Introduction
1 A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 12th edn (London, 1809), pt IV, ch. 1, pp. 248–9, 250.
2 See B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977); on the conservative reception and recasting of Smith, see E. Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), ch. 2 & passim; on the broader religious and political framing of these changes, see B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988); for its continuing impact upon government and charitable thinking in late Victorian England, see G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study of the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971).
3 On Hegel’s conception of political economy and ‘civil society’, see G. Stedman Jones, ‘Hegel and the Economics of Civil Society’, in S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani (eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 105–31; on the combination of evangelical Christianity and possessive individualism in Vormärz Prussia and the part it played in the development of Young Hegelianism, see especially W. Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (Cambridge, 1999).
4 Marx to Engels, 18 June 1862, Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 41 (London, 1985), p. 381.
5 See, for instance, F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, 1948); F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Illinois, 1952); G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984).
6 See J. De Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History 54 (June 1994), no. 2, pp. 249–271.
7 J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett (ed.), 14th edn (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 296–7; A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), E. Cannan (ed.) (Chicago, 1976), bk 1, ch. 1, p. 16. See the discussion of the significance in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century arguments about commercial society, in I. Hont, Jealousy of Trade (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming), introduction.
8 T. Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two (1792), M. Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 2, pp. 487–8.
9 A.-N. de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), J. Barraclough (trans.), S. Hampshire (ed.) (London, 1955), p. 180.
Chapter I
1 T. Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two (1792), M. Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 2, p. 461.
2 A.-N. de Condorcet, Sketch f or a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), J. Barraclough (trans.), S. Hampshire (ed.) (London, 1955), pp. 12, 169.
3 Condorcet, Sketch, pp. 173–4.
4 Condorcet, Sketch, pp. 176–7.
5 See R. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848 (London, 1988), p. 170.
6 Condorcet, Sketch, pp. 180–1.
7 Condorcet, Sketch, p. 181.
8 Condorcet, Sketch, p. 182; A.-N. de Condorcet, ‘The Nature and Purpose of Public Instruction’ (1791), K. M. Baker (ed.), Condorcet: Selected Writings (Indianapolis, 1976), p. 106.
9 As above, p. 126.
10 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 456.
11 Paine, Rights of Man: Part One, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 316, 387; Rights of Man: Part Two, pp. 403, 438, 456, 485.
12 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 476, 482–92; on the importance of Sinclair, see I. Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 26–8.
13 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 501–2.
14 As above, pp. 501–2.
15 See A. O. Aldridge, ‘Condorcet et Paine: leurs rapports intellectuels’, Revue de Littérature Comparée 32 (1958), no. 1, pp. 457–65; G. Kates, ‘Tom Paine’s Rights of Man’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1958), pp. 569–87; W. Doyle, ‘Tom Paine and the Girondins’, in W. Doyle, Officers, Nobles and Revolutionaries (London, 1995), pp. 209–19; B. Vincent, ‘Thomas Paine républicain de l’univers’, in F. Furet & M. Ozouf (eds.), Le Siècle de l’avènement republicain (Paris, 1993), pp. 101–26; J. P. Lagrave, ‘Thomas Paine et les Condorcet’, in B. Vincent (ed.), Thomas Paine ou la République sans frontières (Nancy, 1993), pp. 57–65; G. Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (London, 1989), ch. 4; see also A. O. Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (London, 1959); J. Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (London, 1995).
16 Condorcet, ‘Reception Speech at the French Academy’ (1782), in Baker, Condorcet: Selected Writings, p. 6; the best account of what Condorcet meant by ‘the calculus of probabilities’ is to be found in K. M. Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, 1975); see also L. Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1988), esp. pp. 210–25; Hacking, The Taming of Chance, ch. 5.
17 Condorcet, Sketch, p. 162.
18 As above, pp. 162, 181.
19 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 488–9.
20 T. Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797), M. Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 3, pp. 333, 337.
21 See Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, pp. 27–30, 127–9.
22 On Leibniz’s memoir, see Hacking, The Taming of Chance, pp. 18–20.
23 On the significance of changes in eighteenth-century attitudes towards insurance and the importance of The Society for Equitable Insurance, see L. Daston, ‘The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance, 1650–1830’, in L. Kruger, L. J. Daston & M. Heidelberger (eds.) The Probabilistic Revolution, vol. 1, Ideas in History (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 237–61. But see also G. Clark, Betting on Lives, The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775 (Manchester, 1999), esp. pp. 117–18, where resistance to a statistical approach to death is ascribed, not to the absence of a prudential attitude towards insurance before 1750, but to the persistence of popular and often credible beliefs about mortality patterns.
24 Cited in Daston, ‘The Domestication of Risk’, p. 250.
25 See Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, pp. 279–82; Hacking, The Taming of Chance, pp. 44–6.
26 See J.-A.-N. Caritat Marquis de Condorcet, Vie de Monsieur Turgot (1783) (Paris, 1997), p. 187; A. R. J. Turgot, ‘A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind’, in R. L. Meek (ed.), Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 41–59; Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, p. 207.
27 Cited in D. Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 90. Winch’s book is an invaluable source on the contrary uses made of Smith’s work in the two generations following his death.
28 A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 12th edn (London, 1809), pt IV, ch. 1, p. 10.
29 R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael & P. G. Stein (eds.), A. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1976), p. 208; on Smith’s fears of the systematic plans of reform associated with the economistes, see I. Hont, ‘The Political Economy of the “Unnatural and Retrograde” Order: Adam Smith and Natural Liberty’, in Französische Revolution und politische ökonomie, Karl-Marx-Haus Trier (1989), pp. 122–49.
30 Paine, Agrarian Justice, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 3, p. 341.
31 Condorcet, Vie de Monsieur Turgot, p. 164; Condorcet, Sketch, pp. 127, 163.
32 In this context, the link between between Turgot, Condorcet and Smith derives as much from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as from The Wealth of Nations. In each there is a new emphasis upon the reflective character of human beings and an aversion to mechanical and determinist theories. These linkages are powerfully brought to the fore in E. Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), esp. ch. 8 & passim. Particularly important was a shared idea of ‘economic enlightenment’ linked to a dynamic view of history and cultural/mental development, as against static and ahistorical conceptions of self-interest. See, for example, the distaste for Helvetius manifested in the correspondence between Turgot and Condorcet. Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 199–201.
33 Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith’, I. S. Ross (ed.), in W. P. D. Wightman & J. C. Bryce, Adam Smith: Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Oxford, 1980), p. 304.
34 Condorcet, Sketch, p. 180; he had already addressed this theme more explicitly in his Essai sur les assemblées provinciales of 1788, where he argued that the first cause of poverty was the unequal distribution of wealth due to bad laws and that the second was low wages due to the obstruction of free competition caused by guild and apprenticeship regulation, A. Condorcet O’Connor & M. F. Arago (eds.), Oeuvres de Condorcet, 12 vols. (Paris 1847–9), vol. 8, pp. 453–9; and see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 171–2; see also L. Cahen, Condorcet et la révolution française (Paris, 1904), pp. 83–7.
35 Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, p. 208.
36 Condorcet, ‘The Nature and Purpose of Public Instruction’, in Baker, Condorcet: Selected Writings, p. 106.
37 As above, p. 119.
38 See Condorcet, Vie de Monsieur Turgot, p. 171.
39 Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, pp. 292–3.
40 Paine, Rights of Man: Part One, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 314; Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 413.
41 E. Canaan (ed.), Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) (Chicago, 1976), bk 3, ch. 2, p. 409.
42 Paine, Agrarian Justice, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 3, pp. 328, 330. The different inferences writers around the time of the French Revolution drew from the so-called ‘agrarian law’ was of central importance in determining divergent paths of radicalism in the nineteenth century. See G. Stedman Jones, ‘Introduction’, in G. Stedman Jones (ed.), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto (London, 2002), pp. 149–55.
43 Condorcet, Sketch, p. 32.
44 Condorcet, ‘The Nature and Purpose of Public Instruction’, Baker, Condorcet: Selected Writings, p. 109; Sketch, pp. 180, 192.
45 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 409, 456; Agrarian Justice, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 3, p. 337; Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 496.
46 See I. Hont, ‘Commerce and Luxury’, in M. Goldie & R. Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-century Political Thought (forthcoming), ch. 14; see also E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge, 1994); P. Riley (ed.), F. de Fénelon, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (Cambridge, 1994).
47 I. Kramnick (ed.), William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1798) (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 171.
48 See Winch, Riches and Poverty, ch. 3; Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 68–71.
49 See Winch, Riches and Poverty, pp. 76–80.
50 See D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford, 1977), p. 230.
51 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. iv, ch. 1, p. 10.
52 R. Price, ‘A Future Period of Improvement’(1787) in D. O. Thomas (ed.), Richard Price, Political Writings (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 164, 165; on the relationship between the American Revolution and British radical dissent, see P. N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 1994); on the character of British radicalism in the 1780s and its reaction to the first years of the French Revolution, see R. Whatmore, ‘A Gigantic Manliness: Paine’s Republicanism in the 1790s’, in S. Collini, R. Whatmore & B. Young (eds.), Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 141–6. On the salience of calls for moral reform in the 1780s, see J. Innes, ‘Politics and Morals: The Reformation of Manners Movement in Later Eighteenth-century England’, in E. Hellmuth (ed.), The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1990), pp. 57–119.
53 See F. Acomb, Anglophobia in France (1763–89) (Durham, NC, 1950) and Whatmore, ‘A Gigantic Manliness’ in Collini et al., Economy, Polity, and Society, pp. 148–9.
54 A.-N. Condorcet, ‘On the Influence of the American Revolution in Europe’ (1786), Baker, Condorcet: Selected Writings, p. 81.
55 For Paine’s American experience and its impact upon his thought, see E. Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976), chs. 3, 4, 6 & passim.
56 Whatmore, ‘A Gigantic Manliness’ in Collini et al. Economy, Polity, and Society, pp. 135–58; see also A. O. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York, 1957).
57 Paine, Rights of Man: Part One, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 383; Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 437.
58 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 403–4, 471; Rights of Man: Part One, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 321.
59 T. Paine, Common Sense, (1776), Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 1, p. 83.
60 Condorcet, Vie de Monsieur Turgot, pp. 173–5; ‘On the Influence of the American Revolution on Europe’, Baker, Condorcet: Selected Writings, p. 74.
61 ‘The Explanatory Note of M. Sieyès in Answer to the Letter of Mr Paine, and to Several Other Provocations of the Same Sort’, in M. Sonenscher (ed.), Sieyès, Political Writings (Indianapolis, 2003), pp. 169–73; and on the basis of Sieyès’ position, see the introduction and notes, pp. vii–lxiv, 163–4.
62 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, ch. 3, p. 422.
63 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 406, 414.
64 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, bk. 1, ch. 1, p. 16; Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 454.
65 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 415–16, 422–4.
66 As above, p. 498.
67 Paine, Agrarian Justice, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 3, p. 325; Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 495.
68 Cited in I. Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York, 1994), p. 244.
69 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, pp. 456, 512.
70 Although she has an interesting interpretation of Paine, I cannot agree with Gertrude Himmelfarb that Paine’s position was just another proposal for Poor Law reform. Himmelfarb makes no reference to the fact that Paine was primarily attempting to intervene in a debate in France. See G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984), pp. 86–99.
Chapter II
1 Cited in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), p. 112.
2 See N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), pp. 197, 203 & ch. 6 passim.
3 R. A. & S. Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols. (London, 1838), vol. 2, pp. 3–5.
4 R. Price, ‘A Discourse on the Love of Our Country’, Political Writings (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 190, 195.
5 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event (1790) (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 157–9. Price in the same passage had referred to ‘their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects’. Burke took this as a reference to the events of October 5–6 1789, when the people of Paris forced the Royal Family to return from Versailles to the Tuileries. Price called this a ‘horrid misrepresentation’ and said that his remarks referred to the fall of the Bastille on 14 July and the king’s showing himself to his people as the restorer of their liberty. See Price, Political Writings, pp. 176–7.
6 Cited in Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 110.
7 Cited in Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics, p. 207; see also J. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000).
8 See especially E. Rothschild, ‘Adam Smith and Conservative Economics’, Economic History Review 45 (Feb. 1992), pp. 74–96.
9 (T. R. Malthus), First Essay on Population 1798 (London, 1966), pp. 303–4.
10 D. Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LLD’, in I. Ross (ed.), Adam Smith Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Oxford, 1980), p. 311.
11 According to McCulloch, Dugald Stewart omitted to mention that when Smith was a student at Oxford he was reprimanded by the university authorities for possessing and reading Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. J. R. McCulloch (ed.), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith LLD; with a Life of the Author (1838), 4th edn (Edinburgh, 1850), p. ii.
12 E. Burke, ‘Preface to the Address of M. Brissot to His Constituents’, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 8 vols. (London, 1803), vol. 7, p. 299. Burke was incensed that the education of the Dauphin had been passed to Condorcet, and that he had therefore been handed over ‘to this fanatick atheist, and furious democratic republican’. E. Burke, ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 7, p. 58.
13 See E. Rothschild, ‘Adam Smith and Conservative Economics’, p. 80. The effort to blot out the ideas of Condorcet appears to have been very successful. A single edition of an English translation of Condorcet’s Sketch appeared in 1795, but was not republished until a new translation appeared in 1955.
14 G. Claeys, ‘The French Revolution Debate and British Political Thought’, History of Political Thought 11, 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 59–80; see also I. Hampsher-Monk, ‘John Thelwell and the eighteenth century radical response to political economy’, Historical Journal, 34, 1 (1991), pp. 1–20.
15 For Smith’s argument, see Smith, The Wealth of Nations, bk 3, ch. 2, pp. 407–9.
16 For background, see J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism, English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795–1834 (London, 1969), chs. 1, 2 & passim; J. Innes, ‘The Distinctiveness of the English Poor Laws, 1750–1850’, in D. Winch & P. K. O’Brien(eds.), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience 1688–1914 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 381–409; T. Horne, Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain 1605–1834 (Exeter, 1986).
17 T. Ruggles, The History of the Poor, Their Rights, Duties and the Laws Respecting Them, 2 vols. (London, 1793), vol. 1, pp. xv, 10. See also P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988).
18 See Innes, ‘The Distinctiveness of the English Poor Laws’, pp. 385–91.
19 N. Scarfe (ed.), A Frenchman’s Year in Suffolk: French Impressions of Suffolk Life in 1784 (Woodbridge, 1988), p. 215; see also F. Dreyfus, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt 1747–1827, un Philanthrope d’autrefois (Paris, 1903), pp. 14–15.
20 F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor, 3 vols. (London, 1797), vol. 3, p. cccxi.
21 See Eden, The State of the Poor, appendix xi & see also G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984), pp. 73–8.
22 T. Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797), M. Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 3, pp. 338–9.
23 Burke, Reflections, pp. 256, 262.
24 See R. Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 102, and for an excellent overview part II passim.
25 Paine, Rights of Man: Part Two, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 514.
26 M. Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (London, 1794), vol. 1, pp. 21–2; for Wollstonecraft’s own religious views, see B. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 3.
27 H. More, ‘The History of Mr Fantom, the New-fashioned Philosopher’, The Works of Hannah More, 11 vols. (London, 1830), vol. 3, p. 12.
28 Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, pp. 234–5.
29 On the centrality of the presence of the poor as an object of compassion and contemplation in the world of early Christianity in contrast to its insignificance in the outlook of pagan antiquity, see P. Brown, ‘Late Antiquity’, in P. Veyne, A History of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 235–97.
30 W. Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country Contrasted with Real Christianity (London, 1797), pp. 404–5.
31 H. More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education; with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune’, The Works of Hannah More, vol. 5, p. 25.
32 Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System, p. 405.
33 More, ‘The History of Mr Fantom’, The Works of Hannah More, vol. 3, pp. 28–9.
34 Burke, Reflections, pp. 211, 265; ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’ (1791), The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 7, pp. 13, 49, 57, 58; ‘Three Letters Addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament, on Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France’ (1796), The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 8, pp. 98, 169, 236, 259.
35 J. Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, Defence of the French Revolution and Its English Admirers against the Accusations of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 3rd edn (London, 1791), pp. 140–1. The detachment of radicals from Christianity, in Britain at least, appears to have been more an effect than a cause of support for the Revolution. See M. Butler, Romantics, Rebels & Reactionaries: English Literature and Background 1760–1830 (Oxford, 1981), esp. ch. 3.
36 J. Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, 2nd edn (London, 1797), pp. 374–5; see also A. de Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism: A Translation (London, 1797).
37 T. Paine, The Age of Reason, ch. 1 ‘The Author’s Profession of Faith’, Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, p. 21.
38 E. Burke, ‘Letters on a Regicide Peace’, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 7, pp. 368–9.
39 E. Burke, ‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 7, pp. 376, 377, 386, 391, 404.
40 See Rothschild, ‘Smith and Conservative Economics’, p. 87; and see also D. Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 8. For an account of how the problem of scarcities and famines was approached by Turgot and Smith, see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, ch. 3; and see also S. L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague, 1976).
41 (T. R. Malthus), An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London, 1798), p. 17.
42 In March 1793, in an appendix to a pamphlet, Peace and Union Recommended, Frend contrasted the wartime plight of poor country women near the Cambridgeshire village of St Ives whose earnings were ‘to be scotched three pence in the shilling’ with that of rich war profiteers whose incomes alone should have been ‘scotched’ by a quarter to pay for the war and relieve the plight of its poverty-stricken victims. For this, he was expelled from his college fellowship at Queen’s College and ejected from the university. Frend had also been Coleridge’s tutor while at Cambridge. See A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979), pp. 268–9. On the connections between socinianism (the denial of the Trinity) and political radicalism before the French Revolution, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 330–46.
43 On Malthus’s politics, see especially Winch, Riches and Poverty, pt III; and see also P. James, Population Malthus (London, 1979). After 1815, although he was still in principle a Whig, his politics became increasingly conservative. His semi-Physiocratic views on agriculture led him to defend landlords and support the Corn Laws, while his distrust of manufacturing and towns made him increasingly fearful of crowds and popular disturbance.
44 For an account of the theology and theological context of Malthus’s Essay, see especially A. M. C. Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798–1833 (Cambridge, 1991), chs. 3 & 4; see also D. L. Le Mahieu, ‘Malthus and the Theology of Scarcity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 40, pp. 467–74.
45 D. Stewart, ‘Critical Examination of a Late Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society’, ‘Plan of Lectures on Political Economy for the Winter 1800–1, The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, Esq. FRSS, W. Hamilton (ed.), 11 vols. (Edinburgh, 1855), vol. 8, p. 203; and discussed in Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion, pp. 113–14. On the impact of Stewart on the positions adopted by the Edinburgh Review, see B. Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society (Cambridge, 1983).
46 For an account of the development of natural theology in eighteenth-century Cambridge, see Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion, ch. 3.
47 I. Kramnick (ed.), William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1798) (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 751–2, 759, 763.
48 (Malthus), An Essay, pp. 286–7, 351, 358.
49 (Malthus), An Essay, pp. 353, 354, 357, 363.
50 (Malthus), An Essay, pp. 11, 353, 364, 365, 369, 395.
51 (Malthus), An Essay, pp. 176–7.
52 (Malthus), An Essay, pp. 148–50.
53 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, bk 1, pp. 81–2, 91; bk 5, p. 321.
54 On this topic, see E. Rothschild, ‘Social Security and Laissez Faire in Eighteenth-century Political Economy’, Population and Economic Development 21, (Dec. 1995), pp. 711–44.
55 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, bk 1, pp. 19–20; The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 12th edn (Glasgow, 1809), pt I, sect 3, ch. 2, p. 86.
56 (Malthus), An Essay, pp. 86–7, 88, 254.
57 Malthus’s theological deficiencies are discussed in Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion, pp. 106–12.
58 Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion, pp. 142–4.
59 Although it should not be forgotten that Malthus has never lacked influential advocates. See especially the admiring study by Keynes in ‘Essay in Biography’, in E. Johnson and D. Moggridge, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 29 vols. (London, 1971–82), vol. 10.
60 (Malthus), An Essay, pp. 32–3.
61 E. A. Wrigley, ‘Malthus on the Labouring Poor’, in E. A. Wrigley (ed.), Poverty, Progress and Population (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 243, 244–5.
62 See P. H. Marshall, William Godwin (Yale, 1984), ch. 10; Winch, Riches and Poverty, p. 305.
63 Condorcet, Sketch, pp. 188–9; for Condorcet’s unpublished larger manuscript on the subject, see I. Cahen, ‘Condorcet inédit. Notes pour le tableau des progrès de l’esprit humain’, La Revolution française 75 (1922), pp. 193–212; (Malthus), An Essay, pp. 153–4; Godwin, Enquiry, pp. 767–70; Winch, Riches and Poverty, pp. 305–6. On the idea of ‘promiscuous concubinage’ as a cause of sterility, see J. Spengler, French Predecessors of Malthus (Durham, NC, 1942); T. Laquer in M. Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body (New York, 1989), pt III, p. 339; B. Wilson, ‘Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and Questions of Women’, PhD thesis, Cambridge, 2002.
64 Winch, Riches and Poverty, p. 314; for an argument contrary to Malthus that the enhanced sense of security afforded by Poor Laws assisted the mobility of labour in early modern England, see R. M. Smith, ‘Transfer Incomes, Risk and Security: The Roles of the Family and the Collectivity in Recent Theories of Fertility Change’, in D. Coleman & R. Schofield (eds.), The State of Population Theory: Forward from Malthus (Oxford, 1986).
65 T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population or a View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness (1803), 2 vols., P. James (ed.) (Cambridge, 1989), vol. 2, pp. 122, 123, 126.
66 Malthus, An Essay, 1803 edn, p. 127.
67 Malthus, An Essay, 1803 edn, p. 127.
68 M. Philp, ‘English Republicanism in the 1790s’, Journal of Political Philosophy 6, 3 (1998), pp. 235–62.
69 See L. Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation 1760–1820, Past and Present 102 (1984), pp. 94–129; P. Spence, The Birth of Romantic Radicalism (Aldershot, 1996).
70 Malthus, An Essay, 1803 edn, pp. 123–4.
71 G. Claeys, ‘The French Revolution Debate and British Political Thought’, History of Political Thought 11, no. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 59–80; on the ultra radicals, see I. McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford, 1993).
72 (Malthus), An Essay, p. 85.
73 In 1817, Malthus wrote in support of savings banks which, ‘as far as they go, appear to me much the best, and the most likely, if they should become general, to effect a permanent improvement in the condition of the lower classes of society’. But he stressed that this could only be a partial remedy and strongly opposed any parish assistance in the establishment and administration of such funds. See Malthus, An Essay, 1817 edn, vol. 3, 275; see also pp. 277–8.
74 J. S. Mill, ‘The Claims of Labour’, cited in Winch, Riches and Poverty, p. 405.
75 (Malthus), An Essay, p. 287.
76 J. B. Sumner, A Treatise on the Records of Creation; with Particular Reference to the Jewish History, and the Consistency of the Principle of Population with the Wisdom and Goodness of the Deity, 2 vols. (London, 1816), vol. 2, pp. 7, 8, 14, 25; and see the discussion of Sumner in Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion, pp. 160–3. Sumner was also a member of the royal commission whose report led to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. There is unfortunately no space to discuss here how the campaign to abolish the Poor Law concluded by amending the act. Malthus himself thought that the abolition of the Poor Law ought to be a gradual process. There has been a long discussion among historians about the intellectual and political authorship of the act. For a general account, see J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795–1834 (London, 1969).
Chapter III
1 J. B. Say, ‘Discours préliminaire’, Traité d’économie politique ou simple exposition de la manière dont se forment, se distribuent et se consomment les richesses, 2 vols. (Paris, 1803), vol. 1, pp. i–iv, xx–xxi. On Smith, Say wrote, ‘but between his doctrine and that of the economists, there is the same distance which separates the system of Ticho-Brahe from the physics of Newton; before Smith, some true principles had been put forward several times; but he is the first to show the true connection between them, and how they arise as necessary consequences of the nature of things.’ As above, pp. xx–xxi, and see p. xliv.
2 See G. Lefèbvre, The Coming of the French Revolution (New York, 1947); C. Bloch, L’Assistance et l’état en France à la veille de la Revolution (Paris, 1908), bk 3, pp. 361–550; F. Dreyfus, Un philanthrope d’autrefois, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt 1747–1827 (Paris, 1903), pp. 138–200.
3 See O. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-century France 1750–1789 (Oxford, 1974), pt II & passim; A. Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor (Oxford, 1981), ch. 1.
4 Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor, pp. 27–8; I. Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York, 1994), pp. 244–5 & chs. 8 & 9.
5 Bloch, L’Assistance et l’état, p. 443.
6 See Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-century France, chs. 2 & 12; Woloch, The New Regime, pp. 244–8; Bloch, L’Assistance et l’état, pp. 436–42.
7 Cited in C. Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon 1715–99 (London, 2002), p. 494.
8 Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor, p. 172.
9 Woloch, The New Regime, pp. 254–8.
10 J. B. Say, Olbie ou essai sur les moyens de reformer les moeurs d’une nation (Paris, yr 8 (1800)), p. 3.
11 On Say’s early career and his relationship with Clavière, see R. Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford, 2000), chs. 3–6.
12 R. Price, ‘Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World’, in D. O. Thomas (ed.), R. Price, Political Writings (Cambridge, 1991), p. 119.
13 As above, pp. 145–6.
14 Asked what he did during the Terror, the Abbé Sieyès answered, ‘J’ai vécu’ (‘I lived’).
15 B. Franklin, Poor Richard: The Almanacks for the Years 1733–1758 by Richard Saunders (Philadelphia, 1976), p.278.
16 Cited in Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution, p. 117.
17 Say, Olbie, pp. 23–5.
18 Say, Olbie, pp. 23, 29, 33–4, 42–3.
19 Say, Olbie, pp. 12–15, 19.
20 Say, Olbie, pp. 3–5, 85–6, 91–4, 102; for Fourier’s mockery of the Christian heaven, see G. Stedman Jones (ed.), C. Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 200–1.
21 Say, Olbie, pp. 1, 8.
22 Say, Olbie, pp. 5, 27, 48–9, 71, 75.
23 Say, Olbie, pp. 29–31, 106.
24 Say, ‘Discours préliminaire’, Traité d’économie politique (1803), vol. 1, p. xliii; he expanded these remarks in the second edition of 1814, see ‘Discours préliminaire’, Traité d’économie politique, vol. 1, p. xcii; vol. 3, pp. 52, 56, 61, 174.
25 The Physiocratic political economist Dupont de Nemours attacked him for deferring to English ideas. He begged him to ‘leave the counting house’ and return to the French language of liberty. Cited in Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution, p. 38.
26 Say, ‘Discours préliminaire’, Traité d’économie politique (1814), vol. 1, p. xcv.
27 Say, Traité d’économie politique, vol. 2, p. 288.
28 I develop this argument in Before God Died: The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Utopia (forthcoming).
Chapter IV
1 See M. Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848 (Cambridge, 1980); for a general survey see M. I. Thomis, Responses to Industrialisation (Newton Abbot, 1976); G. Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium (Cambridge, 1987).
2 The relevant discussion in Smith is found in The Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, bk 2, ch. 5, pp. 384–5.
3 H. Gouhier, La Jeunesse d’Auguste Comte et la formation de positivisme (Paris, 1970), pt III, ch. 2; E. Alix, ‘J. B. Say et les origines de l’industrialisme?’, Revue d’économie politique (1910). P. Steiner, ‘Politique et l’économie politique chez Jean-Baptiste Say’, Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques 5 (1997), pp. 23–58. See S. M. Gruner, ‘Political historiography in Restoration France, History and Theory (1972), pp. 346–65; M. James, ‘Pierre-Louis Roederer, Jean Baptiste Say and the Concept of industrie’, History of Political Economy 9 (1977), pp. 455–75; T. Kaiser, ‘Politics and Political Economy in the Thought of the Idéologues’, History of Political Economy 12 (1980), pp. 142–59; C. B. Welch, Liberty and Utility. The French Idéologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York, 1984), ch. 3.
4 E. J. Sièyes, ‘What is the Third Estate?’, M. Sonenscher (ed.), Sieyès, Political Writings (Indianapolis, 2003), pp. 92–163.
5 J. B. Say, Traité d’économie politique, ou simple exposition de la manière dont se forment, se distribuent et se consomment les richesses (Paris, 1814), vol. 1, pp. 40–52. See P. Steiner, ‘La Théorie de la Production de Jean-Baptiste Say’, in J. P. Potier and A. Tiran, Jean-Baptiste Say: Nouveaux regards sur son oeuvre (Paris, 2002), pp. 325–59. See also R. Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford, 2000); R. R. Palmer, An Economist in Troubled Times (Princeton, 1997).
6 On the eighteenth-century discussion of ‘doux commerce’ see A. Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests. Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977).
7 B. Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns?’ [1819], in B. Constant, Political Writings, B. Fontana (ed.) (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 308–29.
8 Say, Traité d’économie politique, vol. 2, ch. 7, sect. 5, pp. 92–4.
9 But Say does emphasise the role of machinery in the division of labour and the importance of advances in the use made of the powers of nature. It was for this reason also that Say criticised the term ‘commercial society’ and preferred to refer to ‘industrial society’. Eventually, he imagined, in ‘a perfectly industrial society’, ‘men without being less numerous, would all be employed which categorically demanded a certain amount of intelligence, and where all action which was purely mechanical would be performed by animals or machines’. See Steiner, ‘Le Théorie de la production’, p. 334.
In the 1814 edition of the Traité, there is a brief chapter arguing the merits of machines both for ‘la classe ouvrière’ and, even more, for consumers. It was stated that many more hands were employed in cotton manufacture in England, France and Germany since their introduction, just as in printing. See vol. 1, ch. 7, pp. 52–61. Say was to elaborate these arguments in the Cours complet, as the argument about machinery grew more intense (see below).
10 J. B. Say, England and the English People, 2nd edn, J. Richter (trans.) (London, 1816).
11 As above, p. 14.
12 As above, p. 21.
13 As above, pp. 26, 29–30, 30–2.
14 As above, pp. 35, 36, 37–8.
15 As above, p. 38.
16 As above, p. 39.
17 As above, p. 43.
18 As above, pp. 65–6.
19 As above, pp. 63–5.
20 As above, p. 62.
21 See G. Stedman Jones, ‘National Bankruptcy and Social Revolution: European Observers on Britain, 1813–1844’, in D. Winch & P. O’Brien (eds.), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 61–93.
22 M. de Montvéran, Histoire critique et raisonée de la situation de l’Angleterre au 1e Janvier 1816, 8 vols. (Paris, 1819), vol. 1, p. 324.
23 M. le Comte Chaptal, De l’Industrie française, 2 vols. (Paris, 1819), vol. 2, p. 29.
24 As above, vol. 2, p. 31.
25 As above, vol. 2, pp. 38–40. Chaptal was a chemist as well as a factory owner. He became professor of chemistry at the École Polytechnique. Under the First Empire he acquired a large estate where he pioneered chemical experiments, especially in the cultivation of sugar beet. In 1823 he published La Chimie appliquée à l’agriculture. This contrast between France and England was taken up by N. de Briavoinne in De l’Industrie en Belgique, causes de décadence et de prosperité (Brussels, 1839): ‘C’est par une sorte d’aveu universel que la France est reconnue le siège de la révolution dans les arts chimiques, l’Angleterre celui de la révolution en mécanique’ (p. 192).
26 Edinburgh Review 64 (October 1819), p. 367.
27 J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d’économie politique ou de la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population, 2 vols. (Paris, 1819).
28 As above, vol. 1, p. vi. Sismondi claimed that, pushed beyond a certain point, the division of labour could benefit the entrepreneur, without it producing a comparable advantage to society. ‘We have demonstrated that if it is not accompanied by a [comparably] growing demand, the competition which enriches a few individuals produces a certain loss for all the others’, as above, vol. 1, pp. 370, 374.
29 J. B. Say, ‘Sur la Balance des consommations avec les productions’, Revue Encyclopédique 23 (1824), pp. 20–1; Traité d’économie politique, 2 vols., 1803, vol. 1, p. 80; vol. 2, p. 244; J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, ‘De la balance des consommations et des productions’, Revue encyclopédique 22 (1824), p. 281. Cited in P. Steiner, ‘Say, les ideologues et le groupe de coppet’, Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques, no. 18, 2nd. sem. (2003), pp. 331–53.
30 As above, p. 339.
31 As above, p. 341.
32 As above, p. 337.
33 As above, p. 322.
34 As above, p. 323.
35 J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, ‘Political Economy’, Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, 1815 (New York, 1966), pp. 117–18, 119–20.
36 Sismondi, Nouveaux principes, vol. 2, p. 262.
37 As above, vol. 1, p. 146.
38 As above, vol. 2, p. 262.
39 As above, vol. 2, p. 305. In a later work, Études sur les sciences sociales (1836, 1838), Sismondi provided the following definition of ‘pauperism’ – the word which dominated French and German discussion of the condition of the ‘proletarian’ in the 1820s–50s: ‘Pauperism is a calamity which began by making itself felt in England, and which has at present no other name but what the English have given it, though it begins to visit also other industrial countries. Pauperism is the state to which proletaries [sic] are necessarily reduced when work fails. It is the condition of men who must live by their labour, who can only work when capitalists employ them and who, when they are idle, must become a burden on the community’ (Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government; a Series of Essays Selected from the Works of M. de Sismondi) (London, 1847), p. 149).
40 As above, vol. 2, p. 350.
41 As above, vol. 1, p. 368. Here is the probable origin of the notion, found in the Communist Manifesto, that proletarians have no country.
42 Agriculture toscane, cited in Sismondi, Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government, p. 31.
43 J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge, 16 vols. (Paris, 1807–24).
44 See above, p. 32.
45 From the introduction to Études in Sismondi, Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government, p. 139.
46 Sismondi, Nouveaux principes, vol. 2, p. 401.
47 This complaint about the disappearance of intermediate social strata and the increasingly stark polarisation of rich and poor was endlessly repeated in the literature of social criticism between 1820 and 1848. See, for instance, the treatment of this theme in the Communist Manifesto, G. Stedman Jones (ed.), Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London, 2002), p. 231.
48 Sismondi, Nouveaux principes, vol. 2, p. 359.
49 As above, vol. 1, p. 362.
50 As above, p. 45.
51 As above, vol. 2, p. 366.
52 Sismondi, Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government. The only other complete text by Sismondi available in English, his article of 1815 on political economy for Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, provided no more than hints of the critical position he would adopt in Nouveaux principes.
53 In France, see for example the Éloge of Sismondi by Mignet, translated in Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government, pp. 1–25, and Michelet’s tribute: ‘His glory is to have pointed out the evils; courage was necessary for that! – to have foretold new crises. But the remedy? That is not an affair of the same man, or the same age. Five hundred years have been required to set us free from political feudalism; will a few years be sufficient to set us free from industrial feudalism?’ (as above, p. 42). For German discussion of the notion of the ‘proletariat’ in the 1830s and 1840s see W. Conze, ‘Von “Pöbel” zum “Proletariat”’, in H. U. Wehler (ed.), Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte (Cologne, 1973), pp. 111–37. For Sismondi’s impact upon legitimist social criticism, see A. de Villeneuve-Bargemont, Économie politique chrétienne, 3 vols. (Paris, 1834).
54 J. B. Say, Letters to T. R. Malthus on Political Economy and Stagnation of Commerce, H. Laski (ed.) (London, 1936), p. 8; see also D. Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), pt III.
55 Say, Letters to T. R. Malthus, p. 9.
56 As above.
57 J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d’économie politique ou de la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population (Paris, 1827). In a new preface Sismondi considered his position vindicated by the course of the 1825–6 depression, which included riots against the power loom in Lancashire: ‘[S]even years have passed by and the facts seem to me to have vindicated me. They have proved much more than I could have done, that the savants, from whom I separated myself, were in pursuit of a false prosperity’ (p. ii). According to Sismondi’s journal, in the later 1820s Say was coming round to the Sismondi position: ‘5th September 1828 – I have had a letter from M. Say, who announces to me a second volume of his book with some concessions to my principles on the limit of production’, Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government, p. 449.
58 J. B. Say, Cours complet d’économie politique pratique, 6 vols. (Paris, 1828), vol. 1, p. 364.
59 As above, pp. 390–1.
60 As above, pp. 393–4.
61 As above, p. 395.
62 As above, pp. 396–7.
63 As above, p. 398.
64 As above, p. 399.
65 As above, p. 400.
66 As above, p. 401.
67 As above.
68 As above, p. 412.
69 As above, p. 416.
70 As above, pp. 418–19.
71 As above, pp. 420–1.
72 See D. C. Coleman, Myth, History and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1992), pp. 1–43.
Chapter V
1 J. Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie politique (Brussels, 1842), ch. 38.
2 See L. Say (ed.), Nouveaux dictionnaire d’économie politique, (Paris, 1891), p. 197; Dictionnaire de biographie française (Paris, 1954), p. 643.
3 Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie politique, p. 167.
4 As above, p. 173.
5 As above, p. 173.
6 As above, p. 173.
7 As above, p. 180.
8 As above, p. 180. The new ‘social school’ of French economists was defined by the fact it ‘related all progress to the general perfection of society’ (see above, p. 297). Blanqui included in his ‘social school’ not only those mainly inspired by Sismondi, like Villeneuve-Bargemont and Droz, but also those such as Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte who followed Say (see above, ch. 41).
9 As above, p. 181.
10 As above, p. 183.
11 As above, p. 205.
12 As above, p. 169.
13 As above, p. 203.
14 M. Villermé, Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures de coton, de laine et de soie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1840), vol. 2, pp. 169–92, 281–2.
15 E. Buret, De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (Brussels, 1842), p. 596.
16 Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie politique, pp. 204–5.
17 L. von Stein, Der Sozialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs, 2 vols., 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1848), vol. 1, p. 166.
18 Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie politique, p. 167.
19 ‘Introductory Discourse’, in J. R. McCulloch (ed.), Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1850), pp. liii-liv.
20 Edinburgh Review 46 (June–October 1827), p. 1.
21 As above, pp. 1–2.
22 H. Martineau, The History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace, 1816–1846, 2 vols., London (1849–50), vol. 2, p. 708.
23 G. R. Porter, The Progress of the Nation in Its Various Social and Economic Relations from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1847), p. 178.
24 See N. F. R. Crafts, ‘British Economic Growth, 1700–1831: A Review of the Evidence’, Economic History Review 36 (1983), pp. 177–99; Crafts, ‘The New Economic History and the Industrial Revolution’, in P. Mathias & J. A. Davis (eds.), The First Industrial Revolutions (Oxford, 1989); C. K. Harley, ‘British Industrialisation before 1841: Evidence of Slow Growth during the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 42 (1982); Harley, ‘Re-assessing the Industrial Revolution: A Macro View’, in J. Mokyr (ed.), The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective (Boulder, Co., 1993); N. F. R. Crafts & C. K. Harley, ‘Output Growth and the British Industrial Revolution: A Restatement of the Crafts–Harley View’, Economic History Review 45 (1993).
25 See E. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain (London, 1835); P. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (London, 1833); A. Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London, 1835); Porter, The Progress of the Nation.
26 Nassau W. Senior, An Outline of the Science of Political Economy (London, 1836), p. 72.
27 For an account, see M. Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815–1848 (London, 1980), pt II.
28 As above, pp. 111–44.
29 Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, pp. 14–15.
30 As above, p. 19; and see K. Marx, Capital, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 35 (London, 1996), ch. 15, p. 435.
31 E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988); N. von Tunzelmann, Steam Power and British Industrialisation to 1860 (Oxford, 1978).
32 Berg, The Machinery Question, p. 132.
33 B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988), p. 69.
34 W. Huskisson, The Speeches of the Right Honourable William Huskisson with a Biographical Memoir, 3 vols. (London, 1831), vol. 3, pp. 670–1.
35 As above, pp. 671–2.
36 Porter, The Progress of the Nation, pp. 478–9.
37 Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie politique, pp. 252–3.
38 As above, p. 250; see also Marx’s reference to ‘the cynical Ricardo’ in K. Marx, ‘Critical Marginal Notes on the Article, the King of Prussia and Social Reform, by a “Prussian”’, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 192.
39 Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie politique, pp. 252–3
40 J. R. McCulloch, A Treatise on the Principles and Practical Influence of Taxation and the Funding System (London, 1845), p. 110. On McCulloch’s attitude to child labour, see D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch: A Study in Classical Economics (London, 1970), p. 371.
41 Martineau, The History of England, vol. 2, p. 715.
42 R. Owen, ‘An Address to the Working Classes, April 15 1819’, in R. Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings, G. D. H. Cole (ed.) (London, 1927), p. 150.
43 R. Owen, ‘Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System’, in G. Claeys (ed.), Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings (Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 94.
44 W. Hazlitt, Political Essays (London, 1819), p. 103.
45 Edinburgh Review 64 (October 1819), pp. 453–77.
46 As above, pp. 474–5.
47 As above, p. 468.
48 As above, p. 468.
49 As above, p. 468.
50 Sismondi, Nouveaux principes, 2nd edn, vol. 2, p. 365.
51 Edinburgh Review 35 (March–July 1821), p. 110.
52 M. Agulhon, 1848, ou l’apprentissage de la république 1848–1852 (Paris, 1975), p. 10.
53 J. Stillinger (ed.), John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (Oxford, 1971), pp. 39, 64–5, 69, 117–18.
54 Richard Cobden to Joseph Sturge, 25 July 1842, cited in W. Hinde, Richard Cobden: A Victorian Outsider (Yale, 1987), p. 114.
55 Mill, Autobiography, p. 64.
56 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, 2 vols., 3rd edn (London, 1857), vol. 1, pp. 447–8.
57 T. Carlyle, Past and Present (London, 1843), ch. 1, ‘Midas’, pp. 1–8.
58 Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie politique, p. 153.
59 R. Carlile, The Life of Thomas Paine Written Purposely to Bind with His Writings, 2nd edn (London, 1821), p. 23.
60 G. Stedman Jones, ‘The Labours of Henry Mayhew, Metropolitan Correspondent’, London Journal vol. 10, no. 1 (1984), p. 82; H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols., 1861 edn, vol. 2, p. 325; vol. 3, p. 309.
61 J. M. Baernreither, English Associations of Working Men (London, 1889), p. 167. See also J. Thompson, ‘A nearly related people: German views of the British Labour Market, 1870–1900, in D. Winch and P. K. O’Brien, The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914 (Oxford 2002).
62 For an excellent account of the difficulties of friendly societies, see P. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England 1815–1875 (Manchester, 1961), ch. 4 & passim. See also Barry Supple (1974), ‘Legislation and Virtue: An Essay on Working Class Self-Help and the State in the Early Nineteenth Century’. In Neil McKendrick, ed., Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society (London: Europa, 1974), pp. 211–254.
63 Gosden, Friendly Societies, p. 97.
Chapter VI
1 Cited in A. Gueslin, L’lnvention de l’économie sociale: le XIXe siècle français (Paris, 1987), p. 94.
2 See F. Burdeau, Histoire de l’administration française: du 18e au 20e siècle, 2nd edn (Paris, 1994), pp. 145–9.
3 See Gueslin, L’lnvention de l’économie sociale, pp. 161–6; see also P. Schöttler, Naissance des Bourses du Travail (Paris, 1985); C. Topalov, Naissance du Chômeur 1880–1910 (Paris, 1994).
4 J. M. Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War 1871–1914 (Cambridge, 1975), p. 323.
5 Cited in R. D. Anderson, France 1870–1914: Politics and Society (London, 1977), p. 96.
6 S. Webb, Socialism in England (London, 1890); The History of Trade Unionism (London, 1894), p. 361; and see also J. Saville, ‘Henry George and the British Labour Movement’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 5 (Autumn 1962), pp. 18–26.
7 H. George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with the Increase of Wealth … The Remedy (1879) (New York, 1987), p. 560; the impact of Henry George on late nineteenth-century radicalism was worldwide from Tolstoy to John Dewey. It is generally forgotten how important a part his ideas played on the prehistory of the Labour Party and of New Liberalism in Britain. See, for example, the testimony of Keir Hardie, who wrote in 1906 that his reading of Progress and Poverty and George’s visit to Scotland in 1884–5 ‘unlocked many of the industrial and economic difficulties which then beset the worker trying to take an intelligent interest in his own affairs’ (‘Character Sketches. 1. The Labour Party and the Books that Have Helped to Make It’, The Review of Reviews (June 1906), p. 571). Or Bernard Shaw, who later wrote to George’s daughter, ‘Your father found me a literary dilettante and militant rationalist in religion, and a barren rascal at that. By turning my mind to economics he made a man of me’ (cited in Agnes George de Mille, ‘Preface’, Progress and Poverty, p. xiii).
8 George, Progress and Poverty, pp. 508, 557; on its impact upon discussion of the housing crisis in London in the 1880s, see G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971), ch. 11.
9 Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, Charles Bradlaugh: A Record of His Life and Work by His Daughter (1894), 7th edn (London, 1908), pp. 170, 172; H. M. Hyndman & Charles Bradlaugh, Will Socialism Benefit the English People? (London, 1884), p. 17.
10 See G. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency (Oxford, 1971); Stedman Jones, Outcast London, pt III.
11 W. E. Blackley, ‘National Insurance: A Cheap, Practical, and Popular Means of Abolishing Poor Rates’, The Nineteenth Century 4 (July–Nov. 1878), pp. 835–9.
12 On the origins of the welfare legislation of the Liberal governments of 1906–14, see B. R. Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain: The Origins of the Welfare State (London, 1966); P. Thane, ‘Contributory vs. Non-contributory Old Age Pensions, 1878–1908, in P. Thane (ed.), The Origins of British Social Policy (London, 1978); ‘The Working Class and State “Welfare” in Britain, 1880–1914’, Historical Journal 27 (1984) pp. 877–900; P. Thane, ‘Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750–1914’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, vol. 3, Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1–63; J. Harris, ‘From Poor Law to Welfare State? A European Perspective’, in D. Winch & P. O’Brien (eds.), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 409–39.
13 See W. J. Mommsen (ed.), The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany 1850–1950 (London, 1981); E. P. Hennock, British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance 1880–1914 (Oxford, 1987).
14 On the Poor Law reforms of the late 1860s and early 1870s, see M. E. Rose, ‘The Crisis of Poor Relief in England 1860–1890, in Mommsen, The Emergence of the Welfare State, pp. 50–71.
15 Revd & Mrs Samuel A. Barnett, Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform (London, 1888), pp. 191–9. On the intellectual and political character of turn-of-the-century social democracy, see P. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978); S. Collini, Liberalism and Sociology (Cambridge, 1979); E. Bragini and A. Reid, Currents of radicalism, poplar radicalism, organised labour and party politics 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991).
16 A. Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England: Popular Addresses, Notes and Other Fragments (London, 1884), pp. 11, 14, 17, 83, 84, 85, 88, 93. On Toynbee, see Alon Kadish, Apostle Arnold: The Life and Death of Arnold Toynbee, 1852–83 (Durham, NC, 1986). On the development of negative evaluations of industrialisation, see M. J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981).
17 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, pp. xv–xvi, 20, 21, 25, 86, 87, 109, 114, 146.