Classical liberalism is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics and civil liberties under the rule of law, with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech. Classical liberalism, contrary to liberal branches like social liberalism, looks more negatively on social policies, taxation and the state involvement in the lives of individuals, and it advocates deregulation.
David Ricardo was a British political economist, politician, and member of Parliament. He is recognized as one of the most influential classical economists, alongside figures such as Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith and James Mill.
Thomas Robert Malthus was an English economist, cleric, and scholar influential in the fields of political economy and demography.
Classical economics, also known as the classical school of economics, or classical political economy, is a school of thought in political economy that flourished, primarily in Britain, in the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th century. It includes both the Smithian and Ricardian schools. Its main thinkers are held to be Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and John Stuart Mill. These economists produced a theory of market economies as largely self-regulating systems, governed by natural laws of production and exchange.
In classical economics, Say's law, or the law of markets, is the claim that the production of a product creates demand for another product by providing something of value which can be exchanged for that other product. So, production is the source of demand. In his principal work, A Treatise on Political Economy, Jean-Baptiste Say wrote: "A product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value." And also, "As each of us can only purchase the productions of others with his/her own productions – as the value we can buy is equal to the value we can produce, the more men can produce, the more they will purchase."
The dismal science is a derogatory term for the discipline of economics. Thomas Carlyle used the phrase in his 1849 essay "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" in contrast with the then-familiar phrase "gay science" used to refer to the art of troubadours.
John Ramsay McCulloch was a Scottish economist, author and editor, widely regarded as the leader of the Ricardian school of economists after the death of David Ricardo in 1823. He was appointed the first professor of political economy at University College London in 1828. He wrote extensively on economic policy, and was a pioneer in the collection, statistical analysis and publication of economic data.
Maurice Herbert Dobb was an English economist at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is remembered as one of the pre-eminent Marxist economists of the 20th century. Dobb was highly influential outside of economics, having helped to establish the Communist Party Historians Group which developed social history and attracted future members of the Cambridge Five to Marxism in the 1930s.
Richard Jones was an English economist who criticised the theoretical views of David Ricardo and T. R. Malthus on economic rent and population.
Ronald Lindley Meek was a Marxian economist and social scientist known especially for his scholarly studies of classical political economy and the labour theory of value. During the 1960s and 1970s, his writings were influential in the Western academic discussion about Marx's economic theory.
The Political Economy Club is the world's oldest economics association that was founded by James Mill. It was founded in 1821 in London with David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Robert Torrens, because there were not any professional associations for free trade economists to peer-review their work. Despite Mill's exclusive limit to 30 members: the Political Economy Club was a predominant influence on 19th century economics.
James Bonar was a Scottish civil servant, political economist and historian of economic thought.
Neil De Marchi, is an Australian economist and historian of economic thought and is a professor at Duke University. De Marchi specializes in both teaching and research that pertains to the history of economic ideas and the history of markets, and also the functioning of markets with a specific focus on art markets. His works have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Econometrics, the European Journal for the History of Economic Thought, and the Art Bulletin. He has also contributed to pieces within various books, having written introductions to such works as “Idealization in Economics, Poznan Studies 38,” and a biographical entry of John Stuart Mill for The Handbook of Economic Methodology. De Marchi received his Ph.D. from Australian National University in 1970, after completing his B.Phil. in economics at the University of Oxford. He also obtained his B.Ec. with first-class honors in 1960 from the University of Western Australia. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society.
Ian Steedman was for many years a professor of economics at the University of Manchester before moving down the road to Manchester Metropolitan University. He retired from there at the end of 2006, but was appointed as an emeritus professor.
A Treatise on Political Economy; or The Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth, known as Traité d'économie politique in French, is an industrial economics book written by Jean-Baptiste Say.
William Blake was an English classical economist who contributed to the early theory of purchasing power parity.
Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. Because one does not necessarily have to be politically Marxist to be economically Marxian, the two adjectives coexist in usage, rather than being synonymous: They share a semantic field, while also allowing both connotative and denotative differences. An example of this can be found in the works of Soviet economists like Lev Gatovsky, who sought to apply Marxist economic theory to the objectives, needs, and political conditions of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union, contributing to the development of Soviet Political Economy.
Donald Norman Winch, was a British economist and academic. He was Professor of the History of Economics at the University of Sussex from 1969 to 2000, and its Pro-Vice-Chancellor from 1986 to 1989.
Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to their Applications, simply referred to as Principles of Political Economy, was written by the nineteenth-century British political economist Thomas Malthus in 1820. Malthus wrote Principles of Political Economy as a rebuttal to David Ricardo's On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. While the main focus of their work is to explain economic depressions in Europe and the reasons why they occur, Malthus uses his scholarship to explore price determination and the value of goods.
A history of economic thought is a book by the Russian economist Isaak Illich Rubin (1886–1937). A second revised edition published in Russian in 1929 was first translated into English by Donald Filtzer and published in 1979. The book covers the period from mercantilism in the 16th century to the decline of the classical school of political economy with writers like John Stuart Mill in the mid-19th century. It critically appraises the theories of major writers, and places their thought in the context of the economic and social changes of their day. It adopts a Marxist standpoint in making critiques, but Marx's work is not itself discussed at any length. The book ends with the state of economics as Marx found it when he first turned to it in the mid-19th century. Rubin's other major work, Essays on Marx's theory of value, takes up Marx's own contributions.
