The Economics of Adam Smith: Studies in Classical Political Economy/I.

Economica ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 40 (160) ◽  
pp. 474
Author(s):  
Mark Blaug ◽  
S. Hollander
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Øjvind Larsen

Piketty’s Capital in Twenty-First Century has posed a totally new platform for the discussion of the economy and capitalism. Piketty has reinvented the classical political economy founded by Adam Smith in his 1776 Wealth of Nations. Piketty has shown via massive historical research how growth and inequality have developed since 1793. Piketty’s conclusion is that the French Revolution did not change the existing inequality either in the medium or in the long term. Piketty’s prediction is that a new form of global capitalism will arise, patrimonial capitalism, in which inequality will develop further and the 1% of the World population will control 95% of all wealth in the World.


2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Ullmer

Sir William Petty (1623–1687) is generally known to historians of economic thought as an early contributor to classical political economy. In fact, Karl Marx claimed—rightly, I believe—that Petty was the founder of that school of thought (Marx 1867, p. 81). Frank Amati and Tony Aspromourgos echo the sentiment that Petty, and not Adam Smith, was “the founder of classical political economy, that school which had its culmination in the Ricardian economic theory” (Amati and Aspromourgos 1985, p. 127). Aspromourgos has also observed that Petty wrote A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, as well as other works, in order to provide “an answer to the questions of how to maximize total employment and surplus labour, and how to best utilize surplus labour” (Aspromourgos 1996, p. 16, emphasis added).


2017 ◽  
Vol 137 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-370
Author(s):  
Nicola Giocoli

Abstract This paper deals with the famous Lochner v. New York (1905) decision from the perspective of the history of economic thought. In »Lochner« the Supreme Court affirmed freedom of contract as a substantive constitutional right. It is argued that, in writing for the majority, Justice Rufus W. Peckham was heavily influenced by classical political economy. Not, however, in the trivial sense of endorsing pure laissez faire, but in the deeper sense of applying Adam Smith’s recipe for building a “system of natural liberty”, viz., a social order founded on justice, private property, and free competition. My interpretation is validated by looking at the economic content of Peckham’s jurisprudence as a judge in the New York Court of Appeals. JEL Codes: B12, K21, L40


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Εμμανουήλ Μανιούδης

H διατριβή επιχειρεί να απαντήσει σε ένα εναργές ερώτημα: με ποιόν τρόπο το ιστορικό, το κοινωνικό και το μεθοδολογικό στοιχείο μπορούν να θεωρηθούν ως οργανικά συστατικά της οικονομικής θεώρησης. Το διακριτικό της γνώρισμα συνίσταται στην εστίαση της στην περίοδο της κλασικής πολιτικής οικονομίας όπου η σχέση μεταξύ θεωρίας, ιστορίας και μεθόδου φθάνει στο απόγειο της. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, επιχειρείται να ανασυσταθούν οι τρόποι μέσω των οποίων οι Adam Smith και John Stuart Mill ενέταξαν το ιστορικό, κοινωνικό και μεθοδολογικό τεκμήριο – σε όλες του τις μορφές- ως έναν επιστημολογικό και μεθοδολογικό πυλώνα οικονομικής ανάλυσης. Η αφήγηση αναπτύσσεται διφυώς. Στο πρώτο μέρος, παρουσιάζεται η σμιθιανή θεωρία για την ιστορία ενώ επιχειρείται, μέσω του Πλούτου των Εθνών, να ανασυσταθούν οι τρόποι με τους οποίους ο Smith χρησιμοποίησε την ιστορία ως αρμό οικονομικής ανάλυσης. Στο δεύτερο μέρος εξετάζεται το έργο του John Stuart Mill ως το ‘κύκνειο άσμα’ της κλασικής περιόδου. Επιπρόσθετα εγγράφεται μια ‘εξαθεματική’ προσέγγιση των τρόπων με τους οποίους ο Mill χρησιμοποίησε το ιστορικό στοιχείο ως σύστοιχη διάσταση της πολιτικής του οικονομίας.


Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke

This concluding chapter argues that the three intellectual streams that fed into what was eventually to become Marxism took shape not only as partial appropriations and transformations of Rousseau's ideas but each also embodied a continuing engagement with Stoicism. It reveals that what eventually crystallized under the banner of Marxism was in an important sense a putting together, as well as a radical transformation, of major elements of German idealist philosophy, especially Hegel; of the classical political economy that reaches back to Adam Smith; and of the radical French politics that unfolded over the course of the Revolutionary decade of the 1790s.


2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Maneschi

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


Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are two of the foremost thinkers of the European Enlightenment, thinkers who made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and who shaped some of the key concepts of modern political economy. Among Smith’s first published works was a letter to the Edinburgh Review where he discusses Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Smith continued to engage with Rousseau’s work and to explore many shared themes such as sympathy, political economy, sentiment, and inequality. This collection brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of Adam Smith and Rousseau scholars to provide an exploration of the key shared concerns of these two great thinkers in politics, philosophy, economics, history, and literature.


Author(s):  
Georg Menz

This new and comprehensive volume invites the reader on a tour of the exciting subfield of comparative political economy. The book provides an in-depth account of the theoretical debates surrounding different models of capitalism. Tracing the origins of the field back to Adam Smith and the French Physiocrats, the development of the study of models of political-economic governance is laid out and reviewed. Comparative Political Economy (CPE) sets itself apart from International Political Economy (IPE), focusing on domestic economic and political institutions that compose in combination diverse models of political economy. Drawing on evidence from the US, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, and Japan, the volume affords detailed coverage of the systems of industrial relations, finance, welfare states, and the economic role of the state. There is also a chapter that charts the politics of public and private debt. Much of the focus in CPE has rested on ideas, interests, and institutions, but the subfield ought to take the role of culture more seriously. This book offers suggestions for doing so. It is intended as an introduction to the field for postgraduate students, yet it also offers new insights and fresh inspiration for established scholars. The Varieties of Capitalism approach seems to have reached an impasse, but it could be rejuvenated by exploring the composite elements of different models and what makes them hang together. Rapidly changing technological parameters, new and more recent environmental challenges, demographic change, and immigration will all affect the governance of the various political economy models throughout the OECD. The final section of the book analyses how these impending challenges will reconfigure and threaten to destabilize established national systems of capitalism.


Author(s):  
D. Andrews

In classical political economy, the real wage derives its reality from its association with a given set of products that provides for the subsistence of workers through time. In neoclassical theory the connection between the real wage and a given set of products is broken, because the restriction of workers’ consumption to a particular set of products conflicts with the idea of individual consumer preference. Thus, the ‘reality’ of the real wage in neoclassical theory is grounded differently, in a particular standard of value that can be called an index number standard. The difficulties involved with this construction raise questions about the theoretical adequacy of the notion of real wage itself. In particular, this leads to a conclusion that stands in sharp contrast to the empiricist proclamations of neoclassical theory.


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