; Sindima 1995: 151; Dixon
1976: 65-70; Junod 1938: 112; Fortune 1974: 16; Prozesky 1995; 2003; Senghor 1964:
72-73; Birch and Cobb 1981: 95-144 Whitehead 1920: 31-33).
8.3 Beyond Self-Interested Rationality to Relational Rationality

If everything is related and interrelated with everything else, it also follows that this
relationality of all that exists should be reflected in our ways of thinking. The type of
reasoning that is implied in African humanism and process philosophical anthropology
enables us to combine the subject and object of observation, the natural and supernatural,
the mundane and the divine, the material and the spiritual in an inseparable oneness. This
type of reasoning rejects the instrumental reason of modern economic theory of self-
interest that is usually appealed to as the defining characteristic of homo economicus.
Relational rationality advocates thinking with others through participation and
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communion with everything that exists. This implies that as human beings we are
communicative by nature. Communicability becomes possible because life is lived in
Ukama – in relationships with others (Senghor 1964: 72-73; Kaunda 1966: 35-36; Mbiti
1976: 108; Uzukwu 1995: 42-45; Murove 2004: 134).
We are not human because of insulated reason, but through relational rationality. Since
reason is embedded and arises in the context of Ukama, the same reason cannot be
disentangled from Ukama because such a reason would not be able to take into
consideration the interests of all the realms of existence. The implication of this
observation is that we come to know who we are in the context of relationships with
others. An all inclusive way of reasoning enables us to develop a general moral outlook
that can foster solidarity among all that exists. By giving primacy to a relational reason,
we are ethically committing ourselves to the need for taking into account the
consequences of our actions on the present as well as on the future. This is possible
because we have the ability to feel the future as much as we can feel the past. Instead of
always acting on the basis of utility maximisation, relational rationality gives us the
opportunity to ask ourselves what the consequences of greed-driven economic behaviour
on the well-being of the future generations will be? (Whitehead 1926: 95; 1933: 80;
Hartshorne 1974: 206; Cobb and Griffin 1977: 83; Bujo 1998: 54; Kenyata 1953: 119;
Mbiti 1969: 108; Murove 2004: 144).
Relational rationality or rationality that is concerned with others or is sympathetic to the

plight of others will enable us to be emotionally moved by the sufferings of others
because human actions are communicative and are responded to by other members of
society. It is our ability to communicate and respond to the community, which lures us to
the idea of advocacy ethics. Advocacy ethics implies that the ideal ethical existence has
to take into account the interests of those who cannot fend for themselves. Advocacy
ethics implies that a genuine social life should enable the participation of everybody. We
should also be in solidarity with those who are living in inhumane conditions. In the light
of the notion of human experience as espoused in African humanism and process
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philosophical anthropology, there is no self that is meaningful apart from the well-being
of others (Samkange & Samkange 1980: 52; Cobb and Griffin 1977: 82).
The idea of giving primacy to relationality among all that exists also implies that ethics
should foster the common good among all that exists. This affirmation of relationality
among all that exists means that we should see each living entity as capable of feeling the
existence of others within the community of existence. If everything exists with others
and through others, it also implies that an all-inclusive existential outlook must arise from
our universal interconnectedness. Another way of articulating our universal
interconnectedness would thus be through the promotion of the common good.
8.4 Fostering the Common Good

To foster an ethic of the common good that aspires from African humanism and process
philosophical anthropology, we need to see self-interest as relative to the larger
community of existence. We also need to realise that the human race is indivisibly one,
and all human beings, no matter whether they are living now or in the future, are related
and interrelated to the extent that they constitute the same organic whole. This holistic
conceptualisation of the common good implies that economic activities should also take
into consideration the well-being of the natural environment and the future generations,
and that wealth must be made accessible to everybody in society (PR 1929: 343-344;
Cobb and Griffin 1977: 19-20; Prozesky 1995: 23).
In order to promote the common good, the economy should be orientated towards the
promotion of human needs rather than wants. Also, there has to be a balance or
equilibrium between human needs and the needs of the natural environment. Striking a
balance between human needs and the environmental well-being is possible on the
premise that we make communities our starting point for the acquiring and distribution of
wealth. In this regard, the community as a whole should decide, in line with its ethos and
mores, the best way of attaining its own well-being. It is through such a process that the
acquiring and enjoyment of wealth will promote communal solidarity instead of strife and
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rapacity (Daly and Cobb 1989: 164-165; Senghor 1964; Nkrumah 1968; Nyerere 1968;
Mboya 1963; Gelfand 1981). Communal solidarity becomes the natural condition of
human existence when everybody has access to economic means to a descent livelihood.
On the other hand, others are dehumanised if they are deprived of a descent livelihood
because of lack of such solidarity. It becomes unethical to have a few individuals
swimming in a pool of luxury on the modern economic neo-liberal pretext that they are
benefactors of society whilst the majority of the populace is agonising under grinding
poverty. The ethic of the common good lays an obligation before us that all people should
participate in the creation and distribution of wealth. (Nyerere 1968: 312-319; Samkange
& Samkange 1981: 80; Bujo 1998: 210; Kenyata 1953: 120).

This section was mainly concerned with recommendations and suggestions for a holistic
ethic that can help us to go beyond the modern economic theory of self-interest. Since
African humanism and process philosophical anthropology put emphasis on individual
communal belonging, it has tried to show that our human existence has a dual natural
mandate. Firstly, we have an ethical obligation to live in a way that promotes the well-
being of the community. It is in communities that we find our humanness being fulfilled.
Secondly, since African humanism and process philosophical anthropology prioritise the
relatedness and interrelatedness of everything that exists, it also follows that an authentic
human existence should be sensitive to the needs of the future generations as well as
those of the natural environment.
Another recommendation was that we can go beyond self-interest by emphasising

relational rationality, that is the type of rationality that can enable us to promote harmony
and communion with everything that exists. Relational rationality that is espoused in
African humanism and process philosophical anthropology implies communicability and
our ability to think with others and experience the sufferings of others. The ability to
think and feel the sufferings of others implies an advocacy ethics. The ethics of advocacy
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means that we should abandon instrumental reason and emphasise humanness and
relationality.
Lastly, I have tried to show that African humanism and process philosophical
anthropology imply that primacy should be given to the common good. The kind of the
common good that is advocated implies that economic activities should take into
consideration the well-being of the natural environment, and that everybody should have
access to wealth in the community. It follows that we should reject the modern economic
theory of self-interest that the economy flourishes and nourishes everybody because of
the selfishness of individuals.
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SECTION B: GENERAL CONCLUSIONS
8.6 Overview
We have now come to the conclusion of this study and it is fitting at this stage to try to
provide its general conclusions in a comprehensive manner. This is what this section of
the chapter aims to do. It also serves as a summary to the entire study as well –an
accurate summary, it is hoped.
The problem that was investigated in this study is as follows. Modern economic
discourses, it was shown, presume that human beings are solely self-interested in their
economic relations. Whilst individuals use self-interest in order to maximise their
utilities, the results of their self-interested actions are deemed desirable because they lead
to unintended socio-economic gains for all. The problem with this approach to the
economy, however, is that the primacy given to self-interest makes it difficult for us to
account for the role of morality in human economic relations. If human beings are only
self-interested, it is also implausible for us to have an idea of society or community as
indispensable to the individual’s ultimate well-being. The theory of self-interest in
modern economic discourses implies that human beings are only selfish. This being the
case there is nothing that can stop them from polluting and depleting the natural resources
upon which the future generations depend.
To overcome the theory of self-interest in modern economic discourses, this study

presented African humanism and process philosophical anthropology as critical tools that
offer us a relational holistic ethical paradigm. Since the commonalities that derive from
these two critical tools show that we can only be fully human by virtue of belonging to
the present community, the past and the future, it was deduced that self-interest is
illusory. It was also deduced that self-interest poses a danger to harmonious social
existence as well as to human relationality between the present generation and the future
generations. In a nutshell, the aim of this study was to give a critique of the modern
economic theory of self-interest in a way that enables us to come up with another ethical
existential paradigm.
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While conclusions were given at the end of each chapter, my main objective in this
section is to give an overall summary of this study. Since this study is triadic in its
structure, I shall restate the observations that have been made in it in three parts. The first
part was concerned with historical discourses on the evolution of economic self-interest
from the era of ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity up to early and late modernity
(Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 ). The second part (Chapters 6 and 7), which serves as a critique,
was concerned with the concepts of African humanism and process philosophical
anthropology as critical tools against the socio-economic theory of self-interest.
Finally, the third part (Chapter 8) on the one hand, is a synthesis of this study because it
gives suggestions and recommendations on the basis of the commonalities between
African humanism and process philosophical anthropology. On the other hand, it is a
summary of the whole thesis. My aim in this general conclusion is to establish the
connection of these chapters as well as to give a full picture of the study as a whole in a
synthesised form.
8.7 Self-Interest and Early Philosophical Discourses

In chapter 2, I started by tracing the historical origins of the socio-economic theory of
self-interest from religious and philosophical perspectives. The theory of self-interest
attracted much philosophical debate among Greek philosophers such as Plato, the Stoics,
the Pythagoreans and Aristotle. In this philosophical discussion, two views emerged. The
first view was that of Plato, the Stoics and the Pythagoreans who advocated the ideal of
community of property – panta koina. Inferences to self-interest were made with the aim
of showing that community of property would provide safeguard against chaos and social
anarchy. Aristotle rejected this ideal of community of property on the grounds that people
should love themselves first, and that self-love was integral to human nature. Another
argument made by Aristotle was that for there to be liberality in society, the individual
must own something from which s/he can give to others (Rhys 1906; Gorman 1979;
Russell 1991; McKeon 1941).
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From the religious perspective, three modes of thought on self-interest were discussed.
The first was that God gave wealth for common use, hence self-interest and private
property represented a sin of avarice. The Church fathers suggested community of
property as a way of counteracting self-interest. In their economic moral teachings, it
seemed that they were more influenced by Plato, the Stoics and the Pythagoreans. The
second type of religious economic outlook came from Thomas Aquinas. While Aquinas
condemned avarice, he adopted Aristotle’s position by maintaining that property should
be privately owned in order to avoid quarrels. Aquinas did not diverge from the economic
ethic of the Church fathers on avarice and usury (Shewring 1948; Hirschman 1977;
Gonzalez 1990; Aquinas 1948; 1975)
The third religious economic outlook received illumination from Max Weber’s theory to
the effect that the economic teaching of reformed Protestantism, especially that of the
Puritans, had contributed enormously to the rise of the spirit of modern capitalism. The
Protestant reformers themselves did not approve of the sole pursuit of self-interest in
economic activities. According to Weber, however, the Puritans gave religious
justification to individual acquisitiveness of wealth as a calling from God. It was central
to Weber’s theory that their teaching on predestination encouraged believers to show
their elect status by participating in the accumulation of wealth. We have seen that this
religious justification of what turned out to lead to avarice or greed in economic affairs
constituted a radical shift from the economic ethics of the Church fathers and the early
Protestant reformers. A word of caution on this theory was given to the effect that the
Puritan justification of self-interest could have been a reiteration of the secular economic
outlook of early modernity on self-interest (Viner 1978; Troeltsch 1931; Hengel 1986;
Weber 1958; Tawney 1926; Heilbroner 1962; Josephson 1962; Canterbery 1987;
Hollinger 1983).
8.8 Early Modernity and the Socio-Economic Theory of Self-Interest

In the era of early modernity I discussed self-interest from the political and economic
perspectives. From the political perspective, political theorists argued that by nature
people were only self-interested, and that self-interest was the main reason why there are
governments. It was self-interest which was the main reason for people entering into
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contracts. The role of government was to protect individuals’ self-interests by

guaranteeing that each of the participants in the contract was obliged to honour the
agreement. It was also deduced that political liberalism understood the role of
government as that of co-ordinating conflicting individuals’ self-interests because society
was presumed to be comprised of a multiplicity of interests (Machiavelli 1961; Hobbes
1962; Kropotkin 1924; Macpherson 1970; Hume 1882).
I argued that self-interest provided an epistemological symbiosis between political

liberalism and economic liberalism during the era of early modernity. It was during the
era of early modernity that the concept of homo economicus or the economic man was
invented. This concept implied that a human being was solely self-interested. Of most
significance in the evolution of liberal capitalism was the pragmatic stance which was
taken by Bernard de Mandeville when he said that vices rather than virtues were the main
cause for the flourishing of wealth. Mandeville taught that individual vices might be
private but in the long run they become public virtues because they benefited everybody.
One of the most significant observations that were made by Mandeville was that human
beings were greedy creatures whose emotions and actions can be reduced to selfishness.
It was observed that Mandeville’s reflections on the liberal economy were a precursor of
Laissez Faire capitalism (Mandeville 1924; Hayek 1967).
The Mandevilian thesis that all private vices were the cause of the flourishing of wealth
was adopted by Adam Smith who said that economic relations are about appealing to
each other’s self-interest. This was a crucial insight in the evolution of capitalism.
Smith’s understanding of economic relations was that self-interest was more reliable than
benevolence. Since self-interest was more reliable than benevolence, government was not
supposed to interfere with the economy under the pretext of trying to help the poor. Smith
saw God’s providence as assisting the individual’s self-interest in advancing the welfare
of society. It was mainly for this reason that he coined the term ‘the invisible hand’, with
the aim of showing that even though the individual was solely self-interested, those self-
interested actions are directed by the invisible hand in such a way that they end up
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promoting the common good (Smith 1976; 1872; Heilbroner 1972; Lux 1990; Arrow and
Hahn 1971).
In trying to interpret the meaning of the invisible hand, three possible implications came
to the fore. The first implication was economic. It was presumed by economists that
business people are in actual fact benefactors of society because in their economic
enterprises they usually end up promoting certain ends which they did not intend to
promote. The second implication of the invisible hand was religious because Deists
believed that the universe and society were designed by God in such a way that they work
under laws that concur with God’s intentions. It was shown that Smith believed that self-
interest produced beneficent purposes because the well-being of humanity was entirely
within the domain of God, and not of human beings. It was thus established that
Providence was synonymous with the concept of the invisible hand. The third implication
was sociological. The invisible hand was postulated as commensurate with the
sociological theory of spontaneous orders. The gist of this theory was that sometimes
human actions produce results that were not intended. The implication was that while the
individual might be solely self-interested, the sum of the actions of these self-interested
individuals produces an order which they had not intended (Smith 1872; 1976;
Dahrendorf 1989; Polanyi 1968; Hayek 1982; Shand 1990).
When all those implications of the invisible hand are taken together we end up with an
understanding that the liberal economy is a natural system that works well without
interference from government, and that we should rely on individual self-interest. The
idea of economic liberalism was critiqued by Karl Polanyi with a two pronged argument.
Firstly, Polanyi said that the idea of a self-regulating economic system that relies on
individual self-interests did not have a natural origin but that such an economic system
came about due to the writings of early modern liberal thinkers. Consequently, the idea of
a self-regulating market or a spontaneous order was fallacious because there is no society
that can exist without rules and regulations with regards to economic relations. Polanyi’s
second argument was that self-interest was relative to Western civilisation. There are
other societies, such as African societies, which did not have economic relations based on
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self-interest. Modern capitalism was introduced to the Africans through manipulation

during colonialism (Polanyi 1968; Mudenge; Xenos 1989; Canterbery 1987; Heilbroner
1985).
8.9 Other Contributions to and Debates on the Theory of Self-Interest in Early

Modernity
In chapter 4 I followed up Polanyi’s arguments and demonstrated that self-interest was
integral to evolutionary economics during the era of early modernity. In Thomas
Malthus’ population geography, he argued that laws that were supposed to help the poor
were dangerous to society because nature has a tendency of setting equilibrium between
human consumption and the available resources. It was argued, however, that this type of
reasoning had a potentiality of institutionalising greed and selfishness in society. The
same type of reasoning was discerned in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution which
implied that the pursuit of self-interest among species was integral to natural selection. In
the same vein, Herbert Spencer argued that the pursuit of self-interest in economic
relations led to the survival of the fittest (Hodgson 1988; Malthus 1958; Heilbroner 1972;
Lux 1990; Darwin 1859; Knight 1991; Spencer 1907; Schumpeter 1986; Canterbery
1987; Conniff 2003).
Within evolutionary theory, self-interest was portrayed as a survival mechanism that was
common among all the species. The existence of self-interest in economic relations had
nothing to do with our moral evaluations and inclinations. Philip Wicksteed was more
nuanced on the difference between ethics and the role of self-interest in economic
relations. Wicksteed’s argument was that in economic relations self-interest was ethically
neutral because those who enter into economic relations are not necessarily concerned
with the moral outlook of each other. Self-interest simply served the purposes of business
relations, and it had nothing to do with the selfishness or unselfishness of the individuals
involved in such relations. It is in this sense that Wicksteed severed self-interest from
ethics on the grounds that it was value neutral. (Wicksteed 1946; Samuel and Nordhaus
1992; Lux 1990; Dimand 1996).
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Within the school of evolutionary economic paradigm, three humanistic arguments came
from John Ruskin, Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen. While these critics were critical of
modern capitalism in their various ways, they all agreed that the pursuit of self-interest in
economic relations was not value neutral. Self-interest was an advocacy of greed or
selfishness in human economic relations. Self-interest was thus seen as dehumanising
because it deprived other people of their decent livelihood. A common thread that ran
through the arguments of Ruskin, Marx and Veblen was that self-interest was not a
universal state of human existence. Rather it was a particular group of people in society –
the bourgeoisie (Karl Marx), business people (Ruskin) or the leisure class (Veblen) – that
was self-interested or greedy. Hence according to these three scholars, self-interest was
dehumanising because it severed the individual from his or her communal relations and
belongingness (Ruskin 1862; Marx 1973; 1975; Veblen 1931).
This humanist argument was critiqued by von Mises and Alexis de Tocqueville who
argued that economic relations that are based on the individual pursuit of self-interest
lead to economic prosperity as compared to economic relations that are based on
collectivism. From a theoretical point of view, Mises argued that it was individuals who
make choices and act on those choices. It followed that communities are abstracts
because it is the individual who is concrete. Collectivities are thus suspected of repressing
individual freedom. From an empirical point of view, Tocqueville argued that the
economic success of a society that has embraced individualism and valued the pursuit of
self-interest such as America, should be seen as enough evidence that self-interest is more
trustworthy than collectivities. These two arguments in support of self-interest became
integral to late modern economic thought (Mises 1996; Tocqueville 1946).
8.10 Self-Interest and Later Modern Economic Thought

Chapter 5 started by investigating self-interest in later modern economic thought. In this
investigation it was established that the economic discipline presumes that the individual
is solely self-interested. The main presumption of contemporary neo-liberal economists is
that human beings act after calculating costs and benefits to their self-interests. The use
of instrumental reason in the pursuit of self-interest serves as a way of maximising utility.
In the pursuit of self-interest, it is alleged that there is no room for judging whether the
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action is morally bad or good. An action is only economical when it leads to the
maximisation of utility. The implication of the theory of utility maximisation was that
human beings are solely accentuated by greed (McConnell 1972; Heap and Varoufakis
1995; Tullock and McKenzie 1985; Hamlin 1986).
We saw that there were other neo-liberal economists who explicitly rejected welfarism on
the grounds that it violated the right of individuals to do whatever they felt like doing
with their fortunes. Neo-liberal economists argued that government should not interfere
with the economy with the aim of promoting welfare because people’s public
commitments are not trustworthy as compared to individual private interests. The
presumption was that society would prosper without government intervention in the
economy. The conviction that arose among neo-liberal economists was that government
and public affairs are just nothing but a manifestation of self-interest. Neo-liberal
economists also believed that self-interest would promote welfare better than
governmental economic intervention that aims to do so (Rand 1967; Nozick 1974; Brittan
1988; Heyne 1983; Shand 1990; Field 1999).
There were three arguments that were raised against the modern socio-economic theory
of self-interest. The first was a sociological argument that the economic success of
society depends on shared social values. For this reason, it was deduced that for us to
understand the real nature of human economic relations we should rather focus on
economic behaviour of societies instead of self-interest. The implication of this
sociological argument was that societies and their cultures are indispensable in
determining human economic relations (Sen 1987; Huber 1984; Daly and Cobb 1989).
The second argument came from an economic perspective in which it was said that the
postulation of self-interest as the sole determining motive in human economic relations
ignores the reality of the plurality of motivations in economic relations. Related to this
argument was the idea that self-interest is adhered to by neo-liberal economists as a
model for methodological purposes, otherwise homo economicus does not exist in real
life. The third argument was that by implication the pursuit of self-interest will militate
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against the well-being of future generations as well as that of the natural environment
(Daly and Cobb 1989; Georgescu-Rogen 1971; Sindima 1985; Heilbroner 1985; Ikerd
1999; Handy 1998; Daly 1996).
8.11 African Humanism and its Implications for the Theory of Self-Interest
Chapter 6 was a critique of the socio-economic theory of self-interest in modern
economic discourse from an ethical point of view, based on African humanism. The gist
of my argument was that the African understanding of a person as a relational being
renders self-interest unintelligible. Since the world-view of African humanism puts
emphasis on relatedness and interrelatedness, it was also observed that to be human was
to experience one’s existence as inseparable from all that shares this existence with
humanity. The world-view of African humanism showed that people are immersed in
relationships through life, such that the individual’s self-interest cannot be separated from
the well-being of the whole. Thus individuals cannot be understood as isolated units who
relate to each other and to reality in general on the basis of the pursuit of self-interest
(Mazrui 1977; Mazrui 1994; Junod 1938; Mutsvairo 1993; Murove 1999; Fortune 1974;
Dixon 1976; Sindima 1995).
The world-view of African humanism was also echoed in the African individual ontology
which emphasises individual belongingness as espoused in the African ethic of Ubuntu.
Since this ethic maintains that the individual is an individual by virtue of belonging to
other people in community, it also follows that the individual’s personhood and well-
being is socially mediated. Ubuntu implies that human beings are required to show those
character qualities that are socially appreciated because a behaviour that arises from
selfishness is an expression of a lack of humanness. The ethic of Ubuntu reinforces the
idea that as human beings we are dependent and interdependent on others, therefore there
is no person who is self-sufficient to the extent of ignoring the well-being of others. A
sense of concern for the well-being of others is not only oriented at the present
community but also at those who will exist in the future. The primacy of relationality as
espoused in Ubuntu was also complemented by the concept of Ukama. This concept
implies that relationships are an overriding ethical requirement for an authentic existence
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(Shutte 1993; Samkange and Samkange 1980; Ramose 1999; Dandala 1996; Kasenene
1994; Gelfand 1973; Bujo 1997; Mutwa 1997; Mazrui 1986; Prozesky 2003; 1999).
Since the world-view and the individual ontology of African humanism put emphasis on
relationality, it was also shown that relationality has a dominant role in African
reasoning. It was shown that African reasoning is all-embracive as it sees threads of
connectedness and interconnectedness among all that exists. Because of relationality, the
individual gives primacy to communion with everything that exists – the natural, the
supernatural, the mundane and the divine exist in an inseparable oneness. The communal
belongingness of the individual became the antithesis to the individualistic notion of
privacy. Within this African notion of relationality it was deduced that individuals exist
and flourish because of communities that support them, hence the individual’s well-being
is inseparable from that of the community (Senghor 1964; Mbiti 1969; Kaunda 1966;
Uzukwu 1995).
From the preceding observation it was also shown that since African humanism gives
primacy to the community in its conceptualisation of persons, it also follows that the
starting point for understanding human economic behaviour is the community. Since the
African conceptualisation of community presumes the individual to be inseparable from
the collective, it was inferred that the modern socio-economic theory of self-interest that
postulates the community as an association of self-interested individuals is unintelligible.
African humanism puts emphasis on communal well-being as the pre-requisite to
individual well-being. If the individual depends on the community for his or her well-
being, it also implies that s/he continuously needs others. The communitarian base of
African humanism makes self-interest deplorable as unethical or as a serious danger to
the life of the community (Menkiti 1984; Zvobgo 1979; Okere 1984; Boulaga 1984;
Kenyata 1953; Gyekye 1997; Bujo 2001).
The argument that was levelled against the communitarianism of African humanism was
that too much emphasis on community can lead to curtailing individual freedom. Without
individual freedom, there cannot be economic progress. Related to this argument was the
228
idea that society exists because of the individuals who compose it. To counter this
argument, it was observed that the individual exists in a state of ontological dependence
such that the individual and the community cannot be abstracted from each other. We
have also seen that another argument against African communitarianism was that since
there is a symbiosis between capitalistic development and individualism, African
communitarianism will inhibit the spirit of capitalism. To support this claim, the
advocates of this argument said that in Africa, capitalism triumphed in those African
societies that had embraced the ethic of individualism through Christianity (Shutte 2001;
Tempels 1959; Gyekye 1987; Kennedy 1988; Iliffe 1983; Theron 1995).
To refute the above argument, it was observed that African humanistic values were
incompatible with neo-liberal capitalism. This argument was traced to the writings of
African politicians who said that African traditional values imply an economic system
that puts emphasis on caring for the well-being of other human beings before one’s self-
interest. Since the individual’s well-being cannot be severed from that of the community,
it also followed that the individual had to promote the well-being of the community. This
way of reasoning became the rationale behind post-colonial African socio-economic
policies such as Ujamaa and Harambee. The main conviction in these policies was that
the individual pursuit of self-interest cannot promote the well-being of everybody. Finally
it was shown that it was African humanistic values that were the foundations of an
African traditional society as a caring society (Nyerere 1968; Bujo 1998; Nkrumah 1962;
Mboya 1963; Senghor 1965; Toure 1959; Gelfand 1981; Moyo 1992; Friedland and
Rosberg 1964; Gyekye 1997).
8.12 The Implications of Process Philosophical Anthropology on Self-Interest

Chapter 7 was a continuation of my critique of the socio-economic theory of self-interest,
this time from the perspective of process philosophical anthropology. Process
philosophical anthropology is an inference of the would-be ethical implications of
process philosophy on human existence. I started by observing that the relevance of
process thought to ethics lies in its relational metaphysical conceptualisation of reality in
general. This relational conceptualisation of reality was based on new scientific theories
such as the theory of relativity and quantum physics. In his interpretation of these
229
sciences, Alfred North Whitehead deduced that everything that is real or actual was
relationally constituted. It was said that the process account of relationality can be
captured in two ways. Firstly, everything that exists is related to the past, the present and
the future due to the ability of each actual entity to feel the existence of others. Secondly,
actual entities or individuals are societies because of the contributions made by other
actual entities to their existence (Whitehead 1925; 1929; 1933c; 1948; Zohar 1990;
Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Capra 1983; Bohm 1988; Margulis and Sagan 1987;
Jungerman 2000; Cobb and Griffin 1977; Hartshorne and Peden 1981).
If everything is related and interrelated with everything else, the implied philosophical
anthropology was that human beings do not exist externally to these relationships. It was
mainly from the premise of the interconnectedness of all actual entities that Whitehead
refuted the idea of independent existence that is sometimes implied in the doctrine of
individualism. Another related argument against individualism was made by Charles
Hartshorne when he refuted self-interest or egoism on the premise that it presumed an
understanding of a person as an enclosed entity. If the individual is contributed to, and
influenced by relationships, it also follows that our personal identities and interests are
not permanent. If nothing is permanent, the implication is that it is implausible to assign
self-interest as the sole determinant of human economic behaviour (Hartshorne and
Peden 1981; Jordan 1968; Leclerc 1958; Whitehead 1925; 1948; Hartshorne 1950).
An important aspect of process philosophical anthropology was the idea that actual
entities are societies in the sense that they have inherited certain qualities from the past.
The implied philosophical anthropology was that our human personalities are influenced
by others, and that they will influence the future. The ethical implications were that our
present actions will be judged as good when they contribute positively to the well-being
of future generations. Another ethical implication was that if everything is related and
interrelated with everything else, actions that are morally commendable should be those
that show a generality of outlook in the sense that self-interest should embrace the
interests of others at present, the interests of the future generations as well as of the
natural environment. Since African humanism and process philosophical anthropology
were a critique against the theory of self-interest, the following chapter drew from these
230
critical tools and made suggestions and recommendations that could help us to
reconstruct an ethical discourse beyond self-interest (Hartshorne 1974; Whitehead 1920;
1933; Prozesky 1995; Birch and Cobb 1981).
8. 13 Beyond Self-Interest: Towards a Holistic Ethic

Drawing from the commonalities between African humanism and process philosophical
anthropology, this chapter was concerned with recommendations for a humane and
holistic ethical paradigm that can enable us to reject self-interest. For this purpose, three
recommendations were made.
The first recommendation was that, following the implications of African humanism and
process philosophical anthropology, an authentic human existence should be based on an
all-embracive notion of community. In such an all-embracive community, deriving from
the African concept of Ubuntu and the process concept of society, we should
conceptualise our human existence as intertwined with the existence of others. Our
relatedness and interrelatedness with others should lead us to reject self-interest as
destructive to community life. Our human relatedness with others also implied the
absence of dichotomy between the individual and community. This absence of dichotomy
between the individual and community spells that the individual’s interests subsist in the
interests of the community. The relatedness of the individual’s interests to those of the
community implied that s/he should exist in a way that fosters solidarity instead of
existing solely with the aim of pursuing one’s self-interest. It was observed that the
notion of community that arises from African humanism and process philosophical
anthropology fosters solidarity between human community and the natural environment
(Dandala 1996; Ramose 1999; Whitehead 1929; Hartshorne 1950; Menkiti 1984;
Prozesky 2001; Daly and Cobb 1989; Kenyata 1953).
The second recommendation came from the realisation that since African humanism and
process philosophical anthropology put emphasis on relationality in our conceptualisation
of reality, we should go beyond self-interest by putting emphasis on relational rationality.
If everything is related and interrelated with everything else, it was suggested that this
231
relationality should be captured in our way of thinking such that all that exists should be
conceptualised as existing within a state of inseparable oneness. I have shown that
relational rationality contradicts instrumental reasoning which is at the heart of the self-
interest-promoting reason of utility maximisation. Relational rationality puts emphasis on
thinking with others through participation – thus enabling us to think in a way that fosters
solidarity with all that exists. Relational rationality sensitises us to think with and for
others instead of thinking solely in terms of maximising our utilities (Whitehead 1926;
1933b; Hartshorne 1974; Cobb and Griffin 1977; Bujo 1994; Mbiti 1969; Murove 2004).
The third recommendation was based on the idea that we can foster our relatedness and
interrelatedness by actively promoting the common good. The practical way of fostering
the common good was that our human economic activities must be pursued in a way that
takes into account the well-being of the natural environment, those who will exist in the
future, as well as making wealth accessible to everybody in society. This observation
implied that human needs and environmental well-being should be the determining
factors in the acquiring and distribution of wealth. It was realised that such an ideal
would be possible on the premise that the community should decide in the light of its
ethos how wealth should be acquired and distributed. The implication of this idea was
that it became unethical to have a few super-rich individuals presumed to be benefactors
of society while the majority is living under grinding poverty (Whitehead 1929; Prozesky
1995; Daly and Cobb 1989; Senghor 1965; Nkrumah 1968; Nyerere 1968; Mboya 1963;
Gelfand 1981; Samkange and Samkange 1981; Bujo 1998; Kenyata 1953).
8.14 Conclusion
Today we need a new conceptualisation of human economic relations that realises that
the modern socio-economic theory of self-interest dehumanises human beings because it
implies that as human beings we are only motivated by greed. We also need to realise
that greed cannot promote the common good because it is the very force that destroys
communities. From the point of view of process philosophical anthropology, self-interest
is implausible because it is based on some fallacious understanding of human existence.
232
To overcome this socio-economic theory of self-interest in modern economic discourses,

economic ethics must put emphasis on relationality.
When we say Umuntu ngomuntu ngabantu in African humanism, it also implies that the
pursuit of self-interest would vitiate this human belongingness. In the categories of
thought as espoused in African humanism, self-interest is unethical on the grounds that it
cannot enable us to take into consideration the reality of our Ukama (relationships) with
other human beings, the natural environment as well as with the future generations.
Process philosophical anthropology authenticates African humanism from a scientific
philosophical point of view of relatedness and interrelatedness. The implied process
philosophical anthropology has shown that self-interest is based on the illusion of
egoism.
233
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THE THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST IN MODERN ECONOMIC DISCOURSE:

A CRITICAL STUDY IN THE LIGHT OF AFRICAN HUMANISM AND

MUNYARADZI FELIX MUROVE

submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA

PROMOTER: PROF M B G MOTLHABI

Student Number: 852-048-8

I declare that THE THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST IN MODERN ECONOMIC

CHAPTER THREE: EARLY MODERNITY AND THE ECONOMIC THEORY

CHAPTER FIVE: SELF-INTEREST AND LATE MODERN ECONOMIC

6.8 Conclusion and Observations ................................................................................ 175

8. 13 Beyond Self-Interest: Towards a Holistic Ethic................................................ 230

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Statement of the Problem

The theory of self-interest in modern economics, which amounts largely to the

First, it is to consider the grounds, as well as their plausibility, on which modern

1.1.2 Origins of the Problem

Self-interest in modern economics derived from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in

My critique of the modern economic theory of self-interest will be based on a relational

1.2 The Limitations of the Study

theory of self-interest unacceptable. My critique of self-interest is limited to African

1.3 Significance of the Study

Here I am insisting that economics should be treated as a humanistic discipline that

1.4 Method of Investigation

1.5 Plan of the Study

PART I: THEORY OF SELF-INTEREST AND MODERN ECONOMIC

CHAPTER TWO: EARLY GREEK AND JUDEO-CHRISTIAN DISCOURSES ON

2.2 Self-Interest Defined

2.3 Self-Interest and Greek Philosophical Discourses

2.3.1 Plato and the Pythagoreans

According to Plato, it was necessary that “every government, in as far as it is

Pivotal to Aristotle’s advocacy of self-interest and its resultant private ownership of

2.4 Self-Interest and the Judeo-Christian Tradition

2.4.1 The Essenes of Qumran

Evidently common ownership of property was highly valued as an expression of high

2.4.2 St Ambrose of Milan

2.4.3 Gregory of Nazianzen

2.4.4 St. Basil the Great

2.4.5 St. Augustine

2.4.6 Thomas Aquinas

2.5 Self-Interest and the Reformation Era

development, according to Weber, gave rise to the ‘spirit –Geist’ of capitalism or

According to Weber, therefore, the Puritans emphasised the accumulation of wealth as

…rigid limitation of expenditures on personal consumption or charity,

Business activities, especially in Reformed Calvinism, came to be understood as a

a creature be so arrogant as to want to frustrate totally or partially the purpose of

By embracing the pursuit of self-interest as a calling in economic activities, therefore, it

Some scholars argue, consequently, that the evolution of capitalism, particularly in

2.6 Conclusion and Observations

owned in common. Common ownership of property was argued for as a pre-requisite to

Modernity in philosophy, as in economics, taught that the individual was rational,

CHAPTER THREE: EARLY MODERNITY AND THE ECONOMIC THEORY

3.2 Definition of Modernity

contemporary economics, neo-liberal economics and modern economics. All these

3.3 Self-Interest and Political Theories of Early Modernity

3. 3.1 Machiavelli and Political Liberalism

Thus the legacy of Machiavelli to political liberalism is that he attributed self-interest to

3. 3.2 Self-Interest in Hobbes’ Theory of Social Contract

3.3.3 David Hume and Self-Interest in Politics