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.

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 Natural and Unnatural Paths

2009 ◽  
pp. 228-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Coyne
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
The Rise Of China

Adam Smith in Beijing is Giovanni Arrighi’s attempt to make sense of the rise of China and the fate of the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, while at the same time speculating about the role of East Asia in the twenty-first century. In interpreting these current events Arrighi draws much from The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith classic of political-economy which proves to be surprisingly relevant despite being over two-hundred years old. One of the book’s unifying themes is Adam Smith’s prediction that one day “the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force, which by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another” (p. 3).

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.

scholarly journals Thomas Piketty – The Adam Smith of the Twenty-First Century?

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Dahl Rendtorff ◽  
Øjvind Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
First Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Thomas Piketty

Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) has become a bestseller in the world. Two month after its publication, it had sold more than 200.000 copies, and this success will surely continue for a long time. Piketty has established a new platform to discuss political economy.

The Tercentenary of Henry Martyn's Considerations upon the East-India Trade

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Maneschi
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Welfare ◽  
Real Cost ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
The Impact

Henry Martyn's Considerations Upon the East-India Trade, published anonymously in 1701, stands out as a major contribution to the field of political economy that took root in Britain in the eighteenth century, and to the demonstration of the gains from free trade (Martyn 1701). Martyn provided one of the earliest formulations (and by far the clearest) of what Jacob Viner termed the “eighteenth-century rule” for the gains from trade, that “it pays to import commodities from abroad whenever they can be obtained in exchange for exports at a smaller real cost than their production at home would entail” (Viner 1937, p. 440). The numerical examples that Martyn used to illustrate it went even beyond the case for free trade advanced seventy-five years later by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Martyn's tract contains other remarkable insights that became important features of classical political economy, such as the nature and advantages of the division of labor, the dependence of the latter on the extent of the market, the workings of a market economy, the role of money, and the impact of international trade on resource allocation, on productivity, and on economic welfare.

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 Many Faces of Socioeconomic Change

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Toye
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Face ◽  
Scientific Expertise ◽  
The Many ◽  
Century Development

This book provides a survey of different ways in which economic sociocultural and political aspects of human progress have been studied since the time of Adam Smith. Inevitably, over such a long time span, it has been necessary to concentrate on highlighting the most significant contributions, rather than attempting an exhaustive treatment. The aim has been to bring into focus an outline of the main long-term changes in the way that socioeconomic development has been envisaged. The argument presented is that the idea of socioeconomic development emerged with the creation of grand evolutionary sequences of social progress that were the products of Enlightenment and mid-Victorian thinkers. By the middle of the twentieth century, when interest in the accelerating development gave the topic a new impetus, its scope narrowed to a set of economically based strategies. After 1960, however, faith in such strategies began to wane, in the face of indifferent results and general faltering of confidence in economists’ boasts of scientific expertise. In the twenty-first century, development research is being pursued using a research method that generates disconnected results. As a result, it seems unlikely that any grand narrative will be created in the future and that neo-liberalism will be the last of this particular kind of socioeconomic theory.

Human Rights and 21st Century Challenges

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
World Population ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Relative Share ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century

The world faces significant and interrelated challenges in the twenty-first century which threaten human rights in a number of ways. This book examines the relationship between human rights and three of the largest challenges of the twenty-first century: conflict and security, environment, and poverty. Technological advances in fighting wars have led to the introduction of new weapons which threaten to transform the very nature of conflict. In addition, states confront threats to security which arise from a new set of international actors not clearly defined and which operate globally. Climate change, with its potentially catastrophic impacts, features a combination of characteristics which are novel for humanity. The problem is caused by the sum of innumerable individual actions across the globe and over time, and similarly involves risks that are geographically and temporally diffuse. In recent decades, the challenges involved in addressing global and national poverty have also changed. For example, the relative share of the poor in the world population has decreased significantly while the relative share of the poor who live in countries with significant domestic capacity has increased strongly. Overcoming these global and interlocking threats constitutes this century’s core political and moral task. This book examines how these challenges may be addressed using a human rights framework. It considers how these challenges threaten human rights and seeks to reassess our understanding of human rights in the light of these challenges. The analysis considers both foundational and applied questions. The approach is multidisciplinary and contributors include some of the most prominent lawyers, philosophers, and political theorists in the debate. The authors not only include leading academics but also those who have played important roles in shaping the policy debates on these questions. Each Part includes contributions by those who have served as Special Rapporteurs within the United Nations human rights system on the challenges under consideration.

The Glory and the Sorrow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tackett
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Small Time ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Ordinary Citizen ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The book describes the life and the world of a small-time lawyer, Adrien-Joseph Colson, who lived in central Paris from the end of the Old Regime through the first eight years of the French Revolution. It is based on over a thousand letters written by Colson about twice a week to his best friend living in the French province of Berry. By means of this correspondence, and of a variety of other sources, the book examines what it was like for an “ordinary citizen” to live through extraordinary times, and how Colson, in his position as a “social and cultural intermediary,” can provide insight into the life of a whole neighborhood on the central Right Bank, both before and during the Revolution. It explores the day-to-day experience of the Revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, the disappointments—often all mixed together. It also throws light on some of the questions long debated by historians concerning the origins, the radicalization, the growth of violence, and the end of that Revolution.

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