ABSTRACT
Launched in May 1818 in time to cover the Westminster contest during that summer’s general election, The Gorgon was distinguished by its insistence on the need to fuse the struggles against economic and political exploitation as two inextricably linked parts of the ‘double portion of oppression’ burdening ‘the working man’. This emphasis on the importance of adequately recognising the links between ‘bad laws’ and ‘the tyranny of ... employers’ came closer than any of the other weekly magazines to moving beyond an earlier model of radical thought that defined exploitation primarily in terms of self-serving government corruption, to a critical awareness of economic relations between employer and worker (p. 195). Its insistence ‘that disputes betwixt journeymen and their masters, are a mere contest betwixt the wages of the former, and the profits of the latter’ hovered on the brink of nineteenth-century socialism’s more fundamental conception of struggle between labour and capital (p. 139). But ultimately, its engagement with these issues was constrained by its theoretical debt to Adam Smith’s celebration of the rules of commerce, a model that it was forced to modify but never quite tempted to abandon. In this sense, The Gorgon represents a classic instance of radical thought at the limits of its inherited debt to a free market vision of prosperity.
