ABSTRACT
Although John Stuart Mill adopted Ricardo’s political economy – as well as Bentham’s utilitarianism and James Mill’s philosophic radicalism – he was critical of its assumption of the permanence of class society. In the article ‘Miss Martineau’s summary of political economy’ (1834), Mill argued:
[Ricardian political economists] revolve in their eternal circle of landlords, capitalists, and labourers, until they seem to think of the distinction of society into those three classes, as if it were one of God’s ordinances, not man’s, and as little under human control as the division of day and night. Scarcely any one of them seems to have proposed to himself as a subject of inquiry, what changes the relations of those classes to one another are likely to undergo in the progress of society; to what extent the distinction itself admits of being beneficially modified, and if it does not even, in a certain sense, tend gradually to disappear.
