The new Political Economy, which in 1815 captured the attention of a country exhausted by war and drained by economic crisis, was to have profound effects on British and, indeed, the Western world's economic and political life for more than a hundred years. Professor Langer's new study is the first to analyze fully the interplay of ideas, politics, and history in this crucial period of change. Rather than treating the theories of the classical political economists as a set of abstract formulations, the author looks at how they were actually applied to the political and moral problems of the day. He examines how the economists, their doctrines, and the ruling political alignments affected the course of history, particularly in the conflicts surrounding the Corn Law, the Poor Law, child labor, and the reform of the monetary system.
Jane Marcet is not writing for the working classes, but for women and men of the educated classes of the nineteenth century. She draws her principles and materials from the writings of the great masters who have written about political economy, particularly Adam Smith, Th omas Robert Malthus, Jean-Baptise Say, Jean Charles Luonard de Sismondi, and David Ricardo.Marcet consolidates the ideas of bankers as well as professional political economists. She makes their ideas accessible, not only to the young people she identifi es as her audience in the book's preface, but also to the middle classes--political actors and business people. She challenges the English classical school to take seriously the ideas of continental economists by inserting those ideas into a popular book.Marcet maintains distance from some of the central tenets of classical economics, but engages in conversation with its masters. Sometimes she accepts criticism of their ideas, but at other times she keeps her own counsel. The ideas of the masters will be immediately identifi able to those for whom political economy is not new, although a few of their more abstruse questions and controversies have been omitted. When the soundness of a doctrine appears well established, Marcet presents it conscientiously. Evelyn L. Forget's well written introduction describes the life and background of the author as well as the book's history, bringing this timeless classic into the twenty- first century.
In 1666, King Charles II felt it necessary to reform Englishmen's dress by introducing a fashion that developed into the three-piece suit. We learn what inspired this royal revolution in masculine attire--and the reasons for its remarkable longevity--in David Kuchta's engaging and handsomely illustrated account. Between 1550 and 1850, Kuchta says, English upper- and middle-class men understood their authority to be based in part upon the display of masculine character: how they presented themselves in public and demonstrated their masculinity helped define their political legitimacy, moral authority, and economic utility. Much has been written about the ways political culture, religion, and economic theory helped shape ideals and practices of masculinity. Kuchta allows us to see the process working in reverse, in that masculine manners and habits of consumption in a patriarchal society contributed actively to people's understanding of what held England together. Kuchta shows not only how the ideology of modern English masculinity was a self-consciously political and public creation but also how such explicitly political decisions and values became internalized, personalized, and naturalized into everyday manners and habits.
We think of economic theory as a scientific speciality accessible only to experts, but Victorian writers commented on economic subjects with great interest. Gordon Bigelow focuses on novelists Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell and compares their work with commentaries on the Irish famine (1845–1852). Bigelow argues that at this moment of crisis the rise of economics depended substantially on concepts developed in literature. These works all criticized the systematized approach to economic life that the prevailing political economy proposed. Gradually the romantic views of human subjectivity, described in the novels, provided the foundation for a new theory of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer. Bigelow's argument stands out by showing how the discussion of capitalism in these works had significant influence not just on public opinion, but on the rise of economic theory itself.
During and especially after World War II, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war’s devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology, and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West’s moral bearing. In light of their epoch’s calamities, these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. Confronting dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity but also which Enlightenment we should wish to have.
Hollander investigates the relation of Malthusian economics to that of the other great classicists - particularly Smith, Ricardo, J.B. Say, and the French physiocrats. He redefines our common perception of Malthus's method and character.
Examining the domestic politics of imperial expansion these essays question the role of the Industrial Revolution and British imperial leadership beyond the issue of hierarchy and The Great Divergence. This volume brings together leading global economic historians to honour Patrick O'Brien's contribution to the establishment of global economic history as a coherent and respected field in the academy. Inspired by O'Brien's seminal work on the British Industrial Revolution as a global phenomenon, these essays expand the role of the Industrial Revolution and British imperial leadership beyond the issue of hierarchy and The Great Divergence. The change from the protective Atlantic empire, 1650-1850, to the free trade empire of the last half of the long nineteenth century is elaborated as are the conscious efforts of the free trade empire to develop markets and market economies in Africa. British domestic politics associated with the change and the continuation to the recent politics of Brexit are fascinatingly narrated and documented, including the economic rationale for imperial expansion, in the first instance. The narrative continues to the crises of globalization caused by the world wars and the Great Depression, which forced the free trade British Empire to change course. Further, the effects of the crises and the imperial reaction on the East African colonies and on New Zealand and Australia are examined. Given current concerns about the environmental impact of economic activities, it is noteworthy that this volume includes the environmental impact of globalization in India caused by the free trade policy of the British free trade empire.
This is the first book to examine the central tenets of economics from a feminist point of view. In these original essays, the authors suggest that the discipline of economics could be improved by freeing itself from masculine biases. Beyond Economic Man raises questions about the discipline not because economics is too objective but because it is not objective enough. The contributors—nine economists, a sociologist, and a philosopher—discuss the extent to which gender has influenced both the range of subjects economists have studied and the way in which scholars have conducted their studies. They investigate, for example, how masculine concerns underlie economists' concentration on market as opposed to household activities and their emphasis on individual choice to the exclusion of social constraints on choice. This focus on masculine interests, the contributors contend, has biased the definition and boundaries of the discipline, its central assumptions, and its preferred rhetoric and methods. However, the aim of this book is not to reject current economic practices, but to broaden them, permitting a fuller understanding of economic phenomena. These essays examine current economic practices in the light of a feminist understanding of gender differences as socially constructed rather than based on essential male and female characteristics. The authors use this concept of gender, along with feminist readings of rhetoric and the history of science, as well as postmodernist theory and personal experience as economists, to analyze the boundaries, assumptions, and methods of neoclassical, socialist, and institutionalist economics. The contributors are Rebecca M. Blank, Paula England, Marianne A. Ferber, Nancy Folbre, Ann L. Jennings, Helen E. Longino, Donald N. McCloskey, Julie A. Nelson, Robert M. Solow, Diana Strassmann, and Rhonda M. Williams.
Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) is today a largely unknown figure, sometimes considered to be a forerunner of Karl Marx. Yet a closer look at Hodgskin’s works reveals that he was actually a committed advocate of laissez-faire economics and enthusiastic about labor-saving machinery and the Industrial Revolution, with a genuine interest in the well-being of the working classes. This book places him in the tradition of classical liberalism, where he belongs—as a disciple of Adam Smith, but even less tolerant of government power than Smith was. Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class: The Economic Thought of Thomas Hodgskin will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in the history of economic thought, economic history and the history of political thought.
First published in 1990, this is an analysis of the history of western economics from Petty to Supply-Side, through the prism of the controversies over productive labour and its product. It treats the early economists’ "productive-unproductive" dichotomies as shorthands for many other sets of distinctions relevant for boundaries, value and welfare. Central to the debates is the question of whether the economy is said to generate a ‘surplus’. Economists and politicians with views on these matters include the Physiocrats, Smith and Ricardo, Marx and his Soviet and western admirers, the marginalists, Keynes, Polanyi, Becker, and Reagan. The book maps the shifting emphases that economists and social thinkers have placed on markets and ‘mode’ of production generally. This reissue will be useful to students of economic thought, welfare theory and policy, growth economics and economic systems.
