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Goethe on Demonic Fiscal Policy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2009
Extract
Very few readers of J. W. von Goethe's Faust have recognized that he is making a moral claim which was a commonplace among the British classical economics. The British classical economists raised a fundamentally moral objection to the public debt. It was, they said, a way of making destructive policies seem less onerous. This moral criticism of public debt has been made now and again in modern economics; nonetheless, this point has gone largely unremarked in later moral discussions. To some extent this is an unescapable consequence of intellectual specialization: how many moralists of stature have worried about an appropriate fiscal policy? Moreover, when moralists do turn their attention to problems in which economists are interested, their contributions all too often suffer from elementary, but fatal, technical defects.
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References
FOOTNOTES
1 This raises an obvious problem of transmission and influence. None of the commentary I looked at was any assistance in answering the obvious question whether Goethe was interested in British economics. Of course, I may have simply looked in the wrong place.Google Scholar
2 Adam, Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited Todd, W. B., Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 920Google Scholar. “The ordinary expence of the greater part of modern governments in time of peace being equal or nearly equal to their ordinary revenue, when war comes they are both unwilling and unable to increase their revenue in proportion to the increase of their expense. They are unwilling, for fear of offending people, who, by so great and so sudden an increase of taxes, would soon be disgusted with the war; and they are unable, from not well knowing what taxes would be sufficient to produce the revenue wanted. The facility of borrowing delivers them from the embarrassment which this fear and inability would otherwise occasion. By means of borrowing they are enabled, with a very moderate increase of taxes, to raise, from year to year, money sufficient for carrying on the war, and by the practice of perpetual funding they are enabled, with the smallest increase of taxes, to raise annually the largest possible sum of money.”
We see the same concern in David Ricardo's pungent remark: “To keep … [the ministers] peaceable you must keep them poor.” Ricardo to Trower, cited in Shoup, Carl S., Ricardo on Taxation (New York: Columbia University Pres, 1960), p. 162.Google Scholar
McCulloch, J.R., “Preface,” A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts And Other Publications on The National Debt and the Sinking Fund, edited by McCulloch, J.R. (London, 1857) made the same point in relation to the Richard Price's sinking fund scheme to repay the national debt, p. xivGoogle Scholar: “Neither must it be supposed that the notion of the wonder-working effects of sinking funds has beend a mere harmless error. On the contrary, few delusions have been practically so mischievous. By making it be believed that the greatest amount of debt might be defrayed by a sort of hocus pocus machinery without loss to any one, it was one of the principal causes of the extravagance that characterised the early portion of the war with revolutionary France …”
This literature is surveyed in Levy, David, “The Paradox of the Sinking Fund,” Deficits, edited Buchanan, James, Rowley, Charles and Tollison, Robert, (New York: Blackwell's, 1986).Google Scholar
3 Buchanan, James M., Public Principles of Public Debt (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, 1958).Google Scholar
4 Knight, Frank H., Freedom and Reform (New York, 1947).Google Scholar
5 Charles Roden, Buxton, Prophets of Heaven & Hell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), p. 1: “In the course of European history, four great works emerge which belong to a class apart. They are the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost and Faust … What chiefly unites them in a brotherhood of greatness is that each presents in a single picture, a view of the Universe as a whole. Man's life here on earth is what primarily interests them; the story is a story of Man's pilgrimage–the evils that beset his path, his striving, his duties, his hopes, the possibilities of his salvation.”Google Scholar
6 Enright, D.J., Commentary on Goethe's Faust Direction 10 (1949), p. 14Google Scholar: “The first book to deal at length with the subject was published in Frankfurt-on-Main in 1587, under the blurb ‘Historia of Dr. Johann Fausten, the widely-known Magician and Master of the Black Art, How he sold himself to the Devil for an appointed time…’” The polemical importance of the Faust theme is analyzed by Yates, Frances A., The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (Boston: ARK Paperbacks, 1984), pp. 115–125.Google Scholar
7 Johann, Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I & II, edited and translated by Atkins, Stuart, volume 2 of Goethe's Collected Works (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1984), lines 1331–1352.Google Scholar
8 West, M. L.The Orphic Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 116–117: “Aristotle, too, speaks of ‘theologians’ who derive everything from Night. … He has in view a theogony where Night alone occupied the first place, and it was surely the Orphic one described by his pupil and colleague Eudemus. Two additional details can be gathered from what he says. The theogony did not represent Night itself as having a beginning: it did not say that Night ‘came into being’ (as Hesiod says ‘First Chaos came into being’) but that ‘Night was in the beginning’ (as Aristophanes' birds say ‘There was Chaos and Night and black Erebos first’). The ruler of the world was not Night but Zeus.”Google Scholar
9 Emily, Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 147Google Scholar points out that even in Homer, Zeus feared Night. The Iliad, translated by Fitzgerald, Robert (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974), XIV: 256–164:Google Scholar
Then Zeus woke up and fell into a fury and hurled the gods about his hall, in quest of me above all. Out of heaven's air into deep sea to be invisible forever he would have plunged me, had not Night preserved me, all-subduing Night, mistress of gods and men. I fled to her, and he for all his rage drew back, for fear of doing a displeasure to swift Night.
10 A collision between economists and moral pholosophers in both the Greek and Christian tradition over the ramifications of trades of this structure is discussed in David Levy, “Rational Choice and Morality,” History of Political Economy 14 (1982), pp. 1–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 The one bright spot: the taxes paid in kind have been delivered on schedule, 4856–4860.
12 Stuart, Atkins, Goethe's Faust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 131 confuses the discounting with Gresham's law. Gresham's law assumes that the exchange rate between the two monies is fixed.Google Scholar
13 A somewhat earthier prose translation is provided in Goethe's Faust, translated by Barker, Fairley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 102: “We've issued an instalment of pay and the whole army's loyal again. The men are in good spirits. The pubs are full and the girls are busy.”Google Scholar