CHAPTER 20

New Economic and Political Ideas

Laissez Faire and Its Critics

Adam Smith Government should refrain from interfering “Every Individual neither intends to promote the

public interest, norknows how much he is prompting it…He is in this case, as in many cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always worse for the society that it was not part of it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

Thomas Malthus “There are few states in which there is not constant

effort in the population to increase beyond the means of subsistence.”

David Ricardo Iron Law of Wages

Laissez Faire and Its Critics

Jeremy Bentham “Greatest happiness for the greatest number”

Freidrich List “The wider the gap between the backward and

advanced nations becomes, the more dangerous it is to remain behind.”

Count Henri de Saint-Simon Social organization

Auguste Comte “the great fundamental law is this…that each of our

leading conceptions passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; the Scientific, or positive…The first is the necessary point of departure of human understanding, and the third is the fixed and definitive state. The second is merely a transition.”

Laissez Faire and Its Critics

Marx and Engels “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeymen, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Engels – “the employment of women breaks up the family; for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works for the same length elsewhere, what becomes of the children?”

“ The Communist disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose by their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!”

Protests and Reforms

Responses to working conditions

Move beyond the stage of the individual

Collective Action

Protests and Reforms

British government investigates

Ameliorative Legislation

Widespread discontent

Little legal reform overall