ABSTRACT
Classical economics—usually understood to mean the British laissez-faire school of political economy from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations up to John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, including the works of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, James Mill, and David Ricardo—has an interestingly complicated relationship to its literary-critical afterlife. However, Mill's Principles is still grounded in utilitarian principles and the scientific method, though enlarged by inductive observation and flavored by some of the sensitivity to historical conditions that would later mark the late nineteenth-century historical school of economic theory associated with Gustav von Schmoller and Max Weber. In economic theory, classical political economy gave way to neoclassical theories of value based on consumer demand instead of labor in the 'marginal revolution' led by Stanley Jevons in Britain, Carl Menger in Austria, and Leon Walras in France. In the 1970s and 1980s, classical economic theory enjoyed an ideological revival in the Anglo-American political sphere.
