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Week 4: Marcet, Utopian Socialists and John Stuart Mill - Coggle Diagram
Week 4: Marcet, Utopian Socialists and John Stuart Mill
Jane Marcet
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- Populariser of knowledge and economic ideas
- Daughter of wealthy Swiss banker --> privileged background
- Runs a household at 16
- Writes so ordinary women can understand what is going on in academics
- Defends the classical thinkers and conventional economic knowledge at the time in a simplistic way
- Originally published anonymously
Works on Political Economy:
- Conversations on Political Economy (1816)
- John Hopkins' Notions of Political Economy (1833)
3 levels of conveying economic information:
- High - Smith, Ricardo (moral philosophers)
- Medium - politicians, publicists
- Low - ordinary people e.g. Marcet
Through social movements you can get an understanding of the causes that people are mobilising around
New consciousness of the economy that is taking place during the long 19th century --> Marcet is one of several knowledge brokers
Society isn't just accepting what the likes of great thinkers are saying, the ones shaping public policy is often coming in from Medium thinkers
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Utopian Socialists
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Radical programme for change of society
Origins in a benevolent paternalist elite group of people
Predates John Stuart Mill
Takeaways:
- Contrast to classical Political Economy and focus on practice - animating ambitions are wild, trying to theorise something different
- Agents of Change are benevolent and bourgeois
- Gendered - male figures who are not attuned to the gendered implications of what they are doing
Saint Simon - 1760-1825)
- Utopian Socialist French Aristocrat
- Founds an industrial religion --> Man must work to share society's fruits
- Society as a factor - rewards should be portioned according to one's social contribution
- Sympathetic to workers- industrialist vision
Robert Owen (1760-1825)
- Welsh Utopian Socialist
- Sets up Villages of Cooperation at New Lanark
- New Harmony, Indiana 1799 - cotton mill with limitations in the work day
- However, people exploit the system and don't obey the rules
- Envisions New Moral World
Legacies:
Founds first model trade unions --> Grand National (1833)
Father of the consumer cooperative movement --> Rochdale Pioneers (1844)
Fourier (1772-1837)
- French Utopian Socialist
- Fouriers Utopia: Phalanxes are units of organisation
- Grand Budapest Hotel --> large central building which has various rooms
- Mingling between people and culture
- Everything takes place in hotel, communal profit
- Chronology towards Enlightenment in 5 stages (we are in the fourth)
Heilbroner quote: "Note that they were Utopian socialists. The 'utopia' was not merely a matter of idealistic ends; it was also a key to the means... But secondly, note that these were Utopian socialists. This meant they were economic reformers. Utopia-builders had existed since Plato, but it was not until the French Revolution that they began to react to economic as well as political injustic." pg. 123
John Stuart Mill
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- Son of James --> Founder of political economy club
- Child Prodigy
- Philosopher of liberty
Influences include: Comte (1798-1857) and Bentham (1748-1832) as well as wife Harriet and daughter Helen
Defining Political Economy Value: “Political economy presupposes an arbitrary definition of man, as a being who invariably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained in the existing state of knowledge”
- Influence of Bentham evident
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Heilbroner quote: "The discovery, like so many great insights, was very simple. It consisted in pointing out that the true provinence of economic law was production and not distribution." pg. 126
contd: "But - and this is perhaps the biggest but in economics - the laws of economics have nothing to do with distribution." pg. 126