Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Ryan Walter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Usual Treatment ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
David Ricardo

This chapter describes how the book departs from the existing historiography that concerns the work of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. In short, the approach here is to focus on intellectual contexts and linguistic evidence. This excludes the usual treatment of these authors in terms of their methods and models, and it also forecloses the study of their work in relation to ‘classical political economy’ since this category is a retrospective invention of Karl Marx that he coined for the purpose of establishing his supersession of these writers. The implications of the general revision attempted here are far-reaching, especially in relation to the propriety of approaching past thinkers in terms of their ‘method’ and the nature of political economy as a vocation in the early nineteenth century.

Dugald Stewart on intellectual character

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER TANNOCH-BLAND
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Character ◽  
History Of

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) lectured in astronomy and political economy, held the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh University from 1775 to 1785, then the chair of moral philosophy from 1785 to 1810, and wrote extensively on metaphysics, political economy, ethics, philology, aesthetics, psychology and the history of philosophy and the experimental sciences. He is commonly regarded as the last voice of the Scottish Enlightenment, the articulate disciple of Thomas Reid, father of Scottish common sense philosophy. Recently some historians have begun to rediscover elements of the contribution Stewart made to early nineteenth-century British intellectual culture, and his Collected Works have been republished with a new introduction by Knud Haakonssen.

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.

The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Way

When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.

scholarly journals Special Issue Foreword: On the Political Economy of Amateur Athletics

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Joshua I. Newman ◽  
Kyle S. Bunds
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Economic Behavior ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Thorstein Veblen ◽  
State Governance ◽  
David Ricardo ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

In its most artless definition, political economy refers to the study of inter- and intrastate transaction—concerned in large part with the dialectics of state governance and the production/consumption functions therein. Many of us, with varying degrees of deliberation, have read the works of forerunning political economists such as Adam Smith (c. 1723-1790), David Ricardo (c. 1772-1823), Thomas Malthus (c. 1766-1834), John Stuart Mill (c. 1806-1873), Karl Marx (c. 1818-1883), and Thorstein Veblen (c. 1857-1929). These classic political economists and their contemporaries shared a concern for the extent to which land, labor, income, capital, and the population derived value from, and maintained contingency with, state polity. While each diverged from the others in how to best organize the State in relation to markets and exchange activities (and vice versa) so as to optimize the citizenry’s well-being, these scholars and their contemporaries laid the foundations for the long-standing field of inquiry fixed on exploring how various national political systems (democracy, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, etc.), markets, and political and economic behavior could bring about national prosperity, maximize individual freedom, or raise collective utility.

The Macroeconomic thought of Sir William Petty

2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Ullmer
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Total Employment ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Surplus Labour ◽  
P 16

Sir William Petty (1623–1687) is generally known to historians of economic thought as an early contributor to classical political economy. In fact, Karl Marx claimed—rightly, I believe—that Petty was the founder of that school of thought (Marx 1867, p. 81). Frank Amati and Tony Aspromourgos echo the sentiment that Petty, and not Adam Smith, was “the founder of classical political economy, that school which had its culmination in the Ricardian economic theory” (Amati and Aspromourgos 1985, p. 127). Aspromourgos has also observed that Petty wrote A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, as well as other works, in order to provide “an answer to the questions of how to maximize total employment and surplus labour, and how to best utilize surplus labour” (Aspromourgos 1996, p. 16, emphasis added).

scholarly journals KRITIK TERHADAP SISTEM EKONOMISOSIALIS DAN KAPITALIS

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
M. Sholahuddin
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Perspective ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
Economic Ideology ◽  
Islamic Economic ◽  
David Ricardo

The failure of economic capitalism system stated by Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Ricardo (1772-1823) actually have been criticized by Karl Marx (1818-1883) in his book "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (1857) and "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859). Karl Marx and Engels compile a new synthesis of economic socialist system. Stranger enough, socialism particularly as economic ideology is destroyed earlier than Capitalism. Meanwhile, capitalism still survives by transforming performance. For examples, at the time of the glory of Socialism age, capitalism was transformed into socialism state with social justice and welfare state concepts, and when Islam began to rise, it was transformed into new performance as if it has characteristic of Islam, but in fact it is still capitalism. This writing tries to criticize both of them by Islamic economic perspective.

Classical Political Economy and the Evolution of Central Banks: Endogenous Money and the Fiscal-Military State

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 660-667
Author(s):  
Matías Vernengo
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Central Bank ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Central Banking ◽  
Jel Classification ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Endogenous Money ◽  
David Ricardo

The paper analyzes briefly the changing ideas on the role of money and banks from William Petty to Thomas Tooke, including the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. It analyzes the role of ideas in shaping the evolution of central bank regulation. Particular importance is given to the Bank of England’s inconvertibility period, from 1797 to 1821, and the ensuing debate in shaping Robert Peel’s Bank Act of 1844, which is often seen as the birth of modern central banking. The importance of the Say’s Law, and the inexistence of an alternative theory of the determination of output, is shown to play an essential role in the policy prescriptions of the so-called Bullionist authors, who won the debates that shaped central banking practices in the nineteenth century. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of what is a central bank according to the dominant (marginalist) mainstream of the profession, and what an alternative conception based on what may be termed classical-Keynesian political economy would be. JEL Classification: B10, N20, E58

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