Aims of the lecture

• 1. To draw attention to the impact of “popular” writers who used political economy to further public debate on policy issues relating to free trade, protection and fiscal reform, rather than develop political economy as theory.

• 2. To emphasize that “free trade” and “protection” were not in the mid-nineteenth century alternative options that could be clearly identified with any one point on the political spectrum; hence many of the popular arguments about national and international economic development made in the nineteenth century resonate with today’s responses to globalization and neoliberalism.

• 3. To suggest that contemporary popular economics sometimes recycles ideas that were “popular” a very long time ago.

Bibliography

All of the authors dealt with in this lecture wrote for a new reading public; political journalism flourished in the nineteenth century, and it became possible to write popular works on political economy that would sell in significant numbers. These writers are, however, often viewed today as producers of derivative, non-canonical works, and there has been little serious engagement with their writing. Furthermore, this marginal status in the commentary has in turn encouraged low-grade modern commentary from those seeking to recruit these writers as precursors to this or that ideological project. Bastiat, in particular, is very popular today among American libertarians, as any search of the Internet will show; but none of the sources that can be found are especially interested in serious historical evaluation of Bastiat’s significance as a writer in the mid-nineteenth century. The use of Bastiat by libertarians tells us more about libertarians than about Bastiat, and here we are interested in Bastiat – and Carey, and List, and George.

The only account of Friedrich List that fully takes account of the importance of American political economy to his arguments is Keith Tribe, “Die Vernunft des List: National Economy and the Critique of Cosmopolitical Economy”, in Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995/2007), chapter 3.

Henry Carey was a major figure and was much written about at the time. A survey of early American political economy can be found in Paul Conkin, Prophets of Prosperity: America’s First Political Economists (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980).