| Profile | Major Works | Resources |
Sir Archibald Alison, 1792-1867
Scottish Episcopal cleric, lawyer, jurist and sheriff of Lanarkshire.
Born at Kenley, Shrospshire, the son of an Anglican vicar, Archibald Alison was educated in Edinburgh, Scotland. Pursuing a legal career, Alison was called to the Scottish bar in 1814, and was appointed sheriff of Lanarkshire in 1828. In 1851, Archibald Alison was elected Rector of Glasgow University.
Sir Archibald Alison was an Episcopalian Tory, a rather rare combination in Scotland. He was a frequent contributor to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, a Tory review. Like Tories of his day, Alison embraced a traditional, paternalistic "organic" view of society and, from his court in Glasgow, gained a reputation as a jurist very much alarmed by the changing conditions of the poor in the industrial age. But both his articles and his record on the bench demonstrates he was an active opponent of allowing the poor to take matters into their own hands, tolerating neither expansion of the suffrage nor trade union activity.
Archibald Alison's principal claim to fame is his wildly successful History of Europe (1833-42), where his Tory proclivities seeped through in his resounding condemnation of events like the French Revolution. In numerous articles and other publications, Alison defended the Corn Laws, the Poor Laws, slavery and other bêtes noires of the Whiggish Classicals.
Alison's principal contribution to economic debates was his 1840 treatise on population, which built upon Malthus's population doctrine with a twist. He focused particularly on Malthus's recommendations on the enbourgeoisement of the proletariat, i.e. that if the poor could somehow be inculcated with the "superior" habits of the middle classes, they would curb their fertility and climb out of their vicious circle of poverty. Alison was particularly keen on deciphering the causes of "emulation". He reasoned that this was easier done in the towns, where the proximity of people and the competitive spirit of commercial activity generated pressures to "emulate" the habits of one's betters, but also to keep an ever-higher standard of living (in a "keeping up with the Joneses" sort of way, an effect he expounded upon at length). But Alison despaired of the condition of the countryside, where people were relatively isolated from each other, there were few examples of "betters" (absentee landlords were the rule) and class stratification was deep. Social mobility, Alison insisted, was made all the more impossible by the growth of large farming estates and the disappearance of small farms that might have been accessible to an ambitious rural laborer. All this, Alison concluded, worked against the "emulation" principle; there was very little hope that the rural poor would ever be able to curb their fertility as their town-dwelling brethren had done. He recommended a "return" to the pastoral ideal of small yeoman farmers, resident landlords, cross-class interaction and mobility, to achieve the emulatory effect of voluntary restraint and lift the rural poor. Needless to say, Alison's ideas were more romantic yearning than policy-effective.
The novelty of Alison's work, then, is the emphasis he placed on emulatory effects not only of "moral" habits but also of consumption, and the need to pay attention to the conditions for social mobility in different contexts. In both these regards, Alison is much quoted by later population theorists.
Alison was a member of the Royal Societies of both Edinburgh and London.
|
Major Works of Archibald Alison
|
Top|
Resources on Archibald Alison
|
All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca