A musician friend of mine posted on the ‘book a quote from a philosopher, “let me write a nation’s songs, and I care not who writes its laws…” I recognized it immediately from the well-known Paul Samuelson quote “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economics textbooks.” This second quote comes from the forward to a 1990 economics textbook. Samuelson, of course, wrote the best selling economics textbook of the mid 20th century, and is one of the most influential economists of the post-war era.
I asked my friend who the quote was from – my guess was non-philosopher Irving Berlin. He told me it was one Andrew Fletcher, which, it turns out, is the name of one of the members of Depeche Mode. According to Wikipedia, his role in the band is looking nice and cashing checks. He was not the source of the quote.
The source of the quote was Scottish philosopher Andrew Fletcher (1653-1716), a forerunner of the Scottish Enlightenment who wrote on politics, governance, and commerce. Besides speeches and letters, his published writing spans between 1697 and 1704, and is mainly concerned with the relationship between Scotland and England, which were united thereafter in the Act of Union in 1707 that created the United Kingdom. Fletcher, as a member of Scottish Parliament, took the part of the national interest in his writing and, in An Account of a Conversation for the Common Good of Mankind argued against the rising commercial society of England and the Netherlands, because the concentration of wealth and population led to the corruption of morals and the conflict of intersts among nations. In part, he was looking at Ireland and worrying Scotland would suffer the same treatment at the hands of the more prosperous English after union. But more generally. his investigation of England’s political arithmetic led him towards an early model of federated European trade union. (For more, see Andrew Fletcher’s criticism of commercial civilization, by Shigemi Muramatsu, 2003)
I can’t seem to quite track down the context of Fletcher’s quote about song writing – it seems he said it in attribution to someone else, Sir Christopher Musgrace or perhaps someone like him, and also possibly implying that Plato had made a similar assertation. I found a further attribution that Plato attributed something similar to someone named Damon. It’s all rather confusing.
But it seems to me that Samuelson must have come across that quote somewhere, which makes sense – economists, even the mathy ones, all spend some time with Scottish Enlightenment writers. But it’s a really striking parallel to me. I recall once reading a Krugman blog post about how he admired Suzanne Vega, and the skill of songwriting generally. And clearly Samuelson thought enough of it to use it for his own purposes.
samuel barbour 