Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/58

32 and his law of population, to which he had devoted much consideration, desiring to give it a better arithmetical formulation. He adopted from Malthus the latter's ideas on the relationship between the increase in population and the increase in the means of subsistence, but wished to correct the English economist's calculations, and it was typical of Černyševskii that he should fail to recognise how arbitrary is Malthus' mathematical formula. He placed Malthus beside Ricardo as one of the greatest of thinkers, and declared that a knowledge of Malthus was an essential precondition to accurate sociological thought.

In economics, Černyševskii followed the so-called classical economists, especially Adam Smith and Ricardo; but he had a personal preference for John Stuart Mill, and in his translation of this writer's work he gave expression in notes to occasional dissent, voicing his own radical views. He doubtless selected Mill owing to the latter's intimate association with utilitarian ethics and sociology. Moreover, Mill's political individualism was congenial to Černyševskii. His own conception of economics was ethical. Political economy was for him the medicine, the hygiene, of economic life, and not merely its pathology; the function of economic science was to teach what men must do in order to escape economic destruction. Competition and struggle were to be done away with.

His ethical outlook on economic relationships is conspicuously displayed in his valuation of labour. Following Fourier, Černyševskii maintains it to be a part of the very nature of work, that "almost" all varieties of it are agreeable or attractive; if work be disagreeable, this is "almost" always due to "fortuitous external conditions." Labour is not a commodity.

Černyševskii formulates the customary arguments against excessive division of labour—although the classical economists derive them from the conventional economic view that labour is essentially distasteful and that labour is a commodity.

The crimes of capitalist production, the proletarianisation of previously independent industrial workers, the heaping up of wealth in the hands of a few, and so on, are depicted by Černyševskii in vivid colours, but he admits that capitalism has favoured individualism; the fundamental evil of capitalism, he says, is free competition. He extols the growth of manufacturing industry and the modern spirit of enterprise which