But laissez-faire is a political, as well as an economical, doc trine. In the former field it assumed the garb of individualism. Here, perhaps, its outstanding exponent was Jeremy Bentham, and its essential basis the hedonistic calculus. Since every person, it argued, is the best judge of his own happiness, the more free he is left in his search for its attainment, the more certain he is to reach it ; and since each man is equally entitled to happiness, all artificial barriers imposed by government in the way of its realization are necessarily evil. Armed with this creed, Bentham ism became the main agent in the nineteenth century of political democracy. It may claim to have been the chief doctrinal factor in securing the enlargement of the parliamentary franchise, the improvement of judicial procedure, the promotion of liberty of contract (including the right of combination), and the abolition of religious inequality. Its underlying assumption was a purely mechanical conception of society as an aggregate of individual atoms each of which would secure the best results for itself in the absence of contravening circumstances. It regarded the State as essentially the promoter of order and security, and viewed with distrust its assumption of larger functions on the ground that this tended to a paternalism which decreased the initiative and responsibility of the individual. Since no government could know the interests of its individual citizens as well as they knew these themselves, it was, a priori, doctrinal error for government to embark upon any social experiment destined to limit the sphere of individual action.
The political leaders of the individualist school were, in Eng land, Bentham himself and the two Mills; though the younger Mill, especially after 1848, moved slowly but definitely towards socialism. In France, men like Tocqueville, Prevost-Paradol, and, in a special sense, Tarde, may be regarded as outstanding ex ponents of this attitude. Towards the close of the nineteenth century Herbert Spencer lent the weight of his then enormous prestige to the support of an individualism perhaps more far reaching than in any other expression; but it should be said that his outlook was in fundamental contradiction with the general principles of his own philosophy. It is important, also, to note
that, through its hostility to state action laissez-faire has, on its political side, close affiliations with anarchist doctrine. Logically, the border-line between such thinkers as Spencer and Bastiat, on the one side, and anarchists so different as Godwin and Max Stirner upon the other, is very narrow, though the differences in temper and object are, of course, outstanding. (See ANARCHISM.) As an influence in affairs, laissez-faire may be said to have reached its apogee about 187o; after that time the current of events moved steadily and increasingly in the direction of col lectivism. It was discovered that competition logically resulted in combination ; and it was found that liberty of contract only begins where equality of bargaining power begins. To secure the latter, or some approximation thereto governmental interference was adjudged necessary by thinkers of the most various schools. The development of systems of national education and social insurance, the growth of municipal trading, the need to protect the consumer from, particularly, the angle of public health, the necessity of responding to the wants of an electorate increasingly proletarian in character, these and things like these all softened the sharpness of the original doctrine. By the end of the century, the thinkers who maintained it in its pristine rigour were but a handful.
See the article ECONOMICS and also L. Stephen, The English Utili tarians (1900) ; E. Halevy, La Formation du radicalisme philo sophique (190I); E. Cannan, Theories of Production (2nd ed., 19o3) ; A. Schatz, L'Individualisme (19o7) ; C. Gide and C. Rist, History of Economic Doctrines (1915) ; H. J. Laski, Political Thought from Locke to Bentham (1920) ; J. M. Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926).
(H. J. L.)