Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Contexts and possibilities
- Part II Texts
- 4 The Real Rights of Man, Thomas Spence, 1775
- 5 An Essay on the Right of Property in Land, William Ogilvie, 1782
- 6 Enquiry concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, William Godwin, 1798
- 7 The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States, Charles Hall, 1805
- 8 A Lay Sermon Addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes on the Existing Distresses and Discontents, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817
- 9 Report to the County of Lanark, Robert Owen, 1821
- 10 A Few Doubts as to the Correctness of Some Opinions Generally Entertained on the Subjects of Population and Political Economy, ‘Piercy Ravenstone’, 1821
- 11 An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, William Thompson, 1824
- 12 Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital or the Unproductiveness of Capital Proved with Reference to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen, Thomas Hodgskin, 1825
- 13 Rural Rides, William Cobbett, 1830
- 14 Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Contexts and possibilities
- Part II Texts
- 4 The Real Rights of Man, Thomas Spence, 1775
- 5 An Essay on the Right of Property in Land, William Ogilvie, 1782
- 6 Enquiry concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, William Godwin, 1798
- 7 The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States, Charles Hall, 1805
- 8 A Lay Sermon Addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes on the Existing Distresses and Discontents, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817
- 9 Report to the County of Lanark, Robert Owen, 1821
- 10 A Few Doubts as to the Correctness of Some Opinions Generally Entertained on the Subjects of Population and Political Economy, ‘Piercy Ravenstone’, 1821
- 11 An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, William Thompson, 1824
- 12 Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital or the Unproductiveness of Capital Proved with Reference to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen, Thomas Hodgskin, 1825
- 13 Rural Rides, William Cobbett, 1830
- 14 Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Looking back over the ten books studied in the previous chapters, we can now sketch in a pattern of change and development. At the beginning, Spence and Ogilvie stand apart, not only because of their agrarian emphasis, but also because their social criticism is rooted in the language of natural rights, a language that has no great importance in any of the later texts. The thinkers who come next, Godwin, Hall, and Coleridge, are in different ways the most seminal. Godwin takes eighteenth-century associationism to the most egalitarian and optimistic conclusions. He offers the prospect of a glorious social future, achieved by a transformation and perfection of human character. The new moral worlds of Owen and Thompson flow from here. Hall's text is a watershed. It is the first of them significantly to borrow from and debate with classical economy; all of those that follow continue this debate. Coleridge's originality lies, in John Stuart Mill's well-known words, in his contribution ‘towards the philosophy of human culture’. His cultural critique of commercial society has affinities with that of Cobbett; both stand at the beginning of a tradition that embraces Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Tawney, Eliot, and Leavis. A developing critique of exploitation is to be found in the texts, especially those of Spence, Ogilvie, God win, Hall, Ravenstone, Thompson, and Hodgskin. It begins as an offshoot of ‘the Norman yoke’ myth; conquerors monopolize the land and force the dispossessed to labour on highly unfavourable terms.
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- Socialism, Radicalism, and NostalgiaSocial Criticism in Britain, 1775-1830, pp. 270 - 274Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987