The Philosophic Radicals and Colonialism

1961 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Semmel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
New Science ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Corn Laws ◽  
Navigation Acts

In 1948, in an address before this association, the late J. B. Brebner spoke of laissez-faire as a “myth,” describing it as a battle cry of the middle classes in their struggle with the landed aristocracy, and noting particularly that the philosophic Radicals—the Benthamites—were proponents not of laissez-faire, as they had been represented to be, but of a new bureaucratic collectivism. It is becoming clear that the reputed mid-Victorian policy of “anti-colonialism” is likewise a myth, as two Cambridge dons argued in an article in 1953, for England continued to extend her empire—both “formal” and “informal”—during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Was the policy which led to the extension of the empire in direct contradiction to the ideas of the men who had revealed the absurdities of the “Old Colonial System” in the bright beam of the new science of political economy and had brought about the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and of the Navigation Acts in 1849? Or is the “anti-colonialism” of Radical doctrine also a myth? I hope to show that Benthamite Radicals, far from being ideological opponents of colonialism, as they are usually depicted, were advocates of positive programs of empire, and, grounding their argument upon the new economic science, constructed and maintained a set of doctrines of which the keystone was the necessity of empire to an industrial England.

Political Economy and the Science of Economics in Victorian Britain

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Tribe
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
New Science ◽  
University Life

This chapter looks at the historical understanding of political economy. It also describes the transformation of political economy as a general understanding of wealth and its distribution to a new science of economics. This transition can be linked to the expanding system of public education during the later end of the nineteenth century and the reorganisation of university life around teaching and research in modern subjects. The movement for wider access to higher education was associated with the formation of new university subjects in the humanities. Among these modern subjects, commerce and economics were prominent as new disciplines of study relevant to the modern world.

The Shift toward Secular Ideology

2021 ◽  
pp. 273-298
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Following the rise of the state, religion served to legitimate societies’ institutions, practices, and unequal distributions of income, wealth, and privilege. However, emerging capitalism and its expanding bourgeoisie in Western Europe challenged the Catholic Church’s monopoly on truth and meaning, opening space for secular legitimation. The science of political economy increasingly evolved as a principal body of social thought legitimating inequality. This transfer from religion to political economy begins with the mercantilists and is mostly complete by the end of the nineteenth century. Political economy’s principal inequality-legitimating doctrines include the utility of poverty, the justice of the invisible hand, the Malthusian population doctrine, the wages-fund doctrine, and the trickle-down thesis. Most of these doctrines take on more of a patina of “natural” science in the late nineteenth century when the neoclassical revolution in economics attempted to sever economic science from morality and politics and express itself technically with calculus.

scholarly journals Political Economy, Ideology and the Persistence of Working-Class Housing Problems in Britain, 1850–1914

1987 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-143
Author(s):  
Richard Rodger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Organized Sport ◽  
Running Water ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The People ◽  
The Family ◽  
Urban Conditions

Nineteenth-century housing was not all gloom and doom. For significant elements of the nation the standard of comfort and material welfare improved substantially. Suburbanization of the middle classes in the second half of the century appreciably improved environmental conditions, the family in particular benefitting from a semi-rural existence with only the commuting breadwinner subject to the hostility of urban conditions. In the last third of the nineteenth century rising real incomes were especially beneficial to artisans and the more regularly employed labouring class. last third of the nineteenth century rising real incomes were especially beneficial to artisans and the more regularly employed labouring class. Linoleum, curtains, parlour furniture, even pianos transformed the immediate appearance of the home; shoes, a change of clothes and running water that of the people; and the kitchen range, water closets and gas mantles re-arranged the domestic patterns in other respects. The possibility of an outing to the seaside was for many a realistic one, while the growth of organized sport created leisure possibilities, as did the expansion of clubs and other social activities.

Responsibility, Criminalization, and Political Economy

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-216
Author(s):  
Lindsay Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Impact

One of the most important and distinctive themes of Lacey’s recent work has been the analysis of penal practices from the perspective of political economy. However, it is arguably the case that ‘political economy’ is primarily viewed as a dimension of the context in which the criminal law develops rather than as a method of legal analysis. In this chapter I explore the meaning and critical potential of the concept of political economy—how it is used by Lacey, the different traditions that she draws on—and what the perspective and theory of political economy contributes to our understanding of criminal law. I seek to deepen the relevance of political economy to the analysis of criminal responsibility by exploring how the development of the modern conception of English criminal law in the early nineteenth century was itself shaped by contemporary understandings of political economy. Most historical work on the development of the modern criminal law has focused on the impact of utilitarianism to show how changes in penal laws and institutions were linked to new efforts to shape individual conduct in society. However, equally important to the intellectual and political culture of the early nineteenth century were understandings of the new ‘science’ of political economy. This chapter explores the ways in which theories of political economy shaped the modern criminal law in this period and thereby to open up new possibilities for exploring connections between criminal law, criminal responsibility, and political economy—and thus for critical criminal law theory.

From the Foundation of Liberal Political Economy to its Critique

2014 ◽  
pp. 72-93
Author(s):  
Gilbert Faccarello
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Liberal Political Economy ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between economics, religion, and morals are by far more complex than usually stated. It is possible to show that, at some crucial steps of the development of economics, religious thought gave it a decisive impetus, but it is also true that religious thought developed a strong critique of these very developments. The very beginning of the French eighteenth century allows us to exemplify the first kind of relationship: it shows how some fundamental propositions of liberal political economy stemmed out of religious questions and controversies. The French nineteenth century, by contrast, witnessed the second and inverse movement: it shows how some Protestant and Catholic authors, dissatisfied with the evolution of the economic situation, strongly criticized the “laissez-faire” economic theories of the time and tried to change them.

Herbert Spencer and the Political Economy of Mean-Spiritedness Revived

1999 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-143
Author(s):  
Rick Tilman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Social Theorist ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Century Thought

In recent years the reputation of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) has undergone a transformation. Indeed, until the mid-1970s the answer to the rhetorical question, “Who reads Spencer now?” would surely have been “hardly anyone.” However, since then sociologist Jonathan Turner, intellectual historian Robert Bannister, political scientist Robert Perrin and dozens of economists and humanists have contributed to reconsideration of his role in nineteenth-century thought. They have also reinterpreted the corpus of his work and suggested new ways to utilize his contributions as a social theorist. Most important for our purposes is their effort to demonstrate that his stances on policy issues were not as mean-spirited as his critics have claimed. Indeed, Bannister, for example, forcefully argues that neither Spencer nor his American contemporary, William Graham Summer, were as consistently in favor of laissez faire or as harsh in their attitudes toward the underprivileged and the lower classes as scholarly convention once had it.

Three questions to political economy (An attempt of system introspection)

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. B. Kleiner
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Linear Component ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Economic Space ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
System Paradigm

The development of the system paradigm in economic science leads to the formulation of a number of important questions to the political economy as one of the basic directions of economic theory. In this article, on the basis of system introspection, three questions are considered. The first is the relevance of the class approach to the structuring of the socio-economic space; the second is the feasibility of revising the notion of property in the modern world; the third is the validity of the notion of changing formations as the sequence of “slave-owning system — feudal system — capitalist system”. It is shown that in modern society the system approach to the structuring of socio-economic space is more relevant than the class one. Today the classical notion of “property” does not reflect the diversity of production and economic relations in society and should be replaced by the notion of “system property”, which provides a significant expansion of the concepts of “subject of property” and “object of property”. The change of social formations along with the linear component has a more influential cyclic constituent and obeys the system-wide cyclic regularity that reflects the four-cycle sequence of the dominance of one of the subsystems of the macrosystem: project, object, environment and process.

The Idea of a Meaningful Synthesis of Marxist and Non-Marxist Systems of Political Economy as a Mirror of Intellectual Turmoil (About V.T. Ryazanov’s Book «Modern Political Economy: Prospects of Neo-Marxist Synthesis»)

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-98
Author(s):  
A.B. Lyubinin
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
Subjective Assessments ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Political Economic

Review of the monograph indicated in the subtitle V.T. Ryazanov. The reviewer is critical of the position of the author of the book, believing that it is possible and even necessary (to increase the effectiveness of General economic theory and bring it closer to practice) substantial (and not just formal-conventional) synthesis of the Marxist system of political economy with its non-Marxist systems. The article emphasizes the difference between the subject and the method of the classical, including Marxist, school of political economy with its characteristic objective perception of the subject from the neoclassical school with its reduction of objective reality to subjective assessments; this excludes their meaningful synthesis as part of a single «modern political economy». V.T. Ryazanov’s interpretation of commodity production in the economic system of «Capital» of K. Marx as a purely mental abstraction, in fact — a fiction, myth is also counter-argued. On the issue of identification of the discipline «national economy», the reviewer, unlike the author of the book, takes the position that it is a concrete economic science that does not have a political economic status.

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