Question

How did the Political Economy of the John Stuart Mills differ from that of the other Classical Political Economists? Be explicit about the purpose of political economy, socialism (and Utopian Socialist ideas), the trajectory of capitalism, the stationary state, and inequality (class, gender and race).

Answer 1

John Stuart Mill:

John Stuart Mill was born at 13 Rodney Street in Pentonville, Middlesex, the eldest son of Harriet Barrow and the Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist James Mill. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.

Political Economy:

Political economy is an interdisciplinary branch of the social sciences that focuses on the interrelationships among individuals, governments, and public policy.

The study of production and trade and their relations with law, custom and government; and with the distribution of national income and wealth. As a discipline, political economy originated in moral philosophy, in the 18th century, to explore the administration of states' wealth, with "political" signifying the Greek word polity and "economy" signifying the Greek word "oikonomía" (household management). The earliest works of political economy are usually attributed to the British scholars Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, although they were preceded by the work of the French physiocrats, such as François Quesnay (1694–1774) and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781).^[3]

In the late 19th century, the term "economics" gradually began to replace the term "political economy" with the rise of mathematical modelling coinciding with the publication of an influential textbook by Alfred Marshall in 1890.^[4] Earlier, William Stanley Jevons, a proponent of mathematical methods applied to the subject, advocated economics for brevity and with the hope of the term becoming "the recognised name of a science".^[5][6] Citation measurement metrics from Google Ngram Viewer indicate that use of the term "economics" began to overshadow "political economy" around roughly 1910, becoming the preferred term for the discipline by 1920.^[7] Today, the term "economics" usually refers to the narrow study of the economy absent other political and social considerations while the term "political economy" represents a distinct and competing approach.

Political economy, where it isn't considered a synonym for economics, may refer to very different things. From an academic standpoint, the term may reference Marxian economics, applied public choice approaches emanating from the Chicago school and the Virginia school. In common parlance, "political economy" may simply refer to the advice given by economists to the government or public on general economic policy or on specific economic proposals developed by political scientists.^[6] A rapidly growing mainstream literature from the 1970s has expanded beyond the model of economic policy in which planners maximize utility of a representative individual toward examining how political forces affect the choice of economic policies, especially as to distributional conflicts and political institutions.^[8] It is available as a stand-alone area of study in certain colleges and universities.

Classical Political Economy:

Classical economics is a broad term that refers to the dominant school of thought for economics in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most consider Scottish economist Adam Smith the progenitor of classical economic theory. However, Spanish scholastics and French physiocrats made earlier contributions. Other notable contributors to classical economics include David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Eugen Böhm von Bawerk.

The origins of classical economics can be traced to Adam Smith’s work THE WEALTH OF NATIONS (1776) where he applied principles of John Locke’s Liberal political philosophy to the study of economics. The work reflects both the influence of England’s first industrial revolution in which the industrial capitalists became the preeminent class, and the Age of Reason when it was assumed that laws of nature can be applied to institutions in society presumably for the welfare of all people. David Ricardo’s work ON THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND TAXATION (1817) made the term “political economy” part of the dialogue regarding the inexorable relationship between the political regime and the economy, something well known not just in England where classical economics has its origin but on the continent as well. Some scholars argue that Marx and Engels were the last of the classical political economists, although they were fierce critics of classical economics identified with Smith, Ricardo, Thomas Malthus as apologists of capital.

The Industrial Revolution gave rise to classical political economy first by apologists of industrial capitalism and then by critics ranging from economic nationalists to socialists. Ultimately, industrial capitalism shaped the value system of industrialized nations that accepted liberal political economy as “natural”, organic rather than a result of the evolutionary process of historical dynamics subject to change as was the case with the Feudal/Manorial mode of production that existed from the fall of the Roman Empire until the nascent stage of the Commercial Revolution in the 15th centuary.

While many argue that classical political economy comes to an end with the European social revolutions of 1848, others maintain that it continued through the later part of the 19th century. There are also scholars who argue that Joseph Schumpeter and John M. Keynes, both candidly open to the severe shortcomings of capitalism, belong in the category of classical or modern political economy. Closely identified with the New Deal in the US, Keynes had a global influence in recognizing that left to its own devices and without the state to buttress the political economy, capitalism will collapse because of inherent contradictions in the system exactly as Marx and Engels had argued.of Neoliberalism