ABSTRACT
John Gray's attitude to the market in his most famous work, the Lecture on Human Happiness, 1825, is that of the convinced communitarian. Gray believed the National Chamber of Commerce could enlist the aid of Adam Smith by taking account of the factors mentioned by him in the Wealth of Nations as determining the wage levels of different occupations. John Bray's alternative to existing economic arrangements was a system where all the real capital of the country: the land, buildings, machinery, vessels, and every other description of reproducible wealth, except the personal property of individuals which was possessed and controlled by society at large. A labour standard of value, a standard as invariable as any that can be made use of, was to provide the basis for stable and certain values whose existence would ensure that all exchanges within a 'social system' would be of a non-exploitative character.
