The Woman Proprietor in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner: Social Reform Novel as Paradigm of John Stuart Mill’s Liberal Political Economy

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-178
Author(s):  
Julia P. McLeod
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Liberal Political Economy

POLITY AND ECONOMY IN PLATO’S REPUBLIC

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-248
Author(s):  
Loren Lomasky
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Economic Liberty ◽  
Liberal Political Economy

AbstractAlthough the architectonic of Plato’s best city is dazzling, some critics find its detailed prescriptions inimical to human freedom and well-being. Most notably, Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies sees it as a proto-totalitarian recipe, choking all initiative and variety out of the citizenry. This essay does not directly respond to Popper’s critique but instead spotlights a strand in the dialogue that positions Plato as an advocate of regulatory relaxation and economic liberty to an extent otherwise unknown in the ancient world and by no means unopposed in ours. His contribution to liberal political economy thereby merits greater attention and respect.

scholarly journals Free Trade and Empire in the Anglo-Irish Commercial Propositions of 1785

2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Livesey
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Free Trade Area ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Trade Area ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
The Right ◽  
Liberal Political Economy ◽  
Open Markets

AbstractWilliam Pitt's 1785 proposal for a free trade area between Britain and Ireland attempted to use free trade as a mechanism of imperial integration. It was a response to the agitation for political reform in Ireland and followed the attainment of legislative independence in 1782. The proposal aimed at coordinating economic and fiscal policy between the kingdoms without imposing explicit political controls. This article establishes that the measure failed because of the lack of consensus around the idea of free trade. Three contrasting ideas of free trade became apparent in the debates around the propositions of 1785: imperial or neomercantilist free trade, Smithean free trade, and national or neo-Machiavellian free trade. Imperial free trade was critical of monopolies but sought to organize trade to the benefit of the imperial metropole; Smithean free trade saw open markets as a discipline that assured efficiency but required imperial institutional frameworks, legally secured, to function. Neo-Machiavellian free trade asserted the right of every political community to organize its trade according to its interests. The article establishes the genealogy of these three positions in pamphlet debates and political correspondence in Britain and Ireland from 1689 to 1785. It argues that majority political opinion in Ireland, with exceptions, understood free trade in a neo-Machiavellian sense, while Pitt was committed to a Smithean ideal. The propositions collapsed because these internal tensions became more evident under the pressure of criticism. Liberal political economy did not of itself offer a route to a British exceptionality that finessed the tensions inherent in empire.

Liberal Political Economy and Global Capitalism

1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 86-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Diskin ◽  
Tim Koechlin
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Liberal Political Economy

The Problem of Liberal Empire Reconsidered

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-177
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The Political ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
Economic Violence ◽  
Liberal Political Economy ◽  
Liberal Imperialism

This review essay situates Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) in the context of the two-decade-long debate about the emergence of a liberal imperialism during the nineteenth century. Through an examination of the political economy of emancipation in the British West Indies, Taylor recasts the problem of liberal imperialism by decentering its justificatory discourses in the metropole to examine its practical effects in the colonies. In this turn, he provides an important and missing “materialization” of liberal empire that makes the deep connections between free trade and freeing slaves legible. The practical and theoretical coincidence of these nineteenth-century developments as well as Taylor’s reconstruction of a West Indian tradition of political economy provide a new way of conceptualizing colonial economic violence elaborated as the product of a neglectful empire. It is in this tradition of critiquing and resisting a neglectful empire that we find critical and normative resources to think beyond the terms of our own entrapments within the terms of liberal political economy.

Empire and Indifference

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-842
Author(s):  
Utathya Chattopadhyaya
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Liberal Capitalism ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Political Freedoms ◽  
Anthropological Literature

The Caribbean's middleness within anthropological literature has been recognized and progressively untangled by scholars like Sidney Mintz and David Scott. The dialectics that figure the Caribbean as a perennially contingent space, always embodying too little and too much of the values that bound discourses of colonial modernity, frame the arguments in both Victorian Jamaica and Empire of Neglect. Both books respond to the problem of an ill-fitting Caribbean, especially after the formal abolition of slavery gave way to apprenticeships and inaugurated an uneven process of gaining political freedoms. Victoria's six-decade reign over the British Empire witnessed the expansion of liberal capitalism, reformulations of state and planter relationships, and movements for political rights under empire. Insurgencies and rebellions dotted the landscape of empire, from India (1857–59) and Jamaica (1865) to the Zulu territories (1879) and Alexandria in Egypt (1879–82). Empire responded to subjects who exposed its shaky footings through greater repression, social reform, and ballasting the civilizing mission from above. From below, colonized subjects inhabited empire in resistant, calculative, and often contradictory modes that revealed the undoing of imperial ambitions in practice. The Caribbean's marginalization in post-emancipation political economy, as the British Empire occupied more territory in Africa and Asia, produced many such complex habitations of empire that superficially may appear, pace Mintz, to be culturally midway between there and here.

The transformation of fiscal reform: reciprocity, modernization, and the fiscal debate within the business community in early twentieth century Britain

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 1005-1048 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Trentmann
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Business Community ◽  
British History ◽  
Political Pluralism ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
Tariff Reform ◽  
Liberal Political Economy

ABSTRACTThe debate over Free Trade was central to modem British history. This essay shifts attention from party politics to the changing discourse and perception of state and economy within the business community. It distinguishes three phases in the erosion of liberal political economy: reciprocity, defensive tariff reform, and modernizing protectionism. An analysis of the changing argument for protection points to the emergency of a new politico-economic settlement in the age of war and coordinated capitalism. The Free Trade culture of individualism and market was displaced by a new economic vision of combination and regulation. In political culture, however, state and economy continued to be viewed as separate spheres. Instead of a corporatist system, the new settlement between state and business was marked by a dissociation of economic from political pluralism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document