ABSTRACT
Every nineteenth-century economist, whether they were in basic agreement with David Ricardo’s economic analysis or rejected it in whole or in part, was undoubtedly influenced by the tradition he shaped. His chief disciples were James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill (180673) who made the greatest contribution to extending, refining, and continuing the Ricardian tradition. William Nassau Senior (1790-1864) dissented from Ricardo, especially on value, and Charles Babbage (1791-1871), who has only recently been recognized as anticipating the modern computer, is best remembered for his emphasis on the gains to England from exporting machinery.1 But it was John Stuart Mill who, reared in an intellectual environment intended to train him to carry on the tradition of Bentham’s Utilitarianism and Ricardo’s political economy, became the chief architect of the agenda for reforming nineteenthcentury capitalism in England. He understood that to address the adverse effects of the industrial revolution, the most critical of which was the poverty of the working class, it is essential to identify the operational laws underlying the problem. He was less concerned with theoretical analysis for its own sake than with the application of the doctrines of Malthus and Ricardo, in which he had
been steeped, virtually, since childhood, The source of “the problems of the laboring poor” is to be found in the law of diminishing returns, which inexorably raises the cost of food and raw materials, and the difficulties workers confront in raising their wages, given that the funds for maintaining workers (i.e. the wages fund) might become impaired in consequence of “the sinking or fixing of capital in machinery” too rapidly so there may be a need for legal measures to moderate its pace.2
