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AbstractOwing to the mainstream interpretation of classical economics as being supply-side, studies examining the analytical role of demand and consumption have been scarce. In this paper, I bring together such passages in Cantillon, Steuart, Smith and Ricardo and forge an analytical link between social tastes and consumption—an attempt at reconstructing a classical theory of taste formation. A classical theory of taste formation has as its foundation methodological holism—viewing social classes as the fundamental unit of analysis. Through a discussion of necessaries and luxuries in the above classical economists, the social division of commodities is highlighted. By drawing on social classes and the social division of commodities, it is seen that taste plays a critical role in the determination of economic growth by influencing consumption expenditure. Finally, it is demonstrated that taste is both a cause and consequence of foreign trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant interpretation of the classical theories of aggregate activity levels and economic growth is that they are supply-side in nature with the contributions of Sismondi and Malthus viewed as notable exceptions. However, a focused examination of the key texts of the classical economists such as Cantillon, Quesnay, Turgot, Steuart, Smith, and Ricardo reveals that strong demand-side thinking has in fact been lurking beneath the surface in the theoretical world of the classical economists even before Sismondi and Malthus. The major implication is that Say's law is an imposition on classical economists and that in the case of Ricardo, his endorsement of Say's law cannot easily be reconciled with the demand-side ideas in his writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The purpose of this article is to identify the ideological functions of economic theory using the historical case of the opinions of classical economists on the poor law as an example (treating ideological sets of ideas as justifications for the social order). Research Design & Methods: The research method adopted in this paper is an analysis of the text carried out in the context of its social function. Findings: The article analyses some moral and social aspects of the emergence of economic theory and shows classical economists' criticisms of the Old Poor Law as rationalisation of social prejudices of upper classes of society. The essence of the discourse of mainstream economists has been to show low moral resources in the working class as the cause of poverty, together with the thesis that social assistance perpetuates this condition. The opposite of these theories were John Barton's arguments, portraying welfare as an investment in the moral resources of the poor, allowing them to return to the ranks of working people. This dispute was forgotten for many years, but seems still relevant in the 21st century context. Implications / Recommendations: This paper supports the opinions of eminent scholars (like Blaug or Lindert) that the main problems with poverty are essentially the same in our times as in the 19th century. Blaming poor people for their poverty seems as familiar to us today as it was two hundred years ago. Thus the issue of the welfare state is more moral and political than it is theoretical. Contribution: This paper is a contribution to the identification of the role of social prejudice in the emergence of economic theory. Article type: review article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The purpose of this article is to identify the ideological functions of economic theory using the historical case of the opinions of classical economists on the poor law as an example (treating ideological sets of ideas as justifications for the social order). Research Design & Methods: The research method adopted in this paper is an analysis of the text carried out in the context of its social function. Findings: The article analyses some moral and social aspects of the emergence of economic theory and shows classical economists’ criticisms of the Old Poor Law as rationalisation of social prejudices of upper classes of society. The essence of the discourse of mainstream economists has been to show low moral resources in the working class as the cause of poverty, together with the thesis that social assistance perpetuates this condition. The opposite of these theories were John Barton’s arguments, portraying welfare as an investment in the moral resources of the poor, allowing them to return to the ranks of working people. This dispute was forgotten for many years, but seems still relevant in the 21st century context. Implications / Recommendations: This paper supports the opinions of eminent scholars (like Blaug or Lindert) that the main problems with poverty are essentially the same in our times as in the 19th century. Blaming poor people for their poverty seems as familiar to us today as it was two hundred years ago. Thus the issue of the welfare state is more moral and political than it is theoretical. Contribution: This paper is a contribution to the identification of the role of social prejudice in the emergence of economic theory.

Taking a cue from some passages of The Wealth of Nations, this paper defines notions of maximum willingness to pay and of individual surplus expressed in hours of labour for a two‐good pre‐capitalist economy. From the individual surplus, a consistent objective theory of individual choice is constructed, and a demand schedule free from subjective elements is derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this paper is showing mainstream economic theory as an important factor shaping the evolution of political liberalism. The role of the economic theory in this process seems underestimated. The paper analyses the writings of two classical liberal thinkers – John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, the former a pioneer of egalitarian liberalism, the latter of laissez-faire liberalism. Both Mill and Spencer were the followers of the classical political economy accepting the classical theory of distribution. Both saw the distribution of wealth as a spontaneous process, seeing no possibility correcting it for the people’s sake without disturbances or damages. According to the classical theory of wage fund, workers would get higher incomes only through accumulation of capital by owners and repressing their own fertility. Such statement was fundamentally opposite to all postulates of the workers’ movement. Workers always claimed bigger share in social income and legislation favoring laborers. The inevitable result of this contradiction was a conflict between liberal and democratic ideas. Mill and Spencer proposed two different solutions. J. S. Mill found a specific compromise and proposed enlarging franchise on working class, but with a still dominant position of the educated classes. Mill was against equal franchise for the working class because he did not conceive them as liable, rational and sober people. This position results from the wage fund doctrine; according to it, abundant workers’ fertility is wasteful for them and only sexual restraint (or chastity) would make their wages higher. Spencer in his early writing was an enthusiast of democracy, supposing the working class’ affinity to free market solutions. His later disappointment with democracy turned him into a strong critic of democratic parliamentarism from the standpoint of laissez-faire individualism. The case of these two liberal thinkers shows fundamental difficulty in reconciliation between the ideas of democracy and free market. We could choose democracy accepting welfare state or choose free market solution and become unambiguous critics of democracy. Spencer was a forerunner of all later ‘neoliberal’ critics of welfare state. Mill’s opinion was halfway between laissez-faire liberalism and modern egalitarian liberalism. Democracy and equal voting rights became acceptable by mainstream economist only when they had abandoned the wage fund doctrine and other constructs of the classical political economy. Thus changes in the economic theory had a significant impact on the evolution of political liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debates that are being made today under the headings of classical economics and its inherited liberal system emphasize the role of the industrial revolution in the formation of this system, while it seems; For a correct understanding of ideas and semantics, concepts such as; The "invisible hand" and "free economy" left behind by the founders of this economic system, especially Adam Smith, must be considered in the political-legal and even moral nature of the system. For this reason, this study tries to examine some of the basic features of the English constitutional system of the Smith era, such as; The concept of "state", "public interest", "freedom" and their subsequent evolution, to the question of what factors played an important role in the emergence of the theoretical foundations of liberal economics by Adam Smith and the theorists after him? Give the right answer. The results show that the key concepts of classical economics emphasized by Adam Smith were, in fact, prescriptions for the elimination of the immoral-political effects that the newly established post-revolutionary constitutional system inevitably had on economics because of its rejection of the old traditions of feudalism. British politics imposed. Thus, although his intellectual reflections are understood today in a different sense from their original reading by the neoclassicists and others, because these intellectual foundations created a meaningful closeness and alignment between the British political and economic system, it is still the case. They are the focus of Western economists, and their economic system, despite the evolutionary trends after classical economics, has so far maintained a system based on "individualistic" principles.

Whereas contracts are the legal tools for the substantiation of economic transactions, in order to respond to the needs of economic actors in accordance with the evolution of economic approaches, they have changed. Developments in economic schools can be classified in one sense in the form of classical, neoclassical and behavioral schools. The main purpose of the study is to examine the developments of contractual justice from the perspective of economic developments in the context of these schools. Recruiting a descriptive-analytical design, the study revealed that commutative and distributive justices are the foundations of contractual justice and complement each other. Commutative justice has always been the basic principle of contract law; however, its scope has expanded beyond the concept of fair pricing in the pre-classical era. Distributive justice, after the advent of neoclassical economics, became more prominent at the same time as the need for government intervention in the economy to address the side effects of a free economy. The school of behavioral economics, by questioning the hypothesis of rational choice and the neo-classical school of economics, raised the need to pay attention to the cognitive biases of individuals in decision-making, especially in the consumer market and in terms of standard terms. It has, despite the optimization of the concept of justice in contracts, at the same time, created fears of excessive government protectionist interventions in contracts. In general, commutative and distributive justice complement each other in establishing contractual justice.

The debates that are being made today under the headings of classical economics and its inherited liberal system emphasize the role of the industrial revolution in the formation of this system, while it seems; For a correct understanding of ideas and semantics, concepts such as; The "invisible hand" and "free economy" left behind by the founders of this economic system, especially Adam Smith, must be considered in the political-legal and even moral nature of the system. For this reason, this study tries to examine some of the basic features of the English constitutional system of the Smith era, such as; The concept of "state", "public interest", "freedom" and their subsequent evolution, to the question of what factors played an important role in the emergence of the theoretical foundations of liberal economics by Adam Smith and the theorists after him? Give the right answer. The results show that the key concepts of classical economics emphasized by Adam Smith were, in fact, prescriptions for the elimination of the immoral-political effects that the newly established post-revolutionary constitutional system inevitably had on economics because of its rejection of the old traditions of feudalism. British politics imposed. Thus, although his intellectual reflections are understood today in a different sense from their original reading by the neoclassicists and others, because these intellectual foundations created a meaningful closeness and alignment between the British political and economic system, it is still the case. They are the focus of Western economists, and their economic system, despite the evolutionary trends after classical economics, has so far maintained a system based on "individualistic" principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about Adam Smith’s economics, but one unanswered question is whether his method of inquiry is a modelling approach. It is therefore interesting to investigate to what extent Smith can be described as an economic modeller. Such an investigation is presented in this paper. By studying elements of modelling methods developed by those who influenced Smith, as well as his own ways of doing economics, together with his general insights on how science, including economics, should be practiced, we show that his method of inquiry is hugely based on modelling empirical phenomena.

Given the unconditional favour that scholars imbued with classical ideas should bestow on any manifestation of business freedom and entrepreneurial spirit, it was not a given that classical jurists and economists would join the ranks of those who in the late 19th century complained about the corporatisation of the American economy. The usual explanation is that they did so out of doctrinal and practical concerns for the effect of the associated rise of monopolies and trusts. A complementary account exists, however, offered by law historians and based on the doctrinal controversies about the true nature of corporations triggered by the famous Santa Clara decision (1886) of the US Supreme Court. The paper casts new light on the latter account by uncovering those aspects of classical economics that made it impossible for its supporters – economists and jurists alike – to unreservedly support the corporate form before and beyond the trust problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present article is to discuss the nature of money under a commodity standard. The notion of money supply endogeneity, endorsed by Post-Keynesian (PK) scholars within the institutional framework of modern credit economies, is extended to the case of a gold standard regime by recourse to the view of early classical economists, which highlights the endogenous determination of the supply of precious metals in a long-period position. This interpretation represents a more robust and natural extension of the PK approach than the neoclassical quantity-theoretic framework employed by several PK scholars to give account of the normal working of this monetary system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article engages with Amartya Sen's interpretation of Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (PCMC). Sen has the distinction of highlighting the philosophical and methodological aspects of Sraffa's work. In this regard, Sen has highlighted the role of counterfactuals in economic theory and the role of value theory in political economy as a matter of "social communication." On these two issues, there is considerable discussion in recent Sraffian scholarship that is concerned with the significance of Sraffa's critique of marginalist theory and the rehabilitation of classical economics. The article scrutinizes Sen's interpretation of PCMC and highlights several noteworthy contributions and insights. While being sympathetic to the substantive points of criticism entailed by PCMC, Sen misunderstands Sraffa's "critique of economic theory" and the reasoning involved in such a critique. A critical reading reveals that Sen's interpretation of Sraffa is more reflective of his own work on the "choice basis of description" than an appreciation of Sraffa's theoretical project. Despite the misunderstandings, the article highlights the similarities in vision between Sen's interpretation of Sraffa and Sraffa's revival of classical economics. By undertaking such a critical reading, the article raises important issues about method and the scope of economic enquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Polish Journal of Economics / Gospodarka Narodowa is the property of SGH Warsaw School of Economics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iberian Journal of the History of Economic Thought is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Enlightened Movement in Spain is widely known for its modernizing effort and its economic and social reform projects in Spain in the 18th and 19th centuries. In line with the European Enlightenment, the ideals of classical liberalism and utilitarianism began to spread hand in hand with the enlightened intellectuals as a paradigm towards the well-being of the people. The anthropocentric turn of the Enlightenment brought with it not only the struggle for the rights of man and the consequent evolution of European absolute monarchies towards enlightened despotism, but also the evolution of the very perception of wealth, well-being and happiness of the society. Thanks to the works of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus or Jeremy Bentham, the roots of the Happiness Economics can be traced back to the 18th century through the association they made between the economic development of society and the level of happiness. This paper analyzes the project of the Royal Sevillian Economic Society of Friends of the Country for the salted meat trade with the province of Buenos Aires as a case study of the connection between economic development, well-being and happiness in the Spanish Enlightenment through the study of the transcripts of sessions collected in the Libro de Actas No. 1 (1775-1780) and the copies of letters collected in the Book of Correspondence of the Society, as well such as the loose papers available in the Municipal Archive of Seville.

Copyright of International Journal of Islamic Economics & Finance Studies is the property of Politik Ekonomik ve Sosyal Serdivan and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper re-assesses (the non-monetary part of) Carl Menger's Grundsätze (1871). It begins by pointing out that representatives of the so-called "German Use Value School" elaborated the theory of marginal utility prior to Menger. The paper then turns to Menger's criticism of the theories of value and distribution of the classical economists and draws the attention to some important misunderstandings by him. After a summary account of Menger's alternative construction, the paper informs about the criticisms put forward against it especially by his two main students, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser. It is then argued that contrary to Menger's view, relative prices reflect inter alia the substances that "transmigrate" into commodities in the course of production. Despite the numerous objections levelled at it, the Grundsätze are nevertheless a "great" work, because it invites to correct what is problematic in it and develop what is sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth-century Physiocrats are widely considered to be precursors to classical economics, the French ninteenth-century Economistes, and contemporary free-market economics. They advocated free trade against mercantilism, and natural law against despotism. Although the Physiocrats also contributed to Walras and modern economic engineering, they fit squarely within the French (and world) liberal tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crisis is a very important aspect of our everyday life and no matter of the dimension we refer to this represents a period in the evolution of a society marked by great difficulties and anxiety. From an economic point of view this is a normal and necessary event, leading to marvellous growth and development. Even so, the authorities are often not prepared or do not know how to mitigate and manage its shortfalls. The main objective of this paper is to focus around the financial crisis development in the perspective of Classical, Neoclassical and Keynesian economics. Even hundreds years apart, all of the three schools have captured the determinants, implications and some measures to mitigate the imbalances which are still relevant today. The question remains though, so why the world did not resolve the puzzle of financial distress taking into consideration the age of these types of events, the number and the forms they hit our society in the last decades. This study will try to summarize the main ideas of ones of the greatest minds of the past in order to bring some light over the financial crisis phenomena.

This paper is the first of a two-part investigation of a topic that has received little attention: the relationships between Keynes and Smith in economic theory and policy. Due to its wide scope and the need for careful discussion of primary sources, two papers are presented. Part I focuses on Keynes and examines all his remarks concerning Smith to address two central questions. Did Keynes classify Smith as a 'classical economist' and hence as an exponent of the views he rejected? And how was Smith, and the 'invisible hand', treated in Keynes's writings from 1910 to 1946? The second paper focuses on Smith, and the parallels between the economic arguments of these master-economists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cracow Review of Economics & Management / Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego w Krakowie is the property of Cracow University of Economics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In recent years studies have appeared that highlighted Adam Smith's interventionist recommendations. These opinions are not new. The exceptions to liberalism in Smith's thought were pointed out by Jacob Viner in 1927. Even before Viner, there were economists who condemned the exaggeratedly liberal portrayal of Smith. But one thing is to stand aside from extreme viewpoints, and another not to have a clear orientation: the thesis of this article is that Adam Smith was in balance a liberal. To prove it, the interventionist and liberal aspects of Smith are contrasted, and his writings are situated in context to sort out the contradictions, and to define him as a moderate liberal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the exception of Pasinetti's work on structural change, the sraffian literature remains silent on normative issues. By generalizing Smith's notion of free competition, this paper identifies and formalizes an ideal social arrangement yielding a unique income distribution configuration which is fair in terms of the "equality of opportunity" norm, and which can be used as a benchmark for normative analysis in Sraffa's system. In this hypothetical economy, the price vector, the wage rate and the profit rates depend only on physical quantities. The relation between this result and Sraffa's "physical real cost" theory of value and distribution is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]