Richard Whately and the Gospel of Transparency

David Levy and Sandra J. Peart

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2010, vol. 69, issue 1, 166-187

Abstract: Whately is a difficult thinker, partly because he is competent in so many disciplines. Joseph Schumpeter, who struggled with Whatley's “elusive” greatness, saw a systematic core in Whately: the force behind Nassau Senior's axiomatics. Whately's contemporaries did not talk of axiomatics, but they did point out that his work depended upon an unusually small number of authorities, that is, Aristotle, Bacon, and Smith. In our interpretation, these foundational sources gave Whately three guiding principles to characterize all human activity: innate sociability, innate self‐love, and costly mental activity. Self‐love includes a desire to know and a desire to share knowledge. These principles, coupled with a normative principle of fairness, constitute the basis for his science of reciprocal exchange, or catallactics. Violations of fairness motivate his multidimensional reform proposals. For Whately, fairness requires transparency, and the demands of transparency for tractions is literally Gospel.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2009.00701.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:69:y:2010:i:1:p:166-187

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0002-9246

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Economics and Sociology is currently edited by Laurence S. Moss

More articles in American Journal of Economics and Sociology from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().