C. E. Ayres's reliance on T. H. Huxley: did Darwin's bulldog bite?

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Oct, 1995  by Lamar B. Jones

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Another possibility for Ayres's attraction to the Huxleyian perspective may come from the rebellious nature both men had. As was true of Huxley, Ayres constantly rebelled, and his attacks on orthodox economics closely resemble those Huxley so persistently employed in his attempts to draw British science to his view. When Ayres quoted from Huxley's address as president of The British Association the remark ". . . the great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact" he set the tone for his own attack on orthodox economics (Ayres 1932, 85). Ayres's context identifies something in his outlook that di Gregorio spotted in Huxley's:

I am struck by how much of his life and work was marked by a rebelliousness which may be described as "adolescent" in nature. By this I do not mean to disparage Huxley - or adolescents. I mean a constant conflict against existing centres of power and influence in order to establish a personal identity, which at the same time feels uneasy or insecure at the vacuum of authority which the conflict itself tends to produce, and which therefore seeks the foundation of its own general "new order" (di Gregorio, 193).

Ayres and Huxley both thrived on controversial writing. Until their later years each wrote splendid prose. However, as Ashforth recognized about Huxley, "Controversial writing is inevitably concerned with the pursuit of victory rather than truth, and most seasoned warriors concede that might and right do not necessarily go together" (Ashforth, 122). Certainly the same view fits Ayres's writings, especially in the first half of his life. However, at no time is it appropriate to infer that Ayres was untruthful or purposefully misleading in his writings. The point is that extremes between position were drawn for purposes of comparison which might have, instead, been more judiciously made. His writings about Darwin are a case in point, as is, for example, the statement that ". . . capitalism is itself collapsing . . ." which he wrote in his most important work, The Theory of Economic Progress (Ayres 1962, 280).

For both Ayres and Huxley it may well be that the ultimate judgment of their work lies in a statement Paradis wrote about Huxley: "Unable to achieve a formal philosophical system equal to his vision - Huxley chose what to him was the only worthwhile alternative: the rhetorical affirmation of a complex vision, which he was unable theoretically to define" (Paradis, 177). Ayres tried to rely on that very same "complex vision" but it let him down. Not surprising, his own efforts to theoretically define were opaque and inconclusive. The really odd twist in all of the Ayres-Huxley matter is that what Huxley really achieved was a "Non-Darwinian Revolution," a revolution which "rejected certain key aspects of creationism, but which was non-Darwinian because it succeeded in preserving and modernizing the old teleological view of things" (Bowler, 5). No wonder that Ayres had to acknowledge that "Classical price theory has managed to absorb the opposition" (Ayres 1962, 11). Ayres's institutional economics has not been able to derail the prevailing paradigm in economics because his analysis is rooted in an inability to offset what natural selection itself may have created - the very rules of the game of life, which the classical economists simply recognized and codified.