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VIII. 
THE FO~~TION OF THE LATE CLASSICAL 
ORTHODOXY 
There were five distinct elements of the historical situ- 
ation surrounding the formation of the late classical orthodoxy 
in economic theory that were essential to its taking the form 
that it did. None of these elements of the situation could have 
been dispensed with; all five are necessary in order to make 
the fact that late classical political economy took on a Ricar- 
dian form intelligible. 
The first element is the unique position and influence of 
one man: John Stuart Mill. 
To an extraordinary extent, his Principles of Political
Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy was 
the vital heart of classical political economy from 1848 until 
the dissolution of the school. Most of the third generation of 
classical economists followed Mill's Principles to the letter, 
and even those with theoretical disagreements paid tribute to 
the breadth of Mill's influence and authority. Even Marx agreed 
that Mill completely dominated his peers among the classical econ- 
. 1 omlsts. 
Mill was an enormously capable thinker; and a master of 
Victorian prose. He was far superior in literary skill to any 
of the other political economists. Furthermore, John Stuart Mill 
was much more than a political economist: he was the foremost 
intellectual, principal philosopher, and a leading standard-bearer 
of classical liberalism. 


-95- 
Since he had such a range of interests, the center of Mill's 
attention was far from the field of classical political economy. 
As an economist, Mill sought not so much to develop economic theory 
as to place political economy within a proper philosophical and 
political context: that of classical liberalism. Among the first 
to conclude that Mill did not have his full mind on his political 
economy was Marshall, who excused what he saw as Mill's lapses 
as an economist by attributing them to Mill's wish to "set himself 
to bring into prominence the human, as opposed to the mechanical, 
element in economics.,,2 
Mill believed that the "old political economy" was faulty 
not in its analyses but in its applications, in the place it had 
within the general analysis of society. Any faults that Mill may 
have seen in the material of the science itself took second place, 
in his mind, to the much more important task of making sure that 
those who used political economy applied it from the proper per- 
spective. Pedro Schwartz has convincingly demonstrated that Mill's 
project in his Principles was to remove the "old political economy" 
from its inhuman context and to expound "some of its applications 
to social philosophy" when economic life was viewed from a liberal 
	. 	3 
perspectlve. 
J.S. Mill himself expressly claimed that his book had a 
general tone by which it is distinguished from all previous expositions of political economy .••• This tone consisted chiefly in making the proper distinction between the laws of the Production of wealth-which. are real laws of nature, dependent 
on the properties of objects--and the modes of Distribution, which . • . depend on the human will. The common run of political economists confuse these things together 
. . • ascribing the Sqme necessity to things 


-96- 
dependent on the unchangeable conditions 
of our earthly existence, and to those which, being but the necessary consequences of particular social arrangements, are merely coextensive with • • . institutions and customs.4 
The "common run" of political economists had forgotten that society 
is something we make ourselves. No theoretical mistake in the 
principles of the science could be nearly as serious as this hor- 
rible error in perspective. 
Mill set out to correct this error. He does not claim that 
his book is original in theory: 
The appearance of a treatise like the present • • • may be thought to require some explanation. It might • • • be sufficient to say, that no existing treatise on Political Economy contains the latest improvements that have been made in the theory of the subject .••. To supply, however, these deficiencies in former treatises . . . is not the sole, or even the principal object which the author has in view.5 
Mill believed that he had succeeded in his task. Evaluating his 
text, he was satisfied because 
It was, from the first, continually cited and referred to as an authority, because it was not a book merely of abstract science, but also of application, and treated Poli tical Economy riot as a t-hing by itself, but as a fragment of a greater whole; a branch of Social Philosophy.6 
If Mill was indeed interested primarily in giving political 
economy a place within classical liberal social philosophy, then 
it is not surprising that the political economy in Mill's Princi-
pIes is very Ricardian. Mill had learned political economy in 


-97- 
his early teens at his father's knee--at the knee of that James 
Mill who was so rigorous and dogmatic a follower of Ricardo. 
Ever after, he had regarded political economy as a settled sci- 
ence, applicable wherever men were mainly motivated "through the 
desire for wealth" and thus were ruled by "the psychological law 
that a greater gain is preferred to the smaller.,,7 Given 
these facts, it is most reasonable that John Stuart Mill should 
have, with his mind mostly not on the theory but on the applica- 
tion of political economy, taken the political economy he had 
learned in his youth as--with a few major corrections--the one 
that he had to fit into classical liberalism? And given Mill's 
wide intellectual reputation and his substantial stature, is it 
surprising that his fellow economists followed the example of the 
first intellectual of Britain? What chance did any of them have 
in an argument with this man who had read Greek when he was three? 
There are grave problems with this explanation. For although 
Mill's fellow economists of the third generation were not his 
intellectual equals, they were his peers as political economists. 
They could not debate him on logic or political philosophy or 
ethics or the administration of India. They could debate him 
on political economy. And the third generation of political econ- 
omists did not hesitate to argue when they disagreed with Mill. 
Cairnes, Thornton, and the American Francis Walker, for example, 
attacked Mill sufficiently to convince Arnold Toynbee that the 
Ricardo-Mill orthodoxy had been overthrown around 1870; yet no 
economist thought of himself so completely a pupil and disciple 
	'11 	" 	8 

o Ml as Calrnes. 

f

-98- 
While Mill's hold outside the intellectual community of classical political economy could possibly be explained by Mill's unique stature, this cannot explain his hold within the "invisible college" itself. Yet there his Principles held sway for forty years. There must have been some other reasons--besides Mill's prestige--why the other classical economists found Mill's presentation so comfortable. Taking account of the unique position of J.S. Mill only pushes the historical problem back to another level: what predisposed the classical economists of the third generation to so readily accept J:S. Mill's Ricardian formulation of political economy? 
But before an attempt at an- answer to this question, a methodological caveat. The second historical element relevant to the formation of the late classical theoretical orthodoxy is that, like all social science, political economy is interpretive. It does not lay bare the laws of nature that rule economic phenomena; it sets out analytical constructs and rules for their behavior which together give an enlightening and (one hopes) 
not too misleading approximation to the actual phenomena studied. To claim, as I have done in this essay, that corresponding to each type of capitalist market economy there is a unique economic theory possible within the framework of classical political economy that is "correct," is to lie. This is not the case. The assumption that it is the case is, itself, an analytical construct which (one hopes) gives an enlightening and not too misleading approximation to the actual relation between fact and theory that is to be used to help set social policy. 



Also an analytical construct is the statement that Britain had, in 1810, an agricultural and, in 1860, an industrial capitalist market economy. There were substantial elements that I would call "industrial" in the British economy of 1800 and substantial elements that I would call "agrarian" in the British economy of 1860. Thus there are two possible sources of error: the economies of the nineteenth century do not exactly correspond to the ideal types, and the relationship between ideal type of economy 
and "accurate" economic theory is itself an approximation. The 
two sources may have multiplied so as to generate what I call the discrepancy between theory and reality on their own. The problem may not be in the history, only in my theory. But I think that the divergence between economic theory in 1870 and the economy 
of 1870 is enormous, so large as to dwarf any possible uncertainty present as a result of my theoretical approximations. 
The third element present at the formation of the late classical orthodoxy was the ideological nature of political eco- 
nomy. 
In its primitive version, the argument runs that political economy is not a science, but an ideology; it was constructed to help legitimate the bourgeois-dominated social order of nineteenthcentury England; to expect it to have any relation to the "real" structure of the economy is to be naive. In this version, the argument is a straw man: Scrope's, Marshall's, Keynes's, Samuelson's, or Lucas's political economy is just as good at helping 
to legitimate the social order as Mill's. So pressure from the social formation on the intellectuals in the direction of a Ricar- 


-100- 
dian political economy is not comprehensible. 
There is, however, a serious version of the argument: political economy is by politics out of moral philosophy. The first of its parent disciplines has never had extraordinary love for scientific truth; the second has always relied on introspection for its evidence--and introspection is a good way to reach conclusions with which one agrees. Since neither of the sources of political economy had any great concern for scientific method or for empirical truth, why should anyone expect that political economy will correspond to the actual structure of the economy? Economic theories are advanced in political debates, and they are usually based on dubious psyc~ological premises. So there seems to be no place for empirical reality to enter. 
This argument carries a lot of truth. And, indeed, there are many complaints that classical political economy ignored empirical evidence that went against its theoretical predilections. 
But the classical economists tried so hard to be scien- 
tists. McCulloch spent years collecting empirical data. Pages upon pages in Mill's Principles are concerned with actual types of land tenure existing in Europe and the empirical correlations between prosperity in the countryside and type of land tenure. Torrens spent pages trying to justify his own particular reliance on theory and empirical fact, his attempt to be theoretically rigorous and yet to check theory against the real world.9 The 
classical economists saw themselves as scientists, not as politicians. And if their most strenuous efforts were not enough 


-101- 
to give at least a presumption that they tried very hard to describe social reality, then I fail to see how anyone can speak of social "science" at all. Still, the fact that the classical economists were not certain whether they were deducing psychological laws or generalizing from empirical observations did give classical political economy additional play, more room to go astray. 
Fourth, during the time of the formation of the late classical orthodoxy, Britain was prosperous. In general, times of great prosperity are not times of great upset in economic theory. The health of the economy during the 1850's and 1860's, the prolonged boom that accompanied the ~arious revisions of J.S. Mill's Principles, gave the economists the belief that they understood the functioning of the economy. They had no incentive to critically examine economic theory until the great boom had turned 
into the great depression that began in 1873, until the weaknesses both in the economy and in economic theory became obvious. 
The special position of John Stuart Mill certainly gave 
the late classical orthodoxy more unity and authority than it would otherwise have possessed. The shortcomings of the classical economists as scientists kept their doctrines more insulated from disturbing empirical evidence than one would have originally expected. The prosperity of England during the 1850's and 60's helped create a satisfied habit of mind among the classical economists of the third generations. And the always approximate nature of historical explanation means that there is a lot of fuzziness in the link between the causes and the result. 


-102- 
But even all these put together do not make the shape late classical political economy took intelligible. Strong pressures-derived from the classical economists' wish to understand economic life--should have moved classical political economy toward more "industrial" conceptions of wages and capital. For a time these pressures seemed to work: as Ricardo's authority waned 
in the 1820's and 30's, the economists of the second generation advanced a wide spectrum of different theories, some of which contained clearly "industrial" visions of economic life. Yet 
when the economists of the third generation gathered themselves into a tight cluster around a theoretical orthodoxy--as opposed 
to those of the second generation, who had at best given loose allegiance to a vague set of principles--their orthodoxy was closer to the political economy of Ricardo than the political economy 
of Senior, Scrope, and Longfield had been. The potential for change had been present. wi thin the intellectual community; yet change did not take place. 
And one reason change did not occur was that political economy was too successful at being a science. 
All the classical economists, in varying degrees, built on the theories set forth by Ricardo. They took over his analytical framework. They took over his theories of the behavior of the analytical constructs of economics. And they made whatever modifications they thought necessary to produce an accurate theory of economic life. But they started not from observation but from the theories of Ricardo. 
This is not surprising. This is what would have been expected from the standards of science. For scientific communities 


-103- 
are inherently conservative. They do not create new theories 
except when absolutely necessary. They prefer to modify the old 
ones, to take an approach that helped solve some past problem and 
ingeniously modify it to present circumstances. Only when a the- 
oretical approach has run into a complete dead end will it be a- 
bandoned. And it will be abandoned only if there is a competing 
theory that better explains not only the problem at hand but the 
problems previously solved by the old approach. Scientific theo- 
ries are, by virtue of the sociological structure of science, endur- 
, 10 lng. 
This works fine in the natural sciences. For the set of 
phenomena that are to be explained and the laws by which the phe- 
nomen a are generated do not change over time. And if scientists 
attempted to create a new theoretical framework for each problem, 
then the discipline would never acquire any unity~ It is clearly 
best to always try to use a theory that has worked in the past. 
And only if no progress is made try to create a new theory--which 
must then also work to explain the phenomena that marked the ini- 
tial success of the old theory. 
But there are no unchanging "laws" of the economy. In eco- 
nomics, there are only approximations that are useful for a decade, 
a half-century, or an age. As the social context, internal struc- 
ture, and technological bases of the economy change, the proper 
theories for use in economic analysis change also. The classi- 
cal economists, however, tried to be scientists. They had a set 
of theories which they knew to be "true." The theories of Ricardo 
had given a sound theoretical basis for analyzing the Corn Laws, 
the Poor Law, the dangers of governmentregulation~ private mono- 


-104- 
poly, and resttictions on free trade. Policies produced in accord 
with these economic theories had been followed by the great boom 
of the 1850's and 60's. And so, acting like scientists with an 
empirically-tested orthodox theory behind them, the third gener- 
ation of classical economists applied a modified Ricardian ortho- 
doxy to the analysis of late nineteenth-century Britain. Nothing 
could have been further from the mind of Mill, Fawcett, or Cairnes 
than the idea that, since the economy was undergoing radical 
change, economic theory ought to be undergoing radical change. 
Like scientists, the classical economists thought that since the 
Ricardian theories had apparently worked in the past, there was 
a presumption that they would work in the present. 
Thus Cairnes, writing in an economy that contained both 
recurrent major financial crises and the highest reproducible 
capital to output ratio the world has ever seen, used a theoret- 
ical base dominateD by Malthus's principle of population and Mill's 
vision of capital as advances of wages to workers. Cairnes did 
make what he thought of as a major theoretical innovation: his 
idea of non-competing groups. He concluded that the labor market 
could not be analyzed as if all wage differentials had economic 
causes but had to be thought of as segmented as a result of class. 
He was most apologetic: only the deepest study of the labor mar- 
ket had convinced him that the theories of his teachers were in- 
adequate.ll In general, the theoretical innovations of the third 
generation were few and were made hesitantly, only when there 
was no alternative. As if the fact that a theory had worked for 
Ricardo made it very strange that it did not work for the analysis 


-105- 
of an industrial capitalist economy. 
But political economists, trying to create a set of theories to help in the i~mediate comprehension of the economy of their time, could not afford this natural-science like respect for the theories of their predecessors. In combination with Mill's dominance, economic prosperity, relative inattention to empirical evidence, and the incompleteness of the transformation of the economy, the desire of the classical economists to act like scientists kept their orthodox theories from changing so as to be applicable to Britain in the closing years of the nineteenth century. 
I think all these elements make the analytical failures 
of the late classical economists intelligible. And the picture is a depressing one. In spite of their strongest efforts, their original theories, historical chance, and their very rules of scientific procedure themselves combined to thwart the classical economists in their attempt to comprehend the economy of the late nineteenth century. 


-106- 

NOTES 
Notes to pages 1-1. 
CHAPTER I 

lThe phrase "classical economists" has been used to refer to many different groups. I use "classical economists" to refer 

to the group of intellectuals centered around the Political Economy Club from 1815 until the rise of the neoclassical, marginalist school of British economists late in the century. My "classical economists" include David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Robert Torrens, James Mill, John Barton, J.R. McCulloch, William Lloyd, Nassau Senior, George Scrope, John Stuart Mill, Henry Fawcett, William Thornton, J.E. Cairnes, and others. They do not include Alfred Marshall, Thomas Hodgskin, Samuel Read, Simonde di Sismondi, W.S. Jevons, or Friedrich Engels. Adam Smith is included in 

his guise as a classical economist; that is, Adam Smith 

as his Wealth of Nations was read by Ricardo is included. Adam Smith the moral philosopher, Adam Smith as read by Dugald Stewart, is not included. 

I use "classical political economy" as a synonym both for "classical economics" and for the "classical school." Thus, the "'classical economists" are the same as the "classical political economists" and the "classical school of economists." 
The principal references on the classical economists 

as a group are Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford, 1954), Part II; Mark Blaug, Ricardian Economics (New Haven: Yale, 1958); and, superior, D.P. O'Brien, The Classical Economists (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). Also good for a fairly short yet comprehensive introduction to the classical economists and their theories 

is Mark Blaug, Economic Theory 'in Retrospect (London: Heineman, 1962). I am told that the third edition (which I have not seen), published in 1981, is far superior. The relevant chapters are numbers 3 through 6, on the classical economists themselves, and number 8, on the rise of the marginalists. 

2The vision of the economy of Britain in the nineteenth century lying behind this paragraph, and this essay, is essentially one I have learned from K~rl Polanyi, as set out in Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1957); and Karl Polanyi, "The Economy as Instituted Process," in Polanyi et al., Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1971). 
shapeType75fBehindDocument1pWrapPolygonVertices8;6;(0,4223);(19468,4223);(19468,0);(21500,0);(21500,21500);(0,21500)posrelh0posrelv0pib

-uJ7 
Notes to pages 1-4. 
3By "created the science of political economy" I mean two separate things. First, the classical economists thought that they were engaged in a project not fundamentally different from the physics of Galiileo, Kepler, Laplace, and Newton. Second, we today view the classical economists as social scientists, engaged in a project different from physics yet having some claims to empirical validity and objectivity. 
4The end of classical political economy is hard to date, for there was never a moment when the leading economists of England solemnly pronounced that Ricardo, J.S. Mill, and their peers had been wrong. Alfred Marshall, for example, saw no clear break between the classical and the marginalist, neoclassical schools. See his Appendix on the history of economics in Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1920). 
5See chapter III of this essay. My main source for (very rough) estimates of the structure of the British economy during the nineteenth century is Phyllis Deane and W.A. Cole, British Economic Growth, ~-~ (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1967) • 
6It does not go beyond Cairnes, and thus does not seriously analyze the attempted formation by economists like Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall of a classical-marginalist synthesis in the 1880's and 1890's. It also does not trace the gradual transformation of orthodox economics into price theory that was begun by Marshall and continued by such 
of his peers and pupils as Wicksteed, Fisher, Pigoll, and Knight. 
7The epistemology, philosophy, history, and sociology of science-and of intellectual communities, of disciplines, in general--raise thorny and unsettled questions. This morass is far too deep for me to enter here, but I can recommend some points of entry: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Chicago, 1970); imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism ~ the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1970); and Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972). For an unholy attempt to apply a theoretical perspective derived from Foucault and Althusser against Althusser, see (a book that was my Dark Angel most of the fall) Keith Tribe, ~, Labour, ~ Economic Discourse (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). For a good collection applying Some of this theoretical base to economics, see S. Latsis, ed., Method ~ Appraisal in Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1976). 


-108- 
Notes to pages 4-9. 
Any understanding of the debate is hampered by the circumstance that it is carried on in at least three mutually-incomprehensible intellectual tongues. There does, however, seem to be a broad area of agreement. The most important thing to do in the history of an intellectual discipline is to grasp, first, the conceptual framework present within the text (or theory) when the text (or theory) is read (or understood) as its author intended it, and, second, the overall analytical language within which the author and his work belong. 
The ideas above are present in all the words "discourse", "problematic", "research program", and "paradigm". And a change in conceptual framework or analytical language 
is called, variously, an "epistemological break," a "scientific revolution," or a "supersession of a research program. " 
8The term "invisible college" is Kuhn's--he pays, I think rightly, the most attention to the sociological nature of scientific communities. 
9See Appendix II for a table of the various Principles texts and their authors. 
10Those who divide economic theory into periods on the basis of the methods of analysis used tend to see the two most significant breaks as coming between Adam Smith and Ricardo and between J.S. Mill and Jevons. Those who divide 
the history of economics on the basis of the overall visions of the economic process see the breaks as coming before Adam Smith and between Pigou.and Keynes. The marginalists, Jevons, Edgeworth, and Walras, did not have 
a radically different conception of the economy than did J.S. Mill; they had a radically different set of tools, which led them to seek an analytical framework within which they could ask questions that their tools could help answer. 
In other words, the theori~s of any group of economists have three elements: 
1) An overall perspective, a place for economics within social science, or social philosophy. 
2) An analytical framework, a set of aggregates and analytical constructs that will be used in analysis. 
3) Individual theories of the behavior of the analytical constructs--these theories will be closely linked with the "tools", the concepts of optimization, equilibrium, arbitrage, and illusion held. 
The marginalists found themselves with a new set of "tools", and so they created an analytical framework within which those tools could be used to create helpful individual theories. The analytical framework of the marginalists, how- 


-109- 
Notes to pages 9-12. 
ever, did not answer the same questions as the analytical framework of the classical school. So the two ran in tandem for twenty years or so, with all the young economists gravitating toward the new, exciting, promising approach and ignoring the old, settled approach. 
CHAPTER II 
1 'd Davl. 
Ricardo, "Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn 
on the Profits of Stock," in David Ricardo, l'lorks and Correspondence, Piero Sraffa ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1951), vol. IV; Edward West, Essay_~ the Application of Capital to Land (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1934); Thomas Malthus, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent," in Thomas Malthus, The Pamphlets of Thomas Robert Malthus (New York: Kelley, 1970); and Robert Torrens, An Essay ~ the External Corn Trade (London: 1820). All had been unknowingly anticipated by James Anderson, whose Observations on the Means of Exciting ~ Spirit of National Industry (Edinburgh: 1777) had appeared in 1777. 
2From John Stuart Mill's Logic. of Political Economy, W. Green, 1909), p. xv. 
Quoted in J.S. Mill, Principles Ashley ed. (London: Longmans, 
3For a good, yet dense, view of the coming together of the analytical framework of classical political economy, see Keith Tribe, the chapter "The Formation of Economic Discourse," in his Land, Labour, and Economic Discourse. 
4Maria Edgeworth, quoted in Blaug, Ricardian Economics, p. 38; from Ricardo, Works, vol. X,p. 172. The two great popularizers of classical political economy (and they were enormously successful) were Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau. For an account of their careers, see Guy Routh, The Origin of Economic Ideas (New York: Random House, 
1973) . 
5See William Thornton, On Labour (London: 1869) , and Francis Walker, political Economy (New York: 1888). 
6See W. Stanley Jevons, Theory of Political Economy (London: l871), and Francis Y. Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics (London: 
l881) . 


-1l0- 
Notes to pages l3-15. 
7Henry Sidgwick, The Principles of Political Economy (London: 1883), p. v. 
8por a short summary of Marshall's economics, see the chapters "Marshallian Economics--Demand and utility" and "Marshallian Economics--Cost and Supply" in Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect. Even in Blaug's neoclassic-oriented explication of Marshall, it is apparent that Marshall himself is at least as close to J.S. Mill as to Paul Samuelson. 
9see Appendix I, and also the University of Cambridge Calendar (London) for various years. The University of Cambridge Calendar was used for no reason other than that Widener Library's collection of documents on nineteenth-century Oxford is less complete. 
10 	d' 
See Appen lX I. 
II 	d' 
See Appen lX I. 
l2As Mill's editor, Ashley is not an unbiased authority. The quote is from J.S. Mill, Principles, p. xxiv. 
l3Both Blaug and Schumpeter believe more strongly than I do that J.S. Mill dominated late classical economics. See the chapter on J.S. Mill in Blaug's Economic Theory and pages 527- 534 in Schumpeter's History.
l4J•R• McCulloch, the leading classical economist in the twenty years following the death of Ricardo, seems to have barely known of the existence of an Irish group of political economists. He owned many of their pamphlets and lectures, however. The basic essay on political economy in Ireland is R.D.C. Black, "Trinity College, Dublin, and the Theory of Value, 1832-1863," in Economica, August, 1945. There is also a doctoral dissertation on Mountifort Longfield, chief of the Irish economists, by Lawrence Moss at columbia. I would have dearly loved to have gotten my hands on it. 
l5see, for example, the introduction to Sismondi's Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government (London: 1847), in which the translator hopes that this collection will finally gain Sismondi an audience in Britain. J.S. Mill cites Sismondi fifteen times in Mill's Principles--but always either as an empirical authority or as an example of ludicrous theoretical error. 


-111- 
Notes to pages 15- 17. 
l6Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoirs (Edinburgh: lBll), pp. 
Bl-B2. Many different readings of Adam smith's works are possible, and all are convincing. Depending on one's taste, one can consider Smith 
1) a political economist, in the company of Ricardo, J.S. Mill, and Alfred Marshall. 
2) a political philosopher, in the tradition of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Burke. 
or 3) a social theorist, in the tradition of Marx and Weber. 
I come down on the third side, but I suspect that this is 
a result of my having taken Social Studies 10 at an early and impressionable age. Samuel Hollander, in The Economics of Adam Smith (Toronto: Toronto, 1973), comes down 
on the first; Dugald Stewart, who was there, comes down 
on the second. Keith Tribe advances a (to me) untenable interpretation in which Adam Smith is seen as a deviant member of a group practicing the discourse of "Political Oeconomy," a group that includes both the English mercantilists (William Petty, Dudley North, Richard Cantillon, James Steuart, and others) and the French physiocrats (Turgot, Quesnay, Mirabeau, and others). 
In any case, for the purposes of this essay this dispute does not really matter: there is a reading of the Wealth of Nations in which Smith emerges as a classical political economist, and the classical economists themselves read Smith in this fashion; therefore this particular reading of Smith is relevant to this essay. 
l7See Sraffa's "Introduction" in volume I of Ricardo's Works, pp. xxiv-xxv. Also see pages 135-137 in Tribe.
18 	, II P' 'I 	' , 
See Ml , rlnClp es, p. XXVll. 
19To back up this interpretation of Adam Smith as moral philosopher, I need only allude to the titles of his other works: 
The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Lectures on Police, Justice, Revenue, and Arms reveal that Smith was not a full-time economist. 
Of course, neither was John Stuart Mill nor Henry Sidgwick. But in their works of economics, they write like economists. Mill's and Sidgwick's status as philosophers is little more relevant to their political economy than George Scrope's activities as a geologist are relevant to his political economy. By contrast, Smith's eco-, nomics is intimately dependent upon his larger theory of society. 


-112- 
Notes to pages 17-20. 
20Ricardo, v. I, p. 6. 
21Including James Maitland, Robert Torrens, and Edward West. a more complete list of the classical economists (one in the main I agree with), see O'Brien, The Classical Economists, pp. 2-5. 
For that 
22The next such Principles text was Henry Fawcett's Manual of Political Economy (London: 1863). In his Introduction, Fawcett begs serious students of political economy to go read J.S. Mill's book instead. J.E. Cairnes's Some Lead- 
----- 
ing Principles of Political Economy (Londoh: lB74) did 
not appear until lB74. 
230nce again, consult O'Brien for a more complete list. 
24Such is the convincingly-demonstrated thesis of Pedro The New Political Economy of ~.~. Mill (London: 1972) . 
Schwartz's L.S.E., 
25 'h 	'1" 	h 	' h 
Slnce t e mercantl 1st wrlters of the seventeent and elg t- 
eenth centuries did not constitute an intellectual community, attempts to find an orthodoxy of "mercantilism" have always led to immense scholarly uproar. See D.C. Coleman, ed., Revisions in Mercantilism (London: Methuen 1971). For there simply is no common intellectual ground among the mercantilists on which such an orthodoxy could be based. At most there are often-used arguments which, however, are used in different analytical frameworks. 
26see the Centenary Volume of the Political Economy Club (London: 
Political Economy Club, 1921). For a quick sketch of the club, see ~'Brien, p. 12. 
27Idem. 
2Bldem. 
29~'Brien, pp. 14-15. Also see F.W. Fetter, "The Authorship of Economic Articles in the Edinburgh Review," JPE 61 (1953). 
30 	" h 	' 	'I' h 	' 	' 
F.lrV. Fetter, T e Economlc Artlc es In t e Westmlnster ReVlew 
and Their Authors, lB24-5l," JPE 70 (1962). 
31F•W• Fetter, "The Economic Articles in the Quarterly Review and Their Authors, 1B09-1B52," JPE 66 (195B). 


-113- 
Notes to pages 21-23. 
32 
J.R. McCulloch, ~ Catalogue of Books, the Property of the Author 
of the Commercial Dictionary (London: lB56), pp. 120-127. 
33Quoted in John M. Keynes, Essays in Biography (New York: court, Brace, 1973), p. 148. 
Har- 
34chapters I through XVIII are principally a commentary on smith's Wealth of Nations. Chapter XX is a critique of Say's Treatise of Political Economy. Chapter XXI returns to Smith; 
it criticizes his chapter on the rate of profit for the doctrine that profits fall as capital accumulates independent of diminishing returns to land. Chapter XXII critiques Buchanan, Horner, and Smith. Chapters XXIV-XXVIII attack Smith alon~. Chapters XXIX and XXX critique Say again. Chapter XXXI is a (friendly) commentary on Barton. And Chapter XXXII is a critique of Malthus. 
35See 
Thomas Malthus, Principles of Political Economy (Boston: 
Wells and Lilly, lB2l), "Introduction," chiefly pp. lB-19. I apologize for using this most rare edition. But I found the book at the bottom of Pusey Library, and it had been senator Charles Sumner's copy. So I did not resist the impulse to use it. 
36Robert Torrens, Essay ~ the Production of Wealth (London: IB2l), pp. i-vi. 
37 	'11 	"1 	'd 	h" 	bb 
J.S. Ml ,Prlnclp es. Clte more t an SlX tlmes are Ba age, 
Carey, McCulloch, Malthus, Rae, Ricardo, Senior, Sismondi, Smith, Thornton, Tooke, and Young. Babbage, Sismondi, 
and Young are used as sources of empirical references. Carey is used as a theoretical straw man. All the rest were full members of the intellectual community of classical political economy. 
3BAnd they were viewed as a unified, single-minded intellectual force. I definitely recommend Carlyle's asides on the "Professors of the Dismal Science" in Chartism and in his Latter-Day Pamphlets. 
39see 
Blaug, Ricardian Economics, p. 196. For a mendacious distortion of the classical economists' position on the Factory Acts, see Thomas Sowell, Classical Economics Reconsidered (Princeton: Princeton, 1974),_ p. 29. Sow~ confuses three separate issues: 
1) He cites McCulloch in support of his contention that the classical economists were generally pro-union and supported repeal of the Combination Laws that made 


-114- 
Notes to pages 23-23. 
trade unions illegal conspiracies. Sowell neglects to mention that McCulloch argued for the legalization of trade unions because he held that wages were determined by the size of the wage fund, and thus that the outlaw of unions did not in the least reduce wages. However, according to McCulloch, the outlaw of unions led the workers to think that they would raise wages and to agitate for them. McCulloch thought that legalization of unions would lead the workers to form them, discover that they did not help, disband them, and then accept their place in society. When the legalization of unions led 
to strikes and industrial unrest, McCulloch muttered dourly about how the ill-advised legalization had led dangerously close to outright class war. See D.P. 0' Brien, J.R. McCulloch: A Study in Classical Economics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970). This position of McCulloch's is rather far from pure support for trade unions. 
2) Sowell then cites~ as evidence for the un-neanderthal attitude of the classical economists, their support for contraception and the limitation of population. This, 
of course, was a fundamental conclusion of classical economics: population had to be restricted or else the economy would run itself into a Malthusian disaster, in which wages would be at physical subsistence levels and profits would be so low that accumulation would have ceased. Avoidance of the Malthusian catastrophe was good for both the capitalists and the workers, and, in any case, it had nothing to do with the classical economists' attitude toward unions, which they usually saw as evil monopolies restricting freedom of contract. 
3) Sowell caps the paragraph with the sentence "Even Malthus supported child labor laws." In general, the classical economists opposed the regulation of the working hours of adults because such regulation harmed their interests: it interfered with their freedom to contract to work sixteen hours a day,should they wish to do so. Since children were not full rational agents, this ~rgument did not apply to them. The technological exigencies of production, however, supposedly required that children and adults work the same number of hours a day. In limiting the working hours of children, society was implicitly also impairing 
the freedom of adults to contract. All classical economists were against adult-labor laws; they were for or against childlabor laws as they thought the benefits to children from restricting their hours outweighed or failed to outweigh 
the harm to adults by restricting their hourse. And on 
this issue the early classical economists split about fiftyfifty--with Malthus on the more progressive side. 
For Malthus was one of the least Malthusian, least neanderthal, of all the classical economists. He was always 


-115- 
Notes to pages 23-25. 
the one arguing that the Malthusian theory of population did not apply because it held only over the course of centuries, that costs of adjustment and imperfections in the market made the theoretical logic of his peers invalid. To say that "even Malthus" did something, with amazement that such a devil-figure could do anything reasonable, is to completely misrepresent his place among the classical economists. 
If Sowell thinks that all three of the issues he raises are connected with the classical economists' attitude toward "the working class," he is wrong. The three issues come 
out of completely different parts of the classical economists' conceptions of the economy and cannot be meaningfully aggregated into a "progressive" attitude toward the working class. And Sowell misrepresents the place and representative quality of his citations within the dialogue of classical political economy. Either Sowell's own devotion to the 
free market has so blinded him that he cannot read the classical economists in the 'context of their own picture of the world (but he has spent so much time writing about Say's 
Law that I cannot believe he does not understand what he 
is reading) or he is mendaciously distorting the doctrines of the classical economists so as to give himself and his allies an honorable intellectual history. 
40see Blaug, Ricardian Economics, pp. lll-117. 
41 	"f' 	l' 	h 	f 	h 
By a sClentl lC revo utlon, or a c ange 0 researc program, 
or an epistemological break. 
42 	'11 	1 	", 	( h' 	h' 
James Ml ,Se ected Economlc WrltlngsC lcago: C lcago, 
1966), p. 204. 
43 	, 	l' 	f h 	' 	f I" 	1 
Nassau Senlor, Out lne ~ t e SClence0 Po ltlca Economy 
(London: 1836), p. 1. 
44j~S. Mill, Principles, p. xxvii. 
45 	' , 
Henry Fawcett, Manual, p. Vll. 
46 	h' 	d' 	h' 	d ' 
In t e lntro uctlon to lS Essay on Pro uctlon, Torrens states 
that he is trying to present political economy while avoiding the mistakes both of Malthus and of Ricardo. 
The Essay on Production is one half of Torrens's general treatise. The other half is contained in his Essay on the Corn Trade, but that part of his theory needed "remodelling and extending." See Robert Torrens, Essay on the External Corn Trade (London: lB15) and Essay ~ the Production of Wealth (London: lB2l). 


-116- 
Notes to pages 25-25. 
47 	'1 	'd 1 '1 	'( 
See Marlan Bow ey, Nassau Senlor an C asslca Economlcs. New 
York: Octagon, 1967). 
488 ee 
R.D.C. Black, "Trinity College, Dublin, and the Theory of Value." Also see the entry for Mountifort Longfield in the Dictionary ~ National Biography. 
Longfield was born, in Ireland, in 1802. He attended Trinity College in Dublin, where he received his LL.D. in 1831. In 1831, Richard Whately, newly created Archbishop of Dublin, endowed the Richard Whately Professorship of Political Economy at Trinity College. Mountifort Longfield was its first occupant. During his tenure, 
he published three sets of lectures: his Lectures on Political Economy (Dublin: 1834), ~ LectUres on the Corn Laws (Dublin: 1834), and Three Lectures on Commerce and o~ Absenteeism (Dublin: 1836). After~livering this last set of lectures, in 1834, Longfield was appointed Regius Professor of Feudal and English Law at Trinity College. He gave the Political Economy Chair up to Isaac Butt. 
For the rest of his life, Longfield was alternately 
a law professor and a judge. He published little else-just one long essay on land tenure in Ireland for the Cobden Club (in J.W. Probyn, ed., Systems of Land Tenure, published in London in 1876). He died in l88~nd was described as the "noted political economist and judge Mountifort Longfield." 
Longfield's position in the intellectual community of classical political economy is not secure. He is not cited at all in Mill's Principles, Fawcett's Manual, or Cairnes's Leading Principles. Mark Blaug could find only one nineteenth-century economist resident in England who claimed 
to be a disciple of Longfield. And the don of the second generation, J.R. McCulloch, did not even own Longfield's textbook, his Lectures. Given these facts, to include Longfield within the scientific intellectual community of classical political economy seems dUbious at best. 
Yet both of Longfield's o~her series of published lectures are in their proper place, under "Political Economy," on J.R. McCulloch's bookshelf. And so are the works of at least two of Longfield's pupils, Isaac Butt and James A. Lawson. One of Butt's works even made its way into J.R. McCulloch's The Literature of Political Economy (London: 1845), in which McCulloch recommended it as a very good work which had somehow not received the attention it deserved. And in his Literature of Political Economy McCulloch was not trying to give ~ accurate catalogue of 
the literature. He included only those books which he thought advanced Sound principles, or which had received such wide circulation that he wished to place himself on 


LL /- 
Notes to pages 25-26. 
record as opposed to them. 
The preponderance of the evidence seems to be that Longfield was regarded as a legitimate political economist. At least, his obituary, the Cobden Club, and J.R. McCulloch all call him one. And although he and his pupils had little influence on political economy across the Irish Sea, their works were read by some. 
Furthermore, Longfield and his doctrines sprung from British roots. Longfield's teacher was Richard Whately, who in his less religious moments (that is, when he was not comparing the workings of the Invisible Hand to a divine miracle like the transformation of water into wine 
at the wedding at Cana) was a sound political economist. And Longfield saw himself as a fOllower of Smith and Ricardo. 
Longfield is included within the bounds of classical political economy for the reasons Say and Sismondi are excluded. Sismondi was certainly an "economist" in the sense of believing in and analyzing the "economy." Sismondi has a strong claim to be considered the first historically-aware economist: he was deeply interested in the economic systems out of which capitalism arose. And Say was second only to Ricardo among the economic disciples of Adam Smith. But they were not products of classical political economy. Their intellectual roots and allegiances were elsewhere. By contrast, Longfield's ideas were developments of currents present elsewhere within classical political economy. Elements of his works can 
be seen in the writings of such authors as Jones, Lloyd, Scrope, Senior, and Whately. So I include Longfield, and his Principles text, within the intellectual community of classical political economy. 
49The degree of theoretical divergence in the Principles texts 
of the second generation is far larger than in the first 
or the third generation. In the first generation, the three works of Torrens, Ricardo, and James Mill are grouped closely together, with Malthus alone in oPposition. In 
the third generation all works cluster around the theoretical position of J.S. ~ill. In the second generation, however, there is no obvious cluster. McCulloch is closer to Ricardo than to any of his peers. Senior about splits the difference between McCulloch and Scrope. Scrope is rabidly anti-Malthusian and pro-laissez-faire. And Longfield is about as far from McCulloch as Scrope, but in a somewhat different direction. For a table of Principles authors 
and books, consult Appendix II. 
50Inasmuch as Fawcett's and Cairnes's theoretical positions are expressly derived from J.S. Mill, less reference will be made to them in future chapters than to the other Principles.


-lIB- 
Notes to pages 26-:3 o. 
51 	, 1" 	'd ' 	h 11' 	,. I 
A reconCl latlon contlnue In Mars a s Prlnclp es. 
\ 
CHAPTER III 
lsee Deane and Cole, pp. 154-181, with the table on page 166. 
2 	, 
See Deane and Cole, pp. 142 and 166, cf. also pp. l36-1Bl. 
This estimate of relative productivity is itself the quotient of two rough estimates, and so should be taken as, at best, a guide to qualitative properties. 
3see Ronald Meek, The Economics of Physiocracy (Cambridge: Harvard, 1953), pp. 267 anQ 273. 
4 That 
is, fluctuations in the agricultural shocks in the rest of the economy. of England depended completely upon agricultural sector. 
industries caused The economic health the health of its 
5see E.L. JDnes, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge, 19B1), pp. 95-102. 
6Idem• I am thinking of the transformation of the British economy from feudalism to capitalism as a three-stage process. First, a feudal society goes through a two century long "mercantile revolution" and becomes an agrarian, mercantile capitalist economy. Only then does this agrarian mercantile capitalist economy pass through the industrial revolution and become an industrial capitalist economy. 
7This speed of transformation is, in fact, the defining characteristic of mercantile capital. It is being continually turned over, is present one instant as raw materials and advances of wages, the next as the finished product, and then as money which can be reapplied to the purchase of raw materials or to some other line of business. 
BI am thinking, in fact, not of the Elizabethan Poor Law itself but of its amendment, the Act of Settlement of 1662' (14 Carolus II cap. 5). Under the provisions of this act, unemployed indigent laborers were to be removed, at public expense, to their parish of origin. This law was only workable in the almost complete absence of labor 


-119- 
Notes to pages 30-32. 
mobility. 
9 Total 
reproducible capital was worth no four times annual wage payments. pp. 196-202. 
more than three or See Deane and Cole, 
10 
Deane and Cole, p. 166, cf. pp. l54-1Sl. 
11 . 
Ibid., pp. 142, 166. 
l2And 240,000,000 pounds sterling total had been invested in railroads by lB50. E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (New York: Penguin, 1969), p. 112. 
l3Deane and Cole suspect that the reproducible capital to output ratio may have doubled. See Deane and Cole, pp. 196- 202. 
l4Before the lB20's, shocks to economic life had always apparently arisen out of war, demobilization, or crop failure. But starting in the 1820's, there is a ever-present sequence of financial and industrial crises generated from within the industrial sector itself. 
151 am 
thinking in terms like those of Polanyi in his chapter 
on the transformation of land, money, and labor into commodities. See The Great Transformation. 
l6"Ireland has near seven millions of working people, the third unit of whom, it appears by Statistical Science, has not for thirty weeks each year as many third-rate potatoes 
as would suffice him • . • and their fare across by steam is four-pence sterling! Crmvds of miserable Irish darken all our towns." Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (Boston: Dewolfe, Fiske, 1929), pp. 21-24 
17 	- 	' 
But one should not overstate the degree to whlch workers In 
late nineteenth-century Britain were shielded from the pressures of the market. Labor was far more nearly an economic commodity in lS60 than it had been in lB10. 


-120- 
Notes to pages 35-37. 
CHAPTER IV 
lSmith, Wealth of Nations, p. 64. I feel I should note that the type of "deep analysis" of a work which I am undertaking 
in the next three chapters is very dangerous. In attempting to uncover ,the underlying beliefs and views of the author, analysts often succeed only in uncovering their 
own beliefs. For a close textual reading can find some support for almost any position. Still, I firmly believe that the quotes and passages I have chosen are representative of the thought of the classical political economists. 
2Ibid., p. 65. It is irrelevant because the state of nature "was at an end • • • long before the most considerable improvements were made in the productive powers of labour." Thus, "it would be to no purpose ,to trace further what would have been its effects upon the recompense or wages of labour." 
3Ibid., p. 65. On page 65, note the source of profit in the advances made by the capitalist farmer to the worker, in the separation of the worker from the means of subsistence. 
4 Idem. 
5Ibid., pp. 66-67. 
6Ibid., p. 69. 
7 'd 
Ibl ., p. 71. 
BIdem• It is not certain in what "run," long or short, Smith is working in this passage. The word "centuries," however, implies that wages fall back to "the lowest rate consistent with common humanity" only slowly. 
9Ibid., p. 79. 
10some hints, however, of this idea appear in Malthus. 
llThe determinants of wages come from E. Canaan's marginal notes 
to Smith in the Wealth of Nations. Cairnes expands at length on his theory of non-competing groups in his Leading Principles. 


-12l- 
Notes to pages 38-42. 
12 	'11 	1 . d 	.' , 
James Ml , Se ecte Economlc Wrltlngs, pp. 228-229. 
13Ibid., pp. 230-231. 
l4Ibid., pp. 231-244. 
l5Ricardo, v. I, pp. 88, 93-94. 
l6Ibid., pp. 94-95. It is clear that by "natural price" Ricardo means "psychologically-determined level of customary subsistence." 
l7Ibid., pp. 108-109. Thus the necessity for repeal of the Corn Laws, because only by expanding the effective land area availble to feed England can the stationary state be pushed further off. 
l8Ibid• , 
chapter IX. 
19Ibid., p. 157. Recall that Ricardo considers the demand for raw produce to be completely inelastic. 
20Ibid., p. 159. 
21 
Robert Torrens, Essay ~ the External Corn Trade, pp. 374-377. 
Later on, around 1830, Torrens rejected the Malthusian theory. But during the 1810's and 1820's he was a firm believer in 
it. 
22 b' d 	h" 	f' 
I l ., pp. 377-383. Every ot er classlcal economlst of the lrst 
generation says that the Malthusian principle implies that the real wages of the laborer tend toward subsistence. Torrens thinks that it implies that the real per capital income of working class households tends toward subsistence. Torrens's position is more understandable. It does, however, lose the link between subsistence and wages. For it introduces average family size as an additional variable. 
23Malthus, Principles, pp. 192-193. 
24~ 
J;bid., p. 188. 
25Ibid., p. 198. 


-122- 
Notes to pages 42-49. 
26Ibid., pp. 195-200. 
27Ibid., p. 203. I think this is a statement of the wage fund principle, that wages are equal to capital divided by population. Malthus is not clear. This may be a reformulation of Smith's principle that wages depend on the rate of economic growth. 
28To assume that they did not see what was under their noses seems to me to dangerously flatter the present at the expense of the past. I find it more likely that they saw other things, or that they saw more things. 
29scrope in the Quarterly Review. Quoted in Ricardian Economics, pp. 149-150. 
30Longfield, Lectures, p. 203. The analogy is deficient because the laborer "is not 'produced' for the sake of what he can afterwards earn." 
3l, 	I' 
Senlor, Out lne, p. v. 
32MCCUlloch, Principles, pp. 335, 346. McCulloch allows an increase in wages to, after a time, feed back and raise the customary level of subsistence. 
33 h 	' 	5 
Sc umpeter, Hlstory, p. 66 • 
34Mcculloch, Principles, p. 327. 
35 'd 
Ibl ., pp. 327-328. 
36, 	' 
Senlor, Outllne, p. 174. 
37Ibid., pp. 174-175. Lack of government interference thus enters explicitly into Senior's production function. 
38Ibid., p. 198. 
39scrope, Political Economy, p. 45. 
40, 	1 5 
Ibld., p. 8. 
41 f' ld 	"I 	' , 
Long le ,Prlnclp es, p. Vll. 


-123- 
Notes to pages 49-53. 
42see chapter VI of this essay. 
43Longfield, pp. 210-211. 
44Ibid-., p. 170. 
45The quote is from Blaug's Ricardian Economics, p. 126. 
46J•S. Mill, Principles, pp. 343-344. 
47see the Appendix to Mill's Principles on the wage fund, in which Ashley reprints selections from Mill's review of Thornton's On Labour, from the Edinburgh Review, in which Mill recants the wage fund theory. It was a complete shock. Walker compared Thornton's extraction of the recantation to a hunter, taking aim at a squirrel in a tree, suddenly finding a bear crashing down at his feet. 
48 '11 	"I 	d' 
Ml , Prlnclp es, Appen lX O. 
49Such had been Mill's view before his recantation, that trade unions were necessary to ensure "the somewhat earlier attainment of a rise which the competition of the market" would have taken considerable time to gain them. 
50 'll 	"1 	d' 
Ml ,Prlnclp es, Appen lX O. 
51Ibid., p. 721. 
52 b' 	' 
I ld., p. XXXlX. 
53J•S• Mill had been enthusiastic about the limitation of contraception from his earliest youth. As a young teenager, he had been arrested for distributing pro-contraception leaflets 
to the workers of London. 
54 
Fawcett, Manual, pp. 135-l36. 
55 , 	d'" 	I 	1 
Calrnes, Lea lng Prlnclp es, p. 83. 
56Ibid., p. 264. Cairnes believes that Mill's recantation was most "ill advised," and "unnecessary." 


-124- 
Notes to pages 55-61. 
CHAPTER V 
1wealth of Nations, p. 262. 
2 Idem. 
3Ibid., pp. 262-263. 
4Ibid., p. 267. 
5Ibid., p. 259. 
6Ibid., p. 3. 
7 Ibi d ., pp . 3 -9 . 
8Chapters 1 through 4 of Book I of the Wealth of Nations.
9Ibid., p. 259. 
10 , 
260. 
Ibld., p. 

llIbid., p. 67. 
l2Ibid., p. 96. 
13, 48 
Ibld., p. . 
14 	, II 	"I 	6 
J.S. Ml , Prlnclp es, p. 40 • 
15J.S• Mill, Principles, pp. 4l0-412. 
16Smith, Wealth of Nations, pp. 114-115. 
17walker developed and used the concept of "entrepreneurial rent" in his Political Economy. Say always believed that there were four economic agents:' the landlord, the laborer, the rentier, and the entrepreneur. 
lSRicardo did notice that there were lots of disequilibrium dislocations associated with the end of the Napoleonic Wars. He 


-125- 
Notes to pages 6l~67. 
has an entire chapter in his Principles devoted to the readjustment after the war. 
191 learned Ricardo's Corn Model from the description in Hicks's Capital and Growth~ The same interpretation is given in Sraffa's "Introduction," in Luigi Pasinetti, in Blaug's chapter on Ricardo in Economic Theory. 
20, d 	1 
Rlcar 0,v. I, p. 19. 
21Ibid., p. 126. 
22The Essay on Profits is contained in volume IV of Ricardo's Works. 
23Sraffa in the introduction to Ricardo's Works, v. I, p. xxxi. 
24Malthus to Ricardo, in Ricardo, Works, v. VI, p~ 117-118. 
25Ricardo's problem was solved by Piero Sraffa in Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. The rate of profit, in Ricardo's framework, does indeed depend on the physical surplus of workers' production over workers' wages in the wage good industries. 
26Ricardo to McCulloch, in Ricardo, Works, v. VIII, pp. 194, 221, 237. 
27Ricardo, Works, v. I, p. 387. 
28Not 
even as a theoretical possibility--and the only status he grants the second correction is as a theoretical possibility, not as an empirical likelihood. 
29The 
chapter "On Machinery" is in fa~t a commentary on John Barton's pamphlet, "Observations on the Circumstances that Affect the Condition of the Labouring Classes," and Ricardo urges all 
to consult Barton. 
30Ricardo, Works, v. I, p. 388 supra.
3IIbid., p. 396 supra.
32Ibid., p. 396. 
33James Mill, Selected Economic Writings, p. 274. 


-126- 
Notes to pages 68-74. 
34Ibid., p. 251. 
35 	h' 	f 	1 	" 5 
Torrens, Essay ~ t e Productlon ~ Wea th, pp. Vll, • 
36Malthus, Principles, pp. 228-229. 
37Idem• 
38Idem• 
39Ibid., p. 231. 
40Ibid., p. 257. 
41Ibid., p. 228. 
CHAPTER VI 
l~cCUlloch, Principles, pp. 94-95. 
2Ibid., p. 
95. 
3Ibid., pp. 
85-89 
4 _ 
95-100. 
Ibld., pp. 

5Ibid., pp. 
182-183. 
6 , 
l7l. 
Ibld., p. 

7Ibid., p. 
38l. 
8 'd 
380. 
Ibl ., p. 

9scrope, Political Economy, p. 102. 
10Ibid., p. 103. Note who employs what in Scrope's formulation. 


-127- 
Notes to pages 74-79. 
llIbid., p. 94. 
l2Ibid., p. 99. 
l3In Scrope's view of the world, however, the accent is on the contribution which capital can make to production, not on the pain necessary to create capital. 
14Longfield, Lectures, pp. 155-160. 
15, 15 
l60'oc 
Ibld., pp. 1, 

l6Ibid., pp. 163-164. 
l7Ibid., p. 170. 

lSIbid., pp. 170-171. 
19Ibid., pp. 171-172. 
20Ibid., p. 171. 

21IbiQ., pp. 17l-l79. 
22Ibid., pp. 180, 
183. 
23Ibid., pp. 187-188. 
24Ibid., p. 195. 
25Ibid., p. 196. 
26Idem• 
27published originally as part of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, in 1836. 
2Ssenior, Outline, pp. 5S-59. 
29Ibid., pp. 59-60. 


-128- 
Notes to pages 79-84. 
30Ibid., p. 67. 
31Ibid., p. 140. 

32J•S• Mill, Principles, p. 41S. Mill says explicitly that this only holds if no natural agents are used in production. 
33Ibid., p. 67. 
34Ibid., pp. 66-75. 
35Ibid., p. 80. 
36Ibid., pp. 91-96. 
37Ibid., pp. 97-100. 
38Ibid., p. 101. 

39J•S• Mill, Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy (London: 1844), pp. 90-91. Mill took sections and examples out of this particular essay and used them in his Principles, so I am confident that his thought did not change between 1844, when he published the Essays, and 1848, when he published the Principles.

40prin., pp. 416-417. The similarity of Mill's formulation to Marx's "surplus-laborJ' is striking. 
41Ibid., p. 405. 
42Ibid., p. 407. 
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43Fawcett and Cairnes--and in this O'Brien concurs, see The Classical 
Economists, pp. 2-S--do not seem to have had much presence 
outside the shadow of Mill. Marx attributed the intellectual eminence of J.S. Mill in orthodox political economy to the "flatness of the surrounding landscape" which made "small hills appear mountains." 

-129- 
Notes to pages 85-96. 
CHAPTER VII 
lQuoted in Ricardian Economics, p. 117. 
	2 	d' 
See Appen lX II. 
3Ashley in J.S. Mill, Principles, p. 984: 

4Those classical economists who attacked the wage fund theory in the third generation had nothing simple to offer in its place; they did not try to explain the relative shares of profit and wages. 

5Which is present in all of Ricardo's statements of his theory from the Essay on Profits pn. The stationary state occurs when, with wages at subsistence, the rate of profit is so low that no new accumulation takes place. 

6See Meek's Essay "The Decline of Ricardian Economics in England," in Ronald Meek "Economics and Ideology" and Other Essays (London: Chapman and Hall, 1967). 
7see Marshall's appendix on the wage fund in his Principles.

8see Blaug's chapter on the Austrian theory of capital in his Economic Theory. 
CHAPTER VIII 

lAlthough Marx claimed that the only reason the "shallow syncretist" was so prominent was on account of "the flatness of the surrounding landscape." 
2Marshall, in the appendix on the wage fund, in his Principles.
3See Pedro Schwartz, The New Political Economy of J.S. Mill. 
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4J•S• Mill's Autobiography, quoted in Mill's Principles, p. xxi. 

-130- 
Notes to pages 96-104. 
5 b'd 	' , 
~., p. XXVl1.. 
6J•S• Mill's Autobiography, quoted in Mill's Principles, p. xviii. 
7J•S• Mill's Logic, quoted in Mill's Principles, p. xv. 
8see Toynbee's "Essay on Ricardo," in his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution (London: Longmans, Green, 1928). 
9see Torrens's introduction to his Essay on the Production of 
Wealth.
10My view of the nature of science has been deeply conditioned by Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 
111 refer to the sections on "Non--Competing Groups" in Cairnes's Leading Principles.