History of Economic Thought

As my History of Economic Thought subject progresses, I am rightfully beginning to acknowledge and appreciate better the contributions of renown dead economists from mercantilists to physiocrats, and now pre-classical to classical. Vast as their fields of studies may seem, basic foundations of this social science are beginning to curve themselves out as time progresses. Questions of production, factors of production, money, politics and government amongst others are slowly taking form as the years get ever recent. Economics has in deed evolved a huge considerable bit no doubt, but it is also striking how much of Smith, say, can be picked out in our modern economic systems.

Interesting to note is Thomas Carlyle quote in "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" we reviewed today. Thomas, a Victorian historian, was arguing for the reintroduction of slavery as a means to regulate the labor market in the West Indies, views that John Stuart Mill clearly objected,

Truly, my philanthropic friends, Exeter Hall philanthropy is wonderful; and the social science -- not a "gay science," but a rueful --which finds the secret of this universe in "supply and demand," and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful. Not a "gay science," I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

John Stuart Mill was quick to answer him on this saying, in "The Negro Question"

There is, however, another place where that tyranny still flourishes, but now for the first time finds itself seriously in danger. At this crisis of American slavery, when the decisive conflict between right and iniquity seems about to commence, your contributor steps in, and flings this missile, loaded with the weight of his reputation, into the abolitionist camp. The words of English writers of celebrity are words of power on the other side of the ocean; and the owners of human flesh, who probably thought they had not an honest man on their side between the Atlantic and the Vistula, will welcome such an auxiliary. Circulated as his dissertation will probably be, by those whose interests profit by it, from one end of the American Union to the other, I hardly know of an act by which one person could have done so much mischief as this may possibly do; and I hold that by thus acting, he has made himself an instrument of what an able writer in the Inquirer justly calls a true work of the devil.

I am really looking forward to hear what Marx, Marshall and Keynes bring to this science, which I would not go as far as Carlyle went to call it dismal.