William Thompson (philosopher)
William Thompson | |
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Anglo-Irish | |
Era | Modern philosophy |
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William Thompson (1775 – 28 March 1833) was an Irish political and
Born into the
Marxist James Connolly described him as the "first Irish socialist" and a forerunner to Marx, who cited Thompson in his works as well as being an influence upon Marx's thought.
Life
Born in Cork, William was the son and heir of one of the most prosperous merchants of that city, Alderman John Thompson, who held, amongst other offices, that of Mayor in 1794. William inherited the small trading fleet and landed estate near Glandore, West Cork after his father's death in 1814. Rejecting the role of absentee landlord commonly led by those of a similar situation, William based his living quarters on the estate and despite many travels, invested much time with the tenants on the estate introducing agricultural innovations, services and education for children aimed at improving the welfare and prosperity of the families present.
By the 1830s, he was suffering from a chest affliction that finally killed him on 28 March 1833. He had never married and left no direct heir. Thompson was an atheist.[2]
Ideas
An enthusiastic student of the writers and ideas of the
Thompson was greatly impressed by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, with whom he corresponded and established a friendship, later staying at the English philosopher's house for several months in 1821–22 while visiting London. As well as Bentham, Thompson read and corresponded with other utilitarian contemporaries such as
Contribution to political economy
It was the contrasting ideas of Godwin and Malthus that spurred Thompson into the project of research into the role of distribution in
In the Inquiry, Thompson follows the line of the
One of Thompson's colleagues in the Cooperative movement, John Minter Morgan, made the observation that he was the first to coin the term competitive to describe the existing economic system. The case for the originality of this work is further made by Max Nettlau who states: "[Thompson's] book, however, discloses his own evolution; having started with a demand for the full product of labour as well as the regulation of distribution, he ended up with his own conversion to communism, that is, unlimited distribution."
In 1827, fellow
Feminism
Although he rejected the political and economic implications of Malthus' essay on population, Thompson recognised that, particularly in Ireland, unrestrained population growth did pose the threat of rising poverty. As such, he was like Bentham and
Vegetarianism
Thompson became a non-smoker, teetotaller and vegetarian for the last 17 years of his life.[5][6] These abstemious habits, he explained, helped him to concentrate on his reading and writing.[5]
Thompson ate bread and jam for breakfast and he would lunch on potatoes and turnips.[5] He did not eat butter or eggs but was fond of honey. Honey was produced in large quantities on his farm and Thompson supplied his workers with his favourite beverage, honey tea.[5]
Influence on cooperative movement
Opposition to Robert Owen
Thompson and others of the Cooperative movement have tended to be somewhat unfairly subsumed under the political label of Owenism. In fact, although his writings and social experiments at New Lanark had helped to bring the cooperative movement together, many, Thompson included, were critical of Owen's authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies. Thompson further distrusted Owen's courtship of rich and powerful patrons, believing that the rich as a class could never be expected to be in favour of any project of emancipation for the labouring poor as this would threaten their privilege. He also believed in the necessity of the workers in any co-operative community having eventual security of ownership of the community's land and capital property. He gained a considerable following within the cooperative movement for these positions and it was to distinguish themselves from Owen's positions that this wing of the movement began to adopt the label of "socialist or communionist" (Letter to "The Cooperative Magazine", London, November 1827, cited by OED as first documented use of socialist) rather than "Owenist". (Robert Owen in private correspondence uses the socialist neologism five years earlier than this in 1822)
These differences led to open confrontation between Thompson and Owen at the Third Cooperative Congress held in 1832 in London. Owen, perhaps discouraged by the failure of his attempted community at New Harmony, maintained that it was necessary to wait for Government and Stock Exchange support and investment into large scale communities. Thompson and his supporters contended that they must move towards establishing independent small scale communities based on the movement's own resources. The argument was not resolved at that congress and by the following one Thompson was unable to attend probably as a result of the illness that was to lead to his death in another five months.
Influence on Karl Marx and Marxists
Thorstein Veblen has said Marx had a "large...unacknowledged debt" to Thompson.[7] Harold Laski remarks that Thompson "laid the foundations" for Marxism.[8] James Connolly held Thompson in high regard saying he was an "original thinker, a pioneer of Socialist thought, superior to any of the Utopian Socialists of the Continent" who had "a merciless fidelity to truth".[9] Herbert Foxwell believed Thompson to be "the first writer to elevate the question of the just distribution of wealth to the supreme position it has since held in English political economy. Up to his time political economy had been rather commercial than industrial".[9]
Karl Marx had come across Thompson's work on a visit to Manchester in 1845, and cites it in passing in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), and also in Capital itself.[10] Thompson's "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth" is acknowledged by Marx as one of the works on political economy he studied.[11]
Selected publications
- State of the Education in the South of Ireland, 1818.
- An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, (Longman, Hurst Rees, Orme, Brown & Green: London), 1824.
- Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery, (Longman, Hurst Rees, Orme, Brown & Green: London), 1825.
- Labor Rewarded. The Claims of Labor and Capital Conciliated: or, How to Secure to Labor the Whole Products of Its Exertions, (Hunt and Clarke: London), 1827.
- Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities on the Principles of Mutual Co-operation, United Possessions and Equality of Exertions and the Means of Enjoyments, (Strange and E. Wilson: London), 1830.
See also
Notes
- ^ Fintan Lane, "William Thompson, bankruptcy and the west Cork estate, 1808-1834", in Irish Historical Studies, vol. xxxix, no. 153 (May 2014), pp 24–39.
- ^ "Such actions established among the Catholic population of the area a long-lived reputation for kindness and fair dealing which persisted despite his professed atheism." Noel Thompson, 'Thompson, William (1775–1833)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed May 6, 2008).
- ^ a b Lee 1901.
- S2CID 9110691.
- ^ a b c d Pankhurst, Richard. (1954). William Thompson (1775-1833): Britain's Pioneer Socialist, Feminist, and Co-operator. Watts. p. 8
- ^ Feehan, John. (2003). Farming in Ireland: History, Heritage and Environment. University College Dublin. p. 105
- ^ "The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers-1".
- ISBN 9781438452050.
- ^ a b "James Connolly: Labour in Irish History - Chapter 10". www.marxists.org.
- ^ Marx 1992, pp. 397–399.
- ^ "Karl Marx and the DIB". Royal Irish Academy. 3 May 2018.
References
- Connolly, James, 'The first Irish socialist: A forerunner of Marx' in Labour in Irish History, (Dublin, 1910; London, 1987)
- Dooley, Dolores, Equality in Community: Sexual Equality in the Writings of William Thompson and Anna Doyle Wheeler, (Cork University Press, Cork), 1996.
- Dooley, Dolores (Ed.), William Thompson: Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, (Cork University Press, Cork), 1997.
- Marx, Karl (1992) [1978]. Capital: A critique of Political Economy. Vol. 2. Translated by Fernbach, David. London: Penguin / New Left Review [Originally: Pelican Books]. pp. 397–399.
- Pankhurst, Richard, William Thompson (1775–1833) Pioneer Socialist, (Pluto Press, London), 1991.
- Lane, Fintan, 'William Thompson, class and his Irish context, 1775–1833', in Fintan Lane (ed.), Politics, Society and the Middle Class in Modern Ireland, pp. 21–47 (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke), 2010.
- Lane, Fintan, ‘William Thompson, bankruptcy and the west Cork estate, 1808-1834′, in Irish Historical Studies, vol. xxxix, no. 153 (May 2014), pp 24–39.
- Lee, Sidney, ed. (1901). . Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co.
- Thompson, Noel W., The People's Science: the popular political economy of exploitation and crisis, 1816–34, (Cambridge University Press), 1984.
External links
Media related to William Thompson (philosopher) at Wikimedia Commons