Aims of the lecture

• 1. To show how the objective theory of value and price espoused by Malthus and Ricardo in the 1810s and 1820s transformed into a subjective theory of value by the 1870s.

• 2. To show that this shift was mediated first by James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy (1821) and then by John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848).

• 3. To demonstrate that far from Millian political economy being continuous with that of Ricardo, the work of Say and Bentham was influential in detaching Mill from this “classical” framework, and that this detachment laid the foundations for the work of Stanley Jevons, Francis Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall and Philip Wicksteed, which is discussed in lectures 10 and 12.

Bibliography

Donald Winch has collected together James Mill’s principal writings as James Mill: Selected Economic Writings (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1966), although this edition is marked by the then-current idea that Mill is a “popular” version of Ricardo, whereas a close reading of Mill reveals that his version of Ricardo is in many regards a more workable version of contemporary political economy.

John Stuart Mill’s writings are available as The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 volumes, J. M. Robson (ed.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91); the Liberty Fund have paperbacked some titles, and all of the Toronto edition is available to download from the Library of Liberty website (http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/mill-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-in-33-vols (accessed 26 October 2017)).

William Thomas’s The Philosophic Radicals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) provides the essential context to the work of the young John Stuart Mill.

Joseph Persky’s The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) is a reliable re-evaluation of Mill’s arguments about social and economic progress.

For an overview of discussion of political economy in nineteenth-century periodicals see Frank W. Fetter, “Economic Controversy in the British Reviews, 1802–1850”, Economica 32 (1965), 424–37.