ABSTRACT
The concern of this chapter is to enlarge on contributions made in the nineteenth century by the extremely diverse group of individuals who divorced themselves from the deductive methodology and the generalizations (or laws) of the classical tradition, and often from its conservative laissez-faire political tradition. Our particular interest is in those who wrote up to 1870, the latter date coinciding with the work of the 'first generation' marginalists. Although the contributions that appeared in the first half of the century are important in their own right, they are of greater significance for the development of political thought rather than economic theory. Accordingly, the contributions of the socalled 'utopian' socialists, Claude-Henry de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837), lie beyond our concern. While their proposals for reforming capitalism differ from one another, the common thread of their thinking (as well as that oflater socialists), is their agreement with the criticisms which the French philosopher Rousseau directed at the natural law philosophers. They challenged the concepts of the state and private property as 'natural' because, in practice, instead of promoting the utilitarian ideal of the greatest good for the greatest number, they were the source of an inequitable distribution of wealth and
income. Thus, we begin with the work of those socialists who, in England, were associated with the cooperative movement known as Owenism, and the arguments by JeanCharles-Leonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842) in France. Robert Owen (17711858) attracted large numbers of followers who championed the English reform movement known as 'Chartism.' Sismondi dissented from 1. B. Say's law of markets, which claims that the process of production simultaneously generates an equivalent of purchasing power so that a general glut of commodities is an impossibility.
