Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-230
Author(s):  
Ryan Walter
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Great Freedom ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Parliamentary Debate ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Accepted Form ◽  
The French Revolution

This Conclusion closes the study by summarizing the account of political economy that has been developed, which is intended to replace the standard accounts of ‘classical political economy’. The premise motivating this alternative account is that it is unacceptable to simply assume that classical political economy existed. By studying the major controversies of the period, the forms of argument active in them, and the reception of Smith’s Wealth of Nations in the doctrinal contests between Malthus and Ricardo, it was not possible to support the claim that such a unity existed. Instead, the evidence suggests that political economy was an ill-defined staging ground for contests spilling out of parliamentary debate. This is why the vast majority of texts represent attempts to supervene on policy. These texts—including those by Malthus and Ricardo—were almost always produced using ready-to-hand concepts and instruments. That is, political economy was constructed with great freedom, without intellectual specialization, and in dialogue with the controversies of the day. Moreover, it did not possess its own vocabulary or methods and was even construed as a species of political metaphysics of the same type thought to have caused the French Revolution. In such a context, theoretical speculation concerning commercial life was neither a prestigious nor an accepted form of behaviour, and both Malthus and Ricardo went to elaborate lengths to justify ‘theory’. This circumstance represents a major discontinuity between their time and ours.

scholarly journals Piketty’s Capital. The Revival of Political Philosophy, Political Economy and Social Sciences in the Light of the Declaration of Human and Citizens’ Rights in the French Revolution of 1789

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Øjvind Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
First Century ◽  
World Population ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
The World ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
The French Revolution

Piketty’s Capital in Twenty-First Century has posed a totally new platform for the discussion of the economy and capitalism. Piketty has reinvented the classical political economy founded by Adam Smith in his 1776 Wealth of Nations. Piketty has shown via massive historical research how growth and inequality have developed since 1793. Piketty’s conclusion is that the French Revolution did not change the existing inequality either in the medium or in the long term. Piketty’s prediction is that a new form of global capitalism will arise, patrimonial capitalism, in which inequality will develop further and the 1% of the World population will control 95% of all wealth in the World.

Before Method and Models

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Walter
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Intellectual Freedom ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Corn Laws ◽  
David Ricardo ◽  
The French Revolution

Before Method and Models offers a revisionist account of political economy in the time of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, c. 1790–1823. In contrast to simply assuming that ‘classical political economy’ existed and provides the context for making sense of the writings of Malthus and Ricardo, this book recovers the circumstances that shaped their works. This leads the inquiry into the major political controversies of the time—the Bullion Controversy and the Corn Laws debate—and the texts with which Malthus and Ricardo attempted to intervene into these disputes. The results show that political economy was produced using ready-to-hand concepts and instruments, giving its practitioners great intellectual freedom. Yet political economy was also expected to act as a species of counsel to Parliament and resolve policy questions. In this context, the presumption of Malthus and Ricardo to style themselves as ‘theorists’ who possessed special intellectual capacities that set them above merely ‘practical’ writers attracted hostile responses from their contemporaries. The tenuous position of theory in this period was worsened by the intellectual aftermath of the French Revolution, which enabled the enemies of Malthus and Ricardo to portray their work as theoretical enthusiasm—as the product of undisciplined minds that had succumbed to the pleasures of system, utopia, and fanaticism. The attack and defence of political economy in this setting was conducted with the vocabulary of theory and practice, and the period thus stands as a time when reflection on commerce and politics was conducted without method and models.

The Political Economy of Burke&s Analysis of the French Revolution

1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. A. Pocock
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Single Structure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertake the study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider it as a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by its reader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian's aim now becomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to intelligent readers at the relevant time. Alternatively, one may consider it as a tissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessible and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a single structure of meaning. The historian's aim is now the recovery of these statements, the establishment of the patterns of speech and thought forming the various contexts in which they become intelligible, and the pursuit of any changes in the normal employment of these patterns which may have occurred in consequence of the statements’ being made.

Individual Sovereignty and Community: Wordsworth’s Prelude

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Beenstock
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
General Will ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Wordsworth understood poetry as a development of political economy. The 1805 Prelude describes his personal growth as a transition from a state of nature to society. Echoing Rousseau’s Second Discourse and Social Contract, Wordsworth presents nature as a socializing force and initially assumes that the French Revolution realizes the general will. When the revolution degenerates into violence, Wordsworth also blames its failure on Rousseau’s theory for its weak account of community. In the final books of the 1805 Prelude Wordsworth qualifies his withdrawal to the private will and to poetic vocation by comparing himself to Adam Smith, David Hume, and Godwin, all of whom he regards as excessively individualistic. In his revisions to the 1850 Prelude and in The Excursion Wordsworth eclipses individual sovereignty and turns to utopian communitarianism. This resolution of the tension between private and general wills explains the lesser popularity of these poems for modern readers. Nonetheless, the 1805 and 1850 Preludes and The Excursion map out an epic concern with the struggle between individual and community as central to Wordsworth’s poetry.

The Debate over Theory Before Malthus and Ricardo

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-66
Author(s):  
Ryan Walter
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter establishes a new context for reading the political economy of Malthus and Ricardo. It is the extended debate over the role of theory and practice in politics and political reform, a contest that Edmund Burke launched by publishing his hostile response to the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In attempting to defend theory, both Mackintosh and Stewart engaged in sophisticated rhetoric that attempted to portray Burke’s veneration of custom and usage as philosophically naïve at the same time as they insisted on the necessity of theory for a science of politics. It is in these defensive postures that both Mackintosh and Stewart came to articulate the idea of a ‘theorist’ of politics.

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