scholarly journals Ricardo's Theory of Profit and the Third Edition of the Principles

1993 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
General Nature ◽  
Distributional Analysis ◽  
The Third ◽  
In The Beginning

David Ricardo's “On Machinery” chapter continues to interest theorists and historians of economic thought (Blaug 1958, Hollander 1979, Kurz 1984, Samuelson, 1988, 1989, Morishima 1989, Negishi 1990). Yet the addition of the chapter to the third edition of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation arguably overturns much of the view for which Ricardo is so well known (Davis 1989). In the added chapter Ricardo allows, contrary to his original view in the first two editions, that the introduction of machinery is indeed injurious to the class of laborers. More interestingly, because machinery substitutes for labor, wages cannot rise and profits are no longer threatened by rising rents. Effectively the contest between capitalists and landlords of the first two editions of the Principles is replaced in the final edition by one between capitalists and laborers. However, not only does the “On Machinery“ chapter substantially change the distributional argument customarily attributed to the Principles, but it also permits an examination of Ricardo's thinking about distribution in two distinct, but related frameworks. The discussion here compares the distributional analysis in the first two editions with that of the third to explain the general nature of the Ricardo's theory of profit. It does so by providing a novel interpretation of Ricardo's characterization of profit as a residual, and by emphasizing the historical context in which distribution occurred in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: The Civil Law and the Foundations of Bentham's Economic Thought

Utilitas ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
General Structure ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

Between 1787, and the end of his life in 1832, Bentham turned his attention to the development and application of economic ideas and principles within the general structure of his legislative project. For seventeen years this interest was manifested through a number of books and pamphlets, most of which remained in manuscript form, that develop a distinctive approach to economic questions. Although Bentham was influenced by Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he neither adopted a Smithian vocabulary for addressing questions of economic principle and policy, nor did he accept many of the distinctive features of Smith's economic theory. One consequence of this was that Bentham played almost no part in the development of the emerging science of political economy in the early nineteenth century. The standard histories of economics all emphasize how little he contributed to the mainstream of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century debate by concentrating attention on his utilitarianism and the psychology of hedonism on which it is premised. Others have argued that the calculating nature of his theory of practical reason reduced the whole legislative project to a crude attempt to apply economics to all aspects of social and political life. Put at its simplest this argument amounts to the erroneous claim that Bentham's science of legislation is reducible to the science of political economy. A different but equally dangerous error would be to argue that because Bentham's conception of the science of legislation comprehends all the basic forms of social relationships, there can be no science of political economy as there is no autonomous sphere of activity governed by the principles of economics. This approach is no doubt attractive from an historical point of view given that the major premise of this argument is true, and that many of Bentham's ‘economic’ arguments are couched in terms of his theory of legislation. Yet it fails to account for the undoubted importance of political economy within Bentham's writings, not just on finance, economic policy, colonies and preventive police, but also in other aspects of his utilitarian public policy such as prison reform, pauper management, and even constitutional reform. All of these works reflect a conception of political economy in its broadest terms. However, this conception of political economy differs in many respects from that of Bentham's contemporaries, and for this reason Bentham's distinctive approach to problems of economics and political economy has largely been misunderstood.

James on the Perception of Space

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Hatfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Spatial Perception ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Sensory Physiology ◽  
Central Topic ◽  
Active Processes

The perception of space was a central topic in the philosophy, psychology, and sensory physiology of the nineteenth century. William James engaged all three of these approaches to spatial perception. On the prominent issue of nativism versus empirism, he supported nativism, holding that space is innately given in sensory perception. This chapter focuses on James’s discussions of the physiology and psychology of spatial perception in his Principles of Psychology. It first examines the historical context for James’s work, guided by (and commenting on) his own account of that history. Included here are his arguments for nativism. It then examines central aspects of his theory of spatial sensation, perception, and conception. Finally, it touches on the reception of his nativism, his phenomenological holism, his characterization of perception as involving active processes of discernment and construction, and his conception of perceiving organisms as environmentally embedded.

Economics and Theology in Europe from the Nineteenth Century

2014 ◽  
pp. 112-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Teixeira ◽  
António Almodovar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Social Doctrine ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Ethical Critique ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Market Economics

This chapter analyzes the historical evolution of European Catholic theology and economic ideas from the turn of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. It focuses on the evolution of Catholic economic thought and its effort to evaluate the workings of economic life according to a definite set of religious principles, with particular attention to the attempts of building a distinctive Catholic approach to political economy (and later in economics). We will emphasize the commonalities identified among authors and to the Catholic efforts to engage with economics and to be accepted into the arena of political economy. The analysis will show how Catholic economic has changed during this period, with the attempts to undermine the foundations of liberal market economics and, if possible, to develop an alternative economic system giving way to a social doctrine that essentially performs an ethical critique of existing systems.

2. The Nineteenth-Century Roots of Theoretical Traditions in Global Political Economy

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-51
Author(s):  
Matthew Watson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Trade Policies ◽  
Friedrich List ◽  
Global Political Economy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Origins

This chapter focuses on the historical origins and the subsequent intellectual lineage of the three core theoretical positions within contemporary global political economy (GPE): realism, liberalism, and Marxism. ‘Textbook GPE’ privileges nineteenth-century understandings of political economy when discussing the pre-history of its own field. This helps explains GPE's treatment of feminist scholarship within the textbooks; feminism remains largely marginalized from textbook GPE, presented as something of a postscript to avoid accusations of it having been omitted altogether rather than being placed centre stage in the discussion. The chapter then looks at how the nineteenth-century overlay operates in textbook GPE. To do so, it makes sense to concentrate in the first instance on the issue that did most to divide nineteenth-century economists: namely, the free trade policies resulting from the general ascendancy of laissez-faire ideology. The most celebrated of the critics, Friedrich List, is treated much more as a dependable authority figure in GPE than he is in the history of economic thought. Indeed, in textbook GPE, the disputes between realist and liberal positions is very often presented initially through an account of List's work, despite the pre-history of liberalism being much the longer of the two.

The Gospel of Work and the Virgin Mary: Catholics, Protestants, and Work in the Nineteenth Century

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 255-274
Author(s):  
Jane Garnett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

When, in 1904–5, Max Weber published his famous essay on The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’, he set out to explore the reasons for an affinity, the existence of which was a commonplace in large parts of Europe and North America. Whilst the literature on the strengths and weaknesses of Weber’s thesis is vast, much less attention has been paid to the contours of the mid to late nineteenth-century debate out of which his interest developed. Yet the neglect of that context has continued to foster over-simplified views of the world with which Weber’s argument originally engaged. His essay forms part of a much more extensive discourse on the role of religious belief in economic life. This paper discusses one particular nexus of that debate: the way in which British Protestants shaped their economic ethic by reference both to their ideas of Catholicism and to perceived oversimplifications of Protestant virtue; and the way in which Catholics in Italy responded to the promotion by secular liberals of what was seen by them as ‘puritan’ economics – that is, the maxims of British classical political economy. To compare the British and Italian contemporary literatures on this theme helps to draw out and to clarify some significant complexities in nineteenth-century thinking about the relationship between economics and morality. Underpinning each religious critique in Britain and in Italy was an emphasis on the necessary closeness of the relationship between attitudes to work and attitudes to the rest of life. In each case this implied an assertion at the philosophical level that economics had a metaphysical dimension which needed to be justified, and at a practical level that time spent both working and not working was devotional. Because each was engaging with a popularized model of political economy there were in fact methodological affinities between their respective positions in this context, little though each would often have liked to acknowledge it. These have been obscured by obvious distinctions of cultural and political development which have in turn produced different historiographical traditions. Moreover, the predominance, since the early twentieth century, of a supposedly ‘objective’ model of economics which tacitly denies its metaphysical dimension has meant that nineteenth-century Christian economic thought has been discussed rather as part of the multiple stories of denominational social action than as what it more crucially set out to be: that is, a radical intellectual challenge to the premises of mainstream economic assumptions.

scholarly journals The scientific method of Sir William Petty

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Ullmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Inductive Reasoning ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
Scientific Approach

An understanding of the precise nature of the scientific method of Sir William Petty has proved elusive to historians of economic thought, in no small part because of a lack of Petty's own characterization of his scientific approach. This research clarifies the nature of Petty's method, as to whether it was primarily inductive or deductive, and to what extent it relied on empirical foundations. The paper employs a two-pronged analysis. First, it examines the main sources of Petty's method: the works of Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, and the synergistic influences of the Hartlib Circle, the Royal Society, the Dublin Philosophical Society, and the Mersenne group. Second, four of Petty's most noted contributions to political economy are deconstructed in order to identify his scientific method. This research concludes that Petty relied almost exclusively on deduction in his scientific approach and that his analysis does not reveal any inductive reasoning. When data was available, Petty constructed his economic theories on empirical foundations.

The Life of the Dead: Karl Marx in Context

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-69
Author(s):  
Peter C. Caldwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Actual Practice ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Dead

In Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, Gareth Stedman Jones draws a distinction between Marx’s nineteenth-century views and those of twentieth-century Marxism, which abandoned ideas of Marx that seemed outdated. Stedman Jones’ careful reconstruction of Marx’s philosophical, political, and economic thought in the context of the new social thought of the early nineteenth century, however, reveals aspects of Marx that returned to challenge official Marxism. In this respect, Stedman Jones’ conception of intellectual history as the careful placement of ideas in their historical context conflicts with his actual practice of intellectual history, which discovers challenges to the present in past debates.

The Debate about the Rechtsstaat in Nazi Germany, 1933–1936

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Theoretical Study ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

This chapter provides the legal and historical context necessary for appreciating the contribution of Fraenkel’s ethnography of Nazi law. I begin with a brief history of the idea of the Rechtsstaat in Germany. I trace the term’s evolution from its emergence in the early nineteenth century until 1933. In the second section I overview the most important Nazi critiques of the liberal Rechtsstaat, with a particular focus on the theoretical study of public law. The focus is on the major intellectual faultlines in the legal subfield of Staatsrechtslehre, from which Jewish protagonists were purged. In the third section, I focus on intellectual efforts inside the Nazi academy to “racialize” the Rechtsstaat, to bring it in line with the racial imaginary. The final section explains why, and when, the concept of Rechtsstaat was abandoned by legal theorists in the “Third Reich,” and the consequences for the practice of law.

The Expression of Self and Grief in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis through Distant Readings

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Monzingo ◽  
Daniel Shanahan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Linear Trend ◽  
First Person ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
The Third ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
In The Beginning

When writing about grief, Peter N. Stearns and Mark Knapp (‘Historical Perspectives on Grief’, in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrot (London: Sage Publications, 1996): 138) speculate that ‘[i]n contrast to eighteenth-century songs about death, which were set in the artificial pastoral world of shepherds and written in the third person, Victorian grief songs were personal and immediate’. Inspired by this claim, we investigated the usage of pronouns, as well as topics surrounding grief, in ballads taken from broadsides in the nineteenth century. We found that the use of first-person pronouns increases over the nineteenth century, and that this was not a linear trend; there were sharp increases in the usage of first-person pronouns beginning in 1815, which leveled off in the third quarter of the century. Additionally, we examined the usage of lyrical topics about death, grieving, negatively valenced emotion and sadness, and asked whether such topics correlated with the increased usage of first-person pronouns. We found that there was not a strong correlation with the usage of pronouns and such topics, though there was a small correlation between the usage of such pronouns and sadness and a stronger positive correlation between a focus on the present and positively valenced emotion. These findings suggest that first-person pronouns are not reliable indicators of lyrical topics surrounding grief, or vice-versa. Using personal pronouns as a measure of intimacy, we conclude that songs written in the beginning of the nineteenth century did see a rise in intimacy in song lyrics. However, this increase does not appear to be tied to songs about grief, specifically. Despite the existence of many personal grief songs in the Victorian period, our distant reading reveals linguistic trends and interrelations that challenge the intuition that nineteenth-century grief songs were more personal than earlier ones.

WILLIAM J. BARBER ON IRVING FISHER AND AMERICAN ECONOMIC THOUGHT

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (03) ◽  
pp. 343-349
Author(s):  
Robert W. Dimand
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Eminent Scholar ◽  
History Of

The eminent scholar William J. Barber made three great contributions to the history of American economic thought: on the institutionalization of political economy in US universities in the nineteenth century, on the interplay between economic ideas and events in US policy-making from 1921 to 1945, and on the contributions, writings, and career of Irving Fisher.

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