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 the Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland. 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, classical political economy, or Smithian economics is a school of thought in political economy that flourished, primarily in Britain, in the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th century. 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 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. Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher 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.
Richard Jones was an English economist who criticised the theoretical views of David Ricardo and T. R. Malthus on economic rent and population.
The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798, but the author was soon identified as Thomas Robert Malthus. The book warned of future difficulties, on an interpretation of the population increasing in geometric progression while food production increased in an arithmetic progression, which would leave a difference resulting in the want of food and famine, unless birth rates decreased.
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 had a strong influence on the Western academic discussion about Marx's economic theory.
The Political Economy Club is the world's oldest economics association founded by James Mill and a circle of friends in 1821 in London, for the purpose of coming to an agreement on the fundamental principles of political economy. David Ricardo, James Mill, Thomas Malthus, and Robert Torrens were among the original luminaries.
James Bonar was a Scottish civil servant, political economist and historian of economic thought. He was born in Perth but brought up, from the age of four, in Glasgow where his father was a Church of Scotland Minister. This clerical background extends to two uncles, both ministers who 'came out' in the disruption of 1843, both later serving terms as Moderator of the Free Church General Assembly. From Glasgow Academy Bonar graduated MA in Mental Philosophy from Glasgow University in 1874. He followed the same lengthy undergraduate career that Adam Smith pursued more than a century before gaining a Snell Exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford from which he graduated with a first in 1877.
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.
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.
