ABSTRACT
'Political economy', Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations, considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects. First, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves. Secondly to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. The chapter examines political economy's intervention in one of the central economic and political debates of this period: the question of the poor. William Blake in the 1790s saw the deepening hostility to the poor as fundamentally political. David Ricardo was the greatest of the English political econo-mists and his The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, first published in 1817, a massively influential text. One voice more than any other challenged the pretensions of political economy and its systematic distortions of reality – that of William Cobbett.
