The Prescriptions of the Classical Economists

One of the responsibilities of those living in an age of dissolving beliefs is to see that the good parts of earlier thinking are not lost. Even those who regard economic liberalism as a dead cause would do well to consider the nature and significance of Professor Robbins's new inquiry into the classical policy prescriptions. No policy system, once politically potent, will be allowed simply to fade away; its break-up will be hastened by those seeking to appropriate certain fragments of it, and those who wish to destroy others. Today, those who draw their theory of policy in the main from the English and Scottish classical writers find themselves embattled upon two fronts. There are appropriators who would present one of the two principal ornaments of that school, Ricardo, as chiefly significant as contributing to the preliminaries of Marxism; and there are patronisers who treat the classics as devoid of virtue, the dubious apologists of the impotent state. Professor Robbins, though not unaware of the first category, addresses himself in the main to the second. He enters upon the task of rehabilitating the English classical economists as a source of policy, It is high time, he believes, that their real positions should be plainly stated. Ostensibly he has undertaken a purely historical and descriptive exercise in exposition. But the book is a good deal more than this; it is provocative at three different levels, each with its peculiar interest. He gives us his attitude as an eminent contemporary economist toward present-day treatment of the study of earlier systems in general, and of the classical case in particular. Secondly, he deals vigorously with the mis-statements he believes to be current about Adam Smith, Bentham, Malthus, Ricardo, the Mills and the rest. Finally, he discusses what the classical system, in its positive aspect, really stood for

Art · Economics · Epistemology · Exposition (narrative) · Literature · Political science · Positive economics · Principal (computer security) · Reflexive pronoun · Sociology · State (computer science) · Virtue · Wish · Economic Theory and Institutions · Economic Theory and Policy · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism